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FOUR YEARS LATER
A grandmotherly woman dressed in a dark gray wool suit enters a sparsely furnished office deep in the bowels of the Pentagon. She peered over her oversized tortoiseshell glasses and asked the surprised looking man behind his desk, “Are you Theodore?”
Theodore Boston, aka the “Boss,” jerked upright in his chair, clicked off his computer monitor, and stifled his first response, which was, “How the fuck did you get in here?”
“Excuse me, ma'am, you must be lost. What visitor’s group are you with? I’ll call for someone to escort you back to your group.”
As he reached for the buzzer to call his assistant, he mentally rehearsed a massive ass chewing for a) letting Grandma Mosses wander into his supposedly secure office area, and b) giving her his name not to mention his first name. Wait I don’t think my right-hand man even knows my first name. Boston paused, hand hovering over the buzzer, and looked up at the woman again. He now saw that she was wearing a government ID on a lanyard. The name was Skerry. Christ, she was from the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The sweet little old lady face suddenly disappeared, and in a nanosecond, a transformation occurred.
“Mr. Boston, do you take me for a fool?” asked the woman, who now looked more barracuda than grandma. “Well, do you?”
“Oh, well, no. I thought that was rhetorical. What does the Committee want with me, ma’am?”
“Right now I am your worst nightmare.”
“I can see that.”
“Did you say something, Theodore?”
“No. No, ma’am just clearing my throat.”
“Your unit as far as I can tell is totally useless and redundant. I know all about you and it. You are the Administrator of the United States Assistants For and From The American People. From what I have been able to dig up, U.S.A.S.S.T. is a cleanup unit that handles various let us say miss steps by one of our agencies, employees, or extraordinarily idiotic citizens. You are also supposed to prevent widespread panic after a national or world disaster, diverting blame from the US and its government by assigning blame to some unbalanced sap, unstable country, or, if conditions are right Mother Nature. You and your team of...”, Skerry paged through her iPad “ twenty employees are spin doctors. I’ve been trying to access your past missions, and a majority of the reports have been redacted due to being highly classified.”
“Yes, most of our assignments are confidential,” Boston answered while casually leaning back in his chair. He paused, then a look of confusion flashed across his face. He rose slightly in his chair, hovered above the seat, and slammed his palms down onto his blotter, smashing a pen in the process. “Alleged unit? What do mean by alleged, useless and redundant?”
“For one thing we already have a similar organization in place. U.S. Aid From the American People, USAID, which makes you and your unit...” (Skerry made little quotation marks in the air), “...redundant. Also, your unit consists of you and one other person. The rest are mercenary types you hire on a job by job basis. The salaries and benefits for your little unit of twenty non-existent employees funnels, I assume, to your Swiss bank account with a cut to your sole employee. You are aware The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence oversees the intelligence community of which you are a part? The Committee can reign in, shut down, and in some cases imprison those who misuse, or in your case, blatantly steal from, their allotted budgets.” She leafed through a thick file and added, “I see this appears to be a pattern for you throughout your employment history.”
Skerry sat back in her chair with a small smile on her face, thinking, This is when they all start pleading and making excuses.
Boston, however, just stared at her with those cold silvery eyes. Who had silver eyes? Why isn’t he saying anything? I’m not sure he’s even breathing. Why do I feel uncomfortable? This is not going as planned. Skerry cleared her throat slightly and said in what she thought was a straightforward, clear voice, “Well, Theodore do you have anything to say for yourself?”
Boston had stopped hovering over his chairseat and suddenly stood up, which made Skerry back away slightly.
“First, my unit is nothing like the UNICEF clone USAID division. My division is boots on the ground, get your hands dirty, do the job, and leave no trace. In and out, bam!” Boston punctuated this by slamming his fist down on the desk. “Yes, I hire outside the government payroll. Everyone human resources sent me had, how can I say, a....”
“A conscience?”
“Yes. That’s it exactly! Boston thundered pointing at Skerry. “You know exactly what I mean.”
“Which is the reason for my visit to your little office today. You have been selected by someone higher up than me to give you a choice. You and your second in command, Joseph, either go down in flames regarding your appropriation of government funds, or do what you do best and stamp out the storm that is upon us regarding that sent from hell formula. We originally felt that Teaberry was the best target on which to place the blame. Teaberry was perfect, but they had to be noble and go public on how their company was to blame, and that for every jar of the formula turned in, they would triple people’s money back. They also threw a consultant under the bus, some nobody who’d assisted in coming up with the formula. Teaberry handled that nicely: ‘Yes, we will take the blame, but this guy, was the one who really poisoned you.’ Now, we can’t use Teaberry as a scapegoat, and Tranwrach was just too pathetic to use. Blaming him would be like throwing a brain-damaged hamster to the wolves.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“It’s two-pronged. Find scapegoats we can use. A similar formula was produced at the same time. Find those bodies. Not the corporation, the people. It’s much easier to hate faces. That’s the second part of the plan, so put it on the back burner. The most important part of your assignment is to come with scenarios on how to control the ever-expanding population. Get me stats on how much time we have, how many bodies we have cluttering up the planet. Also, include projected life spans with and without the formula and how to get a controllable number of bodies on this rock ASAP. You can hire people, but I want actual government workers, not crazed mercenaries. By the end of this year, the formula will have been out for four years, and our number crunchers estimate the planet will be carrying eight billion people. Verify that figure as well. This is getting serious. If you are successful, I understand there are a few openings at the NSA in its collection division. Don’t fail, or your perfect little world will end. Do you understand?”
Boston stared silently at Skerry for a full ten seconds. Then he reached out his hand to shake hers said, “I understand. I will get to work immediately and inform my sole employee of the change in direction the unit has taken. There will be no problems. You can count on it. I have a division in mind for the number crunching. I believe they have less than twenty in their department and there is a task force of sorts for this very problem,” he said with a grin.
After Skerry had left, Boston looked down and saw he had started to tear his desk blotter in half without realizing it. “My ‘perfect little world’? Oh yes, I do indeed have a perfect world in mind, and you and your kind, Skerry, have no place in it.”