He felt a surge of anger. “Great, one hot shithole to another. I’m supposed to thank you? That it?”
Eric grinned. “We spend most of the time inside the mountain. It’s quite comfortable in here.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “So you sent a hot piece of tail to sweet-talk me into joining this outfit. What is this place?”
Eric sat up straight, his grin vanishing. “First, don’t ever say anything like that to her face. And second, her father just might disappear you. Like, off the face of the earth.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not kidding,” Eric answered solemnly. “Sorry for pulling you into this, but I need your help. Welcome to the Office of Threat Management.”
Deion had never heard of the agency. Until yesterday. “What does that mean exactly? I worked with you five years ago, then you show up on a prisoner transfer. A week later I’ve got an offer extended. I was told someone vouched for me. But Area 51? Isn’t this place full of aliens and shit?” He knew the CIA had many active intelligence programs, but had never heard of one this big, and certainly not buried under a mountain at Groom Lake.
“Walk with me,” Eric said. “I’ll explain everything.”
Eric led him through the maze of tunnels. “No aliens here. That was just a cover story cooked up by the CIA while they were testing the Oxcart, the precursor to the SR-71. I’m surprised you’re not up on that.”
“Sorry man, they didn’t cover ancient history at the Farm. It was a need to know basis and I didn’t need to now. What’s with this place?”
“The Groom Lake facility is still run by the Air Force but the Office runs the underground installation, and it has a single mission. To find and prevent threats that no one else can find, and keep them from escalating. You know what a Black Swan event is?”
“No idea.”
“It’s an event that has a massive impact and was completely unpredicted, but, in hindsight, was glaringly obvious. It’s the unknown unknowns. That’s why we exist, to prevent these from spiraling out of control.”
Deion was pushing to keep up with Eric’s long stride. They moved quickly through the base, finally stopping in front of a large door guarded by an armed MP.
Eric pressed his palm to a reader buried in the wall and the door opened. He showed his badge to the MP who studied it, then motioned him through the door. They entered a small room with a wall of glass, another MP ensconced behind it. The door shut behind them. They stood there for several moments until the guard behind the glass spoke. “Name?”
“Eric Wise, escorting Deion Freeman.”
The guard watched them intently, then keyed a button and the far door opened.
“This is one hell of a man trap,” Deion said.
“You’ve no idea,” Eric said. “If something’s not right, we’d be locked in until an armed squad showed up. The glass is bullet proof. Not bullet resistant, but bullet proof. Not even a 50 cal would penetrate it. The doors and walls could stop a suicide bomber. If the guard thinks I’m being coerced, he can evacuate the air in the chamber, rendering us unconscious. The guards will then shoot first and ask questions later.”
“What the hell?”
Eric motioned him through the door. “You’ll understand in a minute.”
They stepped through the door into a massive room with stepped flooring. The far wall contained row after row of monitors. Dozens of people sat at workstations, hunched over their keyboards. A tall man stood to the side, the officer on duty, who nodded at Eric and barked, “Commander on deck.”
Eric nodded back, then turned to Deion and spread his arms. “Welcome to the War Room.”
Deion stared. “Holy shit.”
“Holy shit,” Eric agreed. “More information flows through this room than any other place on earth. The people here monitor every piece of information in the world. Everything the CIA knows, we know. The NSA. The Pentagon. We have network taps in all the big telecoms, and they stream the data to us. But, it’s more than just the data. We process it all and look for the patterns, the thing that can’t be seen. When we find it, we act.”
Deion was speechless. He looked from one giant monitor to another. One displayed a data-stream from a satellite over the Koreas, another a topographical map of Iran, red boxes on the map in a constant flux of motion. Phone numbers scrolled by on another, faster than the eye could see.
In fact, everywhere he looked he saw an overwhelming amount of information. He tried to focus on just one screen, a graph of electronic gaming equipment being purchased through phony accounts and shipped to Syria, but trying to keep up with the flickering text made him lightheaded. He gave up and turned back to Eric. “This is what you do here? How could anybody make sense of this?”
Eric grinned. “Beats the hell out of me. But here, in this room, we protect the United States. Here we protect the world.”
Later, after Eric had shown him his quarters, they sat at the small table in the kitchenette.
Deion shook his head in disbelief. “Get the fuck out. Truman?”
“Scouts honor,” Eric said. “They created the OTM back in the fifties. Been doing it ever since.”
Deion let it sink in. He would call bullshit on just about anybody, but Eric was one of the squarest shooters he had ever met.
He remembered asking a Delta operator called IronMan, a wiry little man from Cleveland, about how Eric got the call-sign Steeljaw. IronMan just smiled. “Wise doesn’t shoot the shit or fuck around with the rest of the guys. When your ass is in the fire, he’s the guy you want. He’s a stone cold motherfucking killer. I’ve seen him hold a kid, pat him on the head while we led the kid’s old man outside and threw him in a truck. When we got outside the village, he blew the old man’s brains out. Then he wrapped the body up in white cloth and dug the hole himself, then buried the old fuck. We asked him why, said it was his job, his responsibility. No, if you want the job done, he’s your guy.”
Now he listened as Eric told the story of his own recruitment, how Smith blacklisted him, then showed up on his doorstep, offering him the job. Then Eric told him about Project StrikeForce, the Wipe, the Weave, the Implant.
“You have to understand, the Office operates in secret. There’s no accountability. If things go right, nobody knows we exist. If things go wrong, people die. We have to do some questionable things to keep that from happening.”
Deion took a sip of coffee, a deep roast that danced across his tongue.
You can always tell a first-class operation by the quality of its coffee.
“We’re going to create some kind of super soldier to take care of these kind of situations?” he asked.
“You could say that. Only, he’s not super. He’s just a man with some enhancements and really good equipment.”
“Who is this lucky man?”
Eric paused. “John Frist.”
Deion jumped from the table, knocking his chair back. “No way. Absolutely not!”
Eric watched, calmly. “You’re all in now, Deion. Frist is the man. Don’t worry, after the work they’re doing, he won’t be the same man. They’ll undo him.”
“Undo him? What the hell does that mean?”
“I wish I could explain it, but I barely understand it myself. Let’s just say they’re messing with his mind. He won’t remember his involvement in the Red Cross bombing. When we’re done, he’ll be perfect. Look, I need your help on this.”
He tilted his head. “What if I say no?”
“You can’t say no to this,” Eric said quietly. “You’re part of the team now. You’re still CIA, but you belong to the OTM. When Nancy recruited you, she told you the assignment was unusual.”
“I hear that shit all the time. I never expected it to be true.”