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Page 35.
Scene 13. Rector: Compass News
 Johannes Rector, Chief Executive Officer of Compass News Corporation, sat over breakfast on the breezy, sunny balcony of his Loma Portal hillside villa in San Diego. A small video screen on the table kept looping headline news, surrounded by sugar, salt, pepper, hot sauce, steaming coffee, and steaming ranchero omelette. A slice of beautifully cut and polished semi-precious quartz, glowing dark blue as the edge of night, lay over a small pile of paper napkins whose edges fluttered in the wind. Rector ate with gusto, while working. He'd been on the job since dawn, working from home as he preferred. He spent too many hours working on in-flight planes, and in a concrete-block office in Langley, Virginia.
Just eight blocks down the sandy street was a public beach. He could have bought closer to the beach, but he and his wife preferred the view high up in Loma Portal. They kept a powerful binocular telescope on a bipod to look over the Pacific Ocean, the beach, and the winding coastal street far below.
This morning, like all early mornings, the beach was not yet occupied by the public, who would arrive later and jam up the narrow streets with their parked cars. At the moment, its empty beach and crashing surf were still the provenance of joggers, dog walkers carrying little poop bags, and surfers in wet suits.
Rector was a slender, middle-aged man whose ancestors had been Ethiopian Orthodox fishermen and hunters on the Red Sea coast. For centuries, his ancestors took their goods to market, crossing the sea to Yemen and Oman on the Arabian Peninsula. His scholarly ancestors pursued their studies and teaching in the fabled cities of Lalibela and Axum. During the 1930s, as Mussolini's murderous troops overran the country, Rector's father had brought his wife and children to Hell's Kitchen in New York City, and from there to the West Coast. Rector was a fourth-generation U.S. citizen. He'd visited the old country after the exile of its Communist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, in the 1990s. Members of Rector's family ranged from darkest African to lightest Mediterranean in skin tone, as was common along the Sinai land bridge after tens of thousands of years of human migrations between Asia and Africa. Rector himself was dark skinned, but by his more Caucasian features could pass for an Arab or Berber. His short-cut, frizzy hair had gone prematurely white, as if his potent brain had generated electrical fields while deeper than deep in thought.
At the moment, he was reading cryptonet cables from western capitals, especially from Sigma 2020. Compass News was not a news organization, but an intelligence service in a sense similar to the German BND (Federal Reporting Service). Actually, NEWS stood for the four points of the compass: North, East, West, South. Compass News was an independent intelligence brokerage, providing freelance observation and intervention to its clients. Over ninety percent of its contracts came from Sigma 2020, the security service of the world's largest corporation. That was Camelback Consortium, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. Sigma 2020's liaison with Compass News was Claire Lightfield, located at the nexus of government political, military, and intel power just outside Washington, D.C. That troika of powers—government, corporate, and military-intel—made Sigma 2020 one of the most powerful secret services on earth, working parallel with the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other corponational agencies. But Sigma 2020 had rivals, in a world where gigantic, ultra-national consortia often had annual operating budgets larger than those of many nations. Such corporations fought among each other like feudal kingdoms and duchies. Rector's small, highly focused Compass News helped give Sigma 2020 its spear-points. Rector liked to compare his organization's relation to Sigma 2020 with that between Markus Wolf's sharp little HvA and the huge Stasi in the former East Germany, but without the mistrust and rivalry, and without the stigma of brutality and evil surrounding the Stasi.
Rector's trained and perceptive eyes sifted through nearly 200 bulletins on his large-screen digital pad. His eyes came to rest on a CIA cable regarding a super-sniper rifle made in China. What particularly caught his attention was the attribution to separate sources in the Israeli Mossad, Chinese MSS, Australian ASIS, South African NSI, and Nigeria's NIA. He bookmarked this cable to return for later thought. He rolled through another twenty or thirty items, none of which warranted a second look. He then returned to contemplate the suspect cable.
Rector was, like any CEO, a salesman. Contracts came and went. Rector would never reveal how many men and women were on his pass-through payroll. He was always on the lookout for new work, when it was not brought to him by Sigma 2020 and its powerful North American network of corporate and government entities. Those included the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as the Mexican CI&SN.
