Wednesday, June 29, 2005

MacDougal

I've written a bit about MacDougal here, and looking back, a lot of it is negative, so I want to set the record straight on the guy.

MacDougal was an exceptional agent back in his day. He did a lot of stuff during the Cold War that kept this country on top. He's still a crack shot with just about any type of gun, even more deadly with a sniper rifle. He's a smart guy, learns fast and processes information quickly. But he's a terrible decision maker and has poor instincts, but at the same time trusts his judgment and his instincts above anything else. Plus, the world has passed him by.

See, back in his day, things were fairly clear. There were "good guys" and "bad guys", and allegiances didn't change that much. Nowadays things change on a whim; our enemies one day are our allies the next. But MacDougal still sees things in black and white, and it got to the point where, skillset notwithstanding, he was no longer an effective field agent, so he was assigned to a desk.

I was assigned to MacDougal when I first started out (they've since scrapped the "buddy system"), and he likes to remind me that he taught me everything I know. In reality, though... he taught me everything he knows, which was considerable, but not overwhelming, and I've learned a lot more since then, including the fact that most of what he taught me was wrong. It took me a while to figure that out, but I wasn't left with a great first impression anyway. On our first mission together, he left me alone in Magadan to score with some Tatiana. That's where he picked up the aforementioned gonorrhea. I finished the mission myself, which he claimed was his "plan all along", because it provided me with an "excellent learning experience". A few weeks later he was on a healthy dose of antibiotics, so that's karma for you.

So he's a questionable decision maker. He's also a bit of a bumbler, not as severe or comedic as Mr. Magoo, but if there's something to be done with any level of complexity, it's 50/50 he's going to screw it up. I'm not going to delve into the problems we've had... but I could write pages and pages about his misadventures... "MacDougal hotwires a boat", "MacDougal navigates the streets of Murmansk", "MacDougal is unable to find the Baykonur Cosmodrome, despite having accurate coordinates and a working GPS."

One of the last straws (I'm not sure that there was an official "last straw") was the PK mission. There's been more than one PK mission, but this one is "the" PK mission. We were supposed to be working with a group called Code 7, a group that a one point we were very much working against. During a meeting at one of Code 7's hideouts, one of their ops came into the room and "spooked" MacDougal. The two had met before years ago and had been on opposite sides. MacDougal "lost his cool" and shot the guy in the leg. This resulted in a hasty exit from the company of Code 7, and a prolonged chase through the city, ending only after we hopped on a boat and hid in the harbor for a few hours.

One could understand if, in the heat of the moment, a quick decision had to be made, and he capped the wrong guy. But we'd been briefed about everyone in their organization, from the top down, and we knew the guy was going to be there. We also knew that these guys were legitimately going to be working with us, so there was no need to fear them. Sometimes the intel you get is wrong, and you use your instincts... problems arise when you don't have any instincts. It's like Zero Effect: "There aren't evil guys and innocent guys. It's just... It's just... It's just a bunch of guys." He couldn't figure that out, so he shot guys in the leg. OK, he shot a guy in the leg. But he endangered more than one mission, and so they pulled him from active duty.

So now he's head of field support. It's actually a promotion in an organizational chart way, but he's not too happy with it. He stops by a lot to talk about my missions, offering not-very-useful advise, like when your Mom would tell you to "wear your jacket" when it was cold out. And his people skills are terrible, because he's horrible at carrying on a conversation, can't function in groups, and he's pushing fifty (if not there already), and he tries to act like he's twenty. One night a few years ago we were out at the Owl & Thistle, and we were talking about the movie "Elf". And then someone mentioned that their old landlord looked just like James Caan, and then we got to talking about landlords and rent and houses and things of that sort, and MacDougal was just sort of sitting there silent for about twenty minutes. And then there was this little lull in the conversation, and MacDougal says, "Hey hey... did you guys see that movie, Elf?" OK, that was twenty minutes ago, but maybe he's got something to add, so we're like "Yeah." And he said, "That was a pretty good movie, huh?" And that's it. Sometimes it's just painful to watch him interact in a social setting.

