NEAR BOSTON, TIME LINE FOUR, MAY 2020
Two months after her abortive kidnapping, Rita was allowed a weekend trip home to visit her family. In fact, she was urged to do so. “E-mail and Facebook aren’t enough,” explained her supervisor, an affable African American named Patrick O’Neill who’d worked surveillance operations when he was in the FBI. “If you vanish off the face of the earth for weeks, then send them vaguely reassuring messages, your parents will worry that you’ve been abducted; it’s entirely natural. But you’ve been through basic orientation and briefing now, and it’ll make life a lot easier for us—and for them—if you go home and explain what’s happened.”
“Easier for you?” Rita asked dubiously.
Patrick shrugged. “Your grandpa’s been rattling the bars. Your father’s even talking about hiring a private eye, just to shut him up. It’s not going to help anybody if they waste money on a wild-goose chase, and we figure they’ll calm right down if they get a chance to see you in person. Regularly, even. So we’ve got a cover package for you that should hold up for a weekend, and we can work it into your training schedule. Think of it as a field exercise. We’ll recycle the same cover when you go to Quantico for the National Academy course, so it’ll help you bed in.”
“Okay!” Rita resisted the urge to jump up and down. Eight weeks of grueling exercise and six-hour classroom days at the TSA’s off-world Camp Graceland training center had begun to blur into a hellish cross between the Girl Scouts, college, and a prison.
Camp Graceland was a boot camp for spies. The teacher/student ratio was nearly 1:1, and except for her direct supervisor, Patrick, everybody knew her by a false name. They had started with medical tests (drug tests, epigenetic methylation scans: the usual), then rushed her through a bunch of interviews and security checks—some while being monitored by a polygraph, others with her head stuck in an fMRI scanner. She still remembered the Very Serious security officer’s expression as he’d asked if she was now, or ever had been, a Communist: he’d been a sight. (The question was clearly the legacy of some paranoid congressional imposition on the national security apparat. “No, but my grandpa Kurt used to be one, and I send him photographs of government buildings via dead letter drop” clearly wasn’t on the list of acceptable answers.) It had led to her explaining her geocaching hobby to him—and the idea that there was an entire subculture of folks who went on furtive Internet-mediated treasure hunts for buried objects using GPS and old-school spy tradecraft seemed to have caused him deep personal distress. Luckily for her, eccentricity was not yet illegal. So she eventually passed the checks.
The interviews and a swearing-in were followed by a weeklong basic organizational orientation course, then a stripped-down version of the training that National Clandestine Service people got. The upcoming course at Quantico was more conventional—it was the law enforcement leadership course the FBI ran for other organizations. Clearly someone upstairs thought it might help if she knew how to think like a senior cop … or a senior counterespionage officer. “When do I go?”
“You’ve got two more weeks on this segment,” said Patrick. “We’ll use the final week to work up your cover and establish operating procedures. Then you get to go on leave on Friday, using your cover while traveling. You don’t need to use the cover while you’re with your folks, but resume on Monday when you travel to Quantico.”
“Huh.” She paused. “How much can I tell them? How much do you want me to hold back?”
Patrick checked a file on his tablet. “You can tell them you landed a job with DHS; that’s not a problem. If they know anything about your, uh, birth parents, you can hint that it’s connected. But they don’t need to know about Graceland, about anything that’s happening here, or anything you’ve been told is classified or that you suspect is classified and somebody screwed up and forgot to tell you about. And if they don’t already know about your birth mother’s capability, they don’t need to learn about it now. There’s a cover story for them—a boring office job and some stuff you periodically get asked about. If they conclude that we’ve roped you in so we can keep an eye on you, that’s perfect, because it’s partly true.”
“Right.” Rita paused. “I don’t like lying to my parents,” she admitted. It went against every instinct of her upbringing: but then, so did opening up and telling Patrick what she was thinking. It had taken weeks of work on both their parts to get to the point where it was possible. Rita was independent-minded, suspicious, and somewhat antiauthoritarian. She’d have been a complete washout for a regular DHS job: but a human intelligence agent—or HUMINT asset, as the organization referred to them—required an entirely different profile. “It goes against the grain.”
“We don’t want you to lie to them. People are mostly very bad at lying, and good at telling when folks they know are lying to them. What we want is for you to tell them the truth—but only the safe bits. This way, you can calm them down and reassure them not to worry about you, and then you can stop worrying about them—which you have been doing, to the point where if you keep doing it it’ll impair your ability to do your job.” He raised an eyebrow. “Did you think we hadn’t noticed?”
“No.” Rita flushed.
“Kid, you’re wound up tighter than a drum. We’re training you for one of the most specialized and stressful missions; you’ll do your job better if you’re not looking over your shoulder the whole time worrying about your family. Anyway, we’ll start on your cover briefing tomorrow. Right now you’re due to start the Intro to Crypto workshop with Melissa from No Such Agency in about ten minutes: I’d get moving if I were you.”
NEAR PHOENIX, TIME LINE TWO, MAY 2020
“Mom?”
“Rita! Where have you been?”
“Long story, Mom. Listen, is Dad around? Grandpa? What about River, is he okay—”
“Yes, yes, everyone’s all right! Are you—”
“I’m about thirty miles up the road, Mom, driving a rental. I can be with you in an hour?”
“Oh my, oh my, yes. Come right over. Listen, are you in trouble?”
“Not exactly, but I’ve got a new job and things are complicated. Can it wait so I can tell everyone over dinner?”
“Oh! Yes, yes, you’re right. Come right on over.”
“Love you, Mom. Bye.”
“Love you too.”