Read Online The Once and Future Spy by Robert Littell - Free Book Online Page B

trouble?” the DDI asked.
    “It was nice of you to lay it on.”
    “I’m told you’re known as the Weeder. Where does the name come from?”
    “It’s English, I think. Our friends at MI5 and MI6 call the academic types who sort through old dossiers weeders. I was trained
     as a historian, which is another way of saying I like browsing through files and I’m not allergic to dust. When I came on
     board I was put to work in the archives. When someone filed a request for a dossier under the Freedom of Information Act,
     I had to weed through the files to see what could be safely given out, and what had to be plowed under. My boss, Mr. Linkletter,
     had done a tour in the London bureau—he took to calling me the Weeder. The name stuck. It was sort of an in-house joke.”
    “You must have come across a lot of dirty laundry in your day,” the DDI mused. He smiled another of his lopsided smiles that
     seemed to invite a reply.
    The Weeder smiled back noncommittally. If the new DDI had an appetite for dirty laundry, he ought to feed him Operations Subgroup
     Charlie and Stufftingle. A terrorist group was going to try and explode a primitive atomic device at some place called Kabir
     on the Ides of March. But Wanamaker didn’t seem to be doing anything, as far as the Weeder could make out, to stop it. Even
     American nationals in the target zone, wherever that was, would not be warned. If that wasn’t dirty laundry, what was?
    “My predecessor,” Rudd was saying, “tells me you run a highly sensitive No Distribution operation. He says you report directly
     to theDDI. No chain of command. No cutouts. You want to put me in the picture?”
    The Weeder said, “My pleasure.” He glanced again at the Maillol lithograph; he still thought it would look better off center.
     “About ten years ago, in the late seventies, our technical people discovered that an ordinary telephone picked up conversation
     even when it was on its cradle. The telephone transmitted tiny impulses that could be isolated and converted into recognizable
     speech. The hurdle was that the equipment used to pick up these impulses was bulky and had to operate in the immediate vicinity
     of the telephone being targeted. The tech boys worked on the problem. What they came up with was equipment that was more sensitive
     and could operate at almost any distance from the target telephone. The impulses were still incredibly weak when they arrived
     at the monitoring station, but with the help of a computer programmed to read the impulses, we were able to get recognizable
     speech. The bottom line is that we are able to transform a cradled telephone into a bug.”
    The DDI’s eyebrows actually danced. “Are you telling me that you can sit in your loft in SoHo and dial any number in America
     and eavesdrop on conversations near the phone?”
    “That’s about it,” the Weeder said. “The way I figure, if you steal documents you can never know for sure whether what you
     find out you were meant to find out. You can never know if you are stealing the right documents. But when you steal conversations
     you’re getting a look into someone’s head—you’re getting a glimpse of the thought process. And that’s worth its weight in
     gold.”
    Rudd glanced uneasily at the phone on his desk. “Could the opposition be doing the same thing to us?”
    “Not likely—we monitor their computer capability carefully. They don’t have the know-how. Yet.”
    “How did you come to run this operation?”
    The Weeder shrugged. “I picked up a working knowledge of Russian at college, and the Russians were obviously going to be our
     principal target. I knew how to program computers. I was bored stiff working in Mr. Linkletter’s archives. I hated Washington.
     When they offered me the opportunity to run an operation of my own in New York, I jumped at the chance.”
    “How long have you been at it?”
    “Eight months now.”
    “How are you funded?”
    “Our budget is