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Rattling my tip jar again. This past month and change has been an absolute storm of financial hits. Any donation of any kind will get a ficlet, just message me here.
Also, for your edification: the start of something I was planning to finish before I posted but which you’ll see first now in thanks for your past and present support.
Code Talker: D Is For Deadlock or Possibly Ah-Da-Ah-Ho-Dzah
It began, as many things involving Overwatch ultimately did, with an anonymous text message dropped in a tipline mailbox (“IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING,” the rallying cry of Homeland Security since at least the mid-Oughts, weaponizing the paranoia of random citizens being a thing that never truly went out of style). It ended, as did many things that eventually came to involve Blackwatch, with small arms fire and carefully orchestrated explosions and interrogation rooms under places not formally known as prisons. In between, there was a mystery.
And if there was anything that Commander Gabriel Reyes absolutely could not resist, it was a mystery. Particularly when the alternative was paperwork.
⧫
“A secretary.”
Gabriel did not look up from the screen he was perusing, primarily because he didn’t want to have to either see or acknowledge the look of supreme despair that he knew would be living on his commanding officer’s face at that moment. “What about him? And it’s ‘administrative aide.’ Get with the proper terminology, Commander.”
“Wait, you actually have one?” That sounded more incredulous than actively despairing and so he chanced a look and found Jack Morrison, Commander of Overwatch, staring at him with unvarnished astonishment naked on his face. Admittedly, the astonishment might have had more to do with the fact that every available horizontal surface in his office was covered in the neatly, precisely arranged by both chronological order and grade of importance stacks of hardcopy and their accompanying workpads that represented eight full months of only dubiously attended paperwork than it did with his actual possession of a administrative aide. Or a secretary. Either/or. “Where is she?”
“Right now?” Gabriel checked the schedule. “Down in the range improving his service pistol marksmanship qualifications to at least expert.”
“...Really. Really, Gabe.” Now there was the absolute despair he had grown to know and love. “Is the kid even field rated? Does he have to be in order to successfully serve as your s -- administrative aide?”
“He will be by the time I’m done with him.” Gabriel replied, evenly, and finished signing off on his segment of a report that might or might not have involved highly sensitive operations currently underway beneath the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica. “And he will also be perfectly competent to put a bullet or two in anybody who tries to walk into or out of this office with something they ought not to be carrying. Or anyone else’s office, once he gets tired of working for me and runs screaming into the night. It’s an all-around win for the organization.”
“You remain the world’s most dedicated troll. I love you, but it’s true.” Jack lifted a stack of something that probably constituted only dubiously actionable intel given its relative proximity to his desk, deposited it neatly on the floor, and pushed the hoverchair previously occupied over, handed a tablet across the desk to take the place of the one he’d just set aside. “I probably shouldn’t distract you from bringing joy to the hearts of filing clerks all over the northern hemisphere but I really think I need to read you in on this one.”
“Do tell.” Gabriel made some space on his desk by virtue of piling three things he absolutely did not want to deal with just then together, opening a drawer, and dropping them inside, where they would molder at least until his aide got back from the firing range.
Jack tapped the pad pointedly. “Two weeks ago, someone texted that to the US Department of Homeland Security office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The tipline mailbox.”
Gabriel inclined a single, are you fucking with me brow and thumbed the tablet open. The message was a precisely arranged block of alphanumeric text followed by twenty pages of increasingly baffled and irritated memos back and forth between the DHS field office, DHS HQ in DC, and, finally, the Overwatch field office just down the hall and three floors up. He paged through them, eyebrows migrating steadily in the direction of his hairline as he went and, when he was finished, he muttered aloud. “What the actual fuck?”
“Cryptanalysis tends to agree with the assessment that it’s a cipher of some kind -- the original thought was a relatively basic transposition variant. The frequency analysis suggested as much. But when they tried to decrypt it on the basis of that theory, not a single attempt produced a readable result.” A wry little smile. “Athena’s been running cipher tables for days and getting nothing.”
“So why exactly are we thinking this is something worth cracking and not just some intensely bored computer science nerd idly trolling the local DHS office?” He could see why they’d thought in that direction, as a part of his brain started working out the math and the transposition modifiers and, even then, saw exactly why it wouldn’t work.