He folded his hands over his lean belly, and regarded the screen before him. He did not need to run diagnostics to see there was an exceptional spatter pattern here. Also, the dates of acquisition seemed to be very close together. If Rector had to lay odds, he would guess that this intelligence was a plant across multiple borders, which implied a large and sophisticated planter. Therefore, most likely, it was disinformation—a bit of truth, tainted by some specific grain of lie that the seeder wanted to spread, the way one fed a cat its scary pill by wrapping it in hamburger. Why veterinary pharmaceutical companies didn’t make meat-flavored pills for dogs, or fish-flavored pills for cats, was one of those imponderables.
Rector put his breakfast aside. He ran several targeted searches on all the day's intel, in depth, and came up with one more item. A CIA third-stringer, a local coded as Ribeye, had been in the audience when Colonel Osman Rulik was assassinated. Ribeye had sent an encrypted message up his chain of command from the Central Asian Emirates (CAE). Rector read through a news story from API-Evening Mail, and became more puzzled.
Finally, he reached for a phone and called Washington on an ultra-secure satellite synch.
Claire Lightfield answered from her Camelback-CIA main office near Langley. "Good morning, Rector." Nobody ever called Johannes by his Christian name, not even his wife. Claire added: "I trust it's nice and sunny where you are."
"Sunny is a state of mind," Rector said drily. "I take it you're in umbrella mode."
"Rain and leaves are beating against my window as we speak. Tears run down the glass. Tell me something sunny. What can you pry me loose of?"
"Information. What do you know about a new Chinese sniper rifle?"
"I saw the message traffic, as well as the news story."
"Doesn't it strike you as scatter chatter?"
"The thought crossed my mind."
"That someone is planting this little story—not too artfully but backed by lots of money—in a spatter pattern, meaning it's a dog pill in a chunk of ground chuck?"
"I'm fighting a cold, and a little slow this morning, but yes—I see your point."
"Assassination is serious business, Claire."
"I know. Especially since it's been illegal for the U.S., since half a century ago."
"Guys like Osman Rulik are a dime a dozen. So why spatter disinformation across half the world's major intel nets, and then the press to top that?"
"You got me." Claire lapsed into one of her pregnant pauses, when you could almost hear terraflops of wetware churning in her brilliant mind. "He wouldn't seem worth it."
"My thought exactly," Rector said. "If we knew the source, we might have a juicy Event brewing."
"That's half the battle," she said. "I'd like to know what's the McGuffin." That was an Alfred Hitchcock term for the core of a thriller—the object of the quest or search, usually a lost spy message or a deadly formula or some such hot item over which characters would die mysteriously.
"I'm baffled; that's why I called." Rector hoped she would come up with an illuminating response, and waited.
"So maybe someone wants to start assassinating heads of state," Claire said. "That would explain the disinfo campaign."
Rector said: "And maybe the Chinese rifle story is a blind for the real thing, whatever that might be. I mean, clearly, Claire, this not about Rulik or the rifle, but about the concept itself."
"Hmm… maybe someone is sending a message, and the message can only be that they are putting a service up for sale," Claire said.
Rector said: "What's new about that? Unless it's a new technology."
Claire said: "We must keep all possibilities open, but I like your approach. On that lemma, if we decide it might be true, we would logically think that the Chinese have absolutely nothing to do with it."
"Right, because of all the players in this fairy tale, they are mentioned at least twice."
"Yes, someone is going out of their way to point a finger at them. They beat it to death. Who is the real source of this broadcast offer?"
"That's the key question."
Rector said: "You mentioned money. Sounds well-funded, which suggests a corporate origin."
"Right…Anaconda comes to mind," she said. Global Anaconda was Camelback's greatest rival, and number two only to Camelback's number one among corponations around the globe.
"I'll keep that thought on file, without jumping to conclusions. We’ll have to track this story carefully. You have a guy on it?"
"Mmm. Now that you mention it. I'll check across channels, but I think Camelback's CIA wing has a dog in this fight."
"Fella named Ribeye?"
"Hmm, yeah. You want him?"
"Make him my asset. We'll both stay in the loop."
"Done deal, my friend." Claire rang off.
Rector sat in the sunshine and breeze, deep in thought. He sipped his morning orange juice, while his wife emerged onto the rooftop terrace in Loma Portal, San Diego, carrying a little tray of Mexican pastries. Rector's thoughts were not just about building business. The world was full of opportunities. Some jobs were much bigger in scope than they initially seemed. Rector's instinct told him this strange sniper rifle event (or case) might just be the drifting tip of a very, very large, shadowy iceberg.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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