Op Center 02 - Mirror Image Page 4

  Fields-Hutton reached into his pants pocket and removed his handkerchief. Inside was a Mexican peso, one of the few coins which had no value in Russia. At worst, if it were found, it would he picked up and kept as a souvenir-hopefully, by a high-ranking official who had something useful to say in private.

  Sneezing again and bending hard as he did, FieldsHutton slid the peso under the door. He was relatively certain that there would be a motion detector on the other side of the door, but that it wouldn't be sensitive enough to notice the coin. Otherwise, every cockroach and mouse in the museum would set it off. Rising quickly, he walked away, his nose buried in the handkerchief

  Meandering back toward the main entrance, he allowed a guard to search his shoulder bag and then went outside, found a spot under a tree by the river, and slipped his CD Walkman from the bag. He jumped the machine to different tracks on the disc-the numbers describing, in code, just what he'd seen in the museum. These numbers were recorded on the writable disc. Later, when he was away from any receivers that might be based in the museum, he would order the Walkman to transmit the signal to the British Consulate in Helsinki, where it would be relayed to London.

  When he finished telling them about the TV studio, Fields-Hutton sat back to listen to what he hoped were the sounds of espionage taking place around his small peso.

  SIX

  Sunday, 12:30 P.M., St. Petersburg

  When the coin slid under the door of the reception area, it passed through an electromagnetic CIS. The counterimpulse screen was designed to be disrupted by any signal that passed beneath it, down to the cadmium batteries that powered digital watches.

  The disruption sounded a beep that overrode other information coming into the earphones of Operations Center Security Director Glinka. Though he wasn't an alarmist, Colonel Rossky was-especially with zero hour a little over a day away and a rumor that someone from the outside had been watching what was going on for the past few days.

  He checked with the receptionist, who said that no one had come or gone. Thanking her, the short, muscular man slid his headset off, handed it to his aide, got up from his seat, and walked down the narrow corridor to the Colonel's cubicle.

  He looked for any excuse to stretch his legs, having spent nine hours doing nothing but test open bugs in dozens of embassies around the world. This, after having spent four hours of running two of the Operations Center phone lines through a battery of tests for on-and-off hook voltages, on-line listen, tone sweep, high-voltage-pulse test, and all-wire listen tests.

  The central hallway was about the length and width of two bus aisles strung end-to-end. It was lit by three twenty-five-watt bulbs set in black fixtures and suspended from the ceiling. It was so thoroughly soundproof that nothing less than a cannon or jackhammer could be heard or felt by someone on the outside. Both interior and exterior walls were made of brick covered with a liquid foam coating and six alternating layers of spun fiberglass and inch-thick sheets of hard, black rubber. These were topped with tarpaulin to insulate the facility from moisture and then by a layer of pasteboard. A coat of matte-black paint absorbed the light which might otherwise leak through cracks in the floors above them.

  Like a tree trunk, the corridor had several branches, each leading to several areas: computers, audio surveillance, aerial reconnaissance, communications, library, exit, and more. General Orlov's office was on one end and Colonel Rossky's on the other.

  Glinka reached the Colonel's office and pressed the red button on the speaker beside the door.

  "Yes?" the high voice crackled through the speaker.

  "Colonel, it's Glinka. I've picked up a .98-second disturbance in the reception area. That isn't long enough for someone to have walked through, but you wanted me to tell you if there were any-"

  "Where is the janitor?"

  Glinka said, "He's working in the Kurgan wings-"

  "Thank you," Rossky said. "I'll look into it myself."

  "Sir, I can go and

  "That will be all," Rossky snapped.

  Glinka ran a hand across his blond crewcut. "Yes, sir," he said as he turned from the door and headed back to his post.

  So much for a short walk up the stairs, he thought. But it was better to be miserable than to cross the unforgiving Colonel Rossky, which is what poor Pavel Odina had done when he stole equipment from the facility. Glinka had only mentioned the theft to the Colonel because he didn't want to be blamed for it himself He never thought the computer software designer would meet with such a horrible fate, which everyone here knew that Rossky had orchestrated.

  Shambling back to his seat, he retrieved his earphones and settled in for what he was sure would be another unbroken shift of five hours or more.

  He quietly considered all the ways he would love to derail the strutting son of a bitch if he had the courage ....

  Tucked into his old, crisply pressed black uniform, with its distinctive red lapel flashes and freshly blocked hat, short, lean Colonel Leonid Rossky left his office and strode toward the fireproof door that led to the staircase. Like all soldiers of the spetsnaz-a word formed from spetsialnoye nazhacheniye, "special purpose"-he had both nerves and character of granite. It showed in his hard expression. His dark eyebrows dipped severely above his long, straight nose, and his thin lips turned down at the edges where they blended with the deep, hard lines from his nose. He wore a thick mustache, which was unusual for the breed. But his gait was typical of the special forces: fast and assured, as though only an invisible leash kept him from racing toward a goal only he could see.

  Opening the door and shutting it firmly behind him, Rossky pressed the keypad code to lock it, then hit a button on the intercom beside it.

