CKL
Synopsis
More adventures in the world of WAYPOINT KANGAROO (NaNoWriMo 2006).
Excerpt
About sixteen months ago, there was a bit of a shake-up within the agency's power structure. Okay, that's an understatement. It's kind of a long story. The short version is, our old D.Int went kind of crazy and tried to start an interplanetary war by destroying half of Mars. We managed to stop him--Paul was instrumental in ferreting out the conspiracy here on Earth, and I played my part in outer space--so now we have a new D.Int, and she's almost as bad as Paul.
Don't get me wrong. I have the greatest respect and admiration for Paul Tarkington. He's dedicated his life to a cause, and it's a worthy cause, one of historical significance which affects the lives of people and even nations. But most days I'm also scared to death of him. I don't think that fear is at all mitigated by my having been raised by him since I was a teenager, before I even knew what he did for a living. If anything, I've probably seen him at his most unguarded, and I know that his often single-minded pursuit of his goals is not an act or a show meant to intimidate others. This is who he really is. He gets the job done like no one else can, but like so many things in espionage, there is always a price.
Our agency's new Director of Intelligence, Darlene Stenba, was the first female officer with a commissioned command in the United States Outer Space Service. She captained the [TK ship name] for [TK] years, including [TK] tours of duty during the Independence War between Earth and Mars, and was highly decorated by the time she retired from active duty [TK or whatever the term is for no longer captaining a vessel]. She was already on the fast track to some kind of high-ranking Intelligence office when the whole Mars thing went down last year, and as soon as the old D.Int was taken into custody--and I mean within minutes--she stepped in as interim Director, with every intention of making that position permanent.
From what I've seen and heard and read, Admiral Stenba is every bit as qualified and dedicated as Paul is. And that scares me a little.
D.Int's office is on an upper floor of the office building next to the one which sits above my department's hidden bunker. There's an underground tunnel connecting the two buildings, and several others in downtown Washington, DC. I take the elevator up from my office to that subterranean level and walk underneath a city street, pass through another security checkpoint, then ride another elevator up to the executive floors.
Unlike some private corporations, where having a corner office with a view might be a highly coveted status symbol, the agency's higher-ups tend to be kept as far as possible from public view. Partly it's a security issue, but it's also a rank and respect thing. CEOs have personal assistants and drivers and entourages to attend to their needs and take care of all the little details so the big muckymucks can focus on running their companies. Directors in intelligence agencies have bodyguards and technicians to manage their personal security, so the brass can concentrate on all the myriad projects they have to manage at all times. The more important you are, the more protection you have and the more secure your office is.
D.Int's office is in the innermost section near the center of the building floor. The roughly square section has the Admiral's office in one corner, backing onto a machine room that takes up another quarter of the space, and then a panic room which takes up the remaining half of the section and also doubles as a secure vault. These are the most important assets on this level, and they live at the center of the layout, relatively safe--or at least more so than anyone else--from spying or direct attacks.
I wind my way from the elevator into D.Int's office. The layout of these offices and hallways is not as intentionally confusing as the maze which Oliver designed to safeguard the entry to D.Ops' offices, but I'm unfamiliar with this level, so I have to stop and check signs every now and then. And I'm still reminded of the labyrinth which hid the minotaur in ancient Greek mythology.
After a few minutes, I find myself at D.Int's door. There's no annunciator plate, so I knock on the door and find it completely solid. There's no way she could have heard me through that. I'm looking around for an intercom or some kind of instruction placard when the door slides open, and only then do I notice the well-hidden sensors running across the top of the door frame. Of course there would be an automated system to tell her when someone's approaching.
"Come on in, Kangaroo," D.Int says.
I step over the threshold, and the door slides shut behind me, surprisingly quiet for something so solid. There are two chairs facing D.Int's desk. I sit down in the one closer to the door and wait for her to finish what she's doing. She has no less than six different screens extruded from the clear [TK tech] surface of her desk, displaying a dizzying array of different, multicolored, animated datagrams. Her fingers dance from one screen to another, manipulating controls I can barely see to combine and partition and recombine the data. It reminds me a little of Jessica reading the raw logs from my implanted body sensors, but this is even a step beyond that--D.Int has already applied some processing to whatever data she's looking at, and now she's doing further transforms on it.
I'm a little surprised that someone at her level would be working directly with intel data like this. Most directors are more managers than individual contributors; Paul doesn't go out into the field, and Fleet Admiral OSS doesn't fly his own ship. But all those people must still itch to do the actual work which got them to where they are now. It's just easier for Stenba to actually do it once in a while, since her job is all about data, and she can play with that just as easily from her secure office location.
"Been watching the news?" she asks, almost conversationally. Her eyes are still tilted down at her desk screens.
"Nothing but, ma'am," I say. "We're still trying to get a positive ID on the civilian who was shot by the Canadian border patrol."
"Hoping that he's your bank robber?"
I start to respond, then close my mouth and study her face. I don't use my eye, even though it would augment my normal vision with an overlay of any of various sensors I could choose, including infrared, radiological, and electromagnetic. It would be rude to scan her, especially here, and I'm pretty sure she would notice the blinks and finger twitches it requires for me to turn on the eye and set it to the right configuration.
So I settle for watching her very closely as I say, "I didn't realize you were involved with that detail."
"I'm involved with every detail," she says, dismissing one screen with a swipe of her hand across its surface. The infinitely malleable piezoelectric material melts back into her flat desktop. "And it's not every day that D.Ops physically threatens the President. Word tends to get around about things like that."
It takes me a moment to process this information. "He did what?"
