Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“Got a question.”

“Okay.”

“Got any one-timers left?”

“Why do you ask?”

“We just like the extra security,” she replied. The studiedly casual reply didn’t work.

“You telling me my systems aren’t secure?” Russell asked in well-hidden alarm.

“There is reason to believe some of our encryption systems are not fully secure, Mike,” Ed told the embassy Communications Officer.

“Shit,” he breathed, then turned with some embarrassment. “Oh, sorry, Mary.”

She smiled. “It’s okay, Mike. I don’t know what the word means, but I’ve heard it spoken before.” The joke didn’t quite get to Russell. The previous revelation was too earthshaking for him to see much humor at the moment.

“What can you tell me about that?”

“Not a thing, Mike,” the Station Chief said.

“But you think it’s solid?”

“Regrettably, yes.”

“Okay, back in my safe I do have a few old pads, eight or nine years old. I never got rid of them-you just never know, y’know?”

“Michael, you’re a good man.” Ed nodded his approval.

“They’re good for maybe ten dispatches of about a hundred words each-assuming they still have matching pads at Fort Meade, but the guys I report to don’t throw much away. They will have to dig them out of some file drawer, though.”

“How hard to use them?”

“I hate the goddamned things. You know why. Damn it, guys, the new STRIPE cipher is just a year old. The new Brit system is an adaptation of it. I know the team in Z-Division who developed it. I’m talking 128-bit keying, plus a daily key that’s unique to the individual machines. No way in hell you can crack that.”

“Unless they have an agent-in-place at Fort Meade, Mike,” Ed pointed out.

“Then let me get my hands on him, and I’ll skin the motherfucker alive with my Buck hunting knife.” The very thought had jacked up his blood pressure enough that he didn’t apologize to the lady present for his vulgarity. This black man had killed and skinned his share of white-tailed deer, but he still had a hankering to convert a bear into a rug, and a big ol’ Russian brown bear would suit him just fine. “Okay, I can’t tell The Fort about this?”

“Not with STRIPE you can’t,” Foley answered.

“Well, when you hear a big, angry shout from the West, you’ll know what it is.”

“Better you don’t discuss this with anybody right now, Mike,” Mary Pat thought out loud. “They’ll find out soon enough through other channels.”

That told Russell that the Rabbit signal he’d dispatched the other day was about somebody they wanted to get out in a hurry, and now he figured he knew why. Their Rabbit was a communications specialist, and damned sure when you got one of those, you got him the hell on the first train out of Dodge. Soon enough meant right the hell now, or as close to it as you could arrange.

“Okay, get me your signal. I’ll encrypt it on my STRIPE machine and then one-time-pad it. If they’re reading my signals”-he managed not to shudder-“will that tell them anything?”

“You tell me,” Ed Foley replied.

Russell thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, it shouldn’t. Even when you can crack the other guy’s systems, you never get more than a third of the traffic. The systems are too complex for that-unless the other guy’s agent-in-place is reading the cleartext on the far end. Ain’t no defense against that, least not from my point of view.”

And that was the other very scary thought. It was, after all, the same game they played and the same objective they were constantly trying to achieve. Get a guy all the way inside who could get the all-the-way-inside information back out. Like their agent CARDINAL, a word they never spoke aloud. But that was the game they’d chosen and, while they knew the other side was pretty good, they figured that they were better. And that was the name of that tune.

“Okay, Mike. Our friend believes in one-time pads. I guess everybody does.”

“Ivan sure as hell does, but it must drive their troops crazy, having to go through every signal one letter at a time.”

“Ever work the penetration side?” Ed Foley asked him.

Russell shook his head at once. “Not smart enough. Good thing, too. A lot of those guys end up in rubber rooms cutting out paper dolls with blunted scissors. Hey, I know a lot of the guys in Z-Division. The boss guy there just turned down the chair in math at Cal Tech. He’s pretty smart,” Russell estimated. “Damned sight smarter than I’ll ever be. Ed Popadopolous’s-his name is Greek-father used to run a restaurant up in Boston. Ask me if I want his job.”

“No, eh?”

“Not even if they threw in Pat Cleveland as a fringe benefit.” And that was one fine-looking lady, Ed Foley knew. Mike Russell really did need a woman in his life. .

“Okay, I’ll get you a dispatch in about an hour. Okay?”

“Cool.” Russell headed out.

“Well, I think we rattled his cage pretty hard,” MP thought aloud.

“Admiral Bennett at Fort Meade ain’t going to be real happy either. I got a signal to draft.”

“Okay, I’ll see how Eddie’s doing with his crayons.” And Mary Patricia Kaminsky Foley took her leave as well.

JUDGE ARTHUR MOORE’S morning briefing normally happened at 7:30 in the morning, except on Sunday, when he slept late, and so it took place at 9:00. His wife even recognized the knock of the National Intelligence Officer who delivered the daily intelligence news, always in the private study of his Great Falls house, which was swept weekly by the Agency’s best debugging expert.

The world had been relatively quiet the previous day-even communists liked to relax on weekends, he’d learned on taking the job.

“Anything else, Tommy?” the Judge asked.

“Some bad news from Budapest,” the NIO answered. “Our Station Chief, James Szell, got burned by the opposition making a pickup. Details unknown, but he got himself PNG’d by the Hungarian government. His principal deputy, Robert Taylor, is out of the country on personal business. So Station Budapest is out of business for the moment.”

“How bad is that?” Not too bad, the DCI thought.

“Not a major tragedy. Nothing much seems to happen in Hungary. Their military is pretty much a minor player in the Warsaw Pact, and their foreign policy, aside from the things they do in their immediate neighborhood, is just a mirror image of Moscow’s. The station’s been passing us a fair amount of military information, but the Pentagon doesn’t worry too much about it. Their army doesn’t train enough to be a threat to much of anybody, and the Soviets regard them as unreliable,” the NIO concluded.

“Is Szell somebody to screw up?” Moore asked. He vaguely remembered meeting the guy at an Agency get-together.

“Actually, Jimmy is well regarded. As I said, sir, we don’t have any details yet. He’ll probably be home by the end of the week.”

“Okay. That does it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nothing new on the Pope?”

“Not a word, sir, but it’ll take time for our people to shake all their trees.”

“That’s what Ritter says.”

IT TOOK FOLEY almost an hour to write up his dispatch. It had to be short but comprehensive, and that taxed his writing ability. Then he walked it down to Mike Russell’s office. He sat there and watched a grumbling chief communications officer one-time-pad the words one goddamned letter at a time, pad it with more Czech surnames, then super-encrypt on his STRIPE encryption machine. With that done, it went on the secure fax machine, which, of course, encrypted the text one more time, but in a graphics fashion rather than an alphanumeric one. The fax encryption was relatively simple, but since the opposition-which was assumed to monitor the embassy’s satellite transmitter-could not tell if the signal was graphics or text, that was just one more hoop for their decryption people to jump through. The signal went up to a geosynchronous satellite and back down to different downlinks, one at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, another at Sunnyvale, California, and, of course, one at Fort Meade, Maryland, to which the other stations sent their “take” via secure fiber-optic landlines.