Operations Center 2, CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
Chris Leroux stepped inside Operations Center 2, his team already manning their stations. All rose to their feet, concern written on their faces. He waved them down. “I’m okay, everyone. Thanks for your concern.” He gave a special look to Sonya Tong as she took her seat. “I understand Sonya filled my shoes quite capably. A special thanks to her.”
Kane patted her on the shoulder and she flushed as clapping and a few cheers erupted.
Leroux silenced them with a slightly raised hand. “Okay, here’s the situation. The Director has given us carte blanche to deal with the situation. We’re not worried about due process here, we’re worried about results. The Assembly has been on our radar before, and despite our warnings to them, they are back. For those of you in the room who are new, what I’m about to tell you is about as Top Secret as you can get. Repeat it outside of this room, and somebody downstairs will be reprinting your yearbook with your photo not in it. Understood?”
Heads bobbed around the room, some eyes wide with fear.
“Okay, here’s what we know. We know they have been around for at least a century, perhaps longer, perhaps much longer. We believe they are a cabal of about one dozen people, very well-connected, mostly industrialists. We were able to trace several of them a little over a year ago due to some sloppy email security by one of their new members. When we reached out to the Assembly, warning them off from their attempts to target myself and Kane, as well as our families, they did back off, but all of the members we had identified were later found dead. We now have no idea who they are, or where they are, beyond a single opening in the dark web.”
Randy Child raised a hand slightly. “What’s their purpose?”
“From what we can tell, they try to influence world events to their benefit. Whether that’s influencing foreign and domestic policies, industrial espionage, or whatever, they have been manipulating things for over a century. To be honest, we really don’t know that much about them. All we know is that they are dangerous, powerful, and have their fingers in everything. We know they were involved in trying to trigger a war with China, so we assume they are heavily involved in industries that would benefit from that. Bringing them down will be difficult, perhaps even impossible, but we need to try.”
Child spun in his chair. “Where do we start?”
“The only place we can. The dark web. Let’s see what we can find. Also, we know they must be up to something big. This 9-1-1 outage could be a coincidence, but it might not be. Remember, to them the world is a chessboard. Moving a pawn might seem insignificant to us, but tomorrow or next year, it could have significant consequences. We can’t let them succeed in whatever it is they’re up to, because for them to do what they did today, it must be big. And that can’t be good for our country, or the world.”