Read Online Straits of Power by Joe Buff - Free Book Online

on something seemingly priceless to us, which from their own point of view they believed we’d find out about quickly in any case.” He turned to the head of the CIA. “Am I not right?”
    “Well, hypothetically. I can’t say too much about who we do or don’t have working for us where, for very obvious reasons. But we definitely have to remember that the Germans are seeing everything from a perspective that differs from ours. So yes, it’s possible that the feeding back of one of our own codes, to warn us it had been broken, could be a red herring.”
    “In that case,” the FBI head declared, “the entire transmission is valueless.”
    This point hung heavily in the air.
    The president leaned forward. Everyone was immediately attentive. “To my mind, the scenario that the message is valid has still been neither proved nor disproved. What we’ve achieved is to put the different scenarios clearly out on the table.”
    Everybody nodded, including the FBI director.
    “All right,” the president said. “Let’s move on. The question of Peapod.”
    The FBI director started in again, aggressively. “Wannabe defectors in time of war are a dime a dozen. All we really know about this guy is that he goes with whores.”
    “He would still be useful to us,” the CIA director said. “We like to have our agents by the short hairs.”
    The president chuckled at the unintentional play on words—sex and short hairs—and everyone else laughed. Jeffrey thought some of it sounded forced.
    The national security advisor talked for the first time during the meeting—she was well regarded as a woman of few words. “I’m going to pose the question that has begged to be asked and answered since we came into this room. Is Peapod the same person who sent that transmission? . . . This then raises another question. Is Peapod then so priceless that, whatever it takes, we have to extract him, or is the transmission bait to help the Germans place a double agent in our midst?”
    At first no one spoke. Those are the two big questions, all right, Jeffrey told himself.
    “If he did have such high access,” the CNO thought out loud, “we’d want to keep him in place so he could give us even more. He says he knows important things about the upcoming German offensive, but insists on telling us in person. Only in person. That does seem a little odd.”
    “What else do we know about Peapod?” the president asked the CIA director.
    The DCI glanced at the people seated away from the table. “Aides, staffers, all of you out of here please.” The junior men and women left; the inner door was locked behind them.
    “To answer your question, Mr. President, not much, except by logical inference and informed speculation. That plus the age-old spy-craft rule that it’s safest to assume things that seem connected aren’t coincidence. . . . If Peapod, who, on the understanding that this stays inside this room, uses the name Klaus Mohr, has truly done everything he seems to have done, he’s an exquisitely talented technologist. Klaus Mohr might not be his original name.”
    “Even so,” the army chief of staff said, “our prewar files on persons who might pose cyberwarfare threats should contain something.”
    “People like this Peapod, this Klaus Mohr, might have been identified, searched for, early on by the coup planners, and whisked into an underground where they could continue their work, almost as a form of national treasure.”
    “You’re trying to say that their best technical minds were drafted into the conspiracy and hidden away, even given new lives?”
    The national security advisor pursed her lips. “So it’s plausible, or at least conceivable, that Klaus Mohr, trade attaché, is in fact someone else, and his job at the consulate is his disguise.”
    The CIA director nodded. “That’s a good assessment, ma’am. Educated guesswork, intuition, hunches, lateral thinking, plain common sense, they’re squishy means