Red Rabbit Part 29

"Michael, you're a good man." Ed nodded his approval.

"They're good for maybe ten dispatches of about a hundred words each-a.s.suming they still have matching pads at Fort Meade, but the guys I report to don't throw much away. They will have to dig them out of some file drawer, though."

"How hard to use them?"

"I hate the G.o.dd.a.m.ned things. You know why. d.a.m.n it, guys, the new STRIPE cipher is just a year old. The new Brit system is an adaptation of it. I know the team in Z-Division who developed it. I'm talking 128-bit keying, plus a daily key that's unique to the individual machines. No way in h.e.l.l you can crack that."

"Unless they have an agent-in-place at Fort Meade, Mike," Ed pointed out.

"Then let me get my hands on him, and I'll skin the motherf.u.c.ker alive with my Buck hunting knife." The very thought had jacked up his blood pressure enough that he didn't apologize to the lady present for his vulgarity. This black man had killed and skinned his share of white-tailed deer, but he still had a hankering to convert a bear into a rug, and a big ol' Russian brown bear would suit him just fine. "Okay, I can't tell The Fort about this?"

"Not with STRIPE you can't," Foley answered.

"Well, when you hear a big, angry shout from the West, you'll know what it is."

"Better you don't discuss this with anybody right now, Mike," Mary Pat thought out loud. "They'll find out soon enough through other channels."

That told Russell that the Rabbit signal he'd dispatched the other day was about somebody they wanted to get out in a hurry, and now he figured he knew why. Their Rabbit was a communications specialist, and d.a.m.ned sure when you got one of those, you got him the h.e.l.l on the first train out of Dodge. Soon enough meant right the h.e.l.l now, or as close to it as you could arrange.

"Okay, get me your signal. I'll encrypt it on my STRIPE machine and then one-time-pad it. If they're reading my signals"-he managed not to shudder-"will that tell them anything?"

"You tell me," Ed Foley replied.

Russell thought for a moment, then shook his head. "No, it shouldn't. Even when you can crack the other guy's systems, you never get more than a third of the traffic. The systems are too complex for that-unless the other guy's agent-in-place is reading the cleartext on the far end. Ain't no defense against that, least not from my point of view."

And that was the other very scary thought. It was, after all, the same game they played and the same objective they were constantly trying to achieve. Get a guy all the way inside who could get the all-the-way-inside information back out. Like their agent CARDINAL, a word they never spoke aloud. But that was the game they'd chosen and, while they knew the other side was pretty good, they figured that they were better. And that was the name of that tune.

"Okay, Mike. Our friend believes in one-time pads. I guess everybody does."

"Ivan sure as h.e.l.l does, but it must drive their troops crazy, having to go through every signal one letter at a time."

"Ever work the penetration side?" Ed Foley asked him.

Russell shook his head at once. "Not smart enough. Good thing, too. A lot of those guys end up in rubber rooms cutting out paper dolls with blunted scissors. Hey, I know a lot of the guys in Z-Division. The boss guy there just turned down the chair in math at Cal Tech. He's pretty smart," Russell estimated. "d.a.m.ned sight smarter than I'll ever be. Ed Popadopolous's-his name is Greek-father used to run a restaurant up in Boston. Ask me if I want his job."

"No, eh?"

"Not even if they threw in Pat Cleveland as a fringe benefit." And that was one fine-looking lady, Ed Foley knew. Mike Russell really did need a woman in his life....

"Okay, I'll get you a dispatch in about an hour. Okay?"

"Cool." Russell headed out.

"Well, I think we rattled his cage pretty hard," MP thought aloud.

"Admiral Bennett at Fort Meade ain't going to be real happy either. I got a signal to draft."

"Okay, I'll see how Eddie's doing with his crayons." And Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley took her leave as well.

JUDGE ARTHUR MOORE'S morning briefing normally happened at 7:30 in the morning, except on Sunday, when he slept late, and so it took place at 9:00. His wife even recognized the knock of the National Intelligence Officer who delivered the daily intelligence news, always in the private study of his Great Falls house, which was swept weekly by the Agency's best debugging expert.

The world had been relatively quiet the previous day-even communists liked to relax on weekends, he'd learned on taking the job.

"Anything else, Tommy?" the Judge asked.

