The Bear And The Dragon Part 15

"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 d.i.c.k to go along with the job t.i.tle, 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 h.e.l.l," 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 d.a.m.ned 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 s.h.i.+t. 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 t.i.t 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 wellrehea.r.s.ed 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 pa.s.sionate kiss.

Afterward there was no talk about the CD-ROM, which she tucked into her purse before leaving. It was a nicelooking 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 surrept.i.tiously 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&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 G.o.d's own hand.

In the 1940s and '50s, NSA had been able to hire American's finest mathematicians, and one of the tasks a.s.signed them had been to work with AT&T to create a universal telephone operating system that could be used covertly by American intelligence officers. Back then, AT&T was the only real rival NSA had had in the hiring of skilled mathematicians, and beyond that, AT&T had always been a prime contractor for just about every executive agency of the government. By 1955, it was done, and for a surprisingly modest fee AT&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&T to make its systems compatible with every other country's to ease international communications. With the 1970s had come push-b.u.t.ton 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&T to rig for NSA. The operating systems first given the world's telephone companies by AT&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 n.a.z.i occupation of Holland.

Ming finished the installation and ejected the disk, discarding it into her waste can. The easy way to dispose of secret material was to have your adversary do it, through the front door, not the back one.

Nothing really happened for some hours, while Ming did her usual office tasks and Nomuri visited three commercial businesses to sell his high-powered desktop computers. All that changed at 7:45 P.M.

By this time, Ming was at her own home. Nomuri would get a night off; Ming had to do some things with her roommate to avoid too much suspicion-watching local television, chatting with her friend, and thinking about her lover, while the whole reason for the wispy smiles on her face played out entirely outside her consciousness. Strangely, it never occurred to her that her roomie had it all figured out in an instant, and was merely polite enough not to broach the subject.

Her NEC desktop computer had long since gone into auto-sleep mode, leaving the monitor screen dark and blank, and the indicator light in the lower right position of the plastic frame amber instead of the green that went with real activity. The software she'd installed earlier in the day had been custom-designed for the NEC machines, which like all such machines had proprietary source-code unique to the brand. The source-code, however, was known to the National Security Agency.

Immediately upon installation, the Ghost program-as it had been christened at Fort Meade, Maryland-had buried itself in a special niche in the NEC's operating system, the newest version of Microsoft Windows. The niche had been created by a Microsoft employee whose favorite uncle had died over North Vietnam while flying an F-105 fighterbomber, and who did his patriotic work entirely without the knowledge of his parent company. It also dovetailed exactly with the NEC code, with the effect of making it virtually invisible even to a line-by-line inspection of all the code within the machine by an expert software engineer.

The Ghost had gone immediately to work, creating a directory that sorted the doc.u.ments on Ming's computer first by date of creation/modification, and then by file type. Some files, like the operating system, it ignored. It similarly ignored the NEC-created transcription program that converted Roman characters, actually the English phonemes of the spoken Mandarin language, into the corresponding ideographs, but the Ghost did not ignore the graphic-text files that resulted from that program. Those it copied, along with telephone indexes and every other text file on the fivegigabyte hard drive. This entire procedure took the machine, guided by the Ghost, seventeen-point-one-four seconds, leaving a large file that sat by itself.

The machine did nothing for a second and a half, then new activity started. The NEC desktop machines had builtin high-speed modems. The Ghost activated these, but also turned off their internal mini-speakers so that no evidence of the transmission would be heard by anyone. (Leaving the speakers on was a primary security measure. The flas.h.i.+ng lights that told of their activity were hidden because the modem was inside the box for this model.) The computer then dialed (this term had somehow survived the demise of rotary dials on telephones) a twelve-digit number rather than the usual seven used by the Beijing telephone system. The additional five digits sent the seeker-signal on a roundrobin adventure through the hardware of the central switching computer, and it came out in the place designated two weeks before by the engineers at Fort Meade, who, of course, never had an idea what this was all for, or where it would happen, or who might be involved. The number that rang-actually there wasn't a mechanical or electronic ringer of any sort-was the dedicated modem line that exited the wall by Chester Nomuri's desk and ended in the back of his very high-end laptop-which was not an NEC, because here, as with most computer applications, the best was still American.

Nomuri was also watching TV at the moment, though in his case it was the CNN international news, so that he could know what was going on at home. After that he'd switch to a j.a.panese satellite channel, because it was part of his cover. A samurai show he liked was on tonight, in theme and simplicity rather like the Westerns that had polluted American TV in the 1950s. Though an educated man and a professional intelligence officer, Nomuri liked mindless entertainment as much as anyone else. The beep made him turn his head. Though his computer had software similar to that running in Ming's office, he'd allowed the aural prompt to tell him that something was coming in, and a three-key code lit up his screen to show exactly what it was and where it was coming from.

