asked, scanning the message again for any sordid details, but finding only cold facts, as though The Wall Street Journal had covered the seduction. Well, at least Nomuri had a little discretion. No rigid quivering rod plunging into her warm moist sheath—though Nomuri was twenty-nine, and at that age the rod tended to be pretty rigid. Chet was from California, wasn’t he? the DCI wondered. So, probably not a virgin, maybe even a competent lover, though on the first time with anybody you mainly wanted to see if the pieces fit together properly—they always did, at least in Ed Foley’s experience, but you still wanted to check and see. He remembered Robin Williams’s takeoff on Adam and Eve, “Better stand back, honey. I don’t know how big this thing gets!” The combination of careful conservatism and out-of-control wishful thinking common to the male of the species. “Okay, so, what are you going to reply? ‘How many orgasms did the two of you have’?”
“God damn it, Ed!” The pin in the balloon worked, the DCI saw. He could almost see steam coming out of his wife’s pretty ears. “You know damned well what I’m going to suggest. Let the relationship blossom and ease her into talking about her job. It’ll take a while, but if it works it’ll be worth the wait.”
And if it doesn’t work, it’s not a bad deal for Chester, Ed Foley thought. There weren’t many professions in the world in which getting sex was part of the job that earned you promotions, were there?
“Mary?”
“Yes, Ed?”
“Does it strike you as a little odd that the kid’s reporting his sex life to us? Does it make you blush a little?”
“It would if he were telling me face-to-face. The e-mail method is best for this, I think. Less human content.”
“You’re happy with the security of the information transfer?”
“Yeah, we’ve been through this. The message could just be sensitive business information, and the encryption system is very robust. The boys and girls at Fort Meade can break it, but it’s brute force every time, and it takes up to a week, even after they make the right guesses on how the encryption system works. The PRC guys would have to go from scratch. The trapdoor in the ISP was very cleverly designed, and the way we tap into it should also be secure—and even then, just because an embassy phone taps into an ISP doesn’t mean anything. We have a consular official downloading pornography from a local Web site through that ISP as another cover, in case anybody over there gets real clever.” That had been carefully thought through. It would be something that one would wish to be covert, something the counterintelligence agency in Beijing would find both understandable and entertaining in its own right, if and when they cracked into it.
“Anything good?” Ed Foley asked, again, just to bedevil his wife.
“Not unless you’re into child abuse. Some of the subjects for this site are too young to vote. If you downloaded it over here, the FBI might come knocking on your door.”
“Capitalism really has broken out over there, eh?”
“Some of the senior Party officials seem to like this sort of thing. I guess when you’re pushing eighty, you need something special to help jump-start the motor.” Mary Pat had seen some of the photographs, and once had been plenty. She was a mother, and all of those photographic subjects had been infants once, strange though that might seem to a subscriber to that Web site. The abusers of girls must have thought that they all sprang into life with their legs spread and a welcoming look in their doll-child faces. Not quite, the DDO thought, but her job wasn’t to be a clergyman. Sometimes you had to do business with such perverts, because they had information which her country needed. If you were lucky, and the information was really useful, then you often arranged for them to defect, to live in the United States, where they could live and enjoy their perversions to some greater or lesser degree, after being briefed on the law, and the consequences of breaking it. Afterward there was always a bathroom and soap to wash your hands. It was a need of which she’d availed herself more than once. One of the problems with espionage was that you didn’t always do business with the sort of people whom you’d willingly invite into your home. But it wasn’t about Miss Manners. It was about getting