Barron confirmed the assumption with a nod. “We’ve had one in place for twenty years.”
“Always risky,” Cooke said. Exfiltrations were rare. Most foreign assets retired in place or left their homeland on their own. “How long before Mitchell can get him out?”
“Hard to say, given the increased security over there,” Barron admitted. “I’d send a separate team to do the job if I could, but with Beijing in lockdown, it’ll be tough to get more than a few people in on short notice without raising red flags. So it might just be grab-and-go.”
“That’s a devil of a thing to do to a man,” Cooke said. It wasn’t a criticism. “Ask him to walk out of his whole life on a moment’s notice.”
“Better than getting shot by the MSS on a moment’s notice,” Barron said.
Cooke sat back in her chair. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” Barron said. “The Red Cell just put in a request to send a pair of analysts to China to debrief Pioneer.”
Cooke nodded. “Burke and Stryker think they’ve got something developing on their Assassin’s Mace theory.”
“Normally, I wouldn’t let a DI analyst within a hundred miles of an asset that sensitive, but if they’re on to something with this Assassin’s Mace idea, I might be inclined to give them some latitude. But even if we send them, there’s no guarantee we can get them and Pioneer in the same room. Sending a pair of analysts might just be feeding the surveillance monster. I’m fine with sending Stryker, but Burke sounds too high-risk to me.”
“He’s done time in the field, so he’s got some ops training,” Cooke replied. “Firearms, Crash-and-Bang, the usual stuff we run analysts through before we sent them to the sandbox”—Iraq. “I’ll get his file to you.”
“Crash-and-bang isn’t the same as training to operate in a hostile countersurveillance environment.”
Cooke nodded. “True, but risk is the business,” she said, finishing the argument. “Greenlight the Red Cell TDY to Beijing.”
“They don’t say two words to Pioneer without one of my people in the room,” Barron said.
“Agreed,” she assured him. “But I want Mitchell to give them full cooperation. None of those station chief king-of-the-hill games.”
“Mitchell will love that,” Barron said.
“He’d better learn,” Cooke said. “If the Chinese are going after the Pescadores, I want Stuart to have plenty of warning this time. If the diplomats fail, the PLA won’t just be rolling tanks for the next part. They’ll be flying planes, and those move just a bit faster.”
The Information Operations Center was one of five CIA divisions set up to attack problems not bounded neatly by national borders. Drug trafficking, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and counterintelligence each had earned their own units, but IOC had outgrown most of them in little more than a decade. The criminals engaged in the other offenses were not blind to technology’s march, and the Internet had come to underpin their activities as much as money. IOC pursued them all, fueled by a budget that would have placed it easily in the Fortune 1000.
Kyra was surprised to see that Jonathan knew his way through the Analysis Group spaces. It was a cubicle farm like the one she had expected to see in the Red Cell, but the sheer number of workspaces was enormous. There were dozens, easily more than a hundred, all flanking a single aisle that ran more than a hundred yards from end to end. The vault took up the entire side of the building on this floor alone.
Farm is too small, she decided. A cubicle plantation?
“Twenty years ago, there was exactly one analyst working computer security issues,” Jonathan muttered quietly to her.
“I guess somebody figured out that the Internet was changing the world.”
“A rare case of the Agency staying on top of technology instead of playing catch-up,” he agreed. Jonathan steered her by the arm to a private office at the end of a wall opposite the analyst pens and pushed the door open without bothering to knock.
“Jonathan!” Kyra heard the voice, basso, but her position kept her from seeing the man in the office. “Get in here and close the door before someone sees me consorting with the Red Cell.”
“I apologize for what you’re about to endure,” Jonathan said quietly. He held out his arm in gentlemanly fashion to let Kyra pass.
Kyra stepped into an office large enough only for the desk, a file cabinet, and a shabby visitors’ couch that looked far older than the room itself. The desk was overrun by no less than four computer monitors and Kyra counted at least five hardware towers on the floor, making the rat’s nest of wiring underfoot entirely predictable. What space was left on the desktop was overtaken by papers and DVD jewel cases with assorted classification markings scribbled on them in permanent blue ink. The room’s occupant was reasonably handsome, young, with two days’ growth of blond beard on his face, but his threadbare military sweater was hardly the height of fashion. He smiled innocently, and Kyra got the impression that the man was utterly ignorant that his clothes were totally without style.
“Kyra, meet Garr Weaver,” Jonathan said.
“One of the few here who will still speak to Jon. How did Mr. Burke here convince you to hook up with his outfit?” Weaver spoke with a light southern accent that seemed mixed with occasional New England inflections on the vowels. Weaver was either raised in the South and educated in the North, or the reverse. Kyra settled on the former, given that his southern accent was more prominent than the Boston cadence.
“He didn’t—,” Kyra started.
“A volunteer!” Weaver exclaimed, taking Kyra’s answer and logically extending it to the wrong extreme. Weaver stood and offered his hand, which she shook before sitting on the couch. Up close she saw it was covered with the hair of a hundred visitors. She was appalled that she would have to attack her shirt and pants with a lint brush when she got home but tried not to show it.
“A directed assignment,” Kyra said.
Weaver’s eyebrows went up in mock surprise. “The seventh floor has instituted the draft again?”
“Don’t mind the interrogation,” Jonathan advised. “Garr is one of the Red Cell’s emeritus members.”
“I did a rotation there a few years ago when I got swept up by one of Cooke’s press gangs. Jonathan and some heavy drinking made it tolerable,” Weaver said. Kyra figured that the last part was a lie. “So what can I do you for?”
“A favor, I hope.” Jonathan held out the CD. “This is a custom software program developed by a Chinese aerospace company, but we have no follow-up on it. I need you to take a look at it.”
“Excellent. I love tearing foreign software apart.” Weaver extracted the disk by the edges and placed it carefully in the tray sticking out of a Macintosh tower under his desk. He pressed a button on a grubby keyboard and the tray slid shut. “Anything you can tell me about the asset who handed this over?”
“No,” Jonathan said.
“Ah. One of those,” Weaver said. “Does the company have a name?”
“Xian Aircraft Design and Research Institute,” Kyra said. “It might have also been filed under China Aviation Industry Corporation.”
“Ah, the Chinese. The source of all cyberevil in the world, or so the Pentagon thinks,” Weaver said. The disk finished loading and a single icon appeared on one of the monitors. Weaver called up a window displaying the file’s statistics. “Not a very big file, a Linux binary, almost a hundred megabytes.”
“The Chinese use Linux?” Jonathan asked.
“A variant called Red Flag Linux,” Kyra said.
“You know Linux?” Weaver asked, surprised.
“Computers are a hobby,” she admitted.