The Chinese man contacted Denise a month after her return to America. She almost thought that he had forgotten about his pledge, and she wondered if perhaps that was better. She had mentioned meeting him in the debriefing, when she returned from the conference. Of course, she had; people had seen them together in the bar, and she would face a polygraph eventually, so it was better not to conceal a foreign contact now. But the operations officer who debriefed her didn’t seem to care, especially when Denise said she thought the Chinese man didn’t have any potential as a “developmental.” She was so unimportant, even her contact with a Chinese official didn’t matter.
The first package of material arrived by Federal Express, just as the Chinese man had said it would. It was a long list of Russian computer scientists at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, with the names of several dozen highlighted in yellow. Denise Ford had seen this same list before. It had been generated by the machine-learning algorithm that she was using to examine Russian technical journals, as part of a joint project between her directorate and IARPA.
How had the Chinese man obtained this list? Ford could not imagine. But as she turned to the end of the package, she saw a note of explanation. The highlighted names were the ones involved in important, secret work. Over the next days, Ford subtly put this information to work. It was intuition, she told her colleagues, a feeling that she had from studying the product of the machine-learning search about who might be worth a deeper look.
Two weeks later, another package arrived. The documents in this second installment were more detailed. They listed the engineers at a computer science laboratory in Kazan that was engaged in advanced research on quantum computing. Ford put this to work, too. People were beginning to pay attention to her good guesses. And then there was a third package, focusing on a research pathway the Russians had chosen that hypothesized that there might be quantum bits with more than two dimensions. This, too, was gobbled up in the interagency hunt for information about rival approaches to quantum computing. The operations directorate got involved, too, when the analysts said the Russians were on a path to nowhere. The operators devised ingenious ways to make it appear that the Russian misadventure was actually a success, so that they dug deeper in the wrong direction.
This information helped Denise Ford’s career, just as the Chinese man had promised. And in the CIA’s hands, it harmed a Russia that he had seemed, genuinely, to despise.
It was a few months later that the first package arrived from the Chinese man in which he asked for Denise Ford’s reciprocal help, too, in creating the one world of scientific knowledge in which they both believed.
What to make for dinner, after the delicious wine and cassis that had made her lightheaded? Though she’d had a very long day, Denise Ford decided that she would prepare something special. She’d shopped for the ingredients, after clipping the recipe from the New York Times. She made herself a salad of French lentils, topped with shredded Manchego cheese, and after that a breast of roasted ginger chicken. She set an extra plate in the candlelight, for symmetry, but she ate the sumptuous meal all by herself.
Despite the anxiety of twenty-four hours earlier in the computer laboratory in Seattle, Ford fell asleep quickly. She arose the next morning feeling refreshed and newly confident.
20.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Kate Sturm was in her office the next day catching up on paperwork when, just after noon, she received a call from the Seattle field office of the FBI. The special agent in charge apologized that it had taken him two days to complete the forensics on the compromised machine in the laboratory of the Seattle computer company, QED. The fingerprints had been difficult to lift from the plastic surface of the protective cover on the quantum computing device. And it had taken a few extra hours to process them, because the analysts had initially gotten a false match with another set of prints.
“We have a positive ID,” the FBI man said. “Probably nothing, though. It was the lady who accompanied you that day. I see that she has TS/SCI clearances. Denise H. Ford.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Sturm. She felt a prickly heat on her skin and a sudden loss of breath.
Sturm willed herself to be calm. She thanked the SAC and asked him to keep this information out of FBI channels for the moment, while the agency’s Office of Security assessed the information. He agreed. This was an accident, he assumed, worthy of an administrative reprimand but not a criminal referral.
Sturm let her heartbeat settle. She dabbed away the sweat on her forehead with a tissue. Then she called John Vandel’s direct line.
“I need to see you right away, John,” she said.
“Not the best time,” answered Vandel. “The Director is having one of those days. How about tonight or tomorrow?”
