by Tom Clancy
“Morning, Jack,” a voice said from the corridor door.
“Hey, Robby.” POTUS pointed to the coffee tray. Vice President Jackson got himself a cup, but passed on the croissants. His waistline looked a little tight. Well, Robby had never looked like a marathoner. So many fighter pilots tended to have thick waists. Maybe it was good for fighting g-forces, Jack speculated.
“Read the PDB this morning. Jack, this Russian oil and gold thing. Is it really that big?”
“George says it’s even bigger. You ever sit down with him to learn economics?”
“End of the week, we’re going to play a round at Burning Tree, and I’m reading Milton Friedman and two other books to bone up for it. You know, George comes across as pretty smart.”
“Smart enough to make a ton of money on The Street-and I mean if you put his money in hundred-dollar bills and weigh them, it is a fucking ton of money.”
“Must be nice,” breathed a man who’d never made more than $130,000 in a year before taking on his current job.
“Has its moments, but the coffee here’s still pretty good.”
“It was better on Big John, once upon a time.”
“Where?”
“John F. Kennedy, back when I was an O-3, and doing fun work, like driving Tomcats off the boat.”
“Robby, hate to tell you, my friend, but you’re not twenty-six anymore.”
“Jack, you have such a way of brightening up my days for me. I’ve walked past death’s door before, but it’s safer and a hell of a lot more fun to do it with a fighter plane strapped to your back.”
“What’s your day look like?”
“Believe it or not, I have to drive down to the Hill and preside at the Senate for a few hours, just to show I know what the Constitution says I’m supposed to do. Then a dinner speech in Baltimore about who makes the best brassieres,” he added with a smile.
“What?” Jack asked, looking up from the PDB. The thing about Robby’s sense of humor was that you never really knew when he was kidding.
“National meeting of artificial fiber manufacturers. They also make bulletproof vests, but bras get most of their fibers, or so my research staff tells me. They’re trying to make a few jokes for the speech.”
“Work on your delivery,” the President advised the Vice President.
“You thought I was funny enough way back when,” Jackson reminded his old friend.
“Rob, I thought I was funny enough way back when, but Arnie tells me I’m not sensitive enough.”
“I know, no Polish jokes. Some Polacks learned to turn on their TVs last year, and there’s six or seven who know how to read. That doesn’t count the Polish gal who doesn’t use a vibrator because it chips her teeth.”
“Jesus, Robby!” Ryan almost spilled his coffee laughing. “We’re not even allowed to think things like that anymore.”
“Jack, I’m not a politician. I’m a fighter jock. I got the flight suit, the hackwatch, and the dick to go along with the job title, y’dig?” the Vice President asked with a grin. “And I am allowed to tell a joke once in a while.”
“Fine, just remember this isn’t the ready room on the Kennedy. The media lacks the sense of humor enjoyed by naval aviators.”
“Yeah, unless they catch us in something. Then it’s funnier ’n hell,” the retired Vice Admiral observed.
“Rob, you’re finally catching on. Glad to see it.” Ryan’s last sight of the departing subordinate was the back of a nicely tailored suit, accompanied by a muttered vulgarity.
So, Mishka, any thoughts? ”Provalov asked.
Reilly took a sip of his vodka. It was awfully smooth here. “Oleg, you just have to shake the tree and see what falls out. It could be damned near anything, but ‘don’t know’ means ‘don’t know’. And at the moment, we don’t know.” Another sip. “Does it strike you that two former Spetsnaz guys are a lot of firepower to go after a pimp?”
The Russian nodded. “Yes, of course, I’ve thought of that, but he was a very prosperous pimp, wasn’t he, Mishka? He had a great deal of money, and very many contacts inside the criminal establishment. He had power of his own. Perhaps he’d had people killed as well. We never had his name come up in a serious way in any murder investigations, but that doesn’t mean that Avseyenko was not a dangerous man in his own right, and therefore worthy of such high-level attention.”
“Any luck with this Suvorov guy?”
Provalov shook his head. “No. We have a KGB file for him and a photograph, but even if that is for the right person, we haven’t found him yet.”
“Well, Oleg Gregoriyevich, it looks as though you have a real head-scratcher on your hands.” Reilly lifted his hand to order another round.
“You are supposed to be the expert on organized crime,” the Russian lieutenant reminded his FBI guest.
“That’s true, Oleg, but I ain’t no gypsy fortune-teller, and I ain’t the Oracle of Delphi either. You don’t know who the real target was yet, and until you learn that, you don’t know jack shit. Problem is, to find out who the target was, you have to find somebody who knows something about the crime. The two things are wrapped up together, bro. Get one, get both. Get neither, get nothing.” The drinks arrived. Reilly paid and took another hit.
“My captain is not pleased.”
