"And you want us to copy it?"

"Looks sensible to me."

"You know what my people will say if we copy a system from CIA?" Olson asked.

"God damn it! We stole the idea from you, remember?"

"Jack, we're working on something similar, easier to use, little bit more secure. There are problems, but my back-room boys are almost ready to try it out."

Almost ready, Ryan thought. That means anywhere from three months to three years.

"General, I'm putting you on official notice. We have indications that your communications links are compromised."

"And?"

"And I will make that report to Congress and the President as well."

"It's much more likely that there's someone at State who leaked this. Further, it is possible that you're the victim of disinformation. What does this agent give us?" the NSA Director asked.

"Some very useful material - us and Japan."

"But nothing on the Soviet Union?"

Jack hesitated before answering, but there was no question of Olson's loyalty. Or his intelligence. "Correct."

"And you're saying that you're certain this isn't a false-flag operation? I repeat - certain?"

"You know better than that, Ron. What's certain in this business?"

"Before I request a couple hundred million dollars' worth of funding, I need something better than this. It's happened before, and we've done it, too - if the other side has something you can't break, get them to change it. Make it appear that they're penetrated."

"That might have been true fifty years ago, but not anymore."

"Repeat, I need better evidence before I go to see Trent. We can't slap something together as quickly as you can with MERCURY. We have to make thousands of the goddamned things. Supporting that is complex and costly as hell. I need hard evidence before I stick my neck out that far."

"Fair enough, General. I've had my say."

"Jack, we'll look into it. I have a tiger team that does that, and I'll have them examining the problem tomorrow morning. I appreciate your concern. We're friends, remember?"

"Sorry, Ron. Long hours."

"Maybe you need some time off. You look tired."

"That's what everybody tells me."

Ryan's next stop was at the FBI.

"I heard," Dan Murray said. "That bad?"

"I think so. Ron Olson isn't so sure." Jack didn't have to explain. Of all the possible disasters for a government to face, short of war, none was worse than leaky communications links. Literally everything depended on secure methods of moving information from one place to another. Wars had been won and lost on the basis of a single message that had been leaked to the other side. One of America's most stunning foreign-policy coups, the Washington Naval Treaty, had been the direct result of the State Department's ability to read the cipher traffic between all of the participating diplomats and their governments. A government that had no secrets could not function.