It was a bomb.
At least a self-destruct device. A very powerful one, fifty kilos of high explosive....
Ghosn backed off; a sudden urge to urinate gripped his loins. The engineer fumbled for a smoke and lit it on the third attempt. How had he missed ... what? What had he missed? Nothing. He’d been as careful as he always was. The Israelis hadn’t killed him yet. Their design engineers were clever, but so was he.
Patience, he told himself. He commenced a new examination of the cylinder’s exterior. There was the wire, still attached, from the radar device, and three additional plug points, all of them empty.
What do I know of this thing?
Radar transceiver, heavy case, access hatch... explosive sphere wired with ...
Ghosn leaned forward again to examine the object. At regular and symmetrical intervals on the sphere were detonators ... the wires from them were ...
It isn’t possible. No, it cannot be that!
Ghosn removed the detonators one by one, detaching the wires from each, and setting them down on a blanket, slowly and carefully, for detonators were the most twitchy things man made. The high explosive, on the other hand, was so safe to use that you could pinch off a piece and set it on fire to boil water. He used the knife to pry loose the surprisingly hard blocks.
“There is an ancient legend of Pandora, a woman of mythology given a box. Though told not to open it, she foolishly did so, admitting strife and war and death into our world. Pandora despaired at her deeds until she found, remaining alone in the bottom of the nearly empty box, the spirit of hope. We have seen all too much of war and strife, but now we have finally made use of hope. It has been a long road, a bloody road, a road marked with despair, but it has always been an upward road, because hope is humanity’s collective vision of what can, should, and must be, and hope has led us to this point.
“That ancient legend may have its origin in paganism, but its truth is manifest today. On this day we put war and strife and unnecessary death back into the box. We close the box on conflict, leaving in our possession hope, Pandora’s last and most important gift to all humanity. This day is the fulfillment of the dream of all mankind.
“On this day, we have accepted from the hands of God the gift of peace.
“Thank you.” The President smiled warmly at the cameras and made his way to his chair amid the more-than-polite applause of his peers. It was time to sign the treaty. The moment was here, and after being the last speaker, Fowler would be the first to sign. The moment came quickly, and J. Robert Fowler became a man of history.
He was not going slowly now. He pulled the blocks away, knowing as he did so that he was being reckless and wasteful, but now he knew—thought he knew—what he had in his hands.
And there it was, a ball of metal, a shining nickel-plated sphere, not corroded or damaged by its years in the Druse’s garden, protected by the plastic seal of the Israeli engineers. It was not a large object, not much larger than a ball that a child might play with. Ghosn knew what he would do next. He reached his hand all the way into the sundered mass of explosives, extending his fingers to the gleaming nickel surface.
Ghosn’s fingertips brushed the ball of metal. It was warm to the touch.
“Allahu akhbar!”
9
RESOLVE
“This is interesting.”
“It’s a rather unique opportunity,” Ryan agreed.
“How reliable—how trustworthy?” Cabot asked.
Ryan smiled at his boss. “Sir, that’s always the question. You have to remember how the game works. You’re never sure of anything—that is, what certainty you have generally takes years to acquire. This game only has a few rules, and nobody ever knows what the score is. In any case, this is a lot more than a defection.” His name was Oleg Yurievich Lyalin—Cabot didn’t know that yet—and he was a KGB “Illegal” who operated without the shield of diplomatic immunity and whose cover was that of a representative of a Soviet industrial concern. Lyalin ran a string of agents with the code name of THISTLE, and he was running it in Japan. “This guy is a real field-spook. He’s got a better net going than the KGB Rezident in Tokyo, and his best source is right in the Japanese cabinet.”
“And?”
“And he’s offering us the use of his network.”
“Is this as important as I’m starting to think it is ... ?” the DCI asked his deputy.
“Boss, we rarely get a chance like this. We’ve never really run ops in Japan. We lack a sufficient number of Japanese-speaking people—even here on the inside to translate their documents—and our priorities have always been elsewhere. So just establishing the necessary infrastructure to conduct ops there would take years. But the Russians have been working in Japan since before the Bolsheviks took over. The reason is historical: the Japanese and the Russkies have fought wars for a long time, and they’ve always regarded Japan as a strategic rival—as a result of which they placed great emphasis on operations there even before Japanese technology became so important to them. What he is doing is essentially giving us the Russian business at a bargain price, the inventory, the accounts receivables, the physical plant, everything. It doesn’t get much better than this.”
“But what he’s asking ...”
“The money? So what? That’s not a thousandth of a percent of what it’s worth to our country,” Jack pointed out.
“It’s a million dollars a month!” Cabot protested. Tax free! the Director of Central Intelligence did not add.
