February 13th, 2012
Lieutenant Colonel John Casey, United States Air Force Reserve, was a dedicated individual. He had gone to the University of Wisconsin – Madison on an Air Force ROTC scholarship. Recruited by the National Security Agency just before graduating high school, he became an NSA agent upon graduation from college, while serving in the Air Force Reserve.
He was proud to show up for his one weekend a month and two weeks every summer. It gave him the opportunity to do some flying, and he was happy to do so in whatever they threw at him, whether it be an F-16 or a simple T-38.
He hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to fly the F-22 Raptor, and he thought that maybe, just maybe, that’s what this letter from the Air Force, marked “Official” was all about. Casey doubted it, given that he was pushing forty, but he could hope, couldn’t he?
Casey was somewhat disappointed when he opened the letter. Nope, it wasn’t an invitation to go fly an F-22 for a weekend. In fact, it wasn’t even a flying op at all. It was a notification that on Monday, February 20th, he was to report to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside for an exercise based on the Emergency Communications Control protocol, abbreviated in the letter as ECOMCON.
He frowned. It was rare for him to have not heard of a military protocol – as an NSA agent, almost everything the military did was available for his review. However, from time to time, the occasional thing slipped through the cracks. Nonetheless, he was sure he would’ve heard about a protocol that regarded communications control.
Casey didn’t have time to worry about that right now, though. It was his turn to host poker night, and the Bartowskis and the Woodcombs would be over within half an hour – apparently bringing with them a sort of “blind date” for Casey. “She’s a real looker,” Ellie Woodcomb had promised him. “And, she likes guns and crappy old Fords, so you two should get along quite well.”
Casey had bristled at the “crappy old Ford” remark, but had been intrigued by the idea of a woman who liked guns, especially if she was as attractive as Ellie Woodcomb seemed to promise.
And the funny thing was, he trusted Ellie’s judgment. He only had her judgment on Sarah Walker to base that off of, but she had been so incredibly right on her prediction of things to come for Sarah and Chuck long before anybody else that it was hard to NOT trust Ellie.
Quite honestly, Casey had come to regard the Woodcombs and the Bartowskis as family long before. He rarely admitted to it, but he would do anything for his “family” – including die for them.
When Chuck and Sarah’s twins had been born a little over a year before, they had asked Casey to be their godfather. He had been so taken aback and moved by the request that he had actually teared up while holding their newborn son, John – named after him.
Of course, he refused to admit that the incident in the maternity suite at Cedars-Sinai had ever happened, but the Bartowskis knew the truth. They tried not to give him too much crap about it, though – after all, he was still a pretty mean customer.
A knock at the door interrupted Casey’s reverie. He crossed to the door and opened it.
Chuck Bartowski stood there. “You’re early,” Casey grunted.
“What can I say,” Chuck replied. “We showed up to drop John and Lisa at Ellie’s apartment, and, well, things got a little out of control.”
Devin’s sixteen year-old cousin Bethany was babysitting John and Lisa, along with Ellie and Devin’s baby girl, Katie. “Everything was good, but then, just as she was about to put him down, John decided to pee all over Sarah,” Chuck continued, trying to keep a straight face.
Casey couldn’t help it – he burst out laughing. “THAT’s my boy!” he chuckled. “Piss on the CIA!”
Chuck smiled, too. “Oh, he thought it was hilarious. You should’ve seen him – laughing his head off while this stream just poured out of his diaper onto Sarah’s shirt.”
“Let me guess – Walker, not so amused?”
“Not so much,” Chuck confirmed, shaking his head. “She’s over with Ellie right now, trying to find a top that’ll fit.”
Casey raised an eyebrow. “That… might be a challenge,” he said.
And that was true. When Sarah had been pregnant with the twins, she had gone from a C to a D cup. After the pregnancy, she got back into shape fairly quickly, but for some reason, that particular aspect of her anatomy never went back to its previous size.
Chuck didn’t mind. Chuck didn’t mind one bit. For Sarah, however, it was somewhat of a nightmare – literally a back-wrenching one. Not only that, but it made her even more of a target for disgusting men leering at her all across Los Angeles.
There was another knock at the door, and Casey went back to open it. It opened to reveal Ellie, Devin, and a woman Casey hadn’t seen before – and Ellie was right, she was in fact a looker.
And behind them was Sarah Walker Bartowski, wearing a baggy UCLA ΦΔΕ shirt – one of Devin’s old pre-med fraternity t-shirts. She looked annoyed as she walked into the house.
“Sarah, you don’t look too happy,” Chuck said.
“You could say she almost looks… pissed?” Casey cracked. Chuck grinned, and Devin let go a full-blown guffaw at that.
Sarah turned to Chuck and Casey. “Both of you SHUT UP,” she hissed. “I am not in the mood!”
Ellie sighed. “Well, this evening’s just getting off to a GREAT start, isn’t it?” She turned to the woman standing next to her. “Maya McCarthy, this is John Casey. John Casey, Maya McCarthy – she’s a radiologist at City of Angels.”
“A pleasure to meet you, John,” Maya said, extending her hand.
“Pleasure to meet you, too,” Casey replied, taking her hand and surveying her like the intelligence agent he was. About two inches shorter than Walker, she had the darker skin of a long-time Angeleno, but emerald green eyes and bright red hair that befitted her very Irish last name.
“So, what do you do, John?” Maya asked.
“Well, I’m the general manager of the Burbank Buy More,” he replied – he’d rapidly risen through the ranks, being appointed G.M. of the store just before Thanksgiving 2011. “I’m also a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.”
