Survival Of The Fittest

Diana preferred meetings outside of her own office, and she preferred walking to sitting. The Hart building was just big enough to get lost in. The exterior was a bit too clean and polished. Didn’t remind her much of the cozier floor space back in Jefferson.

Garland she’d hired two years ago, and he had already become the best chief of staff she’d ever had. He was uncannily good at finding her when she was roaming. The stub of her heel clicked with each step through the atrium’s sea of marble. Garland took two rushed strides for every one she took.

“Dossier’s already been prepared for your meeting with the Monsato exec.”

“Masters,” Diana corrected out of habit, without intent.

“Right you are, Senator.” A binder was rifled through, posed between them while Diana glanced at it out of the corner of her eye. “Mr. Masters is still skeptical about the bill’s controls on GMO research, all possible counterarguments he’ll bring up are highlighted. Per usual.” The brightness of the skylights faded as the two of them clipped a corner, Senator Dupree rushed the other way with the classic ‘don’t even look at me’ worry lines creasing his face.

He’d had it rough these past few weeks- they all had.

“After your meeting with Gustafson I can schedule a quick check in with the other Agri committee if you want.”

“Shouldn’t be necessary. One of them needs to battle plan they’ll call.” Diana made a point of making it known that you called her via cell. You called the office number if you wanted an intern.

The summer interns were heading home at the end of the month when the Senate entered recess. She’d handpicked these four from fifty-some vetted applicants, had ended up picking them all from Harris-Stowe. Qualifications in abundance, plus, they’d been almost violently charming in the phone interviews. One of them made it abundantly clear without much in the way of proof that he was being explored to play basketball overseas in Asia. Diana had grown to love them in their few months together, and she was prepared to recommend them personally. She wondered if her name recognition would go far in the realm of professional sports.

Or at all. Who knew who Diana O'Shaughnessy was you chopped off the Senator part?

“Let Teague know that Jacob and I are probably going to put in a memo sometime soon.” Soon was always a fairly precise term when Diana was involved. She didn’t like mucking around with vaguery much.

“... We might actually get something useful out of this.”

“That being likely?” Garland risked the quips. Another thing Diana liked about him.

“Hardly.”

She remembered his office door- she’d visited often enough, in times of crisis and times of inanity alike. Third from the left when you entered the hallway right by the elevator shafts. He had a particularly unenviable view of all of a busy intersection and a few manicured trees from the nearby green space if one craned their neck just right. But his was still probably the homiest office in the building. Something about it- he just had an eye for that sort of thing.

Diana entered without knocking, and spoke without even waiting to be seated.

“Danya’s got to be shacking up with Canon or something- they just have to be loving all this media frenzy up in the White House that isn’t about Canon tweeting about banning queers from the Coast Guard whatever nonsense.”

Garland quietly shut the door behind her, leaving her alone with Senator Gustafson. She barely smiled, even in such familiar territory.

“That aside. How’s your day been?”

Jacob Gustafson glanced over his shoulder as he heard the door open, to see who it was entering. Upon seeing it was Diana, he immediately relaxed, and turned back to staring at the complex and, to the untrained eye, indecipherable diagram that he’d drawn. Jacob had an open door policy, by and large, but there were exceptions to that rule - a list of exceptions that, in an increasingly acrimonious and uncivil DC where leaking was common-place and outright fabrication becoming scarily mundane, had been growing. Diana would never be such an exception. There were cut from the same cloth - pragmatic red-state Democrats trying to stick up for fundamental values and good governance in an increasingly turbulent Washington.

And they happened to get on.

He chuckled at her - well, was it a joke, a quip, an early scene of descent into conspiracy nuttery? - her comment about Canon and Danya, and turned around again to make sure his office was halfway presentable. It wasn’t. An eclectic array of takeout boxes dominated one corner of the small conference table in the middle of the room. The rest, taken up with papers and files. The corner with the takeout was by far the neatest.

Senator Gustafson was the Ranking Member - and, in his humble opinion, rightful Chairman - of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. It was farm bill season, and those deadlines would remain in place regardless of what crisis of the week hung over DC. The careful and punctilious work of guiding food and rural development policy had to go on. And Jacob was, at heart, a reformer. Not a reformer for the sake of reform, but if something needed to be fixed, well, Jacob prided himself on having the relevant skills and the publicly spirited mindset needed to get done what needed to be done.

But Jacob took the world as it was. He understood the ways of the world, understood that imperfect landscapes called for unconventional means of traversal. To get something done, especially when a coalition of vested interests stood in form opposition, you had to fight back. Assemble your own coalition. Right now, he was working on a way to repeal or reform monetisation and cargo preference requirements. It was tricky. The policy case was overwhelming, but having to think of some cost-effective way of nullifying the shipping lobby was tricky - or, failing that, he would have to assemble an equal or greater special interest force.

