by Ian Slater
She told him there were none. She had come all this way on her own.
Mr. Lo spoke to the guard, who answered respectfully and immediately left the cell, only to return a minute later with another guard, the second man carrying a wooden chair, to which they tied her and proceeded to beat her legs about the shins with split bamboo cane. She did all she could to withstand the pain but soon was biting her lip, tears running, whimpering like a whipped puppy.
“Who are your cohorts?” asked Mr. Lo quietly.
Alexsandra didn’t answer.
“You are a bad woman!”
She said nothing.
“If you do not tell me in five minutes, I will turn you over to Black Berets. You understand?”
She understood it would be much longer than five minutes — any earlier and he’d lose face.
“You are a spy,” said Mr. Lo. “Who are your cohorts?”
She could hear the slow drip of water from the wall nearest the river, the cell so dark she could only make out a bead of sweat on Mr. Lo’s face and the dull sheen of the guard’s bayonet. Mr. Lo shook his finger at her. “We will put snakes in you. Do you wish this? Yes?”
She told herself there were no snakes in Harbin — the idiot man. It was too cold, but unconsciously she pressed her thighs together. It was a mistake. Lo now knew the long nose was more afraid than she made out. He whispered to the guard, who nodded, quickly tied her hands behind her, and left the room.
CHAPTER TWELVE
New York
Apart from the few guests from the Plaza who had dared brave the cold, briskly crossing from the luxurious comfort of the hotel to the chestnut barrow by the southeast entrance to the park, a jogger was the vendor’s only customer.
“What can I tell ya!” complained the vendor. “I had ‘em poifect, then bam, bam, bam. Everyone comes for lunch— all in a bunch — so now ya gotta wait.”
“They look done enough,” said the jogger, a tall, gangly man clad head to toe in a gray tracksuit, his goatee beard crusted with snow, his hood laced tightly. In front and back of the gray jacket, in Day-Glo tape, there was a sign announcing to the world: I DON’T CARRY CASH, CREDIT CARDS, OR WRISTWATCHES!
He kept jogging in place.
“You want them?” said the vendor, stirring the chestnuts perfunctorily with his scoop. “You can have ‘em. But they ain’t cooked. Please yourself. ‘S only five minutes they’ll be done. What’s your hurry?”
The gray man slid a hand inside the tracksuit’s midriff pocket, peeking at a stopwatch attached to the pocket with a safety pin. “Got an appointment in five minutes.”
The vendor pointed the scoop at the man’s midriff. “Thought you had no valuables?”
The gray man shrugged. “Worth a try.”
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” yelled the vendor, a limo passing fast by the curb, throwing up an icy wave of slush. “You sonofabitch!” Sticking his head under the barrow’s meager awning, he turned to the gray man. “Big shot! Jay La Roche. Thinks he owns this fuckin’ town.”
“Probably does,” said the tall man, still jogging on the spot.
“How you gonna pay me if you don’t have no cash?”
The jogger bent down and extracted a five from his right sneaker. “Emergency funds.” He winked.
“Yeah. Right,” said the vendor, his grin thin with cynicism. “Some of those boys cut you up good, you hold out on ‘em.” He scooped up the chestnuts into one of the white bags and handed it to the man. “Four bucks.”
The runner kept jogging in place while the vendor’s hands did a number in his apron, frowning and mumbling something about not having change.
The jogger kept marking time until the vendor grunted and gave him four quarters before throwing on another fistful of chestnuts.
It was a dead drop — a note in the bottom of the paper bag with instructions for the next meet. Daytime meets were normally eschewed, but with the First Directorate under pressure from Yesov, Kirov had decreed that Operation Ballet should go ahead as fast as possible. The splash by Jay La Roche, or whoever it was in the limo, had nothing to do with it, but the vendor’s reaction made it more convincing if the FBI or CIA had been watching, which the jogger doubted. The Americans hadn’t yet broken a single three-man cell in the poisoned water crisis — PCBs dumped in New York’s water supply earlier in the war. True, a member of one cell in Queens who had kicked off the sabotage at the Con Ed’s Indian Point Nuclear Plant had reported to the jogger, his control, that he suspected he was being followed, but Control told him to relax — everybody in the plant who’d been on the shift and had clocked off twenty minutes before the bomb had exploded in the monitor room was being followed. Routine. Hell, since the water crisis, thousands of people were being followed.