"Some bad news from Budapest," the NIO answered. "Our Station Chief, James Szell, got burned by the opposition making a pickup. Details unknown, but he got himself PNG'd by the Hungarian government. His princ.i.p.al deputy, Robert Taylor, is out of the country on personal business. So Station Budapest is out of business for the moment."

"How bad is that?" Not too bad, the DCI thought.

"Not a major tragedy. Nothing much seems to happen in Hungary. Their military is pretty much a minor player in the Warsaw Pact, and their foreign policy, aside from the things they do in their immediate neighborhood, is just a mirror image of Moscow's. The station's been pa.s.sing us a fair amount of military information, but the Pentagon doesn't worry too much about it. Their army doesn't train enough to be a threat to much of anybody, and the Soviets regard them as unreliable," the NIO concluded.

"Is Szell somebody to screw up?" Moore asked. He vaguely remembered meeting the guy at an Agency get-together.

"Actually, Jimmy is well regarded. As I said, sir, we don't have any details yet. He'll probably be home by the end of the week."

"Okay. That does it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Nothing new on the Pope?"

"Not a word, sir, but it'll take time for our people to shake all their trees."

"That's what Ritter says."

IT TOOK FOLEY almost an hour to write up his dispatch. It had to be short but comprehensive, and that taxed his writing ability. Then he walked it down to Mike Russell's office. He sat there and watched a grumbling chief communications officer one-time-pad the words one G.o.dd.a.m.ned letter at a time, pad it with more Czech surnames, then super-encrypt on his STRIPE encryption machine. With that done, it went on the secure fax machine, which, of course, encrypted the text one more time, but in a graphics fas.h.i.+on rather than an alphanumeric one. The fax encryption was relatively simple, but since the opposition-which was a.s.sumed to monitor the emba.s.sy's satellite transmitter-could not tell if the signal was graphics or text, that was just one more hoop for their decryption people to jump through. The signal went up to a geosynchronous satellite and back down to different downlinks, one at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, another at Sunnyvale, California, and, of course, one at Fort Meade, Maryland, to which the other stations sent their "take" via secure fiber-optic landlines.

The communications people at Fort Meade were all uniformed noncomms, and when one of them, an Air Force E-5, ran it through his decoding machine, he was surprised to see the notation that said the super-encryption was on a one-time pad, NHG-1329.

"Where the h.e.l.l is that?" he asked his watch supervisor, a Navy senior chief.

"d.a.m.n," the chief commented. "I haven't seen one of those in a long time." He had to open a three-ring binder and root through it until he found the storage site inside the big communications vault at the far corner of the room. That was guarded by an armed Marine staff sergeant whose sense of humor, like that of all the Marines who worked here, had been surgically removed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center prior to his a.s.signment to Fort Meade.

"Hey, Sarge, gotta go inside for something," he told the jarhead.

"You gotta see the Major first," the sergeant informed him. And so the senior chief walked to the desk of the USAF major who was sitting at his desk, reading the morning paper.

"Morning, Major. I need to get something out of the vault."

"What's that, Chief?"

"A one-time pad, NHG-1329."

"We still have any of them?" the major asked in some surprise.

"Well, sir, if not, you can use this to start a fire on your grill with." He handed the dispatch over.

The Air Force officer inspected it. "Tell me about it. Okay." He scribbled an authorization on a pad in the corner of his desk. "Give this to the Marine."

"Aye aye, sir." The senior chief walked back to the vault, leaving the Air Force puke to wonder why the squids always talked so funny.

"Here you go, Sam," the chief said, handing over the form.

The Marine unlocked the swinging door, and the senior chief headed inside. The box the pad was in wasn't locked, presumably because anyone who could get past the seven layers of security required to get to this point was probably as trustworthy as the President's wife.

The one-time pad was a small-ring binder. The Navy chief signed for it on the way out, then went back to his desk. The Air Force sergeant joined him, and together they went through the c.u.mbersome procedure of decrypting the dispatch.

"d.a.m.n," the young NCO observed about two-thirds of the way through. "Do we tell anybody about that?"

"That's above our pay grade, sonny. I expect the DCI will let the right people know. And forget you ever heard that," he added. But neither really would, and both knew it. With all the wickets they had to pa.s.s through to be here, the idea that their signal systems were not secure was rather like hearing that their mother was turning tricks on Sixteenth Street in D.C.

"Yeah, Chief, sure," the young wing-wiper replied. "How do we deliver this one?"

"I think a courier, sonny. You want to whistle one up?"

