“You put up a good fight,” the troll told him while a guard found the hood and slipped it over Linder’s head. “Sorry about the injection, but nobody leaves without a confession. I mean nobody.”
“Call it what you like,” Linder replied. “but I confessed to nothing.” For a moment he wondered what consequences the troll would have faced had he not cheated to win his case.
”Go ahead, be a sorehead if you want,” the interrogator answered with a self-righteous look. “But someday you'll thank me for what I did. Without that confession, you’d be dead.”
S6
In this life, one is given only one conscience. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
SIX YEARS EARLIER, JUNE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Warren Linder grumbled at finding the last remaining seat in the business class rail car. The last time he had traveled to the Farm for training, he had driven his beaten-up old Audi. But having returned from overseas only days before, he no longer owned an automobile and wasn’t sure when he would ever buy another. Under the Unionists, new cars were taxed to the hilt and used cars were ridiculously overpriced.
Linder had paid the extra fare for a business class seat out of his own pocket, since government reimbursement rates covered only coach class fares. He expected it would be worth the money to avoid the hordes of ill-smelling migrant workers and refugees with their piles of luggage and smelly food. But the business class car was also overbooked and it looked and smelled as if many of the passengers had spent the night in their seats all the way down from Boston.
If the train departed on time, he would be in Williamsburg by noon, giving him time to check in for the month-long Ops Refresher Course and fit in a three-mile run and some reading before he met Neil Denniston at the Officers’ Club for Happy Hour. But, since the train routinely left late and required an additional hour or more to make up for equipment failures, he would be lucky to have time to unpack and shower before the flag came down outside the club and the bar opened for business.
The train pulled out of Washington’s newly reopened Union Station an hour late and followed the Potomac to Alexandria, Woodbridge, and Quantico en route south through Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Williamsburg to Newport News. Since Linder had been fortunate enough to be posted overseas through the worst days of what most people referred to as the Events, he looked forward with morbid fascination to seeing how Virginia’s cities, towns, and countryside had fared during the six years he had been away.
Certainly, some of the Events had been global in scope. For example, he had endured power outages caused by massive solar flares while posted to Beirut. But the Lebanese, having experienced power outages routinely during their long civil war and from occasional Israeli air strikes, were supremely resourceful at nursing their battered electric power grid back to health and coping whenever the grid was down.
Lebanon had also suffered earthquakes during the Events, the worst of them hitting hard in the Sannine Mountains and the agricultural lands of the Bekaa Valley, toppling many of the surviving ruins at Baalbek, including the Temple of Jupiter’s iconic eastern facade. The attendant tsunamis had inundated selected areas along the Mediterranean’s eastern shore, but early warnings along Lebanon’s coast had prevented the heavy loss of life experienced to the north in Syria.
Oddly, Linder hadn’t really noticed the global cooling that followed two years of volcanic eruptions along the Ring of Fire until he visited Kuwait, where the cooling was considered a boon, reducing the Gulf State’s scorching daytime highs by as much as fifteen or twenty degrees.
But, as everyone knew, the Events had hit America disproportionately hard, and not only because of its highly developed infrastructure and its fragile just-in-time industrial and consumer supply chain. Nature seemed to have reserved its cruelest blows for the Americans. The sun had aimed its worst solar flares at North America, tsunamis had struck its most populated and vulnerable coastal regions, earthquakes rattled hardest where Americans were least prepared, and the timing of each disaster had aggravated its effect, catching people asleep in their beds, for example, or expelling them from their homes in the dead of winter.
As the train stirred to leave Union station, Linder watched the crowd on an adjacent platform heave forward to board an overcrowded northbound local to New York and Boston. He was grateful that traffic on the Virginia line was relatively light, due to greater competition from buses and jitney vans along a route less congested and less subject to disruption than the Northeast Corridor.
