“Marxism doesn’t mix well with humanity, does it?”
Sears shook his head. “Not hardly, and toss in a culture that places a much lower value on human life than ours does.”
“Okay. Good brief. Here,” she said, handing over ten printed pages. “I want a written evaluation after lunch. Whatever you might be working on now, SORGE is more important.”
That meant a “seventh-floor tasking” to Dr. Sears. He’d be working directly for the Directors. Well, he had a private office already, and a computer that wasn’t hooked into any telephone lines, even a local area network, as many of the
CIA’s ‘puters were. Sears tucked the papers into a coat pocket and departed, leaving Mary Pat to look out her floor-to-ceiling windows and contemplate her next move. Really it was Ed’s call, but things like this were decided collegially, especially when the DCI was your husband. This time she’d wander over to see him.
The DCI’s office is long and relatively narrow, with the director’s office near the door, well away from the sitting area. Mary Pat took the easy chair across from the desk.
“How good is it?” Ed asked, knowing the reason for her visit.
“Calling this SORGE was unusually prescient for us. It’s at least that good.”
Since Richard SORGE dispatches from Tokyo to Moscow might have saved the Soviet Union in 1941, that got Ed Foley’s eyes to widen some. “Who looked at it?”
“Sears. He seems pretty smart, by the way. I’ve never really talked to him before.”
“Harry likes him,” Ed noted, referring to Harry Hall, the current Deputy Director (Intelligence), who was in Europe at the moment. “Okay, so he says it looks pretty good, eh?”
A serious nod. “Oh, yeah, Eddie.”
“Take it to see Jack?” They could not not take this to the President, could they?
“Tomorrow, maybe?”
“Works for me.” Just about any government employee can find space in his or her day for a drive to the White House. “Eddie, how far can this one spread?”
“Good question. Jack, of course. Maybe the Vice President. I like the guy,” the DCI said, “but usually the veep doesn’t get into stuff like this. SecState, SecDef, both are maybes. Ben Goodley, again a maybe. Mary, you know the problem with this.”
It was the oldest and most frequent problem with really valuable high-level intelligence information. If you spread it too far, you ran the risk of compromising the information—which also meant getting the source killed—and that killed the goose laying the golden eggs. On the other hand, if you didn’t make some use of the information, then you might as well not have the eggs anyway. Drawing the line was the most delicate operation in the field of intelligence, and you never knew where the right place was to draw it. You also had to worry about methods of spreading it around. If you sent it encrypted from one place to another, what if the bad guys had cracked your encryption system? NSA swore that its systems, especially TAPDANCE, could not be broken, but the Germans had thought ENIGMA crack-proof, too.
Almost as dangerous was giving the information, even by hand, to a senior government official. The bastards talked too much. They lived by talking. They lived by leaking. They lived by showing people how important they were, and importance in D.C. meant knowing what other people didn’t know. Information was the coin of the realm in this part of America. The good news here was that President Ryan understood about that. He’d been CIA, as high as Deputy Director, and so he knew about the value of security. The same was probably true of Vice President Jackson, former naval aviator. He’d probably seen lives lost because of bad intelligence. Scott Adler was a diplomat, and he probably knew as well. Tony Bretano, the well-regarded SecDef, worked closely with CIA, as all Secretaries of Defense had to do, and he could probably be trusted as well. Ben Goodley was the President’s National Security Advisor, and thus couldn’t easily be excluded. So, what did that total up to? Two in Beijing. At Langley, the DCI, DDCI, DDI, and DDO, plus Sears from inside the DI. That made seven. Then the President, Vice President, SecState, SecDef, and Ben Goodley. That made twelve. And twelve was plenty for the moment, especially in a town where the saying went, If two people know it, it’s not a secret. But the entire reason for having CIA was this sort of information.
“Pick a name for the source,” Foley instructed his wife.
“SONGBIRD will do for now.” It was a sentimental thing for MP, naming agents for birds. It dated back to CARDINAL.
“Fair enough. Let me see the translations you get, okay?”
