The Awkward Squad

by Ian McDuff

This, of course, is for the ‘Hidden Talents: Smart Boys With Glasses’ Challenge, the last of the four Summer Challenges here.

It’s an AU. It’s about as A as an AU can be.

But I like to think of it as an AH. Alternate History. A counterfactual.

It’s dedicated to all my friendslist at LJ, but particularly to BG, Doc, Cooper, Linc, Merc, Scotty, Megs, Karen, and the Ive.

It was typical of the way a certain necessary but annoying type of mind works – the type of mind that tends to be possessed of counterintelligence men rather than enjoyed by NIOs or by the hard-case case officers in the Directorate of Operations – it was typical of what may be called the Angletonian mindset that there was an institutional myth at Langley, holding the Awkward Squad to be Michael Eisner’s fault. Academically minded senior personnel on the upper floors sometimes went rather too far in turning the professorial parlor game of the counterfactual, of alternate history, to their work and lives and milieu, but, however unjustly, credit for the eventual creation of what became the Awkward Squad went to Eisner, and to one Louis Pearlman.

It will be recalled, of course, that the swift demise of Eisner’s programming blunder, the ‘New Mickey Mouse Club,’ had its roots, in large part, in the scandal that erupted concerning Pearlman’s attempts to break into management in youth-oriented media. The former lackey of the NKOTB machine had managed to change the trend of programming and popular culture overnight, inadvertently and very much to his own disadvantage, when the revelations of his chicanery and darker misdeeds than mere chicanery broke: to the point, after successive Congresses in the Reagan and Bush administrations had held excruciating hearings, that Michael Medved had attributed a reversal of cultural trends to Pearlman and Eisner. The suggestion became the received, conventional wisdom on the subject, well into the 1990s.

‘Rarely,’ George Will wrote at the time, ‘have the concepts of the Law of Unintended Consequences and of the doctrine of the felix culpa intersected in this manner. Before Lou Pearlman’s being exposed and Michael Eisner’s incredibly ill-timed move into the scandal-wracked and thus disapprobated teen-idol market, this country seemed hell-bent on an ever increasing sexualization of children and of the image of the child. The failure of Eisner’s programming move, as a measure of the public’s revulsion at the increased objectification and exploitation of minors, proved that even the Zeitgeist is reined in by the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith.’

As late as the year 2000, of course, the Pearlman Hearings served as a sort of short-hand in the culture wars, a synecdoche for the cultural reversal that followed, particularly in the realm of popular music. Years after the scandals, and the recording and entertainment industry’s inevitable response when parents voted with their checkbooks against teen-idol-making, John Derbyshire could still expect to be understood when he spoke of how ‘the Pearlman Factor, a cautionary tale, still (thankfully) stands athwart the threatened trend to resurrect teen-pop and the Eighties-style revival of sitcoms and variety shows starring smart-mouthed runts who are to be sympathized with, emulated, applauded, and, God help us, seen as more sexy, because more hip, than their boring old parents. Had not the Pearlman Scandal broken when it did, and been followed by hearings that grilled industry moguls like bangers to serve with mash, we might conceivably have spent the Eighties and Nineties in watching Lolitas gyrate on stage in emulation of Mrs Ritchie, and in listening to the caterwauling of ephebes trying to recreate the darkest days of the New Kids on the Block. Perhaps, instead of becoming a Nashville “hat” act, Oklahoma’s wholesome The Brothers Hanson would have been long-haired androgynes selling bubblegum pop. Worse yet, it is not inconceivable that some new white-bread version of the Jackson Five would have been shoved at us, with gosling-tenor lads of sixteen shimmying and thrusting and moonwalking like the Sequined One himself, or that some American schoolboy version of the mercifully short-lived Spice Girls had become the idols of teenaged girls: modern Elvises and Ricky Nelsons, but more overtly sexualized, and marketed sexually. A sort of Death in Venice version of the Ink Spots, but with pimples. We should have called them, doubtless, the Spots.’

To which, memorably, Andrew Sullivan had retorted, ‘What did we get out of the culture wars but flannel, grunge, and the Stone Temple Pilots? We’d have been better off with boybands. At least teenaged girls and teenaged gays would have had fantasy objects close to their own ages, instead of having to moon over athletes and grunge bands at least ten years their seniors.’

