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.
“Fuck,” Nomuri breathed on seeing the size of the download. In pictures this could be the porno shots of damned 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—Japanese 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 password, 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 patsbakery@brownienet.com. 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 space.
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 establishing 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 bitch,” the DDO breathed, and lifted her phone. She pressed a button, 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 Japanese 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 ass down to The Farm and pass 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