Like a couple of weeks ago, I'm sitting in Keith's office (he's one of the tech guys), and he's got Beastie Boys coming out of his speakers. MacDougal pokes his head into the office, listens for a second, then does some sort of Bulworth "throw your hands in the air" dance and asks, "You down with O.P.P.?". I was just going to go along with it, adding the requisite response "Yeah, you know me!" but Keith just sighed and said, "This is Paul's Boutique." MacDougal said he'd never heard of them, but the name sounded less like a rap group and more like a hair salon. Around this point Keith decided to ignore him and focus on the video feed we were looking at.

Anyway, that's MacDougal. I guess I didn't help change the way he's portrayed in the journal. Oh well. He is what he is.

Monday, June 27, 2005

Perception

Not even a week after I talk about plutonium and RTGs in a post, the New York Times writes a horrible peice about how the United States is going to start production of Pu-238 again. The article will probably disappear soon, so here are some choice quotes:

"The substance, valued as a power source, is so radioactive that a speck can cause cancer."

"Plutonium 238 is hundreds of times more radioactive than the kind of plutonium used in nuclear arms, plutonium 239. Medical experts agree that inhaling even a speck poses a serious risk of lung cancer."

Now plutonium isn't something that you want to play around with, I think that much is obvious. Notice though, that no "medical experts" are actually cited... just that there exist medical experts with this opinion. Yes, Pu-238 is 'hundreds' of times more radioactive than Pu-239. Around 280 times, to be exact. And yet it's 8,850 times less radioactive than radon-222, some of which is probably floating around in your home right now. So if inhaling a speck of Pu-238 poses a serious risk of lung cancer... what does that say about radon, which you probably inhale a tiny bit of each day (after all, unlike plutonium, it's already a gas, and a fairly common one at that)? There's nothing about radon in there, though, because that's not the point of the article.

The point of the article, and this is clear if you read between the lines, is not that the government is resuming production of plutonium-238, but that this is a very bad thing. And there certainly are issues with the production of radioactive material. But it's not an article tempered by science. It's speculative, citing anonymous sources, with the exception of an outspoken advocate for keeping Yellowstone National Park "nuclear free" (something I'm all for). Let's understand each other... I'm not a big fan of anything radioactive, or anything that, in general, is going to kill anyone else. I'd like it if the world didn't have any guns at all, but I'm not naïve enough to expect that to happen anytime soon, so in the meantime I'm going to pack and strap in the name of righteousness, and when the time comes when there's no longer a need to carry around guns or make plutonium-238, I'll be first in line to spend the rest of my time making daisy chains.

Back on the topic of perception...

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans were urged to resume their American lifestyles as though America had not just been attacked. The NFL skipped a week, and baseball games were cancelled, and the market closed for a few days, but then came the prevailing notion that if we lived in fear and didn't return to our regularly scheduled lives, "the terrorists had already won." Naturally, this was quickly subject to parody: If I don't eat these jelly donuts, the terrorists have already won... If I don't download six gigs of porn, the terrorists have already won. You get the idea.

But I'm reminded of a scene in "Sneakers", where Marty and Cos are discussing banks. If people think a bank is financially shaky, they will withdraw their money, and pretty soon the bank is financially shaky. It's all in perception. This is how elections are won and lost. To get elected, it doesn't matter or not you're soft on crime, but rather how you are perceived. And this is how products are sold. It doesn't matter whether your detergent gets clothes whiter or not, but rather how the public perceives your detergent. Have you noticed commercials for Tyco and Halliburton recently? These are companies that have a negative perception because of media coverage (right or wrong), and they are running advertisements to change that perception.

This all leads me back to the last mission. I thought I had made this point well, but looking back at it, I may not have. No one was going to kill anyone with the materials we recovered. But two things to consider is that (a) they may have tried, and (b) in doing so, they'd have spooked a good lot of people. That spooking is entirely due to perception, but it's not really a good thing to have an entire country afraid to go to sleep at night, and that's why we act. And while this was probably something that an ordinary agent could have taken care of, there were some extenuating circumstances I can't get into that made the services of American Jones et. al. a necessity.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

RTG

I got back just in time to see the Mariners pull one out in extra innings. Too bad I was too tired to develop coherent thoughts, or I'd have been very excited about it.