What this watershed event in pop culture had to do with the men who were to make up the Awkward Squad was not altogether obvious, except to the excessively subtle minds of certain Agency mandarins who were fond of intellectual jests. The theory, as it was eventually elaborated in bored moments, was that had Eisner and/or Pearlman succeeded in recreating the teen-idol, bubblegum-and-bobbysoxers phenomenon, Carter and Timberlake and possibly McLean or Dorough – all of whom had had youthful flirtations with the entertainment industry – might have been the nuclei of just such a music craze. And of course, Bass, of all unlikely people, had in his youth shared a vocal coach with Timberlake, and so on, through well more than six degrees of speculation.

Harmless intellectual fun, in its way, but indicative of the Agency mindset, with its endless speculations about possibilities, alternate and contingent readings, and unintended consequences. After all, the Agency, almost a century after the fact, still amused itself with the old, oft-told tale of how the young Allen Dulles, in Zurich in 1917, had felt he could not bear to listen to one more émigré tale of woe, and ducked an appointment with a mad Russian, going off to play tennis instead. A few days later, having not had the chance to talk to the Americans, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, ‘Lenin,’ had accepted the Imperial German Army’s offer to send him back to Russia to raise a revolution that would free Germany’s eastern flank…. And then there was the major league scout who had failed to sign Castro to a contract….

Indicative, too, of the Agency’s almost academic, professorial, tweedy acceptance of the utility of oddballs, and the honed institutional knowledge that musicians, for example, are often better at such things as cryptanalysis, say, than even linguists or mathematicians are.

In an office park in Vienna, Virginia, there is an unremarkable building, a building like a thousand thousand others: bands of darkly mirrored glass windows, invisibly interrupted by struts, set in a buff-colored stone: a bastardized Bauhaus building, all angles and lines, with a concrete planter outside the entrance for a few azaleas at the northern limit of their range. But this anonymity through indistinguishable and undistinguished conformity applies only to the building’s outer integument. A closer survey would reveal – if a casual visitor were ever allowed close enough to the building to make such a survey – that the structure was possessed of elements outside the common run of office buildings. No outdoor parking was available, and indeed, the casual eye could hardly discern the entrance to the actual parking garage. The only access was by keycard, and there were never any solicitors or casual visitors to attempt an access in happy ignorance of that bar. And dimly discernible within the lobby, glimpsed ‘through a glass darkly’ beyond the mortar-proof, smoked glass door, were several armed security personnel.

Inside, the building was oddly, almost ominously, quiet, save for a persistent white noise that suggested both baffles and the consumption of considerable electric power. The corridors were as impersonal as government assistance, and there were neither names nor meaningful numbers on any of the eternally shut interior doors. And somewhere, somehow, there was a hum or thrumming that spoke to some sense other than the five we know, an atmosphere of earnest, urgent, and unremitting calculation.

This was the District-area pied-à-terre for the Awkward Squad. The real work was done elsewhere, and could be, in real time, through the Wonders of Technology; but there were occasions on which it was necessary to be in physical proximity to Langley, Foggy Bottom, the EOB, and DoD. For ‘face-time,’ a term that caused the Awkward Squad’s de facto leader to make a wry face of benign disgust whenever he heard it.

Had anyone in Congress – including members of the House, Senate, and Joint Select Committees – ever seen a line item analysis of the Awkward Squad’s budget, he would most likely have boggled at it: even as a part of the intel community’s ‘black’ budget, the Awkward Squad came high. But in reality, its existence was a tribute to governmental thrift. The Awkward Squad – or to give it its formal, wholly unused name, the Joint Threat Research and Response Working Group – was a means for the United States to employ persons it could not otherwise, under applicable law and regulations, employ, and a measure whereby personnel on whom the government had expended considerable sums in training and education could give the government its money’s worth despite various barriers to their working openly for it.

Responsible solely to the National Command Authority and reporting solely, with a right of immediate access at any time, to the DCI, the Awkward Squad was the most offbeat weapon in the US arsenal. The Inspector General pretended not to know of its existence, the Directorate of Intelligence actually didn’t (though several people in CI had their suspicions), and the Directorate of Science and Technology was only dimly aware that there was ‘something out there’ when they were tasked with the occasional, incomprehensible assignment. The NSA had never been able to pick up its traffic, and therefore concluded, in Berkleyan fashion, that it didn’t exist. State had never pinpointed it: the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism blamed Langley for every scrap of product that embarrassed Armitage and the pinstriped-trouser brigade. The NIC didn’t care if it existed or not: it merely devoured its product with an insatiable maw; the DHS hoped that there was something in an otherwise bare cupboard like it, else someone needed to invent it, and fast; and the Joint Chiefs didn’t give a damn what the sources were so long as they could rely, as experience proved they could rely, on the product.

