bidders had been guaranteed. But the other bidders must be the other major intelligence agencies locked in battle with the Americans. Who else would want what CHIBI was selling?
YES OR NO?
“Yes. I will send a representative to London on the date specified.”
INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW.
CHIBI disappeared from the screen. Another digital jinn in the wilderness of the Dark Web.
A quick, cold look from Mohammadi’s blinded eye sent the tech scurrying out of the air-conditioned room. The intelligence chief sat alone in the underground bunker, surrounded by the hum of a dozen large-screen monitors, rubbing his stump and thinking.
CHIBI was a genius. A single, silent bid in an anonymous auction would guarantee maximum profit. If CHIBI offered the same quality “free sample” to the others as had been offered to him, they would all be champing at the bit—and bidding high.
Time to meet with the Supreme Leader. He stood, brushing away the wrinkles in his clerical robe.
With the economy in shambles, it would take some effort to gather the vast sum he had in mind.
Priceless didn’t come cheap.
Inshallah.
5
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
NSA HEADQUARTERS
Dead rats. Sometimes pigeons. But dead, desiccated rats were better. We slathered them with hot sauce to keep the feral cats away and stuffed film rolls or transposition ciphers in them for dead drops. That was how we did it in Moscow back in the day.”
So said Director of National Intelligence Mary Pat Foley, sitting at the head of a large mahogany table in the fourth-floor conference room. Her husband, Ed Foley, had been the youngest CIA Moscow chief of station ever. They served together. Brought and raised their kids over there. It was the late eighties. It was the Cold War.
It was a long time ago.
Mary Pat glanced around the room. Polite smiles, mostly. Indulging the boss, no doubt.
The faces were all so young. Forties, mostly, a few even younger. On either side of her sat the security department head or their representative from each of the sixteen agencies that comprised the Intelligence Community (IC) Cloud, as well as the rep from her own office, the ODNI. The room’s glass walls were electronically shaded from the dozens of NSA analysts at their workstations on the floor beyond. Total security all around.
She used to be the youngest person in every room. More often these days, she was the oldest.
When did that happen? she thought.
One fleeting day at a time.
The youngest face in the room sat directly opposite her on the far end of the table. Amanda Watson was also the most attractive. Blond and athletically built, the thirty-three-year-old computer savant looked more like a Fox News anchor than CloudServe’s senior design engineer and principal architect of the IC Cloud. Watson was also in charge of IC Cloud security and personally ran the Red Team hacking group that routinely assaulted the IC Cloud, searching for any hardware or software weak spots to exploit. Who better to do this than the woman who had designed the world’s first “unhackable” cloud network?
“Rats? Sounds kinda gross,” Watson said, flashing a perfectly engineered smile. “But I’m guessing it worked.”
“Like a charm.”
Foley scanned the room again. She was trying to find a way to make her point. The average technical IQ around the table was several orders of magnitude beyond hers, especially Watson’s. Who was she to challenge these brainiacs?
The decision to put all IC intelligence onto a single “cloud”—really, just racks and racks of servers in a secured data-storage facility—was made by people smarter than she was and who assured both her and President Ryan that this was the future of intelligence processing, sharing, and security. No more firewalls or turf wars that prevented one federal agency from knowing vital information that another agency had. No more missed opportunities. No more FUBARs. Everything the IC departments did—ELINT, HUMINT, and SIGINT—was uploaded to the cloud. Everyone had access. Everyone would be on the same page. It was exponentially more efficient for information sharing among all IC agencies and organizations, rendered enormous cost savings, and increased computer security by reducing the number and complexity of machines and access nodes.
On paper, it was a brilliant idea.
And all of it more secure than ever before. Or so they said. As one of her aides explained to her, instead of having a bunch of little banks scattered all over the country, where every local bank robber had a chance to break into any one of them, now you had a giant Fort Knox where all the money was kept.
And nobody could break