He picked up his cell phone - holding it with a care and delicacy of someone who had no idea how durable the device was - and after a few seconds of inept fumbling, took a photo of the board that he’d drawn up. He paused. Jacob looked at the image he’d taken. Out of focus. He scowled. “Can you uh…” He held out his phone. “Take a photo of this?” Gustafson pointed to the whiteboard. “This phone should have enough resolution to uh...take it well, but my hands are shaky.”

“Can’t complain,” Jacob mused, in response to her question, before doing exactly that. “My back’s killing me, Cara’s fighting with her local homeowners’ association so there’s press sniffing around there, and our distinguished colleague Senator Winters has welched on backing my amendment to S 118, so that’s all great.” He clicked his tongue, turning to face her.

“So how are you? How’re things at Homeland Security?” Jacob asked, knowing what the tone of the answer would be already. The Homeland Security committee had been one of his old stomping grounds, but keeping a seat on Appropriations had required casting most of his older committee assignments aside. His departure had represented a lamentable loss of institutional memory, but it was what it was.

“I’m guessing pretty...shit.” He took a seat at the edge of the table, leaning back and pulling out, from under a nondescript pile of folders, a folder that his staff had prepared on SOTF. “So. What’s the policy line?”

Diana's immediate target once she reappraised her bearings were the takeout boxes. She had a solidly austere relationship with her environment- all things had their place, up to and including in the trash can. Her critical eye for detail- other's words, not her own- could have landed her a mayoral post somewhere if she'd been willing to forgo all the repetitive dealing and posturing that came with a seat in the Senate chamber. She'd been tempted more than a handful of times, and the most recent was a still fresh memory of a 2016 circus spectacle.

An armful of styrofoam shapes tumbled into the irrelevance known as landfill-designated. She only then realized- recycling.

Old habits died hard. She had short sleeves on anyways, so moving things from one trash can to another was no skin off her bones. She started to speak only then, having meditated on Jacob's words all the while.

"You know when the progressives start coming for us, the labels on fruit are going to be the least of our concern," Diana moved through things out of order- it was her style, to reassess, re-sort purely based on what first came to mind.

"I might be able to whip Susans to get it done, actually. Labeling exports is a transaction cost, and Susans has been taking heat from a lobby representing the Port of Seattle- both sides of the equation, higher costs for the admin, lower wages for the workers. Think they last had a pay raise... don't even know. Not my state." She bustled over to Jacob's desk, observing the few family photos buried in and among all the mess of legislation and rank-and-file bureaucracy. "Is this one of Cara recent?" She carefully picked out the right photo frame- the one time she'd ever made a mistake with Jacob was when she'd accidentally learned he was a widower. It had been her first term in office. She could likely never forget for the rest of her life how much she'd wanted to throw herself out his window in that exact moment.

"She's looking fit," she murmured, impressed. "How recent was her second child? Just last year. Remind her, by the way, that homeowners associations are a Mafia. The whole US government can't handle the damn things."

Finally, she acquiesced to Jacob's request and scooped the phone out of his hands. Her way of teasing him, when he had two hands worth of butterfingers and her own old ass could even curate her own Instagram account (cats and grandchildren, what else would it be).

"How are things at Homeland," she blandly echoed. "Let's see. Three some odd years ago we lost one of our best and now things have generally remained all downhill from there." She shook her head briefly, affording Jacob's ego no further overtures, even in jest. "Like you said. Shit, and flies all over it. This way and that way and..." She trailed off, musing.

"As much as the media unfairly rags on us for doing our jobs, it looks even worse from the inside sometimes. Anyways, there's petty snipe fights across the aisle that the media hasn't picked up on yet. A lot of other Committees are trying to muscle in on SOTF related... clout," she concluded, grimacing with distaste at the necessary choice of words. "The memo from on high is that we try to keep our language neutral and objectively somber as possible. I think they think the Republicans are more likely to self-destruct trying to handle Version Seven than we are."

Jacob allowed himself a raised eyebrow at how Diana set about clearing away the food containers without waiting to be asked. Not that he could complain - when the workload was heavy, he stopped caring about keeping a tidy office, yet at the same time having a messy office added exponentially to his stress. “Make yourself at home,” Jacob still commented, as if on auto-pilot.

