No, Marilyn Lu didn’t seem the Mata Hari sort. The record of Hui’s death, too—that seemed very real. If Ben had found her more and more attractive as the evening lengthened—even if the root of his trust was good old-fashioned lust—that was his doing, not hers. Besides, it wasn’t as if he had given away anything that she might not have found herself, in the infosphere, or figured out in the course of running tests on her samples of Kwok’s ashes. And the warning for him in what had happened to Hui—she’d done him a real service, alerting him that way.
Falling downward through the night, however, Ben worried. Even if his response to Marilyn Lu was trust more than lust, he still felt as if he were somehow betraying his mourning for Reyna. But there was something more. Could it be that, in believing they could see through the paradoxes—that they could be more lofty and moral and right than everyone else, even more invulnerable, somehow—were he and Detective Lu only misleading each other? And themselves?
NEED-TO-KNOW
CRYPTO CITY
Deputy Director Brescoll had just returned from a meeting at Langley when he got the reminder. A major update on the Kwok matter was scheduled to begin in ten minutes at one of the NSOC conference rooms. Headed toward the Visitor Control Center of the Headquarters/Operations Building, he realized he’d have to hurry.
Architecturally, H/O was rather like an unraveled hypercube skinned in darkly reflective one-way glass. Beneath that epidermis lay deeper layers of bulletproof glass, with several inches of sound-deadening emptiness sandwiched between outer and inner panes, along with EMR-protective Tempest copper shielding. All of which was intended to make its sixty-eight acres of floor space an informational black hole, sucking down every electromagnetic signal that passed near without giving a single electron back.
Brescoll entered the maze of interconnected floors and corridors through the two-story white pentagon of the Visitor Control Center. Past the turnstiles of the Access Control Terminals and their central security command post stood a six-foot-tall painting depicting the NSA seal.
Inserting his badge in the CONFIRM reader and walking through the turnstile, he glanced at the seal. The “eternal” and “perpetual” circle bordered in white. The words National Security Agency in the top border, United States of America in the lower half, separated on either side by a silver star. The blue field, dominated by an American eagle with wings extended and inverted. On its chest a red, white, and blue escutcheon, heraldically representing nation, congress, and president. Clutched in the eagle’s talons was the silver “key to security,” evolved from the emblem of Saint Peter the Apostle.
Making his way toward the private elevator to the right, Brescoll chuckled to himself. Conspiracy freaks always got a lot of mileage out of the fact that the Pope’s emblems featured the Keys of Peter, too. And that NSA headquarters was located in Anne Arundel County—since, centuries ago, the Arundels had been noted English conspirators and crypto-Catholics. For the paranoids, it followed that NSA had connections to the Vatican, the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant. Et cetera, et cetera. Go figure.
Jim decided he didn’t have time for a stop at his office in the executive suite on the eighth floor. Instead he headed directly for old OPS 1 and the National Security Operations Center in Room 3E099. Walking across the initials NSOC inlaid in the floor, he passed through automatic glass doors and under the seals of the three armed-service organizations that made up Central Security Services, NSA’s military wing.
He then maneuvered his way through a space that to him always seemed half situation room and half deep-space monitoring facility. Cubicles mazed the floor, computer monitors glowing everywhere. Video screens covered the walls. Several of the younger techs wore augmented reality glasses, heads-up displays for everyday life. Some had eye-tracking pseudoholo display screens on their desktops. These flashbar systems were much more common than “airbenders,” the newer and more expensive holographic projector units that ranged all the way up to the top-line stuff in the I Rooms. Brescoll saw only two scaled-down airbenders here, suspending their ghosts over workstations.
Out, then down the hallway past Special Support Activity, Brescoll arrived in the agency’s Worldwide Teleconferencing Center—and not a moment too soon. Seated around the large conference table, he spotted not only the people he’d expected to see—Rollwagen, Wang, Lingenfelter, and Beech—but also many he hadn’t. Among them he recognized the mathematician Tercot—Wang and Lingenfelter’s boss and the agency’s chief scientist—and Major General Retticker, deputy director for operations and Beech’s boss in the NSA/CIA joint Special Collection Service.