“You bet, honey-bunny.” Mary Pat leaned over her husband’s desk to deliver a kiss, before heading back to her own office.
On arriving there, MP checked her computer for the SORGE file. She’d have to change that, MP realized. Even the name of this special-access compartment would be classified top secret or higher. Then she did a page count, making a note on a paper pad next to the screen.
ALL 1,349 PAGES OF RECIPES RECEIVED, she wrote as a reply to cgood@jadecastle.com. WILL LOOK THE RECIPES OVER. THANKS A BUNCH. MARY. She hit the RETURN key, and off the letter went, through the electronic maze called the Internet. One thousand, three hundred and forty-nine pages, the DDO thought. It would keep the analysts busy for quite a while. Inside the Old Headquarters Building, analysts would see bits and pieces of SORGE material, covered under other transitory code names randomly chosen by a computer in the basement, but only Sears would know the whole story—and, in fact, he didn’t even know that, did he? What he knew might—probably would—be enough to get this Ming woman killed, once the MSS realized who’d had access to the information. They could do some things in Washington to protect her, but not much.
Nomuri rose early in his Beijing apartment, and the second thing he did was to log on to check his e-mail. There it was, number seven in the list, one from patsbakery@brownienet.com. He selected the decryption system and typed in the key.., so, the pages had all been received. That was good. Nomuri dragged the message he’d dispatched to the “wipe-info” bin, where Norton Utilities not only deleted the file, but also five times electronically scrubbed the disk segments where they’d briefly resided, so that the files could never be recovered by any attempt, no matter how skilled. Next he eliminated the record of having sent any e-mail to brownienet. Now there was no record whatever of his having done anything, unless his telephone line was tapped, which he didn’t really suspect. And even then the data was scrambled, fully encrypted, and thus not recoverable. No, the only dangers in the operation now attached to Ming. His part of it, being the spymaster, was protected by the method in which her desktop computer called him, and from now on those messages would be sent out to brownienet automatically, and erased the same way, in a matter of seconds. It would take a very clever counterintelligence operation to hurt Nomuri now.
C H A P T E R – 15
Exploitation
“What’s this mean, Ben?” Ryan asked, seeing a change in his morning schedule.
“Ed and Mary Pat want to talk something over with you. They didn’t say what it was,” Goodley replied. “The Vice President can be here, too, and me, but that’s it, they requested.”
“Some new kind of toilet paper in the Kremlin, I suppose,” POTUS said. It was a long-standing CIA joke from Ryan’s time in the Bad Old Days of the Cold War. He stirred his coffee and leaned back in his comfortable chair. “Okay, what else is happening in the world, Ben?”
“So, this is mao-tai?” Cardinal DiMilo asked. He didn’t add that he’d been given to understand that Baptists didn’t drink alcoholic beverages. Odd, considering that Jesus’ first public miracle had been to change water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana. But Christianity had many faces. In any case, the mao-tai was vile, worse than the cheapest grappa. With advancing years, the Cardinal preferred gentler drinks. It was much easier on the stomach.
“I should not drink this,” Yu admitted, “but it is part of my heritage.”
“I know of no passage in Holy Scripture that prohibits this particular human weakness,” the Catholic said. And besides, wine was part of the Catholic liturgy. He saw that his Chinese host barely sipped at his tiny cup. Probably better for his stomach, too, the Italian reasoned.
He’d have to get used to the food, too. A gourmet like many Italians, Renato Cardinal DiMilo found that the food in Beijing was not as good as he’d experienced in Rome’s numerous Chinese restaurants. The problem, he thought, was the quality of the ingredients rather than the cook. In this case, the Reverand Yu’s wife was away in Taiwan to see her sick mother, he’d said, apologizing on the Catholic’s arrival. Monsignor Schepke had taken over the serving, rather like a young lieutenant-aide serving the needs of his general, Yu had thought, watching ‘the drama play out with some amusement. The Catholics certainly had their bureaucratic ways. But this Renato fellow was a decent sort, clearly an educated man, and a trained diplomat from whom Yu realized he might learn much.