With the last two team members less than five minutes out, Hendricks asked the others to stow their belongings quickly and join her at the conference table. She’d already laid out twelve yellow legal pads and twelve black Skilcraft government pens.
It was often said that it took a spy to catch a spy. Monica preferred to think that it took a spy to catch a rat. Turncoat, sellout, traitor, quisling — many pejoratives fit the bill, but
Moles lived underground, out of sight. They were hard to find, but they were blind and witless, digging away toward the smell of food or a mate. Beady-eyed and conniving, rats, on the other hand, slinked through the darkness, eating grain stores, shitting on what they didn’t eat, and spreading plagues.
Rats who sold out to Israel or Taiwan or France, while they couldn’t be forgiven, might at least be understood. Rats who gave up their knowledge to Communist countries were beyond redemption.
Of the twelve people assigned to ELISE, there were seven women and five men. Two were black, three were of Chinese heritage, and two were Hispanic. The rest were white. There was one Southern Baptist, one Lutheran, and one Jew. Agnostics, Mormons, and Catholics tied at three apiece. Everyone in the room spoke at least two languages. More than half, including all the Mormons, spoke fluent Mandarin. Most had graduate degrees, one from Harvard Law School, two were former cops, and two had taught high school. Nine were parents. Three had grandchildren and would gladly show you dozens of photos, though they did not post them on any sort of social media.
An extremely diverse group, but for all their differences, every single member of ELISE hated Communism with the intensity of a thousand suns. Socialism was no better, just Communism by another name. All of them had been around the world and witnessed firsthand the damage Communist regimes rained down on the people. Voicing the notion aloud made one sound like a crazed zealot, but experience had taught everyone in the room that Communism was a fairy tale on paper, the cold reality of which brought riches to the rulers and sorrow, starvation, and death to the ruled. The record of the United States was far from perfect, but those who worked for Monica Hendricks made no apologies for the fervent belief that theirs was not a fight against merely an alternate dogma to democracy, but against evil.
The brush did not paint as broadly when it came to people. Communism was evil, but not all Communists were evil. Some were idealists, caught up in the dream. Others were simply trapped in the cogs and wheels of a great and terrible machine, unable to slip away without being crushed. There were tens of millions of good Chinese people who identified as Communists but would have happily gone another way if not for fear of being run over by a tank.
Whatever Hendricks’s moral views on the Communist regime of the People’s Republic of China, they were a formidable enemy, capable enough to penetrate the CIA with an as-yet-unknown agent in place. She did not intend to underestimate their resolve or their abilities at espionage.
For the protection of all involved, ELISE would be run out of a nondescript office off the mazelike underground mall in Crystal City, Virginia, rented under the name of a fictitious advertising corporation set up by and paid for with funds from the good folks at FBI Counterintelligence Division, where David Wallace served as section chief of counterespionage.
The space, an open bullpen, was large enough for a long conference table Admiral Li was already calling the Big Deck. Fifteen desks, including Hendricks’s, surrounded the table. Two computer servers occupied one of the two closets at the far end of the room, next to a small supply closet. The room had been transformed in a matter of hours by technical surveillance and countermeasures experts, also from FBI, into one big SCIF. This Secure Compartmented Information Facility guarded against what the NSA called TEMPEST — the leakage of electronic signals and sound that could be picked up by an adversary. A typical suburban home spilled enough TEMPEST information from its routers, mobile phones, smart devices, vehicles, and even pacemakers to piece together a large intelligence file.
The room had no windows. False walls and a second ceiling, six inches lower than the existing one, formed a room within the room, impregnated with metal foil to act as a Faraday cage. Everyone who entered, including the IT specialist, was deeply vetted and read all the way in to ELISE. In the unlikely event that they received a visit from, say, an FBI or CIA assistant director or White House staffer, a rotating red beacon would begin to flash annoyingly in the center of the ceiling, reminding everyone that there was an outsider in their midst. They should cover their work product and keep any details of the mole hunt to themselves.
