Chapter 1
October 19, 2009
NSA Headquarters has its own exit off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway labeled “NSA Employees Only”. When you come off the highway, past a screen of trees and hills, you run into a friendly wall of sniper posts and barbed wire. I don’t work for the NSA, but I visit often, so they gave me an electronic beacon for my car. When someone without one of these nifty encrypted radio devices takes that exit, a nasty surprise waits for them at the end of the ramp. All of Ft. Mead goes on a heightened security alert. It annoys the battalion of Marines that guard the place to no end, and they don’t mind taking it out on you.
The base sprawls across the rolling green countryside, but all eyes focus on the sinister, shiny, black boxes, reflecting the massive parking lot that surrounds them, like alien obelisks from a sci-fi movie. The main NSA building consists of two attached structures, one short and long, the other taller and more square, both composed of black mirrored windows. No, not intimidating at all.
I stopped at the security building and some smart looking MPs checked my ID. “Christopher Yan, ODNI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” that’s the head of the entire U.S. Intelligence Community. The picture shows a smiling, half-Chinese, half-American male in his mid-twenties with high cheekbones and a spiky haircut. Perhaps handsome in that skinny-nerd Asian kind of way, I let others be the judge. All I know is that the girls in my high school never made a fuss over me. The guards gave me the once over and waved me in. I was on the guest list.
I gingerly rolled my agency issued Impala over the tire spikes and they directed me to visitor parking. Like your average stadium, those parking far enough out from the main buildings need to catch a shuttle to the front door. Visitor parking spared me this indignity. The number of people the NSA employees is classified. The parking lot could accommodate the population of Delaware.
One of things you’ll notice about guys like me, that is, intelligence officers, special forces guys, police in high-crime areas, anyone who often finds themselves in the unfortunate position of seeing the people they shoot up-close and personal, is that they are extremely aware of their environment. I don’t claim to be a bad-ass in any way, shape, or form, but I do have a knack for knowing where I’m going, and where I’ve been. I remember people and where I’ve seen them before, and I rarely get lost. I may not work at the NSA, but it’s fun to act like I do. I flashed a big smile and gave an enthusiastic “good morning” to all the receptionists I passed. I stopped to tell Miranda she looks good today. She’s tall and lean, with dyed red hair, cut in a bob at the shoulders. She wears glasses, and has freckles, very cute and self-conscious. She pretends that I don’t impress her.
After chatting up Mirada, I made my way through a maze of corridors to the elevators. I was about ten minutes late, not serious. Johnny waited for me there with a fake scowl. Johnny, and everyone calls him Johnny, but not to his face, looked trim and perfectly coiffed as usual, a nice GQ haircut with gray at the temples. He was wearing one of his impeccable tweeds. He goes to Scotland once a year to see his tailor. He plays golf for a week and has a dozen suits made. I’m very good at Nintendo golf, and was told just recently I should be wearing suits to work.
“Good morning Chris-to-pher,” he said in a lilting tone that only a gay man confident in his sexuality can achieve.
Jonathan Strange holds the title of Chief of Operations, under the Deputy Director of Intelligence, in the Office of Arcane Affairs. You have never heard of us.
Harry Truman created the Office of Arcane Affairs with a Top Secret Presidential Directive shortly following WWII. Apparently, we got a hold of a lot of Hitler’s occult research from the SS Ahnenerbe, officially the division of “Ancestral Heritage”, but they were the ones looking for Odin’s Spear and all that crap. Spielberg didn’t make that shit up. They really were looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Just like everything else, it scared the shit out of Truman, and he formed the OAA to research and combat arcane forces for the good of the ‘ole U.S. of A.. It wasn’t long after that the government found out that wizards walk amongst us and decided it was prudent to put a few on the payroll. Like Johnny and me.
Later, during the Kennedy administration, we found out that the KGB had some wizards doing a bang-up job as field officers. Not to be undone, Kennedy ordered the OAA to provide trained practitioners in the arcane arts to any intelligence service that asked for one. That’s my job. So while technically I work for OAA, I am bitch-boy for anyone under the ODNI. The CIA finds out that al-Qaeda has a guy who bends spoons? Call the OAA. Send Christopher. He can take care of it. ONI has a report of a strange, glowing, giant squid? Hey OAA, can Christopher scuba dive? Nothing worse than spooked spooks that don’t have a clue what they’re dealing with.