As the train passed through riot-torn Northern Virginia suburbs, Linder gazed out the grime-caked window onto empty thoroughfares littered with broken glass that stretched between vacant or burnt-out high-rise buildings. Like 1970s Beirut, the streets were alternately deserted or overcrowded, as if separated by the kind of no-man’s-lands that had divided Beirut, Berlin, and Nicosia decades earlier.
In the congested areas, squatters hung laundry out to dry on lines that stretched from one broken window to another. Homeless nomads camped out in parks or vacant lots, erecting their tents and makeshift shanties between mounds of rubble. In some neighborhoods, entire blocks lay waste where homes and commercial buildings constructed with unreinforced masonry had collapsed from quakes centering along the New Madrid Fault, particularly the Great Memphis and Roanoke quakes that had rung church bells all the way north to Maine.
Even where physical damage appeared minimal, as in some formerly affluent suburbs and towns, Linder spotted isolated blocks and sometimes entire neighborhoods that had been torched and looted. The areas between these burnt-out wastelands looked shabby and gray, with vacant storefronts, potholed streets, broken streetlamps, weed-choked median strips, and dangling electrical wires. The only commercial activity Linder could see was centered around open-air flea markets, where shoppers gathered at the tailgates of parked trucks to buy black-market goods.
Linder closed the window shade, drawing a quizzical glance from the elderly woman seated in the aisle seat beside him. He smiled at her before leaning back and closing his eyes.
From the outset of his nearly six years overseas with the Agency, Linder had dreaded the prospect of returning for a Headquarters assignment. During the worst days of the Events, he fully expected Congress and the President to downsize the Agency and reduce its overseas presence as a cost-saving measure. But, to his considerable relief, America’s enemies around the world had prevented that. Rather than back off and let Allah and Mother Nature dispatch the Great Satan, the Jihadists saw the Events as a divine invitation to kick America while it was down.
Later, as the Events wore on and North America reeled under their impact, Linder often considered resigning from the Agency and taking up residency in some peaceful foreign country rather than return. But each time he delved into the details, he realized how impractical it would be. Anywhere he might want to resettle, borders were closed to would-be immigrants and refugees. The world’s leading economic powers were in depression and, wherever jobs existed, a flood of applicants appeared. Even if he found a country that would accept him, how would he earn a living?
When the President finally delivered his Speech Heard Around the World announcing the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from its far-flung military and intelligence bases overseas, Linder knew that time had run out on his privileged life as a clandestine services officer posted abroad. The “every spy a prince” era in American intelligence had finally come to an end. Field officers would no longer enjoy a government-paid apartment and car, or collect hazardous duty pay, cost of living allowance, and a virtually unlimited entertainment and operational expense stipend.
Back at Headquarters, not only would he lose the perks and extra pay, but he would lose the freedom of movement and relaxed supervision that had been fundamental to clandestine intelligence operations abroad. Until now, the guarantee of job security, the good life while abroad, and the relative brevity of Headquarters assignments had made tolerable the prospect of living like a pauper on a mid-level o
fficer’s salary in Washington. But once the President dropped his bombshell, it was clear that most of the Agency’s personnel now posted abroad would likely be deskbound or unemployed before year’s end. If leaving the Agency and taking his chances as an émigré abroad had seemed a non-starter, being sacked by the Agency and left to search for a job in Washington with a six-year gap in his resume seemed scarcely better.
Now he wondered what his family would think if he told them that he intended to quit the Agency in favor of the newly created Department of State Security. Perhaps he was being too alarmist. His most recent Agency performance reports had been strong and he thought he had a good shot at another promotion this year. If so, he might survive the next cut or two, weather the storm, and hang on until retirement, or at least long enough to wangle a transfer to another federal agency or possibly a gig with a defense contractor who needed an Arabic-speaking sales rep.