So... RTGs. An RTG is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Basically, it's a chunk of radioactive material encased in a shell. The material decays, which generates heat, which gets converted to electricity. It's nice for things like spaceships because it provides constant power for a long period of time. The Russians also used them to power lighthouses... they look sort of like rooftop A/C units. When you put an RTG together, you need a source of radioactive material, which, in the case of Russian RTGs, is usually either strontium or plutonium.

Plutonium is generally the best stuff to use for this, because you get a lot of energy with just a little piece of it. The problem comes when the superpower who controls all of these RTGs wakes up one morning and finds that its empire has crumbled into nothing and its citizens can't even bake bread. So there are thousands of these things just lying around Russia and its former republics, many of whose locations the Russians have forgotten, so they're just waiting for someone to go break them open and try to do some nasty stuff with what's inside.

That's where we move in.

Here's the funny part of all this: you can't even really build an effective bomb with the stuff. At least, not the way you might think. The plutonium in these things is not fissile; that is to say that you can't create a nuclear weapon with it. So maybe you build a dirty bomb with it, spread radiation all over the place, and killing lots of people? Not really. The plutonium is stored as a ceramic, which means it won't dissolve in water and is really tough to render aerosol. Blow it up, and it just breaks into smaller pieces of ceramic. And despite what most people think about plutonium, it isn't that dangerous... cyanide is more poisonous, and some isotopes of cobalt are more harmful from a radiological standpoint.

It's the perceived danger that's the problem. A dirty bomb with plutonium in it creates what some folks like to call "mass hysteria". People hear the word plutonium and freak out. America panics. Anyone from that area who dies from cancer in the next thirty years blames it on the dirty bomb. Oversight committees publish their findings, saying that America knew all about the risk well before it happened and did nothing. America becomes angry; demand retribution; depression and recession follow. So we intervene.

The mission. Without getting into too much detail, an RTG over there was vandalized, which isn't too uncommon (usually thieves looking for scrap metal). A couple of enterprising gentlemen found the casing, realized what it was, and figured they could make some good money selling it (and some others they managed to find), to some other enterprising gentlemen. So we swooped in. The whole thing was over in about five minutes. No shots, no injuries, just a couple of arrests, and a couple of items handed over to the Ministry Of Defense, who were none to happy to have us doing their job for them. Honestly, it wasn't something that they couldn't have done themselves, except that, well, they couldn't have done it themselves.

I might write more about this later. I need some more sleep.

Friday, June 17, 2005

High Dive

Well, miracle of miracles, night passed smoothly into day without so much as a word from Chapter. And the High Dive was awesome. We agreed to go there early, me because I was hungry, and Matt because he wanted to see the opening acts. "It's an insult not to see the opening act. You wouldn't walk into a play for just the final act, would you?" Point taken, especially after seeing the impossibly cute keyboardist for a band called "The Hope" (the singer wasn't too hard on the eyes either). It took me about twenty minutes to find out who they were (during which time I also found out that the keyboardist was married). They are some talented musicians, though. Matty was flipping out because there was some dude from Screaming Trees there.

Matt Shaw was pretty damned good, too, although I was more into The Hope, maybe because I like female singers better than guys. But ribs, beer, and good music: not a bad night at all, until the ride home, when Matty started laying some heavy stuff on me. He had a few to drink, not bad, but enough to get him going. The long and the short of it is that sometimes Angie has a ton of work to do for the firm, and it's distracting to have Matty around. She tried sequestering herself, but "he keeps buggin'". And he's bothered by this, which I guess any husband would be if their wife asked them to leave the house for a good period of time. What interests me more is that he's got relationship problems because he's too attentive, and I had relationship problems because I wasn't attentive enough. But at any rate, he had a good bitch session, and I just nodded and agreed with everything until he shut up. He's asleep on the couch right now and I'm about to wake him up and kick him out so I can go to work. Funny how that is...

Thursday, June 16, 2005

A Day In The Life

I thought maybe I'd go through a typical day at work, so you could see how close it is to your own office job. I don't think they are so very different.

