JUDGE ARTHUR MOORE’S morning briefing normally happened at 7:30 in the morning, except on Sunday, when he slept late, and so it took place at 9:00. His wife even recognized the knock of the National Intelligence Officer who delivered the daily intelligence news, always in the private study of his Great Falls house, which was swept weekly by the Agency’s best debugging expert.
The world had been relatively quiet the previous day—even communists liked to relax on weekends, he’d learned on taking the job.
“Anything else, Tommy?” the Judge asked.
“Some bad news from Budapest,” the NIO answered. “Our Station Chief, James Szell, got burned by the opposition making a pickup. Details unknown, but he got himself PNG’d by the Hungarian government. His principal deputy, Robert Taylor, is out of the country on personal business. So Station Budapest is out of business for the moment.”
“How bad is that?” Not too bad, the DCI thought.
“Not a major tragedy. Nothing much seems to happen in Hungary. Their military is pretty much a minor player in the Warsaw Pact, and their foreign policy, aside from the things they do in their immediate neighborhood, is just a mirror image of Moscow’s. The station’s been passing us a fair amount of military information, but the Pentagon doesn’t worry too much about it. Their army doesn’t train enough to be a threat to much of anybody, and the Soviets regard them as unreliable,” the NIO concluded.
“Is Szell somebody to screw up?” Moore asked. He vaguely remembered meeting the guy at an Agency get-together.
“Actually, Jimmy is well regarded. As I said, sir, we don’t have any details yet. He’ll probably be home by the end of the week.”
“Okay. That does it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nothing new on the Pope?”
“Not a word, sir, but it’ll take time for our people to shake all their trees.”
“That’s what Ritter says.”
IT TOOK FOLEY almost an hour to write up his dispatch. It had to be short but comprehensive, and that taxed his writing ability. Then he walked it down to Mike Russell’s office. He sat there and watched a grumbling chief communications officer one-time-pad the words one goddamned letter at a time, pad it with more Czech surnames, then super-encrypt on his STRIPE encryption machine. With that done, it went on the secure fax machine, which, of course, encrypted the text one more time, but in a graphics fashion rather than an alphanumeric one. The fax encryption was relatively simple, but since the opposition—which was assumed to monitor the embassy’s satellite transmitter—could not tell if the signal was graphics or text, that was just one more hoop for their decryption people to jump through. The signal went up to a geosynchronous satellite and back down to different downlinks, one at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, another at Sunnyvale, California, and, of course, one at Fort Meade, Maryland, to which the other stations sent their “take” via secure fiber-optic landlines.
The communications people at Fort Meade were all uniformed non-comms, and when one of them, an Air Force E-5, ran it through his decoding machine, he was surprised to see the notation that said the super-encryption was on a one-time pad, NHG-1329.
“Where the hell is that?” he asked his watch supervisor, a Navy senior chief.
“Damn,” the chief commented. “I haven’t seen one of those in a long time.” He had to open a three-ring binder and root through it until he found the storage site inside the big communications vault at the far corner of the room. That was guarded by an armed Marine staff sergeant whose sense of humor, like that of all the Marines who worked here, had been surgically removed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center prior to his assignment to Fort Meade.
“Hey, Sarge, gotta go inside for something,” he told the jarhead.
“You gotta see the Major first,” the sergeant informed him. And so the senior chief walked to the desk of the USAF major who was sitting at his desk, reading the morning paper.
“Morning, Major. I need to get something out of the vault.”
“What’s that, Chief?”
“A one-time pad, NHG-1329.”
“We still have any of them?” the major asked in some surprise.
“Well, sir, if not, you can use this to start a fire on your grill with.” He handed the dispatch over.
The Air Force officer inspected it. “Tell me about it. Okay.” He scribbled an authorization on a pad in the corner of his desk. “Give this to the Marine.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The senior chief walked back to the vault, leaving the Air Force puke to wonder why the squids always talked so funny.
“Here you go, Sam,” the chief said, handing over the form.
The Marine unlocked the swinging door, and the senior chief headed inside. The box the pad was in wasn’t locked, presumably because anyone who could get past the seven layers of security required to get to this point was probably as trustworthy as the President’s wife.
The one-time pad was a small-ring binder. The Navy chief signed for it on the way out, then went back to his desk. The Air Force sergeant joined him, and together they went through the cumbersome procedure of decrypting the dispatch.
“Damn,” the young NCO observed about two-thirds of the way through. “Do we tell anybody about that?”
“That’s above our pay grade, sonny. I expect the DCI will let the right people know. And forget you ever heard that,” he added. But neither really would, and both knew it. With all the wickets they had to pass through to be here, the idea that their signal systems were not secure was rather like hearing that their mother was turning tricks on Sixteenth Street in DC.
“Yeah, Chief, sure,” the young wing-wiper replied. “How do we deliver this one?”
“I think a courier, sonny. You want to whistle one up?”
“Aye aye, sir.” The USAF sergeant took his leave with a smile.
The courier was an Army staff sergeant, driving a tan Army Plymouth Reliant, who took the sealed envelope, tucked it into the attaché case on his front seat, and drove down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to the D.C. Beltway, and west on that to the George Washington Parkway, the first right off of which was CIA. At that point, the dispatch—whatever the hell it was, he didn’t know—ceased being his responsibility.
The address on the envelope sent it to the Seventh Floor. Like many government agencies, CIA never really slept. On the top floor was Tom Ridley, a carded National Intelligence Officer, and the very one who handled Judge Moore’s weekend briefings. It took him about three seconds to see that this one had to go to the judge right now. He lifted his STU secure phone and hit speed-dial button 1.
“This is Arthur Moore,” a voice said presently.
“Judge, Tom Ridley here. Something just came in.”
“Something” means it was really something.
“Now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you come out here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jim Greer, too?”
“Yes, sir, and probably Mr. Bostock also.”
That made it interesting. “Okay, call them and then come on out.” Ridley could almost hear the Goddamn it, don’t I ever get a day off! at the other end before the line went dead. It took another few minutes to call the two other senior Agency officials, and then Ridley went down to his car for the drive out, pausing only to make three Xerox copies.
IT WAS LUNCHTIME in Great Falls. Mrs. Moore, ever the perfect hostess, had lunch meats and soft drinks set out for her unexpected guests before retiring to her sitting room upstairs.
“What is it, Tommy?” Moore asked. He liked the newly appointed NIO. A graduate of Marquette University, he was a Russian expert and had been one of Greer’s star analysts before fleeting up to his present post. Soon he’d be one of the guys who always accompanied the President on Air Force One.
“This came in late this morning via Fort Meade,” Ridley said, handing out the copies.
Mike Bostock was the fastest reader of the group: “Oh, Lord.”
“This will make Chip Bennett happy,” James Greer predicted.
“Yeah, like a trip to the dentist,” Moore observed last of all. “Okay, people, what does this tell us?”
Bostock took it first. “It means we want this Rabbit in our hutch in one big hurry, gentlemen.”
“Through Budapest?” Moore asked, remembering his morning brief.
“Uh-oh,” Bostock observed.
“Okay.” Moore leaned forward. “Let’s get our thinking organized. First, how important is this information?”
James Greer took it. “He says KGB’s going to kill somebody who doesn’t deserve it. That kinda suggests the Pope, doesn’t it?”
“More importantly, he says our communications systems might be compromised,” Bostock pointed out. “That’s the hottest thing I see in this signal, James.”
“Okay, in either case, we want this guy on our side of the wire, correct?”
“Judge, you can bet your bench on that,” the Deputy DDO shot back. “As quickly as we can make it happen.”