“Because whoever sent the initial message sent it again -- three times in the last three days, a secured line that comprehensively defeated any attempt to trace it back to its source. I know, I know. It doesn’t sound like a particularly good argument in favor of this not being an elaborate snipe hunt to me, either.” He reached over and tapped the screen, pulled up a secondary file. “But the Agent in Charge of the Santa Fe office thinks otherwise -- said they had a similar attempt at communication early last year but the message got fumbled and now she’s wondering if it didn’t have something to do with an incident that went down out in the badlands wilderness area.”
Gabriel disengaged himself from his consideration of the puzzle with an almost physical effort. “What kind of incident?”
“A team of geoscience grad students from California found a mass grave full of relatively fresh corpses, ten in total. Local law enforcement took over and, upon investigating the site, found that the bodies were all members of La Muerte Roja, a local gang known for having not particularly cordial relations with another local gang -- “
“Let me guess! Deadlock.”
“In one. The AiC, Julia Alvarez, thinks someone was trying to tip them off on the location -- either of the grave, or whatever it was that caused those fine upstanding individuals to find their way into it.” A pause. “Admittedly, I’m not so sure I buy that, either. But, since Deadlock pinged the radar recently, I thought it might be worth investigating, if only to rule out the possibility.”
“The possibility that someone is trying to pass coded messages about Deadlock activity to the Department of Homeland Security.” Gabriel’s eyes slid, involuntarily, back to the screen.
“It sounds even stupider when you say it out loud.”
“It’s not stupid. Or at least not stupider than anything else it could possibly be.” He glanced up. “Is that an order, Strike Commander?”
“If you want it to be, Commander Reyes.” Jack stood up, and deposited a fresh stack of paperwork in front of him. “Far be it from me to interfere in any of your more pressing duties.”
Gabriel grinned up at him. “Asshole.”
“Slacker. Get to work.”
⧫
To give the actually and legitimately more pressing duties the full and undivided attention they deserved, he stuck the pad in the desk drawer that contained his current cross-stitch project, a random selection of knitting needles, sixteen legal pads full of random sketches, and every fiddle toy ever gifted to him by the rest of the Overwatch command staff, some of which he occasionally even used. Then he locked it, once the estimable young Master Kestenholz returned from the firing range still smelling slightly of cordite, so as to better concentrate on the things that really required his attention at that very moment. And for at least a handful of hours he was able to firmly push it out of his mind while they rediscovered what the top of his desk and the storage credenza looked like which, considering the sheer volume of crap that needed to be signed, sent, and subsequently filed, he thought was a perfectly adequate day’s work.
“Are you certain, Commander?” And he was so damn young and earnest as he said it, too, all industrious diligence with shining golden curls and huge blue eyes and a charming Swiss accent and Gabriel was briefly convinced that this kid had obviously been vat-grown and programmed specifically to act as his adjunct administrative functions conscience. “It’s only six.”
“Yes, I’m sure -- and you say that now but give it two months.” He grinned and waved off the ensuing objections. “Go home, Kestenholz. And I don’t want to see your face before 0900 tomorrow.”
Which gave him approximately fifteen hours to work on the really classified stuff occupying the futon in the corner, to which he applied a solid six before the itch in the back of his skull grew too insistent to ignore. The rest went into the blastproof, bulletproof storage locker for later and the irresistible puzzle-bearing tablet came out. “Athena.”
The holoscreen occupying the corner of his desk activated itself, displaying Athena’s stylized personal signifier icon, and her voice issued melodiously from the hidden speakers. “Yes, Commander Reyes?”
“May I see the transposition tables you prepared for this communication?” He sent the files to his personal workstation and opened them all in a fan spread alongside the main display, upon which Athena kindly pulled up the decryption attempts she’d prepared. “Thank you. Now...why do you look so familiar?”