I usually stroll in around 9 am, sometimes later. There's no "face time" or standard clockpunching time, but we're expected to be professional and show up when summoned, subject to your ability to provide an adequate excuse for disappearing. For example, if you were at a graduation ceremony and got a call, you wouldn't leave immediately. You'd slip away from the afterparty in search of ice, or napkins, or whatever, then lament about be unavoidably detained when you returned six hours later, and be called irresponsible by your aunt's friends.

The office itself is pretty vanilla. I can't describe it in detail, but it's out in the open, albeit in a low traffic area. From what I understand, the government owns a good deal of surrounding property, and manages it under a real estate front company. Anyway, we've got our logo right there on the side of the building, and if you walked in, you'd be greeted by an enthusiastic tour operator who could drop your ass on a moment's notice if things went South. Those of us who work there barely get a second look unless our attempts to access the inner sanctum fail. The inner sanctum is where the cloak-and-dagger stuff goes down.

As you may be able to guess, the inner sanctum doesn't have any windows, but there's plenty of light. Offices are spread out around the outer ring, cubicles the inner ring, and the datacenter and main conference room in the middle. Corner offices are reserved for meetings as well. The setup is actually really nice.

The first thing I usually do when I get in is sit down and go through e-mail. Chapter SOP states that any e-mail with an Important flag must be read first, so naturally every e-mail that anyone ever sends is flagged as Important. There's also a few folks who don't consider the Important flag enough, so they show up in my office seconds after sending the e-mail, inquire as to whether I've read it or not, and then proceed to read it to me aloud over my shoulder. Yes, e-mail is a wonderful time-saving communication vehicle.

Around the time I'm reading e-mail, MacDougal usually comes by and chats me up for a short period of time, moreso if I've just returned from someplace. He has too much pride to admit it, but I think he misses being in the field. So that'll take anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour, depending on how loquacious the dude is, and how many people pop in to ask if I've read their e-mail. Around ten is when the real work starts getting done.

From ten until closing, I'll work on mission briefs, finish paperwork, help out with intel analysis, and sit in on any number of meetings... occasionally with other field agents, usually with office intel. We've got translators, audio/video processors, communications guys, gadget guys, satellite operators, you name it. These are typically short, just status updates, new revelations, things like that. Mission planning meetings are longer, made up of a cross-functional group of people, usually headed by Jennings or Wallace.

Once or twice a week I like to sit in with the tech guys to see what they're working on, because it's usually something really cool, and when it's not, at least they've got a PS2 in the lab. There's an optional two o'clock every day to go over the general state of everything. It's pretty dry; most people skip it in favor of the Big Board on the back wall of the datacenter. The Big Board lists every country or region that we track and the relative level of activity. Think of it like a mini-DefCon, or maybe the color system they use over at DHS. It's a quick way to assess how active the world is. It's also good for giving people conversational topics... "So, things are pretty busy in Africa today, huh?"

Aside from the tedium of work, there's plenty of "corporate culture" to keep the place stimulated. We're close enough to a couple of golf courses such that we spend a lot of time on the links. "Field work," we call it jokingly. We've got a shooting range on the lower level that's a good source of amuse-- er, training for the field agents, and recently the tech guys have been drooling over a new simulation and modeling package they'd been waiting for, which "completely blows out of the water anything you can buy commercially". But by far the most fun comes when someone visits the front office. It happens only once or twice a month, someone just comes strolling in from nowhere to inquire about travel services. It's funny because we don't advertise... people just see the company logo and are bored or curious or whatever so they stop in. Of course, the whole place looks just like a touring operation should, and Patrice or Andy is more than happy to go over brochures with them, or sit with them while they look through our photo albums. The best part, though, is when they inevitably get down to the price of a tour, and our dedicated service representatives recommend to them in hushed tones the name of a real tour company... "Look, I could get fired for this... but this tour is a ripoff. You should check out Big Expeditions. I'll give you the number." It's hysterical every single time... we all hover around the surveillance monitor waiting for it.

