“Roger that, sir,” he said into his phone, sucking the fingers of his other hand as he did so. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir, within the hour.”
Williams cut the call. He used his still-greasy index finger on the wall to call up the command pad. I grimaced. The thin nanolayer membrane on the wall picked up his request and soon the command pad materialized out of nowhere on the wall, ready to accept his oily orders.
Williams tapped the stop button, and Saving Private Ryan stopped streaming. I asked him what happened, but he just sighed …
… and at that very moment my own cell started ringing. I fished it out of my back pocket. Headquarters.
“All units summoned to headquarters,” said Williams.
2
“Take full precautions to avoid being identified along the way.”
Williams and I followed our orders from the Pentagon and proceeded to Washington in our civvy suits. It would have been ridiculous to try to make it there in our uniforms, as our nameplates and decorations would have made us easily identifiable by definition. Basically, the orders were to come as you are, although Williams wasn’t happy about this—he never felt comfortable meeting the top brass unless he was in uniform, he said. As long as you were squeezed into a tight uniform with plenty of medals and ribbons on your chest you didn’t have any tiresome considerations such as fashion or style to worry about. Uniform is just uniform. With your own clothes you always had to worry about other people judging you based on their own values. I don’t like people I don’t know seeing me as an individual, said Williams.
We took an ordinary commercial flight rather than a military plane. It looked like they were trying to keep the general summons as low-key as possible, not just to the general public but within Forces as well. If John Paul was indeed part of a wider organization then it was quite likely they would have a surveillance network in place to monitor any unusual activity among the Secret Service and Special Forces. There was also probably something about the general summons that the Pentagon didn’t want to be broadcasting to the forces at large.
So we did our best to blend in with the crowds as we made it to Washington on our own steam. We were under strict orders not to take a cab from Reagan National, so we took the metro to Pentagon Station and disembarked along with the throngs of the staffers and the other visitors.
It wasn’t my first time in the Pentagon, but nonetheless I couldn’t help but feel like something of a rube.
Watching the crowd disembarking at Pentagon Station it was nigh impossible to distinguish the staffers from the visitors. Due to developments in biometric IDs, clothes had become somewhat less important as a distinguishing feature than they had been years ago.
My ID, for example, was nowhere to be found in my clothes or shoes, of course—InfoSec’s secure servers had done away with the need for all that.
The upshot of all this was that the people here, whether staffers or visitors, had a tendency to rough it somewhat. Take the visitors, civilians mostly. The fashion of the day was “Pentagon style,” which was somewhere between an homage to and a parody of the typical desk-jockey uniforms of way back when—the era when the two worlds stared into each other’s faces in a game of nuclear brinksmanship. So the civilians wore bland, nondescript (or so they seemed at first glance) outfits, and the military staffers either wore similar Pentagon-style clothes or something even more casual. Basically, the likes of me had no chance of telling who was who.
We pushed through the crowds of uniforms, suits, and Birdlegs and walked toward our destination. The Birdlegs, or Birdlegged Porters, always creeped me out, as they looked just like people with no upper bodies.
Walking robot legs made out of synthetic flesh—they’d been part of the furniture these past few years. The Pentagon was a much larger physical space than people gave it credit for—roughly three times the floor space of the Empire State Building, for example, although no one trumpets this fact. Having said that, it was easier to get around by the fact of its pentagonal shape—it was never too far from one point to another. What did slow things down was the constant security checks—we needed to have our palms and fingerprints read, our retinas scanned, and our ears and noses and eyes matched against their database before we reached our appointed conference room.
We arrived at the part of the building where the conference rooms were concentrated. Virtually all of them seemed to be in use, with a variety of signs hanging from each door, indicating the nature of the conference within.
THE COMMITTEE FOR THE LIBERATION OF LIBYA
EAST EUROPEAN STABILIZATION COMMISSION
PREPARATORY COMMISSION FOR HUMANITARIAN
INTERVENTION IN THE SUDANESE QUESTION
THE CONVENTION FOR DISSEMINATION OF BEST
PRACTICE IN COUNTERTERRORISM
All the world’s problems could be found in this little corner of the Pentagon, and presumably some of the solutions too.
Words like liberation were used without compunction; I can’t imagine that the governments of the countries concerned would have been too happy to be discussed in such explicit terms. But unlike the rest of Washington, this wasn’t the place for diplomatic niceties. Indeed, the whole raison d’être of this place was to freely discuss how America was best going to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries.
One of the conference rooms was different, though. The plaque on the door simply read NO ENTRY.
“Here we are,” said Williams, who then spun around to survey the other conference rooms. “Something a bit surreal about a room with a big ‘No Entry’ sign mixed in with all these others, huh?”
“I guess that’s the White Man’s Burden for you yet again,” I said. “If the hegemon wants to rule the world, we just have to man up and shoulder our responsibilities alone, behind closed doors and away from the rest of the world.”
Williams nodded in agreement. “There’s something so Kafkaesque about this whole thing, isn’t there?”
“When have you read any Kafka?” I asked.
Williams shrugged. “Never. I just wanted to see what it’d be like to use the word ‘Kafkaesque’ in a sentence.”
Williams knocked on the door and a man’s voice answered from within: “Identify yourselves using the device attached to the door.”
I pressed my thumb onto the pale green glass pane about the size of a domino; the lock was released and the door opened an inch.
Inside the darkened room a group of men and women were watching a porn flick.
At least, that was what it looked like when we first entered the room. The projector was showing a black man tied up in restraints, and the audience was distinctly middle-aged. They all turned to glance at us as we entered. Amid the dim sea of faces peering at us I spotted our immediate superior officer and boss, Colonel Rockwell, the leader of Special Operations I Detachment.
“My men from Unit G,” said Boss, beckoning to us to fill the empty seats. The men and women sitting at the table were all around Boss’s age or older, so it looked like we were the babies of the group. A man rose from the table to introduce himself.
Undersecretary of defense for Intelligence, he told us. USD (I). In other words, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported to him—we had some civilian bigwigs in our midst, all right. Presumably he was here to speak for the DIA.
Sure enough, intelligence agencies from the CIA to the NSA were also represented to deputy director level, as were numerous members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, including the senate majority leader. To see such a distinguished group of people huddled together in a room to watch a video of a black man being trussed up in what seemed like bondage gear was somewhat disconcerting, to say the least.