Besides, Con Ed was turning out to be the cells’ best friend, their PR busy talking down the sabotage as a “nut case,” scared shitless that any sign of vulnerability at the Indian Point plant would start off fears of a meltdown, not only at Con Ed, but every friggin’ nuclear plant in the country. The FBI, CIA, and White House were going along with the “nut case” story, too. The water supply poisoning had been cleaned up — many of the toxins leached out, water quality measurements taken constantly instead of once a day — and so now everyone was reassured on that score. But if radiation got loose, that’d be another story. The Americans were on the verge of panic — security was now so tight at nuclear plants, hell, they wouldn’t let the president in without thumbprint ID for fear it might be a double.
The jogger kept moving, cracking the chestnuts on the run as he made his way along Central Park South, turning left on the Fifth Avenue dogleg, entering the park proper on the east side.
Down by the fountain a small man in a dark navy tracksuit doing stretching exercises started running a few seconds after the man in the gray had passed him, catching up to him by the dairy. They were both on the circuit pathway and headed down the mall before cutting across the Sheep Meadow to the snow-covered Strawberry Fields, where they slowed and drew level, blue and gray. “See you got your chestnuts okay,” said the man in the blue.
“Yes,” said the other man, temporarily out of breath. They hadn’t stopped but were walking fast in a strong, long-distance gait. “I thought the price was quite reasonable.”
“Four dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Well-cooked?”
“Best I’ve ever had.”
“All right,” said the smaller man, “I’ve got everyone set. Where’s the main event going down?”
“No idea. All I was told was to get everyone in place.”
“We’ve had everyone in place for ten fucking years,” said the shorter man.
“You’re impatient. Doesn’t do to get in a hurry.”
“We can’t luck out much longer.”
The gray man cracked one of the nuts, dropping the shells on the pathway as they passed under a copse of snow-drooping sugar maples. “If something’s gone wrong,” he told the shorter man, “you’d better tell me right now.”
“Nothing’s gone wrong. Everybody’s a bit edgy, that’s all.”
“Why? What’s the rush — after ten years? A day here or there doesn’t matter.”
“I dunno. Guess I’m stressed myself. I mean I don’t really know how it works. Yeah — okay, so I organize the team, match the talent for the job. But I don’t know how it’s actually going to be done.”
“You’ve no need to know,” responded the man in gray, his breath visible in short puffs of mist. “Organizers aren’t supposed to know. We can’t all do one another’s job.”
“Huh,” said the shorter man, grabbing several chestnuts from the packet. “That’s what the CIA says is worst about our methods. We don’t have cross expertise. So someone else can step in.”
“That right?” said the man in gray. “So who did in their water supply? And knocked Con Ed out? We’re doing all right. They’re in a panic. All we have to remember is everybody does one thing and does
it properly. It’s worked so far — that’s the only thing that matters.”
“I’d still like to understand the guts of it.”
“It’s not classified,” said the man in gray. “You can figure it out from any public library.” He knew it was a barren response. One of the things you didn’t do as a sleeper was to take out a lot of technical manuals from American libraries. It was a sure invitation to surveillance.
“What if something goes wrong?” said the shorter man. “Then I’d have to do it. Shit, this job’s the most important thing any of us’ll ever do. Right?”
“You could do it.”
“That’s like telling me I could be a — I dunno, Mario Andretti, ‘cause I can drive. I mean, if something fizzes out — halfway through? If one of our guys is made and’s taken out?”
