Chapter 2

Mike finally finished with the activities in the Personnel Department and returned to the lobby of the original Headquarters building of the CIA. He paused to look around. Every time he had been there, the architecture of the building had overwhelmed him. The great seal on the floor of the main lobby building gave him chills. He knew it was old fashioned, but symbols, such as the CIA seal, meant something to Mike.

His boss, Dale Dawson, was there to meet him. Smiling, Dale walked over to greet Mike. The man walked with a slight limp. On reaching Mike, he said, “Impressive, isn’t it.”

“Yes, Sir,” Mike answered.

“I’ll take you to where you’ll have your desk. It’s in a secure area. I’ll give you the codes to get in when we reach my office,” Dale said. He glanced at Mike and said, “Before we go there, I want you to see something.”

Mike followed Dale to the north wall of the lobby. Dale stopped in front of a marble wall in which stars had been chiseled. The area with stars was flanked by two flags: the American flag and the flag of the CIA. Below the stars was a book. It contained the names of the men being honored on the wall. Pointing to it, Dale said, “Each star represents an agent who was killed in the line of duty. They are going to add another one to it today.”

The memorial was powerful in its simplicity. Mike swallowed heavily and asked, “Who was it?”

“That’s classified. We’ll never know his name or his mission,” Dale said.

“I understand,” Mike said. He felt like saluting the wall to honor those who gave their lives in defense of the country.

Mike finally settled into his cubicle inside a secure area deep within the building. It wasn’t much of an office, but it was going to be his for a long time. He’d been taken around and introduced to the other members of his department. The introductions had been short and he knew that it would be days before he could remember everyone’s name.

Atop his desk were manuals explaining how to treat classified material. He was going to have to read all of them before getting access to the material necessary for his job. Ready to get to work, he picked up the first manual and opened it, unprepared for how boring the contents would be. His eyes drifted over the page after reading the first four paragraphs.

He sighed and said, “This is going to be a very long day.”

He sat back in his chair and attacked the manual with renewed energy. The procedures for requesting information were laid out in excruciating detail. The procedures for returning classified information were just as bad. There were even procedures for dealing with his filing cabinet. He looked over at the massive filing cabinet in his cubical and then back at the manual.

He was nearly done with the first manual when one of his coworkers stopped by his office. It took Mike a couple of seconds to recall the man’s name. He said, “Sanjay, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Sanjay answered with a slight wobble of his head.

“What can I do for you?” Mike asked.

“I have a list of initial reports that you should read,” Sanjay said handing him a sheet of paper.

Mike had been expecting such a list to provide the current assessment of the areas that he was to monitor. He glanced down at the paper and noticed that it was marked Secret. He tried to remember the procedure for dealing with papers like that and couldn’t recall it. Nodding his head, he said, “Thanks. I’ll get to it.”

Sanjay wobbled his head and said, “You’ll probably want to put that in your filing cabinet until you’re ready to use it. I use the top drawer of my filing cabinet for material like that.”

“I was just trying to remember how to treat classified memos,” Mike said. The head wobble as a way of signaling agreement had always bothered Mike, but he was just going to have to get used to it. It might not be politically correct, but he always felt that a head wobble was a sign of stupidity. No matter how hard he tried, he could never get rid of the image of one of those bobble headed dolls that some people had in the back windows of their cars.

“I remember when I started here. There were so many things to learn that I nearly went crazy,” Sanjay said with a smile. Then he added, “You’ll get used to it.”

“I suppose,” Mike said with a sigh.

“You have a lot of reading to do. I won’t disturb you any longer,” Sanjay said.

“Thanks for bringing this by,” Mike said holding up the sheet.

Sanjay had been right. It didn’t take Mike too long to get used to all of the procedures for handling classified material within a SCIF (a Secure Compartmented Information Facility{skiff}). The whole purpose of a SCIF was to allow people to work with classified information without making it impossible to function effectively.

Mike had known that finding an affordable house was going to be difficult. The good neighborhoods around the capitol were expensive. For the first month in Virginia, they looked for an affordable place near Langley. Each weekend they slowly enlarged the area they considered until they finally had to settle for an old fixer-upper in Leesburg, Virginia. It wasn’t that far in terms of distance from where Mike worked, but the commute was going to be a killer because of the traffic.

