Mirror Image

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mike Rodgers passed buoyantly through the keypad entry on the ground floor of Op-Center. After greeting the armed guards seated behind the lexan, who provided him with the day's password, Rodgers hurried through the first-floor administrative level, where the top officials had offices in the old evacuation-team headquarters. Like Paul Hood, Rodgers preferred to be downstairs, in the new underground area where the real business of Op-Center was conducted.

Another armed guard was stationed by the elevator, and after giving her the password Rodgers was admitted to the elevator. The anachronistic and less expensive "Who goes there?" sentry system had been chosen for Op-Center instead of the more elaborate hi-tech systems used at the other agencies, where fingerprint IDs had been compromised by computer-printed, laser-etched gloves, and voice identification systems had been fooled by synthesizers. Though Rodgers had seen the guard nearly every day for six months, and knew the names of her husband and children, he wouldn't have been admitted if he didn't have the password. If he'd tried to enter, he would have been arrested. If he resisted, he might have been shot. In Op-Center, precision, competency, and patriotism came before friendship.

Emerging in the heart of Op-Center called the "bullpen," Rodgers made his way through a maze of cubicles to the action offices ringing the hub. Unlike the offices above, the rooms here could tap into intelligence resources that ranged from satellite imagery to communicating directly with operatives around the world to accessing computers and databases that could accurately predict the rice harvest in Rangoon five years hence.

Rodgers was using Hood's office while the chief was away. The office was situated next to the conference room affectionately known as "the Tank." The Tank was surrounded by a wall of electromagnetic waves that prevented electronic surveillance. Rumor had it that the microwaves could also cause sterility and insanity. Staff psychologist Liz Gordon half-jokingly said that the waves explained a lot of the behavior that took place within these walls.

Alert and energized despite a late Saturday night on the town, Rodgers entered the code on the keypad beside Hood's office door. The door popped open, the lights came on, and for the first time in six months Rodgers smiled with contentment. At last he was in charge of Op-Center.

Even so, he knew he wasn't being entirely fair to Hood. He had his den-mother side, as Ann had said. But the Director was a good man. He was well intentioned and, more important, he was a highly capable manager. And it was efficient to delegate authority internally to a group of relatively autonomous experts like Martha Mackall and Lowell Coffey II, Matt Stoll and Ann Farris. But more and more, Rodgers felt that OP-Center needed to be run by one man's will, like Hoover's FBI. It had to be run by someone who didn't consult with the CIA or the National Security Council before acting, but let other organizations know what he was doing after the fact. After defusing a war in Korea and the potential bombing of Japan, he had come to believe that Op-Center needed to be more aggressive on the world stage, rather than reactive.

Which is one reason it can't continue being anonymous, Rodgers thought. But there was time enough to do something about that… something passive, like leaking information to the press, or something dramatic, like sending Striker on the kinds of missions that had made Israeli commandos so feared and respected. Missions that didn't have to be attributed to others' operatives, the way their recent attack on the missile site in North Korea was attributed to the South Koreans.

Rodgers and Hood had had this discussion many times, and the Director invariably pointed to their charter, which forbade adventurism. They were supposed to act like police, he said, not fifth columnists. But to Rodgers, a charter was like sheet music. You could play the notes as written and follow the composer's instructions, yet there was still a great deal of latitude for interpretation. In Vietnam he'd read and reread Edward Gibbons's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and something the author had written became Rodgers's credo that the first of earthly blessings is independence.

Fired up by Gibbons and by a dog-eared copy of George Patton's War As I Knew It that his father had given him, Rodgers served two tours of duty in Vietnam. He returned to the States and got his Ph.D. in world history from Temple University, after which he was stationed in Germany, then in Japan. He commanded a mechanized brigade in the Persian Gulf and spent time in Saudi Arabia before returning to the U.S. to try for a job at the Department of State. Instead, the President offered him the post of Deputy Director at Op-Center. He wasn't sorry he took the job. It was exhilarating to be involved in crises around the world. He still savored the aftertaste of his recent, successful incursion into North Korea. But he didn't like being anyone's sidekick, let alone Paul Hood's.

The computer beeped. Rodgers walked toward the desk. He punched Control/A to receive. Bob Herbert's round face filled the screen, transmitted by a fiber optic camera on top of the monitor. The thirty-eight-year-old National Intelligence Officer looked tired.

"Good morning, Mike."

"Hi, Bob," Rodgers said. "What are you doing here on a Sunday?"

"Been here since last night. Stephen Viens at NRO called me at home and I came in. Didn't you read my memo?"

"Not yet," Mike said. "What's up?"