In many ways, it was a throwback to Room 40 and the old ‘Black Chambers’ of the Great War era, and to Bletchley and the OSS: an ad hoc group of eccentrics and eggheads who seemed to operate by mystical intuition, but who got results.

Even in theory – theory being confined, obviously, to what the DCI and POTUS ‘officially knew’ – it was a mere research group, and of course would never carry out operations; but the DCI and POTUS both relied on the Awkward Squad’s initiative in going against the grain of theory.

And the head of the Awkward Squad, a blond Mississippian with ‘Navy’ stamped all over him, was in the District-area office he so detested, in a faceless office building in Vienna, Virginia, precisely because it was time, once again, for theory to go to the wall.

James Lance Bass had no more contemplated a naval career than he had thought of, say, becoming a pop star. If anything, he had thought he might go through Army ROTC at Ol’ Miss or over at Auburn or wherever he ended up. But that changed in his late teens, when the prospect of an appointment to Annapolis was first broached to him. A third cousin back in Laurel had been a Marine officer, and Lance comforted himself with the thought that he could still manage to combine an Academy education, if he got the appointment, with ground combat training. Or (a voice from his childhood whispered), there was always aviation, and the possibility of fulfilling, after all, his infant dreams of being an astronaut. Lance committed himself to being ready and eligible for appointment, even having surgery to repair a cardiac anomaly, and tried not to get so worked up over it that failing of appointment would crush him. When the appointment came, though, he realized just how much he’d set his sights on achieving a dream that had not even initially been his.

Annapolis molded him, as it molds all midshipmen, in its own stern image. He would never cease to be the Mississippi boy who had grown up in the church choir, but the officially-non-denominational but discernibly Episcopalian ethos of the Navy’s services attracted him deeply, with its restrained, old-money pomp and its casual gravity. His tastes became increasingly sophisticated in other ways as well – his mother observed that he was ‘pulling a Faulkner,’ becoming more and more attuned to the manners and mores of the old-money Upper South. Becoming a gentleman as well as an officer. More startling, in its way, was the fashion in which the sea called to him, touching something deep and atavistic within him. He took to it, as he took to the discipline of the Service, as naturally as a seal, or a selkie. By the time he passed out of the Academy and was commissioned, he was the model of a Southern, gentlemanly naval officer. And if he had any secrets that the Navy would disapprove, he had never admitted them even to himself.

He was also destined for a career as far from sea duty as the Navy could offer. He had been talent-spotted early on, by those whose task and duty it is to spot such talents, as having a particular tone and quality of mind. His seamanship was impeccable, he had a bent for navigation and a taste for oceanography, he seemed destined to become a valued Surface Warfare officer, but there was something else, something latent in his cast of mind, that was to cost the combat Navy his services.

His plebe year was unremarkable enough, but by the time he was a third classman, certain of the faculty were keeping an eye on him, and gently steering him where they wished him to go. His professor in FP310, Introduction to Global Strategic Studies, had a quiet word with the professor tasked with teaching FP313, Information Technology and International Politics. Equally quietly, the word traveled to the professor who would teach FP407, Intelligence and National Security, when Bass would be a second classman. The Leadership, Ethics, and Law Department took an interest. And Bass in turn found himself ‘advised’ to take Russian and Japanese. This was one young man that the Navy spooks were not going to lose to the engineers and the battlewagon drivers.

In the end, then, submitting to the inevitable with all the discipline the Academy had instilled in him, Bass found himself, upon graduation and commissioning, in Virginia Beach, attending the Naval and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center, being machined into an analyst, with Monterey in his near future.

But there, too, he had been too quick for his own good, and he found himself with little ceremony and unusual haste bumped to O-2 and seconded to the CIA immediately upon completion of schools.

And it was there that his life turned upside down.

