"Clark is a name known to us. He has met personally with Sergey Nikolay'ch," the desk officer told the rezident. "He's a senior field officer, principally a paramilitary type, but also an instructor at the CIA Academy in Virginia. He is known to be close to Mary Patricia Foleyeva and her husband. It is also said that he has the ear of the American President. Yes, I think we would be interested in his current activities."
The phone they spoke over was the Russian version of the American STU-3, the technology having been stolen about three years before by a team working for Directorate T of the First Chief Directorate. The internal microchips, which had been slavishly copied, scrambled the incoming and outgoing signals with a 128-bit encryption system whose key changed every hour, and changed further with the individual users whose personal codes were part of the insertable plastic keys they used. The STU system had defied the Russians' best efforts to crack it, even with exact knowledge of the internal workings of the system hardware, and they assumed that the Americans had the same problems - after all, for centuries Russia had produced the world's best mathematicians, and the best of them hadn't even come up with a theoretical model for cracking the scrambling system.
But the Americans had, with the revolutionary application of quantum theory to communications security, a decryption system so complex that only a handful of the "Directorate 2" people at the National Security Agency actually understood it. But they didn't have to. They had the world's most powerful supercomputers to do the real work. These were located in the basement of the sprawling NSA headquarters building, a dungeon like area whose roof was held up with naked steel I-beams because it had been excavated for just this purpose. The star machine there was one made by a company gone bankrupt, the Super-Connector from Thinking Machines, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The machine, custom-built for NSA, had sat largely unused for six years, because nobody had come up with a way to program it efficiently, but the advent of quantum theory had changed that, too, and the monster machine was now cranking merrily away while its operators wondered who they could find to make the next generation of this complex machine.
All manner of signals came into Fort Meade, from all over the world, and one such source included GCHQ, Britain's General Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, NSA's sister service in England. The British knew what phones were whose in the Russian Embassy-they hadn't changed the numbers, even with the demise of the USSR-and this one was on the desk of the rezident. The sound quality wasn't good enough for a voice-print, since the Russian version of the STU system digitized signals less efficiently than the American version, but once the encryption was defeated, the words were easily recognizable. The decrypted signal was cross-loaded to yet another computer, which translated the Russian conversation to English with a fair degree of reliability. Since the signal was from the London rezident to Moscow, it was placed on the top of the electronic pile, and cracked, translated, and printed less than an hour after it had been made. That done, it was transmitted to Cheltenham immediately, and at Fort Meade routed to a signals officer whose job it was to send intercepts to the people interested in the content. In this case, it was routed straight to the Director of Central Intelligence and, because it evidently discussed the identity of a field spook, to the Deputy Director (Operations), since all the field spooks worked for her. The former was a busier person than the latter, but that didn't matter, since the latter was married to the former.
"Ed?" his wife's voice said.
"Yeah, honey?" Foley replied. "Somebody's trying to ID John Clark over in U.K."
Ed Foley's eyes went fully open at that news. "Really? Who?"
"The station chief in London talked with his desk officer in Moscow, and we intercepted it. The message ought to be in your IN pile, Eddie."
"Okay." Foley lifted the pile and leafed through it. "Got it. Hmmm," he said over the phone. "The guy who wants the information, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov, former Colonel in a terrorism guy, eh? I thought they were all RIF'd… Okay, they were, at least he was."
"Yeah, Eddie, a terrorism guy is interested in Rainbow Six. Isn't that interesting?"
"I'd say so. Get this out to John?"
"Bet your sweet little tushie," the DO replied at once.
"Anything on Popov?"
"I ran the name through the computer. Zip," his wife responded. "I'm starting a new file on the name. Maybe the Brits have something."
"Want me to call Basil about it?" the DCI asked.
"Let's see what we develop first. Get the fax off to John right away, though."
"It'll go out soon as I get the cover note done," Mary Pat Foley promised.
"Hockey game tonight." The Washington Capitals were closing in on the playoffs, and tonight was a grudge match with the Flyers.
"I haven't forgotten. Later, honey-bunny."
"Bill," John said over the office phone forty minutes later. "You want to come into my office?"
"On the way, John." He walked through the door in about two minutes. "What's the news?"
"Check this out, pal." Clark handed over the four pages of transcript.
"Bloody hell," the intelligence officer said, as soon as he got to page two. "Popov, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich. Doesn't ring a bell-oh, I see, they don't know the name at Langley either. Well, one cannot know them all. Call Century House about it?"
"I think we cross-index our files with yours, but it can't hurt. It would appear that Ding was right on this one. How much you want to bet that this is our guy? Who's your best friend in the Security Service?"
"Cyril Holt," Tawney said at once. Deputy Director. I've known Cyril back to Rugby. He was a year behind me there. Outstanding chap." He didn't have to explain to Clark that old school ties were still a major part of British culture.
"Want to get him into this?"
"Bloody right, John."
"Okay, let's make the call. If we decide to go public, I want us to make the decision, not the fucking Russians."
"They know your name, then?"
"More than that. I've met Chairman Golovko. He's the guy who got Ding and me into Tehran last year. I've run a couple of cooperative operations with 'em, Bill. They know everything down to my dick size."
Tawney didn't react. He was learning how Americans talked. and it was often very entertaining. "You know, John, we ought not to get too excited about this information."
"Bill, you've been in the field as much as I have, maybe a little more. If this doesn't make your nose twitch, get something to clean your sinuses out, will you?" Clark paused for a second. "We got somebody who knows me by name, and is hinting that he can tell the Russians what I'm doing now. He's gotta know, man. He picked the London rezident to tell, not the one in Caracas. A terrorism guy, maybe a guy who knows names and numbers, and we've had three incidents since we got here, and we've agreed that's a lot for so short a time, and now this guy comes up on the scope, asking about me. Bill, I think it's time to get a little excited, okay?"
"Quite so, John. I'll get Cyril on the phone." Tawney left the room.
"Fuck," John breathed, when the door closed. That was the problem with black operations. Sooner or later, some bastard flipped the light switch, and it was generally somebody you didn't even want in the room. How the hell has this one leaked? His face darkened as he looked down at his desk, acquiring an expression that those who knew it considered very dangerous indeed.
"Shit," Director Murray said at his desk in FBI Headquarters.
"Yeah, Dan, that about covers it," Ed Foley agreed from his seventh-floor office in Langley. "How the hell did this leak?"
"Beats the hell out of me, man. You have anything on this Popov that I don't know about?"