Spyder Web

by Tom Grace

  ‘Please have the recorders turned on, Sir Daniel.Anya’s story is a long one.’

  A security officer nodded to Long a few minutes later, indicating that the estate’s tape-recording systems were on. The house cook brought out a tea service for Long and Yakushev before leaving quietly.

  Long started the debriefing. ‘Tell me about Anna Mironova.’

  Yakushev went into the long story of how he had met the young girl with criminal tendencies during a training exercise; how he took her under his wing, trained her, groomed her for life in the West. Long realized quickly that Yakushev’s relationship with Mironova was far different from the usual bond between agent and controller. Long listened quietly as Yakushev described young Mironova’s evolution into a deep-cover agent. Yakushev drew his narrative to a close with the story of their last meeting, during the attempted Soviet coup, when he had set Mironova free.

  ‘Why did you hold this information back?’

  ‘I thought that I had destroyed all records relating to the Cormorant that night and that Anya would be free to live her own life. I have given you every agent who ever worked for me, all but Anya. Anya was different, and more than just an agent to me. She was like me, orphaned in a hostile world, with only her wits to keep her alive. She had the natural talents to make a great spy, and she succeeded only because I sheltered her from the ideological nonsense that they force-fed recruits at the Andropov Institute. Anya was special; she was like a daughter to me. That is why I set her free and why I didn’t tell you about her.’

  After many interviews with the former KGB spymaster, Long thought that he had developed an understanding of the man. Yakushev’s strong personal feelings toward Mironova added a new dimension to that understanding. ‘Are you aware of what she is doing now?’

  ‘No. I have not seen or spoken with her since August of 1991.’ Yakushev thought about the night the coup started; about Anya killing the KGB assassin that had been sent for him. ‘If she followed the news accounts from Moscow during those days, she probably believes that I am dead.’

  Long believed that Yakushev was telling him the complete truth. Moscow had been in chaos in the days after the coup. His people spirited Yakushev out of the Soviet Union with a combination of false papers and hefty bribes. Since that time, Yakushev had been a quiet guest of the British people.

  ‘Sir Daniel, what has aroused your interest in Anya?’

  ‘It appears that your pupil has become an industrial spy.’

  ‘A good use of her skills. She’s probably making a handsome living in the private sector, more so than her meager wages as a servant of the Soviet state.’ Yakushev laughed.

  ‘This isn’t a joke. Mironova is tied up with a British business consultant and suspected dealer of stolen technology named Ian Parnell. The two of them are currently providing services to a certain Chinese intelligence officer who once caused some of your people a bit of trouble.’

  Yakushev felt his stomach tighten. ‘Kang Fa?’

  ‘Yes. Kang is in London right now, working with Parnell and Roe to steal ciphering technology from an American computer corporation.’

  Yakushev’s hands clenched the soft leather armrests of his chair. Even though they had never met, Yakushev knew that Kang Fa had been personally responsible for the deaths of several KGB agents over a fifteen-year period. In Moscow Center, Kang was regarded as a ruthless, but effective, agent who completed his operations by eliminating any loose ends. Unless something drastic was done quickly, Anya would be killed once her usefulness to Kang had ended.

  ‘Would you find it helpful to have an agent inside Kang’s operation?’

  ‘Roe?’ Long questioned.

  ‘Yes. I think if I contacted Anya, I could persuade her to assist you. Anya is very intelligent. I’m certain that she has some sense of the gravity of her situation, and a familiar face, at the right time, might be just what she needs to extricate herself.’

  Long massaged his graying temples, weighing Yakushev’s offer. Roe would provide the significant edge, but only if she could be trusted. ‘You’ve given me a lot to think about.’

  ‘Then you’ll consider my offer?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not a promise that I’ll act on it.’ Long stood and smoothed out the wrinkles in his suit coat. ‘I’m going to have to mull this one over, but I’ll leave a copy of the case file for you to review. I’d also appreciate it very much if you would check your memory again to see if there’s anyone else you might have neglected to tell me about.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m certain that you’ll do what’s necessary.’

