Collusion

by Newt Gingrich

  Pavel’s eyes narrowed. He clenched his jaw.

  “Is it your job to inform me of such news?” he rudely replied.

  Russian counterintelligence officers would be on the hunt. How had the Americans caught him? Had their mole drawn suspicion on himself? Spent large sums of money? Been caught photographing documents? Or was it the most likely explanation. A Russian traitor had exposed an American one? It had been less than forty-eight hours since he’d given President Fitzgerald the password. Even someone as dull as Gromyko would eventually wonder about the timing of the spy’s arrest and Pavel’s trip to Washington.

  Pavel’s car was approaching the public telephone. Nothing. No red painted X on the shell covering it.

  Gromyko already had tried poisoning him and Peter. He felt certain of it. The light of hope was dimming within him.

  Sixteen

  Valerie Mayberry slipped off her wedding ring. She had shadowed Asyan Rivera from her pricy Baltimore inner harbor condo to a picturesque western Pennsylvania town. Home to Smithmyer College.

  Tailing Rivera had been simple. An FBI technician had planted a tracking device on her BMW. Mayberry had arrived at the school’s parking lot a few moments after Rivera. Finding her on campus also had been easy. She was sipping a salted caramel mocha while sending a text at a table in the student center’s food court, and did not look anything like a typical Smithmyer student.

  Mayberry calculated the cost of Rivera’s outfit. A Miu Miu cropped black denim jacket. Worn over a Dolce & Gabbana denim bralette. Skintight Prada black chopped tailored trousers. At least three grand on those three pieces. Valentino Garavani Rockstud combat boots, Italian made: $1,700? Panthère de Cartier sunglasses with gray gradient lenses: at least $900. Another $200 to have her initials engraved on the corner of one lens. Total cost of her rock girl chic outfit, easily $6,000.

  In contrast, Mayberry’s costume consisted of a Walmart fluted-sleeve floral-print blouse, Old Navy denim jeans with knee holes, and black Nike Flex running shoes. Around $200.

  It was Rivera’s handbag that most caught Mayberry’s attention. A Louis Vuitton Sac Plat Fusion Fire Led Elvim 19 black leather satchel. Did any of the college boys ogling her realize it alone retailed for $54,000?

  Rivera stood, having finished her drink and text. She disappeared into a nearby women’s restroom. Mayberry entered the food court and out of habit carried the crumpled cup and soiled napkins that Rivera had left behind to a receptacle before sitting in a chair where she could watch the women’s room.

  She almost missed seeing Rivera exit. Gone was the designer outfit, replaced by an oversize black sweatshirt worn over black denim jeans. High-top sneakers. Her hair tucked under a black stocking cap. Mayberry assumed Rivera had packed her earlier outfit in the Under Armour gym bag slung over shoulder.

  Mayberry followed her outside. Watched her deposit the gym bag into the BMW’s trunk. Kept her distance as Rivera climbed a slight hill making her way to the school’s auditorium where a crowd had gathered. Mayberry lost track of her in the swarm.

  “Concert tonight?” Mayberry asked a nearby student.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  The jostling began. By the time Mayberry got inside, every seat was filled. She found room along a back wall.

  Seconds later, protestors entered. Eight of them paraded down the center aisle to the front of the auditorium. Their leader was dressed in a brightly colored orange-and-black dashiki. The rest wore all black and masks. Three rubberized former presidents: Reagan, Carter, Clinton. A Zorro. A pink pussy-cat protest hat with scarf pulled up. Guy Fawkes—the flamboyantly anarchic terrorist in the comic book series V for Vendetta. Mayberry easily spotted Rivera hiding behind a glittery Mardi Gras jester’s face.

  The dashiki-clad leader, who wasn’t wearing a disguise, raised a bullhorn and began to chant: “Hey, ho, racist professors need to go! Hey, ho, sexist professors need to go!”

  Although the voices of her fellow protestors were somewhat muted, they repeated her call. Others in the auditorium joined in.

  “Hey, ho, racist professors need to go! Hey, ho, sexist professors need to go!”

  Three campus security guards watched from the auditorium’s aisles. Arms folded across their chests.

  “We ain’t lettin’ no racist speak here tonight,” the woman announced. “We ain’t listenin’ to any of his white-privilege bullshit!”

