Kent tried to keep it from being a march, but it certainly wasn’t a stroll. Thirty years in the Corps gave you a posture that was hard to abandon.
“And don’t salute, you old jarhead.”
Kent grinned. He and Howard had known each other for twenty years, and they had a mutual respect. Howard hadn’t gotten into combat when he’d been Regular Army, but he’d had a few dustups since joining this organization and had, by all accounts, acquitted himself well. One could never be sure — once the bullets began to fly, many a paper tiger turned pale and hugged the ground. He was glad that his old friend had been made of sterner stuff. And that there was still action to be had somewhere.
Howard gestured at the chair next to his desk. Kent nodded and sat in the hard-backed chair, his own back straight enough so he didn’t need the support.
“You ready to do this, Abe?”
“Yes, sir, I believe I am.”
“It won’t be like the Marines.”
“I don’t see how it could be, John.”
“But you could make General here. They reward results.”
Kent nodded. Howard didn’t need to mention what that meant. Kent had been a Colonel for years. Unless a shooting war broke out, he was never going to get his star in the Corps. There were too many other birds roosting and waiting for the same thing.
“I’ll give you the fifty-cent tour,” Howard said, “as soon as my secretary gets back. You know Julio Fernandez?”
“That scrounger?” Kent said with a grin. “You bust him from sergeant lately?”
Howard didn’t smile back. “Actually,” he said, “I promoted him. Lieutenant, now. He got married, has a son, and has settled down considerably. I know you’ll want your own team, but he’ll be sticking around a few weeks to make sure you get settled in.”
“I appreciate that.”
Howard nodded. “The new boss should be in his office,” he said. “Have you two met yet?”
Kent shook his head. “Not formally. I saw him at some political thing once.”
“He seems okay, for a civilian. Michaels was a good man — backed me up every turn, and was willing to get his own hands dirty. I hope you do as well with Thorn.”
“Me, too.”
“Ah, there’s Betty. Come on, I’ll show you your new toy.”
“Sir,” Tom Thorn’s secretary said, “Marissa Lowe is here.”
“Send her in.”
Lowe was an attractive black woman, a few years older than he was, and tall, maybe five-ten. Her curly hair was cut short, and her gray suit was businesslike enough, the skirt reaching nearly to her knees. She wore a red silk blouse, and what looked like gold and ruby earrings that dangled an inch below her lobes. Dark brown eyes and lots of smile wrinkles at the corners. A fine-looking, very… earthy woman.
Thorn shook the woman’s hand. She had a firm grip.
“Please, have a seat,” he said with a smile.
She flashed him a smile in return, her teeth very white against her milk-chocolate skin. She walked to the couch and sat. She moved very well, he saw, smooth and controlled.
“What can I do for the CIA, Ms. Lowe?”
“Marissa, please, Commander.”
He smiled again. “Call me Tom, then.”
She nodded. “Shortly before you took over Net Force, our embassy in Ankara had a little visit from the Turkish ambassador, Mustafa Suleyman Agar. The Ambassador’s people had come across some intel he figured might be important to the Turks’ national security.” She had a silky, deep voice.
Thorn nodded. “Okay.”
“Well, calls were made, people talked to, and someone somewhere decided that Net Force ought to be asked to help out the ambassador by having a look at the information — which was hidden somehow on a disk of tourist photographs that came from Iran. The Turks were fairly certain something was there because their agent got himself killed in the process of collecting and bringing it home.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Your Jay Gridley has been digging into it and found a code. He managed to crack part of it. It turned out to be a list of secret agents from the former USSR stationed in Africa and the Middle East, going as far back as the nineteen sixties.”
Thorn seemed to remember a report he’d barely had time to glance at from Gridley, who he had just met. “Ah, yes. I recall Jay said something about Russian spies.”
“Well, it has been a while since the evil empire collapsed, but the Russians never throw anything away, you know, so some of the agents were still in place, if a bit long in the tooth. Real names, code names, dates, places, everything.”
He nodded. “I can see where that would be very valuable.”
She echoed his nod. “The Turks scooped up the ones in their territory, and passed out names of the others to their friends in the region.”
“So we get points for helping the Turks?”
“Oh, yeah, big time.”
Thorn searched his memory, which was usually pretty good about such stuff. There was something else…? Ah, he had it.
“I’ve been swamped with e- and paperwork and I’m not up to date,” he said, “but if I recall correctly, Gridley said he thought there was more material to be decoded.”
“Yes, sir, that’s what we understood. And we are hoping that it is a continuation of the list into our geography.”
“Any reason to believe that?”
“Your man seems to think so, from the report he sent. The way the countries and spies are listed shows a progression in this general direction, going from east to west. We’re hoping it will jump the ocean.”
“You’re thinking maybe there are some Russian spies still knocking around in the U.S.?”
“Oh, we know that. We even know who some of them are. The regular FBI keeps account of them, devil-you-know-versus-the-devil-you-don’t and all. Everybody has secret ops over here — our enemies, our friends, probably even the Swiss — just like we do in their houses. Today’s best friend might be tomorrow’s worst enemy and vice-versa, so we need to stay on our toes. Look at how many times in history we fought knock-down-drag-out wars against folks who are now our best allies: British, Spanish, Mexican, Germans, Japanese, Italians, that wheel just keeps on spinning.” She gave him another little smile. “Anyway,” she went on, “the question is, would this Iranian-Turkish list tell us about a bunch of others we don’t know about? That would be very useful to us.”
“Indeed. So, what is it you want me to do, Marissa?”
“Nothing, really. We’d just like to make sure you keep this one on the front burner. We would appreciate it.”
“I believe we can do that.”
She gave him her brilliant smile yet again. He liked it, and he liked her. She seemed grounded, no-nonsense, straight to the point, and there was never enough of that to go around.
She stood. “I’d like to drop by from time to time, touch base, since I’m kind of the de-facto liaison from the spooks to the computer nerds. I’ll call before I show up.”
He grinned. “You’ll be welcome any time, Marissa. A pleasure to have made your acquaintance.”
“You, too, Tommy.”
Normally, he didn’t much care for that nickname, but it didn’t sound so bad coming from her.
A few minutes later, his secretary beeped him. “Sir. General Howard and Colonel Kent are here to see you.”
“Great. Send them in.”
4
Samuel Cox sat staring at his desk, as if the solution to his problem might be found between the computer and the hard-copy outbox.
His first reaction to the phone call had been close to panic. Not because he was worried about anybody overhearing it — Vrach’s voice was disguised, distorted far beyond vox-pattern recognition. The call was also scrambled, using state-of-the-art equipment. The NSA itself would bang their heads against the code if they tried to break it. After all, they had devised the scrambler, and they said their code was practically unbreakable.