But then again, what if he lost the game of musical chairs and had to compete for a job in the real economy against thousands of cashiered counter-terrorism operators like him? All at once, he recalled how he had started his Agency career as a reckless, ambitious, pedal-to-the-metal operator who rarely blinked at outsized risks. Yet now, six years later, he was prepared to cast his lot with a motley crew of Unionist Party hacks in the newly formed DSS at the first sign of career turbulence.
* * *
A Bluebird bus with its telltale tinted windows awaited Linder and a half-dozen other Agency staffers outside the Amtrak Station when the train arrived. The drive to the main gate took less than ten minutes. At an inner gate, out of view from the main one, an armed security guard checked the papers of each passenger before allowing the bus to enter. The base had not changed much in six years, Linder thought. The wind still whispered through the tall groves of longleaf pines, and he could still spot the foundations of razed World War II barracks and supply depots here and there among the tall grass. Linder looked forward to running and biking along the little used road network that extended into every corner of the base and gaze at the white-tailed deer, cottontail rabbits, raccoons, and an occasional gray fox that he might come across.
He stepped off the bus at the admin building and left his suitcase at the curb. In the lobby, he found a squad of clerks seated behind a row of folding tables that resembled the registration desk at a college reunion. Having identified himself as a participant in the Ops Refresher Course, he was directed to another table, where he showed his passport and his training orders, and received a course schedule, an information packet, a base ID card, and a key to his room in the Bachelor Officer Quarters.
Linder had been notified of his assignment to the course within days of reporting back to Headquarters from Cairo. Unlike most field officers who were recalled following the President’s unilateral withdrawal order, Linder had opted not to take the four weeks’ annual leave granted upon arrival, for he was sure it was intended to give Human Resources enough time to decide whether to reassign him or add him to the list of those who would be selected out. Instead, he had chosen a training course to stay in touch with colleagues and network his way to an onward assignment.
Linder found his room in the BOQ, unpacked, took his three-mile run, and settled in for a short nap before showering up for Happy Hour. He arrived just as the five o’clock siren sounded. Per military custom, he stopped and stood at attention while the base flag was lowered and, as it came down, shuddered to think that, at U.S. military bases on every continent around the world, the American flag was being lowered for the last time.
But a moment later he shook off that gloomy thought and made a beeline for the Officers’ Club to reconnect with friends and get sloshed on cheap PX booze. Since the bar had just opened, the crowd was still thin. A few older officers whom Linder recognized as instructors had taken their accustomed places at the rail while assorted couples and foursomes occupied tables and booths around the room. At its center, a bartender laid a spread with pretzels, peanuts, chips, dip, cheese, crackers, and a chafing dish of the club’s renowned Bambi Balls, venison meatballs prepared from animals culled during the base’s annual deer drive.
It took only a few moments for Linder to detect the subdued mood among the club’s patrons. Despite the relief that many of the new arrivals must have felt at remaining on the payroll for another month, tonight’s crowd seemed far less spirited than he would have expected on the opening night of a new course for veteran officers.
It had been barely a month since the President had called a surprise mid-week press conference to declare victory in the war on terror, tyranny, and villainy around the world and order U.S. military and intelligence withdrawn from their overseas facilities. The resulting contraction in America’s military-industrial complex, the President promised, would generate an unprecedented peace dividend that his administration would earmark for the rebuilding of America’s infrastructure following the devastation suffered during the Events.
At Agency Headquarters, the Pentagon, and the plush office suites of defense contractors in Rosslyn, Arlington, and Crystal City, grizzled veterans of bygone wars recalled the dark days after the Fall of Saigon, when Southeast Asia hands and counterinsurgency experts suddenly became a dime a dozen. Now Arabists and counter-terror experts would take their turn at being redundant. But this time, rather than being permitted to walk the halls and lobby their friends for new assignments, the Human Resources people were keeping as many returnees as possible out of the capital, sending them instead on home leave, to remote training sites, or to temporary duty assignments, trying to isolate them and reduce the opportunity for collective action during this wholesale liquidation of America’s warrior class.