"I'm sure he wasn't completely serious," Stenba says, dismissing another screen, leaving only the four in the middle of her desk. "Besides, those two go way back. Were both in the same college singing group, as I understand it."
I can't imagine Paul singing anything. "Don't change the subject, ma'am. What happened with P--D.Ops and the President?"
Stenba stops working and looks up at me. Her eyes are an unusual blue-green color, and her silver-white hair makes her look older than she is. "If he hasn't told you himself, I'm quite sure it's not my place to inform you of the details."
I nod. "Yes, ma'am." She's right, of course, but I know Paul's never going to tell me. At least this also tells me something about Stenba: she's going to obey the rules, at least for now, at least until she has good reason to break them.
She dismisses the rest of her desk screens and says, "I noticed you accessing some of Intel's data feeds from your office."
"I'm authorized," I say, a little too quickly.
A smile flutters across her face. "Of course you are. In fact, I wanted to offer you better access."
"Excuse me?" This is not at all what I was expecting when I came up here.
She lifts a tablet from a side table and slides it across the desk to me. "Right now you're pulling from our agency-wide data repository. There's a lot of stuff in there, but because it's accessible to anyone in the solar system, we have to limit what we make available. Security reasons, as you know. And on top of that, for various other reasons, we don't release things that we haven't verified or which are otherwise sensitive. We don't want people outside Intel to freak out about something we're not ready to discuss. We want to have analysis prepared before releasing certain data into the wild, as it were."
"Yes, ma'am, I understand." I pick up the tablet. The screen is locked and requesting a thumbscan. "And what is this?"
"That's your all-access backstage pass. I've keyed the encryption to your biometrics, so only you can use it. It still requires a local hard line, but at least you'll be able to see all of our raw data from your office. Feel free to browse, let us know if you notice anything interesting--patterns, outliers, you know the drill."
I can feel my heart racing a little bit, and it's a little bit embarrassing to admit that I find this exciting. As much as I enjoy the field work in Operations--well, maybe "enjoy" is too strong a word, but I like being good at some of it, and it's rewarding to know I'm accomplishing something--it would not have been my first choice of career, and was perhaps the farthest thing from my mind when I was growing up, bouncing between orphanages and foster homes and group care centers.
How much does Stenba know about my personal history?
"Thank you, ma'am," I say, putting the tablet down. "Has D.Ops approved this already?"
Stenba waves one hand. "What's to approve? I'm giving you a gift horse here, Kangaroo. Don't look it in the mouth."
"I do appreciate the gesture, ma'am," I say, "but I'm in Operations. I'm helping out with the intel analysis right now because this is a red ball, but normally--"
"There's no 'normally' for you, Kangaroo," Stenba says. There's no hostility in her voice or her face; if anything, she seems like a schoolteacher explaining something to a slow student. "Your department only has three people in it. Your handler is the Director. You have a goddamn superpower, for God's sake. What's to stop you from doing anything you want?"
I was confused, but now I'm getting uncomfortable. I don't know what D.Int is trying to do here, but it's obviously some kind of ploy, and my experience with the previous D.Int wasn't too pleasant. I'm considering actually turning on my eye and looking around. But not quite yet. I don't want to risk playing that card until I've exhausted my other options.
"If you're short-staffed, ma'am, I can talk to D.Ops about helping you find more personnel."
"This isn't about personnel, Kangaroo. This is about YOU." She points a finger at me, and I actually relax a little. She is running some kind of game here, but it's not expressly malicious, not a conspiracy like I've seen before. There's no defensiveness in her posture or voice; her eyes are focused and still, not darting around at all; the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth is genuine, also crinkling the crow's-feet next to her eyes. Some things people can fake, and some things they can't.
She's trying to help me. Why is she trying to help me? What's in it for her?
"You used to work Intel, didn't you?" she asks.
And then it hits me: she wants to steal me away from Paul. For whatever reason--maybe to increase her own political cachet within the agency, maybe to annoy Paul, maybe because she believes I have some specific expertise she can use--she knows all about the bank robber's pocket-opening device, and she sees what that could mean if it's true. It would mean I don't have to be a field agent, that Paul couldn't justify keeping me on such a short leash all the time. If I'm not the only one with this superpower, I become less special--but not entirely valueless.
"That was a long time ago," I say.
"No so long," Stenba says. "And you did some good work during the war." She doesn't have to say which one; the Independence War is the only conflict of any significance to have occurred within the past few decades. "We could use more people like you."
I stand up, leaving the tablet on the desk. "I think I should go now, ma'am."
She frowns. "Was it something I said?"
"I appreciate what you're offering, ma'am, but I think it would be inappropriate for me to accept at this time. If you'd like me to run it past D.Ops--"
Stenba surprises me by laughing out loud. "Okay, fine, you win." She pulls the tablet back and drops it back on top of the pile on her side table. "I didn't think it would work, but I had to give it a try. I respect your integrity."
I can feel my forehead wrinkle into a frown. "You were testing me?"
"Just feeling the water," she says with a shrug. "I mean, come on, Kangaroo, everyone in the agency knows about this heist video. We all know about your pocket, we all know that Science has a giant hard-on for figuring out how to access it without you.
"It's going to happen someday. Maybe not in our lifetimes, or--" she waves at one of her wall screens, which is showing a live news feed-- "maybe it's happened already. And what are you going to do then? You ever thought about that?"
"I should get back to work," I say.
Stenba smiles, stands, and shakes my hand. "Thanks for stopping by, Kangaroo. And if you ever change your mind, the offer stands." She nods at the tablet. "Both offers."
"Thanks."
The walk back to my office seems much longer than the distance it took to get to D.Int.
#
