by WOOD TOM
I had a problem.
The reply was almost instantaneous: What’s happened?
There was another firm in on the deal.
What are you talking about?
Seven rival sales reps, well briefed on my pitch. They waited until after my morning meeting and offered me a new position. Of the permanent variety.
The response took a few seconds. I’m sorry to hear that.
Be sorry for those reps. I was out of their price range.
Did the deal go through?
Yes, he typed. The customer found my offer irresistible.
Did you collect the item?
Victor thought for a moment being typing. I have it.
What do you need from me?
An explanation.
I don’t understand.
Then allow me to enlighten you. Besides myself, the only people who knew where I would be finalizing the deal are you and whoever you work for.
What are you getting at?
I’m not in the habit of sabotaging my own contracts.
This is not what you think.
Then what is it?
Whatever happened had nothing to do with us.
Victor sat back. The use of the word us made him think that the broker and the client were more closely connected with each other than he had thought.
Victor didn’t type anything.
The broker continued. I know nothing about what happened except for what you’ve just told me. You have to trust me.
If there was a button to simulate a loud laugh on the broker’s computer, Victor would have pressed it.
I prefer to trust myself.
So how can I convince you?
You’ve had your chance.
What about the item?
I won’t be delivering it.
There was a long pause. Please reconsider.
At best you were so incompetent as to allow a third party to find out about our arrangement. At worst just stupid enough to try and undercut me. Regardless, this is where we part company.
Wait.
You won’t see or hear from me again, Victor typed. But I may be seeing you.
He logged off as the broker was still typing a reply. It felt good to end with a threat. An old friend used to tell him any victory, however small, was still a victory.
The broker had said us. It could have been a momentary lapse in concentration revealing the broker and client had colluded to set him up, or it could be nothing. There was no way to be certain at the moment.
A noise made him look up. The annoying novelty ringtone of a cellular phone. The Chinese student fumbled in her pocket to retrieve it. Victor typed in another memorized Web address. There was a momentary delay before the new site appeared on the screen. He clicked one of the twenty links available and watched as the program downloaded.
It was only a few megabytes in size and it took just seconds on the café’s fast Internet connection. Victor then ran the program. He watched passively as a grey box popped up and a rapid stream of numbers and file names appeared, scrolling downwards. Two minutes later the program had run its course, having deleted all records of recent Internet activity from the computer’s hard disk. The program had not only deleted these records but also overwritten with useless data those sectors of the hard disk where the Internet records had been stored. It had then deleted that data and overwritten it again. This process repeated itself thousands of times in rapid succession, ensuring that the original data could never be recovered.
It then repeated the process on itself. Thirty seconds later there was no trace of what sites Victor had visited or what he had done there. A skilful technician might be able to find evidence of the program, but that would be all.
Victor rose from his seat and left the café. There was a security camera watching the front door, so he kept his face angled away as he’d done on the way in.
He headed for the train station.
CHAPTER 11
Central Intelligence Agency, Virginia, USA
Monday
13:53 EST
Five time zones west stood the CIA’s sprawling Langley headquarters. At the centre of the 258-acre site over two million square feet of glass, steel, concrete, and technology housed the world’s most highly funded espionage organization. Composed of the original sixties headquarters and the eighties upgrade, the CIA complex employed around twenty thousand men and women. Of these only a handful could rightly call themselves Roland Procter’s superior, and of this fact he was immensely proud.
Procter sat behind his desk in his enviable top-floor office. The office was light and spacious, climate controlled, tastefully decorated, and of a noticeably large size. The best feature by far was the beautiful view Procter enjoyed of the Virginia countryside surrounding the agency’s headquarters. The associate director for the National Clandestine Service placed the phone down, stood, breathed in to button up his suit jacket, and exited the office.
With long strides Procter made his way through the featureless corridors to the conference room. He was there in less than a minute and pushed open the door. Everybody else was already seated around the long oval table. Only about half actually needed to be there, all big dogs from his department. The others were mandarins from across the hierarchy who had seats because of their status instead of their usefulness. The Ozols operation had been a big deal and plenty of people, even if they had personally contributed nothing towards it, had had a stake in its success and now its failure.
The pleasantries were kept brief as Procter took his seat. Sitting across from him was the department’s deputy director. Meredith Chambers was short and slim, with a narrow face and greying black hair that she vehemently refused to dye. She was a good few years Procter’s senior, but he had to admit she looked pretty good for her age, even if he usually preferred women with far more meat on the hips. Wearing a fine navy pantsuit, Chambers looked as regal as ever. She had been in charge of NCS for less than a year and was still a bit wet behind the ears in Procter’s opinion. Her office was a fair chunk larger than Procter’s own but he had the up on the view. He’d bet his pension she was a firecracker in the sack.
‘Right,’ Chambers began. ‘I understand Alvarez is on the line. Can you hear me?’
Alvarez’s voice came through the table’s speakerphones: ‘Yes, ma’am.’
Procter knew Alvarez pretty well and knew that as well as having all the attributes necessary for a good field officer, he was also one of the true good guys. There was a sense of duty and patriotism so ingrained in him that his blood wasn’t just red but white and blue as well. Over a long career in the CIA Procter was surprised to say that he found straight shooters like Alvarez few and far between.
