But for lunch instead they all drove to the embassy, talking on the way about nothing more sensitive than the admirably clear weather. Once there, they all had hot dogs in the embassy canteen, and then Eddie went to the day-care room. Ed and Mary Pat went to his office.
“He said what?” the Chief of Station snapped.
“He said his wife—named Irina, by the way—doesn’t know his plans,” Mary Pat repeated.
“Son of a bitch!” her husband observed at once.
“Well, it does simplify some of our exposure. At least she can’t let anything slip.” His wife was always the optimist, Ed saw.
“Yeah, baby, until we try to make the exfiltration, and she decides not to go anywhere.”
“He says she’ll do what he says. You know, the men here like to rule the roost.”
“That wouldn’t work with you,” the Chief of Station pointed out. For several reasons, not the least of which was that her balls were every bit as big as his.
“I’m not Russian, Eddie.”
“Okay, what else did he say?”
“He doesn’t trust our comms. He thinks some of our systems are compromised.”
“Jesus!” He paused. “Any other good news?”
“The reason he’s skipping town is that KGB wants to kill somebody who, he says, doesn’t deserve to be killed.”
“Did he say who?”
“Not until he breathes free air. But there is good news. His wife is a classical music buff. We need to find a good conductor in Hungary.”
“Hungary?”
“I was thinking last night. Best place to get him out from. That’s Jimmy Szell’s station, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” They both knew Szell from time at The Farm, CIA’s training installation in Tidewater, Virginia, off Interstate 64, a few miles from Colonial Williamsburg. “I always thought he deserved something bigger.” Ed took a second to think. “So, out of Hungary via Yugoslavia, you’re thinking?”
“I always knew you were smart.”
“Okay…” His eyes fixed on a blank part of the wall while his brain went to work. “Okay, we can make that work.”
“Your flag signal’s a red tie on the metro. Then he slips you the meeting arrangement, we do that, and the Rabbit skips out of town, along with Mrs. Rabbit and the Bunny—oh, you’ll love this, he already calls his daughter zaichik.”
“Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail?” Ed exercised his sense of humor.
“I like that. Call it Operation BEATRIX,” she suggested. Both of them had read Mrs. Potter’s Peter Rabbit as kids. Who hadn’t?
“The problem’s going to be getting Langley’s approval. If we can’t use normal comm channels, coordinating everything is going to be a major pain in the ass.”
“They never told us at The Farm that this job was easy. So remember what John Clark told us. Be flexible.”
“Yeah, like linguine.” He let out a long breath. “With the communications limitations, it essentially means we plan it and run it out of this office, with no help from the Home Office.”
“Ed, that’s the way it’s supposed to be anyway. All Langley does is tell us we can’t do what we want to do”—which was, after all, the function of every home office in every business in the world.
“Whose comms can we trust?”
“The Rabbit says the Brits just set up a new system they can’t crack—yet, anyway. Do we have any one-time pads left here?”
The COS shook his head. “Not that I know of.” Foley lifted his phone and punched the right numbers. “Mike? You’re in today? Want to come over here? Thanks.”
Russell arrived in a couple minutes. “Hey, Ed—hello, Mary. What are you doing in the shop today?”
“Got a question.”
“Okay.”
“Got any one-timers left?”
“Why do you ask?”
“We just like the extra security,” she replied. The studiedly casual reply didn’t work.
“You telling me my systems aren’t secure?” Russell asked in well-hidden alarm.
“There is reason to believe some of our encryption systems are not fully secure, Mike,” Ed told the embassy Communications Officer.
“Shit,” he breathed, then turned with some embarrassment. “Oh, sorry, Mary.”
She smiled. “It’s okay, Mike. I don’t know what the word means, but I’ve heard it spoken before.” The joke didn’t quite get to Russell. The previous revelation was too earthshaking for him to see much humor at the moment.
“What can you tell me about that?”
“Not a thing, Mike,” the Station Chief said.
