John Weisman - Direct Action

Indeed, Mrs. ST. JOHN affected not only MJ’s work environment, but her social life. It was, in a word, constricted. Because of the new regs, Hester P. SUTCLIFFE, spinster, was pretty much confined to dating bachelors whose clearances were either equal to, or higher than, her own. That was a problem, too. Of course Hester (as she thought of herself five and sometimes six days a week) wasn’t actually dating these days. She was in mourning over a just-ended long-term relationship with Tom Stafford, a thirty-nine-year-old case officer who worked at the Counterterrorism Center as a troubleshooter. MJ’s brain corrected itself. Who used to work at CTC.

She was trapped in an emotional maze. The relationship was over-but it wasn’t. They’d said it all-but there was a lot left to be said. And then there was the passion. Oh, the passion.

Still, Tom was gone. That was a certainty. He’d quit CIA in January over some dumb flap-refused to elaborate other than to say the people for whom he worked were idiots and he couldn’t deal with the place anymore. By April, he’d moved to France and taken a job running the Paris office of the 4627 Company, which MJ understood to be a somewhat shadowy risk-assessment and security consulting firm owned by a bunch of retired CIA supergrades. There was something fishy about it.

Still, she couldn’t argue the money. Tom had resigned as a GS-15, step5. He’d made just over $110,000 a year. The 4627 Company gave him a vice president’s title, a $250,000 salary-most of it tax-free-and a 250,000 signing bonus so he could buy an apartment in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. Moreover, he was returning to familiar turf. Tom had served at Paris station for almost four years in the mid-1990s and he’d always said he felt more at home in France than he ever did in Washington.

It had been an amiable, if heart-wrenching split. They still talked every three or four days. She’d visited him in Paris in August, staying for a week at his apartment at 17 rue Raynouard and loving every minute of it. She was, in fact, going to Paris tomorrow for a long weekend with him. The keys to rue Raynouard were already in her handbag.

Tom would probably take her to some romantic, candlelit restaurant, buy her champagne, and ask her to come to Paris and move in with him. It had become his mantra. Every time they spoke, Tom pleaded his case.

So far, she’d refused. There were two niggling problems. The first was rooted in her traditional Irish-Catholic upbringing. O’Connors did not quit their jobs and move to Paris to, well, shack up.

When Tom told her she was taking an old-fashioned stance, her answer (in decent brogue) went: “What’s your point, laddie?”

Sure she was old-fashioned. Between the parental influence of Assistant Battalion Chief and Mrs. Michael John O’Connor (FDNY, retired) and sixteen years of parochial education, that’s how she felt. She was a modern practicing Catholic. She’d always maintained her one-bedroom condo in Rosslyn, even when she and Tom spent most of their time in his Reston town house. It gave her a sense of independence, of security. When-and if-they committed to marriage, she’d give it up.

But that hadn’t happened. And it stung. She understood some of his emotional core. He was a case officer-had been for more than seventeen years. And case officers tended to compartmentalize everything in their lives. They had to, because most of the time they lived lies.

There was only a one letter difference between lives and lies . What a difference that v made. It wasn’t that Tom lied to her, either. It was that he compartmentalized her-as if she were stored in a drawer somewhere in his brain, and when he wasn’t out doing what he did, he’d open the drawer and let her out.

There was always a part of him that was, well, a part apart. She’d never sensed the sort of whole-soul commitment she’d always felt marriage deserved. He said he loved her. And he did. She understood that. But whenever she brought up the M-word, he’d shy away. Retreat behind his damnable case officer’s emotional bulwarks and raise the drawbridge.

And then he’d resigned from CIA and moved to Paris. Abruptly. And not explained why-at least, not satisfactorily so far as MJ was concerned. And now he wanted her to give everything up and move to Paris with the possibility that it would all blow up? Sans commitment? Merci, monsieur, mais non .

Second, there was the current war on terror in which America was engaged. MJ felt that given the crises that came one after another like aftershocks, she wanted to perform some tangible service that would help the U.S. prevail. Working at C-PIG-despite Mrs. SJ-provided that feeling of commitment.

But the unresolved personal situation left a big hole in her heart. God, how she missed him.

To compensate, she threw herself headlong into her work. What Marilyn Jean and her group did was spend their days perusing news photographs from the dozens of agencies that distributed pictures to newspapers and wire services all across the globe. The analysts would use a series of databases to evaluate the people in the photographs. They would first access the Department of Homeland Security’s Terrorist Threat Integration Center database. TTIC, as it was known, held six hundred terabytes of information in its direct-access files, including just over ten thousand photographs of known terrorists.

If TTIC came up dry, MJ would move on to the CIA’s BigPond photo database. There, she had access to photographs obtained from identity cards, passport and visa applications, driver’s licenses, as well as clandestinely taken surveillance and countersurveillance photographs. There were pictures obtained during case officer and agent debriefings, and footage covertly sluiced from government cameras in half a dozen national capitals across the globe. If something clicked, she’d play with the photograph using a secure program called IdentaBase. IdentaBase was one of CIA’s latest VEIL-Virtual Exploitation and Information Leveraging-programs. It allowed MJ not only to access the entire range of national security photographic databases, but its features also included a hugely sophisticated, computerized version of the old police IDenta kits, in which predrawn features-noses, ears, hairlines, face types, and so on-are matched part by part by witnesses.

The result in the old days was a composite drawing of a suspect. VEIL programs went a lot further. MJ could automatically match templated facial characteristics with the TTIC and BigPond photo databases-hundreds of thousands of mug shots and surveillance photos of known or suspected terrorists. Roughly a third of those pictures were new additions to Big-Pond, collected by CIA over the twenty-five post-9/11 months from its stations and bases worldwide. The rest were file photos from half a dozen other agencies-DIA, NSA, FBI, and the National Reconnaissance Office among them-that dated back as far as the 1960s.

The software made its identifications based on 127 separate and distinct points of recognition. Whenever MJ found something in the photographs she believed to be significant, she would flag the photo, print it in high resolution, write a report detailing what she’d found, then pass the package, which was always placed inside an orange-tabbed Top Secret folder, to Mrs. ST. JOHN, who would review it.

If the sin-gin lady thought MJ’s work had merit, she would pass it up the chain of command to the Counterterrorist Center’s senior analyst, a bookish, long-retired reports officer pseudonymed Percival G. LONGWOOD, who had also been rehired post-9/11. Percy LONGWOOD worked somewhere in the ever-expanding maze of offices that made up the CTC, which currently took up more than half of the sixth floor of the CIA headquarters main building.