Her hands moved and unfastened his belt and slacks, which fell to his ankles. He nearly fell himself when he moved one leg, but Ming caught him and both laughed a little as he lifted his feet clear of his loafers and the slacks, and with that they both took a step toward the bed. Ming took another and turned, displaying herself for him. He’d underestimated the girl. Her waist was a full four inches slimmer than he’d thought— must be the damned boiler suit she wore to work, Nomuri thought at once— and her breasts filled the bra to perfection. Even the awful haircut seemed right just now, somehow fitting the amber skin and slanted eyes.
What came next was both easy and very, very hard. Nomuri reached out to her side, pulling her close, but not too close. Then he let his hand wander across her chest, for the first time feeling her breast through the gossamer fabric of the bra, at the same time watching her eyes closely for a reaction. There was little of that, though her eyes did seem to relax, perhaps even smile just a little at his touch, and then came the obligatory next step. With both hands, he unfastened the front closure of the bra. Instantly Ming’s hands dropped to cover herself. What did that mean? the CIA officer wondered, but then her hands dropped and she pulled him to her, and their bodies met and his head came down to kiss her again, and his hands slid the bra straps off her arms and onto the floor. There was little left to be done, and both, so it seemed, advanced with a combination of lust and fear. Her hands went down and loosened the elastic band of his briefs, with her eyes now locked on his, and this time she smiled, a for-real smile that made him blush, because he was as ready as he needed to be, and then her hands pushed down on the briefs, and all that left was his socks, and then it was his turn to kneel and pull down on the red silklike panties. She kicked them loose and each stood apart to inspect the other. Her breasts were about a large B, Nomuri thought, the nipples brown as potting soil. Her waist was not nearly model-thin, but a womanly contrast with both the hips and upper body. Nomuri took a step and then took her hand and walked her to the bed, laying her down with a gentle kiss, and for this moment he was not an intelligence officer for his country.
C H A P T E R – 10
Lessons of the Trade
The pathway started in Nomuri’s apartment, and from there went to a web site established in Beijing, notionally for Nippon Electric Company, but the site had been designed for NEC by an American citizen who worked for more than one boss, one of whom was a front operated by and for the Central Intelligence Agency. The precise address point for Nomuri’s e-mail was then accessible to the CIA’s Beijing station chief, who, as a matter of fact, didn’t know anything about Nomuri. That was a security measure to which he would probably have objected, but which he would have understood as a characteristic of Mary Patricia Foley’s way of running the Directorate of Operations— and besides which, Station Beijing hadn’t exactly covered itself with glory in recruiting senior PRC officials to be American agents-in-place.
The message the station chief downloaded was just gibberish to him, scrambled letters that might as easily have been typed by a chimpanzee in return for a bunch of bananas at some research university, and he took no note of it, just super-encrypting on his own in-house system called TAPDANCE and cross-loading it to an official government communications network that went to a communications satellite, to be downloaded at Sunnyvale, California, then uploaded yet again, and downloaded at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. From there the message went by secure fiber-optic landline to CIA headquarters at Langley, and then first of all into Mercury, the Agency’s communications center, where the Station Beijing super-encryption was stripped away, revealing the original gibberish, and then cross-loaded one last time to Mrs. Foley’s personal computer terminal, which was the only one with the encryption system and daily key-selection algorithm for the counterpart system on Chet Nomuri’s laptop, which was called INTERCRYPT. MP was doing other things at the time, and took twenty minutes to log into her own system and note the arrival of a SORGE message. That piqued her interest at once. She executed the command to decrypt the message, and got gibberish, then realized (not for the first time) that Nomuri was on the other side of the date line, and had therefore used a different key sequence. So, adjust the date for tomorrow… and, yes! She printed a hard copy of the message for her husband, and then saved the message to her personal hard drive, automatically encrypting it along the way. From there, it was a short walk to Ed’s office.
“Hey, baby,” the DCI said, without looking up. Not too many people walked into his office without announcement. The news had to be good. MP had a beaming smile as she handed the paper over.
“Chet got laid last night!” the DDO told the DCI.
“Am I supposed to break out a cigar?” the Director of Central Intelligence asked. His eyes scanned the message.
“Well, it’s a step forward.”
“For him, maybe,” Ed Foley responded with a twinkling eye. “I suppose you can get pretty horny on that sort of assignment, though I never had that problem myself.” The Foleys had always worked the field as a married couple, and had gone through The Farm together. It had saved the senior Foley from all the complications that James Bond must have encountered.
“Eddie, you can be such a mudge!”
That made the DCI look up. “Such a what?”
“Curmudgeon!” she growled. “This could be a real breakthrough. This little chippy is personal secretary to Fang Gan. She knows all sorts of stuff we want to know.”
“And Chet got to try her out last night. Honey, that’s not the same thing as recruitment. We don’t have an agent-in-place quite yet,” he reminded his wife.
“I know, I know, but I have a feeling about this.”
“Woman’s intuition?” Ed asked, scanning the message again for any sordid details, but finding only cold facts, as though The Wall Street Journal had covered the seduction. Well, at least Nomuri had a little discretion. No rigid quivering rod plunging into her warm moist sheath— though Nomuri was twenty-nine, and at that age the rod tended to be pretty rigid. Chet was from California, wasn’t he? the DCI wondered. So, probably not a virgin, maybe even a competent lover, though on the first time with anybody you mainly wanted to see if the pieces fit together properly— they always did, at least in Ed Foley’s experience, but you still wanted to check and see. He remembered Robin Williams’s takeoff on Adam and Eve, “Better stand back, honey. I don’t know how big this thing gets!” The combination of careful conservatism and out-of-control wishful thinking common to the male of the species. “Okay, so, what are you going to reply? ‘How many orgasms did the two of you have’?”
“God damn it, Ed!” The pin in the balloon worked, the DCI saw. He could almost see steam coming out of his wife’s pretty ears. “You know damned well what I’m going to suggest. Let the relationship blossom and ease her into talking about her job. It’ll take a while, but if it works it’ll be worth the wait.”
And if it doesn’t work, it’s not a bad deal for Chester, Ed Foley thought. There weren’t many professions in the world in which getting sex was part of the job that earned you promotions, were there?
“Mary?”
“Yes, Ed?”
“Does it strike you as a little odd that the kid’s reporting his sex life to us? Does it make you blush a little?”
“It would if he were telling me face-to-face. The e-mail method is best for this, I think. Less human content.”
“You’re happy with the security of the information transfer?”
“Yeah, we’ve been through this. The message could just be sensitive business information, and the encryption system is very robust. The boys and girls at Fort Meade can break it, but it’s brute force every time, and it takes up to a week, even after they make the right guesses on how the encryption system works. The PRC guys would have to go from scratch. The trapdoor in the ISP was very cleverly designed, and the way we tap into it should also be secure— even then, just because an embassy phone taps into an ISP doesn’t mean anything. We have a consular official downloading pornography from a local Web site through that ISP as another cover, in case anybody over there gets real clever.” That had been carefully thought through. It would be something that one would wish to be covert, something the counterintelligence agency in Beijing would find both understandable and entertaining in its own right, if and when they cracked into it.