Black And White Ops

After he’d mustered out of the army, Rick had looked into several jobs that interested him, all of which had to do with international security, but no one wanted to pay him what he felt he was worth. One day a young woman had walked up to him at a bar in Manhattan and introduced herself. She told him a special branch of the government had saw his resume on line and wanted to talk to him. They had a job in mind for him. It was temporary, but the pay would offset any long term concerns he might have. All they wanted him to do was report to an address which she handed him on a card. She also handed him a brochure about the agency. Rick thanked her then went home and looked up the agency on line.

He was impressed what he read and, from the description about it, Rick assumed it would be some kind of technological assessment job where he would translate obscure journals for congress. He called the number, made an appointment, and showed up on their front door a week later.

His first clue about the agency’s real mission was from the field office where he reported. It was not some bright and clean chrome office building, but a run-down office in a strip mall in a bad area. If someone had wanted to conceal an obscure agency of the government, they couldn’t have picked a better place. It was completely at odds with the way the agency had presented itself as a benign branch that assessed foreign technological developments.

When Rick sat down with his interviewer, he was surprised they knew so much about him. They even knew about the Basque girl he’d dated in college because he wanted to practice her language. Rick was one of the few outsiders who had mastered Basque, with its words that relied on X’s and K’s since it was not related to any other European language. The relationship never went anywhere, but Rick continued to look for a woman who could match his expectations. They also knew his grandfather had fought on the Carlist side in the Spanish Civil War. They mentioned a few other facts about his family and asked him if he was still interested in the occasional job.

By then, Rick was intrigued enough to find out what they wanted out of him. If these people could find out so much, they had to have some grand job out there which paid good money. So he continued with the interview and found out what they were willing to pay per assignment. When they waved the figure in front of him, Rick was sold. He could have been sent to a desert full of scorpions for the kind of money they were talking. He quickly agreed and filled out a stack of papers for them. He was given a number and told to call it in another week.

The money showed in his bank account a few days later and Rick was excited when he called the agency when he was supposed to. They told him to come in the next day to a completely different office where they would discuss his first assignment. The new address was some place in the financial district, more to his liking.

Rick made an appearance the next day, eager for work. He gave the secretary at the front desk his name and she sent him down the hall to a conference room. When he opened the door, two men and a woman he’d never seen before were waiting to greet him. They told him to be seated and listen to them.

Before Rick could ask any questions, a video projector was produced and a series of images were shown on a screen at one end of the office. Rick was told about an obscure religious leader in Turkey who might have received plans for a biological weapon from some contacts he had inside the Syrian rebels. They needed him to go into Turkey and try to locate the plans. If they existed, he was to take them and destroy any thing which might have recorded them. Since Rick spoke Turkish and Arabic, he was ideal for the job.

They spent a few months training him for what he was supposed to do. The agency had connections with a number of private companies who had firing ranges and obstacle courses where he could learn how to dodge more bullets than he had in the army. The focus was on individuals being sent in to do a job and get the hell out. Usually it had to do with some kind of technology the agency wanted or didn’t want someone else to have. Computer hackers could only do so much, every now and then someone on the ground had to be sent in to complete the assignment.

He’d been parachuted in to Turkey with the knowledge of the Turkish military who didn’t like a whiny little sheik stirring up trouble in the southern part of the country. Rick had located the plans when he broke into the sheik’s office in the middle of the night, then torched the computers where they would have hidden copies of the plans. He couldn’t be sure all of them were gone, it didn’t matter; the agency had sent the sheik a warning by breaking into his office and burning up some valuable office equipment. It would be a long time before he thought about trying something so stupid again.

It was the first of many assignments the agency gave him. He’d been to Indonesia, France and China. And right now he was sitting in a coffee shop in St. Petersburg talking to a very fine looking black American woman. Too bad the assignment had to come first. If everything went according to plan, he’d be out of this country in another forty-eight hours with a big fat bonus waiting for him once he got back to American soil. All he had to do was find out if a certain office building was being used by the Russian mob to hack an important security database inside the pentagon. The hackers had stolen a lot of valuable data. The pentagon’s computer security people had recognized the attempts at intrusion a few weeks ago and traced it back to St. Petersburg. The location was narrowed down to a cluster of office buildings. Now all Rick had to do was find out which building was being used to hack the database. The pentagon security people had already prepared a honey trap for the hackers who thought they were getting valuable data. In reality, it was controlled data. And when they tried to make use of it, the hackers were going to find out what that data could do in ways they’d never thought possible.