CIA Briefing Room 4 — Langley, Virginia | August 8, 2011 | 09:00
Simmons was already at the head of the table when Alen arrived. He was always already at the head of the table. This was a quality he shared with a very specific category of powerful person: the kind who shaped environments rather than responding to them, who ensured that every room they entered had been arranged to reflect a reality of their own construction before anyone else had the opportunity to arrange it differently.
He was a tall man — Alen's own height, which was unusual — and he wore the particular confidence of someone who had never had to be uncertain in a room and had organized his entire neurological relationship with power around the expectation that this would remain the case. He dressed well. He spoke precisely. He had a quality of warmth that was intelligently deployed and functionally indistinguishable from the genuine article to anyone who had not spent the past seven months reading his financial trails.
Alen had spent the past seven months reading his financial trails. He sat at the table and kept his expression exactly as it always was.
"Agent Richard," Simmons said. The smile was there. It was always there — practiced, warm, the smile of a man who had decided years ago that a smile was the most effective instrument for the particular kind of conversation he was always having. "I trust you've been settling in."
"The access has been productive, sir," Alen said. Standing at attention, which was the posture this room required.
"Excellent." Simmons pressed a control on the table. The screen at the far wall illuminated — a map, Russia, a red line tracing the Trans-Siberian corridor through the eastern reaches. He moved to the screen with the ease of someone who had done this specific gesture many times. "Operation Frozen Core."
He explained.
A private armored train. Ex-Soviet researchers — a splinter cell of scientists from the original Progenitor research network, operating outside any government framework, attempting to auction a weaponized G-Virus variant on the black market. The train was moving. The window for interdiction was narrow. The President had personal concern about this sample reaching any buyer, which was why this was being handled at the NSA level rather than through standard Agency channels.
Alen listened. He was listening at multiple levels simultaneously.
The cover story was constructed. That was the first thing — the specific quality of a narrative that had been designed to be accepted rather than arrived at. Ex-Soviet scientists auctioning G-Virus. Clean. Specific enough to be credible, generic enough not to be verifiable through any channel he currently had access to. A story engineered for someone who did not know what he knew.
The second thing:
live tissue sample.
Simmons's specific, unhurried emphasis on those three words. This was not about data. This was not about preventing a weapon from reaching the black market. This was about acquisition. Simmons wanted something from this train. The mission parameters were designed to produce it.
The third thing: comms blackout. Total. An operator going into an environment with no support, no extraction, no record of authorization. In seven months of reading Simmons's operational architecture, Alen had identified four previous instances of this pattern. None of the operatives who had gone into those missions on total comms blackout had produced after-action reports.
They had not produced after-action reports because they had not come back.
"Rules of engagement, sir?" Alen asked.
"Silence," Simmons said. "The storm provides cover for insertion. You go in, you neutralize any resistance, and you extract the sample." He paused. "No witnesses, Valkyrie."
The phrase
no witnesses
was delivered with the same tone he used for every other phrase in this briefing. That was the craft of it — not hiding the darkness in the language, but delivering everything at the same level of ordinary so that nothing registered as different from anything else.
"Understood, sir."
Simmons came around the table toward him. The specific movement of a predator covering ground without broadcasting it. He stopped at Alen's shoulder — not in front, not across, at the shoulder, which was a dominance position so well-practiced it had probably stopped being conscious two decades ago.
"I have complete confidence in you," Simmons said. He put his hand on Alen's shoulder. The weight of it was particular. Not heavy in the physical sense. Heavy in the sense of something that carried a claim. "Oh, and Richard — watch your back. The cold does something to a man's judgment."
Alen looked straight ahead.
He thought:
the cold doesn't do anything to my judgment. You're sending me to die. And you know that I know what you've been moving through Neo-Umbrella. And I know that you know that I know. And this is how you solve that problem.
He said: "Of course, sir."
He walked out of Briefing Room 4 and went to contact Hunnigan through the channel they had established for exactly this kind of communication — the off-book one, the one that did not run through any structure Simmons had access to.
He had approximately eight hours before the operation began.
He intended to use them.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Chapter Thirty-Three follows...