WSB Academy, Location Classified, 1978
For the first few months at the WSB Academy, Anna Devane felt like a stranger in a strange land.
She had been filled with apprehension when she first laid eyes on the big, imposing, gloomy mansion of stone-trimmed red brick. It looked dignified as if it feared not what rain or wind or changing fashion would do to it. The convex mansard roof that was typical of buildings built in the time of Napoleon III; jutting out were any number of dormer windows, and brick chimneys, an iron railing around the flat top gave it an air of distinction, and it was blanketed with ivy so thick it seemed as if it was trying to disguise itself.
Fitting, she thought, for a building used to house and train spies.
While she may have had misgivings, suddenly, everything seemed to fall into focus—the program, professors, recruits, studies, surveillance, countersurveillance, physical conditioning, map reading and navigation, practical exercises, and other spycraft training. Life became homogeneous again. Instead of being made up of detached fragments, the Academy students found themselves as peers, with both shared antipathies and ambitions. They won the day in the annual "CodeRush," a cryptography competition against the second years, thereby gaining their instructors' respect and an enormous confidence boost to themselves. The victory was attributed to the strategic generalship of Ivan Theodore, who marshaled the campaign and created certain new tactics, which demoralized the competition and swept them to triumph.
Outside of the intense coursework, Anna found herself in the thick of the social life of the Academy, and Ivan found himself pulled along and unexpectedly stuck in its web as well. That this came about was due in great measure to her. Anna was the darling of the Academy, and she led their class in everything except cryptography and logistics, which was Ivan forte. Her competence, combined with her charm—a quality acknowledged by all who met her—promptly opened the gates of all cliques, clubs to her, and where she went, Ivan went, too. She was a loyal soul and had made good on her word that she wanted to be chummy with him. Without effort, she took him with her into her ever-widening circle of acquaintanceship, and he found his social pathway made very easy.
As someone who had never experienced friendship before, Ivan marveled at this and did his best to be worthy of her companionship while he could give or take all the others. He was able to hold his own with his wit and intelligence, whereas he knew that he would have been doomed to remain rather on the fringe of things without her sponsorship.
And still, to him, the happiest moments in each week were when she was curled up in the blue wingback chair in his room while they conjugated verbs, debated the finer points of corpus linguistics, and talked of 'ologies and 'isms well into the night. For the most part, Ivan tried to keep as near to the elusive Anna as he could without drawing too much attention from the crowd of admirers that orbited around her like she was the sun.
In the blink of an eye, the year passed as if it had wings, and the initial formal training program came to a close. The second year brought even more pressure as placement was on the mind of every recruit and the competition reached a fever pitch. Getting "selected" at the end would enable a WSB candidate to continue to the next phase of training. If a candidate successfully completed all phases, he or she could graduate as a qualified agent and then, generally, be assigned to a cadre that would handle their formal placement and induction into the organization. The only thing that stood between the Academy students and their WSB ambitions was the Arcana, and it was on the minds of each and every one.
A pall of darkness settled over the marble halls of the academy as their day of reckoning drew ever nearer. The Arcana was a series of intense- perhaps hellish or cruel would be better terms- evaluations meant to break the Academy candidates down and expose their strengths and their weaknesses. Nine exhausting days of physical and psychological testing awaited them- physical conditioning, sleep deprivation, harsh interrogation tactics, hand-to-hand combat, weapons proficiency, isolation, and hunger. Of course, the WSB, with its flair for the dramatic and esoteric, patterned their testing on Dante's Inferno, and each "Circle" was designed to push them to their limit.
The Arcana was designed to strip them down to their most basic elements and reveal the key personality trait that defined their value to the WSB, called a Virtue, and their biggest liability, their Hubris. The importance of the Arcana results could not be understated. Certain jobs and assignments were off-limits if you had the misfortune to have the wrong combination of Virtue and Hubris. These results would determine the course of their training and ultimately placement in the organization, or outright dismissal. There needed to be a stellar outcome for anyone who hoped to be fast-tracked into fieldwork.
