Cliff Ryder - The Ties That Bind

Most days, Denny Talbot, the head of Room 59 for the United States, enjoyed his job.

Throughout his careers in naval intelligence and the SEALs, the corporate world, politics and espionage, he'd learned the skills necessary to manipulate events and people with a calm precision that many others found disconcerting. And he'd learned to enjoy the games required by his position in an international espionage organization: the push and pull of compromise that got things done, the cloak-and-dagger efforts required to kill those who needed killing or remove a threat to the world. In this job, Denny knew he made a difference, helped make the world a better place. Each mission was both professional and personal, because it often meant the difference between a safe world and a world gone mad. And so most days, he enjoyed it.

Today, however, was not one of those days.

Part of his frustration was that he was supposed to be taking a few days off — and instead of being outside, riding his Tennessee walkers and enjoying the fresh air, he was inside. Working. And the work was on the far, distant side of the universe from enjoyable or fun.

An amplified scream of pain brought Denny's thoughts back to what had interrupted his time off. Most of the time, he lived and worked in New York, but he liked to escape to his small ranch outside of Nashville for his downtime. Most of his life had been filled with the noises of cities or combat or meetings in small offices filled with intense people. His ranch was quiet, secluded and — barring an emergency situation — private. But when you worked for Room 59, downtime didn't always equate to time off. The organization was too large and too involved in the shadowy underside of the world for any of its leaders to truly take time off. What they did was too important to ever let the events shaping the post-9/11 world stray too far from their minds.

Created after the horrific events of that fateful day, Room 59 represented an effort by most of the major countries of the world to stop threats before they happened, and to do so in a way that couldn't be traced back to any one specific nation. The countries involved poured millions into the project through shadow corporations that no longer existed, and the organization itself reported to the independent International Intelligence Agency. Yet, as large a joint venture as Room 59 was, its members were invisible to the outside world. Very few people in even the highest levels of government knew who they were. Everything they did — from daily operations to assassination missions to intelligence gathering — was done behind walls of encryption and secrecy. Meetings were held in virtual-reality conference rooms, where people were represented by electronic avatars that might, or might not, represent their true appearance.

Room 59 had important work to do, and discovery by the media or an opposing interest might mean the end of the organization itself.

Denny was seated in a secure office, hidden inside his ranch house. His eyes were covered with a pair of highly advanced glasses that connected to his computer and launched his avatar into the virtual world of Room 59. In that world, his avatar was seated at his desk, too. He tried to make his virtual office very similar to the one he used in the real world. It was comforting to him and seemed to put visitors at ease, as well. People who were comfortable, Denny knew, were more likely to let their guard down.

Floating directly in front of him was a video recording. In the virtual world, no monitor was needed — images, videos, recordings and other data could simply be pulled from icon files and launched into view. The video was poor quality, but clear enough to be seen. The audio track was a little too good for Denny's taste.

The man's screams, the slap of a heavy fist against flesh, the slow pit-pat of blood hitting the concrete floor…these were sounds that Denny knew all too well. He knew torture was a necessary part of espionage, but that didn't make it pleasant. If a man came to enjoy it, he needed to find a new line of work.

In the video, a Russian man was manacled to a chair. His brown hair was wet with sweat and blood, and his deep-set eyes seethed with pain and rage. His lips were swollen, his nose was crooked and thin rivulets of blood ran from both nostrils. Naked from the waist up — his captors obviously hadn't gotten to the more drastic forms of information extraction yet — his chest was crisscrossed with the marks of his interrogation. From the look, Denny guessed they'd been using some kind of heated metal to sear the man's skin.

Denny suspected that the people who were questioning him were CIA, probably black ops, but they weren't on camera and even their voices had been changed on the audio track. With time, they could probably be found, but the interrogators didn't really matter. What mattered was what the Russian was telling them.

Between sobbing breaths, he hissed, "You…fucking barbarians. I've told you. That's all I know."

"Yeah, right," an off-camera voice said. "But here's the problem, Yusiv. I think you're lying. We think you're lying. We think your story is bullshit. Mother Russia hasn't had the money or the technology to develop anything like that."

"I do not lie!" the Russian screamed, then his body sagged in exhaustion. The scream had taken the last of his strength. "They have it and they will use it," he whispered.

"When?" the other voice snapped. "Where?"

The Russian shook his head. "I have told you all I know. They are testing it in the Bering Sea. I don't know how it will be used, but you can be sure that they will. There are powers in Russia who are not happy with the changes in our country. They want to go back to the old ways."

"The old ways?"

"They want to be a world power again," the beaten man said. "Bring back the arms race, the Cold War, all of it. Then, we were feared. Now, we are a joke to the rest of the world."

The interrogators laughed. "That's true," one of them finally said. "So, your story is that someone over there has developed an Oscar-class nuclear submarine capable of supercavitation…and they're testing it in the Bering Sea."

"It is not a story," the Russian said, his eyes blazing once again. "You make it sound like a children's fable."

"We think it is," one of the men said. "We think you didn't like serving in the Russian navy and now you want to defect. Isn't that closer to the truth, Yusiv?"

The Russian spit blood on the floor and shook his head. "I have nothing else to say."

The video cut out at that point, and Denny saw that the communication icon was flashing. He tapped it with an outstretched virtual hand and a small window opened in front of him, revealing the face of Kate Cochran — his boss and the woman who ran Room 59.

Despite her platinum-blond hair and her ability to be lighthearted from time to time, when it came to work, she was all business. "What do you think?" she asked. In Denny's experience, Kate tended to be direct, to the point and have high expectations. When she wanted answers, she wanted them immediately.

Denny leaned back in his chair. He assumed she knew more than she was saying and was looking to him for additional input before reaching any conclusions. "What do you think?" he countered. She was used to his asking questions in response to hers. It was how they worked.

"You know those new biometrics tools our research folks put together?" she asked, then continued without waiting for his reply. "I had the video and audio tracks scanned using those. They're more reliable than any polygraph machine. At the very least, the Russian believes he's telling the truth."