Dark Zone Read Free Page B

typed in his passwords, allowing the computer to proceed, tying into the NSA system by a secure connection.
    As he waited, he picked up the remote and turned on the small television across the room near the bread machine that he had never used. Rubens had probably as little love for the television as he had for baking bread (the machine was a present from one of his many and mostly annoying cousins), but he had come to appreciate the fact that it was important to check the mainstream news media every so often. The daily news summaries he received via e-mail could not communicate the impact of television’s visuals.
    He lingered on CNN only long enough to realize that the anchor was pontificating about a sports drug scandal. On Fox, a man in a rumpled gray suit declared that the time had come to invade North Korea. The text under the man’s face claimed that he was a former CIA analyst. Rubens knew the man well enough to know that this was indeed true—and that the man’s area of expertise had been European farm commodities. Rubens listened for a minute before deciding that the analyst knew as little about Korea as Rubens did about European wheat.
    If there was a time to invade North Korea, it had been in the 1990s. Clinton had blown it, like much else—but that was all academic now.
    Rubens flipped through a few more channels before turning his attention back to the computer. Once a cut-and-paste Xerox job, the daily briefing was now delivered to the upper echelons of the administration via e-mail with links to more detailed information available on SpyNet, an exclusive intranet service used by the government’s “information” agencies, of which the NSA was one. Ruben scrolled through the e-mail quickly. It was all very low-level, and nothing piqued his interest.
    A good thing. That meant nothing had blown up overnight.
    He emptied his cup of coffee and picked up the black phone that sat at the side of the computer. The phone looked as if it dated from the 1960s, and it was in fact possible that the outer shell did. Inside, however, the phone held a state-of-the-art encryption device that rendered his conversations indecipherable to anyone who did not have a similar model. And in theory—much in the field of encryption was theory, for the most part impossible to definitively prove or, to put it more accurately, not worth the time needed to prove—only the person with the number Rubens dialed would be able to understand what he said.
    “Art Room,” said Marie Telach, picking up on the other end of the line. She knew it would be him, but the flat, neutral answer was part of her personality. The fact that she never deviated was a large part of the reason he had chosen her for her job, though lately she had shown alarming signs of being human.
    A vacation would cure that, no doubt.
    “This is Rubens. How is the Korean operation proceeding?”
    “Lia is on her way to the airport. She’ll be in Beijing in a few hours.”
    “Very good. And the other matter,” added Rubens. “Tommy Karr and Charlie Dean?”
    “There was a complication.”
    “A complication?”
    The mission had been a routine milk run.
    “Tommy stopped a purse snatching near the Courts after they landed in London.”
    Was that all? Rubens glanced at his watch. “Making the jump to police work, is he?”
    “They’re on schedule. The meet isn’t for a while yet and everything looks fine. But I thought I should mention it because the robbery victim—”
    “Please don’t tell me it was a member of the SVR,” said Rubens, using the Russian initials for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sluzhba Vneshnev Razvedki, one of the successors to the Cold War era KGB.
    “No—it was Deidre Clancy, the daughter of our ambassador to Great Britain.”
    Rubens did not know Ambassador Alroy Clancy very well; he’d been appointed to the post largely as a reward for his service to the President’s campaign committee. This was exactly the sort of