He became ostracized and quickly withdrew into his own world, allowing himself to take the role of outcast. TTIC was a miracle agency, but even among people who should have been smart enough to understand him, Turbee had become the misfit. His depression increased, and he looked for a way to silently disappear. Soon after he started working there, Turbee began retreating from the TTIC community on a regular basis by playing Internet video games instead of working. He’d almost immediately stopped participating in any of the agency’s social activities. Though possibly the smartest person on the entire team, Turbee was not a functioning member.
On one of those early days, before all the equipment was fully operational, when there were still technicians crawling under worktables and cables littering the stepped floors, there was a commotion, and a collective muttering of “oh shit.” A small detail of Marines entered through the rear doors, and one announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Through the doors stepped the man himself. He was wearing his usual awkward grin, and dressed casually, without a suit jacket or tie.
“Sit down, everyone,” said the President. “Get comfortable. I won’t take up too much of your valuable time.” Turbee noticed Dan’s purple features out of the corner of his eye. Clearly Dan had not been expecting this. No one had.
The crowd of engineers, technicians, scientists, and Intelligence personnel sat down as one, shocked. The techs without desks simply sat on the floor.
“I know that this is a little bit unusual,” said the President. “But I think it’s important for you to hear directly from me why you are here, and why this is going to be an agency of critical importance to my presidency, and those that will follow.
“You probably know that this country is still reeling from the terrorist attack we recently experienced,” he continued. “While it was not the first terrorist attack weathered by this country, it was the attack that woke us up. The entire nation could see that there was, for whatever reason, a frightful collection of terrorists aligned against us, with means of great destruction at their disposal. They declared war on the free and democratic nations of this world, and especially against our own country.
“There were, unfortunately, a great many Intelligence failures that led to these tragic events, and many committees, investigations, and inquiries have been created to find how this could have happened, and to make sure that it never happens again.”
There was a general nodding of agreement in the audience. The mood was electric. It wasn’t every day that the President dropped by to say good morning and welcome the team.
“One of the findings of all of those investigations,” the President continued, “was that there was not adequate coordination and communication between the various agencies charged with keeping the security of this nation. Too often, our Intelligence Agencies were passing one another like ships in the night, not being receptive to the information that other agencies had developed, or duplicating information unnecessarily. Sometimes the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. And too often, patterns that could have been gleaned from streams of information developed by different agencies were not discerned, primarily because information was not being shared. That’s where you guys come in.”
Suddenly the President gave one of the disarming “awe shucks” grins for which he was so famous. “We have in this room,” he continued, “some of the most respected analysts, gathered from all of the agencies that form our Intelligence Community. In addition, we have highly educated people hailing from our great universities: Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, Yale… maybe I should reverse the order,” he chuckled, and the room chuckled with him. “We have individuals in this room who have been station chiefs in Riyadh, in Islamabad, in Khartoum, and elsewhere. We also have people who excel in finding patterns in oceans of data where others see nothing but chaos.”
At that point Turbee saw those powerful eyes fall directly on him, and immediately looked down at his feet. The speech continued for a little longer, and he was impressed in spite of himself. Having only recently graduated from the university life, Turbee, like most university students, felt that the man was a twit and had come to power only because of his last name. But there was nothing stupid about this speech, and nothing weak about the man. Turbee felt a grudging respect begin to grow, and found that he was actually looking forward to working for and with this man. As the President finished his speech and was ushered out, Turbee wished he could go out and shake his hand, but found himself instead rooted to the floor.
At TTIC, the day began with a discussion of the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, and the issues that it raised. The PDB was a briefing prepared every day for the President by the Office of Current Production and Analytic Support, a division of the CIA. Over the years, the PDB had been expanded, until the people handling it renamed it the National Intelligence Daily. During the Kennedy administration, it was reformatted and rearranged, and took on the appearance of a small newspaper. One President had even joked that it should contain a few ads and a sports section. It reflected the Intelligence Community’s perspective on the affairs of the present day, and was the most important newspaper in the country, possibly in the world. The PDB came into play when TTIC was charged with specific tasks by the Director of Central Intelligence or the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. On a number of occasions, the orders came directly from the President. Through hard work and the enormity of their responsibility, especially in regard to issues that made the front page of the PDB, the members of the team soon began to respect one another and to resemble the team that their President had directed them to be.
Many of them continued to wonder about Turbee, though. His messiness, his proclivity to bring food into his workspace without eating it, his pale features, and his unusual repetitive motor mannerisms all puzzled them. One day, however, Turbee showed the team why he was there. On that day, at 7:34am, Madrid time, unknown terrorists detonated explosives on four trains in that city, using cell phone transmissions. More than 200 people were killed, and 1,500 were injured. It was the worst terrorist action that Spain had ever experienced. The bombings occurred during a national election, so the Spanish government immediately blamed the ETA, a Basque separatist organization. The matter was front and center in the PDB the next morning in Washington, and was vigorously discussed during the TTIC morning meeting.
The man leading the discussion was Liam Rhodes. Rhodes, age 45, came from a family that had a history with the CIA — his sure ticket into the Intelligence world, if he wanted to take it. He was a West Point graduate, a former Marine, a Desert Storm vet, and a scholar. After leaving the Marines, he had been admitted to Harvard, where he had obtained a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies in a record three years. After taking time off to handle some family issues, he had re-entered the Intelligence arena as an analyst in the CIA’s Middle East Department. Within ten years, as his skills, intelligence, and education showed through, he was promoted to Director of that department. From there he had been appointed to TTIC.
“No way,” he was saying. “It’s al-Qaeda. The organization of it. The audaciousness. No way the ETA could pull something like this off. One bomb, maybe, but not all of this, and certainly not simultaneously.”
Rather than paying attention to the discussion, Turbee was noodling his way along the Internet, not really following the thread of the conversation. An article had just appeared in one of the Spanish newspapers, stating that an unexploded bomb had been found, and that it had an unusual detonator — a Goma-2 ECO.