“Any luck with this Suvorov guy?”
Provalov shook his head. “No. We have a KGB file for him and a photograph, but even if that is for the right person, we haven’t found him yet.”
“Well, Oleg Gregoriyevich, it looks as though you have a real head-scratcher on your hands.” Reilly lifted his hand to order another round.
“You are supposed to be the expert on organized crime,” the Russian lieutenant reminded his FBI guest.
“That’s true, Oleg, but I ain’t no gypsy fortune-teller, and I ain’t the Oracle of Delphi either. You don’t know who the real target was yet, and until you learn that, you don’t know jack shit. Problem is, to find out who the target was, you have to find somebody who knows something about the crime. The two things are wrapped up together, bro. Get one, get both. Get neither, get nothing.” The drinks arrived. Reilly paid and took another hit.
“My captain is not pleased.”
The FBI agent nodded. “Yeah, bosses are like that in the Bureau, too, but he’s supposed to know what the problems are, right? If he does, he knows he has to give you the time and the resources to play it out. How many men you have on it now?”
“Six here, and three more in St. Petersburg.”
“May want to get some more, bro.” In the FBI’s New York OC office, a case like this could have as many as twenty agents working it, half of them on a full-time basis. But the Moscow Militia was stretched notoriously thin. For as much crime as there was now in Moscow, the local cops were still sucking hind tit when it came to government support. But it could have been worse. Unlike much of Russian society, the militiamen were getting paid.
“You tire me out,” Nomuri protested.
“There is always Minister Fang,” Ming replied with a playful look.
Was the enraged reply. “You compare me with an old man?”
“Well, both of you are men, but better a sausage than a string bean,” she answered, grasping the former in her soft left hand.
“Patience, girl, allow me to recover from the first race.” With that he lifted her body over his and let it down. She must really like me, Nomuri reflected. Three nights in a row. I suppose Fang isn’t the man he thinks he is. Well, can’t win ‘em all, Charlie. Plus the advantage of being forty years younger. There was probably something to that, the CIA officer admitted to himself.
“But you run so fast!” Ming protested, rubbing her body on his.
“There is something I want you to do.”
A very playful smile. “What might that be?” she asked while her hand wandered a little.
“Not that!”
“Oh.. .“ The disappointment in her voice was noteworthy.
“Something for work,” Nomuri explained on. Just as well she couldn’t feel the shaking inside his body, which, remarkably enough, didn’t show.
“For work? I can’t bring you into the office for this!” she said with a laugh, followed by a warm, affectionate kiss.
“Yes, something to upload onto your computer.” Nomuri reached into the night-table drawer and pulled out a CDROM. “Here, you just load this into your machine, click INSTALL, and then dispose of it when you’re done.”
“And what will it do?” she asked.
“Do you care?”
“Well. . . .” Hesitation. She didn’t understand. “I must care.”
“It will allow me to look at your computer from time to time.”
“But why?”
“Because of Nippon Electric—we make your computer, don’t you see?” He allowed his body to relax. “It is useful for my company to know how economic decisions are made in the People’s Republic,” Nomuri explained, with a well-rehearsed lie. “This will allow us to understand that process a little better, so that we can do business more effectively. And the better I do for them, the more they will pay me— and the more I can spend on my darling Ming.”
“I see,” she thought, wrongly.
He bent down to kiss a particularly nice spot. Her body shuddered in just the right way. Good, she wasn’t resisting the idea, or at least wasn’t letting it get in the way of this activity, which was good for Nomuri in more than one way. The intelligence officer wondered if someday his conscience would attack him for using this girl in such a way. But business, he told himself, was business.
“No one will know?”
“No, that is not possible.”
“And it will not get me into trouble?”
With that question he rolled over, finding himself on top. He held her face in both hands. “Would I ever do something to get Ming-chan in trouble? Never!” he announced, with a deep and passionate kiss.
Afterward there was no talk about the CD-ROM, which she tucked into her purse before leaving. It was a nice-looking purse, a knockoff of something Italian that you could buy on the street here, rather like the genuine ones in New York that “fell off the back of the truck,” as the euphemism went.
Every time they parted, it was a little hard. She didn’t want to leave, and truly he didn’t want her to depart, but it was necessary. For them to share an apartment would be commented upon. Even in her dreams, Ming couldn’t think of that, actually sleeping at the apartment of a foreigner, because she did have a security clearance, and she had been given her security brief by a bored MSS officer, along with all the other senior secretaries, and she hadn‘t reported this contact to her superiors or the office security chief as she ought to have done—why? Partly because she’d forgotten the rules, because she’d never broken them or known someone who had done so, and partly because like many people she drew a line between her private life and her professional one. That the two were not allowed to be separate in her case was something that the MSS briefing had covered, but in so clumsy a way as to have been disregarded even upon its delivery. And so here she was, not even knowing where and what here was. With luck, she’d never have to find out, Nomuri thought, watching her turn the corner and disappear from view. Luck would help. What the MSS interrogators did to young women in the Beijing version of the Lubyanka didn’t really bear much contemplation, certainly not when one had just made love to her twice in two hours.
“Good luck, honey,” Nomuri whispered, as he closed the door and headed to the bathroom for a shower.
C H A P T E R – 14
(dot)com
It was a sleepless night for Nomuri. Would she do it? Would she do what she was told? Would-she tell a security officer about it, and then about him? Might she be caught with the CD-ROM going into work and questioned about it? If so, a casual inspection would show it to be a music CD, Bill Conti’s musical score for Rocky—a poorly marked knockoff of an American intellectual property that was quite common in the PRC. But a more careful examination would have revealed that the first—outermost—data line on the metallic surface told the computer CD-ROM reader to skip to a certain place where the content was not music, but binary code, and very efficient binary code at that.
The CD-ROM didn’t contain a virus per se, because a virus circulates mainly across computer networks, entering a computer surreptitiously the way a disease organism enters a living host (hence the term virus). But this one came in the front door, and on being read by the CD-ROM reader, a single prompt came up on the screen, and Ming, after a quick look-around in her office, moved her mouse to put the pointer on the prompt, clicked the INSTALL command, and everything immediately disappeared. The program thus implanted searched her hard drive at nearly the speed of light, categorizing every file and setting up its own index, then compressing it into a small file that hid in plain sight, as it were, identified by any disk-sorting program with a wholly innocent name that referred to a function carried out by another program entirely. Thus only a very careful and directed search by a skilled computer operator could even detect that something was even there. Exactly what the program did could only be determined by a one-by-zero reading of the program itself, something difficult to accomplish at best. It would be like trying to find what was wrong with a single leaf on a single tree in a vast forest where all the trees and all the leaves looked pretty much alike, except that this one leaf was smaller and humbler than most. CIA and NSA could no longer attract the best programmers in America. There was just too much money in the consumer electronics industry for government to compete effectively in that marketplace. But you could still hire them, and the work that came out was just as good. And if you paid them enough—strangely, you could pay lots more to a contractor than to an employee—they wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. And besides, they never really knew what it was all about anyway, did they?