Wizards, however, are not dime-a-dozen. You get born with the gift – you do not get made. Our reports estimate the odds at about one in a million. That’s around 300 wizards total in the U.S. Rarer still, a wizard that the government knows about, and can cajole, harass, or coerce into working for them. So you see Johnny can wear anything short of rainbow colored bicycle shorts to work. They need us. This particular economics of scarcity is what saved my bacon in the end, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
We rode the elevator to the 7th floor in silence, and followed the twisting corridors to an office tucked into the corner, room 12370. Johnny hit the button for the intercom, “James, its Jonathan Strange.”
Jimmy buzzed us in.
The only light in the room came from the computer monitors, about thirty of them. Jimmy sat in the middle of them all, strapped into something that looked like an ultra-modern stainless steel and leather dentist chair. Three keyboards on swivel perches sat in arm’s reach. The whole thing could recline and swing about on a track so that the operator could view another monitor, or input on another device, without getting up from his chair. He gave out a, “What-up Topher?”
I approached his throne and we went into a minute long gang handshake, mostly to annoy Johnny. Jimmy looked like he hadn’t left his lair in days, which was probably the case. He wore a black stocking cap stitched with a picture of Curious George on the front, a testament to the temperature in the room, maybe about 60 degrees. A t-shirt, two sizes too big draped his skinny frame. It said “NSFW” in large red letters. No glasses though, Jimmy’s eyesight decided not to be cliché.
He loves it when I visit. We’re the same age, and all the guys in SIGINT/IMINT (signals intelligence/image intelligence) secretly or not so secretly idolize all of us in HUMINT (human intelligence). James Bond is the shit. Jimmy’s role is analysis; he combs over data collected from all sources and looks for certain patterns. Those certain patterns being occult activities. It’s a grueling thankless job. The few people in NSA who know what he does think it’s kooky or a waste of time at best. We could– probably should–be going through Jimmy’s superior, but Johnny likes his information straight from the horse’s mouth. Besides, we treat Jimmy right, and in return he takes care of us. The higher-ups give us the brush off.
Johnny gave an exaggerated sigh to feign his annoyance, and to move the meeting along. “How have you been James?”
“Can’t complain,” Jimmy shrugged. “You know how it is Doc; they keep us shackled in this cave until we dig up somthin’ massa’ likes.”
“Well I like what you showed me yesterday.” Johnny said, priming the pump a little. “Why don’t you tell Christopher about what’s going on in Sao Paulo.”
“Shit, I wish you were my boss,” he said to Johnny, and then turned to me. Using a bad Chinese accent he said, “The boys from Brazil have sent us something very, very, interesting.”
Jimmy let out a strained cough before continuing in his normal voice. “We’ve been working with ABIN, the Brazilian agency. Every year Sao Paulo hosts the finale of the Formula One racing season. Lots of rich Euro-trash and South American bankers flock to it.”
“Yeah, I follow Formula One,” I told him.
“Oh, from the tea and crumpets set are you? Anyway, so you know that big wigs and playboys crawl out of their hidey-holes for the event.” He turned back to his monitors. “You remember Super Bowl XXXV?”
“Tea and crumpets set, remember? Besides, why should I?” He waited for the question. It was all dramatics, but Jimmy likes to tell a story and we let him, since we’re his only human contact.
“I’m not a football fan either, but the Federal Bureau of Intimidation did something interesting during the game. They set up cameras with the latest in 3-D face recognition software. Faces are like fingerprints, each one is unique, and features can be plotted out into patterns recognizable to a computer, and searched through a database.” Jimmy was used to explaining the tech to Mr. Flintstone and the rest of his superiors.
“They were able to pick out 19 perps in the crowd with outstanding warrants which were scooped up by the Tampa Police. The ACLU went ape-shit about invasion of privacy, and we stopped using it here.” Jimmy made quote marks with his fingers, meaning that we just don’t tell anyone now when we use it in the States.
“Police in the UK still use it.” He went on. “So we teamed up with ABIN and they allowed us to install the system at Interlagos, the race track. We’re giving them the bad guys they’re looking for, and we’re keeping track of international players. Apparently a whole lot of Bond-types are Formula One fans, especially the European guys. I think half of MI-6 are there.”
This started to sound sweet. A spring weekend in Brazil watching the race and hob-nobbing, playing friendly spy-vs.-spy with my peers. All in all, not a bad gig. But my dreams of box seats, beautiful women, and expensive cocktails faded with the invasion of my common sense. They would never send me anywhere without a real mission.
Jimmy just kept talking. “Of course, we just use ears now. Each person’s ear is as unique as a finger print….”
I shook my head, “Wait a minute, they only opened the track to visitors yesterday. You saying you already found something?”
Jimmy smirked. “Oh ya.” He made a few keystrokes on one of his keyboards and the bio came up on the largest monitor.
I saw the picture and went stone cold.