"Aye aye, sir." The USAF sergeant took his leave with a smile.

The courier was an Army staff sergeant, driving a tan Army Plymouth Reliant, who took the sealed envelope, tucked it into the attache case on his front seat, and drove down the Baltimore-Was.h.i.+ngton Parkway to the D.C. Beltway, and west on that to the George Was.h.i.+ngton Parkway, the first right off of which was CIA. At that point, the dispatch-whatever the h.e.l.l it was, he didn't know-ceased being his responsibility.

The address on the envelope sent it to the Seventh Floor. Like many government agencies, CIA never really slept. On the top floor was Tom Ridley, a carded National Intelligence Officer, and the very one who handled Judge Moore's weekend briefings. It took him about three seconds to see that this one had to go to the judge right now. He lifted his STU secure phone and hit speed-dial b.u.t.ton 1.

"This is Arthur Moore," a voice said presently.

"Judge, Tom Ridley here. Something just came in." "Something" means it was really something.

"Now?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you come out here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Jim Greer, too?"

"Yes, sir, and probably Mr. Bostock also."

That made it interesting. "Okay, call them and then come on out." Ridley could almost hear the G.o.d d.a.m.n it, don't I ever get a day off! at the other end before the line went dead. It took another few minutes to call the two other senior Agency officials, and then Ridley went down to his car for the drive out, pausing only to make three Xerox copies.

IT WAS LUNCHTIME in Great Falls. Mrs. Moore, ever the perfect hostess, had lunch meats and soft drinks set out for her unexpected guests before retiring to her sitting room upstairs.

"What is it, Tommy?" Moore asked. He liked the newly appointed NIO. A graduate of Marquette University, he was a Russian expert and had been one of Greer's star a.n.a.lysts before fleeting up to his present post. Soon he'd be one of the guys who always accompanied the President on Air Force One.

"This came in late this morning via Fort Meade," Ridley said, handing out the copies.

Mike Bostock was the fastest reader of the group: "Oh, Lord."

"This will make Chip Bennett happy," James Greer predicted.

"Yeah, like a trip to the dentist," Moore observed last of all. "Okay, people, what does this tell us?"

Bostock took it first. "It means we want this Rabbit in our hutch in one big hurry, gentlemen."

"Through Budapest?" Moore asked, remembering his morning brief.

"Uh-oh," Bostock observed.

"Okay." Moore leaned forward. "Let's get our thinking organized. First, how important is this information?"

James Greer took it. "He says KGB's going to kill somebody who doesn't deserve it. That kinda suggests the Pope, doesn't it?"

"More importantly, he says our communications systems might be compromised," Bostock pointed out. "That's the hottest thing I see in this signal, James."

"Okay, in either case, we want this guy on our side of the wire, correct?"

"Judge, you can bet your bench on that," the Deputy DDO shot back. "As quickly as we can make it happen."

"Can we use our own a.s.sets to accomplish it?" Moore asked next.

"It won't be easy. Budapest has been burned down."

"Does that change the importance of getting his cute little cottontail out of Redland?" the DCI asked.

"Nope." Bostock shook his head.

"Okay, if we can't do it ourselves, do we call in a marker?"

"The Brits, you mean?" Greer asked.

"We've used them before. We have good relations with them, and Basil does like to generate debts with us," Moore reminded them. "Mike, can you live with that?" he asked Bostock.

A decisive nod. "Yes, sir. But it might be nice to have one of our people around to keep an eye on things. Basil can't object to that."

"Okay, we need to decide which of our a.s.sets we can send. Next," Moore went on, "how fast?"

"How does tonight grab you, Arthur?" Greer observed to general amus.e.m.e.nt. "The way I read this, Foley's willing to run the operation out of his own office, and he's pretty hot to trot, too. Foley's a good boy. I think we let him run with it. Budapest is probably a good exit point for our Rabbit."

"Concur," Mike Bostock agreed. "It's a place a KGB officer can get to, like on vacation, and just disappear."

"They'll know he's gone pretty fast," Moore thought out loud.

"They knew when Arkady Shevchenko skipped, too. So what? He still gave us good information, didn't he?" Bostock pointed out. He'd helped oversee that operation, which had really been ramrodded by the FBI in New York City.

"Okay. What do we send back to Foley?" Moore asked.

"One word: 'Approved.' " Bostock always backed his field officers.

Moore looked around the room. "Objections? Anybody?" Heads just shook.