OUTCAST Ops: The Poseidon Initiative

FIFTEEN

Stephen Shah read the nameplate on the woman’s desk. Lena Gandara. Didn’t ring any bells, not that he expected it to. She was a receptionist, not someone he would have worked with.

“I haven’t heard anything about this. Your name again, Sir?”

Now she wanted to know, Shah thought.

“Jacob Rahimi.” He’d chosen the name carefully, to mirror his own in that he had an Americanized first name but a Persian last name matching his ethnicity. He knew they would be used to many employees and contractors with similarly structured names.

Lena pressed a button on her phone and waited with the handset to her ear. “I’m sorry, Mr. Peterson,” Shah heard her say. “But there’s a man here by the name of Jacob Rahimi who says he has orders from President Carmichael to close the embassy. He asked to see you by name.”

Shah nodded his approval when she looked his way. As with everything under his control for this sortie, he’d chosen Peterson carefully. He was high enough in the government’s organizational structure to get the embassy closed if he believed the presidential orders were genuine, but at the same time he hadn’t been at this embassy long enough to have met Shah previously, so he had no reason to recognize him on sight as might be the case with one or two other employees.

A door at the rear of the office space opened and a tall man wearing a rumpled shirt and tie with no jacket emerged, his gaze fixed intently on Shah. He seemed to hold eye contact with him as he strode across the room. When he reached the reception area he glanced briefly at the document in Shah’s hand, and then at his plastic ID badge clipped to his jacket pocket.

“Join me in my office, please.”

Shah followed him across the space, where a few heads were already peeking over cubicle walls to watch him walk back. He could feel the grapevine growing in his wake as the employees speculated on the meaning of his visit. He and Peterson reached the office and Peterson stood to one side with an outstretched hand inviting him in.

“Please take a seat, Mr. Rahimi.” Shah sat on a simple leather chair in front of Peterson’s desk, a nice wood affair but nothing that would trigger excessive government spending complaints. Peterson walked around to his chair on the other side of the desk and sat.

“You have a document for me?”

Shah nodded and handed him the false order. Peterson quickly flipped it over to see if there was anything written on the back (there wasn’t), before placing it flat on the desk in front of him. He pulled a pair of reading glasses from a drawer and put them on.

Shah studied Peterson’s face while he examined the paperwork. One hand rubbed the side of his face as if massaging a cramp, while his eyes alternately squinted and relaxed as he read.

“…in keeping with this directive, all embassy facilities are to be properly discontinued and the premises safely evacuated until further notice,” he finished aloud, looking up at Shah, who nodded authoritatively.

“So they’re caving in to terrorist demands now?” Peterson shook his head in disgust.

“Trying to save lives. Don’t want another event like Monday Night Football, right?”

The embassy man threw up his hands. “But if we start giving in to demands, what happens when they want something else a couple years down the line? What kind of example does this set for other terrorists watching and waiting in the wings?”

“Hey, I don’t make the rules, either. You know how it is. They say ‘take that hill’, and we take that hill, right?”

Shah hoped a little civil service camaraderie might make the man feel more at ease. Instead he stood and pointed out the room’s single window, at a busy street down below.

“What’s going to happen here without any kind of sanctioned American presence? It’s an open invitation to terrorists — c’mon over to The Hague! It’s the Wild West out here!” He turned back from the window and put his hands on the desk on either side of the bogus presidential shutdown document.

“I guess U.S. travelers who lose their American Express will have to find some other way to get an emergency loan for return airfare,” Shah joked.

Peterson actually seemed to brighten a little at that one. “Hey, that is a service we provide from time to time. Just one of the many things we do here. I can’t help but wonder if they’re using this terror thing as an excuse for downsizing. You know, budget cuts! For all I know, it’s a false flag thing and they set that damn chemical bomb off themselves just so they’d have an excuse to close down a bunch of embassies!”

Shah felt his gut turn over at that. Here was a career government man, highly placed at an American embassy, with such a lack of trust in his own government. It reminded him of why he’d joined OUTCAST.

“Let’s not get carried away. All it amounts to is a temporary cease-operations order. You see it says, ‘until further notice’.” Shah immediately regretted refocusing Peterson’s attention back on the document. He’d already seemed to have bought it; no need to get him to look at it some more, you idiot, Shah chastised himself.

“Yeah,” Peterson said, scanning the paper once again, “but we all know what that means.” He raised his head from the paper, thankfully without having concentrated on it further. But now he was staring at Shah’s badge.

“Say, who’re you with, anyway — White House?”

“State Department.”

“So don’t I have to sign off on this? Or Ebeling?” Shah knew Alfred Ebeling was the Ambassador of the Embassy, the top dog.

“You just have to close the embassy down, Mr. Peterson. The best way is to get most of your personnel out of here now. Keep on a skeleton crew for the safeguarding of critical documents, the shutdown of computer systems, data backup to the cloud, that kind of thing. When that’s done, the rest of you leave and lock the door behind you.”

Peterson appeared flabbergasted. “Lock the door behind us…” he stammered. Then he perked up. “And then what? Will we still get paid? Or is this some kind of furloughing, or even worse — layoffs?”

It never ceased to amaze Shah how much these government employees were really looking out for number one, even though they put on such a professional facade of caring about their country.

“…still two years away from my twenty years when my pension kicks in, you know, a lot of us are! I wonder if that has anything to do with this decision!”

Shah continued to shake his head. He was getting the opposition he’d expected all right, but not for the reason he’d anticipated. This guy wasn’t worried about keeping the embassy running so that it could continue to provide needed services, he was worried about his own paycheck and his retirement package. It disgusted Shah to no end. He realized that these were the type of self-serving bureaucrats who had slowly but surely driven him out of government service.

“I assure you that if it does, it would be news to me, Mr. Peterson. To the best of my knowledge the decision to close the embassy has only to do with wanting to at least appear to comply with the terrorists’ demands in order to prevent further bloodshed of innocent American citizens.”

Peterson’s eyes brightened. “So you think it’s just a temporary ploy to keep Hofstad happy and then they’ll reinstate us as soon as Hofstad is under control?”

“That is my understanding, yes. So the sooner you can commence with the shutdown procedures, the sooner everything will get back to normal again.”

Peterson stared into Shah’s eyes for a moment and then picked up his desk phone.