  A student in a Smithmyer sweatshirt three rows from center stage yelled back: “He’s not a racist. Let him speak.”

  “You ain’t black,” the woman declared. “You got no say in who be racist. You ain’t a woman, either, you got no say in who be a misogynist.”

  Mayberry raised her cell phone, joining dozens of others videoing the protest. “Excuse me,” she whispered to a coed scrunched against the auditorium wall beside her. “This is my first day here. What’s going on?”

  “The off-campus fight,” she replied.

  “What fight?”

  The student quickly explained. Each year, Smithmyer held a Day of Nonattendance/Day of Reuniting event. Minority students left the campus to discuss diversity issues. They returned the next day to reunite with nonminority students. This year, its organizers turned tables. Everyone who wasn’t a minority was told to stay off campus. Dr. Francis Williams, an English professor, had written an editorial challenging the switch.

  The student pulled a folded campus newspaper article from the back pocket of her jeans. “Here’s what he wrote. I’m saving it. Nothing like this ever happens at Smithmyer.”

  Mayberry scanned the clipping. “There’s a difference between a group deciding to voluntarily vacate the campus,” Dr. Williams had written, “and that same group telling others they have to go away. Leaving campus to raise consciousness about minority issues is a much-valued tradition at Smithmyer that all of us should respect. But demanding all whites leave the campus is a show of force, an act of oppression against nonminority faculty and students, and this is wrong.”

  She handed back the clipping. Mayberry had read about protests on college campuses about free speech but had never attended one.

  “He’s not a Nazi!” a supporter yelled. “He’s got a First Amendment right to speak.”

  “Not when it’s hate speech,” the woman with the bullhorn replied. “That be verbal violence. Ain’t protected by the First Amendment.”

  The protestor in the pussycat hat yelled, “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater.”

  “She’s right!” someone in the audience responded. “If what you say marginalizes people, you have no right to say it.”

  “What Dr. Williams wrote wasn’t hate speech,” one of his student supporters argued.

  “Was too hate speech,” the bullhorn leader answered. “Defending white supremacy always be hate speech. If you a Nazi, we gonna punch your face.”

  Cheers. Boos. Applause. Taunts. An argument now being waged in slogans.

  “Hey, ho, he needs to go!”

  “No, no, he’s got to speak!”

  An older, bearded white man appeared onstage, prompting the bullhorn protestor to yell: “Shut him up! Shut him up!”

  Mayberry noticed the three security guards quietly leaving.

  “Smithmyer students, please, please listen to me,” Dr. Francis Williams said, raising his hands for silence. “Let’s have a civil discussion here. A teachable moment.”

  For someone with such a genteel appearance, he had a surprisingly strong voice, no doubt honed by years of teaching. Even so, the auditorium’s control booth personnel had to maximize the volume of Williams’s handheld microphone for him to be heard above the crowd.

  “Tonight is not about who should or shouldn’t leave campus,” Dr. Williams said. “It’s about free and open discussion. We can’t have free and open discussion of important ideas if we say that ideas are only valid if made by a person of the appropriate race or sexual identity. And we definitely can’t have a discussion if we start calling o
pinions we disagree with ‘verbal violence.’ Confusing speech with violence guarantees someone will get hurt—because people will feel it appropriate to respond to something that offends them with actual violence!”

  “Racist! Racist! Racist!” came through the bullhorn.

  “Listen to me!” he continued. “I have stood up against racism my entire life. I was active in the civil rights movement. I have always proudly called myself a liberal. But I no longer recognize what passes for liberal these days. It used to be about being color-blind—about treating people as individuals with God-given rights. About freedom, about tolerance. Listening to others.”

  Beads of sweat glistened on Williams’s forehead. “Now being a liberal is all about identity politics. It’s about focusing on our differences instead of what makes us the same. Being color-blind is considered racist now! It’s all been flipped upside down, and it’s tearing us apart. Just look at us!” He paused to catch his breath. Then continued. “Today’s argument is that if you’re an LGBTQ black woman, your view of American society is automatically more valid than that of a straight white male. That is wrong. Logic and reason matter. Not victimization.”

  He raised his free hand hoping to quiet the crowd. Seeing it, the protest’s leader screamed: “A Nazi salute. He’s making a Nazi salute.”

