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Colonel Anatoli Grishin estimated that wherever Jason Monk might be, the chances were he would have some means of communication with whoever had sent him. This could not be via his embassy, which was under surveillance, unless he called in by phone, which would be overheard and traced.
Therefore, reasoned Grishin, he had brought in or collected in Moscow some form of transmitter.
“If I were he,” said the senior ranking scientist of FAPSI whom Grishin consulted for a substantial fee, “I would use a computer. Businessmen do it all the time.”
“A computer that transmits and receives?” asked Grishin.
“Of course. Computers talk to satellites, and via satellites computers talk to computers. That’s what the information superhighway, the Internet, is all about.”
“The traffic must be vast.”
“It is. But so are our computers. It’s a question of filtering out. Ninety percent of computer-generated traffic is chitchat, idiots talking to each other. Nine percent is commercial, companies discussing products, prices, progress, contracts, delivery dates. One percent is governmental. That one percent used to be half the traffic flying ar
ound up there.”
“How much is coded?”
“All governmental and about half the commercial. But most of the commercial codes we can break.”
“Where in all that would my American friend be transmitting?”
The FAPSI official, who had spent his working life in the covert world, knew better than to ask for details.
“Probably among the commercial traffic,” he said. “The governmental stuff, we know the source. We may not be able to crack it, but we know it comes from this or that embassy, legation, consulate. Is your man in one of those?”
“No.”
‘‘Then he’s probably using the commercial satellites. The American government’s equipment is mainly used for watching us and listening to us. It also carries diplomatic traffic. But now there are scores of commercial satellites up there; companies rent time and communicate with their branch offices all around the world.”
“I think my man is transmitting from Moscow. Probably receiving, too.”
“Receiving doesn’t help us. A message pumped out by satellite over us could be received anywhere from Archangel down to the Crimea. It’s when he transmits we might spot him.”
“So, if a Russian commercial company were to engage you to find the sender, you could do it?”
“Maybe. The fee would be substantial, depending on the number of men and the amount of computer time assigned, and the number of hours per day the watch has to be kept.”
“Twenty-four hours a day,” said Grishin, “all the men you have got.”
The FAPSI scientist stared at him. The man was talking millions of U.S. dollars.
“That’s quite an order.”
‘‘I’m serious.’’
“You want the messages?”
“No, the location of the sender.”
“That’s harder. The message, if intercepted, we can study at leisure, take time to break it. The sender will only be on-line for a nanosecond.”
The day after Monk had his interview with General Nikolayev, FAPSI caught a blip. Grishin’s contact rang him at the dacha off Kiselny Boulevard.
“He’s been on-line,” he said.
“You have the message?”
“Yes, and it’s not commercial. He’s using a one-time pad. It’s unbreakable.”