Conspiracy db-6 Read online

  “Excuse me,” said Duong, and without saying anything else, he turned and walked toward the door, not even stopping to put his half-empty plate down.

  35

  Living and working in a communist country under a dicta-torship had certain severe disadvantages for citizens, but it did make some things easier for spies. Case in point: official-looking documents were rarely questioned, as long as they had official-looking signatures.

  The papers Tommy Karr had directing him to appear in the office of the deputy chief of trade on the third floor of the interior ministry were signed and stamped in three places.

  The guard at the front door squinted at each stamp, then opened the door and waved Karr inside.

  The man at the desk proved suspicious. Noting that it was after hours, he decided to call the deputy chief’s office.

  His vigilance earned him a severe tongue-lashing from the deputy chief’s “assistant”—aka Thu De Nghiem, who answered the phone after the call was routed to him by the Art Room’s hackers. Red-faced, the security officer personally escorted Karr to the elevator, even leaning inside and pushing the button for the third floor.

  “What’d you say to him?” Karr asked the Art Room as the elevator started upward.

  “He asked why the deputy chief was working late,” Rockman told him. “Thu told him to save his questions for his performance review.”

  “That’ll fix him.”

  “Once you’re out of the elevator, the stairs should be the second door on the right.”

  “Feel blind without video surveillance cameras, huh?” said Karr.

  “They would help.”

  “Makes it easier for me,” said Karr, who didn’t have to worry about the guard following him upstairs through the monitors. He did, of course, have to make sure he got off on the right floor, which was why he headed for the stairs as soon as he got there. Thao Duong’s office was on the fifth floor.

  “Just plant plenty of video bugs as you go, OK?”

  “Sure will. How’s the one downstairs?”

  “Guard’s still there.”

  “Fire code violation,” said Karr when he found the door locked. He bent down to examine the lock. “Wafer tumbler lock,” he announced. He reached into his lock pick kit for a diamond pick.

  “Tommy, we have a shadow from one of those offices down the hall on the right,” said Rockman. “Someone’s coming.” Karr had already heard the footsteps and straightened.

  “Who are you?” asked the man in Vietnamese.

  The Art Room translator gave Karr the Vietnamese words to reply, but the op had already decided on a better strategy.

  “ ’Scuse me,” he said. “I wonder if you could direct me to Mr. Hoa’s office? I seem to have gotten lost. I’m supposed to be there like five minutes ago.”

  “Who are you?” repeated the man, again in Vietnamese.

  “See, I have this paper.”

  Karr took out the paper he had used to get into the building.

  The man was unimpressed. “Mr. Hoa has gone home,” he told Karr. “Leave.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand Vietnamese,” said Karr, though what the man was saying would have been clear even without Thu De Nghiem explaining it in his ear.

  “Tommy, get out of there,” said Telach.

  “Go!” said the man, using English this time. “Go!”

  “I don’t want to get in trouble,” said Karr.

  “You come back tomorrow,” said the Vietnamese man, switching back to his native tongue. “Go.”

  “You gotta give me back my paper.”

  Karr reached for it. The man shook his head.

  “Just go, Tommy,” said Telach.

  Karr placed his hand on the Vietnamese official’s shoulder. He was a good foot taller than the man, and probably weighed twice as much.

  “I get my paper back now,” Karr said. “Or I throw you out the window at the end of the hall over there.”

  “You need that translated, Tommy?” asked the Art Room translator.

  “He understood perfectly,” said Karr under his breath, walking back to the elevator with the paper in his hand.

  36

  While the deep Black operatives were conducting what might be called a point attack on the Vietnamese, Robert Gallo was in charge of a broader effort, one that took place over several battlefields, all of them electronic.

  The NSA routinely monitored transmissions from several countries, collecting literally mountains of data every day.

  There was so much, in fact, that much of it was never inspected by a human. Even the automated programs that looked for things like key words or “hot” e-mail routes couldn’t inspect every single message.

  Once the Deep Black mission was initiated, a team of analysts specifically assigned to Desk Three began culling through the data. Their efforts were still primarily guided by automated programs, which helped them analyze the information in a variety of ways. Not even the most optimistic member of the team expected to find a specific message that said “kill this person.” What they hoped to spot was a sequence of communications that indicated some sort of conspiracy — transfers of money, communications that did not fit an “ordinary” diplomatic pattern, and that sort of thing.

  Gallo was assigned to work with those analysts, looking to see if there were systems that were not being tapped and which deserved to be. When the analysts developed a theory that an assassination team might be a private enterprise only partly supported, if at all, by the government, they gave him a list of servers being used by Vietnamese businesses. He began penetrating them, using “bots” or automated programs, in this case similar to viruses, to get the servers to give up information about themselves.

  Angela DiGiacomo helped him handle the bots, which had a tendency to get “lost”—though bots were rarely tripped up by security protocols, errors in programming on the host’s end occasionally scuttled them. DiGiacomo was very good at debugging the systems, figuring out where the problems lay, and adapting the programs to work around them without being detected.

