Sarah and Chuck finally get back to spy stuff.
Chapter 7
Tuesday afternoon Chuck and Sarah met back in AG2. They'd both been busy catching up on mundane details that had piled up while they were enjoying their personal time.
"Mmm," Sarah said to herself as she watched Chuck bent over his keyboard and idly visualized him without his suit. "I could really use another couple weeks of nothing but personal time." Chuck looked up from the keyboard and caught her eye.
"Dear God, look at that smile. I can hear the heavenly choir," he said, transfixed with wonder.
"Get your head in the game, Chuck," Sarah said with a giggle. She didn't REALLY just giggle did she? Giggling was something she only did for marks. "Focus, Sarah," she told herself.
"Sorry," Chuck's tone made it clear he was anything BUT sorry. "The official agenda for this meeting is a run down on what we know about what's left of Quinn's gang." He fired up a slide deck and projected an image on the screen, "This is Tommy Predergast, currently working for CIA PsyOps, he seems to be the primary interface between the CIA and Quinn's dirty tricksters. Hobbies are rugby and gaelic football. Vices are single malt scotch and redheaded sex workers."
Sarah thought it was adorable that he used the politically correct 'sex workers.' Tommy and most of the CIA would have just called them hookers. She made a mental note to get more details on Predergast's favorite providers.
"Downstream from Predergast, favored sources of foot soldiers are Camposano faction - Rinaldi Clan - Comorra and Matsuba-kai - KantÅ-Shinboku-kai - Yakuza. We've got active deep searches running on both of them. I've got three learning networks training on everything we know. I walk a scrubbed text dump into AG2 every morning and retrain on the results of five random 60/40 train/test partitions. I also run a daily backpropagation to classify likely areas of operation behind the data points. Nothing earth shattering so far. Matsuba-kai leans heavier on strong arm stuff and weapons trafficking, Camposano heavier on drug and human trafficking."
"I'm sure that means something to you," Sarah laughed. "But I bet your dark net searches are missing a lot. Casey and I should be able to do some old fashioned leg work and recruit some local operatives if there's room in the budget."
"Thanks Sarah, there are still huge gaps in my knowledge of basic spy craft," Chuck admitted sheepishly. "I'll MAKE room in the budget." He advanced to the next slide.
"We ran an algorithm on everything the North Koreans have on the chain of command in all known Predergast operations and got the following word cloud," The slide showed a bunch of surnames in different sized fonts all crammed together. "Three of these stand out: West, Clarke, and Koslov."
The next slide showed more detail on the three men: Gen. Orlando West - INSCOM, Maj. Jameson Clarke - DIA, and Dr. Eric Koslov - CIA. Chuck explained, "From what the North Koreans have been able to piece together, West is a player in military politics, Clarke manages research projects, and Koslov uses his PhD in psychopharmacology to pioneer new interrogation methods. We did deep dives on all public references to each of them. The most colorful by far is Koslov."
The next slide showed four names, all with birth and death dates. Chuck continued, "These four researchers all lodged official complaints of ethics violations against Dr Koslov. In all four cases the investigations into Koslov were dropped. Two of the whistleblowers died by suicide, one by auto accident and the last had a breakdown and died in the hospital."
"Do we have any details on what exactly Koslov was accused of?" Sarah asked.
Chuck shook his head, admitting, "Not really, they were all working at NIH at the time so I'm sure the records exist under seal somewhere. Not something the North Koreans were interested in. Definitely something we can look into, though. Meanwhile we've opened another line of inquiry." He advanced to the next slide.
"This is UChicagoMedicine-Neurology and USC-Neurosciences, the workplaces of Dr. Eleanor Woodcomb and her esteemed colleague Dr. John Barrowman respectively. These two clinics would naturally be of great interest to anyone researching the intersect. For the public good, Carmichael Industries has provided state of the art cybersecurity to both institutions. We have also included a full suite of active countermeasures to monitor and track attackers. We are fortunate to have TWO sites of interest to the same parties as this allows us to correlate anomalies and filter the attacks from the suspicious noise," Chuck finished proudly.
"Well don't keep me in suspense," Sarah said. "Have you identified any attackers?"
"We have," Chuck replied with a grin. "Johnny and Ellie have been kind enough to provide us with some realistic fakes of intersect adjacent research papers in progress. The objective was to entice attackers to access fictitious preprint references no one else would be looking for. The links required the user to view documents using a javascript reader that had access to the local filesystem. Allowing this is a huge security risk so it's impossible to do using a secure government computer. We logged several failed retrieval attempts before Captain Joseph Renetti was able to successfully view the documents from his home computer. We were able to install a local proxy server which encrypts and echoes all outbound traffic."
