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The Manager wasn't used to second guessing himself. It was a distinctly unpleasant feeling.
He had a name. He had a birth certificate and everything. But The Agency had a longstanding convention – not quite a rule, but just shy of one – that its head was referred to by that moniker instead of by name. He couldn't say when it started, but he wasn't going to buck that particular tradition. He'd been doing this job long enough that he referred to himself as The Manager even in the privacy of his own thoughts. It was fitting, after all; it reminded him that the Job was more important than the Man. It was a job worth dying for, and that might pan out if things continued going to shit as they have been.
Traxler might have slightly misjudged things to not consider him a zealot.
He sat in his office, at a desk that was miraculously free of papers for a change. Agents who met with The Manager for various assignments and debriefings were often struck by the man's reliance on physical copies of files to parcel out information. Most people attributed it to his age, though they stopped short of suggesting he was too old for the job, even to themselves. They would be shocked to find him peering intently at the screen of a sleek silver laptop, as he was presently doing.
His reliance on paper wasn't a sign that he couldn't keep up with the times. It was a conscious choice. He did it because it was the only medium that couldn't be electronically intercepted. He ought to know a thing or two about that.
Before the digital age, the job itself was so much harder. When they became mainstream, computers revolutionized every aspect of life – from home, to business, to entertainment, to... this. What used to require reams of paper and massive, cross-referenced files in room-filling cabinets and countless man-hours of analysis could now be done in a manner of seconds with the right electronic records.
Of course, in the bad old days, there weren't nearly as many people for The Agency keep track of. At least the population explosion had the decency to wait until technology could keep up with it.
Rooms that were once stacked to the rafters with hard copy files were cleared out, their contents shredded, and retrofitted with computers. The early ones took up even more space than the filing cabinets they replaced, and still required a substantial quantity of paper – only in the form of punch cards. The analysts in those days wore coats year-round because industrial air conditioners were needed to keep the machines from overheating.
When the Internet (and its predecessor DARPANET) emerged as the new technology disruptor, everything got faster, more efficient... and easier to steal. The mainstream media liked to tout the CIA or the NSA as leaders in electronic surveillance, but The Agency predated them both and originated many of the means and methods that the other agencies got credit for. The Manager was fine to let them have it. The news lost its collective mind when it found out that some foreign government's chief spy agency had worked with computer manufacturers to install specialized surveillance chips right on PC hardware that were impossible to detect unless someone physically examined the motherboards, but it was The Agency that came up with that little trick, back when such devices were hidden inside transistors and vacuum tubes.
Of course, surveillance of that sort, when done by most government agencies, was illegal.
What The Agency did, however, was completely legal. There were subsections of subsections of obscure laws that granted The Agency nearly limitless information-gathering authority, regardless of format. When the country ran on paper, The Agency was one of the largest consumers of the stuff, renting out millions of square feet of warehouse space in dark sites across the region to store it. Now that everything had turned electronic, they had legal access to every bit of information that flowed over an Internet connection. It was stuff that would give the techs at Homeland Security a permanent hard-on if they had any idea of the scope of it all.
That was the other bitch about all of this. The Agency had to keep itself secret not just from the lycanthropes it was surveilling, but from the likes of the CIA and the NSA as well. It was a lot easier in the olden days, but now, finally, the rest of the government's surveillance apparatus was catching up to them. He'd had to call more than one Senator to wave off an over-zealous FBI field agent who got too close to an Agency op.
There had been talk, back before The Manager was, well, The Manager, about coming out of the shadows and combining resources with other government entities. It would certainly give The Agency a boost in manpower, and it was possible (however unlikely) that the other groups could provide surveillance and monitoring capabilities they didn't already have.
He didn't think the notion got very far, but the moment he took the reins of The Agency formally, he made sure to quash the idea once and for all. He simply could not risk its mission being compromised by competing interests or some bullshit political agenda. It was far too important. No, The Agency would continue as an independent operation for as long as breath passed through his body.
Even so, he wondered – not for the first time – if involving the Cruciform Knights was the wisest course of action.
He typed a command on the laptop and a small video screen appeared. It showed a live feed of a meeting that Father Brown was having with some of his congregants. They may have styled themselves a church, but their weekly sermons were held in a rented bingo hall. A hall which happened to provide a freestanding ATM for its members to use to quickly access more money to spend on gaming cards.
That ATM, like most of its kind, had a video camera installed to guard against theft or vandalism. The Agency was able to tap into it and monitor the proceedings. There was no audio, and the video was grainy at best, but it gave him a window to catch the tenor of Father Brown's little gatherings.