And that's about it. Clearly, the missions are much more exciting... when they're actually planned correctly. Matty wants to head out to the High Dive in Fremont tonight to see a guy named Matt Shaw. I don't know what he sounds like... Matty compared him to The Postal Service, and I don't have a clue who they are, but Matty knows his music. If he says the dude is good, the dude is good... and BBQ at the High Dive kicks ass. So cross your fingers and hope that my night isn't horribly interrupted.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Flux

This is annoying.

As of late May, I've been expecting to get shipped out of here on assignment. I have avoided making any sort of near-term plans, and have been non-commital about dates in the future, because I was planning on spending early June overseas. Then we waited... and waited... and waited... and finally Jennings greenlights the thing post-haste. Abby and I were supposed to come in bright and early to get briefed and outfitted, but ten minutes into the brief, shit gets interrupted, and Abby gets pulled off to work on some thing that was supposed to be done but now apparently isn't, and this "has-to-be-done-by-the-weekend" mission has now been pushed off indefinitely. But of course, I'm still basically "on call", ready to leave at a moment's notice, even though I have no idea who'll be coming with me, if anyone. This is called poor management.

Matty called... he wants to go out on Thursday and stay over at my place. Angie is on some sort of deadline with the court and she'll be working at home through the night, so she wants him out of the house. I don't really understand it, but I guarantee you they don't shift priorities on her at the last minute. And I can almost guarantee you that I get a call from Jennings around midnight Thursday night. I'll keep you posted.

Gearing Up

I'm gearing up this morning and heading out sometime this evening. This one should only be a couple of days. I'll be working with Abby Imposimato, which is about all I could ever ask for. She's professional, committed to the job, doesn't screw around. And, as an added bonus, I'm not attracted to her whatsoever, so there's no chance of distraction.

I'd imagine that's one of the misconceptions that people have about this business... that on every mission there's a Holly Goodhead or a Pussy Galore. I hate to ruin the illusion for everyone, but that's just what it is... an illusion. While on occasion you meet an especially fine Tatiana, she's there because your contact has lots of money, not because she's looking for someone to take her on a love jaunt to the South Seas. And the ones that are interested are the ones to watch out for, lest you end up like MacDougal, taking antibiotics for a nasty strain of gonorrhea. I'm not saying we don't get girls... I'm just saying it's not quite the way pop culture makes it out to be.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Bad Storm Rising?

Some words of encouragement before we begin... we've decided who the governor is... it took a long time but we did it. Now let's take that momentum, build the monorail, bury the Viaduct, and bring peace and harmony to this great land.

Ahem.

Things have been busy. The intel department has been sifting through buckets and buckets of stills and videos, and let's just say the some unpleasant folks look to be planning some unpleasant business, and we may need to intervene. I got called in Sunday to help out with intel, which put a serious ruin on my weekend, and only now do I have spare time to log these thoughts. Jennings sent the field agents home early and told us to take tomorrow off as well. Given his track record, that means I'll be flying out sometime next week. I'll keep you posted.

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Public Market

As most of you know, Seattle has a rather famous Public Market down off Pike Street. For a long time (I have no idea how long) there was free one hour parking for shoppers, and just recently they started charging $3 an hour. I know all of this because Gruber wouldn't shut up about it today. Supposedly it costs the market a million dollars a year and they need to recoup that by charging for parking, but you just know that they're making money off the whole thing, and its not the tourists who pay for that but the people who really support the market, and it's really inconvenient for him to drive all that way and then have to pay parking and if the baguette sandwiches at Le Panier weren't the best in the city he wouldn't bother anymore and as it stands he might not go anyway and he might even write a letter...

Deep breaths, my friend, deep breaths.

The best part of all this is... it's not like Gruber pays for it anyway. Unless you go out and start buying his-and-hers Bentleys, the agency takes care of all your expenses. He doesn't pay for the baguette or the parking, or the gas or even that tacky, beat-up, "vintage" Nash Rambler he drives to get there. The faux moral outrage was threatening to ruin the afternoon until Wallace pulled a Reservoir Dogs and announced, loud enough for everyone to hear, "Excuse me, Mr. Pink, but the last [expletive] thing you need is another baguette sandwich."