Devil's Fork

by Spencer Adams

CHAPTER 10

  TUESDAY

  Langley, Virginia

  Sara did not sleep well the night before. In her office, the pervading smell of coffee seemed to attach itself to everything in the room. She had turned into a state where her mind could not get over the message that she sent the previous day with Matt. She thought about it over and over, almost like a computer that catches a virus and starts performing the same task in a loop. She worried that Matt’s computer did have a virus and that someone could have figured out what they were doing with Tom. Matt had combed through his computer afterwards and said he could not find any malware installed, but that did not satisfy her. Something felt wrong.

  In the world of traditional espionage, Sara knew you could never be completely sure whether you were the one carrying out the mission, or whether a mission was being carried out on you. It was confusing, but examples sometimes helped to make the concept clear. Double agents typically created these situations. In one of the most famous cases, the allies in World War II made the Germans believe that German agents had conducted a successful operation to determine where the allies were planning to land in Normandy. During Operation Fortitude, the allies placed inflatable objects that looked like tanks, trucks, and artillery guns onto English fields on the coast close to Calais. German agents in London confirmed that the allies planned to invade Calais. The Germans had believed that they conducted a successful intelligence mission and prepared themselves for an invasion in Calais. However, the real mission was performed on them, as the German agents in London were double agents. They were really working for the British, and their mission was to make the Germans believe that they had discovered where the landings would be. This fear of “being on the wrong side” of the mission pervaded many intelligence agencies. The description of spy operations during the Cold War as chess emanated from the endless quest to outmaneuver an unsuspecting enemy. During the Cold War, analysts were constantly asking themselves whether assets recruited were genuine, or whether they were double agents who were feeding you information to make you conduct an operation right into the hands of the opposing side. This Cold War game created a paranoia that could be felt in CIA headquarters. It was a place where one’s job was to be paranoid all day.

  Sara knew that double agents were not the only source of this paranoia. Anytime the enemy found a way to get information from you, they could turn your mission around so that you were on that wrong side. And that paranoia was boiling inside Sara today. She had heard about Chinese military hacking groups. They were government-sponsored groups whose purpose was to hack the western world and get anything—classified information, asset names, technology blueprints, and commercial information. She had been to sessions where she along with the other analysts had learned the basics about them. But she was not responsible for rooting them out. There were other analysts in the CIA who did that – people who understood computer science, unlike her. Even within SAD, Matt understood computer science at a level where he should have been able to check whether they were being hacked, and he had said he could not find anything on their systems. But why did a Mandarin symbol appear when they sent that message to PACOM? Sara could not stop thinking that if the North Koreans found out what was about to happen, the mission would quickly turn around and be on Tom.

  Sara got up and started walking to Anderson’s office down the well-lit hall. Her mind fixated on this issue so that she did not look around her or even hear any phones ringing. She might as well have been walking through an empty, silent room. When she arrived at Anderson’s corner office, she gave it two knocks and walked in.

  “Sara” Anderson said, pleased to see her “I just got off the phone with PACOM and they are ready. They say the Virginia is in place. I told you I was on the phone earlier with the Helicopter pilots over in Yongsan and they say they are ready too. So it looks like we are set for tomorrow.”

  Sara liked to hear the word “phone” because phones, and particularly the secured phones the CIA used with the military were much harder to hack and listen to than messages sent by a computer.

  “That’s great.” Sara’s voice sounded too monotonous. “I also spoke to Tom and he said he tried out the ADS we gave him and he feels comfortable with it.”

  “I knew he would. I might make it standard issue here,” he said smiling.

  Sara was growing more uncomfortable as she felt the conversation was veering off on a track on which she did not want to be.

  “John, I just wanted to talk to you again about this hacking issue.”

  “Well remember, we are not sure if we have a hacking issue. All the checks we ran said it was nothing. Matt ran a scan and found nothing that led him to believe that his system was compromised. You said you spoke to our team that deals with Chinese hackers and they could not find anything in that computer.”

