The Iridium system was designed to speed communications worldwide. It was not, however, designed to be a secure system. There were ways to do that, but they all required the individual users to make their security arrangements. It was now theoretically possible to get commercially available 128-bit encryption systems, and these were extremely difficult to break even by the most sophisticated of nation-states and their black services … or so the salesmen said. But the remarkable thing was that few people bothered. Their laziness made life a lot easier for the National Security Agency, located between Baltimore and Washington at Fort Meade, Maryland. There, a computer system called ECHELON was programmed to listen in on every conversation that crossed the ether, and to lock in on certain codewords. Most of those words were nouns with national-security implications, but since the end of the Cold War, NSA and other agencies had paid more attention to economic matters, and so some of the new words were “oil,” “deposit,” “crude,” “mine,” “gold,” and others, all in thirty-eight languages. When such a word crossed ECHELON’S electronic ear, the continuing conversation was recorded onto electronic media and transcribed and, where necessary, translated-all by computer. It was by no means a perfect system, and the nuances of language were still difficult for a computer program to unravel-not to mention the tendency of many people to mutter into the phone-but where a goof occurred, the original conversation would be reviewed by a linguist, of which the National Security Agency employed quite a few.
The parallel reports of the oil and gold strikes came in only five hours apart, and made their way swiftly up the chain of command, ending in a “flash” priority Special National Intelligence Estimate (called a SNIE, and pronounced “snee”) destined for the President’s desk right after his next breakfast, to be delivered by his National Security Adviser, Dr. Benjamin Goodley. Before that, the data would be examined by a team from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology, with a big assist from experts on the payroll of the Petroleum Institute in Washington, some of whose members had long enjoyed a cordial relationship with various government agencies. The preliminary evaluation-carefully announced and presented as such, preliminary, lest someone be charged for being wrong if the estimate proved to be incorrect someday-used a few carefully chosen superlatives.
Damn,” the President observed at 8:10 EST. ”Okay, Ben, how big are they really?”
“You don’t trust our technical weenies?” the National Security Advisor asked.
“Ben, as long as I worked on the other side of the river, I never once caught them wrong on something like this, but damned if I didn’t catch them underestimating stuff.” Ryan paused for a moment. “But, Jesus, if these are lowball numbers, the implications are pretty big.”
“Mr. President”-Goodley was not part of Ryan’s inner circle-“we’re talking billions, exactly how many nobody knows, but call it two hundred billion dollars in hard currency earnings over the next five to seven years at minimum. That’s money they can use.”
“And at maximum?”
Goodley leaned back for a second and took a breath. “I had to check. A trillion is a thousand billion. On the sunny side of that number. This is pure speculation, but the guys at the Petroleum Institute that CIA uses, the guys across the river tell me, spent most of their time saying ‘Holy shit!’ ”
“Good news for the Russians,” Jack said, flipping through the printed SNIE.
“Indeed it is, sir.”
“About time they got lucky,” POTUS thought aloud. “Okay, get a copy of this to George Winston. We want his evaluation of what this will mean to our friends in Moscow.”
“I was planning to call some people at Atlantic Richfield. They were in on the exploration. I imagine they’ll share in the proceeds. Their president is a guy named Sam Sherman. Know him?”
Ryan shook his head. “I know the name, but we’ve never met. Think I ought to change that?”
“If you want hard information, it can’t hurt.”
Ryan nodded. “Okay, maybe I’ll have Ellen track him down.” Ellen Sumter, his personal secretary, was located fifteen feet away through the sculpted door to his right. “What else?”
“They’re still beating bushes for the people who blew up the pimp in Moscow. Nothing new to report on that, though.”
“Would be nice to know what’s going on in the world, wouldn’t it?”
“Could be worse, sir,” Goodley told his boss.
“Right.” Ryan tossed the paper copy of the morning brief on his desk. “What else?”
Goodley shook his head. “And that’s the way it is this morning, Mr. President.” Goodley got a smile for that.
CHAPTER 4 Knob Rattling
It didn’t matter what city or country you were in, Mike Reilly told himself. Police work was all the same. You talked to possible witnesses, you talked to the people involved, you talked to the victim.
But not the victim this time. Grisha Avseyenko would never speak again. The pathologist assigned to the case commented that he hadn’t seen such a mess since his uniformed service in Afghanistan. But that was to be expected. The RPG was designed to punch holes in armored vehicles and concrete bunkers, which was a more difficult task than destroying a private-passenger automobile, even one so expensive as that stopped in Dzerzhinskiy Square. That meant that the body parts were very difficult to identify. It turned out that half the jaw had enough repaired teeth to say with great certainty that the decedent had indeed been Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko, and DNA samples would ultimately confirm this (the blood type also matched). There hadn’t been enough of his body to identify-the face, for example, had been totally removed, and so had the left forearm, which had once borne a tattoo. The decedent’s death had come instantaneously, the pathologist reported, after the processed remains had been packed into a plastic container, which in turn found its way into an oaken box for later cremation, probably-the Moscow Militia had to ascertain whether any family members existed, and what disposition for the body they might wish. Lieutenant Provalov assumed that cremation would be the disposal method of choice. It was, in its way, quick and clean, and it was easier and less expensive to find a resting place for a small box or urn than for a full-sized coffin with a cadaver in it.
Provalov took the pathology report back from his American colleague. He hadn’t expected it to reveal anything of interest, but one of the things he’d learned from his association with the American FBI was that you checked everything thoroughly, since predicting how a criminal case would break was like trying to pick a ten-play football pool two weeks before the games were played. The human minds who committed crimes were simply too random in their operation for any sort of prediction.
And that had been the easy part. The pathology report on the driver had essentially been useless. The only data in it of any use at all had been blood and tissue types (which could be checked with his military-service records, if they could be located), since the body had been so thoroughly shredded as to leave not a single identifying mark or characteristic, though, perversely, his identity papers had survived in his wallet, and so, they probably knew who he had been. The same was true of the woman in the car, whose purse had survived virtually intact on the seat to the right of her, along with her ID papers … which was a lot more than could be said for her face and upper torso. Reilly looked at the photos of the other victims-well, one presumed they matched up, he told himself. The driver was grossly ordinary, perhaps a little fitter than was the average here. The woman, yet another of the pimp’s high-priced hookers with a photo in her police file, had been a dish, worthy of a Hollywood screen test, and certainly pretty enough for a Playboy centerfold. Well, no more.