this time she smiled, a for-real smile that made him blush, because he was as ready as he needed to be, and then her hands pushed down on the briefs, and all that left was his socks, and then it was his turn to kneel and pull down on the red silklike panties. She kicked them loose and each stood apart to inspect the other. Her breasts were about a large B, Nomuri thought, the nipples brown as potting soil. Her waist was not nearly model-thin, but a womanly contrast with both the hips and upper body. Nomuri took a step and then took her hand and walked her to the bed, laying her down with a gentle kiss, and for this moment he was not an intelligence officer for his country.
CHAPTER 10
Lessons of the Trade
The pathway started in Nomuri’s apartment, and from there went to a Web site established in Beijing, notionally for Nippon Electric Company, but the site had been designed for NEC by an American citizen who worked for more than one boss, one of whom was a front operated by and for the Central Intelligence Agency. The precise address point for Nomuri’s e-mail was then accessible to the CIA’s Beijing station chief, who, as a matter of fact, didn’t know anything about Nomuri. That was a security measure to which he would probably have objected, but which he would have understood as a characteristic of Mary Patricia Foley’s way of running the Directorate of Operations—and besides which, Station Beijing hadn’t exactly covered itself with glory in recruiting senior PRC officials to be American agents-in-place.
The message the station chief downloaded was just gibberish to him, scrambled letters that might as easily have been typed by a chimpanzee in return for a bunch of bananas at some research university, and he took no note of it, just super-encrypting on his own in-house system called TAPDANCE and cross-loading it to an official government communications network that went to a communications satellite, to be downloaded at Sunnyvale, California, then uploaded yet again, and downloaded at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. From there the message went by secure fiber-optic landline to CIA headquarters at Langley, and then first of all into Mercury, the Agency’s communications center, where the Station Beijing super-encryption was stripped away, revealing the original gibberish, and then cross-loaded one last time to Mrs. Foley’s personal computer terminal, which was the only one with the encryption system and daily key-selection algorithm for the counterpart system on Chet Nomuri’s laptop, which was called INTERCRYPT. MP was doing other things at the time, and took twenty minutes to log into her own system and note the arrival of a SORGE message. That piqued her interest at once. She executed the command to decrypt the message, and got gibberish, then realized (not for the first time) that Nomuri was on the other side of the date line, and had therefore used a different key sequence. So, adjust the date for tomorrow... and, yes! She printed a hard copy of the message for her husband, and then saved the message to her personal hard drive, automatically encrypting it along the way. From there, it was a short walk to Ed’s office.
“Hey, baby,” the DCI said, without looking up. Not too many people walked into his office without announcement. The news had to be good. MP had a beaming smile as she handed the paper over.
“Chet got laid last night!” the DDO told the DCI.
“Am I supposed to break out a cigar?” the Director of Central Intelligence asked. His eyes scanned the message.
“Well, it’s a step forward.”
“For him, maybe,” Ed Foley responded with a twinkling eye. “I suppose you can get pretty horny on that sort of assignment, though I never had that problem myself.” The Foleys had always worked the field as a married couple, and had gone through The Farm together. It had saved the senior Foley from all the complications that James Bond must have encountered.
“Eddie, you can be such a mudge!”
That made the DCI look up. “Such a what?”
“Curmudgeon!” she growled. “This could be a real breakthrough. This little chippy is personal secretary to Fang Gan. She knows all sorts of stuff we want to know.”
“And Chet got to try her out last night. Honey, that’s not the same thing as recruitment. We don’t have an agent-in-place quite yet,” he reminded his wife.
“I know, I know, but I have a feeling about this.”
“Woman’s intuition?” Ed