OPERATION: MAD MEN - The New York Station
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xp_logsEmma meets a younger Kevin Sydney in the guise of the office manager of his first station. Their discussion is... informative.
It had been a cool spring, gratefully accepted by the people of the city after last year's heatwaves and an all too brief winter. As more skyscrapers with their concrete and glass pillars went up, the heat on the asphalt below seemed to grow by leaps. The crisp breezes and comfortable temperatures of the late May days were like a final reprieve before New York's now famous humid summer returned.
Kevin Sydney shook out the water from his umbrella, having caught a brief shower between the station and the building. Technically, his presence in the office, it's existence and the rest of the staff were illegal, the CIA legally constrained from running operations in the United States. Counterintelligence was the bulwark of the FBI. However, with Director Hoover's tendency to leak information useful to his own agenda to members of Congress, Director McCone had started setting up small offices like this one as a safety measure. Regardless, it was an official CIA Station, if highly classified, and that meant former Special Agent Sydney had been made the youngest Station Chief's in the CIA's short history.
He walked through the small office space and hung his umbrella, hat and long coat on the rack in his private office.
"Mrs. Brinson? Is the coffee on?"
There was that interesting thing, Emma thought, when you heard yourself speaking to your executive assistant and then suddenly realised that you were, in fact, the secretary in this situation. And, apparently, the tea lady. Coffee lady. Whatever.
"Is it ever not, Mr Sydney?" she asked, making sure her voice veered into the pertly efficient instead of the decidedly snippy that it wanted to be. This may have been Kevin's memory, but she was the one running the whole scenario, so she knew the coffee was, right now, definitely ready.
"Not arguing, Mrs. Brinson. But we have guests today." Kevin sat down at his desk. "My first serious mission and I'm leading my wife's bridge club into the field."
“Your wife’s… bridge club? What sort of guests exactly are we having?” Emma said, as she rose from her seat and went to prepare a coffee for Kevin. She knew exactly how he liked it in the current time, and a quick probe established that his tastes hadn’t changed over time. It did keep her hands busy at least as she waited for Kevin’s response.
"Our new temporary team. DC assigned all women to this case. Our target's MO is to solely use female operatives and sources, so our normal resources are limited. They're sending over some analysts who have at least had field training." Kevin picked up the stack of files on his desk and started to thumb through them. "Not exactly the dream team I was hoping for."
The tiny crystalline snort of laughter that Emma let out was carefully weighted, so it was impossible to determine if it was contempt, mockery or genuine amusement. “Really, Mr Sydney?” she said, mildly, as she put the coffee cup on his desk.
"Something funny, Mrs. Brinson?"
Emma settled herself back into her own seat, so she wasn’t quite facing the man, a non-confrontational pose. “Let’s say you’d been asked to lead a mission and your Director had said “and everyone on your team of spies has the power to be completely invisible” would you consider that you could call them a dream team? Spies that can’t be seen?”
"My very important spy brain is telling me that you're going somewhere with this." He dropped into his own chair and regarded her levelly. "Yes, being invisible would be a great thing for spies."
“Women are invisible, Mr Sydney,” said Emma, calmly, her tone making it clear that what she was saying was an incontrovertible fact. “Men don’t see us. Men don’t notice us. And in the unlikely event they do see us,” and Emma leaned forward suddenly, somehow rearranging her twinset to emphasise her splendid figure, her eyes a soft doe-eyed gaze on Kevin’s, her lips trembling apart, soft and suddenly kissable, “we are utterly discounted. Things and objects, Mr Sydney. Or part of the furniture.” And she was upright again, back to her usual steely-straight efficient perfect secretary self. “Don’t discount your target’s MO. Recognise how very clever it is.”
Kevin said nothing, regarding her in a way he hadn't before. He took a sip of his coffee and set the cup down. "Mrs. Brinson, if the CIA had offered this field station to you, do you think you would have felt confident taking it?"
