Commander Tom Knox sat on one side of a large oak conference table in Naval Station New York’s Reagan Boardroom. His duffel and backpack were on the seat and floor beside him. An athletically thin, middle-aged woman with thick, flowing, hip-length blonde hair sat across from him in a sharp black suit with lapel pins, a service patch he didn’t recognize, and neither a name tag nor an obvious place for one on her suit jacket. Two younger men, both sandy-haired, both clean shaven, both dressed as she sans the lapel pin, sat on either side of her with briefcases open on the table.
They stared into their open briefcases. She stared at him and he stared back. “What department are you with again?”
She ignored the question. “The San Jacinto is equipped with the latest Aegis, that’s correct, isn’t it?”
He looked down at the highly polished table top for a moment. “What’s on the ship’s manifest?”
The man on her left pulled a stapled, much handled report from his briefcase and slid across to Knox. It stopped right in front of him.
“You learn how to do that in school?”
The woman nodded at the paper without taking her eyes off him. “Is that the paper you submitted directly to the Joint Chiefs?”
He scanned his name under the title The Need for Confirmation of Objective Sans KeyHole, ALWYS, and Related Systems. “You reading other people’s mail again?”
“You subverted the Chain-of-Command on purpose?”
“You here to slap my hands?”
“Is your laptop available?”
He pulled it from his backpack. One of the woman’s aides reached across the table for it. “May I?”
“It’s government property. Go for it. For that matter, so am I. What do you want it for?”
The aide reached under the table to a network hub and ran a cable from the hub to the laptop. Tom could see the glare of the screen on the aide’s face as it came to life. The aide nodded at the woman and she nodded back without taking her eyes from Tom.
“You don’t blink much, do you, Miss…?”
“Are you familiar with MK-Ultra?”
Knox laughed.
The other aide slid paperwork and grainy black-and-white photos across the table to him. He glanced at them and laughed again. “These taken with Brownie Instamatics?”
“In all combat situations, there are certain combatants recognized as being able to tell where the enemy is, their number, their weaponry, whether a mission will succeed or fail, who will and won’t survive a mission, sometimes more. When these combatants are compromised or otherwise unavailable, missions suffer, people are lost.” She read where an aide pointed on his laptop screen. “You’ve met one or two during your career, correct?”
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