Chambers said, ‘Okay, then. A few of us are up-to-date with what’s happened today, some are not, so if you could begin by giving us a summary of the operation’s background.’
‘This morning, Paris time,’ Alvarez began, ‘I was due to meet one Andris Ozols, a retired Latvian officer of the Russian navy and the Soviet fleet before that. Ozols claimed to know the location of a Russian frigate that had sunk in the Indian Ocean a couple of years back. The Russians have never acknowledged the accident, a catastrophic engine malfunction that led to the deaths of all sailors on board, one because it came embarrassingly soon after the Russians and Chinese navies had been doing exercises in the area, and two because, according to Ozols, the ship was carrying eight Oniks antiship cruise missiles.’
Chambers said, ‘I’d now like William to tell us about the Oniks.’
William Ferguson sat on Procter’s side of the table. The head of the Russian office, Ferguson was one of the company’s true old boys. He was in his late sixties, and his face was deeply wrinkled, but he hadn’t lost a strand of the grey hair that was combed back from his high forehead. Unless he wore his long overcoat to bulk him out, he looked thin, half-starved almost, but never weak. He had fought three tours in Vietnam and had received more major medals than Proc
ter had fat fingers. The old guy was a staunch patriot and career spy who had done America’s much-needed dirty work for forty-odd years. His list of exploits against the Soviets during the Cold War was legendary, and to those who knew of his achievements he was rightly regarded as a hero. Even though he was a decade older than Procter, Ferguson was one step down the food chain. That was, in Procter’s understanding, Ferguson’s choice. He had remained in the trenches of his own free will, and Procter had huge respect for that.
‘The SS-NX-26 Oniks,’ Ferguson began in his slow baritone, ‘is quite simply the missile we wish we’d designed. It is the replacement for the SS-N-22 Sunburn, a missile that was described by some experts, myself included, as the most dangerous missile on the planet. The Oniks is even more lethal.’
He cleared his throat before continuing. ‘These missiles practically come guaranteed to ruin your day. They have a range of 162 nautical miles and can cruise at an altitude as low as nine feet if necessary, flying at two and a half times the speed of sound, carrying either a 550 pound conventional warhead or a twohundred-kiloton nuke. For comparison purposes, our equivalents, the Harpoon and Tomahawk, have a range of less than fifty miles and fly at subsonic speeds. Think of a push bike versus an Indy car.
‘But it’s not just the speed or even the range that keeps our admirals awake at night, it’s the accuracy of these weapons. It’s extraordinary. In ’03 Russian and Chinese fleets performed joint war games in the Indian Ocean, simulating attacks against aggressive American-carrier battle groups. The timing of the demonstration was not coincidental. We just happened to be flexing our own naval muscles at the same time, in that same part of the world.’ He showed a wry smile. ‘The highlight of the show was when a Chinese missile destroyer fired a Sunburn with a practice warhead. A high-speed camera recorded the missile hitting the centre of a white cross painted on the hull of the target vessel over sixty nautical miles away. The Sunburn flew at just twenty-two feet above sea level. The Oniks is faster, carries a larger payload, and is even harder to detect, let alone stop.
‘Do we need to be concerned about this weapon?’ Ferguson looked around the room briefly. ‘Absolutely. They’ve been specifically designed to defeat the US Aegis radar and Phalanx defence system that protect our ships. Phalanx’s replacement, the rolling-action missile, has never been tested against these kinds of weapons. Quite simply, we have no proven defence for the Oniks or even the Sunburn. They completely upset the balance of naval warfare, and a few humble destroyers armed with these missiles can take out an entire carrier group. We don’t have anything that comes close to the Oniks. And we want them. Bad.’
Ferguson enjoyed his little speech, Procter could tell. The old man had spent his career battling the Soviets, and since the Berlin wall had come down his experience and knowledge just wasn’t as valuable. Now, everyone was more concerned with the Middle East than the Russians. If the shoe had been on the other foot Procter knew he’d be resentful of that fall from glory. If Ferguson carried any resentment though, he hid it well.
One of the mandarins decided to get his money’s worth. Nathan Wyley was on Procter’s side of the table. Though he was just on the sunny side of fifty, Wyley looked at least ten years younger with his ridiculous shock of floppy blond hair. For some reason Procter had yet to work out, Wyley didn’t much like him, not that Procter cared how the lanky streak of piss felt.
‘How the hell do the Russians have this missile and not us?’ Wyley asked.
Ferguson sighed and motioned for his deputy, Sykes, to answer for him. Procter wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of Sykes’s first name. It was Karl or Kevin or something. He had the build of someone who trained at the gym but not enough to warrant advertising the fact. Procter didn’t know exactly how old he was, but Sykes looked as if he was somewhere in his mid-thirties. Though in the wrong light his tired eyes made him look much older. His suits were always immaculate, tailored, far more expensive than his pay grade should allow. Procter had put Sykes under investigation a couple of years back to find out if he had been supplementing his income, but it turned out he had wealthy parents and a trust fund.