Joshua Scott Chasez, two and a half years older than Lance Bass, was from Bowie, Maryland, an newish (by Maryland or Virginian standards) railroad town on the site of an old tobacco plantation and famous stud farm (Belair, for the knowing), known mostly, in these days, if at all, for a few Georgian-Federal planters’s mansions, for its historically Black college, and for hosting much of the overflow of the District’s Maryland-side sub- and exurbs.

Of course, it is also five miles from the NSA, five from NASA - Goddard, and ten from Fort Meade.

He was a rangy, quirky young man, was Josh, well-liked but looked upon as a bit odd: he grew up possessed of good looks and the skills of a runner and a running-back, and was obviously intelligent: but he seemed scatterbrained, his mind working freakishly. The shortest distance between any two points of thought, it seemed, was for him a lengthy tour down unexpected byways. Some of his teachers suspected synæsthesia as the possible substrate of his strange ability to see patterns others did not see and to make connections others did not make – an intuitive gift that would, in the end, dictate his career.

His rather proper adoptive mother sometimes despaired of him, flighty as he was, but his father, a Cajun uprooted from the bayous by military and then governmental service, had an abiding faith in his son: a faith amply repaid when the ‘scatterbrain’ won through to a National Merit Scholarship and to the Francis Pendleton Gaines Scholarship that smoothed his way, and the family’s finances, into Washington & Lee.

There, the ingratiating if slightly off-kilter Josh – or ‘JC,’ as he swiftly became known – found his footing. He wasn’t nearly rich enough to be a Phi Delt, nor yet hearty enough for Fiji; he wasn’t planning on majoring in hackey-sack and liberalism, so there was no chance of his being a Delt: instead, this Maryland-bred son of a Louisiana father was swiftly assimilated into the tropes of Southern gentility, and pledged KA. With a flair for protective coloration, he was quick to adapt to the madras, starch-everything-including-the-boxers-hangers-not-folded, shagging, gatoring, mantel-diving life laid out for him, and turned what were now model-quality good looks to the carefully casual, artfully mussed business of properly-prep dressing. And he learned to be quiet about all sorts of things, including, though by no means limited to, his intelligence. It was only the professors, who are never surprised by anything, who were not startled when JC Chasez, harrier, Class B squash player, frat boy, notorious stranger to the English language, and Ultimate Face-Man, graduated with special honors in Politics and History, as a double major, was valedictorian of his class, and left forthwith for New College, Oxon, on a Rhodes Scholarship, where in due course he took a First in PPE.

Upon his return to the United States, Johns Hopkins snapped him up, for the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies PhD program, which he completed (thanks to that MA from Oxford) in well under the usual time. With his innate gifts of verbal obfuscation, of course, there was one employer in particular for whom he was a perfect match: the Department of State.

At State, there was no question that his would be a civil service rather than foreign service track, and he was snapped up as an analyst at the GS-11 grade immediately. Shortly thereafter, as another of the Bright Young Up-and-Comers, he was sent to learn the ropes at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

And it was there that he met the young naval officer from the CIA.

People do not, of course ‘turn gay,’ much less do so ‘overnight.’ But the ways of denial are infinite, as are the means of revelation and self-awareness. When, after a week’s worth of working together daily on a project and a no-holds-barred argument over the Orioles’s prospects for the coming season, JC realized that he was not merely attracted to Lance, but was willing to throw everything away: career, family (though he hoped it wouldn’t come to that), friendships, his alumni connections: everything, if only Lance felt the same way; that Lance, not all the years’s worth of madras-espadrilled, Hollins-Baldwin-Sweet-Briar-Randy-Mac prepette Muffys, Mopsies, Bootsies, Kicks, Mollies, and Megs, was The One he could give his life to and spend his life with…. The realization that he was, at the least, bisexual, if not gay, stunned him immeasurably: which was odd, in that that had always been the one thing, the whispered speculation, that others had niggled at whilst JC had been oblivious, from school to W&L to Oxford to the SAIS to State. Especially once he had started at SAIS, when, with exposure to English trendiness newly under his belt, he had been an early avatar, outside of class and on weekends, of what would later come to be called the ‘metrosexual look.’ He was staggered; but he was too honest to lie to himself, or to State, any longer, even unconsciously.

For his own part, after their first week of contact, Lance Bass found himself in a position not unlike that of another Southerner who had once lived in Arlington: pacing the floor at dead of night, struggling for clarity, deciding whether or not his Word and Sacred Honour compelled him to resign his commission.

