"I'd rather not. I may be a slacker, but the job suits me," Creek said.
"I'm sorry about the slacker comment," Javna said. "You've done some important things, Harry. And you've always done the right thing by my family. You've always been there to help us. I haven't forgotten. We haven't forgotten."
Both of their eyes went back to the headstone.
"I was more helpful to some of you than others," Creek said.
"Don't blame yourself for Brian, Harry," Javna said. "That wasn't about you. It was about him."
"I promised you I'd look out for him," Creek said.
"Still sticking up for Brian," Javna said. "You said it yourself. You know Brian. You couldn't tell him anything. You couldn't look out for him because he wouldn't look out for himself. We know that. We've never blamed you for it. You did what you could. And then you made sure he came back to us. Most kids who die up there never make it back. You brought him back to us, Harry. It meant more to us than you know."
"This is Arlington National Cemetery?" Defense Secretary Pope said over the photos, to Phipps.
"That's right, sir," Phipps said.
"I thought you said they were heading for a bar," Pope said.
"They said they'd be meeting for a drink," Phipps noted. "It didn't really occur to us that Javna might be heading to his brother's grave until they were already there."
"Sloppy," Pope said.
Oh, and you would have figured it out instantly, asshole, thought Phipps.
"Yes, sir," Phipps said. "We're not using our in-house people on this one. I'm using a specialist suggested by Jean Schroeder. Rod Acuna. Schroeder says he uses him and his team often."
"Fine," Pope said. "But tell him to keep better tabs from here on out." Pope waved the photo in his hand. "Do we know what they're talking about?" he asked.
"No," Phipps said. "Javna carried a portable acoustic scrambler." Phipps braced himself for another sloppy comment, but Pope held his fire. After a couple of seconds Phipps went on. "But we think this is the guy Javna's going to use for his little project."
"Who is he?" Pope said.
"Harris Creek," Phipps said. " 'Harris' is actually his middle name; his first name is 'Horatio.'"
"Which explains why he goes by his middle name," Pope said.
"He's an old friend of the Javna family," Phipps said, digging through his notes. "Specifically of Brian Javna, who was the younger brother of Ben Javna. There's a twelve-year difference between the two. Or was. Anyway, Creek and Brian Javna joined the service at the same time, when they turned eighteen. They were both at the Battle of Pajmhi. Brian Javna died there."
Pope snorted. "Join the club," he said. No one in the UNE Defense community liked to talk much about the Battle of Pajmhi. There may have been worse clusterfucks in the history of human armed conflict, but Pajmhi had the misfortune of being the most recent.
"Creek got a Distinguished Service Cross," Phipps continued. Pope raised an eyebrow at that. "A note from Creek's CO. was put into his file, saying that the CO. had originally wanted to recommend Creek for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but that Creek had become so agitated at the suggestion that he had to back down. As it is, it doesn't appear Creek ever took receipt of his Cross. Most of his battalion was wiped out at Pajmhi; Creek was transferred to a military police brigade where he served the rest of his tour. Re-upped once and was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant."
Phipps flipped to another page. "After the service, Creek joined the Washington DC police department, working on electronic crimes. You know, fraud, hackers, child molesters in chat rooms. That sort of thing. Quit the department three years ago and spent a couple of years unemployed."
"What, like homeless?" Pope asked.
"No, not like that," Phipps said. "Definitely not homeless. His parents left him a home in Reston after they retired to Arizona. He just didn't work for anyone."
"What was he doing?"
"Doesn't say," Phipps said. "But about fifteen months ago he started working for State Department as a Xenosapient facilitator, whatever that means. His schedules are public record so I checked them out. He spends most of his time visiting embassies for other planetary governments of the CC. He's got no diplomatic training; he doesn't even have a college degree. So it's a pretty good bet Ben Javna helped him land the job."
"How does a semi-literate war hero help out Ben Javna now?" Pope asked. "I'm not seeing the benefit here."
"Well, that's the thing," Phipps said. "You're assuming he's semi-literate because he doesn't have a college degree and he's an ex-cop. But that's not the whole story." Phipps shuffled through his papers and set one on Pope's desk. "Look at this. In his senior year in high school, Creek was a U.S. national gold medal winner for the Westinghouse Science and Technology competition. He designed an artificial intelligence interface to help people with degenerative motor diseases communicate with the outside world. He had a full ride to MIT and had been accepted to Cal-Tech and Columbia. This is one really smart guy, sir."
"He was a tech geek and yet he joined the army," Pope said. "That's not the obvious play."
"Just before his graduation, he got arrested," Phipps said, and handed his boss another sheet "He and Brian Javna broke into a George Washington University physics lab and gave each other brain scans with the lab's quantum imager. Apparently Creek hacked the lab's security system so they could get in, and then Javna talked them past the staff. Also almost talked them back out of the lab, too, but then the lab director showed up and had the both of them arrested. The lab got funding from the army, and some of its projects were classified. So technically, Creek and Javna could have been charged with treason. The judge handling the case gave them the choice of going to trial or joining the army and having their records expunged after they finished a tour of duty. They joined the army."
"That was still twelve years ago, Dave," Pope said. "A dozen years is like a century in tech. They're like dog years. He could be hopelessly behind the times."
"He's been near computers since he's been in the army, sir," Phipps said. "Those years on Metro Police. And when a geek takes a couple years off and hides from the world, he's probably not just playing video games. He's up to date."
"He still live in Reston?" Pope asked.
"Yes, sir," Phipps said. "We're already hard at work bugging his lines."
"Let's be a little more proactive than that," Pope said. "It'd be useful to everyone involved if we found what Creek's looking for before he does."
"Schroeder's given us genome," Phipps said. "All we have to do now is start looking for it."
"Let's get going on it," Pope said. "But I don't want you using any of the usual staff, and I definitely don't want you using any military personnel. They've got this thing about the chain of command."
"This department is crawling with contractors," Phipps said. "I could use one of them. I can encrypt the data so he wouldn't know what he was looking at."
"Do it," Pope said. "And try to find a smart one. I don't know how good this Creek character is anymore, but the sooner we're in business, the longer It'll take for him to catch up with us."
Archie McClellan was born to be a geek. The child of geeks, who were themselves the children of geeks, who were in themselves brought into the world by members of the geek clan, Archie was fated for geekdom not only in the genes that recursively flirted with Asperger's syndrome down multiple genetic fines, but in his very name.
"You were named after an ancient search protocol," Archie's dad, an electronics engineer with the DC Metro system, told him when he was in kindergarten. "And so was your sister," he said, nodding toward Archie's fraternal twin, Veronica. Veronica, who despite all generic predilections to the contrary had already begun a reign of popularity that would propel her all the way to the editorship of the Harvard Law Review, vowed instantly never to tell anyone of her name's origin. Archie, on the other hand, thought this bit of information was super cool. He was a geek before he could spell the word (which would have been at age two years, two months).