The Agent's Daughter

by Ron Corriveau

  Melina opened her car door and headed for a bench a few yards away from the car. “Come on and sit with me over here,” she said.

  Lately, she and her dad did not get to spend much time just talking. Not that he was much of a talker. He preferred to be doing something instead of talking about it. It was his nature. Melina’s dad got out of the car and joined her on the bench. He was flustered and out of his element as he fidgeted, trying to find a comfortable position. Melina wondered how he sat at a desk all day.

  “So, how are you doing?” he said.

  Melina thought for a moment. “Things are going pretty well. I am doing all right in my classes, and there is …”

  Her dad stopped her. “That is not what I meant. What I mean is… how are you feeling? ... you know, about your mom.”

  Melina and her dad had not spoken about her mom’s accident in several months. He was sensitive about the subject, so they just avoided it.

  “I’m doing all right, I guess,” Melina said. “Why do you ask? Is something wrong?

  Melina’s dad couldn’t sit anymore, so he got up and stood in front of Melina. “It’s just that it’s been six months since Mom’s accident. You haven’t had a serious grief breakdown like me and Travis have.”

  “Grief breakdown?” Melina asked as she stood.

  “That’s what the psychologist that I went to called it,” he said. “At some point, the gravity of the situation hits you and becomes immediately and totally overwhelming. It becomes difficult to breathe and hard to stand up. It may be a week after the event or months later, but it comes out of nowhere, wherever you are.”

  “You’re worried that, out of the blue, I might snap because Mom is in the hospital?” Melina asked. She was starting to get agitated.

  Her dad reached out and hugged Melina. “Don’t get mad at me, but yes, I am worried that there is some overwhelming feeling that you cannot control just lurking within your head.”

  “Mom is just in the hospital!” Melina cried, tears running down her cheeks. “She is going to get better. I tell her that every week when I see her.”

  “You’re right, kiddo,” her dad said as he held her tighter. “There is no need for grief.”

  He was lying of course. He did not share her optimism, but he was not going to destroy hers.

  “Is something the matter, child,” a voice from behind Melina said. It was the principal, Mrs. Kalis.

  “No, ma’am,” Melina said as she discreetly wiped the tears from her face. “We were just talking about my mom.”

  ‘Oh,” Mrs. Kalis said, pausing as she remembered the accident. “Laura was … uh… I mean is a good friend of mine. She has always been a tremendous volunteer.” Mrs. Kalis struggled to think of something further to say, but nothing came to her. Melina bailed her out.

  “Mrs. Kalis, this is my dad,” Melina said as she pointed toward him with one of her hands. “Dad, this is Mrs. Kalis, our principal.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said as he shook her hand.

  “Nice to meet you too, Mr. Roberts,” she said in return.

  “My dad is Mr. Roberts,” Melina’s dad said, smiling. “Please call me Evan.”

  “Okay, Evan,” Mrs. Kalis said as she turned to Melina. “How about we go unlock the building and start a new school day.”

  Melina smiled at Mrs. Kalis, and then she looked at her dad. “I’m going to be okay, Dad. Don’t worry. Now skedaddle, you have a meeting to go to.”

  Evan smiled. “All right, kiddo,” he said as he gave Melina a kiss on the top of the head and headed for his car.

  ………………………….

  As Evan made the long drive in to work, he thought about what Melina had said. She was right. Laura wasn’t dead. While the doctors were baffled by her condition, they also said that there was no physical reason why she should not just wake up. She had normal brain waves, but they were less intense than they should be. The doctors said that it was as if the volume on her brain were turned way down.

  Both he and Melina went to the hospital every weekend to visit Laura, but he could not get past the lobby. Melina pleaded for him to accompany her to the room her mom was in, but he would not come with her. And he would not tell her why.

  The silence of his thoughts was pierced by the ringing of his cell phone. He reached for it on the passenger seat. “Hello, this is Evan,” he said.

  “Where are you?” said the voice at the other end.

  “I will be there in a few minutes,” he said. “Tell them that they can start without me if they want.” He hung up and threw the phone back on the seat.

  Hadron Systems is located in a ten-story glass tower on the edge of downtown Dallas. It moved to that location forty years earlier from Washington D.C. when the company won a substantial contract to provide satellite terminals to the U.S. Air Force. Satellite communications were in their infancy then, and the chair of the Senate Armed Services committee was from Texas. He wanted that money spent in his state.

  Evan and Laura used to live in an apartment down the street from the company, but when Melina was born, they migrated to one of the many suburban bedroom communities north of town. It was a long drive, but his hours were irregular, so the traffic wasn’t too bad.

  Evan pulled into a parking structure, parked his car, and walked into the main lobby of the Hadron Systems building. He had an office on the seventh floor, but that is not where he was headed.

  That is because he did not technically work for Hadron Systems.

  He strode through the lobby, past the security desk and the elevators and then ducked into a short hallway. At the end of the hallway was an unmarked black glass panel the size of a door, but without a knob. He pulled a magnetic card from his pocket and waved it in front of a small black box mounted adjacent to the panel. There was a beep, and the panel opened inward. Evan stepped inside.

