Empire Games Series, Book 1(46)
“I guess.” Her eyes narrowed involuntarily. “But about that: I don’t think my cover’s holding.”
“What, has anyone accused you of being an impostor?”
“No, it’s just that—I can tell—they know I’m not really one of them. Some of them are playing along deliberately, and a couple have cut me dead, but I’m really not fitting in. Not sure whether I’m being given the cold shoulder because I’m not a … not a typical cop,” she said weakly.
Patrick’s face hardened. “Any overt racism?”
“No, but—”
“Has anybody called you out, to your face…?”
“No, I think it’s more that they think I’m some kind of fake.”
“Then it’s not a problem. Drop it.” O’Neill’s tone was hard. “You’re not expected to graduate top of your course. Or even in the upper half. You’re here to learn how detectives think, what makes them tick.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll give you a second-level story. They already know you’re DHS. If anyone challenges you, tell them the truth: you’re undergoing deep-cover training. The spin is that you’ll be infiltrating activist groups as a long-term informer. If you don’t mention the world-walkers, nobody’s going to look for that angle; it’s too weird. If they think the DHS is running spies into activist groups, that’ll keep them happy.” He paused. “Racism is another thing. Official policy is zero tolerance, but you know what that’s worth. If you get any trouble, call me and I’ll get the Colonel to drop the hammer on them. That is all.”
“What’s…?” Rita paused. “Yeah, I can do that.” Pretend to be exactly what I am. Tell Patrick if I get any of the other shit. Maybe they’re not all assholes. Maybe that’s why I got a non-Anglo supervisor.
“Just don’t volunteer any information unless you’re directly challenged and you’ll be fine.”
“Apart from the bruises and the Marine assault course they expect me to pass!”
Patrick snorted.
As it happened, nobody challenged Rita to her face. So after another week she deliberately slipped some tells into her classwork—showing more interest than was strictly necessary in the law surrounding undercover informers, or in evasion techniques used by terrorists. After that, a couple of the guys who had been avoiding her started to nod in passing. There were even some brief, guarded conversations in the canteen. They thought they had her pigeonholed. It made life a little more bearable, which she came to appreciate as the physical regime and long classroom hours ground down on her. It didn’t break the ice all around: for some people her skin would always mark her out as other. But it wasn’t only her skin that was the problem—simple racism would have been stamped on, hard, by the instructors. By week six she was coming to suspect that the real problem was in her head.
Rita was lonely, an introvert exposed to an extrovert culture. She could fake it in the classroom and exercises by putting on a front, just like she could act on stage. But the continual effort over a period of weeks left her scant energy for socializing in the evenings; nor was the prospect of barroom bonding with sheriffs from small towns and lieutenants from big-city forces remotely appealing to her. The cultural chasm she perceived when she looked at her classmates was dizzying. They’d chosen a career in law enforcement. She was something else, so different that she felt like a fraud—not through any kind of criminal inclination, but because where they saw things in red and blue she saw an infinite range of purples.
The graduate-level coursework she could focus on; the fitness regime was a weak point. But if she failed at anything, it was the networking and team building.
Finally, after ten weeks, the ordeal was over. She said her abbreviated goodbyes to classmates who had remained strangers throughout, and slunk back to Camp Graceland with her tail between her legs.
“Good luck with your Mission: Impossible assignment, wherever they send you,” said Martina, her course director, a grizzled FBI senior agent turned teacher. “You didn’t fool anybody, by the way,” she added with a smile. “But we don’t mind. I just hope you got whatever your handlers sent you here for.”
Surgical Intervention
BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, MAY 2020
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004910023 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
DR. SCRANTON: I have some bad news for you gentlemen. We lost another drone to the anomalous time line yesterday. That’s time line 178. Situation’s escalating.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Fuck.
COL. SMITH: Louis, what can you tell us about it?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Mission three was flown by an RQ-4 DarkStar. It departed from Wright-Patterson AFB at 1620 local time, then headed south until it crossed over water, topped up from an Air Force tanker, and climbed to flight level 700. Once at cruise altitude it triggered its ARMBAND unit to take it to the destination time line via time line one, and that’s all we know. It’s more than a day past its minimum fuel reserve time, so we’re calling it a definite hull loss.
COL. SMITH: Wait a minute. If this was mission three, what were the first two?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: We followed the usual protocol for newly opened indirect-access time lines: a ground-level atmospheric sample-return box to confirm the presence of air and gravity, then mapping using MQ-1 Predators. They fly in daylight at medium altitude, with cameras set up to perform a wide-area survey of the eastern seaboard area. They were expecting business as usual: an uninhabited wasteland or, at most, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. But neither of them came back, and after two hull losses in a row, some bright spark decided to up the ante. The RQ-4 is a high-altitude stealth drone, sort of an unmanned U-2 analog. And it’s now overdue. Never showed up. Didn’t activate its DOOMWATCH device, either—