Title: Retrospection

Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Crossover, Science-Fiction

Summary: "It was information overload—like an impossible perpetual motion machine moving faster and faster."

Rating: T

Characters: David Webb/Jason Bourne, Pamela Landy, others.

Prologue

At a house in the pacific northwest, a man sat at the kitchen table reading through the latest issue of Time Magazine. He didn't much care for the sugar-coated media, but the article on an actor's latest philanthropic pursuits helped him pass the time, and maintain his cover.

He was handsome, clean shaven, in his early fifties, with salt and pepper hair that he refused to dye as he considered it dishonest. He was, at least in his own opinion, the definitive American family man with a typical name: Oliver.

It was not his real name, of course. He gave that up years ago when he started his rather unique career: the improvement of National Security via indirect means. Everything else was a disguise, a cover, for his real work. And for years, his work had proven beneficial for his country without fail.

A knock at the front door of his two story ranch style house brought little reaction from the man; he had been expecting his visitor. If he really was capable of showing emotion, there would have been a frown on his face. He had been dreading this meeting ever since he first heard her name. The name of a person who would undermine everything he and his few trusted colleagues had spent their lives tirelessly working toward.

He answered the door to let his visitor inside, exchanged the usual pleasantries and retired to the den, which was sound-proofed and regularly swept for bugs.

The man prided himself on thoroughness.

The visitor was at least ten years older than Oliver was--near retirement age--but the stresses of his last job made him appear older than that. Unlike Oliver, his face had the appearance of worn leather, typical for a man who had served in the American Navy before... changing careers. There was little point in reviewing the past of a man who he already knew so well. What they were doing in his den had less to do with who they really were and more about the situation they were about to discuss.

Oliver knew from the visitor's face just how serious the situation was shaping up to be. "I take it the situation in D.C. has not improved."

"Correct. She's been making much more progress than anyone expected," his voice was a mixture of pride and disdain. "They only good news is that the current administration could care less about what she's doing. What she's trying to do will take a long time to get through all the red tape--well past the end of the current administration. The bad news is that the next administration is definitely going to listen to her and run with her suggested changes."

The person suggesting the changes was root of their problem, and the reason for the visit. Nearly two-and-a-half years ago, a very promising government program was exposed to the public, one that had real teeth and helped protect the American public and their way of life from their enemies. Countless years, untold man hours of work, and hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money were lost thanks to a Girl Scout and a now-dead former Asset simply because they couldn't accept how the real world worked.

Despite the anger Oliver's visitor obviously felt toward their mutual "problem," the blame for the program's blow-back and exposure didn't lay entirely at their feet. The program's director, and his predecessor, shouldered most of the responsibility for the failure.

Ward Abbott, the original architect and director of Treadstone, had selfishly wielded his power to make himself and a Russian oil magnate rich. While he was legendary in securing funding and good at choosing people who did their jobs, and who did them quite well, the same couldn't be said of his successor.

Noah Vosen, the former (and now incarcerated) director of the program Blackbriar, Treadstone's successor, was far worse than Abbott ever could have been. Unlike Abbott, who was careful and had people who worked for him that were also careful, Vosen had turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.

It started when the program was first leaked in early 2005 to Simon Ross, a reporter for the Guardian that wrote columns on national security. A very foolish phone call, over unsecured lines and caught by Echelon, brought Ross to Vosen's attention. It was the keyword "Blackbriar" which the reporter had been stupid enough to mention in the conversation with his editor. Vosen's plan, at least initially, was to place Ross under surveillance, locate and take out the source. It was sound thinking up to a point when he began to make fatal errors in judgment.

Vosen made the mistake, understandable as it was at the time, that Jason Bourne, a former operative from Treadstone that went off the reservation, was Ross' source and tried to take them both out. It ended in New York City when Bourne jumped off the roof of the now-defunct SRD facility and into the East River below--his body never found despite an exhaustive search. The visitor had always suspected that he may still be alive, but without so much as a rumor, there was nothing to support that thought; he had enough problems as it was. Her work was going to undermine theirs even further.

Disastrous as Bourne turned out to be, it was nothing compared to the person who helped him. Ironically, the visitor's plan to bring her in on the operation as a scapegoat had backfired. Instead, he had put her in just the right place to bring everything crashing down.

A Girl Scout named Pamela Landy.