  “Good morning, Mark,” Evan said to a man in a dark suit seated at a small black desk. The desk was in the middle of a room the size of a small living room, and the room was empty except for the desk. There was nothing hanging on the light gray walls.

  “Morning to you, Evan,” the man answered back.

  Behind the desk was a larger version of the earlier black glass panel, again with no markings and no knobs. Evan walked past the guard and up to the panel.

  “Name?” a synthesized voice bellowed from a speaker above the panel.

  “Evan Roberts,” Evan said as he stared at the panel.

  Five seconds passed. “Voice pattern confirmed,” the synthesized voice said.

  The black panel slid to the side to reveal another smaller room, about the size of a bathroom. Evan entered, and the panel closed behind him. The room was brightly lit, but it was empty and three of the walls were bare finished wood. On the fourth wall, there was a small two-foot square metal panel. In front of the panel, on the floor were the outlines of feet.

  Evan stood on the feet outlines and faced the metal panel. “Authorization sequence,” he said.

  The panel extended out from the wall and lowered to become a small shelf. Embedded on it were two small black cylinder eyepieces like the kind used to see through a telescope. On either side of the two eyepieces, there were the outlines of hands. Evan placed his hands within the outlines and looked into the eyepieces. A synthesized voice spoke to him from the ceiling.

  “Fingerprints. Confirmed.”

  “Bone geometry. Confirmed.”

  “Iris scan. Confirmed.”

  “Weight. Confirmed.”

  “Identity Verified. Access granted.”

  Evan straightened up and stepped back, and the metal panel moved back into its position on the wall. The lights dimmed, and he could feel the room begin to move. The room was an elevator, and it moved downward at a rapid pace. So much so, that there was a slight sense of weightlessness as the elevator plunged. There was no sound in the room except the loud, muffled sounds of gears and pulleys doing their job. After a short time, the sound less
ened, and Evan could feel the elevator begin to slow. The gears and pulleys made less and less noise until the only sound was the click of the latches securing the elevator in place.

  The friendly synthesized voice announced the arrival, “Basement level. Stand clear of the door.”

  The black panel slid to the side, and Evan stepped out of the elevator into a vast open space filled with the pandemonium of hundreds of people working at computer terminals. Most of them were talking on their phones, so the air was thick with the sound of jumbled conversation. The room itself was two stories tall and was as long as a football field. One of the walls of the room was dominated by a gigantic map of the world with each country outlined in a different color. On either side of the map, there was a large projection screen with each screen displaying a view of the earth from space from a different angle. The screen on the left was zoomed in on the tip of South Africa, and the other showed a view of most of the mountains across central Asia. The remaining walls of the room were covered with dozens of smaller screens that showed local scenes and news reports from around the world. The room had the appearance of a command center NASA would build if it had a much larger budget.

  This was the headquarters for the Executive Reconnaissance Agency.

  Founded during the Cold War, the agency was set up within the Executive branch to give the President of the United States direct tactical control over a foreign intelligence gathering organization. This allowed a more nuanced approach to intelligence gathering and gave the President instant access to the exact information required based on the circumstances of the day. Sometimes that information could be gathered with satellites or other remote electronic means, but often that meant dispatching a field agent directly into an area of interest to blend in and report to the President what was going on.

  Evan was one of those field agents.

  As he made his way across the large room, a man from the information security department approached him. The man was carrying a sealed red folder.

  “There you are,” the man said anxiously as Evan approached. “They’ve been waiting.”

  “Good morning to you too, Jim,” Evan said smiling.

  Jim smiled at Evan and then took a deep breath.

  “Okay, here are your briefing notes,” Jim said. “The meeting is in the main video conference room. Good luck”

  “Thanks,” Evan said as he took the folder.

  He sliced open the folder with his finger, and glanced at the briefing notes as he walked toward the conference room. He could tell it was not going to be a pleasant meeting. When he got to the conference room, he paused, took one more look at the notes, and then went inside.

  “Glad to see you could join us, Mr. Roberts,” said a man at the head of the large conference table. He was the head of the agency, Arthur Glass.

  “My apologies, sir,” Evan said.

  Evan then half-smiled to the man sitting next to Arthur, William Mason. “Nice to see you again William.”

  Not that he meant it.

  William was the head of Hardware Support for the agency. They were responsible for coming up with fancy gadgets and weapons to be used by the agents in the field. They were informally known throughout the agency as the ‘tools’ group. William had a well-known dislike of the field agents. He considered them simpletons and brutes, and he referred to them as “trained monkeys” even though all of them had college degrees. The field agents had a few names for William, as well.

  “Evan,” William said. “This is a new member of my group David Winfield. He just moved here from our Seattle office. He will be your new contact within the Hardware Support department.”

  Each agent was given a single contact within the tools group. This streamlined the process of providing weapons and other items to the agent as they only had to interact with one person.