“Susans, huh?” Jacob leaned forward, intrigued by the prospect, eager to hear her justification. He then leaned straight back, pondering the logic of her proposal. “Aligning with shipping...see, I hadn’t considered allying with them, because my thing is, as you know, about a different COOL system rather than scrapping it altogether, so they’ll know it’s just an alliance of convenience, and then there’s…” Jacob looked back at the whiteboard. “Plus they’d hate me over the cargo preference thing. Then again that might not be a big deal for Washington ports…” He stopped thinking out loud and shook his head clear. “Thanks, Diana. You’ve given me a lot to think about.” Very few Senators from non-coastal states took an interest in these important issues of maritime trade. Jacob appreciated help from wherever he could get it.

Diana asked about his daughter. Jacob smiled. He was proud of her. Couldn’t keep a smile off his face whenever he was asked about her. “Yup. Little Steve is now...ten months old.” About as old as his namesake had been, Jacob thought forlornly. “Cara’s a good mother. And she was actually telling me the other day how great she thinks women like you are for our politics.” Granted, that exact sentiment had been voiced in 2012, but it still held true. “She’s not used to being on the wrong side of the homeowners’ associations. Her only prior experience with them was the one in Billings where...well, I was the metaphorical godfather.”

“How’s Nancy?” Jacob asked, to return the favour.

Then the conversation turned to business. Jacob’s smile returned as she started by praising him - flattery worked well with him, he didn’t waste the energy pretending otherwise around close friends - but it didn’t stay there for long. The challenges facing Homeland Security were insurmountable.

“Yeah, Canon is not a good president for these times,” Jacob mused, putting his feet up on the table in the space that Diana had created. “I actually overheard some of the junior Appropriations staffers putting together a betting pool - or drinking game, I’m not sure - about how he’d react.” Jacob chuckled, knowing full well that, if it got out, it’d be a far greater controversy than the more meaningful flaws that they were satirising. But dark humour was how they coped. He was sure the victims were making far darker quips. “Apparently the best bet is that he’ll find a tweet from one of the victims that criticises him and he’ll flip out. Or that he’ll go for a photo op in Chattanooga and be smiling and giving a thumbs up with the families of the victims.”

“But hey, nothing as bad as that time McAllister forgot to cross a t in a letter to a dead vet’s family,” Jacob added, sardonically. “I get the political strategy side of things - be composed and statesmanlike and let Canon do his thing and maybe help us win back that Tennessee seat in November.” Jacob shrugged. “I get that that’s the politics strategy, and it’s great, and fine, and good, but...we gotta do something.”

“And everyone said that, okay, Canon is going to change DC and revolutionise politics and shake up the status quo and, you know that’s bullshit, I know that’s bullshit, but...maybe it’s worth trying to crack this nut again.” Jacob had done some good stuff in his Homeland Security days. Important stuff. He’d become an expert on government efficiency savings, helped protect the integrity of the nation’s critical infrastructure, done some good stuff on disaster management. But SOTF had...never been cracked. There were moments where they thought they’d done it. Where they thought that, surely, they must have closed off the opportunities and eliminated the funding. But nope. Time and time again, they were proven wrong. It haunted him. He felt a degree of responsibility, and running away to Appropriations did not absolve him of that.

“But I guess that’s why you’re here.”

Even the question about Nancy could flounder for now. When it was time to talk business Diana didn't appreciate much in the way of tangents, up to and including her own daughter. Whatever else was scheduled for that day, she'd called Jacob for a very specific reason. Much as he'd actively worked to jump ship and vanish into the brackish waters of the ship's irrepressible wake he was still, somewhere at heart, one of the best they'd ever had in Homeland.

Diana fiddled with the settings on the camera, getting the marker on the board crystal clear to the pixel, then set the phone down on his desk. Another matter for another time.

"They've managed to keep him quiet so far, so one of his retainers must be working overtime."

No polling existed yet for Tennessee. Diana couldn't yet see how a generic god-fearing Republican suit could win against one of Tennessee's most popular historical governors, but she supposed that was her age beginning to truly show. Not apparent in her energy, not in her stature, but perhaps in her understanding of what America had become.

"I wasn't saying it from the beginning. I knew Canon was going to be cronies and bad optics and gutting our national preparedness," she ticked through the boxes, fast. "Neither of us are the face of boldness on Capitol Hill, I'm well aware. But you're totally right. The tides might be changing."

"Might be washing me out, for that matter." She'd seen what that pollster had run on her own race just last week- two days before the fateful 13th of July that had been the gnat chewing out the biggest itch in her brain. She made it clear with the pace of her aside- through it, then gone, that she didn't care to make that a whole digression.

"And now might be the time to do something a bit crazy. Washington's in a rut and in chaos at once. We might be able to make real progress on SOTF- for once, maybe for all. I think the electorate might be there for it, if we have the right idea. And I'm telling you- no one in this building could come up with the right idea. One exception."

