The Keepers of the Library by Glenn Cooper Read Free Book Online

world doesn’t blow up next February, I retire to Rancho Mirage and play golf till I keel over. But that hasn’t happened, has it?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Instead, we get Doomsday II, and I’m in the middle of an international incident. The Pentagon is up my butt. The White House is up my butt. I’m late to supper every night, so my wife is up my butt. So who’s butt am I going to get up?”
    “Mine, sir.”
    “You’re damn right. Give me your report.”
    My report, Kenney thought. You mean my Kabuki dance, where I pretend to bring new facts to the table and you pretend to listen.
    As the investigation dragged on there were no new substantive facts, so Kenney had come to repeat himself, laboring to find a few incremental tidbits to extend the briefing long enough to save each party from the embarrassment of vacuous silence.
    In the days after the appearance of the first tranche of postcards, the investigation had proceeded along two fronts. The FBI took the lead on reopening Doomsday I and the watchers spearheaded the search for a new Area 51 leak.
    On the FBI side, the chain of custody of the
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’s copy of the database was reexamined and all living personnel who had been involved were reinterviewed. That list included Will Piper, Will’s son-in-law, Greg, and Nancy Piper. Nancy Piper who was now running the investigation made doubly sure that no punches were pulled with her or her family lest she be accused of a conflict of interest. The FBI ran the traps and concluded that their original 2011 investigation had been complete and proper, that no hard copy of the database had ever been printed out and that the
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’s only copy of Shackleton’s digital file had been returned to the government.
    That threw the spotlight onto Area 51.
    On the first day the case broke Kenney had assembled his cadre of watchers and addressed them in his easy Oklahoma drawl, “Okay, boys and girl,” he began—he had a single female on his staff, an ex–military policewoman. “I’d rather lick a cat’s ass than have to do this to you, but until further notice, you’re all mine, twenty-four/seven. Forget about weekends and vacations, forget about your preciouskid’s softball game and your wife’s birthday. You are restricted to base. We are in emergency ops mode. You are going to work your tails off until we find the leaker or prove this is coming from outside our shop. Is that clear?”
    Redmond, the lone woman had said, “I’m going to need to work out more babysitting.”
    “Well, work it out then,” Kenney had snapped.
    “Can I claim for it?”
    “Are you dumb as a sack of hammers, Redmond? You know you can’t claim for that kind of shit.”
    Lopez, a muscular former Ranger who lived in the same Las Vegas subdivision, had said, “Keisha can stay with us.”
    “Aren’t we just one big happy family?” Kenney had muttered before continuing his briefing.
    They started by running all 134 employees through lie-detector tests, including, by protocol, the watchers and the base commander. A half dozen tests came back equivocal and those lucky few got put through the ringer.
    Then the forensic audits began. The database-security group, the algorithm jockeys, as Kenney referred to them, began scouring the servers for any sign of data intrusion they might have previously missed. Shackleton had been an algorithm jockey in his day so Kenney got permission to get a super-nerd to check up on the nerds. In the old days, that would have been impossible since it took a year or more to grind through the Pentagon’s security clearance system before someone could be brought inside the Area 51 tent. Now that every ten-year-old in the world knew what went on at Groom Lake, it wasn’t a problem. On the recommendation of CIA database and encryption analysts, a professor of computational sciences from Stanford was airlifted in andgiven unfettered access to the system. He’d been at it since the first week but he still couldn’t find a