The FBI agent nodded. “Yeah, bosses are like that in the Bureau, too, but he’s supposed to know what the problems are, right? If he does, he knows he has to give you the time and the resources to play it out. How many men you have on it now?”
“Six here, and three more in St. Petersburg.”
“May want to get some more, bro.” In the FBI’s New York OC office, a case like this could have as many as twenty agents working it, half of them on a full-time basis. But the Moscow Militia was stretched notoriously thin. For as much crime as there was now in Moscow, the local cops were still sucking hind tit when it came to government support. But it could have been worse. Unlike much of Russian society, the militiamen were getting paid.
You tire me out, ”Nomuri protested.
“There is always Minister Fang,” Ming replied with a playful look.
“Ah!” was the enraged reply. “You compare me with an old man?”
“Well, both of you are men, but better a sausage than a string bean,” she answered, grasping the former in her soft left hand.
“Patience, girl, allow me to recover from the first race.” With that he lifted her body over his and let it down. She must really like me, Nomuri reflected. Three nights in a row. I suppose Fang isn’t the man he thinks he is. Well, can’t win ’em all, Charlie. Plus the advantage of being forty years younger. There was probably something to that, the CIA officer admitted to himself.
“But you run so fast!” Ming protested, rubbing her body on his.
“There is something I want you to do.”
A very playful smile. “What might that be?” she asked while her hand wandered a little.
“Not that!”
“Oh …” The disappointment in her voice was noteworthy.
“Something for work,” Nomuri explained on. Just as well she couldn’t feel the shaking inside his body, which, remarkably enough, didn’t show.
“For work? I can’t bring you into the office for this!” she said with a laugh, followed by a warm, affectionate kiss.
“Yes, something to upload onto your computer.” Nomuri reached into the night-table drawer and pulled out a CD-ROM. “Here, you just load this into your machine, click INSTALL, and then dispose of it when you’re done.”
“And what will it do?” she asked.
“Do you care?”
“Well …” Hesitation. She didn’t understand. “I must care.”
“It will allow me to look at your computer from time to time.”
“But why?”
“Because of Nippon Electric-we make your computer, don’t you see?” He allowed his body to relax. “It is useful for my company to know how economic decisions are made
in the People’s Republic,” Nomuri explained, with a well-rehearsed lie. “This will allow us to understand that process a little better, so that we can do business more effectively. And the better I do for them, the more they will pay me-and the more I can spend on my darling Ming.”
“I see,” she thought, wrongly.
He bent down to kiss a particularly nice spot. Her body shuddered in just the right way. Good, she wasn’t resisting the idea, or at least wasn’t letting it get in the way of this activity, which was good for Nomuri in more than one way. The intelligence officer wondered if someday his conscience would attack him for using this girl in such a way. But business, he told himself, was business.
“No one will know?”
“No, that is not possible.”
“And it will not get me into trouble?”
With that question he rolled over, finding himself on top. He held her face in both hands. “Would I ever do something to get Ming-chan in trouble? Never!” he announced, with a deep and passionate kiss.
Afterward there was no talk about the CD-ROM, which she tucked into her purse before leaving. It was a nice-looking purse, a knockoff of something Italian that you could buy on the street here, rather like the genuine ones in New York that “fell off the back of the truck,” as the euphemism went.
Every time they parted, it was a little hard. She didn’t want to leave, and truly he didn’t want her to depart, but it was necessary. For them to share an apartment would be commented upon. Even in her dreams, Ming couldn’t think of that, actually sleeping at the apartment of a foreigner, because she did have a security clearance, and she had been given her security brief by a bored MSS officer, along with all the other senior secretaries, and she hadn’t reported this contact to her superiors or the office security chief as she ought to have done-why? Partly because she’d forgotten the rules, because she’d never broken them or known someone who had done so, and partly because like many people she drew a line between her private life and her professional one. That the two were not allowed to be separate in her case was something that the MSS briefing had covered, but in so clumsy a way as to have been disregarded even upon its delivery. And so here she was, not even knowing where and what here was. With luck, she’d never have to find out, Nomuri thought, watching her turn the corner and disappear from view. Luck would help. What the MSS interrogators did to young women in the Beijing version of the Lubyanka didn’t really bear much contemplation, certainly not when one had just made love to her twice in two hours.
“Good luck, honey,” Nomuri whispered, as he closed the door and headed to the bathroom for a shower.
CHAPTER 14 (dot)com
It was a sleepless night for Nomuri. Would she do it? Would she do what she was told? Would she tell a security officer about it, and then about him? Might she be caught with the CD-ROM going into work and questioned about it? If so, a casual inspection would show it to be a music CD, Bill Conti’s musical score for Rocky-a poorly marked knockoff of an American intellectual property that was quite common in the PRC. But a more careful examination would have revealed that the first-outermost-data line on the metallic surface told the computer CD-ROM reader to skip to a certain place where the content was not music, but binary code, and very efficient binary code at that.