Yes! the CIA officer exulted, his right fist slamming into his open left hand hard enough to sting. Yes. He had his agent in f.u.c.king place, and here was the take from Operation SORGE. A bar at the top of the screen showed that the data was coming it at a rate of 57,000 bits per second. That was pretty fast. Now, just hope that the local commie phone system didn't develop a bad connection somewhere between Ming's office and the switching center, and from the switching center to his flat, Chester thought. Shouldn't be much of a problem. The outbound leg from Ming's office would be first-rate, tasked as it was to the service of the Party n.o.bility. And from the switching center to his place would be okay, because he'd gotten numerous messages that way, most of them from NEC in Tokyo to congratulate him on exceeding his sales quota already.

Yeah, well, Chet, you are pretty good at making a sale, aren't you? he asked himself on the way to the kitchen. He figured he owed himself a drink for this bit of performance. On returning, he saw that the download wasn't finished yet.

d.a.m.n. How much s.h.i.+t is she sending me? Then he realized that the text files he was getting were actually graphics files, because Ming's computer didn't store ideographs as letters, but rather as the pictures that they actually were. That made the files memory-intensive. Exactly how memory-intensive they were, he saw forty minutes later when the download ended.

At the far end of the electronic chain, the Ghost program appeared to shut itself down, but in fact it slept rather as a dog did, one ear always c.o.c.ked up, and always aware of the time of day. On finis.h.i.+ng the transmission, the Ghost made a notation on its inside index of the files. It had sent everything up until this day. From now on, it would only send new ones-which would make for much shorter and faster transmissions-but only in the evening, and only after ninety-five minutes of total inactivity on the computer, and only when it was outwardly in auto-sleep mode. Tradecraft and caution had been programmed in.

"f.u.c.k," Nomuri breathed on seeing the size of the download. In pictures this could be the p.o.r.no shots of d.a.m.ned near every hooker in Hong Kong. But his job was only half done. He lit up a program of his own and selected the "Preferences" folder that controlled it. Already checked was the box for autoencryption. Virtually everything on his computer was encrypted anyway, which was easily explainable as trade and business secrets-j.a.panese companies are renowned for the secrecy of their operations-but with some files more encrypted than others. The ones that arrived from the Ghost got the most robust scrambling, from a mathematically derived transcription system, fully 512 bits in the key, plus an additional random element which Nomuri could not duplicate. That was in addition to his numeric pa.s.sword, 51240, the street number of his first "score" in East LA. Then it was time to transmit his take.

This program was a close cousin to the Ghost he'd given Ming. But this one dialed the local Internet Service Provider, or ISP, and sent off a lengthy e-mail to a destination called The "brownienet" was putatively a network established for bakeries and bakers, professional and amateur, who liked to swap recipes, often posting photos of their creations for people to download, which explained the occasional large file transferred. Photographs are notoriously rapacious in their demands for bytes and disk s.p.a.ce.

In fact, Mary Patricia Foley had posted her own highly satisfactory recipe for French apple pie, along with a photo her elder son had taken with his Apple electronic camera. Doing so hadn't been so much a case of establis.h.i.+ng a good cover as womanly pride in her own abilities as a cook, after spending an hour one night looking over the recipes others had put on this bulletin board. She'd tried one from a woman in Michigan a few weeks previously and found it okay, but not great. In coming weeks she wanted to try some of the bread recipes, which did look promising.

It was morning when Nomuri uploaded his e-mail to Pat's Bakery, an entirely real and legitimate business three blocks from the statehouse in Madison, Wisconsin, as a matter of fact, owned by a former CIA officer in the Science and Technology Directorate, now retired and a grandmother who was, however, too young for knitting. She'd created this Internet domain, paying the nominal fee and then forgetting about it, just as she'd forgotten nearly everything she'd ever done at Langley.

"You've got mail," the computer said when MP switched on her Internet mail service, which used the new Pony Express e-mail program. She keyed the download command and saw the originator was cgoodjadecastle.com. The username was from Gunsmoke. Marshal Dillon's crippled sidekick had been named Chester Good.

DOWNLOADING, the prompt-box on the screen said. It also gave an estimate for how long the download would take. 47 MINUTES . . . !

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," the DDO breathed, and lifted her phone. She pressed a b.u.t.ton, waiting a second for the right voice to answer. "Ed, better come see this . . ."

"Okay, honey, give me a minute."

The Director of Central Intelligence came in, holding his morning mug of coffee, to see his wife of twenty-three years leaning back, away from her computer screen. Rarely in that time had Mary Pat ever backed away from anything. It just wasn't her nature.

"From our j.a.panese friend?" Ed asked his wife.

"So it would seem," MP replied.

"How much stuff is this?"

"Looks like a lot. I suppose Chester is pretty good in the sack."

"Who trained him?"

"Whoever it was, we need to get his a.s.s down to The Farm and pa.s.s all that knowledge along. For that matter," she added, with a changed voice and an upward look to catch her husband's eye, "maybe you could audit the course, honey-bunny."

"Is that a complaint?"

"There's always room for improvement-and, okay, yes, I need to drop fifteen pounds, too," she added, to cut the DCI off before he could reply in kind. He hated when she did that. But not now. Now his hand touched her face quite tenderly, as the prompt screen said another thirty-four minutes to complete the download.

"Who's the guy at Fort Meade who put the Ghost programs together?"