Taking a seat beside Rollwagen, Brescoll also recognized others from the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Technology and Systems, most prominently specialists from W Group (Global Issues and Weapons Systems) and M Group (Geopolitical and Military Production). Still others hailed from the NSA advisory board, and from other parts of the intelligence community. From the Defense Intelligence Agency. From Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Intelligence services. From FBI and Homeland Security. From the Department of State.
Under its wall of television monitors, the conference room was filled to capacity with twenty-five participants. Who from the intelligence community isn’t represented here? he wondered. Treasury? Energy? Imagery and Mapping? This hardly seemed a “proportional” response, the Hui murder notwithstanding.
Maybe the importance of the Kwok situation was growing. Understandable enough, he supposed. Units of NSA were responsible for ensuring communications security for CIA, FBI, State, Homeland, and the Pentagon—and if anything threatened those communication links, all those entities were threatened.
Nearly everyone in the room had secure laptops or PDAs placed on the table in front of them or somewhere nearby, and a few had executive versions of the AR glasses and flashbar systems. Every one of the participants seemed primed to pump a lot of secure information back and forth.
“I think it’s time we got under way,” Director Rollwagen said, as she checked her watch. “Welcome, everyone. The current situation is covered in your briefing papers, but I’d like to reiterate a few key points before introducing our two remote participants.
“Jaron Kwok, an NSA analyst and linguist working from documents originally provided by CIA, is missing in China and presumed dead. At about the time of his disappearance, a holo-cast was sent to a great many locations across the infosphere. That broadcast made reference, at least indirectly, to a number of confidential projects we currently have under way. In order to help bring you up to speed on the situation, I’d like to introduce Robert Beckwith of State, currently on-site in Hong Kong, and Special Agent DeSondra Adjoumani, recently returned from the same city but now at FBI Headquarters for debriefing.”
Appearing on two of the larger wall monitors, an Anglo-American man and an African-American woman, respectively, nodded in response to the introductions. Ah, Beckwith must be who State’s intelligence arm put on this, Brescoll thought. He’d be the one coordinating with Adjoumani. She was the legal attaché posted to the American Consulate in Hong Kong, while her supervisor, the legat for China, worked out of the American Embassy in Beijing.
“Prior to the incident,” Director Rollwagen began, “Jaron Kwok’s work for NSA focused on cryptanalytic approaches to recalcitrant historic ciphers and codes—particularly those with reference to China. His backup on the most recent work is Professor Ben Cho. To provide you with further details, and to answer any questions you may have, I’d like to turn the discussion over to the NSA Deputy Director.”
“Through CIA,” Jim Brescoll began, “our informants in the Tetragrammaton program recommended Benjamin Cho to us for the same reason they had earlier recommended Jaron Kwok. Like Kwok, Cho is a genius at recognizing and drawing innovative connections between patterns—particularly across disciplines. Pattern recognition is the basis of code breaking and this skill should be of considerable help to Cho
in investigating the disappearance of his predecessor.”
“How much does Cho know about what his predecessor was working on?” asked Max Pearsall, the FBI’s Homeland Security liaison.
“We’re limiting what we tell him,” the deputy director answered. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about Kwok’s activities, and we’ll want to have Cho asking all the right questions: What did Kwok know? What happened to him? How much do the Chinese know about Kwok and his research? And so on.
“Cho seems to have established a working relationship with a local detective, a woman by the name of Lu. If we keep a tight handle on the situation, we may be able to use him more effectively as a cat’s paw—as the Chinese may be doing with Lu. So we’ll have to come up with a delicate balance between control and autonomy.”
“How so?”
“Our intent is to feed Cho only the information he needs to follow Kwok’s own path, rediscover for himself what made Kwok go missing, and what—presumably—killed him. Avoid prejudicing his investigation, or tipping off the Chinese, as much as possible. Still, we’ll monitor Cho closely. We certainly don’t want his investigation to end the same way Kwok’s did.”
