Empire Games Series, Book 1(80)
“Pleased to meet you, Doctor,” Rita managed to say without stuttering.
Scranton smiled back graciously. “Likewise, I’m sure.”
“Eileen is in my immediate reporting chain, two levels up,” the Colonel added. Two levels up from Major General equivalent, Rita translated internally. What does that even mean? “She reports in turn to the Homeland Security Council and, thanks to the miracle of matrix management, to the National Security Council. The HSC being DHS and the NSC being the Defense Department.”
“Uh—uh—” Rita tried not to hyperventilate. Where does the President come into all this? She had a horrible feeling that the ladder of government didn’t have much headspace above the Homeland Security Council. Suddenly Gomez’s paranoid live-wire act was looking less like an overreaction and more like justifiable caution. “I’m honored. Um. What can I do for you, Doctor?”
“For me personally, nothing.” Eileen smiled self-deprecatingly. She glanced at Colonel Smith. “I’m just sitting in as a monitor. Ensuring that the Homeland Security Council and National Security Council are fully informed.”
Informed by a first-person witness, Rita decoded, in case the Colonel is an inaccurate correspondent. Smith looked as relaxed as he ever did, which corresponded to somewhere between overcaffeinated and hitting the crystal meth in normal-person terms. But he certainly didn’t look stressed out or upset, as he might if his superiors were investigating him for running a rogue operation.
“We’ve become something of a sensation over the weekend.” The Colonel smiled tightly at her. “The Secretary of State was briefed on Saturday, and on Sunday we made headlines in a very small way—on the President’s Daily Brief.” Rita swallowed, queasily nervous. That document was more usually preoccupied by Chinese nuclear battle group maneuvers in the Yellow Sea, or the geopolitical consequences of fluctuations in the price of natural gas in Europe, than by the fifteen-minute foray of an agent blundering around a railway switchyard in the dark. To Rita, who’d grown up carefully keeping her head down, making it onto the Daily Brief felt wrong. “Dr. Scranton is here to ensure that the White House is kept fully informed.”
Rita dry-swallowed. This was like something out of a bad Hollywood adventure game. “Okay, I guess. I’ll do my best—” She realized her mouth was in danger of running away from her, and forced it into silence.
“We’re still on for 0300 hours on Tuesday,” Smith added. “Patrick, do you want to take it away?”
“Um, yeah.” Rita took heart. Patrick was putting a good face on it, but she knew him well enough now to recognize the small signs: he was at least as unnerved as she was. “Our current mission plan repeats and extends the Mission One baseline from Thursday last, adding additional elements that extend the sortie duration to two hours. As before, there will be go/no-go checkpoints and emergency exits at each staging point. The objectives are to revalidate safe insertion protocol, check for signs of adversary awareness, collect uplink data from distributed surveillance nodes, then insert additional surveillance devices…”
One of the suits who’d blown in with Dr. Scranton raised a hand as soon as Patrick paused. “How exactly are you going to check signs of activity on the part of an adversary you have not yet characterized?”
Rita stifled a groan: It’s going to be one of those meetings, she realized. Not so much micromanaged as nanomanaged, every footfall to be structured for maximum carefully contrived defensive ass-covering on the part of the stakeholders. Her unique status as the only JAUNT BLUE operative meant that everybody was simultaneously shit-scared of losing her and eager to put their own grubby fingerprints all over the intelligence assessment that would be read by the woman in the Oval Office.
It was simultaneously fascinating and tedious, like sitting in on one of HaptoTech’s marketing meetings before the trade show. Only Clive would have fired the fingerprint hounds on the spot. I should have stayed over with Angie, Rita realized. Except that, as an opportunity to be a fly on the wall at an intel operation that had just leveled up to Boss, this was unbeatable. Historic, even. The other girls at Spy Camp would have been slack-jawed with envy—and so would their parents.
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO; IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
It was nearly three in the morning and a light rain was falling when Rita climbed out of the trailer—actually a TV production unit’s mobile dressing room that someone had sprung for—and clumped over to the taped-out transfer location. Her back sagged under the weight of all the crap the committee had insisted she carry. This is just nuts, she thought. Tired and irritable, she wished she were brave enough to throw a quiet tantrum.
Sunday night’s meeting had bled over into the small hours of Monday morning, then reconvened over coffee and cronuts at two in the afternoon, then run on again until eight. This deprived her of the chance to do more than catch a quick shower and call Angie—just for the blind reassurance of hearing her voice, a tangible reminder that she hadn’t imagined her life taking an extraordinary swerve for the better.
She also managed to fit in an hour-long nap—one troubled by disturbing dreams of abandonment. Upon waking, the surreal sense of disconnection resumed: Why am I even here? she asked herself. Why can’t I just take the week off? The emotional flash flood, pouring across the rock-hard plain of a life baked by months of drought, made concentrating on what she was supposed to be doing almost impossible. She was besieged by the resurrected ghosts of unquiet memories: hiking together on the Appalachian Trail, lying awake at night in a crowded tent listening to the girl next to her slowly breathing, and wondering—