Ryan managed not to laugh. “So the bastard’s greedy, okay? Our trade deficit with Japan is how much at last count?” Jack inquired with a raised eyebrow. “He’s offering us whatever we want for as long as we want it. All we have to do is arrange to pick him up and fly him and his family over whenever it becomes necessary. He doesn’t want to retire to Moscow. He’s forty-five, and that’s the age when they get antsy. He has to rotate home in ten years—to what? He’s lived in Japan almost continuously for thirteen years. He likes affluence. He likes cars, and VCRs, and not standing in line for potatoes. He likes us. About the only people he doesn’t like is the Japanese—he doesn’t like them at all. He figures he’s not even betraying his country, ’cause he’s not giving us anything he isn’t feeding them, and part of the deal is that he does nothing against Mother Russia. Fine, I can live with that.” Ryan chuckled for a moment. “It’s capitalism. The man is starting an elite news service, and it’s information we can really use.”
“He’s charging enough.”
“Sir, it’s worth it. The information he can give us will be worth billions in our trade negotiations, and billions in federal taxes as a result. Director, I used to be in the investment business, that’s how I made my money. Investment opportunities like this come along about once every ten years. The Directorate of Operations wants to run with it. I agree. We’d have to be crazy to say no to this guy. His introductory package—well, you’ve had a chance to read it, right?”
The introductory package was the minutes of the last Japanese cabinet meeting, every word, grunt, and hiss. It was highly valuable for psychological analysis if nothing else. The nature of the exchange in the cabinet meetings could tell American analysts all sorts of things about how their government thought and reached decisions. That was data often inferred but never confirmed.
“It was most enlightening, especially what they said about the President. I didn’t forward that. No sense getting him annoyed at a time like this. Okay—the operation is approved, Jack. How do we run things like this?”
“The code name we’ve selected is MUSHASHI. That’s the name of a famous samurai dueling master, by the way. The operation will be called NIITAKA. We’ll use Japanese names for the obvious reason”—Jack decided to explain; though Cabot was bright, he was new to the intelligence trade—“in the event of compromise or a leak from our side, we want it to appear that our source is Japanese, not Russian. Those names stay in this building. For outsiders who get let into this, we us
e a different code name. That one will be computer-generated and it’ll change on a monthly basis.”
“And the real name of the agent?”
“Director, it’s your choice. You have the right to know it. I deliberately have not told you to this point because I wanted you to see the whole picture first. Historically it’s evenly split, some directors want to know, and about the same number do not. It’s a principle of intelligence operations that the fewer the number of people who know things, the less likely that there will be any sort of leak. Admiral Greer used to say the First Law of Intelligence Operations is that the likelihood of an operation’s being burned was proportional to the square of the people in on the details. Your call, sir.”
Cabot nodded thoughtfully. He decided to temporize. “You liked Greer, didn’t you?”
“Like a father, sir. After I lost Dad in the plane crash, well, the Admiral sort of adopted me.” More like I adopted him, Ryan thought. “On MUSHASHI, you’ll probably want to think it through.”
“And if the White House asks to know the details?” Cabot asked next.
“Director, despite what MUSHASHI thinks, his employers will regard what he is doing as high treason, and that’s a capital crime over there. Narmonov is a good guy and all that, but the Soviets have executed forty people that we know of for espionage. That included TOP HAT, JOURNEYMAN, and a guy named Tolkachev, all of whom were highly productive agents for us. We tried to do a trade in all three cases, but they were popped before negotiations had a chance to get under way. The appeals process in the Soviet Union is still somewhat abbreviated,” Ryan explained. “The simple fact, sir, is that if this guy gets burned, he will probably be shot right in the head. That’s why we take agent-identity so seriously. If we screw up, people die, glasnost notwithstanding. Most presidents understand that. One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“He’s told us something else. He wants all his reports to be handled physically, not by cable. If we don’t agree, he doesn’t do business. Okay, technically that’s no problem. We’ve done that before with agents of this caliber. The nature of his information is such that immediacy is not required. There’s daily air service to and from Japan via United, Northwest, and even All Nippon Airways straight into Dulles International Airport.”
“But ...” Cabot’s face twisted into a grimace.
“Yeah.” Jack nodded. “He doesn’t trust our communications security. That scares me.”
“You don’t think ... ?”
“I don’t know. We’ve had very limited success penetrating Soviet ciphers for the past few years. NSA assumes that they have the same problems with ours. Such assumptions are dangerous. We’ve had indications before that our signals are not fully secure, but this one comes from a very senior guy. I think we have to take this seriously.”
“Just how scary could this be?”
“Terrifying,” Jack answered flatly. “Director, for obvious reasons we have numerous communications systems. We have MERCURY right downstairs to handle all of our stuff. The rest of the government mainly uses stuff from NSA; Walker and Pelton compromised their systems a long time ago. Now, General Olson over at Fort Meade says they’ve fixed all that, but for expense reasons they have not fully adopted the TAPDANCE one-time systems that they’ve been playing with. We can warn NSA again—I think they’ll ignore this warning also, but we have to do it—and on our end, I think it’s time to act. For starters, sir, we need to think about a reexamination of MERCURY.” That was the CIA’s own communications nexus, located a few floors below the Director’s office, and that used its own encrypting systems.
“Expensive,” Cabot noted seriously. “With our budget problems ...
“Not half as expensive as a systematic compromise of our message traffic is. Director, there is nothing as vital as secure communications links. Without that, it doesn’t matter what else we have. Now, we’ve developed our own one-time system. All we need is authorization of funds to make it go.”
