Secrets of State by Matthew Palmer Read Free Book Online

an armed guard. This time, the guard really did look at Sam’s badge before he was allowed to key in his personal code to open the door to the analytic suites. There were a number of different units on the floor responsible for various global hot spots where Argus was under contract to the U.S. government to provide intelligence support. The Middle East Unit was the largest and, until recently, the Afghan Unit had been the most lucrative. The South Asia contract that CEO Garret Spears had signed with the CIA a few months earlier had pushed the Afghan team into the second slot. They were none too happy about it, as the office realignment had cost them a coveted location near the vending machines. Analysts, like software coders, kept strange hours and ate many of their meals out of microwave ovens with vending-machine candy bars as a chaser. There was no other way to delineate status on the third floor. Corner offices had no meaning here. The third floor had no windows.
    When Sam opened the door to the unit, the buzz of conversation suddenly stopped. A tight knot of people stood bent over one of the desks. You did not need to be a psychic to know that they were looking at the
Washington Post
.
    â€œAnything good in the papers?” Sam asked innocently.
    â€œBoss, what did you do?” As always, Dorothy Cornett, the unit’s hyperefficient admin assistant, cut right to the chase.
    â€œAh, nothing much. Kamen has blown it way out of proportion. It’s a one-day story. No one will even remember it tomorrow. But, since it looks like we’re all here, we might as well do the Monday staff meeting.”
    A few dramatic groans greeted this last pronouncement. The office was centered around a small cube farm where the analysts worked. Sam had a private office, but in a show of solidarity with the staff, he had had maintenance remove the door. There was a conference room that they used for meetings. The office furniture was all new and high-quality. It was also blandly generic. The staff had made an effort to decorate the space with political campaign posters from South Asia. The effect was to make the unit look like an odd parody of a teenager’s room decked out in posters of rock stars or sports heroes.
    The staff filed into the conference room and sat around a table that looked like it had been carved from a solid block of hard plastic. Sam considered his team. They were a mismatched assortment, but in the aggregate they were as good as any group of analysts he had ever worked with. The team had an almost implausible symmetry. Sara Zehri was a Pakistani American who was a leading authority on India, while Shushantu “Shoe” Balusibramanijan was an Indian American expert on Pakistan. The third member of the team, Ken Davenport, was a military analyst with no military experience who could not yet buy a beer in a D.C. bar without being asked for ID. They were young, wildly opinionated, and intellectually curious. Sam had grown quite fond of them in their relatively short time together.
    â€œYou’ve all seen the
Post
this morning,” Sam began. “I’ve dug a little bit of a hole for myself that I’m going to have to climb out of, and I expect to get called up to the fourth floor at some point today to hear about it. So let’s make sure that I’m at least smart on our issues. Otherwise, you’ll be getting a new team leader, and I think I know who they’d bring in to take my place. Trust me. You wouldn’t like him. Sara, why don’t you start?”
    Sara was smart. All the analysts were bright, but Sara was scary smart. If she had a shortcoming, it was that her intellect was unconstrained by any sense of mercy. Once she identified a weakness in an argument, or in a person making an argument, she would drill down and destroy it element by element until nothing was left. Sam had seen her do it to senior analysts from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.