One
Otto Rencke, chief of electronic intelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency, parked his aging Mercedes sedan at his spot in the VIP garage beneath the Original Headquarters Building at the George Bush Center for Intelligence, and headed for the elevators to his third-floor suite of offices. It was just eight in the morning, a Friday, and he was worried about his wife, Mary, who’d been running a fever, but insisted that he get to work though he wanted to stay with her.
“I’m going to the Quick Care Clinic, honest injun,” she’d promised, using one of her husband’s phrases.
At five two and only a bit more than one hundred pounds, with a slight figure, she was almost the exact opposite of Otto, who, at nearly six feet, with a barrel chest, towered over her. Her hair was short and honey blond, while his was reddish brown and long, tied in a ponytail. She was a neatnik, but despite her friendly nagging, he was basically a slob, dressing mostly in sloppy jeans and ragged sweatshirts with either the old KGB sword and shield logo or the CCCP initials of the former Soviet Union.
“Call me soon as you see the doc,” he’d said, and he reached down to give her a kiss, but she reared back.
“Do you want to catch whatever it is I’ve got? Just get out of here.”
He’d thought about her on the way up from their house just a few miles away in McLean, and just now as he stepped off the elevator on the third floor he felt a sense of loneliness. Since they’d been married, last year, they had been side by side almost 24/7, and it felt unnatural to be without her.
She’d come over from her office in the New Headquarters Building, where she’d worked as a senior analyst, and joined her husband in his digs, known by just about everyone as the Wolf’s Den. The unwritten sign above the door said: Beware of the vicious beast within.
Among senior officials in the Agency and elsewhere in Washington, and in most of the major intelligence agencies worldwide, Otto was known as an enfant terrible. His above-genius-level knowledge of computers and their advanced algorithms made him either a friend or a foe depending on which side of the fence you found yourself on. But everyone who knew anything about him both respected and feared him. Except for his friend Kirk McGarvey, who was the former director of the CIA, and Mac’s new wife, the former Pete Boylan, who’d been the Company’s chief of interrogations.
“Good morning, dear,” an AI voice said from about eye level in midair as he got to his door.
“Good morning, Lou,” he said. The lock buzzed, and he let himself in to his lair, which consisted of three offices that had once been used by a team that developed legends—background stories—for agents going out into the cold.
Lou was the interface between him and the advanced computer systems he’d once called his darlings, that sampled the databases of just about every major computer anywhere on the planet, looking for what he called anomalies. They were the bits and pieces of intelligence information that were outside the normal day-to-day flow of data.
If there was a gunfight in Syria, routine intel would detail the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing forces, along with the orders of battle, casualties, and other obvious details. An anomaly could be the presence of a high-ranking officer, under very deep cover, from Russia, or perhaps North Korea, or China. Someone who should not have been there, and whose purpose was unknown.
Linking a series of anomalies together, his programs would come up with an assessment of risks for the U.S. and its allies. The greater the risk, the deeper the color lavender would appear on the many flat-panel monitors.
“How is Mary this morning?” Lou asked.
“She’s going to see a doc and she promised to call.”
“Nothing serious, I hope.”
“A slight fever and cough, probably just a cold.”
“Good,” the program said.
Louise Horn had been Otto’s first wife, but she had been killed in a shoot-out during an operation a couple of years ago. When he’d managed to bring himself back to reality, he reconfigured his darlings, upgrading them to a near-AI level and giving them his dead wife’s personality and voice. Mary hadn’t minded, and in fact she and Louise had known each other, and she and the program were friends. They shared the mission of keeping Otto on track and in touch with the day-to-day bits and pieces of real life beyond his work.
The first room contained three desks, and a number of file cabinets and map cases, filled with printed matter that had never been scanned into any database. The middle room was Mary’s lair, with her computer interfaces. The inner sanctum was Otto’s, with no keyboards, only a one-hundred-inch ultra-high-definition monitor on the wall, and a tabletop monitor about the size of a large pool table. Both surfaces were busy with streams of data, but the background color was only faintly lavender. For the moment all was well with the world.
Otto perched on the edge of the monitor table. “Anything I need to know about?” he asked.
“Beyond background noises, and the usual inquiries, in the past twenty-four hours mostly from State concerning North Korea’s probable continuation of its nuclear program, and the attack on our embassy in Pyongyang, there is nothing of any real significance.”
“Something will come up,” Otto said.
He’d started smoking a couple of months ago, but when Mary had found out, she’d made him quit. He wished he had a cigarette right now.
“It usually does.”
“Where’re Mac and Pete?”
“They are currently on the island of Yakushima.”
“Japan?”
“Yes. Fifty miles south of Kyushu.”
“House shopping?”
“My confidence level is ninety-three percent.”
“I thought they were on Nassau.”
“They are on Yakushima.”
“When did they leave the Bahamas?”
“Seventy-seven hours ago.”
“It’s only ten in the evening there, let me talk to him.”
“Just a moment, dear,” Lou said.
“What is it?”
“There is a message for you from Mr. Taft.” Harold Taft was the director of the CIA.
“Is he on the phone?”
“No. Message is: ‘Mr. Rencke please come to my office at your earliest convenience.’”
“Did he say why?”
“No. Shall I repeat the message for you, dear?”
“Thank you, Lou, but that won’t be necessary,” Otto said, pushing away from the table. “I’ll go now.”
He left his inner sanctum, but at the outer door he stopped. “Did you detect any stress in the director’s voice?”
“It was a text message.”
“My phone didn’t ring.”
“The message was sent directly to me.”
Otto thought it was odd. Not Taft’s style. He walked back to his office. “Show me the message on the monitor, please.”
The text came up, letter perfect. Taft had always been a clumsy typist. “He didn’t send it.”
“No, but it originated in his office.”
“Can you tell me who else is there?”
“Mr. Waksberg and Mr. Kallek.”
Thomas Waksberg was the deputy director of operations, and Harold Kallek was the director of the FBI.
“Can you monitor their conversations?”
“No.”
“You’re being blocked?”
“No one is currently speaking.”
Copyright © 2022 by Kevin Hagberg