“All right,” said the taller man, “but let’s keep up the pace. Joggers don’t stroll.” They increased the speed and he explained it — not only how they would simply sow further panic, but how they’d bring the country to its knees. “The old system of phones — still used in most places back home…” He meant the CIS. “They use analog-wave signals. Sound waves goes out through the telephone exchange, where you hear the clicks, electromechanical switches, then the signals go down cable pairs — or to conductors, if you like — to the next switch, and so on. At the receiving end the telephone converts the electrical wave back to sound. Now with digital — used all over America now — you use the binary scale — a series of zeros and ones representing any number you dial. Information’s broken down the same way — into zeros and ones. Like fax. It’s sent via the bipolar pulsing system. Follow me?”
“No.”
“Okay, look. Christ, you’ve eaten all the nuts!”
“You can buy some more. What about this digital crap?”
“What I’m saying, it’s a computer-based system that transmits all information — voice, data, you name it — in a binary code, so, for example, the number sixteen is one-zero-zero-zero-zero, ten is zero-one-zero-one-zero. Got that?”
“Sort of — not much good at math.”
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. The point is, what we get is a coded stream of pulses at 1.544 megacycles a second. That’s over a million and a half pulses a second. Computer uses a wave form code. Anyway, just think of it as a whole bunch of pulses containing zeros and ones. Right?”
“Go on.”
The taller man stopped for a moment to tie a lace, his gray tracksuit patched with sweat despite the cold, looking around to see if anyone was following, then started off again.
“Now, because you’re dealing with all info in binary combinations of zeros and ones, you can process signals much faster and more cheaply than with the old mechanical switches that have to clunk through one, two, three, four, five… Follow that?”
“Yeah.”
“Fine. Now digital networks all have to be synchronized, otherwise in a sequence of zeros and ones you wouldn’t know where the start of a message or the end of it was. Only problem is, in order to have all the computers synchronized so they know where the start, middle, and end of a message is, you have to have ‘em all keyed into a cesium atomic clock — it’s got the most accurate beat in the world.”
“That’s why our guys are gonna hit the clock?”
“You win the car. Now, when you lose synchronization with the clock, you can ‘free run’ awhile without synchronization, but the ones and zeros start to pile up in no time, run into one another like rush hour on the turnpike. You have one big god-awful traffic jam. You with me?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. When that happens — a pileup — you’re out of sync. Computer networks become a horizontal Tower of Babel. Most important thing — data circuits, like radar, are much more sensitive than voice circuits, so the data circuits pile up much faster, or, as the boys in the trade say, the ‘byte error’—the slippage — becomes unmanageable. And it’s garbage out. So a page of printout that should normally take half a second, runs two seconds. Loss factor four. And alarms aren’t set off in the digital system the same way as they are in analog circuits. You can alter the alarms through interfering with the software, but—” Another jogger was coming their way. When he passed, the man in gray turned about to double check, then continued. “The weak link is that with the cesium-atomic-clock-synchronization system, everybody, and I mean everybody—that is, every computer — has to be on the same mark.”
“The same clock?”
“Right — including the military. No matter how many different codes there are, military has to use the same synchronization. So you hit the clock, military computers go out — AT and T’s stations board in New Jersey lights up like the Fourth of July. Massive computer network breakdown. You remember the big screwups in the early 1990s?”
“No.”
“Biggest one was ‘ninety — January twenty-ninth. Two twenty-five p.m. Hit every one of a hundred and fourteen big computers. Cost ‘em over forty million. Year before in Paris, the big police computer went on the fritz — misread over thirty-nine thousand magnetized labels of drivers’ licenses. Started charging auto drivers all over France with everything from rape to homicide. It was beautiful.”
“Doesn’t the military have a backup?”
“Sure. Don’t have to use land lines — can use satellite pulses — but if the cesium clock’s out, it’s all over except for the crystals.”
“What are they?”
“Crystals? Closest things to the cesium clock in their beat accuracy. Only trouble is, they have to keep them in ‘double oven’—constant temperature. If you lose the clock, the idea is you go to ‘holdover,’ using the crystals as your drum.” The tall man paused, then smiled. “ ‘Course, if you cut off the electric power — no oven. That’s what your third man in the cell is going to do.”
