In the 1940s and ’50s, NSA had been able to hire American’s finest mathematicians, and one of the tasks assigned them had been to work with AT amp;T to create a universal telephone operating system that could be used covertly by American intelligence officers. Back then, AT amp;T was the only real rival NSA had had in the hiring of skilled mathematicians, and beyond that, AT amp;T had always been a prime contractor for just about every executive agency of the government. By 1955, it was done, and for a surprisingly modest fee AT amp;T provided the entire world with a model for telephone systems that most of the world adopted-the modest cost was explained by the desire of AT amp;T to make its systems compatible with every other country’s to ease international communications. With the 1970s had come push-button phones, which directed calls electronically by frequency-controlled codes even easier for electronic systems to use, and infinitely easier to maintain than the former electro-mechanical stepping switches that had made the mortician hugely rich. They also proved even easier for AT amp;T to rig for NSA. The operating systems first given the world’s telephone companies by AT amp;T’s Parsippany, New Jersey, research laboratory had been upgraded yearly at least, giving further improvements to the efficiency of the world’s phone systems-so much so that scarcely any telephone system in the world didn’t use it. And tucked into that operating system were six lines of binary code whose operational concept traced back to the Nazi occupation of Holland.
Ming finished the installation and ejected the disk, discarding it into her waste can. The easy way to dispose of secret material was to have your adversary do it, through the front door, not the back one.
Nothing really happened for some hours, while Ming did her usual office tasks and Nomuri visited three commercial businesses to sell his high-powered desktop computers. All that changed at 7:45 P.M.
By this time, Ming was at her own home. Nomuri would get a night off; Ming had to do some things with her room-mate to avoid too much suspicion-watching local television, chatting with her friend, and thinking about her lover, while the whole reason for the wispy smiles on her face played out entirely outside her consciousness. Strangely, it never occurred to her that her roomie had it all figured out in an instant, and was merely polite enough not to broach the subject.
Her NEC desktop computer had long since gone into auto-sleep mode, leaving the monitor screen dark and blank, and the indicator light in the lower right position of the plastic frame amber instead of the green that went with real activity. The software she’d installed earlier in the day had been custom-designed for the NEC machines, which like all such machines had proprietary source-code unique to the brand. The source-code, however, was known to the National Security Agency.
Immediately upon installation, the Ghost program-as it had been christened at Fort Meade, Maryland-had buried itself in a special niche in the NEC’s operating system, the newest version of Microsoft Windows. The niche had been created by a Microsoft employee whose favorite uncle had died over North Vietnam while flying an F-105 fighter-bomber, and who did his patriotic work entirely without the knowledge of his parent company. It also dovetailed exactly with the NEC code, with the effect of making it virtually invisible even to a line-by-line inspection of all the code within the machine by an expert software engineer.
The Ghost had gone immediately to work, creating a directory that sorted the documents on Ming’s computer first by date of creation/modification, and then by file type. Some files, like the operating system, it ignored. It similarly ignored the NEC-created transcription program that converted Roman characters, actually the English phonemes of the spoken Mandarin language, into the corresponding ideographs, but the Ghost did not ignore the graphic-text files that resulted from that program. Those it copied, along with telephone indexes and every other text file on the five-gigabyte hard drive. This entire procedure took the machine, guided by the Ghost, seventeen-point-one-four seconds, leaving a large file that sat by itself.
The machine did nothing for a second and a half, then new activity started. The NEC desktop machines had built-in high-speed modems. The Ghost activated these, but also turned off their internal mini-speakers so that no evidence of the transmission would be heard by anyone. (Leaving the speakers on was a primary security measure. The flashing lights that told of their activity were hidden because the modem was inside the box for this model.) The computer then dialed (this term had somehow survived the demise of rotary dials on telephones) a twelve-digit number rather than the usual seven used by the Beijing telephone system. The additional five digits sent the seeker-signal on a round-robin adventure through the hardware of the central switching computer, and it came out in the place designated two weeks before by the engineers at Fort Meade, who, of course, never had an idea what this was all for, or where it would happen, or who might be involved. The number that rang-actually there wasn’t a mechanical or electronic ringer of any sort-was the dedicated modem line that exited the wall by Chester Nomuri’s desk and ended in the back of his very high-end laptop-which was not an NEC, because here, as with most computer applications, the best was still American.
Nomuri was also watching TV at the moment, though in his case it was the CNN international news, so that he could know what was going on at home. After that he’d switch to a Japanese satellite channel, because it was part of his cover. A samurai show he liked was on tonight, in theme and simplicity rather like the Westerns that had polluted American TV in the 1950s. Though an educated man and a professional intelligence officer, Nomuri liked mindless entertainment as much as anyone else. The beep made him turn his head. Though his computer had software similar to that running in Ming’s office, he’d allowed the aural prompt to tell him that something was coming in, and a three-key code lit up his screen to show exactly what it was and where it was coming from.
Yes! the CIA officer exulted, his right fist slamming into his open left hand hard enough to sting. Yes. He had his agent in fucking place, and here was the take from Operation SORGE. A bar at the top of the screen showed that the data was coming it at a rate of 57,000 bits per second. That was pretty fast. Now, just hope that the local commie phone system didn’t develop a bad connection somewhere between Ming’s office and the switching center, and from the switching center to his flat, Chester thought. Shouldn’t be much of a problem. The outbound leg from Ming’s office would be first-rate, tasked as it was to the service of the Party nobility. And from the switching center to his place would be okay, because he’d gotten numerous messages that way, most of them from NEC in Tokyo to congratulate him on exceeding his sales quota already.
Yeah, well, Chet, you are pretty good at making a sale, aren’t you? he asked himself on the way to the kitchen. He figured he owed himself a drink for this bit of performance. On returning, he saw that the download wasn’t finished yet.