The CD-ROM didn’t contain a virus per se, because a virus circulates mainly across computer networks, entering a computer surreptitiously the way a disease organism enters a living host (hence the term virus). But this one came in the front door, and on being read by the CD-ROM reader, a single prompt came up on the screen, and Ming, after a quick look-around in her office, moved her mouse to put the pointer on the prompt, clicked the INSTALL command, and everything immediately disappeared. The program thus implanted searched her hard drive at nearly the speed of light, categorizing every file and setting up its own index, then compressing it into a small file that hid in plain sight, as it were, identified by any disk-sorting program with a wholly innocent name that referred to a function carried out by another program entirely. Thus only a very careful and directed search by a skilled computer operator could even detect that something was even there. Exactly what the program did could only be determined by a one-by-zero reading of the program itself, something difficult to accomplish at best. It would be like trying to find what was wrong with a single leaf on a single tree in a vast forest where all the trees and all the leaves looked pretty much alike, except that this one leaf was smaller and humbler than most. CIA and NSA could no longer attract the best programmers in America. There was just too much money in the consumer electronics industry for government to compete effectively in that marketplace. But you could still hire them, and the work that came out was just as good. And if you paid them enough-strangely, you could pay lots more to a contractor than to an employee-they wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. And besides, they never really knew what it was all about anyway, did they?
In this case, there was an additional level of complexity that went back over sixty years. When the Germans had overrun the Netherlands in 1940, they’d created a strange situation. In Holland the Germans had found both the most cooperative of their conquered nations and the most fiercely resistant. More Dutchmen per capita had joined the Germans than any other nationality-enough to form their own SS division, SS Nordland. At the same time, the Dutch resistance became the most effective in Europe, and one of their number was a brilliant mathematician/engineer working for the national telephone company. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the telephone had reached a developmental roadblock. When you lifted a phone, you were immediately connected with an operator to whom you gave the destination you were trying to call, and she then physically moved a plug into the proper hole. This system had been workable when only a few telephones were in use, but the appliance had rapidly proved too useful for limited applications. The solution to the problem, remarkably enough, had come from a mortician in the American South. Vexed by the fact that the local operator in his town referred the bereaved to a competing undertaker, he had invented the stepping switch, which enabled people to reach their own phone destinations merely by turning a rotary dial. That system served the world well, but also required the development of a whole body of new mathematical knowledge called “complexity theory,” which was systematized by the American company AT amp;T in the 1930s.
Ten years later, merely by adding additional digits to be dialed, the Dutch engineer in the resistance had applied complexity theory to covert operations by creating theoretical pathways through the switching gear, thus enabling resistance fighters to call others without knowing whom they called, or even the actual telephone numbers they were calling.
This bit of electronic skullduggery had first been noticed by an officer for the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, and, finding it very clever indeed, he’d discussed it over a beer with an American colleague in a London pub. The American OSS officer, like most of the men Wild Bill Donovan had chosen, was an attorney by profession, and in his case, a very thorough one, who wrote everything down and forwarded it up the line. The report on the Dutch engineer had made its way to the office of Colonel William Friedman, then America’s foremost code-breaker. Though not himself a hardware expert, Friedman had known something useful when he saw it, and he knew there would be an after-the-war, during which his agency-later reborn as the National Security Agency-would still be busy cracking other countries’ codes and ciphers and producing codes and ciphers itself. The ability to develop covert communications links through a relatively simple mathematical trick had seemed a gift from God’s own hand.
In the 1940s and ’50s, NSA had been able to hire American’s finest mathematicians, and one of the tasks assigned them had been to work with AT amp;T to create a universal telephone operating system that could be used covertly by American intelligence officers. Back then, AT amp;T was the only real rival NSA had had in the hiring of skilled mathematicians, and beyond that, AT amp;T had always been a prime con
tractor for just about every executive agency of the government. By 1955, it was done, and for a surprisingly modest fee AT amp;T provided the entire world with a model for telephone systems that most of the world adopted-the modest cost was explained by the desire of AT amp;T to make its systems compatible with every other country’s to ease international communications. With the 1970s had come push-button phones, which directed calls electronically by frequency-controlled codes even easier for electronic systems to use, and infinitely easier to maintain than the former electro-mechanical stepping switches that had made the mortician hugely rich. They also proved even easier for AT amp;T to rig for NSA. The operating systems first given the world’s telephone companies by AT amp;T’s Parsippany, New Jersey, research laboratory had been upgraded yearly at least, giving further improvements to the efficiency of the world’s phone systems-so much so that scarcely any telephone system in the world didn’t use it. And tucked into that operating system were six lines of binary code whose operational concept traced back to the Nazi occupation of Holland.
