Double Eagle
Headquarters
M Street Georgetown
Washington, DC
January 09, 2018
Spence walked down the hallway into a conference room that looked like a situation room in the Pentagon. Each of the six seats at the table was fitted with a personal monitor and key board as well as a communications suite offering secure landline, satellite, and a voice scrambler. Three sixty inch large screen displays covered the front wall. The “Business Circle” graphic filled the center screen.
While most companies portrayed the power structure in a top level organization chart depicting the key leaders and their span of control of people, revenue, market placement and key customers, the business circle plotted the relative position of all the Double Eagle subsidiaries to the inner circle or corporate core operations. Organized simply, both the business elements and their leaders were characterized by their location within a series of ten concentric circles that identified the proximity to the core and the level of sensitive information that each individual leader had been cleared to receive. There were hundreds of locations all over the world that were tied to the company. However, most of those companies were in the outer rings separated from any connection to innermost circles by a web of ownership and compartments that allowed Spence to control what everyone knew about the centralized control that he imposed. Only the inner circle had full knowledge of the Double Eagle organization and a vote on organizational changes.
Spence took his seat at the head of the table and studied Paul McGovern’s face to his right. The two had known one another since their childhood years, played together in the amphitheater in Durres, and both had been the targets of Gjon’s abuse. Paul had taken a different path out of Durres but the two had remained in contact via a primitive coding system that they’d developed as children growing up in the era of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. As children, they played a team of secret agents stopping the plots of evil doers. For the last twenty years, the game had turned more serious, with real people and less distinction between the good guys and the bad. In a sense, their childhood world had been transformed into what was displayed on the large screen at end of the table. McGovern was one of the six people in circle one, the innermost circle, and someone that Spence trusted more than anyone in the world.
“I just spoke with Jack this morning, and he filled me in on the progress of the Special Task Force that convened a week ago under a classified Presidential Directive. Seems like they’ve been poking around the evidence from Veterans Day, the Virginia Beach tunnel, and even our recent failure in Alexandria and concluded that the attacks might have been organized from inside the country. This is very troubling. It turns out that the Task Force lead is that US Navy Seal that somehow survived the tunnel collapse. You’ll recall that we tried to take care of him during that dive on the Metro Bridge. Now he’s turned up again and that group is digging deep and uncovering some sloppy efforts that could expose the company and undermine our strategy. It makes me nervous.”
“I agree. We’ve had a couple of operations that left some loose ends but do you really think there’s any real risk of exposure?”
“Yes, I do. Look at our West Virginia mining operation. The investigators have already traced the bulldozers and connected that boring machine from Switzerland to the same mine.”
The front screen responded to the keystrokes and mouse that Paul deftly navigated on the table. The center screen showed the Starwood Mine Company logo and a picture of its manager. Flanking the center screen were financials on the left and a traditional organizational chart on the right.
“The mine is a circle eight company so we are well-insulated from anything that the Special Task Force might turn up.” Paul brought up another view that provided the mine’s ownership chain that included a Canadian mining conglomerate and a South African Gold Exploration company.
He continued, “They would have to get through the books of multiple companies before they reached our Double Eagle group of companies.”
“What level is the mine’s manager?” asked Spence.
Paul brought up the manager on the right screen. His resume was displayed with a watermarked “Eight” in the background. Paul quickly summarized: “He’s been at the mine for six years and never been exposed to anything other than that level of information. Performance has been solid, and his reports are always on time. We have an “in-depth” on him completed in the last two years. I’ll take a close look at that but just don’t see how he could hurt us. I’m confident that we are protected on this one.”
“Fresno. Paul, one of the pilots posed for a picture at the place that fitted out the planes and exposed his tattoo. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I don’t want to overreact to these oversights, but we’ve had more than our share of problems the past few months, and we do not need the Feds getting any closer.”
Spence reached out and put his hand on top of his friend’s arm.
“We are making progress in leaps and bounds. I just don’t want any more setbacks, my friend. We’ve come too far for that.”
Both men sat back in their chairs, talking and laughing in their native tongue as if neither had a care in the world, back in Durres playing the good guys in the Amphitheatre.