to Peru. It was a gesture of cooperation facilitated by the DDO, no doubt intended to show that Collins had no hard feelings about the mission, which had been authorized directly by the president and national security adviser. The complicated and delicate mission was precisely the sort Desk Three was invented to handle, but Rubens knew Collins felt that her people should have conducted it. Undoubtedly she saw it as yet one more instance of Deep Black encroaching on her agency’s domain. The CIA had made a strong play to “own” Desk Three when the high- tech covert group was first proposed, and Collins was nothing if not a sore loser.
“Vice President Ortez is still running second, I see,” said Collins, sipping her drink — it would be a very weak vodka martini.
“Yes,” said Rubens. “But the race is very close.”
Much closer, in fact, than the polls showed — assuming the information Deep Black was working on was correct, Ortez was the one who was trying to steal the election.
“Imberbe would be a good president,” said Collins. “Though I wouldn’t call him pro-American. Don’t you agree?”
“I really don’t have an opinion,” he told her.
“Oh, you always have an opinion, Bill. You’re just very careful about sharing it.”
Touche, thought Rubens. But he refused to be provoked. “I would say that the problems in Peru are so intractable that any leader would have a difficult time. Ortez has always been anti-American, and he’s been much more vocal about it than the present president. As for Imberbe, he is a reasonably intelligent man. The fact that the company he owns had done much business with America is a plus, and his statements would certainly lead one to think he would be more in sync with us than most of the others. But who can see the future?”
“Not you.”
“Not I.”
There was applause. The first speaker was ambling toward the podium.
“If we can do anything more to help you, you’ll let us know,” said Collins.
She tapped his shoulder gently. For just a moment, the shadow of what he had once felt for her crossed over him. It quickly lifted, but it left him confused and off-balance, un-characteristically paralyzed.
He forced himself to nod graciously. He reminded himself that she was a viper. He told himself that she must have some ulterior motive, that nothing Debra Collins did was accidental, that surely she had been watching for her chance to accost him all through the lunch. By the time Rubens returned to his table, he was back in control, his feelings — misguided, surely — safety locked in a place where they could neither interfere with his judgment nor surprise him with their ferocity again.
6
“The vault room dates from the late nineteenth century,” said the Peruvian election official who met Lia and Fernandez at the bank. “It has survived several robbery attempts, including one by Yankee banditos. There are still scratches on the outside of the door from the dynamite when they tried to blow it up. The room here—” He swung around, gesturing at the high-ceilinged lobby.
“Tell her who the bandits were,” Fernandez prompted.
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is rumor, only.”
A false one, Lia knew — it had been mentioned during her briefing. The western outlaws had spent time in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America, but they’d never come to Peru.
Not to mention the fact that the safe had been built several years after they died. But it was a good story, and Lia saw no sense in interrupting the man as he fleshed it out with a legend about a local romance between Cassidy and the wife of the bank president. Feigning interest, Lia turned her real attention to the security setup, making sure it jibed with what she’d been told by the Art Room on the way over, as well as during her earlier briefing.
The vault was a large steel and concrete encased room, partly underground, sealed by an impressively massive steel door. The room had its own level a few steps down from the lobby. There were two restrooms to the left along a narrow hallway and two equipment closets jammed with gear to the right. Surveillance cameras, both video and infrared, monitored the lobby and vault entrance. There were also motion detectors, but the system had been turned off because guards were now in the bank around the clock.
Two stood just inside the main entrance. They were armed with MP5 submachine guns. Two more guards, also with submachine guns, stood along the rail above the vault floor. A final pair stood just outside the vault door. There were plainclothes guards at the foot of the steps from the lobby; they checked credentials of anyone entering the vault. A trio of Peruvian election officials assisted them and tried to look as important as possible.
A reporter had come to the bank to do a story on the procedures that had been adopted to ensure a fair election, as well as some of the security surrounding the voting machines and related equipment. Though not allowed into the vault itself, he was being given a lecture near the security checkpoint by a carefully coiffured Peruvian government official, who assured him the special voter cards stored here guaranteed an honest result.
“They must have done a dozen interviews here in the last week and a half,” Fernandez told Lia. “The cards and the vault have become symbols of the fairness of the election.”
The official had a model of one of the cards in his hand, holding it out for the man to see. About half as big as a credit card, it looked like a Bic cigarette lighter that had been flattened by a cement mixer. A tapered end housed eight small tonguelike connectors, the slivers of metal looking a bit like flat piano keys. The indentations in the connectors added to the complexity of counterfeiting them.
“This allows the vote to be recorded,” the official said in a sonorous voice. “No impostors.”
He explained that there would only be three cards per voting place and that they had to be entered each time to record a vote. The cards included a chip that produced a 128-byte “key” that “unlocked” communications between two different parts of the system, which as a layman’s explanation of the security system was nearly as good as the considerably more technical brief Lia had received during the mission planning. Since the chips were custom designed and had been delivered only a week before, anyone interested in beating the encryption, let alone duplicating the cards, faced an almost insurmountable task.
Unless the cards had been hacked before they were supplied. In that case, rather than guaranteeing a fair vote, the cards could be used to steal the election rather easily. Which was the reason Lia was here.
Six days ago, an informant at the company that made the chips told the FBI that twelve cards had been engineered to guarantee that Ramon Ortez, the current vice president, would win. The informant had supplied a list of serial numbers for the chips used on the cards; the IDs were not written on the chips or the cards but could be obtained by querying them with a special reader.
The hack was extremely sophisticated — so much so that it had taken the NSA’s experts nearly a day and a half to decide that it was conceptually possible and then design a way to test the cards, which were already in Peru.
Making sure Peru’s elections were held had become a priority for the U.S. following several reversals for democracy in other South American countries over the past six months, including a coup in Brazil. But the fact that Ortez was known to be rabidly anti-U.S. complicated the situation, as did his intimate relation with the current government.
The U.S. couldn’t announce that the cards had been hacked without being absolutely certain that they were. The hack had gone undetected by all of the earlier tests the monitors employed. Working undercover as a specialist brought in for a last-minute check, Lia would upload data from one of the cards so that the NSA specialists could determine whether it was indeed a clever hack or an even more clever hoax.
The question was, what happened next? If the cards had been tampered with, simply revealing the hack might backfire. The company that had made the cards was American, and Ortez would surely claim that the U.S. had set him up. Public sentiment in the region was running heavily against the U.S., and it was very likely he’d be believed. Meanwhile, the UN election committee had indicated that if it detected fraud it would call for a delay in the election. That would also hand Ortez the presidency — the current president was very sick and had already
