Ed Navarro, early into work, crossed the parking lot and came around the corner of his building and jogged his two hundred and seventy pounds up the outside steps.
He laughed as he remembered that his daughter had once called his jogging watching a baked potato run on toothpicks. He sighed. His daughter was a brat but a funny one. It sucked that she didn’t call him anymore since she went away to school, had this very angry seeming attitude toward him now.
Atop the steps, he pressed his card pass to the reader and the lock clacked and he pushed in.
Even more irritating given that he was picking up her tab.
Ever quick on the uptake, as he entered the fishbowl, Navarro immediately noticed that the big boss man’s corner office light was on.
His boss, Rob Carmichael—or Rob Car-meleon as Navarro called him—was a tall nice-looking Black guy from South Carolina. Back when it was all men at the NRO, he, like all the rest of them, had worn camo fatigues and had acted like a man’s man, a good ol’ boy. But as the men were phased out and the ladies and snowflake college kids and the Silicon Valley start-up people were brought in, he had morphed into a kind of college professor replacing the camo with tweed coats and rep ties.
If the Amish had come to work there, Navarro liked to tell people, Car-meleon would be wearing suspenders with a chin beard, warning about the English as he handed out flyers to the next quilting bee.
He looked back at the light on as he found his desk. It was weird that the boss was there. Navarro came in earlier than his crew to pick up the squeal on anything new that had come up and his boss was always long gone.
Down the line of desks, dayshift section chief Barry Hulse tossed a chin hello at him from where he sat on his phone.
“What’s up with Car-meleon?” Navarro said.
“Got a visitor.”
“Who?”
Barry shrugged.
“Dunno. Just came in,” he said.
They both watched as the door opened and out came a white-haired hearty and handsome military-looking man. He was photogenic, the creases of his dress casual khakis sharp enough to split a hair. He seemed vaguely familiar. Some younger guy was with him, big dude, short hair, shoulders like a tight end.
“Heavy hitter, huh?” Navarro said.
Barry chinned the phone and did the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” thing with his hands.
“Ed, could you come in here?” Carmichael called up as the two mysterious visitors left.
“Afternoon, Rob,” Navarro said as his boss closed the door behind him.
“Hey, Ed. Have a seat. I got a red ball just came in.”
“That so?” Navarro said as he sat.
“Yes,” Rob said as he unlocked his desk and took out a blue electronic pass and placed it on the table.
Navarro looked at it as Carmichael locked the desk again.
Whoa, he thought. Red ball indeed.
The pass was the golden invite to the chocolate factory. In the corner of the fishbowl was a SCIF with full unrestricted, and as was rumored, unrecorded access to all the birds, even the ones the guys on the floor didn’t know about.
From the corner of his desk, Carmichael moved over a paper-clipped printout stack.
He placed the SCIF pass on top of it.
“Ed, there was a flight out of South America twenty-four hours ago. The details are there. They want the plane found and I mean yesterday.”
“They?”
Carmichael played with his rep tie.
“Did you say something?”
“Gotcha. I take it you don’t want this in the log.”
“You take it right, Ed. Hit me up when you find it.”
As Ed pulled the paper toward him and saw the Iquitos, Peru, line at the top, he was glad for the office dimness. Because as his boss stood, Navarro’s eyes went full-aperture wide.