Rumors were already circulating among those accepted for the Ops Refresher Course that course performance evaluations would be used to assess each participant’s prospects for future advancement in the Agency and that, unlike previous course sessions, which had little impact on careers, the final evaluation interviews would represent a “come to Jesus” moment for many of the participants.
Linder approached the bar and ordered a double bourbon on the rocks. While he waited for his drink, he scanned the room for familiar faces and allowed his mind to wander back to his first stay at the Farm for the Introductory Ops Course. It had been his first taste of spying and he had loved everything about it, scoring near the top of his class. On his return for the full Intelligence Operations Course later in the year, he had been a standout.
Though the role-playing exercises had seemed contrived at first, Linder found that he possessed a unique combination of traits that suited him to human intelligence collection, including a keen insight into motives, a facility for thinking on his feet, adroit problem-solving abilities, and an uncanny intuitive sense. While gifted at building rapport and trust during role-playing exercises, he also did not shirk from lying when necessary and possessed the predatory instinct to detect exploitable weaknesses in others. In Linder, Agency trainers found a willing and adept pupil in the art of suborning the flawed, the vain, and the weak, expanding their range of conscience to include betrayal, and otherwise bending them to his will.
To his delight, Linder also achieved a maximum score on the Modern Language Aptitude Test and was selected for accelerated Arabic training, initially in suburban Virginia and later in Beirut. By the time he left for the field, his superiors and colleagues in the Middle East Division considered him an emerging talent.
Linder had a vivid recollection of the moment when he realized that he had found his calling. It was in his first or second agent recruiting exercise at the Farm. After he had pitched the target, he knew he could do this, and, even more, he knew he could do it better than most of his classmates without breaking a sweat. One instructor wrote in an evaluation that his gift was equivalent to someone stepping on a golf course for the first time and having the kind of perfect, embedded swing that an instructor just can’t teach.
As he relived that heady feeling, Linder realized how
depleted he felt after three consecutive tours of duty in the field. His pride and ambition had driven him to seek continual recognition and to expect continual praise as his due. By the time he left Cairo, he was setting unrealistic goals and becoming frustrated at not meeting them. He took offense at minor slights and setbacks and sensed that his self-confidence had turned brittle.
Maybe I’ve lost my edge, he thought. Maybe I just don’t have the level of passion and commitment to keep doing this job. Maybe it’s time to walk away for my own good. He thought of the champion boxer who saw himself in the mirror one morning after partying too heavily and said, “Now, that guy should stay out of the ring.”
While Linder mulled over his career options at the bar, he felt a gentle tap on the shoulder. It was Jack Moran, one of Linder’s former instructors in the Ops Course, who had served until recently as Chief of Station at a midsized post in Central America. By coincidence, Moran had been a middleweight boxer in the Navy and still maintained his fighting weight on a wiry five foot ten inch frame. He was one of the most likable Agency men Linder knew and, except for his broken nose, few would suspect that he had been a knockout expert in the ring or was a highly decorated intelligence officer.
“Mind if I join you?” Moran asked with a gentle smile. “Looks like you were doing some serious thinking.”
“Yeah. Watch out, it might be contagious,” Linder replied, gesturing toward the solemn faces seen around the room. “Let me buy you a drink, Jack,” Linder offered. “I’m just killing time till an old buddy of mine shows up and we go out for some dinner. I could use the distraction.”
Moran ordered a scotch and soda and, when it arrived, the two men settled into a booth at a far corner of the room.
After catching up on recent events for each, Moran revealed that he had come to the Farm to serve out one last year before retiring, as the extra year would make a big difference in his retirement pay. He had been hoping to serve another tour as COS in Latin America but a heart condition had blocked his medical clearance. Like many other senior Headquarters officers, he had been pulled into the training assignment soon after the President’s speech to accommodate the volume of returning field officers who were to be kept busy in courses like this until it could be decided who would stay and who would go.
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