  Williams immediately dropped his arm, making him seem guilty.

  The bullhorn protestor seized the moment. Placing her open left palm on the stage, which was about four feet higher than the auditorium floor, she catapulted herself onto the platform with surprising dexterity. She ran toward Williams. In that instant, the room became eerily quiet.

  The woman stopped an inch from him and screamed vulgarities into his face. Someone in the auditorium threw a punch. Within seconds, mayhem.

  Mayberry joined others fleeing from the auditorium. Once outside, she hurried downhill to the visitors’ lot where Rivera’s BMW was parked. She waited several rows away from the car. Rivera appeared moments later, having ditched her Mardi Gras mask. The woman with her was the protest leader, minus her bullhorn. She was talking on a cell phone.

  A Cadillac Escalade entered the lot and drove directly to the two women. Rivera opened its front passenger door for the protest leader to enter. Mayberry raised her cell but only captured a fuzzy photo of the Escalade. It had Washington, D.C., plates.

  Rivera got into her BMW and drove in the opposite direction to the Escalade. Before Mayberry pursued her, she glanced at the Smithmyer College auditorium. The police had arrived, along with an ambulance. Two EMTs were helping a limping Dr. Williams outside to be examined. He was holding a handkerchief to his nose to stop the bleeding.

  Seventeen

  “Can this be hacked?” Brett Garrett asked, holding a satellite phone bearing the IEC label.

  “It’s the finest fully encrypted phone ever made,” Thomas Jefferson Kim bragged.

  “I’ll grant you that, but can it be hacked? It’s my ass hanging out in Moscow.”

  “The GMR-2 encryption algorithm is the most commonly used in SAT phones. The Chinese recently launched an attack using a reverse encryption procedure to decode the encryption key from the output key stream by hitting a 3.3 GHz satellite stream thousands of times with an inversion attack, which eventually produced a 64-bit encryption key enabling them to read and hear message traffic.”

  “In English, please, Dr. Mensa.”

  “The system that I specifically developed for the phone you are holding uses multiple encryption layers before it reaches our satellite where your voice will be further scrambled before being forwarded to a twin phone, the only one that has the necessary key code to unscramble your encrypted voice, although there will be a short delay when we speak. This specific phone’s transmissions will bleed into the stream of other messages being sent to our satellite in random bursts, which means a hacker would have to identify the right burst. Like finding a needle in a—”

  “I got it,” Garrett said. “This phone can’t be hacked.”

  “No, of course it can be hacked.”

  “You just told me—”

  “Garrett, every secret code that’s ever been written can be broken. The only question is how quickly.”

  “How long did it take the Chinese to hack into the most-used SAT-phone system—the one you mentioned? What’s it called?”

  “GMR-2.”

  “How long?”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Two seconds. But this phone will take them longer and I’ll be notified and begin throwing up barriers to stop them.”

  “Two seconds?” Garrett repeated, shaking his head. He tucked the phone into his backpack. “That’s really disappointing.”

  “Sorry I can’t drive you to the airport,” Kim said. “You know, it’s my niece’s birthday.”

  “I’m not sorry at all.”

  “Remember, once you use this phone, the Russians or their mole will begin trying to hack it.”

  “Kim, I’m not calling you unless it is an extreme emergency.”

  The shortest flight from Dulles International to Moscow took under ten hours but it was on an Aeroflot flight and IEU employees only traveled on American-based airlines and their European partners. With a stopover in Brussels, that meant fourteen hours had passed before Garrett landed at Moscow’s Domodedova Airport. Gilbert Hardin, a fellow IEC security employee, was holding a clipboard with IEC written on it under the misspelled name Garrit.

  “Marcus Austin says he needs to see you,” Hardin said, as soon as they were inside the Ford Expedition. “What’s makes you so special?”

  Garrett shrugged. He was tired and not interested in conversation.

  “Austin never talked to any of us when we got here,” Hardin continued. “Twenty-seven months I’ve been here, and he’s never said a word to me.”

  Garrett sat back in the SUV’s front passenger seat and closed his eyes.

  “I’m thinking Kiev,” Hardin said. “You were there. Everyone’s heard.”

  “I got no idea,” Garrett said, his eyes still shut. “IEC told me to come to Moscow, just like it did you.”