  47

  ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN

  May 12

  Since their arrest, Kilkenny and Grin languished in a cell at the Ann Arbor Police Station. They were neither questioned nor arraigned. They had received a visit from their lawyer, who didn’t have much to say except that she was still waiting for the brief on the charges from the district attorney. Other than their three square meals a day, they were simply ignored.

  ‘Room service, jailbirds,’ Mosley announced as the guard let him into the cell. ‘I spoke with Kelsey yesterday and she mentioned that you two like this Angelo’s place for breakfast, so I got them to do up something special. Hope you don’t mind.’

  Grin and Kilkenny remained on their cots, suspicious of Mosley. ‘The only thing we mind,’ Kilkenny said, ‘is being cooped up in here without any explanation. I hope you brought one of those along with the raisin toast.’

  ‘All in good time.’ Mosley wasn’t about to be rushed and he dismissed their rude behavior as a product of their circumstances. In their place, he would probably feel the same. ‘Oh, here, Nolan. This is from Kelsey.’

  Nolan accepted the gift, wondering how Kelsey had accomplished such a feat from her hospital bed. He smiled as he read the gift card that was taped to the package; it was signed ‘With love, Kelsey.’ He removed the wrapping paper. Inside, he found a copy of Clive Cussler’s latest Dirk Pitt adventure.

  ‘Way to go, Kelsey,’ Nolan said as he looked at the classic car on the dust jacket.

  ‘She thought you’d like something good to read during your incarceration.’ Mosley passed around the carryout containers and sat on the cot next to Grin, who brusquely shifted away from him. ‘Hey, I’m a friend.’

  ‘If you were our friend, you’d get us out of here.’

  ‘Grin’s right. You, of all people, know that we’re not responsible for those computer crimes.’

  ‘Yeah! My folks always thought that their hippie son would end up in jail, and here I am. We didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Gentlemen, this is what we call “a ruse.” Barnett and the FBI came up with it as a way to protect you against any further attacks. My boss does not want a repeat of that incident on the freeway.With the two of you in jail and Kelsey still in the hospital, we think Kang and the others will relax and proceed with their plans.’

  ‘Do you think you might have let us in on the secret?’ Grin asked sarcastically.

  ‘I apologize for that, but it was Barnett’s call. He wanted your arrest to look as real as possible. As far as the bad guys know, you two are out of the picture. I’m here to spring you both, so you can get back to work. Grin, you’re going to hole up at MARC, with Agents Harbke and Ullrich, and watch the Spyder. Iverson and some of Moy’s people will cover the Chicago end.’

  ‘What about me?’ Nolan asked.

  ‘You and I are going to London.’

  Once their meal was finished,Mosley tossed his empty carryout box in the trash and brushed a few stray crumbs off his lap. ‘Get your things together. It’s time to go.’

  Five minutes later, a guard led Mosley and the prisoners down the back stairs, to the parking garage. Grin and Kilkenny ducked in the backseat as Mosley’s car was waved through security and rode away.

  Once clear of the police station, Mosley allowed the escaped prisoners to come up for air. Their first stop was the loading dock of the MARC building, where they dro
pped Grin off to assist Agents Ullrich and Harbke in operating the MARC computers and monitoring the Spyder. Grin was to hole up in the computer lab until further notice.Mosley then took Kilkenny home to pack.

  48

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  From her hotel room, Roe finished coding a new set of instructions for the Spyder. Just working out the parameters for the complex program had taken the better part of the weekend. Unlike the earlier instruction sets that she’d downloaded to the device, this one defined a live on-line connection with the Spyder. That extra step forced Roe to modify her normal programming to increase security for the connection; everything had to be perfect if she was to execute a live data transfer from Moy Electronics safely.

  After thoroughly debugging the program, removing any errors that might cripple the execution of her complex instructions, she encrypted the text and prepared to send the message.

