Ron Friday was a very late addition to the mission. His participation had been requested over the weekend by Satya Shankar, minister of state, Department of Atomic Energy. Officially, one of Shankar's duties was the sale of nuclear technology to developing nations. Unofficially, he was responsible for helping the military keep track of nuclear technology within enemy states. Shankar and Friday had worked together once before, when Shankar was joint secretary, Exploration, of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Friday had been called in by a European oil concern to assess legal issues involving drilling in disputed territory between Great Indian Desert in the Rajasthan Province of India and the Thar Desert in Pakistan. Shankar had obviously been impressed by the attorney.
Since Op-Center was stuck with Friday, reading his file had not been a high priority for Herbert. Especially since the CIOC had already okayed Friday based on his Blue Shield rating. That meant Ron Friday was cleared to take part in the most sensitive fieldwork in foreign countries. Red Shield meant that an agent was trusted by the foreign government. White Shield meant that he was trusted by his own government, that there was no evidence of double-agent activity. Yellow Shield meant that he had been revealed to be a double agent and was being used by his government to put out disinformation, often without his knowledge or occasionally with his cooperation in exchange for clemency. Blue Shield meant he was trusted by both nations.
What the Red, White, and Blue rankings really meant was that no data had ever come up to suggest the agent was corrupt. That was usually good enough for a project overseer to rubber-stamp an individual for a mission. Especially an overseer who was new on the job and overworked, like Hank Lewis at the National Security Agency. But the Shield system was not infallible. It could simply mean that the agent had been too careful to be caught. Or that he had someone on the inside who kept his file clean.
Friday's file was extremely skimpy. It contained very few field reports from Azerbaijan, where he had most recently been stationed at the United States embassy in Baku as an aide to Deputy Ambassador Dorothy Williamson. There were zero communications at all from him during the recent crisis in the former Soviet Republic. That was unusual. Herbert had a look at the files of the two CIA operatives who had been stationed at the embassy. They were full of daily reports. Coincidentally, perhaps, both of those men were killed.
Friday's thin file and his apparent silence during the crisis was troubling. One of his superiors at the NSA, Jack Fenwick, was the man who had hired the terrorist known as the Harpooner to precipitate the Caspian Sea confrontation between Azerbaijan, Iran, and Russia. Herbert had not read all the postmortems about the situation. There had not been time. But Friday's silence before and during the showdown led Herbert to wonder: was he really inactive or were his reports made directly to someone who destroyed them?
Jack Fenwick, for example.
If that were true it could mean that Ron Friday had been working with Jack Fenwick and the Harpooner to start a war. Of course, there was always the possibility that Friday had been helping Fenwick without knowing what the NSA chief was up to. But that seemed unlikely. Ron Friday had been an attorney, a top-level oil rights negotiator, and a diplomatic advisor. He did not seem naive. And that scared the hell out of Herbert.
The decrypted NSA e-file arrived and Herbert opened it. The folder contained Friday's observations as well as relevant data about the previous antiterrorist functions of both the National Security Guard and the Special Frontier Force. It did not seem strange to Herbert that SFF had replaced the Black Cats after this latest attack. Maybe the SFF had jurisdiction over strikes against religious sites. Or maybe the government had grown impatient with the ineffectiveness of the Black Cats. There was obviously a terrorist cell roaming Kashmir. Any security agency that failed to maintain security was not going to have that job for very long.
Either he or Paul Hood could call their partners in Indian intelligence and get an explanation for the change. Herbert's concerns about Ron Friday would not be so easy to dispel.
Herbert entered the numbers 008 on his wheelchair phone. That was Paul Hood's extension. Shortly before Op-Center opened its doors Matt Stoll had hacked the computer system to make sure he got the 007 extension. Herbert had not been happy about Stoll's hacking but Hood had appreciated the man's initiative. As long as Stoll limited his internal sabotage to a one-time hack of the phone directory Hood had decided to overlook it.
The phone beeped once. "Hood here."
"Chief, it's Bob. Got a minute?"
"Sure," Hood said.
"I'll be right there," Herbert said. He typed an address in his computer and hit "enter." "Meanwhile, I'd like you to have a quick look at the e-files I'm sending over. One's a report from the NSA about this morning's attack in Srinagar. Another is Ron Friday's very thin dossier."
"All right," Hood said.
Herbert hung up and wheeled himself down the corridor to Hood's office. As Herbert was en route he got a call from Matt Stoll.
"Make it quick," Herbert said.
"I was just reviewing the latest number grabs from the Bellhop," Stoll told him. "That telephone number we've been watching, the field phone in Srinagar? It's making very strange calls."
"What do you mean?" Herbert said.
"The field phone keeps calling the home phone in Jammu, the police station," Stoll said. "But the calls last for only one second."
"That's it?"
"That's it," Stoll told him. "We read a connect, a one-second gap, then a disconnect."
"Is it happening regularly?" Herbert asked.
"There's been a blip every minute since four P.M. local time, six thirty A.M. our time," Stoll told him.
"That's over four hours," Herbert said. "Short, regular pulses over a long period. Sounds like a tracking beacon."
"It could be that," Stoll agreed, "or it could mean that someone hit the autoredial button by accident. Voice mail answers nonemergency calls at the police station. The field phone may have been programmed to read that as a disconnect so it hangs up and rings the number again."
"That doesn't sound likely," Herbert said. "Is there any way to tell if the field phone is moving?"
"Not directly," Stoll said.
"What about indirectly?" Herbert asked as he reached Paul Hood's office. The door was open and he knocked on the jamb. Hood was studying his computer monitor. He motioned Herbert in.
"If the phone calls are a beacon, then the police in Kashmir are almost certainly following them, probably by ground-based triangulation," Stoll told Herbert. "All of that would be run through their computers. It will take some time but we can try breaking into the system."
"Do it," Herbert said.
"Sure," Stoll said. "But why don't we just call over and ask them what's going on? Aren't they our allies? Aren't we supposed to be running this operation with them?"
"Yes," Herbert replied. "But if there's some way we can accomplish this without them knowing I'd be happier. The police are going to want to know why we're asking. The Black Cats and selected government officials are the only ones who are supposed to know that Striker is coming over."
"I see," Stoll said. "Okay. We'll try hacking them."
"Thanks," Herbert said and hung up as he wheeled into Hood's office. He locked his brakes and shut the door behind him.
"Busy morning?" Hood asked.
"Not until some lunatic decided to set off fireworks in Srinagar," Herbert replied.
Hood nodded. "I haven't finished these files," he said, "but Ron Friday is obviously concerned about us having anything to do with the Black Cats. And you're apparently worried about having anything to do with Ron Friday."
Paul Hood had not spent a lot of time working in the intelligence community and he had a number of weaknesses. However, one of Hood's greatest strengths was that his years in politics and finance had taught him to intuit the concerns of his associates, whatever the topic.