She contemplated him briefly, in between all her ranting at the furniture and ceiling.

"Maybe." A humorless smile.

Jacob shrugged. Diana was right to dismiss the point about Canon being a force for change. “Okay, fine, neither of us believed that malarkey, but a lot of our constituents do, so sometimes it’s a useful roleplaying exercise to pretend like it’s worthy of any credence whatsoever. And yup, the tides are changing. It’s up to people like us to make sure some good things come out of the chaos.” She was clearly gearing up to focus on the reason for her meeting - ticking the photo off the to-do list and not answering the question about Nancy - and Jacob knew better than to try and make small talk when Diana was focused on business.

So he stood up and picked up a marker pen. Jacob highly doubted that he was truly the one to do the thing - he’d tried and failed before - but fuck it, there was something invigorating about how much esteem his old Homeland colleagues placed in his capabilities.

The Fog of War was one of Jacob's favourite documentaries. Eleven lessons from Robert McNamara - the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam buildup, who would later go on to admit that he made a lot of bad calls. It summarised, pithily and astutely, lessons that Jacob thought the whole national security community should know.

Jacob turned the whiteboard around, revealing its empty other side. "The old McNamara trick. Empathise with your enemy." Robert McNamara was one of those figures in history that Jacob admired. It was less for what he did, the Gustafson family's national brand had been built on opposing the Vietnam War. More in the sense that, well, McNamara had learned from his mistakes. If he did it all over again, things would go better. Too late for everyone caught up in that sordid quagmire, but lessons could be learned from him.

"Now, it's tricky because we don't know what the fuck their motives are." There were twice as many theories as there were people speculating. It was madness. Some people argued they were making a point, others that they were agents of foreign powers, others that they had some more conventional aim such as greed. "We can't negotiate with them. Even if we wanted to, we can't." Jacob looked at the board. He should start writing something. "But what we can maybe do is...get into their heads."

"Diana, pretend you're Danya. Dianya." He cringed at his own joke, but didn't let it disrupt his flow. "Let's go back a couple of versions. You've just taken hold of the operation. You want to do a new version. What's on your to do list?" Jacob split the whiteboard into columns, titling the first 'shopping list'. He started writing.

Base

Collars - remote detonation, tamper proof

Weapons and joke weapons

Bags for the students

Knockout gas

Island - usually some structures?

Cameras

Possibly bribes, human resources? Catering?

Jacob took a step back, grabbing another marker from the side and chucking it towards Diana. "We need to be methodical. We can't do shit on the motives, which just leaves the means and opportunity. And maybe, just maybe, the mistake has been that we're way too caught up on the motives and the opportunity. Because it's the means that sets this group apart. That's why there haven't been any real copycats. Hard to replicate this shit, even in the most superficial and flimsy way."

Jacob shrugged. "Is what I'd argue."

"People like us," she wordlessly repeated, her dry lips still stuck together.

Jacob taking up the chalk again, that was in some odd way an inspiring sight. Like innocent eyes freshly drenched in wartime propaganda- all the pomp and circumstance warming down through the skin and into the blood. Diana was well past the age where she knew better, and in some odd way all the more touched by the alien sensation of understanding, merely comprehending the presence of a man who was, in his own quiet and understated way, an American hero.

Funny he was bringing up McNamara.

"Understanding motive is a crapshoot. We can't decode the motives of our own civilian population sometimes, let along that of a non-state actor." Her observation was blunt, a quick pen-stroke neatly inserted on top of a sentence far more thorough in mass and volume. Highlighting- it didn't change the meaning, but it emphasized a point cynical as it was inherently irrelevant. Good decisions were made in spite of a lack of understanding.

"Right. I'm Dianya." The marker found an uneasy home looped through two of her off-hand fingers, shoved aside as quickly as it was entrusted to her. She still had Jacob's phone- now put aside. These particular proceedings would only ever exist in memory.

"It was all about the idea of a foreign state, by the time I took over." Two years after Senator Gustafson had taken his leave of absence from matters outside the American border. "Artho had to be a proxy of China, Russia, maybe Iran if you could justify the stretch. Too much infrastructure, too much tech." She found her place by his side. She was the shorter one, the one who cut the less intimidating shape out of her silhouette. "The AT was somebody's Taliban."

"Let's ignore the tree we've been barking up for the better part of the past half-decade, then. Try something else. If you want all these things," she stabbed at Jacob's column, item by item with the now-open tip of the marker bouncing like a machine gun's dance steps. "You go private. Fastest way to make a ton of money disappear without accountability."

"So I set up my supply line in a purposely fragmented way. Shell companies," she started to write everything she said in a very efficiently incomprehensible form of shorthand, doctors finding themselves out-scribbled.

