Back in college old Prof. Hanshaw had explained the Second Artist Effect to her class: “The first artist paints the landscape they see with their own eyes. The second artist paints what they see in the first artist’s exhibition. They can’t show you a true representation, because they never saw the real thing in the first place.” This, Rita was beginning to feel, was as true for intelligence operations as for any other art form—and so she spent a weary morning and early afternoon regurgitating endlessly chewed-over morsels of data for the third-and fourth-string hacks to squabble over.
The worst part of it all was that they mostly seemed to be intent on undermining each other, or the Unit’s reporting, by digging dirt. She half expected one of the Men in Gray to stand up suddenly, point an emotional, accusatory claw at her, and denounce her as a double agent in the pay of Moscow Central. Or perhaps they were hoping to accuse her of summoning imps to sour milk, or of not complying with federal standards for hand sanitizer application during her restroom breaks. If only they knew, she told herself hopelessly, cleaving to the memory of the smell of the nape of Angie’s neck in the early hours as if it was an anchor cable to reality.
At two in the afternoon, Colonel Smith broke in to rescue her. He’d enlisted reinforcements. Dr. Scranton trailed behind, her poker face frozen—like a thin rind of ice covering a lake of viciously dry amusement—as she sent the brigade of second-guessers scattering like tenpins. “Ah, Ms. Douglas.” She nodded to Rita. “Ladies and gentlemen”—she glanced at the Suits from Maryland—“you’ve had your fun. Ms. Douglas, if you’d come with me, please?”
She turned and stalked away without waiting. The Colonel hung back and ran interference while Rita apologized to the swarm of third-tier interrogators and hotfooted it after the doctor. “Sorry about that,” Scranton said offhandedly, then paused for Colonel Smith to catch up. “You were right, Eric.”
“Right?” Rita echoed.
“You were being nibbled to death by…” Smith mopped his brow with a tissue. “What are those fish they use for pedicures? Doctor fish?”
“Diffusion of responsibility meets infighting,” said Scranton. “Well, we left you in the pedicure pool for eight hours, until you were nice and wrinkled. They can’t complain about being denied access.”
“This is a rescue?” Rita yawned, too enervated to raise a hand and cover her mouth.
“First you came to the attention of important people, then you delivered an unexpected result.” Scranton shrugged: her elegant suit jacket’s shoulders rose as if padded with kevlar. Chanel couture for a D.C. bureaucratic quarterback. “They were bound to go apeshit looking for anything they can use as leverage. Do you think they found anything, Eric?”
The Colonel looked, if not haggard, then perhaps somewhat stale. He, too, must have been on the go since yesterday evening, Rita realized. “Not really, but that won’t stop them trying to mix it. We’ll just have to outrun them,” he said. “My office, please. We should keep this quiet.”
“What’s this about?” Rita asked, trudging after him as he led the way to the elevators.
“Phase Two.”
The Colonel’s temporary office was a business suite on the top floor of the hotel building. An open door led to a bedroom. The main room was dominated by a conference table, a sofa suite, and a kitchenette where a coffee filter machine burbled welcomingly. Rita sank into a recliner and tried not to let her eyes close prematurely. Dr. Scranton took the sofa to her left, and spoke: “We’re going to have to get rid of the leeches before they suck us dry.”
“I don’t really understand,” Rita complained.
The Colonel placed a mug of coffee on the occasional table in front of her. “You’re not supposed to. Do you want to bring her up to speed, boss? Or shall I?”
“Huh. Allow me.” Dr. Scranton waited while he fetched her a coffee—What kind of person has the equivalent of a Major General doing the fetching and carrying anyway? Rita wondered. “We live and work in a panopticon, Rita. Everything you do, every breath you take, someone’s watching over you. It’s the price of doing business in a security state. The trouble is, you can be running a nice tight ship and if it suddenly starts delivering results, well, all those eyeballs turn inward. And their owners all start trying to figure an angle that’ll let them take the credit for a job well done.”
“But you’re—” Rita struggled to sit upright. You’re a deputy undersecretary of state! she wanted to shout. What are you even doing here? “Why are you getting involved? Isn’t this below your level?”
“Eric petitioned me to help with leech detachment duty. You’ve waded into a swamp full of bloodsuckers and you can’t reasonably do your job if you’re carrying passengers. But nobody likes a rogue operation. So this week we’re making sure that all the would-be stakeholders get a good look at the Unit, up close and personal. Then after they’ve had a look inside I’m going to slam the door in their face so that Eric can lock it down and get everything back on course.”
She slid an etiolated, almost skeletal hand into her handbag and extracted a white cylinder, raised it to her lips, and sucked, hard. A blue LED glowed at its tip. “The stakes are escalating. Too high for this penny-ante house politics bullshit. My boss, he says his boss is counting on you. And the buck stops on her desk, in the Oval Office.”
Rita watched, eyes glazed, as Dr. Scranton exhaled a stream of bone-white smoke. The undersecretary leaned back, then addressed Colonel Smith.
“The core need-to-know cell is going to be restricted as tightly as possible. Minimum threat surface. You will nominate a team of no more than four bodies to generate internal disinformation under top-secret classification. They will manufacture falsified mission transcripts and reports from Rita to support the appearance that operations in BLACK RAIN are proceeding nominally. Transcripts to be seeded with randomized tells in each distribution, so that your people can trace leakers. If any leaks are identified, those responsible will be either turned—if there’s an organization behind them and they are cooperative—or detained incommunicado.”
Rita noticed Smith’s brief expression of unease. Is that some sort of euphemism? she wondered. “The disinform reports may include elements of legitimate intel if, and only if, we have no reason to redact it—the best lies are parsimonious. In other words, as far as the peanut gallery is concerned, JAUNT BLUE deployment and orientation in BLACK RAIN will continue as planned. In reality, we anticipate that Rita’s tasking will increasingly diverge from the BLACK RAIN road map over time.” The undersecretary turned her unblinking gaze on Rita. “What do you understand from all this?”
Rita’s lips were suddenly dry. “Jesus.” She tried to gather her scattered thoughts. “You’re, uh, exposing the operation internally so that you can use it as cover for a deeper operation? In the BLACK RAIN time line?”