  She was also extremely attractive. Gallo found himself stealing glances at her breasts as she complained about the inept coding of a Chinese gateway that had been giving her all sorts of hassles.

  “What do you think I should do?” Angela asked him.

  Gallo felt his palms starting to sweat. What he wanted her to do had nothing to do with work.

  “Fix it for them?” he stuttered finally.

  She rolled her eyes and went back to work.

  37

  having failed to get in through the front door, Karr resorted to Plan B — the back door.

  Or more precisely, the back basement door, which was not only locked but also connected to a burglar alarm system.

  Neither problem was insurmountable. The same pick that would have opened the door to the stairs worked equally well on the basement lock. The alarm system employed a magnetic sensor that would set off an alert as soon as the magnet was removed or the circuit broken. There were a number of ways around this; the easiest — in this case — was by using a second magnet and a metal shim.

  The difficulty came from the fact that the building’s rear door could be seen from several restaurants and storefronts across the street. So to prepare his way, Karr had to first find a way to become invisible.

  A large truck had been parked just up the street. Too bad it hadn’t been parked about ten yards to the south, thought Karr; then it would easily block the view.

  Well, that wasn’t really a problem, was it?

  Within a few minutes Karr had jumped the truck and moved it behind the building. The view of the door now cut off, Karr went to work. He used his handheld PDA as a gauss-meter, locating the alarm system’s magnet sensor mounted in the threshold. Though it was an unusual spot, it was not difficult to defeat; Karr slid a small neodymium-iron-boron magnet into place as he pushed open the door. A wadded Vietnamese newspaper kept the spring-loaded door ajar, giving him
an easier escape route if needed.

  The door opened into the bottom floor of the stairwell Karr had been trying to enter earlier. Karr put on his night glasses and started climbing.

  “Tommy, Marie thinks you ought to wait until Dean comes over to back you up,” said Rockman. “Shouldn’t be too long now.”

  “Great idea,” said Karr, continuing up the steps.

  “I thought you were going to wait.”

  “I didn’t say I would wait. I said it was a good idea.” Karr moved as quickly and as quietly as he could up the steps. He stopped when he reached the fifth floor, double-checking to make sure there was no alarm on the door.

  “Clear or not clear?” he asked Rockman.

  “We don’t have video.”

  “I’m looking for a bet,” said Karr. He got down to his knees and slid a small video bug beneath the door.

  “Clear,” said the runner in a resigned voice.

  The door was locked, and once more Karr had to break out the pick.

  “Guess they never have fires in Vietnam, huh?” He slipped the pick in, pushed up gently, then stepped into the darkened hallway.

  Thao Duong’s office was near the end of the hallway. Surprisingly large, it had a simple metal desk and a comfortable chair, but no other furniture, not even a bookshelf or a place for a visitor to sit. Papers were stacked along the left wall, some as high as Karr’s waist.

  “Single computer on the desk,” Karr told the Art Room as he checked the sole drawer. It contained only two pens. “PC.

  No network card that I see.”

  “Wireless network?” asked Rockman.

  “Not sure.” Karr took out his PDA and tapped the screen, bringing up a simple wireless detection program. The dialog button on the screen remained brown — no wireless signal.

  “Nada.”

  Karr inserted a small electronic dongle into one of the computer’s USB ports at the rear, then booted the computer.

  Karr’s dongle, about the size of a lipstick, allowed him to bypass the computer’s normal operating system, making it easier to upload its contents to the Art Room. As the machine came to life, he took a wire from his pocket and inserted one end into a second USB port, then connected it to his sat phone. When that was done, he went over to the papers.

  “This is all Vietnamese to me,” he told Rockman, removing his PDA from his pocket. He slipped a camera attachment on it and began beaming images of the stacked pages to the Art Room.

  “Agricultural reports,” said Thu De Nghiem.

  After a couple of stacks, Karr realized that each pile represented a different province. The stacks contained an assortment of agricultural information dating back six or seven years.

  Not exactly what he’d hoped to find.

  “How’s that download coming?” he asked Rockman.

  “We’re about halfway done.”

  Karr sat down in front of the desk, considering where he should plant the audio bug he’d brought. Given the lack of furniture, the most logical place was in the computer, but that also meant it would be the most likely place anyone would look for it.

  Under the pile of papers?

  Hard to tell when they might be moved.

  There was a thermostat on the wall.

  Karr decided there was no sense being too cute and decided to simply stick the bug under the desk. Since he was already sitting on the floor, he leaned back and crawled under. But as he started to put the bug in place he saw a large envelope taped to the bottom of the desk in his way.

  “What have we here?” he said, pocketing the bug. He undid the tape and took the envelope down.

  “Tommy — Thao Duong is walking toward the building.”

  “No shit? My building?”

  “Get out of there.”

  “You finished with the download?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s your hurry?”

  Karr undid the clasp on the envelope. There were newspaper clippings inside, and a small key, the sort that would be used for a locker.

  Karr took out his video bug and scanned the key.

