Close Quarters

FORTY-ONE

After signing off from Watchman, Lindsay sat for a few moments deep in thought. She felt oddly unsettled, her mood even a little flat out of concern for the two men out in the field and her own sense of helplessness, as if she should be doing more for them than simply sitting here in the safe cocoon of the CIA operations centre.

She’d been warned during training and by Callahan himself that such thoughts were entirely normal. Mission support staff wouldn’t be human if they didn’t have them, especially when their contact was limited to the close, almost intimate environment of a secluded room and a set of headphones, each word carrying such a wealth of meaning. And that closeness made it inevitable that the distance between them did not mean the support staff would be entirely removed from a real, tangible sense of the dangers the operatives might be facing.

But that was something she had quickly realized she would have to accept: that Watchman was doing his job, and she had to do hers, no matter what happened.

It was about this time that she came to realize that her particular job was attracting some attention from other personnel in the ops centre. On rare forays to the rest room area, which were mainly as a means of exercising her legs on the stairs, she was aware that she was a subject of discussion. Most of the personnel she saw were more senior in service, and she had the firm impression they knew the Watchman mission was something a little special and out of the ordinary.

That fact was even more noticeable since the imposition of red light rules. There were no actual lights, as one might see in a recording studio, but signs put up on the approaches to this section of the ops centre had undoubtedly changed the atmosphere, if anything intensifying the already muted air of calm purpose that permeated the building. She had also picked up a sense that if there was any scuttlebutt going on, it was centred around events in Ukraine. The others must have known she was a trainee, plucked off the program by Callahan, yet she detected no animosity, merely a curiosity and a shared understanding, even of approval as evinced by brief smiles and nods of recognition.

Without knowing it, she had become one of them.

What she hadn’t found so easy to deal with was Senator Benson’s questioning. She hadn’t enjoyed being asked about Karen or Tommy, finding his manner too probing, too intrusive, especially since she had already given complete disclosure throughout the vetting procedure she’d undergone after applying to join the CIA.

But there was something else there, too; something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She’d had a feeling throughout the talk that there was something behind Benson’s questions, an underlying purpose which had nothing to do with reports or an interest in the wellbeing of newcomers to the Agency. His attitude had been too secretive, almost insidious in nature, as if he were harbouring some ill-purpose which was going to come back and bite her and her family.

She was also dismayed by discovering that she had wanted to say something to Watchman about it. It would have been a gross infraction of protocol and hugely irresponsible of her to load that on him on top of everything else he was undergoing, and she was relieved she had come to her senses in time. Here was a man she didn’t know, had never met, with indescribable pressures on him as he made his way through a war zone with the responsibility of bringing out another man to safety, and she’d very nearly blurted out her worries about being asked a few questions by an individual she found unpleasant.

She told herself to get a grip and turned to her keyboard. If she couldn’t talk to Watchman and felt unable to discuss her concerns about Benson with Callahan, she could do the next best thing. She could put her thoughts in writing. At least that might alleviate the situation and her mood enough to allow her to get on with the job.

With a careful eye on the screens, she wrote down everything that had happened, listing as carefully as she could every question and comment he’d made, every nuanced suggestion and threat. It might not go anywhere, she knew that; she was after all a greenhorn at this game. But if something did happen following Benson’s strange behaviour down here, she would have a dated record of her concerns.

That done, she busied herself linking up additional monitors to give her extra live feeds from the National Security Agency at Fort Meade and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s analysis centre at Bolling. Both were capable of giving coverage of activity on the ground over Ukraine, which she hoped would help Watchman through any trouble spots. Added to news reports and updates, she should be able to spot any build-up of activity before he ran into it.

However, it still left a small gap in up-to-the-minute data, and she wondered how to close that gap right down. What she needed was real-time coverage of the area Watchman was travelling through, an eyes-on view of what was really going on down there ahead of him. There was only one way she could think of, a method of intelligence-gathering that had been covered in some of the recent training lectures.

But to access the facility required a decision way above her pay grade.

She typed a brief note advising Callahan of her actions acquiring live data-feeds from the other agencies, and requested the one additional measure. He might say that it was impossible, that budgetary or policy reasons would get in the way. But if he approved it, she might be the first trainee ever to instigate the use of a camera-equipped UAV — an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone — to provide live backup for a hot mission.