“Can’t wait.”
“Come now, then,” said Vandel. “I’ll pour you a Scotch. Sounds like you need it.”
“Not in your office. Meet me outside the front door. I don’t want anyone else hearing this. I’m leaving for the elevator now.”
Sturm didn’t give Vandel time to say no. She walked quickly down the seventh-floor corridor and descended to the lobby. She was outside the front door, standing by the statue of Nathan Hale, when Vandel emerged from the building. He walked toward her along the stone path.
“You okay?” asked Vandel. “What’s up? Where’s the fire?”
He took her hand, to steady her against whatever had put the flush on her cheeks, but she shook him off.
“Listen to me, John. I think we’re chasing the wrong person as the Chinese mole. It’s not Roger Kronholz.”
Vandel took her arm again and gently tugged her away from the entrance, where other employees were now emerging. They walked north, past the bubble-shaped auditorium.
“Why do you think that?” asked Vandel quietly. “We’ve just started the surveillance of Kronholz. I haven’t fed him the chicken feed yet. Let’s wait and see if he bites.”
“It’s not him. I think it’s someone else. Someone who wasn’t on our list.”
“Okay. I give up. Who?”
“You’re not going to believe this, but I’m worried that it may be Denise Ford.”
“Your pal? I just saw her yesterday. She helped me bait the hook for Kronholz. I mentioned it at the 6:00 meeting, and you didn’t say boo. Are you sure? Denise Ford doesn’t fit. She’s like part of the wallpaper around here.”
“Precisely. And I trusted her, obviously. I thought we could use her as a resource person. But I began to get squirrely after we went to the tech company in Seattle. And I just heard something that really spooked me.”
“I can see that. But back up. This is the first time I’m hearing that anything bad happened in Seattle. What was the problem?”
“Denise acted weird. She kept asking questions that pushed the line. She wanted her own copy of a letter from the Chinese company, Parcourse Technology. She was nosy, but I didn’t take it seriously. And then something really strange happened. While I was off in another room getting a code-word briefing, the protective cover came off the classified monitor of a piece of hardware. It triggered an intrusion-detection alarm. Denise was near the machine. She said it was a mistake, she bumped it accidentally, but I don’t believe her.”
“Why not?”
“Because her fingerprints were on the protective cover. The FBI office in Seattle just called me with the forensic results. She did it, and she lied about.”
“Shit! Why didn’t you warn me last night that you had doubts?”
“I didn’t want to hurt her career if I didn’t have evidence.”
“Oh, right. I forgot. She’s part of the ‘sisterhood.’ ”
Sturm stepped away, as if she had been slapped.
“Stop it, John. I don’t need any crap from you right now. We have a traitor in the building. It’s Denise Ford.”
Vandel’s head froze. His face registered disbelief, then belief.
“Plausible,” he said eventu
ally. “She has a motive, which is that she has been fucked over ever since she washed out of her first big assignment.”
“I’m sorry, John. This is my fault.”
Vandel was rubbing his forehead, thinking about how they had gotten it so wrong. He muttered a curse.
“I am so stupid,” he said. “She’s divorced. She ditched Ford years ago. Her maiden name was Hoffman. Isn’t that right?”
“I think so. What does it matter?”
“This place used to be full of Hoffmans. She may not have a current relative at the agency, but she did once. What a dope I am.”
Sturm was silent for a long moment while they walked.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked as they neared the bubble.
“Nothing, for right now, except watch her. Use Flanagan as a bird dog. He works in her division. Does she know he’s part of our team?”
“No. We never talked about Flanagan.”
Vandel was shaking his head, still stunned by his mistake.
“Do you think she’ll bolt?” he asked “That would be catastrophic.”
Sturm considered his question.
“No,” she said. “She’s a cool customer. I’d guess she has a lot of emotional investment in whatever she’s doing with the Chinese. This is her operation. She won’t give it up easily.”
Vandel shook his head one last time.
