Mitosis

Langley, Virginia
1995

Michael Duncan sighed as he stared at the blank piece of paper in the Selectric typewriter. Like any government agency, the CIA floated on a sea of paperwork. Also like any government agency, there was an inherent desire to keep that paperwork squirreled away until it was "needed." Within the Agency, one could determine the relative importance of a piece of paperwork by how it was supposed to be created. Standard forms were bureaucratic smokescreens, lots of sound and fury signifying nothing. With the growth of computers, reports could be created, filed away, and cleverly lost. By this point, if somebody wanted you to write up a report on honest to God paper, without the information ever touching a computer, you knew the report in question would never see daylight unless the roof got pulled off the archive section of the building. Duncan could intellectually accept the fact he had been given a task which demanded a tremendous degree of trust, and he should be feeling pleased at the implied compliment. Unfortunately, it felt more like telling Vermeer to paint a masterpiece which would never be displayed or even acknowledged as part of his works.

Soldiers in the field know that when somebody gives them the "good news/bad news" routine, he typed, it's the bad news which is the part he needs to pay attention to the most.

The good news certainly sounds great. The Cold War is officially over. The Soviet Union has died after less than a century of existence. The Berlin Wall is being broken up for souvenirs. The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction can now be safely shelved because one of the two biggest kids on the block has lost too much to keep staring at the other.

Here's the bad news: we won the Cold War, and now we don't have the first idea of what the hell to do with ourselves.

* * *

Lancelin Guyton set the report down, his normally cheerful dark features looking very disturbed. "Is it really this bad?" he asked Duncan quietly, the faint Haitian accent he'd never quite lost after ten years in the States oddly punctuating the concern.

"If we're lucky, it's that bad, Lance." Duncan brought the mug of coffee to his lips and took a sip. "I basically examined the US like I would a foreign nation. And there's a lot of very worrying signs hiding around here. It's not all doom and gloom. But it's not puppies and rainbows, either. Internally speaking, our friends at Quantico keep finding newer and more interesting ways to catch eggs with their face, at a time when they have a genuine need to not screw up like they have. I mean, it's not like the bad old days under Hoover, but it's still not great. Hell, Hoover probably would have made something like Waco or Ruby Ridge a thousand times worse. At the same time, there's an irrational belief which is just too stupid to chalk up to optimism about Russia. Not to mention there's some...willful blindness, I'd say, going on with China and North Korea. Admittedly, I trust the guys in Beijing more than I do Pyongyang, but that's like saying I trust a rusty nail over a strand of barbed wire to give me tetanus."

"You genuinely think we'll experience 'significant' terrorist events in the next decade?"

"Further events," Duncan corrected gently. "McVeigh certainly did more damage than Yousef. And we're still looking for that guy Qazi. Point is, the grip on the lid is loosening. Has been since the Wall came down. I think what prompted the request for this report was that cult attack in Japan a few months back. The US isn't exactly a stranger to car bombs. Not since Beirut. Being fair, lot of our allies on the east side of the Pond are much more familiar with them than we are. But chemical and biological agents? That's traditionally been the domain of state actors for a number of reasons. Seeing those weapons get 'democratized' like what Aum Shinri Kyo did in Tokyo should be a wakeup call for anybody with more than two brain cells to rub together."