at Fort Meade who put the Ghost programs together?”
“They contracted a game place—a guy at a game company, I guess,” Mrs. Foley corrected herself. “They paid him four hundred fifty big ones for the job.” Which was more than the Director of Central Intelligence and the Deputy Director (Operations) made together, what with the federal pay caps, which didn’t allow any federal employee to make more than a member of Congress—and they feared raising their own salaries, lest they offend the voters.
“Call me when you have it downloaded, baby.”
“Who’s the best guy we have for China?”
“Joshua Sears, Ph.D., from U-Cal Berkley, runs the China desk in the DI. But the guy at NSA is better for linguistic nuances, they say. His name’s Victor Wang,” the DCI said.
“Can we trust him?” MP asked. Distrust of ethnic Chinese in the American national-security apparatus had reached a considerable level.
“Shit, I don’t know. You know, we have to trust somebody, and Wang’s been on the box twice a year for the last eight years. The ChiComms can’t compromise every Chinese-American we have, you know. This Wang guy’s third-generation American, was an officer in the Air Force—ELINT guy, evidently worked out of Wright-Patterson—and just made super-grade at NSA. Tom Porter says he’s very good.”
“Okay, well, let me see what all this is, then we’ll have Sears check it out, and then, maybe, if we have to, we’ll talk to this Wang guy. Remember, Eddie, at the end of this is an officer named Nomuri and a foreign national who has two eyes—”
Her husband cut her off with a wave. “And two ears. Yeah, baby, I know. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. And we both have the T-shirts to prove it.” And he was about as likely to forget that as his wife was. Keeping your agents alive was as important to an intelligence agency as capital preservation was to an investor.
Mary Pat ignored her computer for twenty minutes, and instead went over routine message traffic hand-carried up from MERCURY down in the basement of the Old Headquarters Building. That was not especially easy, but necessary nonetheless, because CIA’s Clandestine Service was running agents and operations all over the world—or trying to, Mary Pat corrected herself. It was her job to rebuild the Directorate of Operations, to restore the human-intelligence—HUMINT—capability largely destroyed in the late 1970s, and only slowly being rebuilt. That was no small task, even for an expert in the field. But Chester Nomuri was one of her pets. She’d spotted him at The Farm some years before and seen in him the talent, the gift, and the motivation. For him espionage was as much a vocation as the priesthood, something important to his country, and fun, as much fun as dropping a fifty-footer at Augusta was for Jack Nicklaus. Toss in his brains and street sense, and, Mary Pat had thought at the time, she had a winner there. Now Nomuri was evidently living up to her expectations. Big time. For the first time, CIA had an agent-in-place inside the ChiComm Politburo, and that was about as good as it got. Perhaps even the Russians didn’t have one of those, though you could never be sure, and you could lose a lot of money betting against the Russian intelligence services.
“File’s done,” the computer’s electronic voice finally said. That occasioned a turn in her swivel chair. The DDO first of all backed up her newly downloaded file to a second hard drive, and then to a “toaster” disk, so called because the disk went in and out of the drive box like a slice of bread. With that done, she typed in her decryption code, 51240. She had no idea why Nomuri had specified that number, but knowing was not necessary, just so long as nobody else knew either. After typing in the five digits and hitting RETURN, the file icons changed. They were already aligned in list form, and MP selected the oldest. A page full of Chinese ideographs came up. With that bit of information, MP lifted her office phone and punched the button for her secretary. “Dr. Joshua Sears, DI, Chinese Section. Please ask him to come see me right away.”
That took six endless minutes. It took rather a lot to make Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley shiver, but this was one such occasion. The image on her screen looked like something one might get from inking the feet of several drunken roosters, then making them loiter on a piece of