The NSA had recently given him the O.K. to tell people that he was in the Reserves. He had never really understood why they hadn’t wanted him to tell people, but he hadn’t argued.
Maya looked at him closely. “John Casey… John Casey… you’re not the John Casey who was a technical advisor on Mindnode, are you?”
Casey looked down at the floor. Mindnode, the film that George Clooney had made based on Chuck’s wildly successful video game, had been a runaway success at the box office. It had starred Lee Pace, Kristen Bell, and Gareth David-Lloyd – and one Lt. Colonel John Casey had been credited as a technical advisor on the film.
“Yes, indeed, that was me,” he said. “I’m surprised you recognized my name – I was buried so deep within the credits that it’s almost impossible to find.”
“What can I say,” she replied. “I’m good with spotting subliminal things. I have an amazing retention rate on subliminal imagery.”
When Chuck heard her say that, he froze. Looking over the top of his beer bottle, he shot a look at Sarah, who had a poorly suppressed look of alarm on her face.
He took action. “It’s pretty interesting when things intersect like that, isn’t it?”
Behind him, Sarah rolled her eyes and shook her head, although she hadn’t been able to think of anything better. There was no reaction from Maya McCarthy, though. Either the word meant nothing, and this was a remarkable coincidence –
Or she was a highly trained agent.
These same thoughts had registered in Casey’s mind, but he filed the whole thing as a coincidence. There was no way there was a second human Intersect – just none at all. The images on the Beta Intersect had been encrypted so as to not register to a human brain, and the data from the Alpha Intersect had been destroyed during Walker’s first sloppy infiltration into Chuck’s apartment, all those years before.
“Hey, what do you say we play some poker?” Devin asked, interrupting Casey’s reverie.
“Sounds good to me,” Chuck replied.
They always played teams, and tonight happened to be men versus women. The game was Texas Hold ‘Em, and by nine o’clock, the men’s collective pot was maybe a third the size of the women’s. They were getting their collective ass kicked.
The men called a timeout and retreated to the kitchen. “We gotta strategize if we’re gonna come back from this,” Devin insisted.
Casey gave him a strange look. “How exactly are we supposed to strategize at a card game?”
“Bluffing – which the Chuckster is horrible at – and well-placed bets,” Devin replied. “Chuck, from now on, you need to fold unless you’ve got a great hand, because you can’t bluff for crap. Casey and I will handle that. We all need to control our bets, not let the women get us riled up, not let them drive the bet up.”
Chuck made kind of a what the hell gesture with his hands, but didn’t argue the point – Devin was right. Instead, he stepped back to the refrigerator to get another beer. His eyes fell upon the letter attached to the fridge with a magnet.
“Hey, Casey, you got called up?” Chuck asked, reading over the letter. “An exercise at March Air Res-“
His eyes fell on the word ECOMCON, and then rolled back in his head.
A series of images flashed in his mind’s eye – a memo dated March 1998, a series of pictures of President Bush, a nuclear detonation, and a map of the United States with red criss-crosses all over it. Finally, an image of a piece of apple pie appeared, so he knew the flash was coming to an end.
But not before one last image appeared – a long operations plan, which scrolled by slowly. Chuck absorbed the entire thing before it disappeared.
“Dude, are you okay?” Devin asked. He was standing right in front of Chuck.
“Yeah,” Chuck gasped. “Uh, can you go out in the living room and send Sarah in here, please?”
“You sure you’re-“
“DEVIN! I need you to go right now!” Chuck shouted.
Devin looked taken aback. Chuck had never talked to him like that before, so he knew it had to be serious. He turned and walked to the living room. A moment later, Sarah walked through the kitchen door.
“What exactly is going on?” she asked.
“We have a very, very large problem,” Chuck replied, pulling Casey’s call-up letter off of the refrigerator. “You see this?”
“It’s Casey getting called up for an exercise,” Sarah said. “So?”
“It’s not an exercise,” Chuck shot back, shaking his head emphatically. “You see this acronym here at the bottom – ECOMCON?”
“It stands for Emergency Communications Control protocol,” Casey interjected. “What’s going on?”
“I flashed on ECOMCON,” Chuck answered. “The first thing I saw was a memo, written in 1998, telling how the country’s entire communications network – landlines, Internet, cell phones, radio, everything – could be taken offline if need be. Then, I saw a picture of several people who must be higher-ups – I don’t know who any of them were.
“But here’s the worst part,” he continued. “The last thing I saw was a full operations plan for ECOMCON. Basically, it’s run out of Fort Bliss, in Texas. They take all communications nationwide offline. While communications are down, the US military’s senior officers and the civilian administration – in other words, the White House – go to the Mt. Weather Emergency Operations Center in Virginia.
“But it’s not just a protocol,” Chuck said. “It’s an actual full-scale plan for a coup d’état. Once the President arrives at Mount Weather, he’s to be removed from power. The military then takes over, and with communications down, there’s no way to stop them. This isn’t supposed to be run as an exercise, either – the organization that drew up these plans made that quite clear. It’s only supposed to ever go ahead if they’re actually going to remove the President. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s going to happen next Monday.”
Sarah and Casey both looked shocked. Sarah was the first to recover. “Chuck, you said the ‘organization’ that drew up these plans. Was it a branch of the military? Was it the DIA?”
“Oh, no,” Chuck said, laughing bitterly. “Much worse than that.”
He looked directly into his wife’s eyes. “This plan was put together by Fulcrum.”