“And what he doesn’t know, he can’t tell,” Rollwagen added, breaking into the conversation. “To the Chinese, or to organized crime, or to any terrorist cells. All of whom have shown interest in the Kwok material posted at various sites across the infosphere.”
“What’s the status of Kwok’s computing and communications gear?” asked the woman from M Group. “His virtuality visor, implants, and laptop?”
Figures she’d ask about that, Jim thought. Cyber-infrastructure and telecommunications vulnerabilities were M Group’s bailiwick.
“I think that question might be answered more effectively by Mister Beckwith or Ms. Adjoumani,” the deputy director said, glad to step back out of the spotlight.
“We’re sure the Chinese have at least CT-scanned the visor and laptop,” Beckwith said. “The implants have vanished, or were destroyed with Kwok. We have managed to regain control of the laptop and visor, though even that required a great deal of diplomatic pressure. Particularly on Chinese State Security—the Guoanbu.”
“At least you got them back,” said the M Group woman. “Better than the track record we have with some of our airborne listening posts.”
“Or the Pueblo and the North Koreans,” Rollwagen agreed grimly.
Several of the grayer heads in the room nodded silently. The USS Pueblo, sans crew, had been held for what? Forty years? Fifty?
“What about Kwok’s other personal effects?” asked Pearsall from FBI. “What happened to his ashes? The notecards?”
“We were able to obtain power of attorney from his wife, Cherise LeMoyne,” Adjoumani replied. “They were estranged, but still legally married. The Chinese authorities have allowed Benjamin Cho to carry the personal effects home on his return to the US. In accordance with NSA policy, we copied the Kwok notecards and took samples from Kwok’s clothing and remains, soon after those came into Cho’s hands. Doctor Cho himself was, at the time, dining with the police detective from the Special Administrative Region, Mei-lin Lu. So he was unaware of our activities.”
“Do you think it was wise to let Cho spend a significant amount of time with this detective, unsupervised?” Paul Riordan of DIA asked. Both Beckwith and Adjoumani glanced momentarily away, then turned back—at exactly the same moment, though they were separated by thousands of miles. The effect was uncanny, all the more so because it was surely unintentional.
“We had a light tail on Cho for the meeting,” said Adjoumani. “Cho and Lu would have seen only a man walking a small dog, if they noticed him at all.”
“We have every reason to suspect the Guoanbu did the same with Lu,” Beckwith added. “We believe the woman who waited on them at their table in Cafe Deco was a Guoanbu operative.”
“Our background check indicates that Lu is a straight-ahead cop working a murder or suicide angle,” Adjoumani continued. “She has no history of significant political connections.”
“We have evidence, too,” Beckwith said, “that the Chinese security apparatus has kept Lu very much in the dark on everything outside her forensic specialty. It’s likely that we know a good deal more about who’s keeping tabs on her than she does.”
Heads nodded in the teleconference room. Riordan seemed placated by the fact that the Chinese apparently had Lu on an even tighter leash than NSA had attached to Cho.
“What about these postings of the Kwok material in the infosphere?” asked General Retticker, as he turned back toward Jim Brescoll. “You said organized crime and terror groups have shown interest. Anything being done about that? Have any of those groups shown up in Cho’s wake?”
Retticker would want to know about that. Criminal liaisons had been a big part of CIA’s covert operational capacity from the beginning. In the Asian opium zone from Turkey to Thailand, from Southeast Asia in the 1950s to Central Asia in the present day. The cocaine region of the Americas from Peru to Mexico, and now the Tri-Border Free Zone, too.
In recent decades the TBFZ had been a home away from home to drug smugglers, terrorists, arms dealers, money launderers, forgers, fugitives, and organized crime figures from Russia, China, Japan, Nigeria, and the Middle East. The Zone was stuffed to the gills with warlords, crime lords, counterrevolutionists, violent fanatics, and other would-be founding fathers.
In the old days the Company had tried to deny such connections. These days, however, all manner of sins were forgiven in the name of the High Crusade against terrorism. Even if you had to get in bed with Islamic terrorists in order to destabilize a powerful enemy state—like, say, communist China—well, that was excusable, too.