"Why don't you check the E-mailbox and beep me back," Herbert said. "The memo has all the times and exact spellings, and the satellite recon—"

"Why don't you just brief me?" Mike said, dragging a hand across his face. E-mail. Beeps. Fiber optic conferencing. How the hell did spy work go from Nathan Hale unbowed to Matt Stoll's screensavers of Derek Flint dancing Swan Lake? Intelligence work should be physically exhausting, like lovemaking, not electronic voyeurism.

"Sure, Mike. I'll give you a rundown," Herbert replied, somewhat concerned. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Rodgers said. "Just a little out of sync with the late twentieth century."

"Whatever you say," Herbert responded.

Rodgers didn't bother to explain. The Intelligence Officer was a good man, someone who had paid the price for what he did. He lost his wife and the use of his legs in the Beirut Embassy bombing in 1983. But after a great deal of initial reluctance, even Herbert was beginning to be seduced by the computers, satellites, and fiber-optic cables. He called this technological triad a "God's-eye view of the world."

"What we've got," Herbert said, "are two things, maybe related, maybe not. You know we've been picking up microwave radiation from the Neva as it passes near the Hermitage in St. Petersburg."

"Yes," Rodgers responded.

"At first we figured the radiation was from the TV studio the Russians are building at the Hermitage to broadcast artwork to schools. But my TV specialist has been watching their test broadcasts, and they're all in the 153 to 11950 kilohertz range. That's not what we're getting from the Neva."

"So the TV studio's a front for some other kind of operation," Rodgers said.

"Most likely. We thought it might be a new security setup to handle the extra tourists the Russians are expecting for the city's three hundredth anniversary, but that doesn't compute."

"How so?"

"Martha Mackall called a friend at Treasury to get me the budgets for the Russian Ministries of Culture and Education," Herbert said. "There isn't a ruble in either of them for what should be a five-to-seven-million-dollar facility. So we hacked around and found funds for the studio in the budget of the Ministry of the Interior."

"That doesn't mean anything," Rodgers said. "Our government transfers money all the time."

"Yes," said Herbert, "but the ministry earmarked twenty million dollars for the project."

"Interior's run by Dogin, the hard-line Minister who just lost the election over there," Rodgers said. "Some of that money may have gone to his presidential campaign."

"That's a possibility," Herbert agreed. "But there's something else which indicates that the TV studio may be more than that. At one-thirty yesterday afternoon, we intercepted a communication from the northern sector of St. Petersburg to New York. An order for bagels."

"Come again?" Rodgers said.

"It was a brunch order faxed from St. Petersburg to the Bestonia Bagel Shop in Brighton Beach. They asked for an onion bagel with cream cheese, a salt bagel with butter, an everything bagel plain, and two garlic bagels with lox."

"A take-out order from half a world away," Rodgers said. "And it wasn't a joke."

"No," said Herbert. "Bestonia sent back a confirmation. Definitely spooks."

"Right," Rodgers agreed. "Any idea what it means?"

"We sent it over to cryptology," Herbert continued, and they're stumped. Lynne Dominick says the different bagels could represent sectors of the city or of the world. Or they could be agents. The different kinds of spreads could stand for different targets. She said she'll keep working on it, but she called Bestonia and they've got a dozen kinds of bagels with twenty different 'shmears.' It'll take a while."

"What about that shop, the Bestonia?" Rodgers asked.

"Clean until now. Owned by the Belnicks, a family that came from Kiev via Montreal in 1961."

"So they're a deep plant," said Rodgers.

"Very," Herbert agreed. "Darrell informed the FBI and they put a stakeout team on the shop. Nothing's happened so far except for bagel deliveries."

Darrell McCaskey was Op-Center's FBI and Interpol liaison. By coordinating efforts between the agencies, he allowed each to benefit from the other's resources.

Rodgers asked, "You're sure they're bagels?"

"We videotaped the open bags from a rooftop, examined the footage," Herbert said. "They look like bagels all right. And the deliveryman seems to get the right amount of money for the size of each order. Nobody that gets a delivery goes out for lunch, so they must be eating what's in the bags."

Rogers nodded. "So that brings us back to something brewing in St. Petersburg. What's DI6 doing about it?"

"They've got a man on-site," said Herbert. "Commander Hubbard has promised to keep us informed."

"Good," Rodgers said. "And what do you think about all this?"

"I feel like I just took a short Twilight Zone hop back into the 1960s," Herbert said. "When the Russians spend big money on something these days, I worry."

Rodgers nodded as the intelligence chief signed off. Herbert was right. Russians weren't gracious losers, and they were faced with the possibility of the loser in an election having access to a secret operation with agents in the U.S.

Rodgers was worried too.