Emma didn’t take her eyes from the document she was so efficiently typing up from her shorthand notes. “I minute every senior meeting that occurs in this office and most of the others as well,” she said. “Every file in that room,” she nodded her chin at the heavy door behind which lurked the office’s rather complex filing system, “has something in it typed by me, and what I don’t type up, I review to ensure that all of the girls in the typing pool are keeping to standard. I can tell you exactly where everything is filed and all I need is ten minutes and my indexing notes and I’ll tell you what’s in every file in the room. I know the name of every contact of every officer in this field station, the location of every dead drop, the name of every cut-out, the location of every currently active listening device, every front organisation we run, the name of every agent and double agent we are currently in contact with. I, and only I, type up every interrogation undertaken by the field officers here and I sit in on at least half of them. The SOE ladies who managed to live through World War Two loved having someone to talk to about their adventures and I learned enough when they came to conferences that I can probably kill a man in twenty different ways and, for at least half of them, he would die smiling. I’m fully trained in cryptography and encryption as well as shorthand and I can type at 110 words per minute. I know which agents are drinking too much and which ones are getting handy with the typing pool and which ones are having trouble at home, because I talk to the women in the typing pool and I believe what they tell me. I’ve spoken to Langley and had at least five officers put on desk duty for long enough for them to get help before they killed themselves – in the field or in their garage, whichever way they chose to accomplish it. I also make sure that there is always coffee. Would I have felt confident about taking on the field station, Mr Sydney? Yes, I would. Would it ever be offered to me? No, it wouldn’t.” She looked up at Kevin for a moment, her eyes diamond bright and her smile very small and very tight.
"No. Because the other clandestine station chiefs in the US wouldn't take you seriously. Or, it is a convenient excuse to not to tell you directly that the Directorate doesn't take you seriously." Sydney had come up through the ranks very quickly, in part because he approached his work with the same kind of analytic mindset that he'd learned as a sniper; that nothing could be assumed and that if you didn't factor in every bit of information, whether you liked it or not, you were ultimately jeopardizing your mission. They regarded each other levelly for a moment, before the office door opened and people started to walk in.
"I guess these must be my agents. Thank you, Mrs. Brinson." He got up with a nod.
Emma returned his nod. "They'll make you proud, Mr Sydney," she said softly. "Trust them."
It had been a cool spring, gratefully accepted by the people of the city after last year's heatwaves and an all too brief winter. As more skyscrapers with their concrete and glass pillars went up, the heat on the asphalt below seemed to grow by leaps. The crisp breezes and comfortable temperatures of the late May days were like a final reprieve before New York's now famous humid summer returned.
Kevin Sydney shook out the water from his umbrella, having caught a brief shower between the station and the building. Technically, his presence in the office, it's existence and the rest of the staff were illegal, the CIA legally constrained from running operations in the United States. Counterintelligence was the bulwark of the FBI. However, with Director Hoover's tendency to leak information useful to his own agenda to members of Congress, Director McCone had started setting up small offices like this one as a safety measure. Regardless, it was an official CIA Station, if highly classified, and that meant former Special Agent Sydney had been made the youngest Station Chief's in the CIA's short history.
He walked through the small office space and hung his umbrella, hat and long coat on the rack in his private office.
"Mrs. Brinson? Is the coffee on?"
There was that interesting thing, Emma thought, when you heard yourself speaking to your executive assistant and then suddenly realised that you were, in fact, the secretary in this situation. And, apparently, the tea lady. Coffee lady. Whatever.
"Is it ever not, Mr Sydney?" she asked, making sure her voice veered into the pertly efficient instead of the decidedly snippy that it wanted to be. This may have been Kevin's memory, but she was the one running the whole scenario, so she knew the coffee was, right now, definitely ready.
"Not arguing, Mrs. Brinson. But we have guests today." Kevin sat down at his desk. "My first serious mission and I'm leading my wife's bridge club into the field."
“Your wife’s… bridge club? What sort of guests exactly are we having?” Emma said, as she rose from her seat and went to prepare a coffee for Kevin. She knew exactly how he liked it in the current time, and a quick probe established that his tastes hadn’t changed over time. It did keep her hands busy at least as she waited for Kevin’s response.
