by Tom Clancy
“So we probably have a KGB RIF prowling around London still, probably with whatever information Moscow has on our Mr. Clark, and doing what, we do not know.”
“Correct, Bill,” Holt agreed. “I can’t say that I like it either, but there you are.”
“What have you turned up on KGB-PIRA contacts?”
“We have a few things. One photo of someone else from a meeting in Dublin eight years ago, and oral reports of other contacts, with physical description. Some might be the chap in the photo, but the written descriptions fit about a third of male humanity, and we’re leery of showing the photos around quite yet.” Tawney didn’t need to be told why. It was well within the realm of possibility that some of Holt’s informants were indeed double-agents, and showing them the photos of the man in the pub might well do nothing more than alert the target of the investigation to the fact that someone knew who he was. That would cause him to become more cautious, perhaps change his appearance, and the net result would be to make things worse instead of better. This was the most complex of games, Tawney reminded himself. And what if the whole thing was nothing more than curiosity on the part of the Russians, merely keeping track of a known intelligence officer on the other side? Hell, everyone did that. It was just a normal part of doing business.
The bottom line was that they knew what they didn’t know—no, Tawney thought. They didn’t even know that much. They knew that they didn’t know something, but they didn’t even know what it was that they wanted to find out. What was the significance of this blip of information that had appeared on the scope?
“What’s this for?” Henriksen asked innocently.
“A fog-cooling system. We got it from your chaps,” Aukland said.
“Huh? I don’t understand,” the American replied.
“One of our engineers saw it in—Arizona, I think. It sprays a very fine water mist. The tiny droplets absorb heat energy and evaporate into the atmosphere, has the same effect as air-conditioning, but with a negligible energy expenditure.”
“Ahh,” Bill Henriksen said, doing his best to act surprised. “How widely distributed is the system?”
“Just the tunnels and concourses. The architect wanted to put it all over the stadium, but people objected, said it would interfere with cameras and such,” Aukland answered, “too much like a real fog.”
“Okay, I think I need to look at that.”
“Why?”
“Well, sir, it’s a hell of a good way to deliver a chemical agent, isn’t it?” The question took the police official seriously aback.
“Well . . . yes, I suppose it would be.”
“Good. I have a guy in the company, former officer in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, expert on this sort of thing, degree from MIT. I’ll have him check it out ASAP.”
“Yes, that is a good idea, Bill. Thank you,” Aukland said, kicking himself for not thinking of that on his own. Well, he was hiring expertise, wasn’t he? And this Yank certainly seemed to be an expert.
“Does it get that hot here?”
“Oh, yes, quite. We expect temperatures in the nineties—Fahrenheit, that is. We’re supposed to think in Celsius nowadays, but I never did learn that.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Henriksen noted.
“Anyway, the architect said that this was an inexpensive way to cool the spectators down, and quite reasonable to install. It feeds off the fire-sprinkler system. Doesn’t even use much water for what it does. It’s been installed for over a year. We test it periodically. American company, can’t recall the name at the moment.”
Cool-Spray of Phoenix, Arizona, Henriksen thought. He had the plans for the system in the file cabinet in his office. It would play a crucial role in the Project’s plans, and had been seen as a godsend from the first moment. Here was the place. Soon would come the time.
“Heard anything more from the Brits?”
“We have an inquiry in, but no reply yet,” Aukland answered. “It is a very hush-hush project, evidently.”
Henriksen nodded. “Politics, always gets in the way.” And with luck it would stay that way.
“Quite,” Aukland agreed, with a nod.
Detective Lieutenant Mario d’Allessandro punched up his computer and accessed the NYPD central-records file. Sure enough, Mary Bannister was in there, as was Anne Pretloe. Then he set up a search routine, picking gender WOMEN, age eighteen to thirty for starters, and picking the RUN icon with his mouse. The system generated forty-six names, all of which he saved to a file he created for the purpose. The system didn’t have photos built in. He’d have to access the paper files for those. He de-selected ten names from Queens and Richmond boroughs for the moment, saving for the moment only Manhattan missing girls. That came down to twenty-one. Next he de-selected African-American women, because if they were dealing with a serial killer, such criminals usually selected clones as victims—the most famous of them, Theodore Bundy, had almost exclusively picked women who parted their hair down the middle, for instance. Bannister and Pretloe were white, single, reasonably attractive, ages twenty-one and twenty-four, and dark-haired. So, eighteen to thirty should be a good straddle, he thought, and he further de-selected the names that didn’t fit that model.
Next he opened the department’s Jane Doe file, to look up the recovered bodies of murder victims who had not yet been identified. He already knew all of these cases from his regular work. Two fit the search parameters, but neither was Bannister or Pretloe. So this was, for the moment, a dry hole. That was both good and bad news. The two missing women were not definitely dead, and that was the good news. But their bodies could have been cleverly disposed of—the Jersey marshes were nearby, and that area had been a prime dumping site for bodies since the turn of the century.