  "Raisa, lock the outside door."

  "Yes, sir," she said.

  Then he hurried along a dark corridor, up another flight of stairs, and through another keypad-controlled door to a TV studio. Ordinarily, he would have changed into civilian clothes before coming out here, but there wasn't time.

  Workers in the studio were setting up permanent lights, monitors, and TV cameras. They ignored Rossky as he made his way through the cables, crates, and equipment. Beyond the glass-enclosed control booth was a steep, brightly lit stairwell. Rossky climbed and entered a small reception area at the top. Raisa rose from her desk and greeted him with a nod. She went to say something, but he put a finger to his lips to silence her and looked around.

  Rossky saw the peso at once, lying innocuously under the receptionist's desk on the right side of the room. The two employees who were unpacking equipment stopped to look at him. He motioned them to keep talking. They continued discussing a soccer match as Rossky studied the coin. He circled it like a snake girdling its prey, never touching it and afraid to breathe on it. A glitch might have triggered the alarm in Glinka's headset, and the peso might be exactly what it seemed to be. But he hadn't survived twenty years in the special forces by taking anything for granted.

  He saw that the peso was well-worn, as though it had been in circulation for years. The 1982 date seemed appropriate to its condition. He looked at the sides of the coin, at the faded ridges, at the dirt wedged between them. It all seemed very authentic. But the eye could be fooled. Pulling a long black hair from the back of his head, he held it near the coin. The hair dipped like a divining rod. Touching his index finger to the tip of his tongue, he gently dabbed the top of the coin with saliva. He looked closely at his finger and saw traces of dust; where he'd touched the coin, it was clean.

  Static electricity had attracted both dust and the hair, which meant that something inside the coin was generating an electrostatic field. His lips tight with anger, Rossky stood and returned to the Operations Center. The transmitter in the peso wasn't very powerful. Whoever was listening through it had to be within a few hundred yards of the museum. The security cameras would tell Rossky who that might be, and then the spy would be dealt with.

  SEVEN

  Sunday, 9:00 A.M., Washington, D.C.

 
Mike Rodgers passed buoyantly through the keypad entry on the ground floor of Op-Center. After greeting the armed guards seated behind the lexan, who provided him with the day's password, Rodgers hurried through the first-floor administrative level, where the top officials had offices in the old evacuation-team headquarters. Like Paul Hood, Rodgers preferred to be downstairs, in the new underground area where the real business of OpCenter was conducted.

  Another armed guard was stationed by the elevator, and after giving her the password Rodgers was admitted to the elevator. The anachronistic and less expensive "Who goes there?" sentry system had been chosen for Op-Center instead of the more elaborate hi-tech systems used at the other agencies, where fingerprint IDs had been compromised by computer-printed, laser-etched gloves, and voice identification systems had been fooled by synthesizers. Though Rodgers had seen the guard nearly every day for six months, and knew the names of her husband and children, he wouldn't have been admitted if he didn't have the password. If he'd tried to enter, he would have been arrested. If he resisted, he might have been shot. In Op-Center, precision, competency, and patriotism came before friendship.

  Emerging in the heart of Op-Center called the "bullpen," Rodgers made his way through a maze of cubicles to the action offices ringing the hub. Unlike the offices above, the rooms here could tap into intelligence resources that ranged from satellite imagery to communicating directly with operatives around the world to accessing computers and databases that could accurately predict the rice harvest in Rangoon five years hence.

  Rodgers was using Hood's office while the chief was away. The office was situated next to the conference room affectionately known as "the Tank." The Tank was surrounded by a wall of electromagnetic waves that prevented electronic surveillance. Rumor had it that the microwaves could also cause sterility and insanity. Staff psychologist Liz Gordon half-jokingly said that the waves explained a lot of the behavior that took place within these walls.

  Alert and energized despite a late Saturday night on the town, Rodgers entered the code on the keypad beside Hood's office door. The door popped open, the lights came on, and for the first time in six months Rodgers smiled with contentment. At last he was in charge of Op-Center.

  Even so, he knew he wasn't being entirely fair to Hood. He had his den-mother side, as Ann had said. But the Director was a good man. He was well intentioned and, more important, he was a highly capable manager. And it was efficient to delegate authority internally to a group of relatively autonomous experts like Martha Mackall and Lowell Coffey II, Matt Stoll and Ann Farris. But more and more, Rodgers felt that OP-Center needed to be run by one man's will, like Hoover's FBI. It had to he run by someone who didn't consult with the CIA or the National Security Council before acting, but let other organizations know what he was doing after the fact. After defusing a war in Korea and the potential bombing of Japan, he had come to believe that Op-Center needed to be more aggressive on the world stage, rather than reactive.

  Which is one reason it can't continue being anonymous, Rodgers thought. But there was time enough to do something about that ... something passive, like leaking information to the press, or something dramatic, like sending Striker on the kinds of missions that had made Israeli commandos so feared and respected. Missions that didn't have to be attributed to others' operatives, the way their recent attack on the missile site in North Korea was attributed to the South Koreans.