"Our new temporary team. DC assigned all women to this case. Our target's MO is to solely use female operatives and sources, so our normal resources are limited. They're sending over some analysts who have at least had field training." Kevin picked up the stack of files on his desk and started to thumb through them. "Not exactly the dream team I was hoping for."
The tiny crystalline snort of laughter that Emma let out was carefully weighted, so it was impossible to determine if it was contempt, mockery or genuine amusement. “Really, Mr Sydney?” she said, mildly, as she put the coffee cup on his desk.
"Something funny, Mrs. Brinson?"
Emma settled herself back into her own seat, so she wasn’t quite facing the man, a non-confrontational pose. “Let’s say you’d been asked to lead a mission and your Director had said “and everyone on your team of spies has the power to be completely invisible” would you consider that you could call them a dream team? Spies that can’t be seen?”
"My very important spy brain is telling me that you're going somewhere with this." He dropped into his own chair and regarded her levelly. "Yes, being invisible would be a great thing for spies."
“Women are invisible, Mr Sydney,” said Emma, calmly, her tone making it clear that what she was saying was an incontrovertible fact. “Men don’t see us. Men don’t notice us. And in the unlikely event they do see us,” and Emma leaned forward suddenly, somehow rearranging her twinset to emphasise her splendid figure, her eyes a soft doe-eyed gaze on Kevin’s, her lips trembling apart, soft and suddenly kissable, “we are utterly discounted. Things and objects, Mr Sydney. Or part of the furniture.” And she was upright again, back to her usual steely-straight efficient perfect secretary self. “Don’t discount your target’s MO. Recognise how very clever it is.”
Kevin said nothing, regarding her in a way he hadn't before. He took a sip of his coffee and set the cup down. "Mrs. Brinson, if the CIA had offered this field station to you, do you think you would have felt confident taking it?"
Emma didn’t take her eyes from the document she was so efficiently typing up from her shorthand notes. “I minute every senior meeting that occurs in this office and most of the others as well,” she said. “Every file in that room,” she nodded her chin at the heavy door behind which lurked the office’s rather complex filing system, “has something in it typed by me, and what I don’t type up, I review to ensure that all of the girls in the typing pool are keeping to standard. I can tell you exactly where everything is filed and all I need is ten minutes and my indexing notes and I’ll tell you what’s in every file in the room. I know the name of every contact of every officer in this field station, the location of every dead drop, the name of every cut-out, the location of every currently active listening device, every front organisation we run, the name of every agent and double agent we are currently in contact with. I, and only I, type up every interrogation undertaken by the field officers here and I sit in on at least half of them. The SOE ladies who managed to live through World War Two loved having someone to talk to about their adventures and I learned enough when they came to conferences that I can probably kill a man in twenty different ways and, for at least half of them, he would die smiling. I’m fully trained in cryptography and encryption as well as shorthand and I can type at 110 words per minute. I know which agents are drinking too much and which ones are getting handy with the typing pool and which ones are having trouble at home, because I talk to the women in the typing pool and I believe what they tell me. I’ve spoken to Langley and had at least five officers put on desk duty for long enough for them to get help before they killed themselves – in the field or in their garage, whichever way they chose to accomplish it. I also make sure that there is always coffee. Would I have felt confident about taking on the field station, Mr Sydney? Yes, I would. Would it ever be offered to me? No, it wouldn’t.” She looked up at Kevin for a moment, her eyes diamond bright and her smile very small and very tight.
"No. Because the other clandestine station chiefs in the US wouldn't take you seriously. Or, it is a convenient excuse to not to tell you directly that the Directorate doesn't take you seriously." Sydney had come up through the ranks very quickly, in part because he approached his work with the same kind of analytic mindset that he'd learned as a sniper; that nothing could be assumed and that if you didn't factor in every bit of information, whether you liked it or not, you were ultimately jeopardizing your mission. They regarded each other levelly for a moment, before the office door opened and people started to walk in.
"I guess these must be my agents. Thank you, Mrs. Brinson." He got up with a nod.
Emma returned his nod. "They'll make you proud, Mr Sydney," she said softly. "Trust them."