  As before, Roe started by accessing a local Internet server, one that happened to host one of her favorite Web sites, the Piccadilly Gardener. From there, she accessed the British National Telephone Exchange and jumped a few electronic circuits to cover her trail. Then she linked into their satellite communications lines and made her way to North America, where she passed through several other computer systems before finally sending her E-mail message to the Spyder.

  Then,with a flurry of rapid keystrokes,Roe backpedaled through the systems she’d penetrated.After downloading a few tips on spring planting, she logged off the Net. Roe smiled as she read over the gardening tips, hoping that the seed she just planted would successfully take root.

  An hour after posting the latest instructions to the Spyder, Roe arrived at Parnell’s office for a noon meeting.

  ‘Still hard at it, Alex?’

  ‘Just finished, and everything looks fine. I’ve sent off the new program, which should be picked up by the end of business today. Once it loads this file, it will go dormant until Friday.’

  Parnell leaned back and mentally ran over the checklist. ‘Excellent.We don’t want to draw any suspicion away from the current suspects, now do we?’

  ‘A remarkable stroke of luck, I admit,’ Roe replied dubiously. ‘I checked the Detroit newspapers’Web sites and it appears that Kilkenny and another fellow have been charged with several computer-related crimes, including ours. It’s like Cole said—who would believe that the computer itself was capable of doing something like this? Unfortunately, with all the attention over there, someone still might figure out what’s really going on.’

  ‘Perhaps, but by then, you and I will be safely out of reach, basking in the warm Caribbean sun.What do you say we step out for a bit of lunch?’

  From their perch across the park,Axton was again sitting in with the watchers. Parnell’s days seemed filled with the mundane tasks that every businessperson deals with. Most of the man’s business operations were perfectly legal and, for the most part, ethical. Axton’s crew of watchers just sat and watched and listened for those little details that they would use to build their case.

  ‘Did you catch any of that, sir?’ the sound engineer asked as he adjusted the filtering levels on his equipment.

  The conversation in Parnell’s office had ended and Axton pulled the headset off and rubbed his ears. ‘Just two little pieces of interest, a mention of Cole and Kilkenny. That confirms that they know about both of them.’

  ‘Who’s Kilkenny?’

  ‘He’s a Yank on the other end of this mess, lad, someone for whom those two reptiles have caused more than a bit of grief.Well, it looks like they’re breaking for lunch.’

  Axton switched on his radio headset and flagged a warning to his ground crews. ‘Look lively, boys and girls. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are coming down for a snack.’

  ‘Roger, sir,’ the response came back over the radio.

  Before real code names could be issued for this surveillance operation, the watchers started referring to Parnell and Roe as ‘Tweedledee’ and ‘Tweedledum,’ from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Following the same logic, their base of observation was christened ‘Looking Glass’ and Kang Fa had been dubbed ‘the Mad Hatter.’

  ‘Can you make me a copy of that last bit? Maybe the lab boys can filter out some of that background noise.’

  ‘Consider it done, sir,’ the sound engineer replied as he handed Axton a CD. ‘Figured you’d be wanting it for the folks at HQ.’

  49

  ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN

  In the MARC computer lab, an alarm sounded, announcing that the Spyder was once again active. Harbke and Ullrich gathered around Grin’s station to watch the action unfold. The Spyder had just passed through the university network into another computer system. Grin punched a couple of keys and the alarm went silent.

  ‘Liz,’ Ullrich said, turning to her partner, ‘let our monitoring teams know that the Spyder is on-line.’

  Harbke dialed out and passed the word while Grin and Ullrich watched the Spyder traverse several private networks.

  ‘This thing still amazes me,’ Ullrich commented as she watched the Spyder punch through one computer system after another.

  ‘It’s a slick piece of work all right.’ While despising the people who controlled the Spyder,Grin still respected the technology behind the device.

  Harbke returned after making the calls. ‘The CompuServe team reports that someone recently sent a file to the Spyder’s E-mail box.’

  ‘Maybe that’s where it’s headed,’ Ullrich replied.