"They contracted a game place-a guy at a game company, I guess," Mrs. Foley corrected herself. "They paid him four hundred fifty big ones for the job." Which was more than the Director of Central Intelligence and the Deputy Director (Operations) made together, what with the federal pay caps, which didn't allow any federal employee to make more than a member of Congress-and they feared raising their own salaries, lest they offend the voters.

"Call me when you have it downloaded, baby."

"Who's the best guy we have for China?"

"Joshua Sears, Ph.D., from U-Cal Berkley, runs the China desk in the DI. But the guy at NSA is better for linguistic nuances, they say. His name's Victor w.a.n.g," the DCI said.

"Can we trust him?" MP asked. Distrust of ethnic Chinese in the American national-security apparatus had reached a considerable level.

"s.h.i.+t, I don't know. You know, we have to trust somebody, and w.a.n.g's been on the box twice a year for the last eight years. The ChiComms can't compromise every Chinese-American we have, you know. This w.a.n.g guy's third-generation American, was an officer in the Air Force-ELINT guy, evidently worked out of Wright-Patterson-and just made super-grade at NSA. Tom Porter says he's very good."

"Okay, well, let me see what all this is, then we'll have Sears check it out, and then, maybe, if we have to, we'll talk to this w.a.n.g guy. Remember, Eddie, at the end of this is an officer named Nomuri and a foreign national who has two eyes-"

Her husband cut her off with a wave. "And two ears. Yeah, baby, I know. We've been there. We've done that. And we both have the T-s.h.i.+rts to prove it." And he was about as likely to forget that as his wife was. Keeping your agents alive was as important to an intelligence agency as capital preservation was to an investor.

Mary Pat ignored her computer for twenty minutes, and instead went over routine message traffic hand-carried up from MERCURY down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Old Headquarters Building. That was not especially easy, but necessary nonetheless, because CIA's Clandestine Service was running agents and operations all over the world-or trying to, Mary Pat corrected herself. It was her job to rebuild the Directorate of Operations, to restore the human-intelligence-HUMINT-capability largely destroyed in the late 1970s, and only slowly being rebuilt. That was no small task, even for an expert in the field. But Chester Nomuri was one of her pets. She'd spotted him at The Farm some years before and seen in him the talent, the gift, and the motivation. For him espionage was as much a vocation as the priesthood, something important to his country, and fun, as much fun as dropping a fifty-footer at Augusta was for Jack Nicklaus. Toss in his brains and street sense, and, Mary Pat had thought at the time, she had a winner there. Now Nomuri was evidently living up to her expectations. Big time. For the first time, CIA had an agent-in-place inside the ChiComm Politburo, and that was about as good as it got. Perhaps even the Russians didn't have one of those, though you could never be sure, and you could lose a lot of money betting against the Russian intelligence services.

"File's done," the computer's electronic voice finally said. That occasioned a turn in her swivel chair. The DDO first of all backed up her newly downloaded file to a second hard drive, and then to a "toaster" disk, so called because the disk went in and out of the drive box like a slice of bread. With that done, she typed in her decryption code, 51240. She had no idea why Nomuri had specified that number, but knowing was not necessary, just so long as n.o.body else knew either. After typing in the five digits and hitting RETURN, the file icons changed. They were already aligned in list form, and MP selected the oldest. A page full of Chinese ideographs came up. With that bit of information, MP lifted her office phone and punched the b.u.t.ton for her secretary. "Dr. Joshua Sears, DI, Chinese Section. Please ask him to come see me right away."

That took six endless minutes. It took rather a lot to make Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley s.h.i.+ver, but this was one such occasion. The image on her screen looked like something one might get from inking the feet of several drunken roosters, then making them loiter on a piece of white paper, but within the imagery were words and thoughts. Secret words and hidden thoughts. On her screen was the ability to read the minds of adversaries. It was the sort of thing that could win the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, but infinitely more important. It was the sort of thing that had won wars and altered history from the expected path determined by the most important of players, and in that was the value of espionage, the whole point of having an intelligence community, because the fates of nations really did ride on such things- -and therefore, the fates of nations rode on Chet Nomuri's schwantz and how well he used it, Mrs. Foley reflected. What a crazy f.u.c.king world it was. How the h.e.l.l could an historian ever get that right? How did you communicate the importance of seducing some nameless secretary, an underling, a modern-day peasant who merely transcribed the thoughts of the important, but in being compromised made those thoughts available to others, and in doing so, altered the course of history as surely as turning the rudder changed the course of a mighty s.h.i.+p. For Mary Pat, Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency, it was a moment of fulfillment to place alongside the birth of her children. Her entire raison d'etre lay in black-and-white ideographs on her computer monitor-and she couldn't read the f.u.c.king things. She had the language skills to teach Russian literature at Moscow State University, but all she knew of Chinese was chop suey and moo goo gai pan.

"Mrs. Foley?" A head appeared at her door. "I'm Josh Sears." He was fifty, tall, losing his hair, most of it gray. Brown eyes. He hit the cafeteria line downstairs a little too hard, the DDO thought.

"Please come in, Dr. Sears. I need you to translate some things for me."