  Rodgers and Hood had had this discussion many times, and the Director invariably pointed to their charter, which forbade adventurism. They were supposed to act like police, he said, not fifth columnists. But to Rodgers, a charter was like sheet music. You could play the notes as written and follow the composer's instructions, yet there was still a great deal of latitude for interpretation. In Vietnam he'd read and reread Edward Gibbons's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and something the author had written became Rodgers's credo that the first of earthly blessings is independence.

  Fired up by Gibbons and by a dog-eared copy of George Patton's War As I Knew It that his father had given him, Rodgers served two tours of duty in Vietnam. He returned to the States and got his Ph.D. in world history from Temple University, after which he was stationed in Germany, then in Japan. He commanded a mechanized brigade in the Persian Gulf and spent time in Saudi Arabia before returning to the U.S. to try for a job at the Department of State. Instead, the President offered him the post of Deputy Director at Op-Center. He wasn't sorry he took the job. It was exhilarating to be involved in crises around the world. He still savored the aftertaste of his recent, successful incursion into North Korea. But he didn't like being anyone's sidekick, let alone Paul Hood's.

  The computer beeped. Rodgers walked toward the desk. He punched Control/A to receive. Bob Herbert's round face filled the screen, transmitted by a fiber optic camera on top of the monitor. The thirty-eight-year-old National Intelligence Officer looked tired.

  "Good morning, Mike."

  "Hi, Bob," Rodgers said. "What are you doing here on a Sunday?"

  "Been here since last night. Stephen Viens at NRO called me at home and I came in. Didn't you read my memo?"

  "Not yet," Mike said. "What's up?"

  "Why don't you check the E-mailbox and beep me back," Herbert said. "The memo has all the times and exact spellings, and the satellite recon-"

  "Why don't you just brief me?" Mike said, dragging a hand across his face. E-mail. Beeps. Fiber-optic conferencing. How the hell did spy work go from Nathan Hale unbowed to Matt Stoll's screensavers of Derek Flint dancing Swan Lake? Intelligence work should be physically exhausting, like lovemaking, not electronic voyeurism.

  "Sure, Mike. I'll give you a rundown," Herbert replied, somewhat concerned. "Are you okay?"

  "Yeah," Rodgers said. "Just a little out of sync with the late twentieth century."

  "Whatever you say," Herbert responded.

  Rodgers didn't bother to explain. The Intelligence Officer was a good man, someone who had paid the price for what he did. He lost his wife and the use of his legs in the Beirut Embassy bombing in 1983. But after a great deal of initial reluctance, even Herbert was beginning to be seduced by the computers, satellites, and fiber-optic cables. He called this technological triad a "God's-eye view of the world."

  "What we've got," Herbert said, "are two things, maybe related, maybe not. You know we've been picking up microwave radiation from the Neva as it passes near the Hermitage in St. Petersburg."

  "Yes," Rodgers responded.

  "At first we figured the radiation was from the TV studio the Russians are building at the Hermitage to broadcast artwork to schools. But my TV specialist has been watching their test broadcasts, and they're all in the 153 to 11950 kilohertz range. That's not what we're getting from the Neva."

  "So the TV studio's a front for some other kind of operation," Rodgers said.

  "Most likely. We thought it might be a new security setup to handle the extra tourists the Russians are expecting for the city's three hundredth anniversary, but that doesn't compute."

  "How so?"

  "Martha Mackall called a friend at Treasury to get me the budgets for the Russian Ministries of Culture and Education," Herbert said. "There isn't a ruble in either of them for what should be a five-to-seven-million-dollar facility. So we hacked around and found funds for the studio in the budget of the Ministry of the Interior."

  "That doesn't mean anything," Rodgers said. "Our government transfers money all the time."

  "Yes," said Herbert, "but the ministry earmarked twenty million dollars for the project."

  "Interior's run by Dogin, the hard-fine Minister who just lost the election over there," Rodgers said. "Some of that money may have gone to his presidential campaign."

  "That's a possibility," Herbert agreed. "But there's something else which indicates that the TV studio may be more than that. At one-thirty yesterday afternoon, we intercepted a communication from the northern sector of St. Petersburg to New York. An order for
bagels."

  "Come again?" Rodgers said.

  "It was a brunch order faxed from St. Petersburg to the Bestonia Bagel Shop in Brighton Beach. They asked for an onion bagel with cream cheese, a salt bagel with butter, an everything bagel plain, and two garlic bagels with lox."

  "A take-out order from half a world away," Rodgers said. "And it wasn't a joke."

  "No," said Herbert. "Bestonia sent back a confirmation. Definitely spooks."

  "Right," Rodgers agreed. "Any idea what it means?"

  "We sent it over to cryptology," Herbert continued, and they're stumped. Lynne Dominick says the different bagels could represent sectors of the city or of the world. Or they could be agents. The different kinds of spreads could stand for different targets. She said she'll keep working on it, but she called Bestonia and they've got a dozen kinds of bagels with twenty different 'shmears.' It'll take a while."