“We need to confirm this as quickly as we can. I’ll ask the DNI for special authority for the NSA and NRO to crunch data on her travel abroad. We’ll gather the Small Group again tonight. Even if we don’t have proof by then, we can start watching Denise Hoffman Ford very closely.”
Vandel put his hand on Sturm’s shoulder. He never touched her; it was out of bounds. But this was different.
“I wish the Chinese were stupid,” he said. “But they’re not. They are very smart. They’re doing exactly what I would have done. And they’re not finished. But I’m not either.”
“What are you going to do, John? We’re running out of time. We’re going to have to tell the Director, and he’ll tell the White House, and they’ll tell Congress, and then, kaboom. What’s your alternative?”
“I’m going to take Li Zian apart. That’s what. He may think he’s in control here, but he’s wrong. Watch and see. And don’t tell anybody anything.”
The drab office building on North Glebe Road was hardly a prominent location. It was a few hundred yards from the commotion of the subway stop, and the neighborhood was so full of buildings doing classified work that you could throw a rock in any direction and very likely hit someone with a security clearance. But even so, John Vandel’s assistant advised Harris Chang and Mark Flanagan to enter by a back alley into the basement garage.
Chang wore a baseball cap and shades. His gray suit, white shirt, and striped tie were all from Brooks Brothers. Even on the streets of Washington, where nearly everyone is unmemorable, he was especially indistinct. An observer would not have registered his age, profession, or nationality.
Chang was the first to arrive that afternoon. He was escorted down the long hall, past the picket of cyber-locks, to the meeting room designated for the DDO Small Group. Mark Flanagan came twenty minutes later, still early. When the two were gathered in the unadorned, utilitarian meeting room, a tech arrived to dial up Warren Winkle from Singapore on a secure video-teleconference line.
John Vandel appeared at 5:00 p.m. sharp with Kate Sturm. Vandel was wearing suit pants that were low on his waist and his tie was loose, after a long day’s march through the bureaucracy. Sturm was wearing the inevitable black pants suit. They both looked tired and unhappy.
Nobody spoke, not even Winkle, the wise guy from Singapore. They all waited for Vandel to tell them what was next in their hunt for the unseen, unnamed enemy. Flanagan, the lanky Irishman, normally so disdainful of authority, sat rigid. Vandel was stroking his chin, not wanting to begin.
“We have a new target,” Vandel said eventually. “It appears that I was wrong. It’s not Roger Kronholz. It’s someone else.”
He paused. No one spoke. Was he going to make them guess?
“So who is it?” asked Chang, breaking the silence.
“It’s a woman in S&T named Denise Ford, formerly Hoffman.”
“No way,” said Winkle. The disembodied voice conveyed what everyone was thinking.
“Way,” said Vandel. “It’s her.”
“The niece of Cyril Hoffman—the guy who died a couple years ago, who worked at ODNI?”
“Same one.”
“Denise Ford,” muttered Winkle, the sound of his voice hardened by the metallic relay of the voice connection. “So senior. So harmless. So yesterday. She used to be a friend of mine. We went on a date once after she divorced, when I separated from the first Mrs. Winkle.”
“Too much information, Warren. Thank you,” said Sturm.
“I remember her, too, actually,” said Flanagan. “When Denise came into S&T about ten years ago, she was like a wounded bird. The word was she got screwed by the DO. People felt bad for her.”
“Ancient history, doesn’t matter,” said Vandel. “The point is that we need coverage, starting now. I want to catch her in the act. Or at least on the way to Dulles.”
“Can we take this to the Bureau, please?” asked Flanagan. “I don’t want to make a profession of breaking the law.”
“Not yet. I don’t want to bring in the Bureau until the takedown. Right now, I need to get someone into S&T who can keep an eye on her. Make sure she isn’t about to run, but otherwise, keep a loose string. And it has to be someone who already is a member of the Small Group.”
