Yes! the CIA officer exulted, his right fist slamming into his open left hand hard enough to sting. Yes. He had his agent in fucking place, and here was the take from Operation SORGE. A bar at the top of the screen showed that the data was coming it at a rate of 57,000 bits per second.
That was pretty fast. Now, just hope that the local commie phone system didn’t develop a bad connection somewhere between Ming’s office and the switching center, and from the switching center to his flat, Chester thought. Shouldn’t be much of a problem. The outbound leg from Ming’s office would be first-rate, tasked as it was to the service of the Party nobility. And from the switching center to his place would be okay, because he’d gotten numerous messages that way, most of them from NEC in Tokyo to congratulate him on exceeding his sales quota already.
Yeah, well, Chet, you are pretty good at making a sale, aren’t you? he asked himself on the way to the kitchen. He figured he owed himself a drink for this bit of performance. On returning, he saw that the download wasn’t finished yet.
Damn. How much shit is she sending me? Then he realized that the text files he was getting were actually graphics files, because Ming’s computer didn’t store ideographs as letters, but rather as the pictures that they actually were. That made the files memory-intensive. Exactly how memory-intensive they were, he saw forty minutes later when the download ended.
At the far end of the electronic chain, the Ghost program appeared to shut itself down, but in fact it slept rather as a dog did, one ear always cocked up, and always aware of the time of day. On finishing the transmission, the Ghost made a notation on its inside index of the files. It had sent everything up until this day. From now on, it would only send new ones—which would make for much shorter and faster transmissions—but only in the evening, and only after ninety-five minutes of total inactivity on the computer, and only when it was outwardly in auto-sleep mode. Tradecraft and caution had been programmed in.
“Fuck,” Nomuri breathed on seeing the size of the download. In pictures this could be the porno shots of damned near every hooker in Hong Kong. But his job was only half done. He lit up a program of his own and selected the “Preferences” folder that controlled it. Already checked was the box for auto encryption. Virtually everything on his computer was encrypted anyway, which was easily explainable as trade and business secrets—Japanese companies are renowned for the secrecy of their operations—but with some files more encrypted than others. The ones that arrived from the Ghost got the most robust scrambling, from a mathematically derived transcription system, fully 512 bits in the key, plus an additional random element which Nomuri could not duplicate. That was in addition to his numeric password, 51240, the street number of his first “score” in East LA. Then it was time to transmit his take.
This program was a close cousin to the Ghost he’d given Ming. But this one dialed the local Internet Service Provider, or ISP, and sent off a lengthy e-mail to a destination called patsbakery @brownienet.com. The “brownienet” was putatively a network established for bakeries and bakers, professional and amateur, who liked to swap recipes, often posting photos of their creations for people to download, which explained the occasional large file transferred. Photographs are notoriously rapacious in their demands for bytes and disk space.
In fact, Mary Patricia Foley had posted her own highly satisfactory recipe for French apple pie, along with a photo her elder son had taken with his Apple electronic camera. Doing so hadn’t been so much a case of establishing a good cover as womanly pride in her own abilities as a cook, after spending an hour one night looking over the recipes others had put on this bulletin board. She’d tried one from a woman in Michigan a few weeks previously and found it okay, but not great. In coming weeks she wanted to try some of the bread recipes, which did look promising.
It was morning when Nomuri uploaded his e-mail to Pat’s Bakery, an entirely real and legitimate business three blocks from the statehouse in Madison, Wisconsin, as a matter of fact, owned by a former CIA officer in the Science and Technology Directorate, now retired and a grandmother who was, however, too young for knitting. She’d created this Internet domain, paying the nominal fee and then forgetting about it, just as she’d forgotten nearly everything she’d ever done at Langley.
“You’ve got mail,” the computer said when MP switched on her Internet mail service, which used the new Pony Express e-mail program. She keyed the download command and saw the originator was cgoodjadecastle.com. The username was from Gunsmoke. Marshal Dillon’s crippled sidekick had been named Chester Good.
