by Tom Clancy
“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 autoencryption. 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 [email protected]. 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. 47 MINUTES ... !
“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.
“File’s done,” the computer’s electronic voice finally said. That occasioned a turn in her swivel chair. The DDO first of all backed up her newly downloaded file to a second hard drive, and then to a “toaster” disk, so called because the disk went in and out of the drive box like a slice of bread. With that done, she typed in her decryption code, 51240. She had no idea why Nomuri had specified that number, but knowing was not necessary, just so long as nobody else knew either. After typing in the five digits and hitting RETURN, the file icons changed. They were already aligned in list form, and MP selected the oldest. A page full of Chinese ideographs came up. With that bit of information, MP lifted her office phone and punched the button for her secretary. “Dr. Joshua Sears, DI, Chinese Section. Please ask him to come see me right away.”
That
took six endless minutes. It took rather a lot to make Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley shiver, but this was one such occasion. The image on her screen looked like something one might get from inking the feet of several drunken roosters, then making them loiter on a piece of white paper, but within the imagery were words and thoughts. Secret words and hidden thoughts. On her screen was the ability to read the minds of adversaries. It was the sort of thing that could win the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, but infinitely more important. It was the sort of thing that had won wars and altered history from the expected path determined by the most important of players, and in that was the value of espionage, the whole point of having an intelligence community, because the fates of nations really did ride on such things—
—and therefore, the fates of nations rode on Chet Nomuri’s schwantz and how well he used it, Mrs. Foley reflected. What a crazy fucking world it was. How the hell could an historian ever get that right? How did you communicate the importance of seducing some nameless secretary, an underling, a modern-day peasant who merely transcribed the thoughts of the important, but in being compromised made those thoughts available to others, and in doing so, altered the course of history as surely as turning the rudder changed the course of a mighty ship. For Mary Pat, Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency, it was a moment of fulfillment to place alongside the birth of her children. Her entire raison d’être lay in black-and-white ideographs on her computer monitor—and she couldn’t read the fucking things. She had the language skills to teach Russian literature at Moscow State University, but all she knew of Chinese was chop suey and moo goo gai pan.
“Mrs. Foley?” A head appeared at her door. “I’m Josh Sears.” He was fifty, tall, losing his hair, most of it gray. Brown eyes. He hit the cafeteria line downstairs a little too hard, the DDO thought.
“Please come in, Dr. Sears. I need you to translate some things for me.”
“Sure,” he replied, picking a seat and relaxing into it. He watched the DDO take some pages off her laser printer and hand them across.
“Okay, it says the date is last March twenty-first, and the place is Beijing—hmph, the Council of Ministers Building, eh? Minister Fang is talking to Minister Zhang.” Sears ran his eyes down the page. “Mrs. Foley, this is hot stuff. They’re talking about the possibilities of Iran—no, the old UIR—taking over the entire Persian Gulf oil fields, and what effect it would have on China. Zhang appears to be optimistic, but guarded. Fang is skeptical ... oh, this is an aide-memoir, isn’t it? It’s Fang’s notes from a private conversation with Zhang.”
“The names mean anything to you?”
“Both are Ministers Without Portfolio. They’re both full Politburo members without direct ministerial duties. That means they’re both trusted by the chairman, the PRC premier, Xu Kun Piao. They go back thirty years plus, well into the time of Mao and Chou. As you know, the Chinese are really into lengthy relationships. They develop—well, not friendships as we understand them, but associations. It’s a comfort-level thing, really. Like at a card table. You know what the other guy’s mannerisms and capabilities are, and that makes for a long, comfortable game. Maybe you won’t win big, but you won’t lose your shirt either.”
“No, they don’t gamble, do they?”
“This document demonstrates that. As we suspected, the PRC backed the Ayatollah Daryaei in his play, but they never allowed their support to be public. From skimming this, it appears that this Zhang guy is the one who ramrodded this—and the play the Japanese made. We’ve been trying to build a book on this Zhang guy—and Fang as well—without a whole lot of success. What do I need to know about this?” he asked, holding the page up.
“It’s code word,” MP replied. By federal statute, “top secret” was as high as it went, but in reality there were more secret things than that, called “special-access programs,” which were designated by their controlling code words. “This one’s called SORGE.” She didn’t have to say that he could not discuss this information with anyone, and that even dreaming in bed about it was forbidden. Nor did she have to say that in SORGE was Sears’s path to a raise and much greater personal importance within the CIA’s pantheon of bureaucrats.
“Okay.” Sears nodded. “What can you tell me?”
“What we have here is a digest of conversations between Fang and Zhang, and probably other ministers as well. We’ve found a way to crash into their documents storage. We believe the documents are genuine,” MP concluded. Sears would know that he was being misled on sources and methods, but that was to be expected. As a senior member of the DI—the Directorate of Intelligence—it was his job to evaluate information provided to him by various sources, in this case the DO. If he got bad information, his evaluation would be bad as well, but what Mrs. Foley had just told him was that he would not be held at fault for bad information. But he’d also question the authenticity of the documents in an internal memo or two, just to cover his own ass, of course.
“Okay, ma’am. In that case, what we have here is pure nitroglycerine. We’ve suspected this, but here’s confirmation. It means that President Ryan did the right thing when he granted diplomatic recognition to Taiwan. The PRC had it coming. They conspired to wage aggressive war, and since we got involved, you can say that they conspired against us. Twice, I bet. We’ll see if another of these documents refers to the Japanese adventure. You’ll recall that the Japanese industrialists implicated this Zhang guy by name. That’s not a hundred percent, but if it’s confirmed by this, then it’s almost something you could take before a judge. Mrs. Foley, this is some source we have here.”
“Evaluation?”
“It feels right,” the analyst said, reading over the page again. “It sounds like conversation. I mean, it’s unguarded, not official diplomatic-speak or even inside-minister-speak. So, it sounds like what it purports to be, the notes of a private, informal policy discussion between two senior colleagues.”
“Any way to cross-check it?” MP asked next.
An immediate shake of the head. “No. We don’t know much about either one of these guys. Zhang, well, we have the evaluation from Secretary Adier—you know, from the shuttle diplomacy after the Airbus shoot-down, which pretty well confirms what that Yamata guy told the Japanese police and our FBI guys about how the Chinese nudged them into the conflict with us, and what for. The PRC looks on eastern Siberia with covetous eyes,” Sears reminded her, showing his knowledge of the PRC policies and objectives. “For Fang Gan, we have photos of him sipping mao-tai at receptions in his Mao jacket and smiling benignly, like they all do. We know he’s tight with Xu, there are stories that he likes to play with the office help—but a lot of them do that—and that’s about it.”
It was good of Sears not to remind her that playing with the office help wasn’t a character defect limited to China.
“So, what do we think about them?”
“Fang and Zhang? Well, both are Ministers Without Portfolio. So, they’re utility infielders, maybe even assistant coaches. Premier Xu trusts their judgment. They get to sit in at the Politburo as full voting members. They get to hear everything and cast votes on everything. They influence policy not so much by making it as shaping it. Every minister knows them. These two know all the others. They’ve both been around a long time. Both are well into their sixties or seventies, but people over there don’t mellow with age like they do in America. Both will be ideologically sound, meaning they’re both probably solid communists. That implies a certain ruthlessness, and you can add to that their age. At seventy-five, death starts being a very real thing. You don’t know how much time you have left, and these guys don’t believe in an afterlife. So, whatever goals they have, they have to address pretty quick at that age, don’t they?”
“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?”