After all, he was from Mississippi. He was a Southerner, a Christian. A Naval Academy graduate, good God. He couldn’t be less than wholly straight.

Of course he’d endured some taunts, in his awkward adolescence, but those were meaningless: name-calling that the callers themselves knew nothing about, using what were for them words at once alien to their understanding, and mere general terms of abuse. And he’d endured less of that, choir notwithstanding, than he might otherwise have, thanks to having a voice that rivaled Barry White’s for depth and testosterone-level.

And was he willing to throw all this away: not the honors or the conveniences or the security, but rather, his very own comfortable identity, merely because of what might be a one-off, inexplicable attraction that might never amount to anything anyway?

In the end, he could come to only one conclusion. Even if this were an isolated incident, he had no right to take that risk. He refused to sail under false colors; and he refused, in the event this was not an isolated incident, to become caught in a lie that could harm or expose to danger the Agency or the Navy or the country he served. When cut came to shoot, it turned out that honor, honesty, and self-respect did mandate that he resign.

The next day he requested, and somewhat to his surprise got, a ‘soonest’ meeting with the DDI on urgent personal business. Blushing furiously but standing as straight as the Academy could teach him to do, he explained, discreetly but unmistakably, why precisely he was resigning his naval commission and why he felt it incumbent upon him to resign from the Agency as well.

The DDI listened to him pensively, though it was evident he was startled: obviously, LTJG Bass was the last man he’d have suspected of being less than one hundred and ten percent straight.

‘Okay,’ he said, at last. ‘Let’s go see the Director. I understand he has some special program for strays,’ the DDI smiled.

‘Special program, sir?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ the DDI said, a bit tartly. ‘I’m only the Deputy Director, apparently I don’t Need to Know.’

The DCI, to whom the DDI turned him over and whose office the DDI then hurriedly left, did not seem particularly surprised, somewhat to Lance’s alarm; though if there was any man in government service, he reflected, who damned well better have a perfect poker face, come to think of it, it was the Director of Central Intelligence.

‘I understand that as of this morning, Mr Bass, there’s a similar vacancy at Foggy Bottom. Foggy tops, too, over there; foggy minds. SecState’s the only one over there who can find his ass with both hands; the careerists, my God…. Well. I think you did the right thing, I know you did the right thing, by coming to me with this. Now, let’s see what we can do for you. You may have heard I have a program for the lost-and-strayed stock that wander outside the corral.’

Lance’s alarm turned into absolute appall within the next half-hour, as he accompanied the DCI on an unscheduled trip across the Potomac. To the Oval Office.

POTUS was genial, and understanding. ‘That was a balls to the wall thing to do, youngun. Lots of folks’d’n’t have the balls to ’fess up. ’D’ve tried to suck it up long enough for a pension, and it’d inevitabably’d come out, and then, well-doggies, even if you’d never’ve done nothin’, you’d be in trouble.’

Lance was beginning to get an idea of just why and how the DCI was still in place in this new Administration, having been appointed by its predecessor, and just where he had sedulously picked up such phrases, that sat oddly upon his lips, as ‘the lost-and-strayed stock that wander outside the corral.’

‘Problem is, son, the gummint – no, the poor suffering taxpayer, people in this town need to remember it’s their damn money, not ours – just now finished spending a sight of money on your happy rear.’

‘I know, Mr President.’ Lance blushed, again: that had been preying on his mind.

‘Why we have a program. George, you thinkin’ my way on this? The Joint Whatchahooby? Good. After the recent wastage, they need not only personnel, they need a team leader. That Annapolis education’d better at least be up to that much.’

‘Sir? With respect, sir, would it be wise to put me somewhere, as a newbie, over the heads of personnel already in place?’

‘Now, see, that’s the sort of question that does you credit. But the fact is, none of those boys have any interest in managing stuff. Hope you do, big time.’

‘Sir, it is part of my training, as you say.’

‘Well, then, let’s talk it over. It’s not a bad thing: don’t misunderestimate it.’

