“Doesn’t mean it can’t be done,” Jonathan replied. “We should be able to recruit a member of the Standing Committee, right?”
“Couldn’t tell you if we had,” Cooke said.
The APLAA vault was everything Kyra had thought the Red Cell would be, ten times the space or more, with enough cubicles that Kyra wondered whether the Agency wasn’t violating fire codes. There was a two-level rack of laser printers sitting next to an industrial-sized copier, all of them running. The burn bags were overflowing with classified trash waiting to be thrown into the dump chutes that ran to the basement, where somebody would haul them away to be shredded and burned. It looked and sounded like a hundred people or more were in close quarters, and she could feel their energy. Not-so-controlled chaos, she thought. The tension in the vault was like the humidity on a hot Virginia day, nearly tactile and just as pervasive. There was no shortage of noise but an almost complete absence of human voices that Kyra found unnerving. Everyone was working, no one was talking. She wondered whether DI analysts were trained to retreat into their cubicles under stress.
A girl in blue jeans and a black polo shirt — acceptable attire on snow days — stepped forward; a gray badge clipped to her pocket announced her status as a college intern, CIA’s version of legal slave labor.
Poor kid, Kyra thought, though there was probably less than five years’ difference in their ages. They should’ve let the interns stay home instead of dragging them in on a snow day.
“Can I help you?” the intern asked.
I hope I sound like an analyst. She felt like an idiot. “I’m Kyra Stryker, from the Red Cell. We’re writing a piece on the Taiwan raids that went down last night and I wanted to pick up a few research papers.”
The intern frowned. “Does our office director know about it?”
Even the temporary help hates the Red Cell. “I don’t know,” Kyra admitted. “We just got the assignment an hour ago. I’m just doing some research for a backgrounder.” Another term that she’d heard analysts use and hoped she was using correctly.
Apparently she had. “What do you need?” the intern said, with attitude. The younger woman was showing a remarkable lack of patience given that she wasn’t even a full-time staff member. She, of all the staff in the vault, had the least claim on pressure and analytic burdens to justify a lack of manners.
“I could use your help to find some finished intelligence reports.”
“Like I said, we’re all busy right now. You should look them up online.”
They’re busy. You’re just here to run interference. Kyra studied the younger woman for a moment. Her instructors at the Farm had uncovered a talent in Kyra for sizing people up at a glance, finding character flaws through nonverbal cues alone. It was a divine gift for a disciple learning the arts of espionage, and her instructors had taught her to harness it with tactical planning. Some case officers didn’t know how to turn it on and off, lacking the needed conscience, and so used the skill on everyone. Kyra didn’t suffer from that problem. Her inner voice nagged her whenever she considered the idea of “case-officering” fellow Agency employees, but that voice was not inclined at the moment to be blocked by a DI analyst, and a college intern barely qualified for that status anyway.
Hostility was not the best approach at the moment, she decided. The intern was under stress and had shown enough spine to defend her assigned territory against an outsider who outranked her. But that courage was founded on borrowed authority, so a display of anger would just put the woman further on the defensive and possibly drive her to call in reinforcements with real power to say no.
Most people have a natural desire to be helpful, her instructors had told her. Be nice. Be reasonable. Tell them you need them. Don’t give them a reason to dislike you, and their conscience will work in your favor.
Kyra smiled. “I understand, but we really need APLAA’s help on this one. Our paper is going to Director Cooke, so we have to make sure we’ve got our facts straight.”
“Oh.” The girl’s expression faltered.
“If you could just show me where everything is filed, I could probably find the paper myself. I don’t want to take up your people’s time.”
“Which papers?” The intern sounded unsure.
“I have a list,” Kyra said. She looked down at her notebook. “I’d be happy to do the hunting if you’ll just show me where you store copies of your finished intel reports since 1990?”
The intern’s thought process was visible on her haggard features. “Need-to-know” was a gospel commandment. Just because people asked for information, didn’t mean they automatically got it. Mere curiosity wasn’t sufficient. The intern had to reason out whether Kyra actually needed to have access to the materials she had requested.
“I guess that would be okay,” she said. “Come with me.” The intern finally cracked a smile, the sure sign that Kyra had defused her. The girl had gone from an adversary to a willing accomplice in minutes. Kyra followed her through the maze to a pair of government beige filing cabinets only a little shorter than herself. “NIEs, IAs, and Serial Fliers here in the top two racks. PDBs and WIRes with background notes and references filed in chronological order in the bottom two. Anything else?”
“Nope. This’ll be fine. And thanks. I really appreciate your help.”
“You’re welcome,” the intern said before she walked away.
Kyra stared at the file cabinet, opened it, and began searching through the papers.
Kyra dropped her pencil on the table and checked the clock on the wall; 2030 hours. I lost track, she thought. Jonathan had disappeared for hours at a time, leaving her to the welcome privacy of the bullpen for most of the day. Hunger had finally driven her out of the vault a few hours before, but the cafeteria didn’t serve dinner and she couldn’t stomach anything the vending machines were serving. She had finally settled for the old doughnuts she had found sitting in a box on the refrigerator. She had thought about asking before eating but decided that Jonathan’s earlier rebuke about taking without asking gave her the permission she needed.
“Bored?” Jonathan asked. He stared up at the television mounted near the ceiling in the corner. Liang’s press conference was starting late and a pair of British journalists were filling time with inanities that the analyst didn’t want to hear, so he left the mute on.
“This is some kind of hazing, right?” She had been reading binders of intel reports since lunchtime and hadn’t quit even though her brain had stopped absorbing the words hours before.
“If I wanted to haze you, I’d tell you to streak through the gift shop.”
“You can guess what I would tell you to do,” she told him. “I don’t think the China analysts have missed anything.”
“They have,” Jonathan said. “It’s standard practice.”
“I see why they love you so much,” Kyra said.
“It would be a mistake to care,” Jonathan told her.
“Words to live by?”
He sighed. “Cooke was right when she said that CIA has suffered a major intelligence failure on average once every seven years. Postmortems show that every one of them was a failure of analysis, not collection. We had the information to figure out what was happening. And in every case, the analysts suffered from the same mental mistakes — groupthink and whatnot. Requiring analysts to go through more training doesn’t prevent them. More coordination and more review and more editing and every other process we’ve set up to prevent them doesn’t work. In some cases, it even makes them more likely. So when I said it was standard practice, I meant it literally.”