David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

As ever, if you want a vacation in a despotic backwater, I remain your willing hostess,

Leila

PS: Despotic or not, Mandalay is quite beautiful; the offer is real. LM

Ned Swain was almost two weeks into the battle of not smoking cigarettes. It was not going well. He tried controlled breathing; he tried to smoke the craving, not the cigarette; he tried to act like someone who did not want a cigarette. How do such people act? Probably, such people did not have bosses like the odious Nigel. Nigel was twenty years older than Ned, smoked Lucky Strikes, and looked wretched up close. When Ned really wanted a cigarette and really wanted not to want a cigarette, he looked at Nigel.

Usually, Ned would not have been in Nigel’s daily company. But Nigel had lately been ordering Ned to report to the chilly, windowless office in the hotel that provided the station’s cover. He said he wanted Ned to compile new region notes. This was like being told to clean the VCR heads or copyedit some never-read HR boilerplate. The truth was that Nigel was clearly baffled by the new platform software and wanted Ned to bump all the systems back to the previous upgrade. But Nigel couldn’t just ask Ned to do that — to do so would acknowledge his own technological deficits and violate about ten security protocols — so he had Ned show him over and over again how to do the new key-chaining and biometrics. Ned made sure to always appear willing. It’s handy to know your boss’s passwords.

But these days Ned was hyperaware of every cigarette around him. Did he hate them or love them? Where does love become need become hate-because-needed? When Nigel hunched over Ned’s desk to issue his pointless instructions, Ned definitely hated cigarettes. The stench was keen; it rolled off the older man like a viscous sludge.

“You’ll want to see if the Cambodians will confirm this,” Nigel said one morning from close behind Ned’s desk, rattling a recent edition of New Light of Myanmar.

This was like saying You’ll want to wipe your ass after you shit . Nigel was constantly giving Ned instructions on the most easily intuited parts of his job. Ned dug his fingernails into his palms and thus succeeded in not pointing out that every single bit of reportage gracing the pages of the junta’s absurd and idiomatic daily English-language organ was subject to confirmation.

When Ned was himself a cigarette smoker, this close-quartered micromanagement had been a minor point in the long list of grievances he had against Nigel. But as Ned approached week two without Camel one, he was finding it harder to mask his distaste for the man.

Where to begin? Ned should have been in the meat of his career, but instead he was boxed in by a sociopath, made to do busywork in an obscure corner of the Service. Nigel didn’t want anything of any use getting out of Mandalay station without his being able to take credit for it, so he sabotaged the work of every analyst they sent him. Being posted to Nigel’s region was like being moved to a broom closet, but a broom closet where they could keep an eye on you.

Ned was a grade 4 field analyst for a clandestine U.S. military outfit called the Central Security Service. Though the name made them sound like mall cops, the CSS in fact outranked every other intelligence service and agency save one (that one was possibly mythical; it was said to have no name or emblem). But if Ned had to finish out his career working under people like Nigel, he’d rather just quit the Service. Did they let washed-up spies become schoolteachers?

There was no way to take Nigel head-on. You did not go straight at a grade 5. You went straight at a grade 5, he got on a secure phone and dinged your rating twenty points and you were now qualified to hold how many posts in the CSS? Oh, none.

So Ned did what people in stressed marriages and small offices have been doing since forever — he discreetly nudged at the edge of certain situations in order to elicit from his antagonist a rash move or utterance. He waited for his openings. He’d been doing this for a couple of years now.

So when he saw the flick-burst transmission about the possible OpSec breach at the gatehouse near the border, Ned saw an opportunity. It came in on Nigel’s computer station after Nigel had left the office. Nigel ended most workdays around three in the afternoon, but he always left his station open, because he couldn’t be bothered with all the key-chaining required to open and close it. So Ned saw the flick-burst before Nigel. He could have dismissed it, but instead, he made sure that Nigel saw it.

Ned thought that if Nigel was rattled, he might get sloppy and overshare about the Bluebird site. That’s just the kind of thing that Nigel would do. He was evil, but he was lazy too. He had already let Ned know that it was Bluebird securing something in the forest at the border; Ned wasn’t even supposed to know that. Whatever Bluebird was doing up there, it was grade 5 to Ned’s grade 4.

Ned didn’t consider that he might be putting the Majnoun girl in danger. It didn’t seem like much of an OpSec breach anyway. So the girl saw a couple of Bluebirds escorting a client to this big secret site? She was there by accident and she hadn’t gotten near the site itself.

But the news rattled Nigel more than Ned had meant or expected it to. Whatever the Bluebird client was doing up there, Nigel clearly felt that the Service was required to provide something more than the standard DADI protocol (deflect attention, discourage inquiry). He bumped the girl’s electronic surveillance to 6, which was pretty expensive in bandwidth alone. He ordered terra-surveillance from the locals and demanded that Ned update him daily on her movements and comms.

“Sir? If I may?” said Ned, in the voice and affect he used with Nigel. “I don’t think we need to worry about her. She has no idea what she saw, and she’s not going to do any serious snooping around. She’s having enough trouble here already. Zeya is seeing to that.”

“Have Zeya increase pressure on her. We need to mitigate risk to the zero point,” Nigel sputtered back, his small hands shaking. “You understand me, Swain?”

As he had risen through the ranks of the CSS, Ned had gradually come to know the score. Being a truly clandestine agency (the unpublished and unpublishable shield used by the CSS was a falconer’s glove below a falcon holding a telephone receiver), the Service had to work within unique budgetary constraints. Still, it also had to fulfill its mission, which, after 9/11, had been rewritten: To build and maintain the world’s supreme electronic intelligence-gathering apparatus and cyberdefense infrastructure. Ned could rattle it off; every analyst could. So the Service made common cause with a few private-sector endeavors — mainly tech and pharmaceutical, but patriots all. These were the partners. The partners provided the Service with intellectual capital and leading-edge technology. And the service that the Service provided to the partners? A little cover for the advanced research and complex commerce that, in order to be valuable and effective, must take place in zones unattached to a particular jurisdiction.

“We just throw a little shade on things when it’s in our interest, or when it can be said to be in our interest,” one of Ned’s supervisors told him once when he was having a hard time appreciating that particular shade of gray.

It was said that Nigel had been an excellent spy once; his speedy rise through the darker channels of espionage was the stuff of legend. In appearance he was nondescript, in manner receding. He could become a fucking coat tree or melt into a marble column. Then— bam —he was right there, telling you just exactly how you screwed up.