Free Whiplash by Dale Brown Page B

right. How does Whiplash fit into this?”
    “MY-PID will be one of its tools. The unit itself will work on different projects. We want you to support Nuri on Jasmine—he’ll explain that.”
    “Support?”
    “Yes. The whole idea is to get technology onto the front lines. Whiplash is part of that.”
    “Are we testing, or doing?”
    “Both. Just like we were at Dreamland. Whiplash and all of us.”
    Danny felt comfortable with the parallel to Dreamland, but using a computer system that had no human supervisor sounded impractical. There had been a few automated systems at Dreamland—the robot Ospreys, for example, which were part of his security at the base. But even there, someone on watch was always supervising them, prepared to jump in and override if necessary. Here, there was no supervision.
    “I was hoping that we would have more time to build things up, but this situation seems more serious than we thought.”
    “So what else is new?” said Danny.

7
    CIA Headquarters (Langley)
McLean, Virginia
    F OR AN OFFICER WHO SPENT MOST OF HIS TIME IN THE FIELD , coming to CIA headquarters was not generally something to look forward to. Even if one wasn’t coming home to be called on the carpet, the stay tended toward the onerous. For one thing, it was almost always associated with paperwork: official reports, expense reports, and briefings. Then there were the routine and not routine lie detector tests, dreaded audits, and the even more dreaded physical and psychological fitness exams.
    But perhaps the worst thing that could happen to you atLangley, at least as far as Nuri Lupo was concerned, was being second-guessed. Which he expected was on today’s agenda in bulleted capital letters. He’d taken it as a particularly bad sign when Reid told him to take the weekend off. Reid himself always worked Saturdays, so a routine pummeling could easily have started then. Anything that had to wait for the work week to begin was guaranteed to be onerous indeed.
    Not that there was really much to second-guess him on. But of course, that was never the point.
    Nuri’s only consolation—and it was thin—was the fact that he had found a restaurant with a cute waitress the night before. She’d flirted a bit, and he figured he’d be eating there a lot if he was stuck here for any length of time.
    He drove to the parking lot near the main building, parked in one of the visitor’s slots, and went inside to meet Reid. He was a few minutes early, and after going through the ID and weapons check—guns were frowned on—he decided to head down the hall and grab a coffee at the Starbucks. Along the way he passed the displays of Cold War paraphernalia. Though put out mostly to impress visiting VIPs, Nuri found the old gadgets endlessly fascinating, and lingered on his way back, admiring the miniature bugs in the cases, huge by today’s standards.
    Reid, coming down from the other direction, spotted Nuri in the hall. He paused and studied the agent, surprised at how young he looked. He was, in fact, young, though Reid would never hold that against him.
    It was nearly impossible for the older man not to draw parallels with officers and agents he’d known in the past, and his mind did so freely in the few seconds that passed before Nuri looked up and saw him waiting at the end of the hall. The young man reminded him of several people, all good men, all dead well before their time. The comparison that came most readily was to Journevale—Reid remembered the agent’s code name, not his Christian name, even as he pictured him.
    Journevale was a Filipino who’d been recruited by the British to work in Vietnam and at some point was handed over to the U.S. During the time Reid knew him, he’d lived among the Hmong people in Laos, helping organize guerrilla groups that fought along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
    When Reid wanted to check on his status, he had to parachute in via Air America. The flights in rickety airplanes, held together by duct