A crisp hour later (all he could or would spare, carving it from his schedule: the President notoriously hated schedule changes, delays, and unpunctuality), Lance and the DCI were on their way back to Langley. In that time, Lance had been presented with a well-earned commendation for work already performed on the North Korea desk, which had impressed even the dour old NIO for that rogue state, and been nominated for promotion to Lieutenant Commander … and had also been scheduled for immediate retirement from the Navy upon Senate confirmation, as being ‘too young for grade.’ And he had accepted, still not knowing what was in store for him, the directorship of the Joint Threat Research and Response Working Group.

As they were driven back to the Agency’s headquarters, Lance reflected upon the new faces and brief dossiers he’d been raced through.

‘Alexander James McLean. Prefers “AJ,” which I personally think means he watched too many Simon & Simon syndicated reruns, growing up.’

‘It would explain that extraordinary cowboy hat, sir.’

‘You know, I think you’re right. Grew up on the wrong side of everything but the blanket, and maybe that, too. Only one of y’all ’thout a degree. Probably smarter’n all of you put together. Looks case-hardened; marshmallow center, volunteers his spare time doing puppet shows for service dependent children in every military hospital from Bethesda to Norfolk. Army. His way out of the dead end. Sent him to NCO school, planned to send him to OCS. Family troubles, he took to drinking and such, friend of his shook him so hard his teeth rattled. He reported himself, got clean, did a purgatory assignment as a drill at Benning, Enlisted Basic Course. Smart boys in the Army: give ’em drill sergeants who know all the ways the rules get broke from the inside out. End up with salvaged sergeants and better soldiers. Likes dogs, kids, and horses, but there is that attack Doberman side to him. Not, of course, that the JTRRWG ever does field work.’ POTUS ghosted a wink.

‘The friend who shook him until his teeth rattled. Yale. BA in a Near Eastern Languages and Civilization / International Studies double-major. Minor in PoliSci. Dad’s a cop, Mom’s from PR, knew McLean growing up in Orlando. Yale MA in International Relations. Good man.’

‘Eli,’ said POTUS, as if that explained it. ‘Sort of man we’d’ve loved to have working for us on the up and up, but….’

‘How did he wander off the corral, sir?’

‘A touch of involvement in Caribbean politics. Violated the Logan Act.’

‘I take it this was not related to any Puerto Rican issues, then, sir? I understand the Logan Act applies to diplomatic and international issues.’

‘Right. But the Puerto Rican side of the family has always had close ties to another island that also used to be Spanish until 18-and-98. Now, personally, I approve of Mr Howard D. Dorough’s stance on freeing Cuba, probably a sight more than my predecessor did, but we can’t exactly employ him directly, now, can we? Especially since he’s also anathema in the émigré community, which, Jeb tells me, is still pretty right-wing. Turns out that in addition to being for a free Cuba, he has, shall we say, a vested interest in gay rights at home.’

‘Ah. Personally, sir, I’m still a Republican, a Garth Brooks fan, and an NRA member, notwithstanding.’

‘Good for you! I knew I liked you.’

‘Next up, Lance, is this one. Brian Littrell.’

‘Small fellow. Tanker?’

‘As a matter of fact, he was, though I think it was more than the proximity to Hood that sent him to Baylor Law School. Very pious young man is our Brian. VMI man – he’s a Kentuckian by birth; a year and half older than your Dr Chasez, but they might have glimpsed and ignored each other on the streets of Lexington in 1996 or so. History major with a minor in Arabic and International Studies, of all unlikely things, plus that Baylor Law degree.’

‘How did he blot his copybook, sir?’

‘Weeeeelllll. We just can’t have newly-licensed Texas lawyers, who are also serving National Guard armored officers, barely get out of Pakistan alive, charged with smuggling.’

‘Smuggling. Sir.’

‘There’s smuggling and smuggling, son. Some smuggling over there is winked at, though by God that’s going to come to an abrupt halt, and some is openly indulged, but there are some things you really tick them off by smuggling in.’

Lance thought for perhaps a second, and nodded. ‘Baptist, Baylor, thus, Bibles.’

‘Yep, it’s a risky place to try and evangelize. One last thing. He did make it out. Tougher’n whit-leather, that boy, and could go bear-hunting with a hickory switch. Tight with McLean – it’s an Army thing – and Dorough. Next up?’