Next he printed up his list of missing women. He’d want to examine all the paper files, including the photos, with the two FBI agents. Both Pretloe and Bannister had brown hair of roughly the same length, and maybe that was enough of a commonality for a serial killer—but, no, Bannister was still alive, or so the e-mail letter suggested . . . unless the serial killer was the kind of sick person who wanted to taunt the families of his victims. D’Allessandro had never come across one of those before, but serial killers were seriously sick bastards, and you could never really predict the things they might do for personal amusement. If one of those fucks were loose in New York, then it wasn’t just the FBI who’d want his ass. Good thing the state of New York finally had a death-penalty statute . . .
“Yes, I’ve seen him,” Popov told his boss.
“Really?” John Brightling asked. “How close?”
“About as close as we are, sir,” the Russian replied. “It was not intentional, but it happened. He’s a large, powerful man. His wife is a nurse at the local community hospital, and his daughter is a medical doctor, married to one of the other team members, working at the same hospital. She is Dr. Patricia Chavez. Her husband is Domingo Chavez, also a CIA field officer, now assigned to this Rainbow group, probably as a commando leader. Both Clark and Chavez are CIA field officers. Clark was involved in the rescue of the former KGB chairman’s wife and daughter from Soviet territory some years ago—you’ll recall the story made the press recently. Well, Clark was the officer who got them out. He was also involved in the conflict with Japan, and the death of Mahmoud Haji Daryaei in Iran. He and Chavez are highly experienced and very capable intelligence officers. It would be very dangerous to underestimate either of them,” Popov concluded.
“Okay, what does that tell us?”
“It tells us that Rainbow is what it appears to be, a multinational counterterror group whose activities spread all across Europe. Spain is a NATO member, but Austria and Switzerland are not, you will recall. Could they expand their operations to other countries? Certainly, yes. They are a very serious threat to any terrorist operation. It is not,” Popov went on, “an organization I would like to have in the field against me. Their expertise in actual ‘combat’ operations we have s
een on television. Behind that will be excellent technical and intelligence support as well. The one cannot exist without the other.”
“Okay. So we know about them. Is it possible that they know about us?” Dr. Brightling asked.
“Possible, but unlikely,” Popov thought. “If that were the case, then you would have agents of your FBI in here to arrest you—and me—for criminal conspiracy. I am not being tracked or followed—well, I do not think that I am. I know what to look for, and I have seen nothing of the sort, but, I must also admit, it is possible that a very careful and expert effort could probably follow me without my noticing it. That is difficult—I have been trained in countersurveillance—but theoretically possible.”
That shook his employer somewhat, Popov saw. He’d just made an admission that he was not perfect. His former supervisors in KGB would have known it beforehand and accepted it as a normal risk of the intelligence trade . . . but those people never had to worry about being arrested and losing their billions of dollars of personal worth.
“What are the risks?”
“If you mean what methods can be used against you? . . .” He got a nod. “That means that your telephones could be tapped, and—”
“My phones are encrypted. The system is supposed to be break-proof. My consultants on that tell me—”
Popov cut him off with a raised hand. “Sir, do you really think that your government allows the manufacture of encryption systems that it cannot itself break?” he asked, as though explaining something to a child. “The National Security Agency at Fort Meade has some of the brightest mathematicians in the world, and the world’s most powerful computers, and if you ever wonder how hard they work, you need only look at the parking lots.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“If the parking lots are filled at seven in the evening, that means they are hard at work on something. Everyone has a car in your country, and parking lots are generally too large to be enclosed and protected from even casual view. It’s an easy way for an intelligence officer to see how active one of your government agencies is.” And if you were really interested, you found out a few names and addresses, so as to know the car types and tag numbers. The KGB had tracked the head of NSA’s “Z” group—the people tasked both to crack and to create encryption systems and codes—that way for over a decade, and the reborn RVS was doubtless doing the same. Popov shook his head. “No, I would not trust a commercially available encoding system. I have my doubts about the systems used by the Russian government. Your people are very clever at cracking cipher systems. They’ve been so for over sixty years, well before World War Two, and they are allied with the British, who also have a tradition of excellence in that area of expertise. Has no one told you this?” Popov asked in surprise.
“Well . . . no, I’ve been told that this system I have here could not be broken because it is a 128-bit—”
“Ah, yes, the STU-3 standard. That system has been around in your government for about twenty years. Your people have changed to STU-4. Do you think they made that change merely because they wanted to spend money, Dr. Brightling? Or might there have been another reason? When I was in the field for KGB, I only used one-time pads. That is an encryption system only used one time, composed of random transpositions. It cannot be broken, but it is tedious to use. To send a single message that way could take hours. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to use for verbal communications. Your government has a system called TAP-DANCE, which is similar in concept, but we never managed to copy it.”
“So, you mean people could be listening in on every phone call I make?”
Popov nodded. “Of course. Why do you suppose all of our substantive conversations have been made face-to-face?” Now he was really shaken, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich saw. The genius was a babe-in-the-woods. “Now, perhaps, is the time for you to tell me why I have undertaken these missions for you?”
“Yes, Minister . . . excellent . . . thank you,” Bob Aukland said into his cellular phone. He thumbed the END button and put the phone back in his pocket, then turned to Bill Henriksen. “Good news. We’ll have that Rainbow group down to consult on our security as well.”
