Empire Games Series, Book 1(89)
“I don’t really understand,” Rita complained.
The Colonel placed a mug of coffee on the occasional table in front of her. “You’re not supposed to. Do you want to bring her up to speed, boss? Or shall I?”
“Huh. Allow me.” Dr. Scranton waited while he fetched her a coffee—What kind of person has the equivalent of a Major General doing the fetching and carrying anyway? Rita wondered. “We live and work in a panopticon, Rita. Everything you do, every breath you take, someone’s watching over you. It’s the price of doing business in a security state. The trouble is, you can be running a nice tight ship and if it suddenly starts delivering results, well, all those eyeballs turn inward. And their owners all start trying to figure an angle that’ll let them take the credit for a job well done.”
“But you’re—” Rita struggled to sit upright. You’re a deputy undersecretary of state! she wanted to shout. What are you even doing here? “Why are you getting involved? Isn’t this below your level?”
“Eric petitioned me to help with leech detachment duty. You’ve waded into a swamp full of bloodsuckers and you can’t reasonably do your job if you’re carrying passengers. But nobody likes a rogue operation. So this week we’re making sure that all the would-be stakeholders get a good look at the Unit, up close and personal. Then after they’ve had a look inside I’m going to slam the door in their face so that Eric can lock it down and get everything back on course.”
She slid an etiolated, almost skeletal hand into her handbag and extracted a white cylinder, raised it to her lips, and sucked, hard. A blue LED glowed at its tip. “The stakes are escalating. Too high for this penny-ante house politics bullshit. My boss, he says his boss is counting on you. And the buck stops on her desk, in the Oval Office.”
Rita watched, eyes glazed, as Dr. Scranton exhaled a stream of bone-white smoke. The undersecretary leaned back, then addressed Colonel Smith.
“The core need-to-know cell is going to be restricted as tightly as possible. Minimum threat surface. You will nominate a team of no more than four bodies to generate internal disinformation under top-secret classification. They will manufacture falsified mission transcripts and reports from Rita to support the appearance that operations in BLACK RAIN are proceeding nominally. Transcripts to be seeded with randomized tells in each distribution, so that your people can trace leakers. If any leaks are identified, those responsible will be either turned—if there’s an organization behind them and they are cooperative—or detained incommunicado.”
Rita noticed Smith’s brief expression of unease. Is that some sort of euphemism? she wondered. “The disinform reports may include elements of legitimate intel if, and only if, we have no reason to redact it—the best lies are parsimonious. In other words, as far as the peanut gallery is concerned, JAUNT BLUE deployment and orientation in BLACK RAIN will continue as planned. In reality, we anticipate that Rita’s tasking will increasingly diverge from the BLACK RAIN road map over time.” The undersecretary turned her unblinking gaze on Rita. “What do you understand from all this?”
Rita’s lips were suddenly dry. “Jesus.” She tried to gather her scattered thoughts. “You’re, uh, exposing the operation internally so that you can use it as cover for a deeper operation? In the BLACK RAIN time line?”
Dr. Scranton nodded slowly. Her face, no longer poker-still, was nevertheless serious. “They’ve got nukes, Rita. They’re at least late-1960s in technology terms. They’ve got computers and tanks and the proven ability to detect and shoot down stealthed drones. In some ways they’re ahead of us: they’ve got containerized multimodal transport, and they’ve also got electrified freight and high-speed trains. If you were in the White House, what would you be thinking?”
“I’d be thinking—” Oh God, we’re fucked. If they have world-walkers, we are so fucked. “It’s a good thing they don’t have world-walkers, isn’t it?”
Scranton nodded. Then she reached into her handbag and pulled out a tablet. “Watch this,” she said, toneless as an executioner as she handed the device to Rita.
“Watch—”
Grainy CCTV video showed a sidewalk on a quiet city street. A middle-aged woman, her black hair scraped back, walked into a questionable-looking establishment, half diner, half bodega.
Cut to: red brick buildings, shuttered windows, locked doors.
A man dressed in last year’s hipster uncool, with heavy-rimmed spectacles and urban sidewalk-warrior hybrid bicycle accessory, stepped out of a door.
“Brooklyn, back in late March this year,” said Scranton. “Five months ago.”
Under-eave cameras chased the cycle-hipster up an alleyway, along a street, up another alley, and into a wider avenue. Eventually he chained up his bike, shouldered his messenger bag, and approached the same diner as the woman.
“Everyone knows about face recognition algorithms,” remarked Scranton. “They think wearing hoodies will conceal them. Somewhat fewer people know about ear recognition, but it’s a big deal: ears are nearly as unique as fingerprints. And then there’s gait recognition—you can’t easily change the length of the bones in your legs, so we’ve got software that can identify people by the way they walk. You’ll know it’s gone viral when you start seeing news footage of bank robbers in veils and hoopskirts. And of course everyone knows their fatphone camera can recognize cats.”