Spyder Web

12

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.

Cole knew that the translators were home for the night, so he scrounged up another PC and began to install an old U.S. version of the DOS beside the Russian one. Step by step, the programs were identical in execution. In the end, he had two machines sitting there, with a C:> prompt on their screens, waiting for him to do something.

Using an ethernet jack in the lab, he connected the English-language PC to the building’s local-area network and tied into the Linguistic Section’s on-line translation library. He loaded the Russian technical dictionary and queried for a translation of the Directory command. Plodding along, he was able to list out the operating-system commands and identify their English counterparts.

Cole was a man possessed by the thrill of solving a difficult puzzle. As everything began to fall into place, his adrenaline surged. At two o’clock in the morning, rather than fatigue, he felt a burning desire to unlock the secrets on Yakushev’s disks.

He took the first of Yakushev’s program disks and loaded it into the machine that he now called the ‘KGBPC’ and requested a listing of its file directory. The screen began to scroll, filling with the names of programs stored on the disk. On the normal PC, he requested the Russian translation for the Install command and scanned the file list for a program bearing that name.

He found a small file with the appropriate name and typed the command for the KGB-PC to execute the installation program. Cole hadn’t seen many examples of Soviet computer programming, though he’d heard their skills were excellent.

It took over an hour to load all of Yakushev’s software onto the KGB-PC. Cole laughed when he discovered several of the programs were simply Cyrillic versions of popular business software from the early nineties. Who would have thought a good Communist would keep track of his material wealth?

He looked over the list of translations for the disks and eliminated those with generic names, such as Account Data and Correspondence. Instead, Cole decided to concentrate on those with the bird names; either Yakushev was a naturalist or these disks carried something more interesting than personal correspondence and account balances.

Cole loaded the first program, whose Russian name loosely translated into the English word Records. The KGB-PC’s screen cleared and a single title line of text appeared across the top, followed by three numbered lines of text in the center of the screen. The cursor flashed above an Underscore character at the bottom of the screen. Not the prettiest program he’d ever seen, but it was obviously offering one of three choices.

Cole typed the screen text into his translator and discovered that the program was unable to find any data files on the hard disk. He was now offered the choice of loading files onto the hard disk, reading files from the disk, or exiting the program.He grabbed one of the birdnamed disks from the stack and sent the computer off to read it.

KGB-PC’s disk-drive lights began to flash as the central processing unit, hard disk, and floppy disk began to converse with one another in response to Cole’s command. The screen again went blank before filling with information from the disk. In the upper-right corner of the screen, a photograph of a man appeared; in the upperleft corner, the shield emblem of the KGB became evident. The middle of the screen then filled with an options menu.

He translated the information on the screen and discovered that this was a personnel file for a KGB deepcover agent. The agent, code-named ‘Seagull,’ was a man named Vitali Farkas. The program now offered Cole a look at Farkas’s personal information, career record, medical record, cover history, current assignment, historical assignments, and commendations. It was the complete life of a KGB mole tied up in a neat package.

Cole could barely contain his excitement. Using the information encoded on these diskettes, the CIA might be able to cripple an entire section of the MB’s intelligencegathering operations. In a few hours, Frank Villano was going to be one happy man.

Since it was already 3:30 in the morning, Cole decided to work straight through until 7:00 A.M., when Villano would arrive, and give him the good news personally. In the meantime, he would just continue loading diskettes and browsing through what might be the Who’s Who of Soviet deep-cover agents.

Two hours later, Cole still hadn’t come down from the initial rush of success. He’d previewed and printed out the complete files on ten agents whose assignments, up until 1991, had placed them in sensitive positions around the world.

The next disk Cole slid into the KGB-PC’s disk drive was for an agent code-named ‘Cormorant.’ For the first time, an error message appeared on the screen, interrupting the program. Cole translated the message: ‘File not found.’

The message puzzled Cole; after reading the disks on several agents, why would one suddenly be blank? It was tagged just like the others. Since he had nothing to lose by trying, he pulled the disk out of the KGB-PC and loaded it into the other computer.He then loaded a diskscanning utility to give the Cormorant disk a once-over. Yakushev’s disks had been formatted in a standard DOS environment, Cole reasoned, which meant that there was a good chance that a DOS file utility program might be able to identify and correct the problem.

Sector by sector, the utility program found that the disk was undamaged. Cole then asked the program to look for any unallocated program fragments still present on the disk. The program went back to work and quickly returned after locating eight deleted files on the disk. Someone had erased the disk, but they hadn’t wiped it clean of information. Cormorant’s files were still there; only the directory names had been deleted. Cole immediately set out to recover the lost information.Re-creating the disk directory and file-allocation table took no more than ten minutes.

After completing the file recovery, Cole placed the disk back into the KGB-PC and restarted Yakushev’s program. He sat back in his chair, sipping on a can of soda, waiting for the next Soviet agent to be unveiled. Cole choked in midgulp when the digitized photo appeared in the corner of the screen. The picture, though taken several years ago, bore an uncanny resemblance to Alex Roe.

Cole selected the cover-history option from the menu and, word by word, fed the information into the translation program. What came back confirmed his initial reaction.According to the text, the photograph belonged to a KGB deep-cover agent named Anna Mironova. The agent Cormorant was assigned to the acquisition of scientific and technological information under the cover of a Western journalist, freelance writer Alexandra Roe. The disk left no doubt. Cole had aided a foreign agent in acquiring restricted technology. An overwhelming sense of nausea swept over him.

He sat for several minutes, stunned by the truth about Roe. Gradually, his brain began to thaw from its initial panic and he started sifting through the rest of the Cormorant file. The list of commendations was extensive and, even though Cole didn’t bother to translate all of them, he quickly realized that Roe was a valuable agent.

The last entry in the file was dated August 1991, just a few weeks before the coup attempt. Unlike the other commendation entries, this one had no bold capitalized entry naming the decoration. Instead, it was just a single sentence. Cole typed the entry into the computer and waited for the translation. The entry read: ‘10 August, 1991 Capt. Anna Mironova was killed in an automobile accident while on assignment.’

Cole reread the translation several times. He even retyped it into the computer to double-check it, and the computer returned with the obituary for Mironova.

Cole’s thoughts raced. If Villano was right about KGB record keeping, then the files in Lubyanka might list Mironova’s many honors, but they would say nothing about how she had earned them. Yakushev’s operational files would hold the only detailed account of Mironova’s activities under the alias of Alex Roe, and the only known copy of those files was on this disk. As far as Moscow is concerned, Cole thought, Mironova died over seven years ago. Case closed.

In the midst of his disbelief, Cole made an intuitive leap: If Roe had faked her death in order to escape Moscow’s control, how would her former masters deal with her if they discovered this deception?

A wicked smile curled on his face; the tables had turned. He now possessed information as dangerous to Roe as the Gerty report was to him — information that vastly improved his bargaining position with Roe and her partner. Cole copied Yakushev’s program diskettes and the Cormorant disk onto four blank diskettes of the type that the CIA bought in bulk, then placed the copies inside his briefcase. He then scratched the Mylar surface of the original Cormorant diskette with a paper clip, rendering it unreadable.