"Intermediate supplies. Easy to move across borders without attracting attention. Then: I assemble everything in house. So the most important asset for me is... personnel." The one word she actually felt the need to size accordingly, that the human eye could make sense of it. "The AT has world-class geniuses in their ranks, assuming this model. Their recruiting must be through the roof. They target the sort of people you'd notice vanishing?" A rhetorical question. She shook her head.

"Plenty of smart people for cheap. Disaffected. Forgotten. Russian scientists who vanished after the USSR dissolved. You find them, you make them loyal to the cause. So ideological motive is possible- money can't buy this well sealed a ship." She humorlessly observed her own brainstorming aloud. "I make it sound like Danya is actually me."

"The foreign state argument would have been nice and easy," Jacob mused. "Foreign states are easy to deal with. At least, they make sense to the traditional national security mind." If SOTF was the construct of a state, all of the traditional mechanisms of diplomacy and espionage could be used. That was a reassuring thought - but that those traditional methods had not yet borne fruit suggested that they never would.

"You're right. We need to think private." That required a whole sea change in how they assessed the group's capabilities, procedures, hierarchies, vulnerabilities, motives. "Maybe call in the IRS, Danya could be the next Al Capone." An irreverent quip, but there was truth behind it.

Diana worked through the implications methodically, following the idea to its conclusion. Jacob nodded as she worked. When it came to fighting SOTF, no truly original ideas were left. But this angle was certainly one that had never been given its due, never followed as accurately or comprehensively as it deserved. An egregious oversight on behalf of the legislative branch, when laid out so clearly.

"In which case, the most profitable line of inquiry - and this will be very unsexy and unglamorous work but it might help along the way with other issues - is transnational crime. White collar crime. Interpol funding. Corruption. Stuff like that. Just to...make it harder, less easy, less smooth, for them to operate, even if we don't catch them in the net ourselves." Jacob made a mental note of that.

"Maybe it's not recruitment, maybe it's kidnapping?" Jacob suggested, as a possibility. "To step into the Danya role for a second - not to steal your thunder, you've definitely made it your own - but maybe his focus is less on recruiting people, and more on forcing people. Or tricking people. Or blackmailing people. But you're right. This clearly requires talent, and talent that needs more than just mere money to get on board, given the necessary scale. So personnel. That's our big focus."

Diana's comparison to the Taliban - though used to illustrate the likely fruitless theory of there being a state sponsor - had been sitting in the back of Jacob's mind. Finally, he worked out why it had had such an impact on him. "Is it...is it possible we might have funded the AT, we might have trained them?" Jacob clicked his tongue. A scary prospect, not least as it was very politically sensitive. The very last thing he wanted to do was to feed into some nutjob's conspiracy theory that this was in some way a false flag attack or that the deep state was somehow pursuing some duplicitous ends through deplorable strategies. "Not as a conspiracy but, maybe we did some work on explosive collars and abandoned islands and some egghead went AWOL or it fell into the wrong hands." It would have been far easier to pursue that line of inquiry, in a reasoned and measured way, under the previous administration, Jacob realised, scowling.

"It is entirely possible the IRS has flirted with the AT apparatus before." Diana quickly fired the alternative back. "And just hasn't noticed the strings attached to the puppetmaster it tossed behind bars."

But of course, Jacob did have the broader context in mind at a pace almost faster than she could supply. Supply, that was the operative word. Like Jacob said, it was decidedly not captivating work. There was little in the way of optics in hunting criminals through tax forms and spaghetti-noodle legalese. Nobody worked the bully pulpit for the fine print. In a way that made it all the more important an avenue of attack, far as Diana could try to reduce the complex pieces of America's single greatest terrorism nightmare to anything approximating a coherent microcosm of itself.

"Corruption in third world countries. A monster to solve even if the AT had nothing to do with it." Diana sighed, observing the almost palpable weight of decades of questionable American foreign policy spreading like tons of fresh manure over her shoulders. "I doubt I could convince anyone in Homeland to make any major initiatives on that sort of by-the-numbers theoretically low-return operation." Speaking so highly of their colleagues behind closed doors, truly a classic topic of conversation between any two members of Congress.

"Likely not much net we can weave. Not unless our idea suddenly becomes the predominant one with the top brass."

Diana felt the momentary sting of being robbed of her title as the almighty Danya. Ah, the things she could have done if she'd had his sort of blank check seemingly limitless power outside the boundaries of international law or human decency.

"Kidnapping," she repeated stoically, writing down the single word on the board. An idling circle formed around it, slow fingers reflecting the depth of the thought.

