Spyder Web (9 page)

Roe slipped the headphones off and turned toward Cole, who was engrossed in a Blackhawk power play. That man has created an intelligence-gathering gold mine.

She walked into the living room and sat in an overstuffed chair facing Cole. ‘Michael, I think I’ve found an opportunity for us to develop a long-term, highly profitable business relationship.’

Cole muted the sound on the hockey game. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Good. First, I want you to tell me everything you know about the Spyder Project. Then you and I are going to have a chat with my partner. If this Spyder of yours is real, it could be worth millions.’

The jungle march was just what they’d expected: slow. Keeping clear of villages to avoid any undesired contact with the natives meant moving through thick jungle growth. What might normally be a two-day hike became a five-day exercise in silent motion. The heaviness of the flora seemed to envelop them as tightly as the sea, cutting off all but a few rays of sunlight.

The six men probing the jungle with Kilkenny moved as one, silently advancing, with their senses reaching out in every direction. The SEALs operated under the assumption that Masson and his men were as well trained and disciplined as they were. Their opponents also had the defender’s advantage of familiarity with the jungle, and booby traps were to be expected as they approached the enemy camp.

Gates was on point with Darvas, leading the squad during the night march, when he raised his hand and brought their approach to a stop. In the dark growth ahead, Gates saw the unmistakable silhouette of a person in a clearing of jungle growth. He motioned for Darvas to provide cover while he approached the darkened figure.

Crawling slowly across the moist ground on his stomach, Gates closed the distance to his target. Each motion he made, each breath he took was carefully controlled and measured. Like a jungle predator, Gates was calm and patient in stalking his prey.

On Kilkenny’s order, the remaining SEALs took up defensive positions around the clearing. Should Gates and Darvas find themselves outgunned, they would have a place to fall back. Kilkenny waited quietly with the rest of his squad as Gates neared the clearing.

From the jungle’s edge, Gates studied the figure but detected no sound, no motion coming from the man. Not even the sound of breathing. The figure was upright, but unnaturally so, with arms extended outward to each side. Crucified.

Gates moved up close and discovered that, whoever it was, he had been there awhile. The remains were in an advanced state of decay, with the clothing rotted and little flesh remaining on the bones. A garland of feathers and beads was hung around the corpse’s neck, along with several other items that Gates couldn’t readily identify.

‘I’m coming up behind you, Max,’ a muffled voice crackled in Gates’s ear. After years of working together, he knew Kilkenny’s voice even through the distortion of a throat mike.

‘What do you think?’ Gates asked, his gaze still fixed on the grisly figure.

‘Voodoo. Practically everyone on this island believes in the voodoo religion, and Masson is considered a powerful high priest. This is a warning.’ Kilkenny looked at the tattered remnants of the man’s uniform and noticed the shoulder boards hanging loosely. ‘Looks like he was Haitian military. We must be getting close to Masson’s camp.’

Kilkenny raised his hand, then pointed the way. Slowly, they re-formed and melted back into the jungle, leaving the grisly sentry to his silent watch.

December 13

Cole’s flight arrived in Washington on schedule and the bleary-eyed systems analyst entered Frank Villano’s office casually dressed and slightly rumpled. He dropped his suitcase and coat by the door and poured a cup of coffee from the pot that his boss brewed for his personal use. Villano liked his coffee strong, which is just what Cole needed this morning.

Villano took one look at Cole’s faded jeans and dayold stubble and groaned. ‘A little casual for the office, aren’t we?’

Cole just glowered at the thin, bespectacled man behind the desk. ‘If you haven’t checked your calendar, it’s Sunday, the sacred day of football as the play-offs draw near. Anyway, I answered your summons and caught the first flight in. I even came directly here from the airport without stopping off at home.’

‘Ah, Saint Michael.’ Villano raised his hands in benediction. ‘You are a dedicated man, and, for that, I will forgive your transgression against the office dress code.’

‘Thanks.’ Cole sat down and took a sip of the steaming brew from his mug. ‘Now tell me, what’s so important that you have to call me in from Chicago to deal with it?’

