“Just what was USA-202 working on when it caught an A2TI?” Rubens asked.
“NRO restricted, sir, but the encrypted ID says it’s Agency.”
America’s premier code-breakers and SIGINT specialists, after all.
Rubens scowled briefly. Although the CIA had brought the NSA and Desk Three in on this op in the first place, they were still playing their little games, competing with the NSA for precious time on the available reconnaissance satellites. The bureaucracy grinds on …
The National Reconnaissance Office, which ran the technical end of spy satellite surveillance, provided imaging data to both the CIA and the NSA, among others. This morning, it seemed, while the NSA was trying to get observing time on
He decided he would need to talk to Collins about this.
“Mr. Rubens?” Marie’s voice said from behind the image of the Russian helicopter.
“Yes, Marie.”
“You wanted me to remind you when Ms. DeFrancesca reached her AO.”
Automatically, he glanced at his watch, then up at the line of clocks on the wall, each showing a different time zone. It was just past two in Berlin.
“Right, thank you.” Yes, there was still plenty of time before his appointment at the White House. “I’ll be right down.”
Lia DeFrancesca always felt a special thrill when she came here. She could feel the pulse of history in this place.
Her bright red fuck-me heels click-clacked across the brick pavement as she walked quickly across the Unter den Linden from the Hotel Adlon. To her left, across the broad, open expanse of the crowded Pariser Platz, rose the Brandenburg Gate, twelve monumental columns topped by a colossal quadriga, the Roman goddess Victoria’s chariot drawn by four horses abreast.
Once one of twelve gates through which visitors had entered the city of Berlin, the Brandenburg alone survived. It had been a symbol of the Nazi Party when they’d first come to power, and been one of the few structures still standing in the devastation of the Pariser Platz after the war. In 1961, when the Berlin Wall had gone up, the Brandenburg Gate had been just east of the line, in Soviet-controlled territory. The so-called Baby Wall had blocked East Berliners from the Gate, and the west end of the Pariser Platz itself had become part of the infamous death strip between the East and West sectors of the city. When President John F. Kennedy had visited the city in 1963, the Soviets had hung long red banners from the monument, symbolically preventing him from looking into East Berlin.
But the Berlin Wall had come down in 1989 as cheering crowds filled the Unter den Linden on both sides and met at the top. The Brandenburg Gate had reopened on December 22 of that year, when West German chancellor Helmut Kohl had walked through to be greeted by East German prime minister Hans Modrow. The reunification of Germany,
Today, the Brandenburg Gate was a symbol not merely of Germany but of
Lia’s meeting this afternoon was a tangible symbol of the capitalist West’s victory over the communist East. There, at the southwest corner of an office building overlooking the Pariser Platz, well within the boundaries of what had once been communist East Berlin, was a Starbucks coffeehouse.
Her contact, she saw, was already there, waiting for her beneath an umbrella at a sidewalk table.
The Cold War was over, but now a new and far deadlier war had begun — and the enemy, at least in this battle, was a certain sexist pig named Feng Jiu Zhu.
She took a deep breath. Lia was
3
William Rubens walked past Desk Three’s innermost security checkpoint and back into the Art Room. The huge high-definition monitor covering much of one wall of the chamber above the ranks of workstations and NSA personnel showed a live image blown up to movie-screen proportions, a cluster of sidewalk tables in front of a Starbucks
A heavyset Chinese man sat at the nearest table, studying Lia with obvious pleasure. There was nothing inscrutable about that stare as he looked her up and down.
“Is her backup in place?” Rubens asked.
Marie Telach gestured toward a second monitor, a smaller one hanging from a different wall. It showed a still photograph of the Pariser Platz from directly overhead, with each street and building labeled.
“Alabaster is there, on the street,” she said, indicating a red flag on the plaza perhaps thirty yards from Lia’s position. “Onyx One and Onyx Two are here — northwest corner of the Aldon Hotel, fifth floor. All three are keyed in and online.”
“Good.” Alabaster, Rubens knew, was CJ Howorth, currently in training as a field operator with Desk Three. Until recently, she’d been an employee of GCHQ, the British Government Communications Headquarters, and working out of the station at Menwith Hill, in North Yorkshire. GCHQ was closely linked with the American NSA, and with the far-flung Echelon SIGINT system. She was a linguist, a good one, but her sharp thinking and quick action during the
Onyx One was James Castelano, former Navy SEAL and an expert marksman. He was on the seventh floor of the Adlon with an M-110 SASS, or semiautomatic sniper system. One of the Art Room wall monitors was showing the image being transmitted live from Castelano’s electronic sight — a close-up of Feng’s leering face, the crosshairs centered on his forehead. Onyx Two was Harry Daimler, Castelano’s spotter.
“Ah! Miss Lau,” Feng said, standing awkwardly, bowing slightly and extending his hand. The camera peering down over the brim of her hat showed Lia’s hand reach out to be engulfed in Feng’s paw.
Lia’s cover for this op was that of a Chinese American businesswoman named Diane Lau. This meeting had been set up weeks ago, beginning with exploratory inquiries halfway around the world, in Hawaii. Feng was a big player in an international arms-smuggling operation quite possibly orchestrated by the government of the People’s Republic of China itself. Rubens hoped that Feng would offer Lia an advisory position on his staff, a job that would give her a shot at tapping Feng’s personal business empire. He was a senior vice president for COSCO, the China Ocean Shipping Company, and that fact by itself meant that Feng was of
