Forsyth had briefed the admiral on a troubling case in Panama City involving a recruited but obstreperous senator in the Panamanian Parliament who had befriended an unidentified (and imaginary) Russian diplomat who was “talking out of school.” The senator had refused to identify the Russian until the Station agreed to raise his salary. Benford knew that even the possibility of an unknown Russian dip getting cozy with an access agent from CIA would result in a hasty Russian approach to the venal senator in an attempt to identify the wayward diplomat. (The senator, in fact, was a longtime and loyal asset who would report any inveigling contact or surveillance on him.)
“The admiral listened politely but was clearly not interested,” said Forsyth.
“Probably thinking about magnetic impedance and joules,” said Benford. “She continues to be the least likely of the three, in my view.” He turned to Westfall. “You will brief Ambassador Vano tomorrow. He seems less concerned with rank, and is equable in nature, so he presumably will not object to a briefing from a junior snail. Play it with youthful enthusiasm and make it appear you’re exceeding your brief. Observe his reaction. He is a successful businessman with access, who is vain and inexperienced in intelligence matters. Play on that.”
For a junior analyst who was new to the Operations Directorate, Lucius played his role with a fine hand as the overserious analyst with facts and figures who liked to hear himself talk. He told the ambassador about a (fictitious) Russian naval captain in the Northern Fleet stationed in Murmansk who intended to defect and smuggle himself and his family into Finland in the back of one of the hundreds of 18-wheelers passing through the Vaalimaan Rajanylityspaikka, the southernmost Finnish border crossing on the E18. Westfall bragged that the Russian captain commanded a fleet ballistic submarine, would potentially bring kilos of top-secret naval documents out with him, and would attempt the crossing in two months. This would be irresistible bait for the Russians, who would tear apart every truck exiting the Federation, causing holy chaos at the border, which would be easily observed. Benford was enthused now that he had spread his trail of bread crumbs at the feet of each candidate.
“I anticipate FSB and SVR will collaborate, and that DIVA will be involved in the investigations,” Benford said. “We, therefore, will have positive intelligence on which variant was reported to Moscow.”
“If we ever get her reliable commo,” grumbled Forsyth. “We cannot keep meeting her on the street.”
“Hearsey tells me a new piece of communications gear has been tested and will soon be ready for deployment. He is coming to demonstrate it this afternoon. You should all be here to assess its suitability for DIVA, especially Nash, when he returns from the Orient.”
Nash returned the next day, was sarcastically congratulated by Benford on having resisted using his phallus in the Hong Kong operations, and was briefed on the mole hunt. Hearsey came to Benford’s office and nodded to the officers in the room. Definitely channeling Gary Cooper, thought Nate, noticing his tall man’s habit of instinctively ducking slightly under the door frame. Hearsey wore a soft sports jacket over a pinstripe shirt with khaki trousers, and was carrying a silver ZERO Halliburton attaché case. Behind him, dragging a large black plastic Pelican footlocker, was another tech introduced as Frank Mendelsohn, who was short, slight, dark, shy, and twitchy, about whom Benford whispered, “the guy you don’t want assembling the bomb in the basement.”
Hearsey nodded to Nate. The ops officers had worked with Hearsey before; he’d broken into a German factory with Gable to sabotage centrifuge parts destined for Iran, and he had trained Nate’s friend Hannah Archer before she was assigned to Moscow. Hearsey was what they called an operational tech, a trained engineer who knew you couldn’t sneak a listening device into an office if it came in twelve pieces and weighed six hundred pounds. He understood operations, and his technical solutions reflected that understanding, a rare bird.
As he did typically, Benford had bypassed the orotund Director of OTS and confidentially asked Hearsey to consider solutions to DIVA’s communication problem now that she was to be Director of SVR. He asked the rangy tech to think out of the box, and come up with an answer. It was a little risky for Hearsey to accept and work on a bootleg project for Benford without his own chief’s knowledge, but he couldn’t abide his boss, a nontechnical outsider whom he called a seagull manager. “Swoops in, starts screaming, shits on everything, then flies away,” Hearsey had told Benford.
Hearsey sat on the couch, his knees coming even with his stomach. “I assume it’s okay to talk details in front of everyone,” he said. Benford nodded. “I had the beginning of an idea, so I asked NGA, that’s the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—the people who fly the satellites—to image SVR headquarters in Yasenevo. They did an ELINT shot, which reads electronic emissions, then the next pass was a MASINT shot, which measures energy. I was looking for two things: that the main buildings radiate electric energy to the outside; and that there is only one main transformer—step-down transformers block energy—in a separate power plant.”
“How’d you do?” said Forsyth.
“Two out of two,” said Hearsey. “The buildings radiate, so there must be miles of wiring inside the walls, and the transformers are in a dedicated power plant on the other side of the compound.”
“My pulse is racing, but what exactly are you telling us?” said Benford.
Hearsey smiled. “You’re going to like this, Simon. The Russians hardened their headquarters on the inside against external eavesdropping, but didn’t think about energy leaking through the wires outside to the surrounding pine forest. The bottom line is that the two main buildings of SVR headquarters in Moscow are in essence a big honking antenna,” he said. “Even the shapes of the two buildings—a fifteen-floor tower connected to a five-floor wing shaped like a Y—act like a Yagi directional antenna.”
“I will not ask what a Yogi antenna is. But how does that help us?” said Benford.
“That’s Yagi, and it’s just what we need.” Hearsey turned to Mendelsohn, who opened the locker and took out a sleek desk lamp composed of a large ebony base, a stainless-steel, L-shaped arm, and a broad black shade. Hearsey smiled and put the lamp on the arm of the couch.
“Stick this lamp on your agent’s desk and plug it into the wall. That’s it. She can dictate, record, or type messages to Simon through this lamp, using the building’s electrical wires as a carrier, even with people present in the agent’s office,” said Hearsey. “Another feature: align documents along the base under the shade and you can photograph them, even while signing them, right in front of a secretary looking over your shoulder. And the lamp will tell her when an incoming message from Simon is waiting for her.”
“How’s it do that?” said Nate.
“An air vortex ring,” said Hearsey.
“What does that mean?” said Forsyth.
“It’ll blow in her ear,” said Hearsey.
“That can’t be a bad thing,” said Westfall.
Hearsey left after two hours, having demonstrated the functions of the desk lamp concealment for DIVA’s covert communications equipment. Hearsey told them the system was encrypted BOLERO, which crypt Simon found fatuous. Nevertheless, he was pleased. Hearsey had outdone himself, supported by the engineering brilliance of Frank Mendelsohn, whose nickname in the office, inexplicably, was Money Shot. The BOLERO transmitter/receiver was interactive, multifunctional, and protected from tampering by retinal-scan permissive-action link. Messages or images that Dominika loaded into the device would be stored until it detected the authentication code from the BATTLEFAT telemetry satellite in geosynchronous orbit above the Arctic Circle. In 3.5 seconds, Dominika’s stored messages would flood through the building’s electrical grid to the satellite, and simultaneous incoming messages would be read by the BOLERO lamp at the other end of the wall plug in DIVA’s office.