  “Yes, but I still have that eerie feeling. There is no reason a Chinese character should appear when we send a secured message to the military.”

  “We have language translation software that uses those characters. Maybe it was on for some reason. You never know what programs are running on a computer.”

  “These hackers are sophisticated though. I feel like they could have slipped something in our systems so that we would not be able to detect it.”

  “What kind of thing would that be?”

  “I don’t know…I don’t know computer science or how to program or anything. But I feel that they would be able to find some way to do that.”

  “If they are sophisticated, they probably would not be careless enough to have their program bring up a Chinese letter so that we could all see it.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they made a mistake. I really have no idea, but I just feel really uncomfortable that we are about to send Tom into one of the most hostile countries, alone, and that the North Koreans might have been tipped off by the Chinese that he’s coming.”

  “I was actually going to tell you that when I spoke to the Admiral over in Pacific Command today, I asked him if he saw any change in naval activity around the Korean peninsula.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He has not seen any change. Neither from the Chinese navy nor the North Korean navy. If you can call it a navy.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He said Chinese ships have not changed their course and are not even sailing in the direction of the peninsula. The North Korean gunboats that operate in the area have not been acting strangely. Don’t you think that if the North Koreans found out, they would have sent more boats near the coast where we will be operating?”

  “Unless they don’t want us to know that they know,” Sara replied. This was the feeling of the mission turning around on you.

  “Yes but I think if they knew we were on the verge of inserting someone on their shore, they would be doing something rather than playing games.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said looking down. She felt slightly better, but still could not shake that eerie feeling.

  “Anyway, let’s talk about that base. Any more thoughts on what could be there? Or any new thoughts on that phrase, ‘error in how we think about jewels’?”

  Sara was caught off guard, “I – I’m not sure. I don’t understand it because with nuclear weapons, you either are developing them, building them, or doing nothing. There is no other option. All three of those options fall under one of the codewords that Mr. Park gave 1414.”

  “What do you think about the possibility that they are developing weapons more advanced than nuclear bombs? Eric told me they could be developing pure fusion bombs or anti-matter bombs? Eric said those are possible, but the science is advanced, still ahead of our research.”

  “I just don’t understand how we can be mocking this country’s navy in one sentence, and then a few sentences later be speculating that they are developing weapons more advanced than ours. How can that be? And plus, wouldn’t that fall under the ‘red jewels’ code?”

  Anderson sat back and looked dee
p into her eyes as he thought about the contradiction. Sara continued,

  “It’s a paradox – how can a country that is so backwards where they can’t even generate enough electricity for themselves, where journalists go on tours and come back with videos showing that people there have no idea what is going on in the outside world – how can that country be anywhere close to having nuclear weapons. Or in a situation where we are talking about them having anti-matter weapons. What are anti-matter weapons?”

  “’I’m not sure. I think anti-matter creates a massive explosion when it touches regular matter. But I see what you’re saying. OK, I guess we aren’t going to get to the answer through analysis. We really just have to keep waiting for Tom to get there.”

  “I’ll go check our systems to make sure everything is ready for tomorrow. I’ll also take a look at the latest satellite images.” Sara’s mind was back into the mission. She had not thought about the Mandarin character for a full minute or two.

  “Sara, you should also go home early tonight. Tom is getting on the helicopter at 8PM Seoul time tomorrow, which is 7AM tomorrow morning for us. We’ll need to be here early. I want everyone well rested.”

  “OK got it. Thanks John. Oh by the way – why are Mr. Park and his team still here and in that conference room?” Sara pointed down the hall to a room where the team from South Korea looked busy working on something. She assumed they could not have been working on this mission, because they did not come out and speak to anyone. Nobody except Anderson had interacted with Mr. Park since the briefing. Sara usually did not like being so forward, but at this point, the fact that Mr. Park was staying around was becoming obvious.

  “Oh, they’re going to be watching the mission with us in the command room tomorrow. They are also working on something of their own in the meantime.” Anderson knew he was being vague, but also looked at her as though he was not prepared to elaborate any more.