"Yes?"

"He's told us something else. He wants all his reports to be handled physically, not by cable. If we don't agree, he doesn't do business. Okay, technically that's no problem. We've done that before with agents of this caliber. The nature of his information is such that immediacy is not required. There's daily air service to and from Japan via United, Northwest, and even All Nippon Airways straight into Dulles International Airport."

"But " Cabot's face twisted into a grimace.

"Yeah." Jack nodded. "He doesn't trust our communications security. That scares me."

"You don't think ?"

"I don't know. We've had very limited success penetrating Soviet ciphers for the past few years. NSA assumes that they have the same problems with ours. Such assumptions are dangerous. We've had indications before that our signals are not fully secure, but this one comes from a very senior guy. I think we have to take this seriously."

"Just how scary could this be?"

"Terrifying," Jack answered flatly. "Director, for obvious reasons we have numerous communications systems. We have MERCURY right downstairs to handle all of our stuff. The rest of the government mainly uses stuff from NSA; Walker and Pelton compromised their systems a long time ago. Now, General Olson over at Fort Meade says they've fixed all that, but for expense reasons they have not fully adopted the TAPDANCE one-time systems that they've been playing with. We can warn NSA again - I think they'll ignore this warning also, but we have to do it - and on our end, I think it's time to act. For starters, sir, we need to think about a reexamination of MERCURY." That was the CIA's own communications nexus, located a few floors below the Director's office, and using its own encrypting systems.

"Expensive," Cabot noted seriously. "With our budget problems "

"Not half as expensive as a systematic compromise of our message traffic is. Director, there is nothing as vital as secure communications links. Without that, it doesn't matter what else we have. Now, we've developed our own one-time system. All we need is authorization of funds to make it go."

"Tell me about it. I haven't been briefed in."

"Essentially, it's our own version of the TAPDANCE. It's a one-time pad with transpositions stored on laser-disk CD ROM. The transpositions are generated from atmospheric radio noise, then superencrypted with noise from later in the day - atmospheric noise is pretty random, and by using two separate sets of the noise, and using a computer-generated random algorithm to mix the two, well, the mathematicians say that's as random as it gets. The transpositions are generated by computer and fed onto laser-disks in realtime. We use a different disk for every day of the year. Each disk is unique, two copies only, one to the station, one in MERCURY - no backups. The laser-disk reader we use at both ends looks normal, but has a beefed-up laser, and as it reads the transposition codes from the disk, it also burns them right off the plastic. When the disk is used up, or the day ends - and the day will end first, since we're talking billions of characters per disk - the disk is destroyed by baking it in a microwave oven. That takes two minutes. It ought to be secure as hell. It can only be compromised at three stages: first, when the disks are manufactured; second, from disk-storage here; third, from disk-storage in each station. Compromise of one station does not compromise anyone else. We can't make the disks tamper-proof - we've tried, and it would both cost too much and make them overly vulnerable to accidental damage. The down-side of this is that it'll require us to hire and clear about twenty new communications technicians. The system is relatively cumbersome to use, hence the increased number of communicators. The main expense component is here. The field troops we've talked to actually prefer the new system because it's user-friendly."