Strategic Moves (Stone Barrington 19)

“No, I expect she asked you to sign the Official Secrets Act.”

The secretary reentered the room before Stone could reply and handed the form to Freeman, who looked it over, signed it, and handed it to Lance.

Lance looked it over, too. “May I use your fax machine?” he asked.

“Of course,” Mike replied. He led Lance over to a bookcase and opened a panel for him, revealing the machine. Lance pressed a couple of buttons and dialed a number. “Will it send both sides of the document?” he asked.

“Yes,” Freeman said, “if you select that option.”

Lance sent the document, then returned to his chair and put the form into his briefcase. “We’ll have a response shortly,” Lance said.

“Don’t you have to conduct an investigation?” Stone asked.

“Yes, but for the moment we will compare the information on the form electronically with what we already know about Mike, to be sure there are no discrepancies.”

This did not seem to worry Mike.

Lance’s cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” he said. He held the phone to his ear. “Yes?” He listened for a moment. “Thank you,” he said, and hung up. “Well, that’s done. Now we can proceed, I think.”

TEN

Lance leaned forward in his chair. “Mike, let me outline a not altogether hypothetical situation in which you might be very helpful to the Agency and to your adopted country.”

Freeman said nothing, just nodded.

“Let us say that there exists in a fairly large city of this country a financial institution which we have reason to believe has been funneling funds to an Al Qaeda subsidiary in Indonesia.”

Mike nodded again.

“This institution has a virtually foolproof safeguard against outside intrusions into its computer network.”

“I would be very interested to hear about those safeguards,”

Freeman said.

“Essentially,” Lance replied, “while they use outside connections to send data, they do not receive data except on a single connection, which has not only the latest in firewall protections, but on which every incoming request for data is vetted by a human operator before it is passed on to the central computer.”

Freeman frowned. “That sounds almost too simple,” he said.

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it? Oh, their ordinary office computer system accesses and downloads from the Internet, but their system for transmitting and receiving secure data is discrete from that.”

“You want us to supply you with people who can hack into their computers?” Freeman asked. “I should think the National Security Agency could better handle that.”

“Of course,” Lance replied. “Unfortunately, the bulk of their personnel are not available to us . . . on-site, let us say.”

“You mean they won’t do a black bag job for you?” Stone asked.

“To put it crudely,” Lance said drily.

Freeman spoke up. “Am I to understand that you want us to put our people inside this institution for the purpose of sacking their computer system?”

“At our present level of expertise, that is the fastest way for us to gain access to their secure data.”

Freeman had not stopped frowning. “You want us to carry out an illegal entry into their offices and steal their data.”

“We would, of course, provide umbrella protection from prosecution to your people,” Lance said.

Stone spoke up. “I’m sure that Richard Nixon offered the same protection to the Watergate burglars.”