"You'd expect there to be more leaks then. Remember STAR? Or the Version 4 rescue. There should have been way more defections and turnover if Danya's-" their, the two standing in that room, for now- "modus operandi was coercion of any sort. Unless his ability to hold people accountable on threats is above and beyond anything we've ever projected. I'm talking force projection and espionage equivalent to our own military."

An uneasy silence followed. Diana had just iterated one of the most chilling aspects of the unknown quantity that was the AT. An organization that could somehow make an entire island on the Earth vanish for two-some weeks whenever the US government, who had more eyes in the sky than the gods themselves, wanted said island found.

"So we can't discount that possibility, is the problem." Diana finished the circle around Jacob's word with a dull flourish. "The AT may well be far more powerful than we try to limit ourselves to assuming, solely based on what they get away with. That makes most of our theoretical frameworks completely worthless."

She tisked.

"What if," she started. "What if it is our government that produced them in the first place then? But it can't just be some Al Qaeda form of surplus arms and ill-advised training left behind in a warzone- that's just part of it, sure, but not the whole story. The AT is too good- their skill is to the level that I sometimes wonder if our cutting edge is even at their level. They have some asset or combination thereof that is above and beyond our own. Maybe a leak high up in the chain of government projects we don't even have the security clearance to hear about. Something more sinister. But then the problem becomes now I'm just a conspiracy nut."

Jacob nodded. With as complex and labyrinthe a system an organisation such as the AT would have required, one of their shell companies or affiliates had doubtless been caught up in some kind of investigation, some kind of money laundering inquiry, something like that. But it was probably such a mundane crime, or the tip of such a complex structure, that it had not been identified as the threat that it was. "It's a perfect cover, really - standard white collar criminals and tax evasion outfits tend not to be treated as, well, suspects in this particular case." Again, he was brought back to the train of thought surrounding transnational crime, especially of the organised nature.

"All their assets are probably pretty dispersed, too." Jacob was not an accountant, and was not an expert in the global financial markets, but he could imagine that, by diffusely spreading out their various assets and liabilities, they avoided overdependence. The AT had made it very hard to track them down. That was a good working assumption. They certainly were not - especially after the close calls in their early days - likely to leave any easy vulnerabilities exposed.

"Yup. Fighting transnational crime and corruption is the way we've gotta go, and..." Jacob clicked his tongue. Diana was right. There were other priorities in Homeland Security - not least the governmental affairs aspects of its brief and the continuing debates around disaster preparedness. Jacob had to confess that, if the committee couldn't be persuaded to fight transnational crime on its own merits, treating it as part of a convoluted and uncertain anti-SOTF strategy was risky. Especially as the current ethos in the GOP was against any form of international cooperation and development aid, as decreed from the top down. "We'd need somebody on Appropriations - which, hey, it's me - and a Judiciary insider too," Jacob mused, pondering the web of committees that would have a say in this debate. "And a Republican ally. Just to dispel any conspiracy theories about international police and us using the IRS to target conservatives and the like."

Jacob sighed. "It's a tall order."

Diana was right about the risks surrounding coercion. And what she suggested was, indeed, genuinely chilling. Destroyed all the paradigms and policy frameworks, not just with SOTF, but with everything. Every power projection and geopolitical assumption that Jacob had would be jeopardised by such a reality.

Jacob thought for a second, before responding. "Maybe coercion was part of their MO before, but now they've got a small base of loyalists who are, well, committed and implicated now? Or maybe you're right, they do have some fantastic ability to project force and conduct espionage, an ability they garnered from top-level access to US material and expertise, in which case..." Jacob shook his head. "Okay. You're gonna have to take the lead on that line of inquiry, because, in all honesty? I can't see them being that level of threat. Because...well, wouldn't they be doing more? Putting myself into Danya's shoes, if I had that level of capability, I'd probably just transition into mercenary ops."

No. No. That wasn't it.

"Maybe you're right." There were limits to Jacob's imagination, after all. And that was terrifying.

"And maybe we've just signed our own death warrants by stumbling close to this conspiracy." He chuckled.

Diana nodded. Better that at least one of them was talking some amount of sense some of the time. A stretch to assume either of them could be one-hundred percent matching point-for-point. It preferably went that way when one didn't limit themselves to following partisan lines, anyways.

"You're right." She wrote it almost word for word as Jacob described it. Arrows replaced the words that implied the flow of time, but she had some marker-constructed abstraction for his idea. "They could afford to be sloppier when they were smaller. Before they were really on our radar as a collective entity." A mewling hum, at that. "Could be that there's something archival we haven't pursued properly yet. Any sort of former counter-terrorism effort that touches on a former or still current AT mechanism of operation. Those might be easier to suss out with some digging and subpoenaing the right retired official."