“So then all the defense computers are down?”
“You’ve got it. Military gets the old ‘all circuits are busy’ crap just like everybody else. The entire continental-based missile defense system of the United States shuts down because over ninety percent of all military phones in this country are slaved to AT and T and the other companies. Private enterprise at its best, my friend.”
“What about the other carriers — Ma Bell and —”
“All in the same boat. The clock goes — they go. I love complex microchip technology. It’s so easy to fuck up.”
“When do we move?”
“When you see the ad.”
They walked down toward the Swedish Cottage, where they said good-bye. They would not meet again. Everything was in place. The man in blue turned left and exited on West Eighty-first Street; the other walked into the American Museum of Natural History. There was a new acquisition of pre-Cambrian fossils. It put everything in perspective. The fossils were all that remained of an entire epoch. The Christians were right about that — in the end, it was all dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
The exhibit’s attendant, who looked a little pre-Cambrian himself, gave the jogger a glance that said he wished visitors to the museum would be better dressed. Then again, he was mollified by the fact that, unlike the ruffians on the streets, here at least was a man of breeding, a man of cultural refinement.
The jogger looked up at the museum clock. It was 1300 hours. Kirov’s “Ballet” was about to begin. What the man in gray hadn’t told his cohort was that the really big payoff of such a massive computer screwup would be the havoc it would play with the navy’s “burst” coded communications for its submarines at sea. They wouldn’t know what the hell was going on, and if they came up near the surface to get emergency TACAMO — take charge and move out — aircraft messages, Novosibirsk would pick up the displacement bulge — the radiant heat difference between the sub and sea temperature — and BAM! — they’d be targeted by the Siberian fleet’s Hunter/Killer subs before the Americans knew it.
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” commented the attendant for the pre-Cambrian exhib
it.
“Certainly is.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Khabarovsk
Freeman was kneeling, saying his prayers. There was a crack — like pine board splitting. He spun about, grabbed the riot gun — its five rounds filled with razor-sharp flechettes — and aimed it at the door. He’d dismissed the reporter’s rumor about a possible SPETSNAZ attack, but all the same…
There was no one at the door. He lifted the phone connecting him to the duty officer. “What in hell was that?”
“River, sir. Ice splitting.”
“Call our Baikal command on the cease-fire line. Ask if the lake’s breaking up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And lieutenant…”
“Sir?”
“You wake me the moment you hear.”
“Yes, General.”
The duty officer rang back moments later, reporting, “Everything’s fine at Baikal, sir. Nothing’s moving.”
“The world’s moving, Lieutenant — we just aren’t aware of it most of the time.”
“Yes, sir.”
Relieved, Freeman knelt to finish his prayer. “Almighty God, arm us. Amen.”
Before putting out the light, he scribbled a memo to the padre who had given a sermon for twenty minutes — ten longer than necessary, in Freeman’s view — a homily in which the padre had told the Second Army congregation that prayer may not indeed be heard by a supreme being but was a way of personally reminding ourselves of our individual responsibility to the collective spirit.
Freeman had been appalled. It wasn’t enough, he told Norton, that he had to put up with weak-kneed strategists back in Washington — now he had to contend with Goddamn revisionist priests who, rather than delivering the word of God straight and undiluted, had to stoop to secular interpretation of prayer so as not to offend the liberal fairies. The general, in an unprecedented move, had risen in the Quonset during the service and, looking about at the congregation of servicemen, helmet under his arm, declared, “With all due respect to the padre here, I feel it is my duty as your commanding officer to inform you that as far as I am concerned, God directly hears your prayers and will not fail us—if we prove worthy.” As the padre’s face grew redder by the second, Freeman had continued, “It is our bounden duty to thrash these neo-Communist sons of bitches in their new garb so soundly that they will never again doubt America’s will.”