‘We’ve been given an interesting challenge, one that requires a person of your unique technical skills and high security clearance.’

Cole was all too familiar with the look on Villano’s face. Someone on the seventh floor wanted another miracle from the computer department. ‘Something hot that they want yesterday, I assume?’

‘You are correct. What do you know about the former KGB’s First Chief Directorate?’

Cole thought for a second, but he recalled only a few generic facts about the KGB from his CIA indoctrination classes. ‘Didn’t they handle Soviet foreign intelligence operations?’

‘Right. We recently acquired some files that are alleged to be the property of Andrei Yakushev, one of the top men in the FCD. Yakushev ran their Special Operations group for twenty years, right up to the failed coup in 1991.’ Villano could see that the name meant little to Cole, and he needed him to understand just how important any information on Yakushev was. ‘Did you ever hear about the CIA’s witch-hunts for moles during the sixties?’

‘Yeah, I heard some stories from the old-timers. ’

Villano bristled for a second, but let the ‘old-timers’ crack slide. Cole knew that Villano was part of that longtenured group of CIA staff.

‘Well, if there were any moles in the CIA, Yakushev was running them. He was their best. Yakushev was also a political rival of KGB chairman Nikitenko, the guy who tried to oust Gorbachev. Now that you know the basics, I’ll explain our situation.’

With his arms behind his head, Villano tilted back in his chair, his feet propped up on top of his desk. ‘We have a new defector, a junior KGB officer who went AWOL back in ‘91 and has been hiding in Latvia ever since. He claims that Chairman Nikitenko personally ordered him to secure Yakushev’s dacha, which had accidentally burned, and to retrieve the late comrade’s files. Our boy followed his orders and went to the dacha, only the fire didn’t look so accidental once he got there. All the bullet holes in the bodies kind of looked suspicious to him. He found the fire safe that Nikitenko wanted and headed back for Moscow. On the way back to Lubyanka, he had a revelation.’

‘He found God?’ Cole asked lightly.

‘No, but he decided that if he went back to Moscow, he had a very good chance of meeting him. Yakushev’s place was a long way out in the country, so this guy was listening to the radio on the way back. That’s when he heard about Gorby catching the Kremlin flu-you know the bug that all the general secretaries get before they croak. Our defector used his head and decided that there was a good chance the accidental house fire might be connected with Nikitenko’s attempted takeover of the government.’

‘The bullet holes ruled out the possibility of a coincidence for him, I take it?’

‘They have a tendency to do that, especially over there,’ Villano said with a nod.’Our defector saw the storm clouds rising and ran for cover. He was born up in the Baltics, so he hightailed it back home until the whole mess blew over, taking Yakushev’s safe with him.’

‘Why is this guy defecting now? The Soviet Union broke up years ago, and the Baltics are independent. I don’t see the value.’

‘He’d been living quietly and never intended to defect, until last week, when his cover was blown. The locals in that part of the world are touchy about Russian nationals and KGB collaborators. Somehow, word got out that he worked for the KGB, and things went bad real quick. For his own safety, the local police spirited him to Riga, where he appeared at the front door of our consulate with a dusty old fire safe and a wild story about the coup.’

‘Okay, so what did we find inside the fire safe?’

‘That’s for you to find out, Michael. We got it open-no big trick there-but all we found was a stack of computer diskettes. We don’t know yet what’s on them, but we have a theory. Like us, the FCD didn’t keep operational information inside their agents’personnel records. For deep-cover agents, like the ones Yakushev ran, the personnel files at Lubyanka might even be falsified to protect agents in the field. The true operational histories and aliases of deep-cover agents might be known only to a handful of high-ranking officers, and our sources tell us that Yakushev was very protective of his operational files. Now, you know that the KGB didn’t just disappear when the Soviet Union collapsed; the Committee for State Security just changed their letterhead. The Security Ministry, or MB, is still run by the same people and still doing the same old thing. If these disks contain Yakushev’s operations files, a good number of agents identified in there may still be active.’

