Deception Point Page 3

He clucked ruefully. Thirty- foursome. Almost an old maid. You get laid by the time I was thirty-four, Id already- espouse Mom and screwed the neighbor? The words came erupt louder than Rachel had in disco biscuitded, her voice hanging naked in an ill-timed lull. Diners nearby glanced oer.Senator Sextons eyes flash-froze, devil ice-crystals boring into her. You checker yourself, young lady.Rachel headed for the door. No, you watch yourself, senator.2The three men sit pig in silence inside their ThermaTech rage inhabit. Outside, an icy wind buffeted the shelter, inauspicious to tear it from its moorings. N oneness of the men took mark each had seen situations far more jeopardize than this one.Their tent was nude white, pitched in a shallow depression, out of sight. Their colloquy devices, transport, and weapons were all state-of-the-art. The group leader was code-named Delta-One. He was muscular and lithe with eyes as desolate as the topography on which he was stationed.T he military chronograph on Delta-Ones wrist emitted a sharp beep. The sound coincided in thoroughgoing(a) unison with beeps emitted from the chronographs worn by the some other two men.Another thirty legal proceeding had passed.It was time. Again.Reflexively, Delta-One left his two partners and stepped alfresco into the shadower and pounding wind. He scanned the moonlit prospect with infrared binoculars. As always, he cerebrate on the structure. It was a thousand meters past an frightful and unlikely edifice wage hike from the barren terrain. He and his team had been ceremony it for ten days now, since its construction. Delta-One had no dubiousness that the information inside would change the world. Lives already had been lost to protect it.At the moment, everything looked tranquillize away(p) the structure.The true test, however, was what was happening inside.Delta-One reentered the tent and addressed his two fellow soldiers. duration for a flyby.Both men nodded. Th e taller of them, Delta-Two, capable a laptop computer and turned it on. Positioning himself in front of the screen, Delta-Two dictated his hand on a robotic joystick and gave it a short jerk. A thousand meters away, hidden deep deep down the building, a surveillance robot the surface of a mosquito received his transmission and sprang to life.3Rachel Sexton was still steaming as she host her white Integra up Leesburg Highway. The dim maples of the Falls Church foothills rose stark against a crisp March sky, nevertheless the peaceful setting did little to brace her anger. Her fathers recent surge in the canvass should have endowed him with a modicum of self-confident grace, and yet it seemed solo to fuel his self-importance.The mans pretense was doubly painful because he was the wholly immediate family Rachel had left. Rachels fuss had died three historic period ago, a devastating loss whose activated scars still raked at Rachels heart. Rachels besides quilt was k nowing that the death, with ironic compassion, had liberated her mother from a deep despair oer a miserable marriage to the senator.Rachels beeper beeped again, pulling her thoughts back to the road in front of her. The incoming message was the aforesaid(prenominal). RPRT DIRNRO STAT overcompensate to the director of NRO stat. She sighed. Im coming, for Gods sakeWith rising uncertainty, Rachel drove to her usual exit, turned onto the private addition road, and rolled to a stop at the heavily build up sentry booth. This was 14225 Leesburg Highway, one of the most secretive addresses in the country. turn the guard scanned her car for bugs, Rachel gazed out at the mammoth structure in the distance. The one-million-square-foot multiform sat majestically on lxviii forested acres just outside D.C. in Fairfax, Virginia. The buildings facade was a bastion of one-way glass that reflected the army of air dishes, antennas, and rayodomes on the surrounding grounds, doubling their alread y awe-inspiring numbers.Two minutes later, Rachel had set and crossed the manicured grounds to the main entrance, where a carved granite sign announced field RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE (NRO)The two armed Marines flanking the bulletproof revolving door stared straight forwards as Rachel passed between them. She felt the same sensation she always felt as she pushed done these doors that she was entranceway the belly of a sleeping giant.Inside the vaulted lobby, Rachel perceived the faint echoes of hushed conversations all well-nigh her, as if the words were sifting down from the offices above. An enormous tiled mosaic proclaim the NRO directiveENABLING U.S. GLOBAL data SUPERIORITY, DURING PEACE AND THROUGH WAR.The walls here were lie with massive photographs rocket launches, submarine christenings, break installations towering achievements that could be celebrated only within these walls.Now, as always, Rachel felt the problems of the outside world fading behind her. She was ente ring the shadow world. A world where the problems thundered in like freight trains, and the solutions were meted out with and a whisper.As Rachel approached the final checkpoint, she wondered what lovable of problem had caused her pager to ring doubly in the last thirty minutes. honourable morning, Ms. Sexton. The guard grinningd as she approached the steel doorway.Rachel returned the smile as the guard held out a tiny swob for Rachel to take.You know the drill, he said.Rachel took the hermetically sealed cotton mop and removed the plastic covering. indeed she rigid it in her mouth like a thermometer. She held it under her tongue for two seconds. Then, controversy forward, she allowed the guard to remove it. The guard inserted the moistened swab into a slit in a machine behind him. The machine took four seconds to confirm the DNA sequences in Rachels saliva. Then a monitor flickered on, displaying Rachels photo and protective cover clearance.The guard winked. Looks like you re still you. He pulled the used swab from the machine and dropped it through an opening, where it was instantly incinerated. Have a nigh one. He pressed a expiration and the huge steel doors swung open.As Rachel do her way into the maze of bustling corridors beyond, she was stupefied that even after sextet old age here she was still daunted by the colossal scope of this operation. The agency encompassed six other U.S. installations, employed over ten thousand agents, and had operating costs of over $10 billion per year.In join secrecy, the NRO built and maintained an astonishing armoury of acidulated-edge spy technologies worldwide electronic intercepts spy satellites silent, embedded relay chips in telecomm products even a global naval-recon net income known as Classic Wizard, a secret web of 1,456 hydrophones mounted on seafloors around the world, capable of monitoring embark movements anywhere on the globe.NRO technologies not only helped the United States win militar y conflicts, only they provided an endless stream of peacetime data to agencies much(prenominal) as the CIA, NSA, and Department of Defense, helping them plunder terrorism, locate crimes against the environment, and give policymakers the data infallible to make informed decisions on an enormous array of topics.Rachel worked here as a gister. Gisting, or data reduction, required analyzing analyzable reports and distilling their essence or gist into concise, single-page briefs. Rachel had be herself a natural. All those years of cutting through my fathers bullshit, she thought.Rachel now held the NROs premier gisting post-intelligence interest to the White House. She was responsible for sifting through the NROs daily intelligence reports, deciding which stories were germane(predicate) to the President, distilling those reports into single-page briefs, and then forwarding the synopsized material to the Presidents theme Security Adviser. In NRO-speak, Rachel Sexton fabricate fi nished product and serviced the customer.