Six years before, CIA had gone to Silicon Valley— undercover, of course— and commissioned a modern manufacturer to set up a brief production run of a very special modem. In fact, it seemed to many to be a sloppy one, since the linkup time it used was four or five seconds longer than was the usual. What you couldn’t tell was that the last four seconds weren’t random electronic noise at all, but rather the mating of a special encryption system, which when caught on a phone tap sounded just like random noise anyway. So, all Chester had to do was set up his message for transmission and punch it through. To be on the safe side, the messages were super-encrypted with a 256-bit system specially made at the National Security Agency, and the double-encipherment was so complex that even NSA’s own bank of supercomputers could only crack it with difficulty and after a lot of expensive time. After that, it was just a matter of setting up a www-dot-something domain through an easily available public vendor and a local ISP— Internet Service Provider— with which the world abounded. It could even be used on a direct call from one computer to another— in fact, that was the original application, and even if the opposition had a hardwire phone tap, it would take a mathematical genius plus the biggest and baddest supercomputer that Sun Microsystems made even to begin cracking into the message.
Lian Ming, Mary Pat read, secretary to… to him, eh? Not a bad potential source. The most charming part of all was that Nomuri included the sexual possibilities implicit in the recruitment. The kid was still something of an innocent; he’d probably blushed writing this, the Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency thought to herself, but he’d included it because he was so damned honest in everything he did. It was time to get Nomuri a promotion and a raise. Mrs. Foley made the appropriate note on a Post-it for attachment to his file. James Bond-san, she thought with an internal chuckle. The easiest part was the reply: Approved, proceed. She didn’t even have to add the “with caution” part. Nomuri knew how to handle himself in the field, which was not always the rule for young field officers. Then she picked up the phone and called her husband on the direct line.
“Yeah, honey?” the Director of Central Intelligence said.
“Busy?”
Ed Foley knew that wasn’t a question his wife asked lightly. “Not too busy for you, baby. Come on down.” And hung up.
The CIA Director’s office is relatively long and narrow, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the woods and the special-visitors’ parking lot. Beyond that are the trees overlooking the Potomac Valley and the George Washington Parkway, and little else. The idea of anyone’s having a direct line of sight into any part of this building, much less the Office of the Director, would have been the cause of serious heartburn for the security pukes. Ed looked up from his paperwork when his wife came in and took the leather chair across from his desk.
“Something good?”
“Even better than Eddie’s marks at school,” she replied with a soft, sexy smile she reserved for her husband alone. And that had to be pretty good. Edward Foley, Jr., was kicking ass up at Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York, and a starter on their hockey team, which damned near always kicked ass itself in the NCAA. Little Ed might earn a place on the Olympic team, though pro hockey was out. He’d make too much money as a computer engineer to waste his time in so pedestrian a pursuit. “I think we may have something here.”
“Like what, honey?”
“Like the executive secretary to Fang Gan,” she replied. “Nomuri’s trying to recruit her, and he says the prospects are good.”
“GENGHIS,” Ed observed. They ought to have picked a different name, but unlike most CIA operations, the name for this one hadn’t been generated by a computer in the basement. The fact of the matter was that this security measure hadn’t been applied for the simple reason that nobody had ever expected anything to come of it. CIA had never gotten any kind of agent into the PRC government. At least not above the rank of captain in the People’s Liberation Army. The problems were the usual ones. First, they had to recruit an ethnic Chinese, and CIA hadn’t had much success at that; next, the officer in question had to have perfect language skills, and the ability to disappear into the culture. For a variety of reasons, none of that had ever happened. Then Mary Pat had suggested trying Nomuri. His corporation did a lot of business in China, after all, and the kid did have good instincts. And so, Ed Foley had signed off on it, not really expecting much to result. But again his wife’s field instincts had proven superior to his. It was widely believed that Mary Pat Foley was the best field officer the Agency had had in twenty years, and it looked as if she was determined to prove that. “How exposed is Chet?”