"An analysis of Renetti's email revealed what is likely to be an intersect research group," Chuck advanced to the next slide. Five names were listed. "Maj Jameson Clarke, Maj Seamus Capaldi, Capt Joseph Renetti, Capt Steven Fedorov, and Capt James Montgomery seem to be a DIA project working out of Walter Reed. Well four of them anyway. Cross referencing with some military rosters generously provided by the North Koreans, we find records for all except Maj Capaldi. We think he's a honeypot similar to the preprints we used to find Renetti so we're ignoring him for now. The captains are all medical doctors with backgrounds in neurology. We're compiling CVs for each for Ellie and Johnny to review."
"That's great work, Chuck," Sarah said appreciatively. "Have you asked Josie about Prendergast and Koslov?"
Chuck shook his head, "I wasn't sure how to approach her. Another situation where my lack of spy craft is hurting me."
"Well, as you know I met with her yesterday," Sarah began. "We made a lot of progress toward a mutual understanding. My proposal was that we put all our software intellectual property in a holding company. Her stake would be 60% and yours would be 40%."
"Wait a second," Chuck said nervously. "Wouldn't that give her control over our IP?"
"You would still have a substantial stake, Chuck, why are you freaking out about this?" Sarah asked innocently.
"Because I would lose control over it," Chuck said incredulously. "Don't you understand how scary it is to have someone else in control of a vital part of your livelihood?"
Sarah raised her eyebrows and smiled at Chuck. She said nothing but watched his face as the wheels started turning in his head. He looked so cute when he finally figured it out.
"OK, I get it. That's the kind of scary Josie lives with every day and she's got a child depending on her so it's that much worse." Chuck sighed at his own cluelessness. "Damn I'm lucky I've got you on my team."
"Don't you forget it," Sarah grinned. "Come to think of it, I think you owe me at least one evening of sexual servitude. Tonight you're taking me to dinner and drawing me a bath afterwards."
"Oui, Madame," Chuck replied agreeably. "We really should have costumes for this kind of thing."
"I like the way you think, Mr. Bartowski," Sarah said merrily. "For this evening my Butler Charles will have to make do with a tux while his regular uniforms are at the cleaners. Dear Charles is ALWAYS ready to get dirty in the service of the lady of the house."
"And does my lady make it a habit of dining out with her butler?" Chuck asked archly.
"But of course," Sarah shot back. "Lady Sarah is nothing if not cautious. Every dish must be sampled for quality and poison before she partakes. Perhaps her insistence that Charles cut her food and feed her each bite is a bit eccentric but rank has its privileges."
"Well before we get lost in the details of my new role, there is a completely separate topic I wanted to discuss," Chuck said with visible regret at having to change the mood. "I've been thinking about the best way to capture Juan Ramirez. I'm thinking a small commando team and a joint operation with Verbanski Corp. Unfortunately we're still finalizing an amendment to our lease that would allow us to remodel part of our office space into showers and physical training rooms. I'm also still working on how to add intersect skills that can be deactivated so they can't be revealed by surprise attacks. For this operation I think my best role would be remote tactical support. I've had Morgan do some preliminary research into tactical simulators, could you work with him to eliminate the alternatives that have issues being adapted for real field operations?"
"Sounds like fun, actually," Sarah admitted. "I look forward to bonding with my operations buddy over a more realistic type of video game."
"Excellent," Chuck said happily. "When you two settle on one, we'll want to load it with simulated Ramirez levels. Have Casey critique the Ramirez soldier responses for accuracy and to fill in any tactically significant gaps in the levels he can think of."
"And how exactly do you fit into this project?" Sarah asked.
"I'll be putting together an intersect program to integrate eight body camera feeds into a unified tactical response with real time adjustments," Chuck replied eagerly. "It will be the next best thing to being there."
"I'm glad you're looking forward to being in command, Charles," Sarah said, laughing. "Because as soon as we're off the clock you will be strictly FOLLOWING orders for the rest of the day."
"Oui, Madame," Chuck said deferentially. "Servicing you is the greatest honor of my life."
"Don't you mean SERVING me?" Sarah asked, grinning.
Chuck bowed low, then met Sarah's gaze and winked. She asked herself if her butler was in need of discipline, then decided that on the whole, she preferred him saucy. Her mind turned to intimate possibilities that wouldn't disturb freshly painted toenails and she smiled dreamily.