“Tell me about it. I haven’t been briefed in.”
“Essentially it’s our own version of the TAPDANCE. It’s a one-time pad with transpositions stored on laser-disk CD-ROM. The transpositions are generated from atmospheric radio noise, then superencrypted with noise from later in the day—atmospheric noise is pretty random, and by using two separate sets of the noise, and using a computer-generated random algorithm to mix the two, well, the mathematicians say that’s as random as it gets. The transpositions are generated by computer and fed onto laser disks in realtime. We use a different disk for every day of the year. Each disk is unique, two copies only, one to the station, one in MERCURY—no back-ups. The laser-disk reader we use at both ends looks normal, but has a beefed-up laser, and as it reads the transposition codes from the disk it also burns them right off the plastic. When the disk is used up, or the day ends—and the day will end first, since we’re talking billions of characters per disk—the disk is destroyed by baking it in a microwave oven. That takes two minutes. It ought to be secure as hell. It can only be compromised at three stages: first, when the disks are manufactured; second, from disk-storage here; third, from disk-storage in each station. Compromise of one station does not compromise anyone else. We can’t make the disks tamperproof—we’ve tried, and it would both cost too much and make them overly vulnerable to accidental damage. The downside of this is that it’ll require us to hire and clear about twenty new communications technicians. The system is relatively cumbersome to use, hence the increased number of communicators. The main expense component is here. The field troops we’ve talked to actually prefer the new system because it’s user-friendly.”
“How much to set it up?”
“Fifty million dollars. We have to increase the size of MERCURY and set up the manufacturing facility. We have the space, but the machinery is expensive. From the time we get the money, we could have it up and running in maybe as little as three months.”
“I see your point. It’s probably worth doing, but getting the money ... ?”
“With your permission, sir, I could talk to Mr. Trent about it.”
“Hmm.” Cabot stared down at his desk. “Okay, feel him out very gently. I’ll bring this up with the President when he gets back. I’ll trust you on MUSHASHI. You and who else know his real name?”
“The DO, Chief of Station Tokyo, and his case officer.” The Director of Operations was Harry Wren, and if he was not quite Cabot’s man, he was the man Cabot had picked for the job. Wren was on his way to Europe at the moment. A year ago Jack had thought the choice a mistake, but Wren was doing well. He’d also picked a superb deputy, actually a pair of them: the famous Ed and Mary Pat Foley, one of whom—Ryan could never decide which—would have been his choice for DO. Ed was the organization man, and Mary Pat was the cowboy side of the best husband-wife team the Agency had ever fielded. Making Mary Pat a senior executive would have been a worldwide first, and probably worth a few votes in Congress. She was pregnant again with her third, but that wasn’t expected to slow Supergirl down. The Agency had its own day-care center, complete to cipher locks on the doors, a heavily armed response team of security officers, and the best play equipment Jack had ever seen.
“Sounds good, Jack. I’m sorry I faxed the President as soon as I did. I ought to have waited.”
“No problem, sir. The information was thoroughly laundered.”
“Let me know what Trent thinks about the funding.”
“Yes, sir.” Jack left for his office. He was getting good at this, the DDCI told himself. Cabot wasn’t all that hard to manage.
Ghosn took his time to think. This was not a time for excitement, not a time for precipitous action. He sat down in the corner of his shop and chain-smoked his cigarettes for several hours, all the time staring at the gleaming metal ball that lay on the dirt floor. How radioactive is it? one part of his brain wondered almost continuously, but it was a little late for that. If that heavy sphere was giving off hard gammas, he was already dead, a
nother part of his brain had already decided. This was a time to think and evaluate. It required a supreme act of will for him to sit still, but he managed it.
For the first time in many years he was ashamed of his education. He had expertise both in electrical and mechanical engineering, but he’d hardly bothered cracking a book about their nuclear equivalent. What possible use could such a thing have had for him? he asked himself on the rare occasions that he’d considered acquiring knowledge in that area. Obviously none. As a result of that, he’d limited himself to broadening and deepening his knowledge in areas of direct interest: mechanical and electronic fusing systems, electronic countermeasure gear, the physical characteristics of explosives, the capabilities of explosive-sensing systems. He was a real expert on this last category of study. He read everything he could find on the instrumentation used in detecting explosives at airports and other areas of interest.
Number One, Ghosn told himself on lighting cigarette number fifty-four of the day, every book I can find on nuclear materials, their physical and chemical properties; bomb technology, bomb physics; radiological signatures ... the Israelis must know the bomb is missing—since 1973! he thought in amazement Then why...? Of course. The Golan Heights are volcanic in origin. The underlying rock and the soil in which those poor farmers tried to raise their vegetables were largely basaltic, and basalt had a relatively high background-radiation count ... the bomb was buried two or three meters in rocky soil, and whatever emissions it gave off were lost in background count....
I’m safe! Ghosn realized.
Of course! If the weapon were that “hot, ” it would have been better shielded! Praise be to Allah for that!