Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

It was a little different in Jackson, Mississippi. There it was the SAC-Special Agent in Charge-himself who made the call on Reverend Gerry Patterson’s First Baptist Church, located in an upscale suburb of the Mississippi state capital. The church was three-quarters of the way into its second century, and among the most prosperous of such congregations in the region. The Reverend Patterson could scarcely have been more impressive, impeccably turned out in a white button-down shirt and a striped blue tie. His dark suit coat was hung in a corner in deference to the local temperature. He greeted the visiting FBI official with regal manners, conducted him to his plush office, and asked how he could be of service. On hearing the first question, he replied, “Yu! Yes, a fine man, and a good friend from school. We used to call him Skip-Fa sounded too much like something from The Sound of Music, you know? A good guy, and a fine minister of the gospel. He could give lessons in faith to Jerry Falwell. Correspond with him? You bet I do! We send him something like twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Want to see a picture? We have it in the church itself. We were both a lot younger then,” Patterson added with a smile. “Skip’s got real guts. It can’t be much fun to be a Christian minister in China, you know? But he never complains. His letters are always upbeat. We could use a thousand more men like him in the clergy.”

“So, you are that impressed with him?” SAC Mike Leary asked.

“He was a good kid in college, and he’s a good man today, and a fine minister of the gospel who does his work in a very adverse environment. Skip is a hero to me, Mr. Leary.” Which was very powerful testimony indeed from so important a member of the community. First Baptist Church hadn’t had a mortgage in living memory, despite its impressive physical plant and amply cushioned pews.

The FBI agent stood. “That’s about all I need. Thank you, sir.”

“Can I ask why you came here to ask about my friend?”

Leary had expected that question, and so had preframed his answer. “Just a routine inquiry, sir. Your friend isn’t in any trouble at all-at least not with the United States government.”

“Good to know,” the Reverend Patterson responded, with a smile and a handshake. “You know, we’re not the only congregation that looks after Skip.”

Leary turned. “Really?”

“Of course. You know Hosiah Jackson?”

“Reverend Jackson, the Vice President’s dad? Never met him, but I know who he is.”

Patterson nodded. “Yep. Hosiah’s as good as they come.” Neither man commented on how unusual it would have been a mere forty years earlier for a white minister to comment so favorably on a black one, but Mississippi had changed over time, in some ways even faster than the rest of America. “I was over at his place a few years ago and we got talking about things, and this subject came up. Hosiah’s congregation sends Skip five or ten thousand dollars a year also, and he organized some of the other black congregations to help us look after Skip as well.”

Mississippi whites and blacks looking after a Chinese preacher, Leary thought. What was the world coming to? He supposed that Christianity might really mean something after all, and headed back to his office in his official car, content at having done some actual investigative work for a change, if not exactly for the FBI.

Cardinal McCarthy learned from his secretary that his two requests for information had been answered before lunch, which was impressive even by the standards of the FBI–Catholic Church alliance. Soon after his midday meal, Cardinal McCarthy personally encrypted both of the replies and forwarded them back to Rome. He didn’t know why the inquiry had come, but figured that he’d find out in due course if it were important, and if not, then not. It amused the churchman to be the Vatican’s master spy in America.

It would have amused him less to know that the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, was interested in this sideshow activity also, and that their monster Thinking Machines, Inc., supercomputer in the cavernous basement under the main building in the sprawling complex was on the case. This machine, whose manufacturer had gone bankrupt some years before, had been both the pride and joy and the greatest disappointment in the huge collection of computers at NSA, until quite recently, when one of the agency’s mathematicians had finally figured out a way to make use of it. It was a massive parallel-processing machine and supposedly operated much as the human brain did, theoretically able to attack a problem from more than one side simultaneously, just as the human brain was thought to do. The problem was that no one actually knew how the human brain worked, and as a result drafting the software to make full use of the hugely powerful computer had been impossible for some years. This had relegated the impressive and expensive artifact to no more practical utility than an ordinary workstation. But then someone had recognized the fact that quantum mechanics had become useful in the cracking of foreign ciphers, wondered why this should be the case, and started looking at the problems from the programming unit. Seven months later, that intellectual sojourn had resulted in the first of three new operating systems for the Thinking Machines Super-Cruncher, and the rest was highly classified history. NSA was now able to crack any book or machine cipher in the world, and its analysts, newly rich with information, had pitched in to have a woodworker construct a sort of pagan altar to put before the Cruncher for the notional sacrifice of goats before their new god. (To suggest the sacrifice of virgins would have offended the womenfolk at the agency.) NSA had long been known for its eccentric institutional sense of humor. The only real fear was that the world would learn about the TAPDANCE system NSA had come up with, which was totally random, and therefore totally unbreakable, plus easy to manufacture-but it was also an administrative nightmare, and that would prevent most foreign governments from using it.

The Cardinal’s Internet dispatches were copied, illegally but routinely, by NSA and fed into the Cruncher, which spat out the clear text, which found its way quickly to the desk of an NSA analyst, who, it had been carefully determined beforehand, wasn’t Catholic.

That’s interesting, the analyst thought. Why is the Vatican interested in some Chink minister? And why the hell did they go to New York to find out about him? Oh, okay, educated over here, and friends in Mississippi … what the hell is this all about? He was supposed to know about such things, but that was merely the theory under which he operated. He frequently didn’t know beans about the information he looked at, but was honest enough to tell his superiors that. And so, his daily report was forwarded electronically to his supervisor, who looked it over, coded it, and then forwarded it to CIA, where three more analysts looked it over, decided that they didn’t know what to make of it either, and then filed it away, electronically. In this case, the data went onto VHS-sized tape cassettes, one of which went into storage container Doc, and the other into Grumpy-there are seven such storage units in the CIA computer room, each named after one of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs-while the reference names went into the mainframe so that the computer would know where to look for the data for which the United States government as yet had no understanding. That situation was hardly unknown, of course, and for that reason CIA had every bit of information it generated in a computerized and thoroughly cross-referenced index, instantly accessible, depending on classification, to anyone in either the New or Old Headquarters Buildings located one ridgeline away from the Potomac River. Most of the data in the Seven Dwarfs just sat there, forevermore to be untouched, footnotes to footnotes, never to be of interest even to the driest of academics.