Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

Despite his background, Reilly didn’t add. Golovko was KGB, formerly a deadly enemy to the West, and an enemy to President Ryan, but somewhere along the line they’d met each other and they’d come to respect each other-even like each other, so the stories in Washington went. Reilly finished off his second vodka and waved for another. He was turning into a Russian, the FBI agent thought. It was getting to the point that he couldn’t hold an intelligent conversation without a drink or two.

“So, get him and thereby hurt your president, and thereby hurt your entire country. Still, it’s one hell of a dangerous play, Oleg Gregoriyevich.”

“A very dangerous play, Mishka,” Provalov agreed. “Who would do such a thing?”

Reilly let out a long and speculative breath. “One very ambitious motherfucker.” He had to get back to the embassy and light up his STU-6 in one big fucking hurry. He’d tell Director Murray, and Murray would tell President Ryan in half a New York minute. Then what? It was way the hell over his head, Mike Reilly thought.

“Okay, you’re covering this Suvorov guy.”

“We and the Federal Security Service now,” Provalov confirmed.

“They good?”

“Very,” the militia lieutenant admitted. “Suvorov can’t fart without us knowing what he had to eat.”

“And you have his communications penetrated.”

Oleg nodded. “The written kind. He has a cell phone-maybe more than one, and covering them can be troublesome.”

“Especially if he has an encryption system on it. There’s stuff commercially available now that our people have a problem with.”

“Oh?” Provalov’s head came around. He was surprised for two reasons: first, that there was a reliable encryption system available for cell phones, and second, that the Americans had trouble cracking it.

Reilly nodded. “Fortunately, the bad guys haven’t found out yet.” Contrary to popular belief, the Mafia wasn’t all that adept at using technology. Microwaving their food was about as far as they went. One Mafia don had thought his cell phone secure because of its frequency-hopping abilities, and then had entirely canceled that supposed advantage out by standing still while using it! The dunce-don had never figured that out, even after the intercept had been played aloud in Federal District Court.

“We haven’t noticed any of that yet.”

“Keep it that way,” Reilly advised. “Anyway, you have a national-security investigation.”

“It’s still murder and conspiracy to commit murder,” Provalov said, meaning it was still his case.

“Anything I can do?”

“Think it over. You have good instincts for Mafia cases, and that is probably what it is.”

Reilly tossed off his last drink. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow, right here?”

Oleg nodded. “That is good.”

The FBI agent walked back outside and got into his car. Ten minutes later, he was at his desk. He took the plastic key from his desk drawer and inserted it into the STU, then dialed Washington.

All manner of people with STU phones had access to Murray’s private secure number, and so when the large system behind his desk started chirping, he just picked it up and listened to the hiss of static for thirty seconds until the robotic voice announced, “Line is secure.”

“Murray,” he said.

“Reilly in Moscow,” the other voice said.

The FBI Director checked his desk clock. It was pretty damned late there. “What’s happening, Mike?” he asked, then got the word in three fast-spoken minutes.

Yeah, Ellen?” Ryan said when the buzzer went off.

“The AG and the FBI Director want to come over, on something important, they said. You have an opening in forty minutes.”

“Fair enough.” Ryan didn’t wonder what it was about. He’d find out quickly enough. When he realized what he’d just thought, he cursed the Presidency once more. He was becoming jaded. In this job?

What the hell?” Ed Foley observed.

“Seems to be solid information, too,” Murray told the DCI.

“What else do you know?”

“The fax just came in, only two pages, and nothing much more than what I just told you, but I’ll send it over to you. I’ve told Reilly to offer total cooperation. Anything to offer from your side?” Dan asked.

“Nothing comes to mind. This is all news to us, Dan. My congrats to your man Reilly for turning it.” Foley was an information whore, after all. He’d take from anybody.

“Good kid. His father was a good agent, too.” Murray knew better than to be smug about it, and Foley didn’t deserve the abuse. Things like this were not, actually, within CIA’s purview, and not likely to be tumbled to by one of their operations.

For his part, Foley wondered if he’d have to tell Murray about SORGE. If this was for real, it had to be known at the very highest levels of the Chinese government. It wasn’t a freelance operation by their Moscow station. People got shot for fucking around at this level, and such an operation would not even occur to communist bureaucrats, who were not the most inventive people in the world.

“Anyway, I’m taking Pat Martin over with me. He knows espionage operations from the defensive side, and I figure I’ll need the backup.”

“Okay, thanks. Let me go over the fax and I’ll be back to you later today.”

He could hear the nod at the other end. “Right, Ed. See ya.”

His secretary came in thirty seconds later with a fax in a folder. Ed Foley checked the cover sheet and called his wife in from her office.

Shit,” Ryan observed quietly when Murray handed him the fax from Moscow. ”Shit!” he added on further reflection. ”Is this for real?”

“We think so, Jack,” the FBI Director confirmed. He and Ryan went back more than ten years, and so he was able to use the first name. He filled in a few facts. “Our boy Reilly, he’s an OC expert, that’s why we sent him over there, but he has FCI experience, too, also in the New York office. He’s good, Jack,” Murray assured his President. “He’s going places. He’s established a very good working relationship with the local cops-helped them out on some investigations, held their hands, like we do with local cops over here, y’know?”

“And?”

“And this looks gold-plated, Jack. Somebody tried to put a hit on Sergey Nikolay’ch, and it looks as though it was an agency of the Chinese government.”

“Jesus. Rogue operation?”

“If so, we’ll find out when some Chinese minister dies of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage-induced by a bullet in the back of the head,” Murray told the President.

“Has Ed Foley seen this yet?”

“I called it in, and sent the fax over. So, yeah, he’s seen it.”

“Pat?” Ryan turned to the Attorney General, the smartest lawyer Ryan had yet met, and that included all of his Supreme Court appointees.

“Mr. President, this is a stunning revelation, again, if we assume it’s true, and not some sort of false-flag provocation, or a play by the Russians to make something happen-problem is, I can’t see the rationale for such a thing. We appear to be faced with something that’s too crazy to be true, and too crazy to be false as well. I’ve worked foreign counterintelligence operations for a long time. I’ve never seen nothing like this before. We’ve always had an understanding with the Russians that they wouldn’t hit anybody in Washington, and we wouldn’t hit anybody in Moscow, and to the best of my knowledge that agreement was never violated by either side. But this thing here. If it’s real, it’s tantamount to an act of war. That doesn’t seem like a very prudent thing for the Chinese to do either, does it?”