"Right away," Caldwell said. He moved to the center of the group and suddenly felt the old, familiar feeling of being in command once again. "Karen and I will stay here to help out with that side of it. You’d better stay too, Chris, to explain the whole idea again. Vic needs to go to Washington to tell Packard what we want, and Lyn had better go with him because she knows the layout of the house."
"It sounds as if we should consider you in charge of this operation," Calazar said.
"Thanks." Caldwell nodded and looked around the room. "Okay," he said. "Let’s go through the whole thing in detail from the beginning and work out as much as we can to synchronize the two ends of it."
Hunt and Lyn arrived in Washington late that afternoon. Caldwell had already called Packard from Alaska, so they were expecting to find Packard, Pacey, and Clifford Benson of the CIA waiting for them. What they were not expecting to find was a contingent of Soviet military officers there too, headed by Mikolai Sobroskin. To their further and total amazement they learned that a Jevlenese defector in the form of the scientist Verikoff was also present in another part of the building.
Most of the Russians were too stunned by what they heard from Hunt and Lyn to be capable of contributing very much to the proceedings. Sobroskin, however, digested their story quickly and confirmed from what Verikoff had already told him-that the office wing of Sverenssen’s house did indeed contain a full communications system into JEVEX, including a neural coupler. In fact Verikoff himself had used it on numerous occasions to make quick visits to Jevlen. This led Sobroskin to propose a means of simplifying considerably the plan that Hunt and Lyn had described. "As you say, the big risk in forcing Sverenssen to do it is that JEVEX might be able to observe what is happening," he said. "But perhaps there is no need for that at all. If we could just gain access to the device, Verikoff might be persuaded to do what is required voluntarily. JEVEX already knows Verikoff. It would have no reason to see anything amiss."
Ten minutes later they all left the room and descended one story of the building to enter a door that had two armed guards stationed outside it. Verikoff was inside with two more of Sobroskin’s officers. At Sobroskin’s request, Verikoff sketched a plan of Sverenssen’s house on a mural display, indicating the location of the communications room and the access door into the wing in which it was located, as well as describing the building’s protective features. "What’s your verdict?" Pacey asked, looking at Lyn, when Verikoff had finished.
She nodded. "One-hundred-percent accurate. That’s it, just the way it is."
"He seems to be telling the truth," Packard said, sounding satisfied. "And everything else he told Sobroskin checks with what Vic Hunt has told us. I think we can trust him."
Verikoff’s eyes widened in surprise. He waved a hand at the sketch he had drawn, and then at Lyn. "She knows this already? How could that be? How could she know about the coupler?"
"It would take too long to explain," Sobroskin said. "Tell us what kind of visual sensors JEVEX has around the house. Are there some in all rooms, outside, inside the communications room, or what?"
"Only inside the communications room itself," Verikoff answered. He was looking from side to side uncomprehendingly.
"So JEVEX would not know about anything that was happening in the rest of the house outside that room," Sobroskin said.
Verikoff shook his head. "No."
"How about conventional intruder alarms around the grounds?" Pacey inquired. "Is the place equipped with anything like that? Would it be possible to get in over the walls and fences without being detected?"
"It’s extensively wired," Verikoff replied. His expression became alarmed as he realized the implication of the questions. "Detection would be certain."
"Is the place watched from orbit by Jevlenese surveillance?" Hunt asked. "Could it be assaulted without it being reported?"
"As far as I know it is checked periodically, but not continuously."
"How frequently?"
"I don’t know."
"How about Sverenssen’s domestic staff?" Lyn asked. "Are they Jevlenese too, or just help that he hires locally? How much do they know?"
"Specially picked Jevlenese guards-all of them."
"How many?" Sobroskin demanded. "Are they armed? What armaments do they have?"
"Ten of them. There are always at least six in the house. They are armed at all times. Conventional Terran firearms."
Packard looked over at the others. One by one they returned slow nods. "It looks as if we could be in with a chance," he said. "It’s time to bring in the professionals and see what they think."
Verikoff suddenly seemed apprehensive. "What is this talk of an assault?" he asked. "You are going in there?"
"We are going in there," Sobroskin told him.
Verikoff started to protest but stopped when he saw the menace in Sobroskin’s eyes. He licked his lips and nodded. "What do you want me to do?" he asked.
An hour later a VTOL personnel carrier flew the whole party across the Potomac to the army base at Fort Myer. They were met by a Colonel Shearer, who commanded a Special Forces antiterrorist unit that had already been called to alert and was standing by. The planning and briefing session that followed went on until the early hours of the morning. The first gray light of dawn was showing in the east as an Air Force transport took off from Fort Myer and followed the coast toward New England. It landed with a whisper less than thirty minutes later at an out-of-the-way military supply depot situated among wooded hills twenty miles or so outside Stamford, Connecticut.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Jevlenese were still tapping into Earth’s communications net. Earth knew they were, and the Jevlenese knew that Earth knew. Therefore, Caldwell reasoned, the Jevlenese would expect any high-level communications between Earth’s governments, especially anything to do with an impending attack on Jevlen, to be encoded by methods that were generally thought to be unbreakable; anything else would not look authentic. But if the codes were indeed unbreakable, little purpose would be served by planting authentically encoded information in JEVEX since JEVEX wouldn’t be able to unravel what it said.
At Caldwell’s request the scientists at McClusky beamed details of the coding algorithms currently used for high-security terrestrial communications through to the perceptron. VISAR studied them and announced that JEVEX would have no problem. The scientists were skeptical. As a test VISAR invited them to compose an encoded message and send it over the beam, which they did. VISAR returned the plaintext translation less than a minute later. The stunned scientists decided that they still had a lot to learn about algorithms. But the implication was satisfactory: JEVEX could be led plausibly to believe that it was eavesdropping on Earth’s highest-level secure communications.
Since then VISAR had been busy manufacturing a revised history of the last few decades on Earth in which the superpowers had not disarmed but gone on to escalate their strategic forces to insane levels of overkill capability, concluding with an account of Earth’s leaders meeting secretly and agreeing to a hasty alliance to hurl their combined strength at Jevlen with the Thuriens transporting the force to within striking distance. Its latest creation, being previewed in the Government Center in Thurios, showed a conference hookup in which some of the senior officers engaged in the joint planning of the operation were delivering a preliminary briefing to their staffs. A General Gearvey, whom VISAR had already appointed as the American Supreme Commander, began speaking.