He stopped at a nondescript door marked with a simple plate on the wall: Counter-Intelligence, East Asia / Pacific. He tapped in his passcode and slipped inside.
The Bullpen, as it was called, was a long rectangular room filled with cubicles, except for an open area at the center where the main conference table sat. Offices lined the edges of the room, providing quieter spaces for the senior analysts, like Connor.
Connor was always the first in. He liked to get most of his work done before the main crowd even arrived. Once the office began to fill up, most of his time was spent jumping between stations and putting together reports for upstairs.
He opened the door to his office and shook his head at the stack of files covering his desk. “Going paperless” had been the mantra of the agency for the last five years. They’d said the same thing in the army. But in both organizations, Connor considered the idea a non-starter, a talking point for execs looking to get promoted. Sure, everyone liked the idea in theory, but in pure practical terms, “going paperless” was a pipe dream that would never happen. People simply liked holding a physical piece of paper in their hands.
He set his backpack down next to his desk, then pulled his blinds back and gazed out at the horizon. The sun would be peeking out soon. From his fourth-floor window, he had a great view of Kryptos, the mysterious sculpture with four encrypted messages that resided in one of the central squares outside the main building. The infamous sculpture, built in 1990, had bewildered and confused experts from around the world, and even using the most advanced supercomputers available today, no one had been able to decipher the final clue. The first three passages had been solved, though it had taken a full two years for someone to figure them out and another ten years before that solution was publicly announced. The final passage on the structure remained a mystery, one that Connor was never going to tackle, but kept some of the agency’s cryptanalysts busy during their spare time.
Connor sipped his coffee, wondering how much fun the sculpture’s creator had watching as expert after expert tried to decrypt his masterpiece. More fun than I’m going to have today, he thought.
He sat down and powered on his computer, then spent several minutes working through the multiple layers of security built into the machine. He opened his email, but only skimmed his unread messages, knowing most of them were updates on cases he wasn’t directly a part of, though his section was working them. He’d learned early on that getting sucked into knowing everything that his unit had going on was a rabbit hole that he could get caught up in for hours. And then he’d never get any real work done.
He skipped past the messages about EU & Eurasia. He knew what they were about: some recent anti-American rhetoric from an ideologue who blamed America for the failing of the European Union. Over the last five years or so, the EU had become somewhat of a bad penny. One country had already bailed from the coalition and others were considering it, and there were more that were furious it was falling apart.
But Connor’s current area of responsibility was China, North and South Korea, Japan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq—and while he liked to stay acquainted with what was going on in the rest of the world, there were good people assigned to those parts of the world, and they did their jobs well.
He finished off his coffee, tossed the empty cup in the trash, and started on his real work. Call logs.
It wasn’t the kind of work he’d envisioned when he first joined the agency. Sitting in an office, listening to and analyzing calls all day… that was a far cry from the spycraft portrayed on TV. He’d known this, of course, but still, sitting in a quiet office for eight hours a day wasn’t exactly his dream “make a difference” job. It certainly wasn’t as fulfilling as being on the ground, putting rounds downrange.
But that was a young man’s game, and his sore legs from his two-mile run this morning reminded him that he wasn’t as young as he used to be. And he could make a real difference here. He’d been in counterintelligence ever since he’d joined the CIA, and he’d had a hand in some fairly large international cases. He’d helped save lives on the ground. And in the army, he’d seen firsthand the lives lost because of inaccurate, or downright false, intelligence.
There were twenty-seven new calls in his queue, all made over the last twenty-four hours. CIA satellites intercepted calls made from overseas locations to the continental United States. There were millions of such calls made each day, but the agency’s new Summit supercomputer was able to process those millions of voices simultaneously, identify specific keywords, record calls automatically, and, if a call reached a threshold of significance based on keywords, flag it for later review by human analysts, prioritizing it based on tone, content, and language.
Most of the human analysts also had to wait for the translations to come down through the system—or use the CIA’s automatic translator, which was absolutely terrible. But Connor was fluent in Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and a few other languages. His parents, who’d fled from Iran during the revolution, had spoken a number of languages at home, and Connor had picked up more languages while in the army. That was part of why he’d risen so quickly through the ranks here at the agency.
The first call in his queue had initiated in Hong Kong. It was a Chinese businessman complaining about American tariffs on his company’s products. The computer had flagged it because the man had gone on a long tirade about dismantling the West and how the Americans were out to completely dominate the world and destroy everyone else.
“I will burn their country