At present, Father Brown was holding aloft a small box, showing it to the others. The image from the ATM's camera wasn't particularly clear, but from its size and shape, The Manager knew exactly what it was: silver-plated ammunition.
He smiled. Mitchum came through. Not that he had any doubts. He'd been grooming the man to replace him when the time came.
Brown and his followers already had access to silver bullets, he knew. He also knew that not all silver ammunition was created equally. The last thing they needed was for Brown to fail because of an unfortunate misfire. It was a fairly simple thing for The Manager to discover what make and caliber of firearms Brown had legally registered, and with that information he'd sent Mitchum on a little shopping expedition. He was to arrange delivery of the most suitable ammunition in a way that couldn't directly be traced back to The Agency. Would Brown make the connection between his contact with Traxler and this anonymous gift? The old man was savvy enough to do so, though The Manager doubted he would advertise it to his followers, but rather would simply accept it. Since it was an unattributed gift and not payment for services rendered, Mitchum and Traxler could legitimately claim that they did not hire the Cruciform Knights to perform any specific action, preserving their ability to speak to the wolves in full honesty.
He had always considered activating Father Brown an act of desperation. Were these desperate times? He didn't know. He'd meant what he said to Traxler about trying to engage the werewolves in a direct confrontation. Despite The Agency's considerable resources and training, he wasn't confident enough that they could neutralize a pack of nine werewolves without at least one of them escaping and raising a stink to the wrong person. In the past, he had ordered the termination of werewolves who didn't move along on their own, but it was a lot different when it was just a single target. The loose ends were a lot easier to tie off, and having agents embedded in various levels of government helped them direct any subsequent investigations where he needed them to go.
He could almost certainly arrange an airstrike and have their whole complex firebombed, but that was the sort of thing that even the idiots in Congress might notice, and he didn't want an investigation to risk exposing The Agency's existence. He was always fighting to maintain just the right balance of action and discretion, and with the world becoming more and more interconnected, the path forward seemed ever more treacherous.
Hence Father Brown.
The Cruciform Knights weren't the only anti-lycanthrope hate group in the world, nor even the largest, but they were one of the fastest growing and their members seemed particularly violent in both words and actions. He'd taken a special interest in the group ever since the fracas in Ireland. That was close to the start of his tenure, but even then, he recognized the potential for someone with the man's fanaticism and skill set, with a set of malleable followers who'd do what he told them. He was able to exert soft pressure to keep the man off INTERPOL's radar, though Brown himself had no idea he was even getting assistance.
Over the years, The Manager had intervened a handful of other times as well, as Father Brown's growing list of congregants committed acts of violence in the name of holy salvation – or whatever it was they believed. The Manager had no patience for the man's ravings; his only interest in the Cruciform Knights was that they had similar enough goals to be potentially useful to The Agency someday.
It would seem that day had arrived.
He had no qualms about sending the group on a suicide mission against the pack if that's what it took, but that had almost as many risks as The Agency itself staging a full-frontal assault. His entire philosophy had been to attract as little attention as possible. A firefight between werewolves and religious nuts would go counter to that. That is why he instructed Traxler to take them to the tavern instead. It could still have enough of an impact to get the pack to leave town.
After that, he could be shed of Father Brown and his followers.
He just hoped everything would go the way he needed it to. He was further out on the skinny branches than he usually liked to go, involving this outside group in Agency affairs. But even if things went badly for Father Brown and his people, at least there wouldn't be any blowback to The Agency. He'd termed it "Operation Lightbringer," though few beyond himself would ever be privy to that knowledge. It amused him to imagine what Father Brown would think of that little code name. He had also been particularly proud of the notion of having Traxler tell Father Brown the truth – or as much of the truth as the agent himself knew, anyway. It might seem to be an irresponsible risk, but Father Brown's reputation was such that nobody would believe him even if he chose to repeat whatever Traxler told him. There were already plenty of conspiracy theories out there about the existence of some shadowy agency floating around Washington, D.C. – people were bound to talk, and most of what The Manager heard was so far from the truth that he wasn't worried about it. Taking the actual truth and putting it in Father Brown's mouth to spout out to whoever would listen should go far toward convincing people it was a lie.
A movement on the laptop screen caught his attention and pulled him out of his thoughts. The meeting appeared to be wrapping up. What happened next would be up to Father Brown.
May God have mercy on us all, The Manager thought, not entirely ironically.