"On the plus side, Rich got out. We've continued to monitor the CLEANSWEEP team's dead letter drops from the OLIGARCH positions, and they look clean. The fact that nobody's visited or tried to stake them out suggests that the bad guys didn't take any of our men alive. So CLEANSWEEP isn't blown, and once we get more field-qualified linguists prepped we should be able to reactivate it-possibly in as little as three weeks. The real problem we've got is that we're multiply bottlenecked: bottlenecked on linguists, bottlenecked on logistics, bottlenecked on general intelligence. If we could find one of their safe houses we'd be in place to run COLDPLAY against them, but the trail's gone cold and there's a limit to how long I can hold on to an AFSOCOM team with no mission-they're needed in the middle east."
"Hmm." James rolled his pen between the finger and thumb of his left hand. His lips whitened, forming a tight, disapproving line that made the resemblance to Hugo
Weaving in The Matrix even stronger. Agent Smith, with a small lapel-pin crucifix and a Ph.D. from Harvard: "I might be able to shake something loose on one of those fronts presently. But VPOTUS isn't going to be happy about the lack of progress."
"Well, I'm not happy either!" Eric dug his fingers into the arms of his chair. His damaged carpal tunnels sent twinges of protest running up his arms. "If you think I enjoy losing agents and trained special forces teams... hell." He raised a hand and ran fingertips through his thinning hair. "I'm sorry. But this failure mode wasn't anticipated. Nobody expected them to blow up the fucking palace and start a civil war in the garden. Maybe we should have anticipated it, if we'd been better informed about their internal political situation, but they don't exactly have newspapers over there and even if they did, we'd have trouble reading them. We'd have to have been fucking mind readers to spot a bunch of plotters running a coup!"
"Language, Colonel, please."
"Shi- sorry." Eric shook his head, angry at his own loss of control. "I'm upset. We've now lost two high-clearance, high-value agents and an AFSOCCOM specops team and we've only really been up and running for fourteen weeks."
"I feel your pain," James said dryly. Eric stared at him, taken aback. "But I'm going to have to brief the vice president tonight on all the progress we haven't been making, and believe me, chewing on ground glass would be less painful," he added. "Now. I've heard from Herz. How's CLANCY going?"
"Badly." CLANCY was the ongoing investigation into the nuclear device that Source GREENSLEEVES claimed was planted somewhere in the Boston/Cambridge area, before he'd so inconveniently managed to get himself killed. "We hadn't found anything really noteworthy-a couple of meth labs, a walled-up cellar full of moonshine left over from the nineteen twenties, that sort of thing-until Judith turned up her anomaly yesterday. I was half-convinced GREENSLEEVES was lying to us, but now-well, I don't think we can afford to take that risk." He shivered. "Just who the he-heck stuck a B-53 bomb on blocks in a warehouse and set it to go off on a ten-year timer?"
"Is that a question?" Doctor James leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingertips again, and the piranha-like set of his lips quirked slightly. Is he trying to smile? wondered Eric.
"Only if I'm not treading on any classified toes," Smith said warily.
"It's not a healthy question to ask. So I suggest you don't ask me about it. Then I won't have to tell you any lies."
"Ah." Smith dry-swallowed.
"Even if I did know anything about it. Which I don't," James said, with a twitch of one eyebrow that spoke volumes.
"Right. Right." Change the subject, quick. The fact that they were silting in a secure conference cell that was regularly swept for bugs didn't mean that nobody was listening in, or at least recording the session for posterity: all it meant was that nobody outside the charmed circle of the National Security infrastructure was eavesdropping. But what kind of black operation would involve us nuking one of our own cities? Smith filed the question away for later.
"Well, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. The original idea of taking the county planner's database and data mining it for suspicious activities is sound in principle, but it yields too many false positives in a city the size of this one. I mean, there are tens of thousands of business premises, many tens of thousands of homes with garages or large basements, and if only one percent of them flag as positives for things like lack of visible tenants or occupants, zero phone use but basic utility draw for heating, and so on, we're swamped. It might be a bomb installation, or it could equally well be Uncle Alfred's old house and he died six months ago and the estate's still in probate or something. Or it could be an overenthusiastic horticulturist trying to breed a better pot plant. On the other hand, hopefully the neutron scattering spectroscopes our NIRT liaisons are getting next week will allow us to make an exhaustive roving search. And we can cover for it easily, by telling the truth-we're testing a bomb detector for terrorist nukes. Everyone will assume we're worried about al-Qaeda, and if we actually do find GREENSLEEVES's gadget... well, do you suppose the VP would like to make hay with that?"
The raised eyebrow was back. "I suppose you have a point." James nodded slowly. "Yes, that would kill two terrorist threats with one stone." Eric relaxed slightly. "What else do you have for me?"
"Well, I'm not saying we're not going to get another break-I think it's only a matter of time-but I can't give you a time scale for quantum leaps. I think if we can reactivate CLEANSWEEP, or figure out some way around the bottleneck in our logistics chain we might be able to progress on CLANCY through other avenues. I mean, if we can get our hands on some useful intelligence about the Clan's nuclear capability that could open up some avenues of inquiry about where GREENSLEEVES got his hands on a gadget, and where it might be now. But for the time being, we're not really pursuing a specifically intelligence-led investigation. Getting back into the Gruinmarkt is, in my opinion, vital-and the more force we can project there, the better."
"I see." James made a brief note on his pad. "Well. I'm hoping we'll have a solution to the logistics issues shortly."
"More couriers? A target for COLDPLAY?"
"Something better." He looked smug.
Eric leaned forward. "Tell me. Whatever you can. Is this more of that harebrained physics stuff from Livermore?"
"Of course." Then something terrifying happened: Doctor James actually smiled. "I think it's time to bring you in the loop on the, as you put it, logistics side of things.
There's a cross-disciplinary team under Professor Armstrong from UCSD who've been working on a subject under, um, closed conditions. They haven't worked out everything that's going on yet, but they've made some fascinating progress that points to a physical explanation for their anomalous capability. I'm going to be flying out there tomorrow morning, and I was hoping you could join me."
Eric glanced at his desk. It'd mean another couple of nights away from Gillian and the boys, and more apologies and tense silences at home, but it needed to be done. "As long I can be back here by Friday-if nothing new comes up in the meantime-I should be able to fit it in." Briefly, he let his bitterness show: "it's not as if I'm needed for the post-CLEANSWEEP debrief, or to report CLANCY as closed out."
"Then you'll accompany me." Doctor James rose abruptly, his expression as warm as any killer robot's. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment it wouldn't do to be late to..."
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
"You called for me, sir."
"Indeed I did, indeed I did. I trust you've been keeping well. Any trouble getting here?"