  “You got all this?” he asked Rockman.

  “Of course we got it,” said Rockman. “Get out of there, Tommy. Out. He’s in the lobby.”

  Karr put the key back in the envelope and returned it to its hiding spot.

  “Done with the download?” he asked, climbing back to his feet.

  “We’re done — go. Go!”

  Karr turned off the computer and pulled his gear away, trotting to the door. As he was about to open it, he realized he’d forgotten to plant his bug. Necessity being the mother of invention, he decided the top of the doorjamb was a perfect place not only for an audio bug but for a video one as well.

  “Pictures with the words,” he told the Art Room, starting to turn the doorknob.

  “The elevator is opening on your floor,” hissed Rockman.

  “It’s Thao Duong. Get out of there.”

  “Great advice,” said Karr, taking his hand off the knob and stepping back into the room.

  38

  Once he made contact with the Vietnamese official, Dean’s job at the reception was over. He had to stay to maintain his cover, however, so he did his best to make small talk with the Vietnamese agricultural officials, bureaucrats, and other foreign salesmen at the gathering. Never good at mingling, Dean found it even more perplexing with the accented English that was used as the common tongue. The “conversations” generally consisted of vague questions answered by nods and half smiles.

  He avoided Tang. It was a good bet that at least some of the Vietnamese suspected she was CIA, though he noticed that didn’t stop them from talking to her. She may not have been extraordinarily pretty, but she was one of the few women and by far the youn gest at the gathering, and that definitely worked in her favor.

  “You were here during the war?” a bespectacled Vietnamese man asked Dean just as he was getting ready to leave.

  “Yes,” said Dean.

  “Where?”

  “Quang Nam Province, mostly.”

  “You were a Marine, then,” said the man. It was a reasonable guess; for much of the war the Marines had been the primary American force in Quang Nam, with a large base at Da Nang.

  “Yes, I was.” Dean looked at him more closely. The man had brown splotch marks on his face and wrinkle marks at the corners of his eyes, half-hidden by the glasses. He was a few years older than Dean. Though thin, he had broad shoulders and a substantial chest; if he were a tree he would be an oak.

  “I was with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam,” said the man. He made no effort to lower his voice, though he was referring to the South Vietnamese Army — in theory an enemy of the present government. “A lieutenant and then a captain.”

  “I see.”

  “We worked with Marines. Very good fighters. Loyal.”

  “Thank you.”

  Curiosity roused, Dean asked the man how he came to be part of the present government.

  “I was not a spy or a traitor,” the former Army officer told Dean. “I’ve been rehabilitated. Connections help.”

  “Charlie, Tommy’s in trouble,” said Rockman in his ear.

  “We need you to back him up now.”

  Dean made a show of glancing at his watch.

  “I have to make a phone call back to one of my accounts at home,” he told the former ARVN soldier. “I’m sorry to have to leave.”

  “My card,” said the man, reaching into his pocket. “If you have some free time, call me.”

  “I’ll try,” said Dean, taking the card, though he knew it was doubtful he’d use it. “I’d like that.”

  39

  Even a man half Tommy Karr’s size could not have found a place to hide in Thao Duong’s office. So Karr found one outside the office — he opened one of the windows directly behind the desk.

  The ledge was all of four inches thick, but Karr didn’t have much choice. He pushed the window down behind him, th
en began making his way to the next window, gripping the gaps in the bricks as firmly as he could.

  The light in the office came on just as Karr reached to the window of the next room. He pulled himself across, then felt his right toe start to slip on the greasy stone ledge.

  This way, this way, he told himself, trying to balance his momentum forward. He did a little slide step and pinched his fingers tighter, pushing himself close to the window. His left foot sailed out over the pavement and his hand lost its grip. Just in time he grabbed the upper part of the window, rattling the jamb but keeping himself on the ledge.

  “Tommy, are you all right?” asked Rockman. “Where are you?”

  “Getting some air. What do you see with that video bug I left in the office?”

  “Just sitting at his desk. We’ll tell you when he’s gone.”

  “What’s he doing?” Karr asked.

  “Working. He went to the pile and took a report out.”

  “Come on. You’re telling me he’s a dedicated bureaucrat?”

  “I’m just the messenger. Wait a second — he’s reaching for that envelope you found.”

  “You ID the key?”

  “Looks like the type used in a firebox or trunk. Do you think you can follow him when he leaves the building?”

  “If I can grow wings in the next five minutes, I’ll be happy to,” said Karr. “Where’s Dean?”

  “He’s on his way. But he’s never going to get there in time. Looks like Thao’s getting ready to go — he put the envelope back.”

  Karr tried opening the window, but it was locked from the inside. Breaking it would make too much noise while Thao Duon was next door, but if Karr waited until he left, it would probably be too late.

  Karr glanced toward the ground and then back at the building, trying to see if it might be possible to climb down.

  There was decorative brickwork at the corner that he could use as a ladder, but that meant going past three more double sets of windows. He was bound to slip sooner or later.