“Which means what?” asked Flanagan warily, his voice bumping up a notch. He knew what was coming.
“You were Ford’s friend, right? Now you’re going to work for her. She needs a deputy. Her boss just told her that, this afternoon. At my suggestion.”
“You can’t ask me to babysit a Chinese mole. Come on, John.”
“I just did. You’ve worked so long in S&T, you’re the one person who would be credible as her assistant.”
Flanagan turned to the group, arms upraised.
“Come on, people. I’m not cut out for this. I’ll screw it up.”
“No, you won’t,” said Chang. “You’re the iceman.”
Vandel nodded; he began to pull away from the table, thinking he had accomplished his mission, but Chang put up his hand.
“Something here I still don’t get: The MSS is usually so careful. Li Zian took a big risk recruiting her. What’s he got on her? How did he convince her to cross over?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” answered Vandel. “Blackmail, idealism, probably some combination. But he knows Americans. He understands our vulnerabilities. He lived in Normal, Illinois, for Christ’s sake, when he was a college student. He has an American foster family. He still writes them letters, or at least he used to, until the FBI told these folks to stop answering. Li is an artist. For him, even a smart patriotic woman might commit treason. But you know what? Li Zian is not quite as smart as he thinks he is.”
Chang looked at his boss and saw the intensity in his eyes and the firm set of his normally loose frame. He remembered that look from Baghdad.
“You want him bad, don’t you, sir?”
“Yes, I do. That is a fact, boys and girls. I want Li Zian really bad. He has recruited one of my agency’s senior officers. I take it as a personal insult. This is the first time a foreign intelligence service has recruited a woman mole in the CIA. I don’t like it, and I am going to burn his ass.”
The meeting broke up. Mark Flanagan stayed behind to send his message to Denise Ford, volunteering his services. Chang stayed behind, too, thinking that Flanagan might want company. But when the big Irishman was finished with his work, he was preoccupied and silent. Chang descended to the basement with him, and they departed the building on Glebe Road by separate exits, their caps pulled low on their heads.
21.
LANGLE
Y, VIRGINIA
Denise Ford’s office in the new Headquarters building overlooked the arched roof of the cafeteria and the back side of old Headquarters, where the senior directors worked. It was close to power, but agonizingly separated from it. Ford had filled her office with keepsakes of happier days: pictures of Paris, her college degree from Yale, and her master’s in computer science from George Washington. There was a picture of her with Marie-Laure Trichet at a reunion ten years ago. Under it, her former French professor had written in flowing script: “Always the big ambition!”
On the credenza behind her desk, where most people might place pictures of a spouse or children, Ford had a framed quotation from the physicist Richard Feynman: “I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.” Nobody had ever thought to ask her what that quotation meant to her, so she had never needed to explain.
On her bookshelf, she had arranged a little display of S&T’s handiwork. The division was the CIA’s version of “Q” in the James Bond movies. She liked to show visitors the robot mouse that could crawl inside walls in denied areas; the tiny drone, little bigger than an insect, which could buzz in the chimney and fly, unseen, through the ventilation system. Sometimes, when she wanted to amuse a visitor, she would spread them on her desk like a little family of toy animals.
Ford’s boss, Bill Grayson, didn’t like paperwork, so it had fallen to Ford over the last few years to review technology projects across the expanse of the intelligence community. It was tedious work, mostly, checking boxes and confirming someone else’s decisions. The job gave her access to many of the black projects at CIA, NSA, IARPA, and In-Q-Tel. It was a lot of bureaucratic detail, but Ford never complained.
Grayson had suggested twice in the past year that Ford needed help, so she wasn’t really surprised when he called her the day before and told her he was giving her a deputy. Grayson said he had already posted a notice on the S&T bulletin board. The timing was mildly suspicious: Kate Sturm had been upset in Seattle, but Vandel had been friendly after that and had even asked for help. So Ford went along with Grayson’s proposal, but with her eyes open.
The Quantum Spy Page 18
