“Maybe, sir. Maybe an interesting needle.” Connor began to relax, warming to the story she was about to tell. “I found this 505 report this morning.” A 505 report was a type of dissemination from the National Security Agency, the electronic listening headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was a routine, low-priority report without special restrictions on its distribution. The NSA issued thousands of these reports every day, jamming the e-mail in-boxes of intelligence analysts connected to the highly secure interdepartmental Intelwire network.
“Okay. Well…?” MacIntyre wanted to cut to the chase. He stared out at the river, which was now being pelted by a January rain. He pushed the intercom button for his assistant. “Deb, call my wife on her cell and tell her I can’t make dinner with the Silversteins. Tell her I’ll call her in a bit, but they shouldn’t wait dinner on me.” MacIntyre’s friends were well used to his frequent no-shows, and had long ago learned not to ask why. He motioned for his eager staffer to continue.
“Well, sir, it was a frequency not used by the Saudi military, but it was coming from the middle of the Empty Quarter, the open Saudi desert. Burst transmissions, heavily encrypted, narrow beam straight up to the Thuraya.” The Thuraya was a commercial satellite over the Indian Ocean. Connor was now unfolding a map of Saudi Arabia on top of the coffee table.
“Yeah, so…” Oh shit, he thought, this kid is talking about some standard 505 report, just the usual low-level crap…Maybe I should have gone to the Silverstein dinner… Sarah will be pissed at me again.
“So I called NSA, like you said we should when we needed more information than they gave us in the reports. I got the runaround almost the whole day, but finally, just after five o’clock, the assistant chief of D-3 called me back.” The young analyst started taking coffee mugs from MacIntyre’s collection of agency cups on the nearby stand, placing them on the corners of the map to keep it from coiling back up. Connor carefully secured the northwest corner with an NSC mug, the southwest with a NORAD cup, the northeast corner with one from CinCPAC, and the southeast one with a chipped blue cup with a gold SIS on it.
“D-3?” The Deputy Director sat up in his leather chair, which had been with him since his first job on Capitol Hill. “That’s NSA’s branch for Chinese military, not the office that handles Saudi.”
“I know, sir.” Susan smiled for the first time since she had entered the room. “The freq in the report is used only by Chinese Strategic Rocket Forces. It’s their nuclear command link.”
“Huh? What did the guy from D-3 say, what’s his explanation?” MacIntyre was looking at the map. The red X that Connor had marked on it was certainly in the middle of nowhere. “That site makes no sense. Chinese? It’s right in the heart of the damned Rub al-Khali. Why the hell would that transmission be coming from the center of the Empty Quarter? There’s nothing there but a quarter million square miles of sand dunes.”
Susan rearranged the mugs. “He said that it was unexplained, but he didn’t seem too worked up about it. Sounded like he wanted to go home. He said that his car pool was waiting and…”
MacIntyre popped out of the chair and moved quickly toward his desk.
Connor began to mumble, “Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you, sir, since NSA didn’t…”
The Deputy Director grabbed a gray phone. “This is MacIntyre at IAC. Let me speak to the SOO.”
There was only one place in the government where there really was “a boy named Sue”—namely, NSA’s Senior Operations Officer, who ran the spy agency’s command center. Senior Operations Officer, who ran the spy agency’s command center. 37129-09. We were told that it was PRC strategic c-cubed.”
Connor listened nervously, envisioning her career ending before it had even begun, especially if the answer was that it was really nothing more than Panamanian shipping comms. “Okay, and the lat-long places it where?” Another pause seemed to take forever. MacIntyre had turned his back to Connor and was fumbling through a directory. “Okay. Little odd, no? Okay, thanks.”
The Deputy Director switched from a gray to a red phone. He looked again at his watch and then punched a speed dial. “I have a priority-two late insertion for the Placeset bird; my code is IACzero-two-zulu-papa-romeo-niner.”
Connor was trying to remember what Placeset was: maybe the high-resolution electro-optical satellite.
“Coordinates, lat five zero degrees, three zero minutes east; long two three degrees, two seven minutes north,” MacIntyre said as he stretched the phone cord while reading the location off the map on the coffee table. “I want a ten-mile radius at Focal Level 7. What time will you have it?”
The Focal Level System was like a lens opening, or stop, on a camera, only the camera was 200 miles up in space. Connor remembered that seven was a real close-up, the kind that almost let you read the words on street signs. She realized that MacIntyre had taken her seriously enough to play a special chit, an after-hours personal request to divert a satellite from the targets that had been agreed upon just that morning by an interdepartmental committee from CIA, DOD, NSA, and the IAC.
MacIntyre put the red phone back in the cradle with his right hand and simultaneously picked up the intercom handset with his left. “Deb, order us the usual pizza, then go home, thanks.” The Deputy Director plunked down heavily in the chair again and smiled at his young analyst. “Now we wait. I hope you like anchovies.”
At moments like this, Rusty MacIntyre felt like a one-armed paperhanger. He and Rubenstein had tried and succeeded in keeping the IAC small; that way they avoided the bloat that had made the CIA so ineffective. But small also meant that Rusty usually ended up doing everything from editing reports to arguing with OMB and the Congress for more money, to hanging out and eating pizza late at night with young analysts.
It also meant he hardly ever got to see his wife. After ten years they still hadn’t gotten around to having a kid and now — with Sarah at thirty-eight — it was almost too late for them to start a family. She never complained about it. “Not to decide is to decide,” Sarah would say to him, “and I’m fine with that.” Maybe she actually was fine being childless, since she enjoyed her work at Refugees International so much, but Rusty wasn’t fine with it.
“Oh, I forgot: here’s your change from the pizza,” Susan said, placing four quarters on the small tabletop.
Rusty MacIntyre smiled at his young analyst. Then he took his empty glass and placed it under the table. Susan gave him a double take but said nothing. Silently, MacIntyre palmed the quarters, placed one in the middle of the table, and pressed his thumb on it. Clink. The coin had disappeared. And then another. Clink. Susan Connor looked under the table, where two quarters sat in the glass. Then MacIntyre did it two more times, apparently pushing the coins through the table.
Susan Connor ran her hand across the tabletop. “How did you…?” she asked, picking up the glass.
“Amateur magic, a hobby of mine. But it’s also a lesson. Not everything is as it appears,” Rusty said, sitting back in his chair. “Here’s how…”
“Blttt… Blttt…” It was the secure phone. It was almost eleven o’clock and the satellite’s ground site manager was calling. The image MacIntyre had requested could now be called up on the Intelwire. As Deputy Director of IAC, Rusty had few perks, but one he did have was a 72-inch flat screen connected to Intelwire. On it popped an amazingly high-resolution image of the Arabian Desert, in the middle of which a red crosshair cursor was blinking.