The couple who had originally owned the house had rented it out. The last tenant had completely trashed the interior. Rather than try to repair it, the couple had decided to minimize their losses by selling the property. Mike had gotten estimates on how much it would cost to hire a contractor to come in and fix the house. The estimated amount had been rolled into the mortgage.

Instead of hiring a crew, Mike intended to do most of the work himself. He’d do all of the work inside the house except for the electrical work. The roof needed replacing and he’d hire a roofer for that. He ordered a huge dumpster for all of the debris that he’d be pulling out of the house.

On the first Saturday after the closing, Mike and Karen entered their new house and looked around at the mess. Mike said, “It needs a bit of work.”

“A bit? I think you’re crazy wanting to fix it yourself,” Karen said. It wasn’t that she doubted his ability to fix the house, but felt that it would take too long.

Walking around the living room, Mike examined the walls taking in the holes that someone had put in them. The renters had even pulled some of the copper wire out of the walls. The carpet was old, worn, dirty, and smelled of mildew. Grunting, he said, “The first thing I’ll do is gut the interior of the house. Everything has to go. That includes the walls, the carpet, those horrible light fixtures, and everything from the kitchen. It’s going to be a lot of work.”

“How long will that take?” Karen asked looking in the darkened bedroom. There were rotting curtains hanging over the windows.

“That’ll take about two weekends with a little help from your Dad. I’ll fix up the bathroom first and then the kitchen. Once those two rooms are in place, we can move in,” Mike answered.

“Just how much time before we can move in?” Karen asked.

“Oh, two or three months,” Mike answered with a shrug of his shoulders. He wasn’t afraid of a little hard work. Of course, the house was going to require a lot of work. He said, “It won’t be done by then, but it’ll be livable.”

“That’s not too bad,” Karen said. They had talked about his plans while going through the process of purchasing the house, but now that it was theirs, she was impatient to move into it.

Mike walked around the rest of the house trying to envision how it would look once everything was repaired. It was a standard three bedroom ranch style house typical of those built in the 1960s. Most of the closets were too small and he wasn’t going to correct that problem. That would require more work than he was willing to put into it. There were two bathrooms; one of which was in the master bedroom. He knew it was the master bedroom because it had a bathroom.

While Mike was in the kitchen checking out the appliances, Karen slipped out the front door and went to the car. She returned a minute later with a pair of overalls. She stripped down to nothing and put on the overalls. When Mike returned to the living room, he looked at his wife with a grin. He said, “No one ever told me that overalls could look that sexy. I can see your nipples from here.”

Karen glanced down at her chest and asked, “Are you saying that I’m supposed to wear a shirt, too?”

“I’m not saying that at all,” Mike said with a grin. He walked over to his wife and kissed her. Life was good and looking better. For the next hour, they expressed their love like newlyweds and christened their new house with all of the appropriate grunts and groans. Their visit to the house wasn’t all fun and games, though. After christening their house with their physical expression of love, they spent the rest of the day moving the tools that would be required to fix up the house into one of the bedrooms.

Mike sat at his desk reading one of the reports on the Chinese research program in high energy weapons. The report was highly classified and concluded that their program was not as extensive as that in the United States. Mike didn’t believe that for a minute. It looked smaller on paper until one considered how many Chinese were working on American projects. From personal experience, he knew that there were a lot of Chinese students and former Chinese Nationals working in critical research areas on campuses across the country, but there wasn’t a word of that in the report he was reading. He put the report down on the table and shook his head at the incompleteness of the report.

His boss chose that moment to come into his cubical. Dale Dawson was a tall man who had been a field agent during the cold war and transitioned into the role of an analyst after his cover had been blown by a mole. He still had a limp from that little adventure. He asked, “So what do you think?”

“I think it barely scratches the surface of the Chinese research program,” Mike answered looking over at his boss. There was obvious disgust in his voice concerning the report.

Not entirely surprised by Mike’s assessment, his boss asked, “What do you mean?”

“I mean that it doesn’t include the research activities that their citizens are performing here,” Mike answered tapping the report.

“That’s a domestic issue. We don’t do domestic,” Dale said dismissing the objection.