Sykes was something of an unknown quantity to Procter. He had the nice clothes, the clean-cut face, good teeth, and said all the right things. He was almost the antithesis of Ferguson – young and frighteningly ambitious. Sykes was in the department to make a name for himself, and probably disliked being assigned to the unglamorous Russian office, but he was keen to impress. Procter could see shades of his own ambition in the guy’s eyes and didn’t always like what he saw.
‘Because,’ Sykes began with a smile that showed lots of bleached teeth, ‘believe it or not, we’re not the top of the pile when it comes to missile technology. Russia may have left most of her arms development in the trash, but the budget strings are still thick in places. Russia has focused on a few key technologies and has more than kept up in areas such as fighter jets. In certain missile technologies they’re the market leaders by a long way, earning billions in sales to other countries. Their antiship-cruise-missile capabilities are not just a step up from our own but a whole leap. They’re at least twenty-five years in advance of anything we’ve got.’
Chambers said, ‘If we could let Alvarez continue now.’
Ferguson nodded as though his approval was actually required.
Alvarez’s voice came back through the speakerphone. ‘In short, Ozols was going to sell the location of the sunken ship to the highest bidder. The buyer would then be free to recover the missiles at their leisure. As you can imagine, there are a lot of regimes out there who would love to get these weapons for their arsenals. Ozols claimed that he had half a dozen other potential buyers interested when he approached us. He wanted to sell the information for two hundred million euros, but I bartered him down to a little over one hundred million.’
Chambers sighed. ‘I cannot overstate the importance of our being the ones to recover those missiles. Not only would we improve our own antiship-cruise-missile technology, but, more significantly, we can prevent some less-than-desirable faction from potentially using the technology against either us or our allies. Furthermore, it would enable our own navy to improve and develop defences against this type of missile.’ She paused before adding, ‘Let’s not forget the Chinese and Iranians have this technology already.’
Wyley leaned toward the speakerphone. ‘A hundred million bucks for a grid reference seems a little steep.’
Ferguson came to the rescue. ‘Each year we spend more than the GDP of most countries making sure we have the best toys. A hundred million to leapfrog a quarter century of arms development is the bargain of a lifetime. Especially because we’ve been after the Sunburn for years and Russia won’t sell.’
‘And they’ll still work after all this time underwater?’ Wyley asked.
Sykes nodded. ‘Maybe, maybe not. They’re housed in airtight casings that protect them from the elements but aren’t designed for submersion in salt water. The casing may have corroded, and any that have been exposed to sea water will be useless, but the technology will still be extractable, as will the warheads carried, which could be anything. Anyone who recovered the missiles and their accompanying electronics would be able to reverseengineer the design and create their own equivalents. Against a regime with these kinds of missiles our naval capabilities are extremely reduced. Even replicas with fifty percent of the capabilities of an Oniks can cripple or even destroy one of our aircraft carriers.’
‘And why deal in Paris?’ Chambers asked.
Alvarez’s voice again emanated through the speakerphone. ‘The man was paranoid as hell. He was convinced we were going to double-cross him. He would only meet on neutral soil. Somewhere he thought we would have difficulty pulling any stunts. Paris was his idea. He gave me a seven-day window, promising he’d call at some point during that period with the time and location of the meet. He phoned just before five-thirty this morning, said he wanted to meet an hour later. Obviously he didn’t
show.’
Chambers leaned forward gracefully. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that Ozols gave any clues as to where the frigate is located before you were due to meet.’
‘Unfortunately he did not. He was coy enough not to give me anything even remotely specific. What he did tell me was that Moscow believed the ship had sunk in deep water and so wasn’t worth recovering but that in fact it had come to rest on continental shelf in shallow water. Ozols claimed it’s in international waters so anyone with a boat and its location can get to it easily. I’m sure you can appreciate that there is a lot of continental shelf out there in the Indian Ocean.’
‘Why didn’t he just try selling the information back to the Russians anonymously?’ one of the mandarins asked.
‘My guess is he knew if he tried to they’d be able to work out who was doing the selling and send a nice little SVR execution team to offer him a better deal.’
Chambers asked, ‘How was the exchange supposed to happen?’
‘Ozols had agreed to supply the information on a flash drive that he was going to give me on the day he was killed. I would then check the information, and, if it appeared genuine, I would wire half the money to his bank account. I would then walk away with the drive once he had checked with his bank that the money was there. The other half would be held in an escrow account that he would get access to once we had located the ship. It was the best deal I could negotiate.’
‘Okay,’ Chambers said. ‘Now take us through what happened in Paris.’
‘We still haven’t gotten even a fraction of the details yet,’ Alvarez began. ‘The French are keeping as many people out of the loop with this as much as possible. It’s so sandwiched in crap it’s taken this long just to chew through it.’
‘Don’t tell me you’re surprised at this,’ Ferguson interjected. ‘Our friends across the pond may be among the least intellectually blessed of our allies, but they’re not quite as dumb as we would like to believe. They have eyes and ears. They know we’re keeping them in the dark about something and they don’t like it.’