August 2, 2011 · Briefing Room Four, CIA Headquarters, Langley · 09:00 hrs
Briefing Room Four was a room that Simmons had clearly chosen rather than been assigned. It had the quality of a space that had been subtly reconfigured over time — the table positioned toward the door in a way that placed whoever sat at its head with their back to the wall and their eye on the entrance, the lighting adjusted from the building's standard fluorescent to a warmer, directed source that illuminated the presentation screen without flattening the faces of the room's occupants. Small modifications, institutional in their invisibility, that communicated a specific relationship to the space: I have been using this room long enough to reshape it.
Simmons was standing at the head of the table when Alen entered. The digital display behind him showed a map of Russia — the full territorial mass of it, which was itself a kind of operational statement, the map of someone who thought at that scale. He was in his customary suit, the tie precisely knotted, the glasses catching the directed light in a way that made his eyes difficult to read, which was almost certainly also a choice.
"Alen," he said. The warm register. The register that was the performance of warmth assembled from the components of warmth — the first name, the unhurried tone, the slight forward lean that suggested undivided attention — without the substrate of warmth that would have made it genuine. "I trust you're settling in."
"Sir," Alen said. He stood at the measured ease of someone who was not at parade rest and was not at casual rest but occupied the professional middle ground that said: I am present, I am attentive, I am not showing you what I am thinking.
"Good. Let's get to work."
Simmons pressed a control on the table. The map zoomed to the eastern section of Russia — the Siberian districts, the vast white geography of the planet's largest single landmass expressing its emptiness in satellite composite. A red line cut through the white, running west to east along a route that Alen recognized from the Trans-Siberian railway's northern freight variant.
"This is what we're calling the Tsar's Express," Simmons said, moving along the table's edge with the unhurried pace of a lecturer who owns the material. "A private armored freight train operating under the cover of a defunct Russian state railway contractor. The operators are a collective of former Soviet research personnel — biologists, weapons scientists, the kind of people who ended up without institutional homes after 1991 and found private employment with buyers whose priorities aligned with their training." He stopped near the midpoint of the table. "They have something to sell."
"The freight manifest?" Alen asked.
"T-Veronica derivative samples," Simmons said. "Specifically, a viral architecture that our research team believes is three to four generations advanced from the original Veronica strain recovered from the Antarctic incident in 1998. Someone has been running a development programme in the eastern districts and has produced something that — if the intelligence is accurate — represents a significant step in stable cross-viral engineering."
He paused. He looked at Alen with the specific attention of someone about to say the important part.
"The President's concern is that this reaches the open market. The buyer pool for something like this — given the post-Raccoon City landscape, the Eastern Slav precedent, the general proliferation of interest in bio-asymmetric capability — is substantial. Our window to intercept before auction is forty-eight hours." He walked the length of the table to where Alen stood. "The mission is fast-rope insertion onto the moving train at altitude, in blizzard conditions. Neutralize the security detail. Secure the research data and the primary sample. Extract clean."
"Rules of engagement?" Alen said.
"Total comms blackout from insertion to extraction. The storm provides the window — no satellite coverage, no signals intelligence that can place a CIA asset on a Russian freight train in Siberian airspace. You go in, you get the package, and you come out." A pause. "No witnesses."
No witnesses. The specific operational instruction that erased the question of what the security detail was — soldiers, researchers, people who had not chosen to be on this train in the right way to deserve what was going to happen to them — by moving them into the category of variables rather than people.
Alen filed the instruction without expression.
"Team composition?" he asked.
"Six Direct Action operatives from the SAC's Tier-1 roster. The best we have." Simmons moved to stand directly in front of Alen — close, in the specific way of someone who uses physical proximity as a form of communication, the register of a conversation that was happening at a different level than the words suggested. "The sample is the crown jewel of this operation, Alen. The intelligence value of the data is significant. The intelligence value of the physical sample is generational." He placed a hand on Alen's shoulder with the warm, proprietorial ease of a man touching something he owns. "I have every confidence in you."
The hand on Alen's shoulder felt, as it had six months ago at the signing, like a brand. The weight of a claim.
"Oh, and Alen?" Simmons said, turning back toward the display screen, his tone shifting to the casual register of a man whose dangerous thoughts wore their most comfortable clothes. "Watch your back out there. The cold does strange things to a man's judgment."
The briefing ended. Alen left the room.
In the corridor outside, he walked for exactly forty feet before he stopped at a water fountain and bent to drink and used the four seconds of stopped motion to run the entirety of the briefing back at full resolution.
T-Veronica derivative. Advanced cross-viral engineering. The specific building blocks of the C-Virus that the NSA intercepts had been naming for eight months. The sample Simmons wanted secured — the crown jewel, he had said, generational intelligence value — was not something Simmons intended to submit to the CIA's research archive. It was something he intended to route to the same financial architecture that Alen had traced in the Level Four records last month. To the Simmons Foundation. To the research programme that did not appear in any classified document that anyone without Alen's specific access combination would ever be able to connect to the National Security Advisor.
Simmons was sending him to steal a component of a weapon. And he was going to do it, because refusing was not currently an option, and because being inside the architecture was more valuable than being outside it, and because the Anomalies file under the subheading The Architect had been growing for four years and was not yet complete.
He straightened up and walked on.
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