Maybe. It was all a maybe.

She also laughed, briefly infected by levity for all of the nonexistent moment before it was promptly dragged back to earth and shattered into give-or-take an infinitely impossible to put back together amount of pieces.

"Well neither of us are strangers to conspiracy, anyways." Going for the one-off quip, even as her tight lips could no longer stretch flexibly around the moment. "We've covered up the skeletons in your closet for heaven knows how many years."

There was the oddest sense that their history together was kindling. Dry, easy to burn up into so much smoke, what with the distressingly simple mess they were trying to unravel between them.

"There is little chance I could get even close to the correct people, if it's a conspiracy that deep rooted. Should we even be following this line of inquiry? If it's true it's not provable. Hardly useful to us, honestly."

She backtracked, a bit.

"The central figures of the AT might have some different motive besides going mercenary." She specifically said central figures for a reason- in deference to the eerily less than totally implausible idea that they could have been any nebulous amount of people living as close to or as far from Washington DC as was possible. "Ideological, so again, it comes back to the idea of there being more loyalists than not."

Jacob chuckled at the mention of conspiracy, but did not give the subject any more attention. He couldn't help but feel that, on that front, he was a wee bit more exposed than Diana. Her skeletons were survivable. His? A few years ago, maybe. But not now.

Jacob started making some notes. The notes that were safe to minute. The notes were the definition of threadbare. Reminders to focus on personnel and recruitment, a list of supplies that were essential end products of whatever production chain they were working on, reminders to look at the transnational crime and inadvertent state sponsor angles. The methodology, as sensitive and politically embarrassing as it was, was not mentioned. The more controversial implications and cynical views on how to pursue these avenues were left out completely. A shame, really, that the details of this potentially historic meeting were largely consigned to memory and memory alone, but the benefits of a more comprehensive record were not worth the risks, no matter how alien those risks were.

Especially in the age of Canon. Jacob could visualise the tweets now - albeit he couldn't help but think in full and grammatically correct sentences. 'Democrats pretend to be terrorists. Weak on terror Democrats ask America to empathise with terrorists. So called moderates blame America for SOTF.' Jacob's seemingly archaic preference for full sentences and moderate punctuation aside, the candor and tone with which their discussions would be construed was tragically predictable.

"Ideological motivation seems likely," Jacob mused, walking over to the window, pondering how it would, at least, be validating if he was shot dead by a sniper. Would prove him right about something, if nothing else. "But what ideological purpose is served by making kids kill each other? Unless it's some hamfisted critique of our schooling system, but I imagine Danya would have told us if his motive was to secure the repeal of No Child Left Behind or something." Jacob shrugged, looking out at the busy intersection. The urban parts of America really needed to reduce their car usage. "Could be general anti-American hysteria, but that would mean we're dealing with a group that has decided it doesn't want to take responsibility and has decided this is the best use of its resources, so..."

"So, motive is a crapshoot." It was very easy to rule out what they couldn't do anything with. Far trickier to develop positive recommendations. "At least, for now. I think once we get a slither of info - just one defection, one piece of actionable intel - then motive could be the key. But it's very all or nothing. And in the meantime, we just need to do what we can to make it difficult. Increase the costs. And we have the broad outlines of a strategy for that." He rather liked his transnational crime strategy.

Jacob grimaced. "V4 could be the key. We might be able to look into what happened there. What went wrong. What went right. Maybe we could find out something crucial about the motives of the former leadership - which, hey, could lead us down an interesting line of inquiry into fixing what's wrong now." He accompanied his train of thought with wavey hand gestures, as if the gesticulation was helping get the blood flowing to his brain. "Maybe get some of the survivors before a closed committee? Obviously I'm sure the intelligence services have looked into this route, but maybe there are some policy implications that we could..."

"Or would that be too harrowing for them? I mean, goodness knows they've survived enough without making them spend time with Senator Winters." Not that he thought that was a comparable trauma, but Winters didn't exactly have oodles of compassion or a sympathetic ear towards mental health ailments.

Diana followed her friend to the window. Parallel to him physically, and in the momentary thought that she might have made herself a target for the shadowy hood and smoky room powers that be. The Illuminati as it were, or whatever new world order was the conspiracy theorists' drink of choice nowadays.

"Right. Motive's a step too far. Not really an issue of subtle cause and effect when its a regular pestilence knocking on our doorstep." She idly stabbed one finger to the glass, smearing it softly with a ghostly echo of her fingerprint.