Tensions were running so high that Ivan felt the need to withdraw from the others just to maintain his focus and sanity. So he took to the grounds on a glorious red and gold fall day to get some clarity. Ivan had to admit he was impressed by the display the trees were making in the avenues and lanes, the labyrinth of gardens and hedges through which he passed. The light brought out the hues of the turning leaves with a rare beauty: a brilliant orange, a deep maroon, set against the green of the manicured lawns and the soft gray stone. It was idyllic, civilized, in that typically English fashion.
He saw men and women standing about in detached groups of two or three, looking warily at each other with thinly-veiled distrust. He rather suspected that the most trying incidents to befall the cream of England and the world's crop were a broken finger in a cricket match and perhaps, at most, horror of horror, cut off from their trust funds. But he cared nothing for the lot of them with the Arcana looming. They all were comrades no longer; they were nothing but competition at this point.
Well, perhaps not all were feeling the same way as him. Among the groups, he caught a glimpse of a brown-haired woman who had an amused look on her face while the veritable embodiment of the All-American male talked in an animated fashion to her. He was tall, handsome, blonde with a flashing white smile, and Ivan hated him more than anything else in the world at the moment. He could hear them laughing and talking. They were evidently having the best of good times. If either was impacted by the stress of the coming days, there was no evidence of it.
He looked away but not before he drew her attention from her companion. She said something he couldn't quite make out as she broke away, fluttering her hand in a hasty goodbye, and headed straight to him. Ivan noted with satisfaction the scowl on her abandoned cohort's face as she left. Once she reached him, without preamble, she threaded her arm through his and smiled.
"We are going for a walk," Anna said decisively, her face upturned to the shining sky. "I ought to go in and work on my Russian syntax, but I couldn't stay in on a day like this. There's something in the air that gets into my blood and makes me feel restless. My brain wouldn't be able to absorb anything. Today is a day for leaves, grass, and fresh air. Nature has a way of making our ambitions seem rather small, and I think that's exactly the kind of perspective that I need today with the Arcana looming ominously before us. " said Anna.
She slowed her pace to match his, and they loitered in the still, crisp autumn air. The sunlight filtered through the trees with a bronze light that fell upon her bare head and made her dark hair shine. Ivan thought her particularly lovely that day, with a vivid, preternatural, bewitching type of prettiness that was amplified by an indefinable, unmistakable air of confidence. Anna paused for a moment to step up onto a low stone wall that edged the walkway, balanced herself on it, and resumed her course. Ivan wished he could be like Anna, who treated the world as if it was full of nothing but possibility.
"D-don't you want to keep talking to your friend?"
"Oh, Charles? Good God no," she said dismissively. "He's such a bore which should be a crime for someone who is the son of a diplomat. He just drones on and on and never says one thing worth listening to, not even by accident. So I just give an occasional yes or no here and there and amuse myself with my own thoughts instead. I'd much rather spend my time talking with you. You are more interesting than Charles will be in a hundred years. Sadly money can buy a person anything but a personality."
"Ww-why d-dd-do you talk to him then?"
"Well, his father is important." she shrugged. "Who knows, having Charles as an acquaintance might be an advantage someday, yeah? Everyone here can be useful in some way, I suppose. "
"Why d-do you care about what they think of you?"
"I don't," Anna said decisively with a toss of her head. Then she stopped and looked off into the distance as if she could see some uncanny world beyond their own.
"Well, I don't...much." she amended with a laugh and a sigh co-mingled.
Ivan understood what she couldn't say aloud. She had shown him glimpses of her sensitive nature; he knew that all disapproval had weight, even the disapproval of those for whose opinions she shouldn't respect. The need to prove herself was so strong it almost flared from her, much like a star's corona. She came to the end of the stone wall, and after a moment's hesitation, Ivan held out his hand. She smiled at him and hooked her fingertips briefly onto his before jumping to the ground.
