The Athena Project

CHAPTER 5

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Is this your first time in the tank?” asked Jack Walsh as they approached the outer door of the Pentagon’s ultrasecure conference room.

Leslie Paxton straightened her jacket and took a deep breath. “Yup. My first time in front of the Joint Chiefs as well.”

“If it helps put you at ease, you’ll only be meeting with the chairman and his assistant, the director of the Joint Staff.”

“For my first national security emergency, I was expecting a larger audience.”

“Don’t worry about the size of the audience,” said Walsh. “Just answer their questions as best you can. I’ll handle everything else.”

Leslie was the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known by its acronym, DARPA, a research agency under the Department of Defense. She had worked as a senior scientist at NASA and as vice president for technology and advanced development at the Loral Corporation before being tapped for her current position. She was a tall, thin woman with long blond hair and a genius intellect.

Her agency’s focus was on generating revolutionary capabilities in order to surprise America’s enemies and to prevent them from surprising the United States. Whether it was artificial intelligence or space-based predator-style drones, DARPA was referred to at DoD as the “technological engine” that drove its radical innovation.

It was a small organization that eschewed hierarchy and government bureaucracy and prided itself on flexibility. Its eclectic staff was made up of the best researchers, thinkers, and scientists from government, universities, private industry, and even the public at large. Disciplines were just as wide-ranging, focusing on both theoretical and experimental strength.

Very little of DARPA’s research was ever performed in government labs-that was for only the most sensitive and promising activities. Most researchers worked in private or in university laboratories, which was why DARPA liked to characterize itself as “one hundred geniuses connected by a travel agent.”

The driving concept at DARPA was to harness the best talent, but not to isolate it. Ideas needed to flow quickly and unimpeded to allow for rapid decision making and to spur innovation.

While a key group of scientists were permanent employees meant to ensure continuity, the majority of DARPA staff was hired for four- to six-year rotations and told to be bold and not fear failure. DARPA didn’t just want outside-the-box thinking, it wanted thinking where you couldn’t even see the box. That could happen only by constantly bringing in fresh ideas and perspectives, a core strength that allowed DARPA to build incredible teams of researchers.

DARPA was about anticipating a scientific advancement and reverse-engineering it, even if such advancement hadn’t been fully realized yet. They also took older experimentation or scientific concepts that had never come to fruition and went at them from completely new angles.

While some projects lasted only the length of a four- to six-year team rotation, more time-intensive projects saw their teams allowed to continue beyond that time frame so as to ensure successful collaboration.

In order to keep itself lean and mean, DARPA often outsourced things it required to different branches of the Department of Defense and the military. Regardless of where DARPA got its personnel, the number-one job of the agency’s director was to hire the brightest minds with the biggest ideas and give them everything they needed to be successful. Leslie Paxton, like her predecessors, understood that radical innovation could come about only from radical, high-risk investments in her people.

Jack Walsh was the Joint Chiefs’ director for intelligence. It was he who had summoned Paxton to the Pentagon from DARPA headquarters this afternoon. His office had been in a flurry of activity. In fact, as Leslie had walked in, the fifty-two-year-old rear admiral had been in the process of throwing a staffer his car keys, saying, “Take mine and double-park it right on their front steps if you have to. I want those records immediately. If anyone gives you any problems, you call my cell phone directly.”

Walsh was a charming, no-BS guy. Intelligence was a people business and he excelled at it. He disliked bureaucracy but could navigate it like no one else in the military. He was as adept at cutting through red tape as he was at circumventing it when a situation called for it. Some of the country’s most innovative intelligence revolutions had sprung from the mind of Admiral Jack Walsh. He was the kind of person people went to bed at night praying was working around the clock to keep them safe. And with two grown children and a failed marriage behind him, Walsh had all the time in the world to focus on keeping America safe.

No matter how many people were in the room, Walsh always made Leslie feel that she was the most important. For a man possessed of such people skills, Paxton found it hard to understand why he had never remarried. In the old-boy network of the Pentagon, he’d always treated her as an equal. He even made it a point to reach out to her and solicit her feedback on different things he was working on, something others in the DoD weren’t as apt to do. He was just an incredibly good guy. And while Paxton respected the professional boundaries of their relationship, if he had ever asked her to dinner, or even to lunch, for that matter, she would have said yes in a heartbeat.

But he hadn’t asked her to come to the Pentagon for a social call. He had asked her to come to assist him in making a presentation to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in response to a developing national security emergency.

They’d spent the better part of the morning and into the afternoon working on what they would do and what they would say. When the time neared for their meeting, she still didn’t feel fully prepared.

“You’re going to do great,” said Jack. “Don’t worry. The chairman is a nice guy; very affable. His assistant can be a real pain in the ass, but he’s also a good guy. He’s pretty direct, so don’t let that intimidate you. It’s just his style. Answer his questions as succinctly as you can and you’ll be fine. Are you ready? Do you need a minute to collect your thoughts?”

Leslie straightened to her full height and shook her head. “The longer we wait the worse this is going to get.”

“I agree,” said Walsh as he reached down and opened the door. “Here we go.”