Jim sighed inwardly. He knew they were all on the same team here, but he wasn’t sure they all played by the same rules.
“We have reason to believe that a young man and young woman,” Adjoumani said, “a couple necking on the Victoria Peak promenade while Cho and Lu were there, weren’t quite what they seemed. We’ve tentatively identified the man as Zuo Wenxiu, a member of the Muslim extremist group known as the New Teachings Warriors. Zuo is also a prime suspect in the murder of Charles Hui, of the coroner’s office. Hui was working on the Kwok case at the time of his decease.”
Murmurs passed through the room, heads nodded.
“As for the postings,” Brescoll said, leaning back into the discussion, “we’ve let them be. We’ve been able to monitor the traffic to those sites and discover who’s expressed a particular interest in them.”
Jim glanced toward the director, then nodded at the big screens, where the images of Beckwith and Adjoumani still lingered. Janis Rollwagen took the hint.
“Mister Beckwith and Ms. Adjoumani,” she said smoothly, “on behalf of everyone here, I’d like to thank you for your work, and your time spent on this meeting. Please keep us in the loop on your continuing activity. Again, thank you very much.”
Beckwith and Adjoumani said their good-byes, then disappeared from the screens. Everyone in the room turned to face Rollwagen and Brescoll.
“Rather, we were leaving those sites untouched—until recently,” Deputy Director Brescoll continued. “Initially they served as good bait, but interest in them, particularly from the Chinese, seems to have peaked. An informant with connections to their Special Computing Institutes claims the consensus there is that Kwok’s peculiar death was an unintended consequence of his encounter with a Chinese countermeasures program. They also believe that we constructed the holo-cast to camouflage the fact that one of our agents was trying to hack into an SCI system. We’ve done nothing to dissuade them of that. I gather the informant works for your agency, General.”
Retticker nodded.
“But isn’t this Chinese detective still out there, following up leads?” he asked. “Including those involving the site postings?”
“We think so. Guoanbu is probably following Detective Lu’s investigation, too,
on the off chance that she might actually discover something of value. But we strongly suspect that her work is a rather low priority for them. As for us, the value of those holo-cast sites has grown thin, so we’re eliminating them. The Kwok holo-cast is being made private again. Professor Tercot is probably the best person to explain how that’s being done.”
He turned to Tercot expectantly, but it took the balding man with the graying flyaway hair a moment to catch on. In the embarrassing pause, Brescoll observed that Tercot, if not exactly the stereotypical absentminded professor, was nonetheless a “type” very common in Crypto City: an introverted intellectual, socially maladroit, and definitely detached from an outside world irrelevant to—and largely ignorant of—his brilliance.
“Umm, yes,” Tercot began, clearing his throat. “To purge the infosphere of sites featuring postings that relate to the Kwok holo-cast, we are selectively crashing these sites. Many of the postings trace back to the parasitic vermin of Cybernesia, so we’re hoping that the crashes will largely cleanse the infosphere of their presence, as well.”
“How are you bringing about these crashes?” General Retticker asked. Jim Brescoll wondered if some of Central Intelligence’s assets might be affected by Tercot’s “infosphere hygiene.”
“Through a number of different approaches,” Tercot said distractedly. “We’ve started with tried-and-true methods like worms, logic bombs, denial-of-service attacks. But soon we’ll move on to more innovative tools: stochastic crash viruses, Galois trojan horses, Fourier trapdoors. All designed to make these systems vulnerable to ‘accidents.’ Not everything going down all at once, but staggered. In every case we’re proceeding in such a manner so as to make these incidents look like everyday events.”
“What’s your time frame?”
“Barring any unforseen circumstances, General, we estimate that all publicly accessible postings of the original Kwok material will be destroyed by the end of the week. Commentary and metacommentary on that material, in various blogs and forums, will take somewhat longer to eliminate, but we expect to gradually ‘disappear’ those within the month.”
The Labyrinth Key Page 9