The Elizabethan Secret (Lang Reilly Series Book 9) by Gregg Loomis Read Free Book Online Page B

Intelligence
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                  The Office of Naval Intelligence, founded in 1882, is the oldest of the seventeen members of the so-called intelligence community. Unlike its cousin, the CIA, it does not have a massive campus but a modest (by government standards) building in a center shared by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency), the US Census Bureau and the National Records Center. Similar to its larger and better known co agency, it is organized into administrative, intelligence gathering and operations divisions. It was originally charged with “collecting and recording such naval information as may be useful to the Department (of the Navy) in time of war as well as peace. . .” Like all government agencies, bureaus and administrations, it has long since expanded its role.
                  Which was the cause, if not the reason, Cincom (Commander in Chief) Admiral Adrene Puller was frowning over the decoded and translated version of an intercepted communication from the historic Imperial Russian Admiralty building in St. Petersburg now serving as headquarters for the present Russian navy. The message had been sent in Fialk (m-125) , a rotor code, a twenty-first century version of the German’s World War II Enigma machine.
                  Happily for Admiral Puller, a Russian defector had swapped one of the machines for American sanctuary from prosecution for “corruption,” the usual crime of those deemed political enemies of the current Moscow regime. A day or so of tinkering and the Navy’s most talented hackers had retrofitted the device to receive messages with intended destinations such as the Russian Pacific, Baltic, Black Sea, or Atlantic Fleets. There had been speculation the man was a plant, the machine a device for dissemination of disinformation. But satellites had, so far, shown intercepted positioning orders had been followed to the predicted letter.
                  Once in a while the blind hog really did find an acorn.
                  But what Admiral Puller had in front of her wasn’t a positioning order. It was hardly a military communication at all. It was directed to the London embassy’s branch of Foreign Intelligence Service for the Russian Federation, one of the two agencies that had been the KGB.
                  Nothing odd about that. The Russian Admiralty frequently communicated with the intelligence services.
                  But this, if correctly decoded and translated, directed someone to attend an auction and buy “lot 228.”
                  Admiral Puller was well aware that corruption and cronyism was rampant in Russian government, but to openly send someone to the world’s foremost auction house to buy an antique or a painting with government funds?
                  Surely not.             
                  There was knock at the door and a yeoman, the Admiral’s secretary, stuck his head in. “Commander Swift here to see you, mam.”
                  “Show him in.” 
                  Swift strode in, standing at attention before the admiral’s desk. Since cover was not worn indoors in most situations and the Navy saluted only when under cover, his hands remained at his sides.
                  At thirty-six, Commander Straton Swift was the youngest head of ONI’s Ops division in memory. In any intelligence organization, successes in operations don’t go unnoticed but they do go unheralded. Only the President of the United States, Admiral Puller, and perhaps half a dozen others knew that it had been Swift who put together the intel resulting in the Panamanian government seizing a North Korean ship carrying Cuban weapons concealed under produce in January of this year. This was just one more of his