Empire Games Series, Book 1(57)

AGENT O’NEILL: This is Kurt Douglas we’re talking about, yes?

DR. SCRANTON: We already investigated him.

COL. SMITH: Yes, I expect the FBI checked him out when he first arrived here. He came from the German Democratic Republic—over the Wall, or rather, over the fence—in the late sixties. After his compulsory military service he volunteered for the Grenztruppen, the border troops, just to get into a position to defect. He deserted—drugged his unit’s dog team—then figured out his way through a minefield. Stole a map, as I recall.

DR. SCRANTON: Yes, that showed a lot of initiative. The FBI backgrounder was quite positive about him …

COL. SMITH: Well, I detailed a couple of people to do some digging, because I thought it was a bit suspicious, and I was right. The Grenztruppen weren’t like our Customs and Border Protection. CBP are cops; the GDR’s border troops were military, and elite military at that. If they’d caught him in the act, they’d have shot him. If he survived, he faced five years in jail and probably espionage charges on top. He claimed to be a motivated political dissident, but back then everyone did. It went down well with the FBI and they rubber-stamped his Green Card and didn’t flag him when he applied for citizenship. What caught my attention is that he left family behind. His mother and father, grandmother, two sisters, plenty of cousins.

AGENT O’NEILL: Huh? He broke his handles?

COL. SMITH: That’s what got me wondering.

DR. SCRANTON: What are you suggesting?

COL. SMITH: He had a plan, he had the means—why didn’t he bring them with him?

AGENT GOMEZ: What did you dig up?

COL. SMITH: I put through a request to our friends in the BfV, the German security agency, to look for signs of Kurt Douglas in the archives they inherited from the Hauptverwaltung Aufkl?rung—the Stasi’s foreign intelligence division. They didn’t find a case file as such, so there’s no evidence that he was a spy, but it turns out that Kurt wasn’t just a border guard either. He was a member of a Pass and Control Unit—the special troops who controlled crossing points, not just securing the border itself—and the Pass and Control Unit troops were all members of the 6th Main Department of the Stasi.

AGENT O’NEILL: Ouch!

AGENT GOMEZ: So Kurt is ex-Stasi? That means his immigration status is—

COL. SMITH: Don’t say it. You’re thinking we could use this as a handle on Rita, aren’t you? Threaten her beloved grandfather with deportation if she steps out of line.

AGENT GOMEZ: Yes, but—

COL. SMITH: Deportation to that well-known starving hellhole and backwater, Germany.

AGENT GOMEZ: Oh.

COL. SMITH: Where he has relatives, will be received with open arms as one who turned against the GDR for moral reasons, and can probably claim a pension.

AGENT GOMEZ: Isn’t lying on your naturalization form a felony? Or, or, we could nail him for conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the US Attorney General—

COL. SMITH: We’d have to convince a judge to play along. There’s no positive evidence that Kurt was a sleeper, and in any case the GDR collapsed more than thirty years ago. It’s ancient history.

DR. SCRANTON: FISA has plenty of judges. We could pick one who lost relatives during the cold war, if we really had to.

COL. SMITH: But it’d be better all round if we didn’t. I can’t think of a better way to break Rita—to make her hate us—than threatening her family. The reason I brought this up … Rita imprinted on a guy who clearly had some exposure to tradecraft at an early age. Beckstein Senior probably picked the adoptive family precisely because she was looking for someone with the right skill set, and she hit the jackpot. Do you realize what this means?

DR. SCRANTON: (slowly) We’ve won the lottery on a rollover.

AGENT GOMEZ: You’re saying she—

DR. SCRANTON: Our prototype candidate doesn’t match the personality profile for a world-walking intelligence asset by accident. She matches it because she’s been trained for it since birth! Trained by a professional paranoid who learned how to operate in a totalitarian police state. Trained to keep her head down, trained how to avoid attention. Admittedly she was trained by a role model with limited experience of a modern ubiquitous computing panopticon, but—

COL. SMITH: We don’t need DRAGON’S TEETH—and JAUNT BLUE—equipped agents to get us intel on adversaries who have Facebook and Google. We have full-spectrum infowar dominance in that sector. We’re trying to develop a world-walking intel capability targeting adversaries who are old-school.

DR. SCRANTON: Handle her with kid gloves, Colonel. It takes a generation to breed a resource like this—they don’t grow on trees. You were absolutely right to draw this to my attention. Give her the Valley tour if you think it’ll help motivate her: hell, give her anything she wants, if you think it’ll make her love us. But you don’t have a lot of time. We need to get this show on the road.

COL. SMITH: How long do I have?

DR. SCRANTON: A week, Colonel. Just one week. Then you need to start her mission training.





END TRANSCRIPT


BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020

Two days later they discharged Rita from the clinic and drove her down to Brooklyn in the back of a van with blacked-out windows. The day after that, they put her on a train to D.C., with orders to overnight in a hotel room, then report to an office in Baltimore the following day. The e-mail came attached to a DHS-backed credit vCard for her fatphone, and stern instructions for how to record subsistence expenses. Traveling on the government’s tab: I’ve come up in the world, she realized. Shame it’s economy class all the way. (Except on the high-speed train, which was business class only.)