‘Littrell’s cousin, Kevin Richardson. USAFA ’92. Expert in natural patterns of camouflage, edible berries and survival whatsits, and such. And in pattern analysis of natural features from photo-recon: why he was slated for intel work, or as the Air Force calls it, Sortie Generation and Logistics. But, well, that’s Starfleet Academy for ya: they let him major in Environmental Engineering, and it went to his head. Tree-hugging off duty is his business, but we really can’t have serving officers arrested at Vieques and calling the whole DoD a toxic Superfund site.’

‘Next. Joseph Anthony Fatone. Got out of Columbia three years back with a degree in Classics and Urban Studies, though he went in thinking he’d be an actor. Not a damn thing wrong with him, as a man or as a linguist, except the press would have a field day with a civil servant whose critically acclaimed translations of Catullus and Ovid and Sappho and so forth are, well, faithful to the texts.’

‘In other words, pro-no-graphic. Obscene. You know. There was a public burning of his Lysistrata in Waco, damn fools.’

‘And this, sir?’

‘Ah, yes. The man who keeps refusing to chair the damn thing on the grounds that paperwork gives him hives. Christopher Alan Kirkpatrick. Grew up as, and I quote, the “poorest white boy in Pittsburgh.” Got in bad trouble as a juvie, though from the highest of motives, I mean, hell, feeding your sisters…. Anyhow, they gave him a choice, and he took it. Momma signed the papers and her self-described “runt” went off to Parris Island to learn discipline and control. It took; he rose to Gunny and then was commissioned through OCS, and the Corps sent him to Penn where he got a PoliSci degree with a Psych minor.’

‘If that’s so, sir –’

‘Why’s he with the Aw- the Joint Working Group? I had thought he might bring some order to the chaos, but that was trying t’douse a fire with kerosene. Bottom line, once he got to Penn, and was an adult without an absolute schedule like the Marines gave him, he began to notice. Well, ’s why he minored in Psych, was this got him interested. Turns out he has bipolar disorder and adult ADHD, for which we had to give him a disabled out of the Corps. I told him he sounded like Al Gore’s description of my mental state, except that nobody’d yet accused him of being a “dry drunk,” that I knew of. Which reminds me to warn you. Boy has a laugh like some sort of hybrid cross between a hyena and a whooping crane. Hope your nerves are good: you’ll need ’em to be.

‘Any rate, that’s your team, son. Well, except for your new deputy, but you don’t need a dossier on him.’

‘Sir?’

‘Well, shoot, boy, we don’t want to lose our investment in your Dr Chasez either, now, do we?’

By early June, then, Lance found himself living in a trim, Georgian-Federal house, part of a compound of perfectly set jewels near Warrenton, in the Virginia Horse Country, other houses on which were occupied by AJ, Joe, Chris, Brian, Kevin, and Howie. The main house was their office. JC lived with him. It was tentative, still, and they were taking it slow, but both now knew for certain that this was It. The real deal.

The neighbors liked them, vaguely understood that they were government contractors of some rarefied and evidently expensive grade, politely ignored the discreet couplehood of Lance and JC, and got most of them interested in the horsey life. The few old-money Virginians among the Hunt Country arrivistes accepted Lance and JC in particular, and the pill was sweetened by the knowledge that in addition to whatever government contracting and private consulting they did, Lance, JC, Howie, Brian, and Chris were all serving as adjunct professors at the American Military University over in Manassas. (After all, the FFV-est of all Virginians had presided over West Point and then over what was to become JC’s alma mater, W&L.)

And ‘private consulting’ was not just a ‘legend,’ a part of the cover: the Warrenton Group, a Virginia Limited Partnership, did accept a few clients, and turned others away after free consultation. None had ever read strictly the fine print of their agreements, required even for a consultation, that granted an exception to the Group’s promised confidentiality in favor of US national security. Some of the Awkward Squad’s best product came from simply being approached, and from listening to what big money and big business had on its mind.

And so spring turned into summer, and the dogwoods blossomed and faded, and the Warrenton Gold Cup was run, and the Angus auctions went on, and the Orioles lost repeatedly, and JC was happy anyway. Lance and Joe became close friends, and JC and Lance came to see why everyone adored Howie, and Chris and Lance developed an ongoing, snarky patter with occasional contributions from Kevin and AJ, that Brian and his new wife and Kevin’s fiancée all thought was better than vaudeville. And they worked hard and played hard and worried about India and Pakistan and about North Korea, and those were the only noteworthy clouds in their sky. And August of 2001 gave way to the breath of coolth that heralded September….

END