"But it won't matter if we don't do well in the Arcana."
"You'll do fine. You are the most prepared out of all of us. You said you felt ready."
"Oh, I know. But FEELING is so different from KNOWING. My common sense tells me what you say is true, but there are times when common sense has no power over me. When I look around, I see nothing but an uncertain future for us all. Soon we will be widely scattered. Some of the rich will be poor, and some of the poor will be rich. Some of the brightest may end up in obscurity, and some of the dullest will end up in high positions.
"You're just tt-tired out, we all are—that is what is the matter with you," he said.
"I wish that's all it was," she said with that far away look in her eyes, then she looked at his concerned face. For the time being, life was savorless, and her ambition had gone out like a snuffed candle, and her artifice of confidence crumbled.
"I'm scared, Ivan. And you are the only person I can admit to. We have the most important week of our lives ahead of us and with the most at stake. Nothing scares me like failure does. Would rather die than fail."
"You'll be disappointed aren't going to kill you, at least not intentionally. Anna, where is this self-doubt coming from?"
"If I don't pass the last year and a half will mean nothing. I'll be out on the street. And...where will I go? What will I do? The other women here have things to fall back on. Degrees that they have earned to fall back on, connections that can get them plumb positions in government, or they can marry rich and powerful men. And what of me? I don't toil, neither do I spin, as the saying goes. All my eggs are neatly placed in the WSB's basket, and it's about to be upturned."
Suddenly she laughed out loud. "Can you imagine me as a wife? Isn't that the funniest and most absurd idea?"
Ivan had a sudden vision of Anna, arrayed in a white gown skimming her curves and a white veil frosting the shining coils of her dark hair. The vision made him catch his breath. But he responded lightly.
"And what if you fall in love?"
"Goodness, no!" she exclaimed," I couldn't love anybody. It isn't in me. Besides, I wouldn't want to. Agents need to be unattached; that's the whole appeal of the WSB. Being in love makes you a perfect fool, I think. And it would give a person such power to hurt you. No, I'd much rather just have a good comrade, like you, for example. I don't need anything more than that."
"Then you could look into non-active careers within the agency. A clerical position?" he teased.
"What! No! I can't do that! A desk job?! You might as well kill me right now because that's what it feels like you are doing by suggesting that."
"Do you have to be this dramatic? Valuable spy work is done every day from behind desks. It takes a village to support an agent in the field. At least the work I plan to do doesn't require a cover story, and the likelihood of being in the line of fire is pretty slim. Each job requires different skill sets."
"I'm sorry. You're right. Fieldwork isn't the only way to defend the free world and democracy and all that. I guess we are opposites but have the same outcome. The world is primed to care about my strength and discount my brain, and you have to trade on your wits because your condition makes the world underestimate your strength. And at the end of the day, all we have to recommend us is our ambition. Just watch. We will show the world who and what we can be. And with no safety nets to fall back on because we won't need any."
"That is a rousing s-speech, but come on, let's go have a cup of tea. I might have taught you Latin phrases, but if there is one thing you have taught me is that tea can be a panacea for anything.
"Tea? We are about to enter a literal Dante's Inferno of trials, and you think that tea is going to help me make it through all nine levels of hell? You should at least offer me biscuits too."
"That I can do. I also know that despite the fact that the next nine days will decide your entire future, and you may end up penniless and alone on the street, you do love a challenge," he said with a smile.
"Well, don't we all?" she replied.
The Vestibule, Location Classified
The brass plaque affixed to the granite wall next to an unremarkable brown door on the unremarkable one-story outbuilding on the grounds of the ICO Academy simply read "The Vestibule." Director Sean Donely smiled as he walked over to the door and gave two loud taps followed by two light taps.
The heavy iron door opened slowly, and a small bespectacled man greeted him heartily.
"Director Donely! Welcome!"
"Vasily! Good to see you!" He clapped him heartily on the back.