“Oh?” Bill observed. “Well, I guess it can’t hurt all that much.”
“Nose a little out of joint?” the cop asked.
“Not really,” Henriksen lied. “I probably know a few of them, and they know me.”
“And your fee will remain the same, Bill,” the Aussie said. They headed off to his car, and from there they’d drive to a pub for a few pints before he drove the American off to the airport.
Oh, shit, the American thought. Once more the Law of Unintended Consequences had risen up to bite him in the ass. His mind went briefly into overdrive, but then persuaded itself that it didn’t really matter all that much as long as he did his job right. It might even help, he told himself, almost believing it.
He couldn’t tell Popov, Brightling knew. He trusted him in many ways—hell, what Popov knew could put him in federal prison, even on death row—but to tell him what this was really all about? No, he couldn’t risk that. He didn’t know Popov’s views on the Environment and Nature. So he couldn’t predict the Russian’s reaction to the project. Popov was dangerous to him in many ways, like a falcon trained to the fist, but still a free agent, willing to kill a quail or a rabbit, perhaps, but never entirely his, always able to fly off and reclaim his previous free life . . . and if he was free to do that, he was also free to give information to others. Not for the first time, Brightling thought about having Bill Henriksen take care of this potential problem. He’d know how. Surely, the former FBI agent knew how to investigate a murder, and thus how to befuddle the investigators as well, and this little problem would go away.
Assets, Brightling thought next. What other things could he do to make his position and his Project more secure? If this Rainbow was a problem, would it be possible to strike at it directly? To destroy it at best, or at worst, distract it, force it to focus in another direction?
“I have to think that one through first, Dmitriy,” he said finally.
Popov nodded soberly, wondering what thoughts had gone through his employer’s mind in the fifteen seconds he’d taken to consider the question. Now it was his turn to be concerned. He’d just informed John Brightling of the operational dangers involved in using him, Popov, to set up the terrorist incidents, and especially of the flaws in his communications security. The latter, especially, had frightened the man. Perhaps he ought to have warned him earlier, but somehow the subject had never arisen, and Dmitriy Arkadeyevich now realized that it had been a serious error on his part. Well, perhaps not that great an error. Operational security was not all that bad. Only two people knew what was happening . . . well, probably that Henriksen fellow as well. But Bill Henriksen was former FBI, and if he were an informer, then they’d all be in jail now. The FBI would have all the evidence it needed for a major felony investigation and trial, and would not allow things to proceed any further unless there were some vast criminal conspiracy yet to be uncovered—
—but how much larger would it have to be than conspiracy to commit murder? Moreover, they would have to know what the conspiracy was, else they would have no reason to hold off on their arrests. No, security here was good. And though the American government had the technical ability to decode Brightling’s supposedly secure phone lines, even to tap them required a court order, and evidence was needed for that, and that evidence would itself be sufficient to put several people in death-row cages. Including me, Popov reminded himself.
What was going on here? the Russian demanded. He’d just thought it through enough to realize something. Whatever his employer was doing, it was larger than mass murder. What the hell could that be? Most worrisome of all, Popov had undertaken the missions in the hope—a realized hope, to be sure—of making a good deal of money off the job. He now had over a million dollars in his Bern bank account. Enough for him to return to Mother Russia and live very well in
deed . . . but not enough for what he really wanted. So strange to discover that a “million,” that magic word to describe a magic number, was something that, once you had it . . . wasn’t magical at all. It was just a number from which you had to subtract to buy the things you wanted. A million American dollars wasn’t enough to buy the home he wanted, the car he wanted, the food he wanted, and then have enough left over to sustain the lifestyle he craved for the remainder of his life—except, probably, in Russia, where he did not, unfortunately, wish to live. To visit, yes; to stay, no. And so Dmitriy was trapped, too.
Trapped into what, he didn’t know. And so here he was, sitting across the desk from someone who, like himself, was also busily trying to think things through, but neither of them knew where to go just yet. One of them knew what was happening and the other did not—but the other one knew how to make things happen, and his employer did not. It was an interesting and somewhat elegant impasse.
And so they just sat there for a minute or so, each regarding the other, and if not not knowing what to say, then unwilling to take the risk of saying what they needed to. Finally, Brightling broke the silence.
“I really need to think this situation through. Give me a day or so to do that?”
“Certainly.” Popov stood, shook hands, and walked out of the office. A player for most of his adult life in that most interesting and fascinating of games, he realized now that he was in a new game, with new parameters. He’d taken possession of a vast sum of money—but an amount that his employer had regarded as trivial. He was involved in an operation whose import was larger than that of mass murder. That was not entirely new to him, Popov realized on reflection. He’d once served a nation called by its ultimately victorious enemy the Evil Empire, and that cold war had been greater in size than mass murder. But Brightling was not a nation-state, and however huge his resources might be, they were minuscule in comparison with those of any advanced country. The great question remained—what the hell was this man trying to achieve? And why did he need the services of Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov to achieve it?