  Evan held out his hand to shake. “Evan Roberts. Pleased to meet you, David... Seattle, huh? Did they tell you that it gets hot here?”

  “It can’t be that unbearable,” David said. “It will be a delightful change from all that rain. Did you say Roberts? Do you have a daughter named Melina?”

  “Yes I do,” Evan said, giving David a strange look. “Why do you ask?”

  “My son Alex spoke yesterday of a Melina Roberts that is in some of his classes. She told him that her father worked here.”

  Evan laughed. “I don’t get those sorts of updates. Melina could have someone from another planet in her class, and she wouldn’t tell me. That’s her mother’s domain.”

  There was a silence in the room. The reference to Laura left everyone unsure what to say.

  Evan didn’t notice and sat down next to David. He looked over at Arthur and then at the giant projection screen on the wall of the conference room. The image on the screen was of the Oval Office in the White House, but the President was not there.

  “Where is the old gal?” Evan said to Arthur as he pointed at the screen.

  “You were late, so she took a phone call,” Arthur said.

  Evan stood up and talked in the direction of the screen. “Hey lady! Get off the phone and let’s start this meeting.”

  “Evan!” Arthur said. “She is talking to the Russian Prime Minister!”

  A moment later, an image filled the video screen. It was President Elizabeth Stone, still on the phone. She lowered the phone from her ear. “Evan, dear. Don’t make me fly down to Texas and kick your butt.” Then she winked.

  Evan smiled and sat back down. The agency was a small operation, and there were only twenty field agents, but he was her favorite. The President knew he would go to the ends of the Earth and put himself in harm’s way on her orders without question. In fact, he had. But what she appreciated the most was his candor. As President, she encountered so many people that told her only what she wanted to hear because they feared her. She found it refreshing to talk with someone that just didn’t seem to have any fear.

  President Stone finished her conversation, hung up the phone and sat down. “All right, let’s get this meeting started,” she said. “Gentleman, we have a new area of concern. Our conventional intelligence sources have come across information that the Republic of Malazistan may be attempting to build a nuclear weapon. The government there is considered somewhat unstable, and there is no telling what they would do with a nuclear bomb.”

  “Malazistan?” Arthur asked. “Do you mean the country in Central Asia that used to be a part of the Soviet Union?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That is the problem. When the Soviet Union controlled that part of Asia, they built an ultra-sophisticated facility for processing uranium into a form that could be used in a bomb. They chose to build it in that area because it was an uninhabitable high desert region of the country. The remoteness of that area was seen as a plus because the facility would be harder to spy on or attack.”

  “Wasn’t the facility dismantled when the country was given its independence?” David asked.

  “No,” said the President. “When the Soviet Union dissolved into Russia and the breakaway republics, the Russians took whatever had strategic value from the countries that they abandoned. They could not take buildings with them, so they left them intact but empty because it would have cost too much to destroy them. According to the Russian Prime Minister, in the case of the nuclear processing facility, it was thought that it would be useless without the uranium. And the Russians took that with them.”

  “So you think that they have gotten hold of some uranium?” Evan asked.

  “We don’t know,” said the President. “That part of Asia is extremely desolate, so we have only been able to get information via satellite imagery. We have been monitoring the facility for several years, and there has been almost no activity. However, over the course of the last few weeks, a steady stream of trucks has visited the facility. There must be something going on there.”

  “What is the nature of the information you need the agency to obtain for you?” Arthur asked.

&
nbsp; The President leaned forward, a look of concern on her face. “I want you to find out if they do have any uranium. And if they do, how much do they have?”

  A quiet fell over the room as everyone thought about what it would take to get the information from such a remote outpost.

  After a few moments, Evan turned to William. “Does the tools group have anything portable that can detect radiation from a long distance? Say, about 1000 feet?”

  William thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think we have anything that could be considered portable.”

  “We do have some sodium iodide scintillation detectors,” David interjected. “The guys in the nuclear lab use them to measure the total dose radiation in a room. You know, in case there is a leak. They can detect minute gamma-ray radiation levels at distances up to about 1000 feet. And they are about the size of a shoebox. They do have one limitation though. They do not test instantly. Because they are meant to measure radiation over time, they require that the detector be in the presence of the uranium for at least a minute to record an accurate reading.”

  William gave David a scowl then turned to Evan. “I don’t understand why you are asking about portable detectors. Where are you going with this?”

  “I was thinking that we could dust off the glider,” Evan said.

  Four years earlier, during a similar meeting, the President had said that she needed aerial imagery of a remote compound in the Middle East that the satellites could not see. They tried flying reconnaissance aircraft over the area, but the planes could not go low enough to get a clear picture. To get the shot, Evan hiked into the nearby mountains, climbed into a hang glider he brought with him and flew it over the compound. At 3000 feet above the ground, he put his glider into a steep dive and swooped down to 1000 feet above the compound. He got a perfect shot of the area and then climbed back up to 3000 feet and flew away undetected.