  “But you’re not like me or the other boys, are you? You got an in with Kim, the owner. You’re special.”

  Garrett opened his eyes. Hardin was a big man. About 280 pounds hanging on a six-two frame. A thick black beard and short ponytail held with a rubber band. Tip of a tattoo visible on his neck. Garrett checked the passenger-side mirror for a Russian tail. It was easy to spot. He assumed Hardin knew they were being shadowed but didn’t care. A simple airport pickup along A-105 heading north into Moscow.

  “You were a big hero in Kiev. Me and the boys will grant you that, Garrett. It’s not what’s got us concerned. You feel me? Or do I have to spell it out?”

  Garrett stared straight ahead. Traffic was light.

  “Just to be crystal clear,” Hardin said, “me and the boys have been talking about Cameroon, and we want you to know there ain’t one of us who’s going to take a bullet because you go soft—”

  Garrett jammed his left elbow up, smashing it into Hardin’s jaw. Turning in the passenger’s seat, he took control of the steering wheel with his right hand to keep the Ford from swerving into the adjacent lane. Caught completely off guard, Hardin discovered his next sensation to be Garrett’s left hand gripping his windpipe.

  Hardin released his hold on the wheel and grabbed Garrett’s fingers, trying to pry them free from his neck. Garrett tightened his hold, locking them. Hardin gasped, unable to breathe.

  “You and the boys,” Garrett said through gritted teeth, “don’t need to concern yourself with me. You got that?”

  Panicked, Hardin nodded.

  Garrett released both of his hands, shifted back in his seat. Hardin grabbed the steering wheel. “You sucker-punched me!”

  Garrett checked the rearview mirror for the Russians, who were still following, and leaned his head back, closing his eyes.r />
  “This isn’t over between us,” Hardin said, spitting blood from his cracked lip that was swelling.

  “Just tell me the time and place,” Garrett said.

  “Oh, I will. You and I will deal with this. I guarantee you that.”

  Hardin reached back between the seats for a box of tissues that was kept for passengers but couldn’t grab it.

  Garrett undid his seat belt, grabbed a handful, and tossed them onto Hardin’s lap.

  Neither spoke during the hour that it took them to reach the U.S. embassy compound in the Presnensky District. A redbrick wall, further protected by concrete crash barriers to prevent cars from penetrating the perimeter, encircled the American compound. The gates were steel. It was Garrett’s first glimpse, and the main building did not impress him. It was a rectangular box that faced westward over Konyushkovskaya Street, a major thoroughfare. The monolithic structure had two exterior surfaces. One half of the façade was composed of light brownstone, the other multiple layers of glass and steel. The windows permitted natural light inside while reflecting different colors based on weather conditions.

  As the Ford entered the complex, Hardin said, “I’m required to tell you. Blue badges for Americans. Yellow for foreign nationals and there’s a bunch working here. Cooks. Cleaning crews. A hard line between the lower and upper floors. The top ones secured. At least they claim they are. I think the bastards got them bugged, too.”

  Garrett was already aware. On his flight to Moscow, he’d read a file Kim had prepared about the U.S. embassy’s past. It was a big file. Between 1953 and 1976, the Soviets had irradiated the original embassy with microwaves. In 1964, covert Russian listening devices had been discovered planted inside the U.S. Seal attached to a podium. When a fire broke out on the old embassy’s eighth floor during 1977, the KGB had sent agents dressed as firefighters inside to pilfer documents. Two years later, both sides had agreed to allow the other to construct new, larger embassies, which is when the current one was built. During construction, Soviet workers were caught riddling it with listening devices. A sophisticated interconnecting system, much like a spiderweb, with bugs concealed in the steel and concrete columns, precast floor slabs, and interior walls. Besides bugs, resonating devices that allowed the Russians to monitor precisely both electronic and verbal communications. Even fake bugs to throw off detectors. So many embedded in the structure that Congress discussed demolishing the entire building and starting over. U.S. intelligence agencies insisted they could make it secure, so work had continued. After the demise of the Soviet Union, the director of Russian foreign intelligence (the SVR) gave his counterparts at Langley blueprints that reportedly showed where every bug had been planted. It was hailed as a gesture of goodwill, but a study by U.S. inspectors later determined all of the devices that he’d revealed already had been located.