His wife had to nod her concern at that one. “He’s hanging out there, but he knows how to be careful, and his communications gear is the best we have. Unless they brute-force him, you know, just pick him up because they don’t like his haircut, he ought to be pretty safe. Anyway—” She handed over the communication from Beijing.
The DCI read it three times before handing it back. “Well, if he wants to get laid— it’s not good fieldcraft, honey. Not good to get that involved with your agent—”
“I know that, Ed, but you play the cards you’re dealt, remember? And if we get her a computer like the one Chet’s using, her security won’t be all that bad either, will it?”
“Unless they have somebody pick it apart,” Ed Foley thought aloud.
“Oh, Jesus, Ed, our best people would have a cast-iron mother-fucker of a time figuring it all out. I ran that project myself, remember? It’s safe!”
“Easy, honey.” The DCI held up his hand. When Mary used that sort of language, she was really into the matter at hand. “Yeah, I know, it’s secure, but I’m the worrier and you’re the cowgirl, remember?”
“Okay, honey-bunny.” The usual sweet smile that went with seduction and getting her way.
“You’ve already told him to proceed?”
“He’s my officer, Eddie.”
A resigned nod. It wasn’t fair that he had to work with his wife here. He rarely won any arguments at the office, either. “Okay, baby. It’s your operation, run with it, but—”
“But what?”
“But we change GENGHIS to something else. If this one pans out, then we go to a monthly name cycle. This one has some serious implications, and we’ve got to go max-security on it.”
She had to agree with that. As case officers, the two of them had run an agent known in CIA legend as CARDINAL, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, who’d worked inside the Kremlin for more than thirty years, feeding gold-plated information on every aspect of the Soviet military, plus some hugely valuable political intelligence. For bureaucratic reasons lost in the mists of time, CARDINAL had not been handled as a regular agent-in-place, and that had saved him from Aldrich Ames and his treacherous betrayal of a dozen Soviet citizens who’d worked for America. For Ames it had worked out to roughly $100,000 per life given away. Both of the Foleys regretted the fact that Ames was allowed to live, but they weren’t in the law-enforcement business.
“Okay, Eddie, monthly change-cycle. You’re always so careful, honey. You call or me?”
“We’ll wait until she gives us something useful before going to all the trouble, but let’s change GENGHIS to something else. It’s too obviously a reference to China.”
“Okay.” An impish smile. “How about SORGE for the moment?” she suggested. The name was that of Richard SORGE, one of the greatest spies who’d ever lived, a German national who’d worked for the Soviets, and just possibly the man who’d kept Hitler from winning his Eastern Front war with Stalin. The Soviet dictator, knowing this, hadn’t lifted a hand to save him from execution. “Gratitude,” Iosif Vissarionovich had once said, “is a disease of dogs.”
The DCI nodded. His wife had a lively sense of humor, especially as applied to business matters. “When do you suppose we’ll know if she’ll play ball with us?”
“About as soon as Chet gets his rocks off, I suppose.”
“Mary, did you ever…?”
“In the field? Ed, that’s a guy thing, not a girl thing,” she told her husband with a sparkling grin as she lifted her papers and headed back out. “Except with you, honey-bunny.”
The Alitalia DC-10 touched down about fifteen minutes early due to the favorable winds. Renato Cardinal DiMilo was pleased enough to think through an appropriate prayer of thanksgiving. A longtime member of the Vatican’s diplomatic service, he was accustomed to long flights, but that wasn’t quite the same as enjoying them. He wore his red— “cardinal”— and black suit that was actually more akin to an official uniform, and not a conspicuously comfortable one at that, despite the custom tailoring that came from one of Rome’s better shops. One of the drawbacks to his clerical and diplomatic status was that he’d been unable to shed his suitcoat for the flight, but he’d been able to kick off his shoes, only to find that his feet had swollen on the flight, and getting them back on was more difficult than usual. That evoked a sigh rather than a curse, as the plane taxied to the terminal. The senior flight attendant ushered him to the forward door and allowed him to leave the aircraft first. One advantage to his diplomatic status was that all he ever had to do was wave his diplomatic passport at the control officers, and in this case a senior PRC government official was there to greet him at the end of the jetway.