‘And the disks that might hold these valuable operational files were in a safe in the middle of a burning building.’ The thought of trying to salvage anything from disks exposed to the heat of a fire made Cole wish he’d stayed in Chicago. ‘Ouch! Now I know why you called me.’

‘You got it,’ Villano replied with an enthusiastic grin. ‘We need your magic. See if there’s anything that you can pull off those disks. If our defector is telling the truth-and his story has checked out so far-these may be the operations files of one of the most dangerous men in the KGB.’

Cole felt as if he were being asked to perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes with a parched stalk of wheat and a fish bone. ‘Where are the disks now?’

‘In the lab waiting for you. Like you said, the boss wants an answer on this one yesterday. Good luck. You need anything, just ask.’

Cole finished the last of his coffee and stared for a moment into the empty cup. He resigned himself to the inevitable, stood up, and moved toward the door.’Thanks for the coffee. I’ll be in the lab.’

Cole slipped on his white lab coat and entered the climate-controlled environment of the electronics laboratory. He ran his ID card through the magnetic strip reader and waited for it to unlock the door to the storage vault where all recovered pieces of electronics equipment were kept during analysis. During the Reagan years, this room had been packed with gear from a Soviet missile sub that officially sank in the Atlantic. Nothing quite that large had come through since.

He found a small box on one of the gray metal shelves that lined the vault; the number matched the file Villano had given him. Cole walked back into the lab, set the box down on a workbench and extracted thirteen small plastic cases. One by one, he opened the cases and found each filled with ten three-and-a-half-inch diskettes.

‘At least Yakushev used world-standard media,’ Cole muttered to himself.’Now I don’t have to cobble anything together to read these.’

The disks all appeared to be in relatively good condition, despite their presumed exposure to fire. Cole knew the old agency motto about trusting walk-in intelligence: It’s Not Gold Unless You Can Prove It’s Gold. Just because this defector told a credible story doesn’t mean it should be taken at face value, he thought. This could be a disinformation operation, or an attempt to start up another mole hunt. This could also be everything this guy says it is. If there was enough heat inside the fire safe to damage the delicate Mylar inside the floppy disks, they would never know one way or the other.

Cole then donned an environmental suit and took the disks into the lab’s clean room, where he spent the next few hours studying the disks under a microscope, checking the surface structure for damage from heat, dust, or smoke. He wasn’t about to put a contaminated disk into a disk drive and try to read it. A particle of smoke is large enough to crash a disk head and gouge the disk’s surface, making data recovery all but impossible. The painstaking process of cleaning the disks took the rest of the day, all while Villano kept checking in on him like an expectant father.

The next day, Cole was ready to attempt a disk read. Starting with the most common personal computer format, he slipped the disk into an IBM-style PC and crossed his fingers. The program he was running would scan the disk at many different levels in an attempt to identify the data-encoding format, if it could be read at all. The screen quickly filled with a pattern of ones and zeros; the first disk appeared readable. Now he had to determine whether the information was intelligible. After scanning 130 disks, he found only four with physical defects that would prevent them from being read.

Cole had kept the disks arranged in the same order he’d found them, and the Agency translators helped decipher the disk labels as he looked for clues about what he was dealing with. Most of the label names meant nothing to him, just names of birds and fish. They could possibly be code names, but they didn’t tell Cole a thing about what information the disks held. Then he found it, buried deep in the list, the one labled Disk Operating System, #1. The next ten disks were all system-and program-related. They were the core of Yakushev’s personal computer.

It was eleven o’clock at night, late into his second day, but Cole now saw light at the end of the tunnel. He grabbed one of the lab PCs and formatted a new hard disk. If the translated titles were correct, within the next hour he might be able to reactivate Yakushev’s computer files.

Cole loaded the first operating-system diskette into the disk drive and restarted the machine. As with all personal computers, the machine ran through its diagnostic tests, followed by a search for its configuration files. The screen then filled with a Cyrillic version of the MS-DOS setup screen.