"Are you here to see how the Arcana is going?"
"Of course. Are we set up?" asked Sean.
"Yes, we have ten being tested at once. All in various phases. Am I correct in assuming that you are here to see a particular candidate? You always check in on the ones you think are that promising."
"That's exactly why I'm here. I'm looking into the progress of Anna Devane."
"Anna Devane?" He said with surprise. "She's not who I expected you to be interested in."
"I recruited her. What else did you expect?"
"I expected you to take an interest in someone with more connections or at the very least an Ivy League education. Her...er...proletarian background has caused a lot of questions among recruits and administrators in the Bureau. Everyone thinks you've given leave of your senses bringing her here. I suppose."
"Never judge a book by its cover. I'm a betting man Vasiliy, and I know when to go all in. Anna Devane could be the best agent I've ever produced. Now tell me, what has she done so far?"
"She's covered a lot of ground. Six circles cleared so far, covering elicitation, dead drops, bumps, brush passes, surveillance detection, and her ability to change her cover on demand, making the transformation be seamless and undetectable. She was tested on her ability to take knowledge and information and prove she could put it to practical use to gather intelligence. Next was safe-cracking. She seems to have a talent for it. No matter what we throw at her, from the most sophisticated modern locks to 18th Century puzzle vaults. Nothing phases her."
Dr. Vasily Vasiliev could only shake his head and avoid Sean Donely's smug gaze.
"You know you can be insufferable sometimes. I will admit that Anna possesses a natural instinct for breaking and entering. Her training here has only given her extra ammunition. Looking over her training records, her scores are in the highest percentiles. Her intelligence is obvious, and she seems to have a willing attitude. And from reading her file, there are no family ties to get in the way of her career. So far, she does look like an excellent candidate for fieldwork. Are you looking to partner her with anyone? I have a few ideas in mind..."
"No, she will start solo,'' said Sean firmly. "You will do the testing, and I will handle everything else after that. I will need to make arrangements. But first, she has to make it through the Arcana. You may feel she is ready, but I will monitor her closely and measure her progress personally. If I see something wrong, I will stop the process immediately. Few so far have completed all of the sessions and kept satisfactory scores throughout. The third session has the most declines, and psychological stress is always more difficult to endure than physical pain. Anna will run into the same wall, you'll see. But I'm confident that she will find a way to get past the wall or over or under it. What is she doing now?"
"Come see! She's in the Seventh Circle- Violence. "
Sean followed him down the corridor and into a small room with a two-way mirror. Anna was seated in the middle of the darkened room, her head bowed, and beads of sweat dripped from her forehead onto the floor. Her hands and feet were bound, and she was blindfolded. She was being questioned and cross-questioned. Two WSB veterans who were well-versed in various interrogation techniques were currently working their way through the playbook. Sean watched a few moments more, thoughtfully rubbing his chin.
"I believe that a full test is needed." He mused. He turned to face Vasily. "She seems fearless, but a little chaos may rattle her."
"If you are so confident in her abilities, you should take her to Purgatorio."
"Purgatorio? We haven't done that in ten years. Not since the incident." he said grimly. "If something goes wrong, the inquiry alone will be its own special circle of Hell. There are other ways to test her fight or flight impulses."
"There are," Vasily agreed. "But aren't you curious to see what her limits are? She definitely knows how to begin but will she know when to quit?"
Sean took another hard look through the mirror. A man was shouting obscenities at Anna, crouching forward to match her seated height. Sean could see her sitting and waiting, tightly coiled like a spring waiting to snap. Then suddenly, she propelled herself at her evaluator. In a flash, she was on top of him, clasping her rope-bound hands together and striking him in the face repeatedly while leaning all of her weight onto his chest with her knee. Pandemonium broke out, and two agents sprung forward to pull her off the unfortunate soul that had awoken her fight instincts.
Sean smiled to himself.
"Set it up."
To Be Continued...