  Fifteen minutes passed as the Spyder penetrated system after system, finally stopping at CompuServe.

  ‘Looks like this is it,’ Grin announced. ‘Let’s see what they want the Spyder to do today.’

  Grin split the laptop screen to display the CompuServe screen in one window and what the Spyder was seeing internally in another.

  ‘All right, he’s logged on and he’s checking the mail,’ Grin said, announcing the play-by-play. ‘Bingo, it’s found the message. The message is blank, but there’s a file attached to it. He’s downloading the file; everything’s fine. He’s logging off; he’s done and closing up the connections.’

  The laptop’s active-matrix screen flashed quickly as the Spyder logged off the computer networks that had covered its electronic tracks. Once the Spyder had returned to a dormant state, Grin loaded up the diagnostic program from Moy Electronics.

  ‘Now let’s find out what our friends in London are planning.’

  Grin switched off the monitoring program and enlarged the bypass window to full screen.

  ‘Grin, what’s all that gibberish?’ Harbke asked.

  Grin checked the program status bar at the bottom of his screen. ‘That file it downloaded was encrypted. What we’re watching is a translation-in-progress.’

  The odd-looking characters were rapidly converted into a new instruction set for the Spyder.

  ‘Can you hand me that blank optical-disk cartridge?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Ullrich replied.

  Grin fed the cartridge into the laptop’s external drive and directed the bypass to copy the new instruction file. Unlike their initial attempt to dump the Spyder’s core program, an effort that had almost cost Nolan and Kelsey their lives, the Spyder’s internal security was completely oblivious to the information flowing out through the bypass.

  After a few minutes, Grin ejected the cartridge and labeled it. ‘Now let’s see if we can get Iverson on the phone. I assume that the FBI is interested in knowing what the Spyder has just been told to do?’

  ‘Hell yes,’ Ullrich replied.

  50

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  Alex Roe spent the rest of the day at Parnell’s office, attending to the details of a few of the legitimate assignments that she was working on. After locking up, she left the building and decided to have dinner in a quiet pub in a less developed part of the wharf district.

  She’d walked about half the distance there when she began to feel like she was being followed. Roe looked around but
failed to detect any of the telltale signs of surveillance. Still, she sensed something out of the ordinary. To ease her fears, she began running a varied pattern of movement through the area in hopes of shaking any pursuit out into the open. She made abrupt turns at random locations, ducked in and out of stores, and crisscrossed the street at random intervals. If anyone was mapping her movements, they would make no sense at all.

  Just behind Roe as she made another turn, the team currently tracking her movements was having great difficulty keeping pace while remaining undetected.

  ‘Team two to Looking Glass, over,’ the young officer whispered into a miniature microphone.

  ‘Looking Glass here, team two, over.’

  ‘Tweedledum is running about like a rabbit. She’s all over the place. I think she’s onto us. Over.’

  ‘Pull back a little, and give her some room,’ the Looking Glass leader advised. ‘We don’t want to alarm her.’

  ‘Roger, team two, out.’

  The British surveillance teams watching Roe pulled back, maintaining only the lightest contact. After a few more minutes of Roe’s chaotic trailblazing, they lost her completely. The watchers reconvened at various points in the area, hoping to reestablish contact.

  Roe kept her random movements up for another ten minutes, searching the thinning crowds for any sign of pursuit; she found none.

  ‘Probably just imagining things,’ she reprimanded herself.

  Roe’s meandering course had pulled her nearly a mile away from her original destination. Halfway there, the hairs on her neck bristled in response to a regular pattern of footsteps that had maintained a constant beat several strides behind her. Turning quickly into an empty alleyway, she heard the footsteps slow and finally stop.

  Roe flattened herself against the alley wall, out of the line of sight from her pursuer. Her heart raced as she tried to rein in her imagination and focus on the situation at hand. She had to assume the worst-case scenario: Her pursuer was either official or criminal. She’d ruled out coincidence, since whoever was following her had stopped when she had turned the corner, and was now waiting at the alley entrance.