Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [78]
After a long ten seconds the guard nodded to her, clicked off his flashlight, and waved her through. She waited for the barrier to come up, then pulled through the checkpoint and into the parking lot. The security procedure she’d just undergone was the same for every employee at the NCTC, at all hours, every day, from the lowest-grade analyst to the director himself. The fact that she was the number two at Liberty Crossing was immaterial to the security guards, who seemed to develop amnesia for faces and vehicles and names within seconds of their passing through the checkpoint. It was not a good idea to get friendly with the guards. They were paid to be suspicious, and they took the onus seriously. Nor were they known for their sense of humor. The whole thing vaguely reminded Mary Pat of the Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” episode: step forward, place your order, step right, pay, take soup, leave. In this case it was pull forward, show badge, speak only if spoken to, wait for nod, then pull ahead. Deviate at your peril.
It was a hassle sometimes, especially on days when she had gotten a late start and wasn’t able to make her usual Starbucks pit stop, but Mary Pat wasn’t about to complain. What they did was important, and woe be the idiot who thought otherwise. In fact, a few morons had over the years made the mistake of taking lightly what the guards did—usually some jackass trying to do a rolling stop and quick badge-flash—and had gotten a weapons-drawn, police-style felony stop for their trouble. A few had even made the mistake of later complaining about the treatment. Not many of those still had jobs at Liberty Crossing.
She pulled into her personal parking space, which was separated from the rest by only a special hash mark on the curb. More security: Names were personal details, and personal details were potential tools for bad guys. Again, not a likely scenario, but here it wasn’t about odds but rather comprehensiveness. Control what you can, because there’s a hell of a lot you can’t.
She walked through the lobby and made her way to the heart of the NCTC and her “office,” as it were, the operations center. While the rest of the NCTC was all warm wood furniture and pleasant earth-toned carpeting, the operations center was something straight out of the television show 24—an oft-joked-about subject here.
At ten thousand square feet, the operations center was dominated by a handful of wall-sized display screens, on which were projected the hot threat or incident or raw data of the minute or hour—given the NCTC’s mission as an intelligence clearinghouse, it was more often than not the former.
Dozens of computer workstations with ergonomic keyboards and multiple wraparound flat-screen LCD monitors manned by analysts from the CIA, FBI, and NSA filled the center space, and at either end sat a raised and glassed-in watch center, one for the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, one for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. In any given calendar day the NCTC could see upward of ten thousand cables come across its electronic desk, any one of which could be a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that, if left unassembled, could cost American lives. Most pieces turned out to be trivial, but all were analyzed with equal care.
Part of the problem was translators, or a lack thereof. A good chunk of the data they looked at every day came to them raw, in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, or any of a half-dozen other dialects that were just different enough from their root language to require a specialist translator, which were hard enough to find themselves, let alone translators who could pass the kind of vetting necessary to work at the NCTC. Add to that the sheer volume of traffic the operations center saw and you got a recipe for data overload. They’d developed a pigeonhole program for categorizing incoming intercepts so high-priority stuff got reviewed first, but that was more art than science; often they found important nuggets only after they’d filtered down through the system, having lost their relevance and context along the way.
The translator problem was