Free Agent Hill: Powerless by James Hunt

that surrounded her weren’t going to last much longer. She grabbed her chief of staff, Alexander, and whispered in his ear, “I want mandatory rest cycles for everyone in this room. If they’ve worked more than ten hours, they go home.”
    “I tried that already, Chancellor. And besides, with the roads the way they are right now, if they went home, they might not be able to make it back.”
    “Then clear out the dining room and set up some cots. We don’t know when all of this is going to end, and the longer our people go without sleep, the sloppier their work will become. That’s something we can’t afford right now.”
    “Yes, Chancellor.”
    While she admired the resiliency of her staff, she knew that adrenaline had a shelf life, and for most of them, it had expired days ago. With one of the staffers telling her about the water shortages in Bavaria, Alexander pushed him out of the way and whispered in her ear.
    A chain reaction of mind-numbing pain rippled through her entire body. “Excuse me, I need to step out for a moment.” The staffer bowed his head, and Andrea quickly followed Alexander out the door and down the hallway. The two stepped in the same hurried stride. “You’re sure about this?”
    “Yes, it just came in a few moments ago. I thought it was a hoax at first. With all the dummy threats that have been coming through over the past week, I didn’t pay much attention to it, but per our protocol, it still went through the screening process. It’s legitimate.”
    Alexander led her into a side room, where a smaller group of individuals with laptops, headphones, and printers sifted through thousands of documents, emails, websites, and articles on anything and everything that could lead them to the source of the entity that had caused the global catastrophe that she was left to deal with. They walked past the team and into a smaller conference room that was empty and separated from the rest of the room. Alexander closed the door behind him and handed her the transcript that the staffer had intercepted. She read the document slowly, carefully, forcing her eyes to go over every word, phrase, and sentence twice. “Bring me the staffer who found this.”
    Alexander opened the door, and a flurry of typing filled the small room. “Finn, in here, now.” A few seconds later, a tall, lanky man with pasty white skin and greasy hair stepped into the room. When he saw that it was the chancellor he was meeting, he did his best to comb the matted mess that was his hair and attempted to tuck in his shirt. “Chancellor,” he said, bowing his head.
    “Where did you get this?” Andrea asked.
    “I’ve been watching any back-channel communication lines, usually reserved for computer hackers using a different layer of the Internet than most ordinary individuals. I found a chat room where a guy was bragging about the fact that he managed to get his hands on some piece of information between China and Russia.”
    “And that’s when he gave you this?” Andrea asked.
    “Well, he didn’t just give it to me—he posted it in the room. I ran an encryption program on it and found that the correspondence had IP addresses in Moscow and Beijing.”
    Andrea lowered the piece of paper onto the desk. “Jesus.” If this was true, if everything the boy was telling her was not some calculated piece of fiction, then she needed to act quickly. “Finn, I want you leading your own team, looking for any other particular rooms in this seedy underground you’ve stumbled upon.”
    “Would I be able to choose my own people, Chancellor?”
    “Yes, bring on whoever you need to get the job done. I want to know what else is out there and who’s saying what.” Finn nodded and left immediately. Andrea turned to Alexander. “I need to speak with the Americans about this immediately to see what they know.”

 
    ***
    Rick Demps watched the two faces on the dual monitors in front of him with hidden satisfaction. He wanted neither