“But you think it’s solid?”
“Regrettably, yes.”
“Okay, back in my safe I do have a few old pads, eight or nine years old. I never got rid of them—you just never know, y’know?”
“Michael, you’re a good man.” Ed nodded his approval.
“They’re good for maybe ten dispatches of about a hundred words each—assuming they still have matching pads at Fort Meade, but the guys I report to don’t throw much away. They will have to dig them out of some file drawer, though.”
“How hard to use them?”
“I hate the goddamned things. You know why. Damn it, guys, the new STRIPE cipher is just a year old. The new Brit system is an adaptation of it. I know the team in Z-Division who developed it. I’m talking 128-bit keying, plus a daily key that’s unique to the individual machines. No way in hell you can crack that.”
“Unless they have an agent-in-place at Fort Meade, Mike,” Ed pointed out.
“Then let me get my hands on him, and I’ll skin the motherfucker alive with my Buck hunting knife.” The very thought had jacked up his blood pressure enough that he didn’t apologize to the lady present for his vulgarity. This black man had killed and skinned his share of white-tailed deer, but he still had a hankering to convert a bear into a rug, and a big ol’ Russian brown bear would suit him just fine. “Okay, I can’t tell The Fort about this?”
“Not with STRIPE you can’t,” Foley answered.
“Well, when you hear a big, angry shout from the West, you’ll know what it is.”
“Better you don’t discuss this with anybody right now, Mike,” Mary Pat thought out loud. “They’ll find out soon enough through other channels.”
That told Russell that the Rabbit signal he’d dispatched the other day was about somebody they wanted to get out in a hurry, and now he figured he knew why. Their Rabbit was a communications specialist, and damned sure when you got one of those, you got him the hell on the first train out of Dodge. Soon enough meant right the hell now, or as close to it as you could arrange.
“Okay, get me your signal. I’ll encrypt it on my STRIPE machine and then one-time-pad it. If they’re reading my signals”—he managed not to shudder—”will that tell them anything?”
“You tell me,” Ed Foley replied.
Russell thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, it shouldn’t. Even when you can crack the other guy’s systems, you never get more than a third of the traffic. The systems are too complex for that—unless the other guy’s agent-in-place is reading the cleartext on the far end. Ain’t no defense against that, least not from my point of view.”
And that was the other very scary thought. It was, after all, the same game they played and the same objective they were constantly trying to achieve. Get a guy all the way inside who could get the all-the-way-inside information back out. Like their agent CARDINAL, a word they never spoke aloud. But that was the game they’d chosen and, while they knew the other side was pretty good, they figured that they were better. And that was the name of that tune.
“Okay, Mike. Our friend believes in one-time pads. I guess everybody does.”
“Ivan sure as hell does, but it must drive their troops crazy, having to go through every signal one letter at a time.”
“Ever work the penetration side?” Ed Foley asked him.
Russell shook his head at once. “Not smart enough. Good thing, too. A lot of those guys end up in rubber rooms cutting out paper dolls with blunted scissors. Hey, I know a lot of the guys in Z-Division. The boss guy there just turned down the chair in math at Cal Tech. He’s pretty smart,” Russell estimated. “Damned sight smarter than I’ll ever be. Ed Popadopolous’s—his name is Greek—father used to run a restaurant up in Boston. Ask me if I want his job.”
“No, eh?”
“Not even if they threw in Pat Cleveland as a fringe benefit.” And that was one fine-looking lady, Ed Foley knew. Mike Russell really did need a woman in his life…
“Okay, I’ll get you a dispatch in about an hour. Okay?”
“Cool.” Russell headed out.
“Well, I think we rattled his cage pretty hard,” MP thought aloud.
“Admiral Bennett at Fort Meade ain’t going to be real happy either. I got a signal to draft.”
“Okay, I’ll see how Eddie’s doing with his crayons.” And Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley took her leave as well.