COL. SMITH: That’s what got me wondering.
DR. SCRANTON: What are you suggesting?
COL. SMITH: He had a plan, he had the means—why didn’t he bring them with him?
AGENT GOMEZ: What did you dig up?
COL. SMITH: I put through a request to our friends in the BfV, the German security agency, to look for signs of Kurt Douglas in the archives they inherited from the Hauptverwaltung Aufkl?rung—the Stasi’s foreign intelligence division. They didn’t find a case file as such, so there’s no evidence that he was a spy, but it turns out that Kurt wasn’t just a border guard either. He was a member of a Pass and Control Unit—the special troops who controlled crossing points, not just securing the border itself—and the Pass and Control Unit troops were all members of the 6th Main Department of the Stasi.
AGENT O’NEILL: Ouch!
AGENT GOMEZ: So Kurt is ex-Stasi? That means his immigration status is—
COL. SMITH: Don’t say it. You’re thinking we could use this as a handle on Rita, aren’t you? Threaten her beloved grandfather with deportation if she steps out of line.
AGENT GOMEZ: Yes, but—
COL. SMITH: Deportation to that well-known starving hellhole and backwater, Germany.
AGENT GOMEZ: Oh.
COL. SMITH: Where he has relatives, will be received with open arms as one who turned against the GDR for moral reasons, and can probably claim a pension.
AGENT GOMEZ: Isn’t lying on your naturalization form a felony? Or, or, we could nail him for conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the US Attorney General—
COL. SMITH: We’d have to convince a judge to play along. There’s no positive evidence that Kurt was a sleeper, and in any case the GDR collapsed more than thirty years ago. It’s ancient history.
DR. SCRANTON: FISA has plenty of judges. We could pick one who lost relatives during the cold war, if we really had to.
COL. SMITH: But it’d be better all round if we didn’t. I can’t think of a better way to break Rita—to make her hate us—than threatening her family. The reason I brought this up … Rita imprinted on a guy who clearly had some exposure to tradecraft at an early age. Beckstein Senior probably picked the adoptive family precisely because she was looking for someone with the right skill set, and she hit the jackpot. Do you realize what this means?
DR. SCRANTON: (slowly) We’ve won the lottery on a rollover.
AGENT GOMEZ: You’re saying she—
DR. SCRANTON: Our prototype candidate doesn’t match the personality profile for a world-walking intelligence asset by accident. She matches it because she’s been trained for it since birth! Trained by a professional paranoid who learned how to operate in a totalitarian police state. Trained to keep her head down, trained how to avoid attention. Admittedly she was trained by a role model with limited experience of a modern ubiquitous computing panopticon, but—
COL. SMITH: We don’t need DRAGON’S TEETH—and JAUNT BLUE—equipped agents to get us intel on adversaries who have Facebook and Google. We have full-spectrum infowar dominance in that sector. We’re trying to develop a world-walking intel capability targeting adversaries who are old-school.
DR. SCRANTON: Handle her with kid gloves, Colonel. It takes a generation to breed a resource like this—they don’t grow on trees. You were absolutely right to draw this to my attention. Give her the Valley tour if you think it’ll help motivate her: hell, give her anything she wants, if you think it’ll make her love us. But you don’t have a lot of time. We need to get this show on the road.
COL. SMITH: How long do I have?
DR. SCRANTON: A week, Colonel. Just one week. Then you need to start her mission training.
END TRANSCRIPT
BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
Two days later they discharged Rita from the clinic and drove her down to Brooklyn in the back of a van with blacked-out windows. The day after that, they put her on a train to D.C., with orders to overnight in a hotel room, then report to an office in Baltimore the following day. The e-mail came attached to a DHS-backed credit vCard for her fatphone, and stern instructions for how to record subsistence expenses. Traveling on the government’s tab: I’ve come up in the world, she realized. Shame it’s economy class all the way. (Except on the high-speed train, which was business class only.)
Being at semiliberty felt strange after months on a training course and two weeks in a clinic, like release from an unusual incarceration. On the train, she whiled away a couple of hours catching up with her FB friends: seeing who’d changed jobs, married, gotten ill, had babies, gotten cats. But there was something curiously distancing about observing her ex-classmates from college and high school at this remove, as if she were watching them in a zoo, from the other side of a wired glass window. It felt dishonest. I’m on my own, she realized. When she’d been struggling for acting gigs and casual employment, she’d just been another Generation Zer. But now she was locked into something much larger, a cog in a huge, invisible machine. Even if she broke security and tried to explain herself to her friends, most of them wouldn’t understand: they’d be like dogs barking at a lecture on the semiotics of Shakespeare. If they did understand her, it would be even worse. It would mean they were wolves in the night, hunting for security leaks.
When FB got old, she logged on to a couple of geocachers’ boards. But then second thoughts arrived. She had a job that involved working for professional paranoids. It had been bad enough explaining geocaching during that polygraph interrogation: what if they were watching her? Worse, what if the watchers didn’t know it was harmless? Geocaching had gotten started as a popular hobby that mimicked old-school tradecraft. Then—as group activities tend to over time—it had gotten more complicated. These days, teams competed to muggle each other’s caches and intercept cyphered communications in travel bugs; it looked so like the real thing that the risk of coming to the attention of people with absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever could not be discounted, just as one who works for the post office might want to rethink the wisdom of using photographs of their coworkers as targets on the firing range.
Rita was beginning to realize that the DHS had inadvertently dropped a neutron bomb on her social life, destroying her personal relationships—even her hobbies—but leaving the bare-walled buildings of her experiences and skills intact. It didn’t hurt: like waking up to a tooth with a dead root that hadn’t succumbed to infection yet, the pain lay in the future.