'Are you having a problem with this op, Mr. Dean?' Rubens asked. 'Something personal!'
Rubens was the head of Desk Three, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, and Dean's boss. A tiny microphone and bone-conducting speaker surgically implanted behind Dean's left ear picked up his own voice — which could be pitched just above a sub-vocalized murmur and still be clearly heard back at the Art Room, the black chamber beneath NSA headquarters that ran Desk Three operations — and played Rubens' replies in his head. The antenna and power supply that gave Dean a direct satellite comm link back to Fort Meade, Maryland, and the headquarters of the NSA was coiled up in his belt. His handlers in the Art Room had been able to listen in on his entire conversation with Mitchell, Llewellyn, and Lockwood.
The strip of plastic he'd left in the Security Office, however, was a bit more sophisticated.
'No, sir,' Dean told Rubens. 'Nothing that will affect the mission, anyway. But I don't like spying on an ally, and I don't like spying on ordinary people.'
It was after lunch, now, and Dean was sitting on one of the plastic couches in the main waiting area just outside of the security checkpoint, a laptop computer open in front of him. Several hundred people, most in casual tourist dress, sat elsewhere on the concourse, gathered in small groups talking, or were lining up to go through the checkpoint. He stared at the laptop's screen, his lips moving slightly as he continued to speak with Rubens three thousand miles away.
'Okay. This should do it.' Dean pressed the return key on his laptop. 'Initiating. Are you getting the signal?'
'Wait a second.'
There was a long pause. Transatlantic encrypted transmissions had been more and more uncertain of late. Communication satellite coverage wasn't as good these days as it had been ten years earlier, thanks to an aging infrastructure and some serious budget cuts. Even the NSA, with the largest budget of any branch of the U. S. intelligence community, had been feeling the bite lately.
'Okay,' Rubens' voice said. 'We've got it.'
Dean was seated only a couple of hundred feet from the upstairs room housing the backscatter X-ray security system, a deliberate positioning that kept him inside the range of the sophisticated surveillance device with which he was working. Inside his laptop case was a black plastic box with two long power cords — apparently an AC adapter for the computer. Although it could serve as an adapter, most of the space inside the box was taken up by a unit that could transmit low-power signals to the micro-circuitry embedded within the piece of tape Dean had left in the security office, initiating an information dump. The batteries were disguised as screws in the casing, while the coiled-up power cords served as an antenna. Dean's laptop, in turn, took the incoming data and boosted it along, via satellite, to Fort Meade.
The plastic strip adhering to the back of the computer console upstairs included a microphone only a little thicker than a human hair, and a simple-minded computer chip that could store a few seconds' worth of incoming sounds, then transmit them when Dean's remote unit pinged it. Power for that transmission came from the ping itself, so routine security scans of the upstairs office shouldn't pick it up, not even active scans by units designed to pick up feedback from more conventional microcircuitry.
'We're getting clear keystrokes,' Rubens told him. 'Don't move for a bit.'
'I'm not going anywhere,' Dean told him.
Upstairs, someone — either Lockwood or, God help them all, the young punk with the big mouth — was typing on the console keyboard, calling up names and other data on the passengers as they filed through. Each keystroke made a distinct sound, as individual as a fingerprint. As the strings of keystroke clacks and clatters were beamed across the Atlantic, they were processed and stored at the Tordella Supercomputer Facility on the grounds of Fort Meade.
Over the space of several hours, the NSA computers would gather more and more keyboard information. Space bars, for example, made a very different sound when struck than regular keys. So did the return key, and it was always struck at the end of a string of characters representing a command. Individual letters and numerals were slightly different from one another, and certain strokes — the numerals 1 and 2 and the letters e and a, for instance — were statistically more common than others. In the course of an afternoon, the NSA's powerful decryption algorithms could with fair to high reliability assign an ASCII code to each distinct keystroke click, producing a transcript of Lockwood's typing that would be almost as clear as it would have been if the Art Room had a camera peering over her shoulder. By tomorrow morning, the Art Room would be able to watch as she or whoever else might be on duty in the security office entered the passwords that gave them access to the entire system at the start of the workday.
And the NSA would then have that access as well.
That access wouldn't give direct access to all of the Royal Star Line's security and financial records, but it would give them direct access to the security software running on the company's internal network. Netguardz was one of several commercial and industrial software packages originally written by coders working for the NSA under a black project called Trojan Horse. Sold worldwide to government and business clients in over eighty countries, each program included built-in back doors allowing the NSA to bypass firewalls and security passwords as easily as if they weren't even there.
And since Royal Star Line did have computers that talked to the Internet for credit card transactions and taking reservations, Netguardz could use wireless technology to give the NSA direct access even to an internal system that was not hooked up to the Internet.
A tall, lanky man in a rumpled suit walked up and sat down on the plastic couch a few feet to Dean's right, unfolded a copy of the Sun, and began to read. Ilya Akulinin was relatively new to Desk Three. The son of naturalized Russian immigrants and a native of Brooklyn, New York, Akulinin spoke fluent Russian that had led to his running numerous ops with America's new Russian Federation allies, first as a Green Beret in the Army and now as an NSA officer working out of the agency's Deep Black ops department, and Desk Three.
'So what happened to your British nanny?' Akulinin asked, his voice pitched low enough that only Dean — and the electronic eavesdroppers in the Art Room back at Fort Meade, of course — could hear.
'Who, Mitchell?'
'Yeah. Looks like he was sticking pretty close to you all morning.'
'He took me to lunch in the employee cafeteria,' Dean said. 'Then he said he had work to do, we shook hands, and he left me on my own. Get the Art Room to read you the transcript, why don't you?'
'I would if you had anything interesting to say.'
'See the guy at two o'clock, gray suit, leaning against the wall next to the ladies' room?'
'Yeah.'
'He showed up five minutes after I sat down here. Pretending to wait for a friend in the rest room, but I think he's a tail.'
'Wouldn't be surprised. He has the MI5 look.'
What griped Dean was the perceived need to play these damned games. His time, he thought, could be used a hell of a lot more effectively tracking al-Qaeda operators, Russian mafia bad guys, or even putting in some time and rounds blowing holes in defenseless paper targets on the firing range back at Fort Meade. Spying on the Brits, on a cruise ship line, of all things, took international paranoia to a whole new low.
Ignoring Akulinin, Dean leaned in his seat and let his gaze move along the line of people checking on board the Atlantis Queen. Most of them, to judge by their occasionally loud but always upscale clothing, were well-to-do. Poor people did not book vacation cruises to the Mediterranean.
Some looked like businesspeople… with plenty of lawyers and doctors and a few accountants thrown into the mix. Most of the men were accompanied by wives, and a few by one or more kids as well, though, again, couples with small children didn't often take vacation cruises. The majority appeared to be older people, retirement age and above, which made sense. If you were retired, you might actually have the time to take a four-week cruise… to say nothing of the money.
There were exceptions, of course — with human beings there were always exceptions. A few older men were accompanied by much younger women who didn't look much like wives, for instance — and there were those two young men holding hands while they waited in line. There were even some more swarthy-skinned, black-haired individuals who might have been Middle Eastern, Pakistani, or Turkish, like the would-be drug smuggler he'd seen apprehended earlier.
But looking at individuals in the queue and trying to pick out the ones who might be terrorists simply didn't
