State of Siege - Tom Clancy [48]
Upon graduating, the slender, five-foot-ten-inch-tall blonde applied to the CIA. She was hired-partly because of her exemplary academic record and partly, she later learned, because equal opportunity guidelines found the notoriously chauvinistic agency short on women. The reasons didn't matter then. Ani was in. Officially, she served as a visa consultant in a succession of U.s. embassies in Asia. Unofficially, she used her downtime to develop contacts in the government and military. Dissatisfied officials and officers. Men and women who were hurt by the Asian financial collapse of the mid-1990's. People who might be persuaded to provide information for money.
Ani was singularly effective as a CIA recruiter. Ironically, she found that her greatest asset was not her knowledge of Asian culture or government. It wasn't even the fact that she'd seen her parents lose their slice of the American Dream and knew how to talk to people who felt disconnected. Her greatest asset was her ability to remain emotionally uninvolved with her recruits. There had been times when it was necessary to sacrifice people for information, and she had not hesitated to do so. She understood from school, from life, from reading history, that people were the coin of governments and armies and that you couldn't be afraid to spend them. In a way, it was no different from telling women they'd looked good in coats or slacks or blouses when she knew they didn't. The store needed their money, and she was determined to get it.
Unfortunately, Ani found that talent and drive weren't enough. When she accomplished what she'd been sent abroad to do, the young woman wasn't given a promotion or higher security clearance. Now the antifemale bias mattered: The good jobs went to her male colleagues. Ani was sent to Seoul to collect data submitted by the contacts she'd established. Most of it was transmitted electronically, and she was not even involved in interpreting what came in. That was done by ELINT teams back at Company headquarters. After six months of sitting at a computer, working as an intel shuffler, she asked to be transferred to Washington. Instead, she was transferred to New York. As an intel shuffler. Because of her overseas experience, Ani had been sent to work at the Doyle Shipping Agency. The CIA front operated from the shell office on the fourth floor of 866 United Nations Plaza. Their mission was to spy on key United Nations officials. The DSA consisted of a small reception area with a secretary-who was off today, since it was Saturday-an office for field office director David Battat, and another office for Ani. There was also a small office for the two floaters who were shared by this office and another in the financial district. The floaters trailed diplomats who were suspected of trying to meet with spies or prospective spies in this country. The office also stocked arms, from guns to C-4, which could be used by the floaters or carried to agents abroad in diplomatic pouches. Ani's small, East River-view office was really the heart of the operation. It was filled with fake DSA files, books of shipping schedules and tax regulations, along with a computer linked to high-tech equipment locked in a broom closet at the end of the small corridor.
Ani's job was to monitor the activities of key United Nations personnel. She did this by using bugs developed by the CIA'S research and sciences group and being field-tested in the UN for the first time-"to work the bugs out," as Battat had put it. The bugs were literally mechanical bugs the size of a large beetle. Made of titanium and extremely lightweight piezoelectric ceramics-materials that caused very little drain on the batteries, allowing them to run for years without being recalled-the bugs are electronically attuned to the voice of a subject. After being set loose inside a building, they required no further maintenance. The fleet, six-legged devices could reach any point in the building within twenty minutes and followed their individual targets by moving behind walls and through air ducts;