"Interesting thing about that is that a lot of the V4 debrief is code word classified." Diana's wheelhouse, not Jacob's, driving home the sheer recency despite the sinking feeling that it had been decades since over two-hundred fifty kids had been sentenced to death, stolen through all the protections the most powerful country on earth had supposedly enshrined in their identities as citizens, protections they should have been able to take for granted. "You wouldn't know since I suppose nobody ever had reason to tell you. Beyond all the buzz and the continued media presence from those folks like Nguyen, Kemal, Volkova, a lot of the real data and information we were possibly able to vacuum up from the aftermath is strictly hush-hush." A moment of contemplation, quiet as the void. "Might be that even the commanders in chief don't know what we extracted from that rescue op."

She shook her head, with that cleared the piled-on weight of inevitability from her shoulders. Not the ailment she'd been elected to suffer from- that was restlessness, insomnia.

"I definitely don't, anyways. Nobody in the Gang does."

Winter's name, at least, earned a hollow smirk. The Senate's resident mummified windbag, among many others.

"I doubt we can extract anything from the survivors that would be relevant. Actually though, come to think of it. Possible tangent, but." And the gears started to turn again. Anything relevant to be sacrificed and ground up in the machine of her mind was singled out.

"You've heard about how Holland is trying to excise his Homeland Security from the House investigations into the matter, right? Or has been since, what, tail end of the debacle that was the V6 investigation." More of the same roundabout. Diana could actively understand, consciously, the amount of wear and tear on her own emotional core, the scar tissue that built up. Nancy had children, Cara had children. Grandchildren, possibly being raised in a world where America couldn't protect them from the demons realer than the ones under their beds. And Diana was numb to it.

"Forbes and Holland have been pretty heated about it, according to the bits of gossip I've been able to skim through. So, imagine the House flips like most everyone is expecting it to." Diana personally did not notch victories until they happened- she stressed the word 'imagine', 'expecting', more so than the flamboyant hyperbole of the mainstream media and all it's extremist counterparts. "A shakeup in leadership might see a proper reassignment of priority on the current V7 investigation. Especially if the pundits are right and the upcoming wave of freshmen are juiced up on progressive need for more transparency and due process."

A beat.

"It's so tiny, but it's something where we have so little to work on. A change of the guard can cause something hidden to become a little easier to dig up, when the earth gets disturbed."

And there it was. As was always the case in DC, it came back to committee jurisdiction. Procedural wrangling. Who wielded the gavels. Inane Beltway insider nonsense such as that that was hard to explain - frustratingly, but perhaps justifiably so - to the people at home. The most disturbing thing about what Diana had said was that, well, she was staking everything on a post-midterm shakeup of jurisdictions. That would take months. Action needed to be delivered now. At the very least, hearings had to be initiated, champions of the cause needed to step forward, policy proposals had to be concocted.

A change of guard - with its butterfly effects on how things were done and what priorities were enforced - was the only chance of improving the likelihood of Congress doing something, that was true. There was a systematic blockage on this issue, and unlike so many other systematic blockages, it could not be attributed to standard partisan wrangling or amplified ideological divides. The notion of shaking things up, in the hope that something cumbersome would be dislodged, was an attractive one. Jacob could not spot any risks with it, if nothing else. What works would continue to work, but the slate would be wiped clean for reform on the issues that needed it.

They couldn't wait that long though. Something had to be done.

"I might pop over to the House, then," Jacob murmured. He had good working relationships there. Not enough to singlehandedly break the gridlock, but he had a productive record. "I don't think I can change anyone's heartfelt calculations about where this issue should be assigned, but perhaps I can get some intel, see what can be done in terms of bicameral cooperation."

He turned to face Diana.

"And here's hoping the administration doesn't tweet about it."

"I would be legitimately surprised if he knew how committees worked."

Diana, in turn, faced her old friend.

"You may be the one championing this, going forward." Rare she admitted the pundits were right. Least of all to the faces of friends she had reason to posture around. Electoral pessimism was, in her honest view, a waste of time thorough enough to warrant lecturing of her staff to the effect. Diana was a woman who got things done. Optics be damned, party be damned. Feelings could be tossed aside, all in pursuit of that fleeting spark of earnestness, that belief in justice she'd so stubbornly tried to keep alive like her marriage. All since that day so long ago when she'd first stepped behind the rinky-dink doors of the Jefferson City mayor's office, she'd told herself the sacrifices would never be in vain.

It would be harder to say that when she was on the outside looking in, watching Washington stumble further into dysfunction and ruin.

"I'll be sure to forward you what I can from Homeland. Anything not code word."

And that was all she had left to say. A simple offer, all the implications left unsaid where they belonged. Business as usual.

"Let's finish cleaning up and get out of here."

Not a request.

((Diana O'Shaughnessy meanwhile concluded))