DOWNLOADING, the prompt-box on the screen said. It also gave an estimate for how long the download would take. 47MINUTES…!
“Son of a bitch,” the DDO breathed, and lifted her phone. She pressed a button, waiting a second for the right voice to answer. “Ed, better come see this..
“Okay, honey, give me a minute.”
The Director of Central Intelligence came in, holding his morning mug of coffee, to see his wife of twenty-three years leaning back, away from her computer screen. Rarely in that time had Mary Pat ever backed away from anything. It just wasn’t her nature.
“From our Japanese friend?” Ed asked his wife.
“So it would seem,” MP replied.
“How much stuff is this?”
“Looks like a lot. I suppose Chester is pretty good in the sack.”
“Who trained him?”
“Whoever it was, we need to get his ass down to The Farm and pass all that knowledge along. For that matter,” she added, with a changed voice and an upward look to catch her husband’s eye, “maybe you could audit the course, honey-bunny.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“There’s always room for improvement—and, okay, yes, I need to drop fifteen pounds, too,” she added, to cut the DCI off before he could reply in kind. He hated when she did that. But not now. Now his hand touched her face quite tenderly, as the prompt screen said another thirty-four minutes to complete the download.
“Who’s the guy at Fort Meade who put the Ghost programs together?”
“They contracted a game place—a guy at a game company, I guess,” Mrs. Foley corrected herself. “They paid him four hundred fifty big ones for the job.” Which was more than the Director of Central Intelligence and the Deputy Director (Operations) made together, what with the federal pay caps, which didn’t allow any federal employee to make more than a member of Congress—and they feared raising their own salaries, lest they offend the voters.
“Call me when you have it downloaded, baby.”
“Who’s the best guy we have for China?”
“Joshua Sears, Ph.D. from U-Cal Berkley, runs the China desk in the DI. But the guy at NSA is better for linguistic nuances, they say. His name’s Victor Wang,” the DCI said.
“Can we trust him?” MP asked. Distrust of ethnic Chinese in the American national-security apparatus had reached a considerable level.
“Shit, I don’t know. You know, we have to trust somebody, and Wang’s been on the box twice a year for the last eight years. The ChiComms can’t compromise every Chinese-American we have, you know. This Wang guy’s third-generation American, was an officer in the Air Force—ELINT guy, evidently worked out of Wright-Patterson—and just made super-grade at NSA. Tom Porter says he’s very good.”
“Okay, well, let me see what all this is, then we’ll have Sears check it out, and then, maybe, if we have to, we’ll talk to this Wang guy. Remember, Eddie, at the end of this is an officer named Nomuri and a foreign national who has two eyes—”
Her husband cut her off with a wave. “And two ears. Yeah, baby, I know. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. And we both have the T-shirts to prove it.” And he was about as likely to forget that as his wife was. Keeping your agents alive was as important to an intelligence agency as capital preservation was to an investor.
Mary Pat ignored her computer for twenty minutes, and instead went over routine message traffic hand-carried up from MERCURY down in the basement of the Old Headquarters Building. That was not especially easy, but necessary nonetheless, because CIA’s Clandestine Service was running agents and operations all over the world—or trying to, Mary Pat corrected herself. It was her job to rebuild the Directorate of Operations, to restore the human- intelligence—HUMINT—capability largely destroyed in the late 1970s, and only slowly being rebuilt. That was no small task, even for an expert in the field. But Chester Nomuri was one of her pets. She’d spotted him at The Farm some years before and seen in him the talent, the gift, and the motivation. For him espionage was as much a vocation as the priesthood, something important to his country, and fun, as much fun as dropping a fifty-footer at Augusta was for Jack Nicklaus. Toss in his brains and street sense, and, Mary Pat had thought at the time, she had a winner there. Now Nomuri was evidently living up to her expectations. Big time. For the first time, CIA had an agent-in-place inside the ChiComm Politburo, and that was about as good as it got. Perhaps even the Russians didn’t have one of those, though you could never be sure, and you could lose a lot of money betting against the Russian intelligence services.