and-black badge clipped to his lapel singled him out as a guest with limited access to the facility.
‘I’m taking you down to see Frank Villano. You’ll remember him from our meeting with the DCI. When I told him what you’d found, he just about jumped out of his skin.’
After a dozen turns in the look-alike corridors of the main office building, Harmon was thoroughly disoriented. Occasional glimpses through office windows allowed him to reestablish his bearings in terms of direction. Mosley ran his ID badge through a magnetic strip reader, which confirmed his access code and released the lock.
Harmon looked over the banks of computers lined up within a glass-enclosed space that filled the interior of the Computer Department. Offices and support spaces lined the perimeter of the glass core, each space dependent on the powerful machines in the center.
They stopped at a corner office on the perimeter, where Villano’s assistant waved them through. ‘He’s waiting for you.’
‘Thanks,’ Mosley replied.
Villano’s large office was filled with the typical debris found in the office of any manager of information systems: piles of printouts, odd software products, and the occasional piece of hardware. Villano was pounding away at his keyboard when Mosley and Harmon entered.
‘Have a seat, gentlemen,’ Villano offered over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be right with you.’
Harmon hung his coat on the wall rack and pulled up a chair beside Mosley while Villano tapped out a few more keystrokes.
‘There, that did it.’ Villano sighed with relief as he finished. He then turned around to face his guests. ‘Thanks for coming down. I understand that you’ve found some disks that Cole stashed away, one with the name Cormorant on it.’
‘Yes.’ Harmon fished the disks out of his shirt pocket and handed them to Villano.
Villano looked over the floppy disk. It was the same make as those purchased en masse by his department, and Villano easily recognized the distinctive handwriting. ‘This is Cole’s all right. Let’s find out what he was up to.’
Villano inserted the disk into his desktop computer and directed the program to work with the files found on the disk. The drive light flashed as the computer read the disk and filled its internal memory with information. In a few seconds, the operation was complete and the program asked Villano what he wished to do next.
‘You’ll have to pardon me, but my Russian is not quite what it used to be.’
Harmon and Mosley peered over Villano’s shoulder and saw a screen filled with Cyrillic characters. It looked like any other computer program, except it was a language neither of them could read.
‘What is that?’ Harmon asked.
‘This is a gift from a defector,’ Villano replied while trying to decipher the menu offered by the program. ‘Recovering this program and its related data files was Michael Cole’s final assignment before going on vacation. The program seems to have found some data files on your disk that it recognizes. I’d say that you’ve found the files of another Soviet spy.’
‘Another spy?’ Mosley asked. ‘Weren’t all the original disks and data files accounted for last January when we started looking through Cole’s work?’
‘Yes, but a few of the original disks were damaged and the data was unrecoverable, including one labeled Cormorant. ‘
‘Frank, I suggest we find out who the hell this Cormorant is,’ Mosley offered. ‘That might just tell us why Cole squirreled away a copy of this disk.’
Villano followed the menu instructions that guided him into the late Soviet spymaster’s database. From the list of agent code names, he selected the Russian version of the word Cormorant. Villano’s computer began churning away at the data until the screen cleared and a new image filled the nineteen-inch monitor. A grainy photograph appeared in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. The face was that of a young woman.
Mosley walked around and crouched beside Villano to get a closer look at the photograph. ‘What’s the text say?’
‘The woman pictured is Anna Mironova. Born in the Russian Republic. Parents deceased. Educated in various preparatory schools and trained by the KGB at the First Chief Directorate Institute. She got in there very young, about high school age, if these dates are correct. Let’s see what she’s currently up to.’
Villano selected one of the menu options that appeared in a status bar along the bottom of the screen. ‘Current assignment: First Chief Directorate, Directorate T, deep-cover agent in the United States.’
‘What’s Directorate T?’ Harmon asked.
‘I believe that was the KGB’s Science and Technology Group,’ Villano replied. ‘Some parts of the FCD were geared toward political or military information. Directorate T officers used to comb the outside world for any technology or scientific information that the Kremlin wanted.’
‘What’s that part on the bottom of the screen?’Mosley asked, pointing at a block of text. ‘That part right there.’
‘Hmm, says that she works as a writer-more precisely, a journalist, by the name of Alexandra Roe.’
‘Damn!’Mosley growled. ‘Get me back to that picture.’
Villano tapped a couple of keys and the photograph of a young Soviet agent filled the screen.
‘She look familiar to you, Dan?’Mosley asked, testing Harmon’s imagination. ‘Add a couple of years, style the hair, and who do you have?’
Harmon studied the image, mentally altering it as Mosley suggested until his mind made the transformation. ‘It’s her all right.’
Mosley and Harmon had raced well beyond Villano at this point. ‘Who’s her? Who is she?’
‘Someone Cole met just before he was killed. Dan and I have been checking into her background, and so far, we’ve come up empty.’
‘Roe’s background always seemed too clean to be real. She’s got all the right documentation, but there’s no depth, no personal history. It’s like she existed only on paper before starting college.’
Mosley had seen the signs of a deep-cover agent before. ‘It sure smells like a legend. If Roe really is a Russian agent and Cole tried to put the squeeze on her, it’s no wonder he wound up dead. Frank, can you punch me out some hard copy? I want to take this to the DCI.’
As Villano worked his way through the menus to request a printout, Mosley then sat back in his chair, shook his head, and laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ Harmon asked.
‘Do you remember our little powwow last week, when we thought we had this whole thing figured out?’
‘Yes, so?’
‘We’ve already got the FBI, the CIA, British Intelligence, and the Chinese knee-deep in this little mess and now we discover that our old friends, the KGB, may have a player on the field, too. Who’s next, the Mossad?’
46
Two hours ago, Sir Daniel Long finished a phone call with Jackson Barnett of the CIA. His counterpart in the American intelligence community had just forwarded some startling news that one of the industrial spies, currently under surveillance, might also be a former Soviet agent. Barnett had asked that the new information about Alexandra Roe be verified by British Intelligence’s high-level source. What disturbed Long most about Barnett’s call was that if the information that the CIA had uncovered about Roe was genuine, then he should have already known about it. After the call, Long requested a driver for a trip out to the cottage-a country estate that British Intelligence used as a safe house.
The ninety-minute trip into the English countryside was uneventful, if not downright depressing. The past two days had seen nothing but rain and clouds over the British Isles and the weather didn’t help Long’s mood. A sense of betrayal burned inside of him as he looked over the pages that Barnett had sent, wondering what else he hadn’t been told by the former mole.