And it was familiar, aggravatingly so, mostly because the reason for it danced mockingly just out of reach. It did so for the rest of the night, not a bit of which was spent sacked out on the now-accessible futon, and at breakfast, when he strolled into the officers’ mess with a fresh legal pad covered in scribbles for his first coffee and five thousand calories for the day, and continued itching relentlessly through the remainder of the morning, even as he reviewed paperwork and signed off on reports and piled physical documents to be archived into the arms of his exceedingly cheerful aide. The bulk of the stuff that Kestenholz could have access to at his current security rating was sitting on a hovercart by just after thirteen hundred, leaving only the still-locked case he’d have to shoot the kid over and two greatly reduced piles of barely-qualifying-as-intel and the small part of his brain currently paying no attention whatsoever to any of it was forcefully dragging the rest away.
“Kestenholz, go and hand that off to Archives, take lunch, and -- “ He pulled up the daily schedule, made an amendment, “go hit the range. We’ll deal with the rest of this after you’ve had the chance to let your arms uncramp.”
“I am feeling a bit peckish.” Kestenholz admitted, with the same unflagging good cheer he’d had on display upon arrival that morning, and Gabriel made a mental note to seriously find out the provenance of that kid and, even if it was an amiable Swiss cloning facility, to write a formal letter of commendation both for his can-do attitude, his ability to keep pace, and his borderline saintly tolerance for terrible paperwork discipline from senior officers. “Would you like me to have the commissary send anything up?”
“Thank you, no. I’ll get something later.” His fingers twitched with the urge to open that file again. “Dismissed, Mr. Kestenholz. Eat a strudel for me.”
Two hours later, he was still gazing, eyes half-focused, at the screens spread out in the air before him, on which six different attempts to decrypt the message according to six separate and distinct methods had produced six different kinds of total gibberish. “I should send you over to Analysis and see what Icebreaker and his pale computer larvae can come up with…”
“Are you talking to me?” The voice was warm, richly amused, and came from the door; he looked over the top of the screen he was currently perusing and found Ana standing there, fist still raised from the knock that he hadn’t heard.
“To myself mostly. What can I do for you?” He rotated the non-solution solution sitting in front of him and spun it, nettled beyond endurance by its ongoing refusal to make sense.
“Oh, nothing really.” Stepped in, closed the door behind her. “It’s just my turn to remind you to eat.”
“I’ve had breakfast. A gigantic breakfast, I assure you, but thank you for your concern.” He laced his fingers together and gave her a Look overtop them; she was not noticeably intimidated.
“It’s fifteen hundred hours, Gabriel.” The gentlest of all possible reproof in her tone. “And it’s also my turn to remind you to sleep.” She came all the way around and very deliberately sat on the edge of his desk, blocking a set of screens from easy view. “You have been sleeping, yes?”
“...For certain values of ‘sleeping.’” Gabriel hedged and turned to face her. “I caught some rest the other day.”
“Which other day? Because it’s Wednesday. And, frankly,” Ana leaned in and smiled beneficently down at him, “you don’t look like you’ve been sleeping. At all.”
“Blame this.” He flicked the screen again and watched its contents spin. “It came in through DHS yesterday afternoon and it’s been eating my goddamned brain.”
Ana caught the edge of the display, considered, and frowned deeply. “A substitution code of some kind?”
“That’s what frequency analysis suggests -- the AiC who sent it seems to think it has something to do with gang-related activity in the southwestern badlands, but nothing I’ve done to spindle, fold, or mutilate it has yielded a coherent message. Not in English, not in Spanish.” He poked the screen again a bit more vengefully. “Even with the Latin alphabet I’m not sure….” It clicked together in his mind. “It’s a Latin alphabet. But it’s not made up of Latin phonemes. There’s more than twenty-six letters, that’s why a standard modular solution doesn’t work.”
“Gabriel?” Ana blinked at him as he stood up, took her gently but firmly by the elbow, and steered her back out the door. “Are you -- “
“Ana, I love you dearly, but get out. I almost have this.” He closed the door, also firmly but gently, in her face.
“I am having food sent up, Gabriel!” Ana shouted, kindly, from the hallway. “And if Athena tells me you haven’t gone back to your quarters by twenty-one hundred I am coming back with my rifle and a tranquilizer dart.”
“You do what you have to do, Ana!” He called back and got to work.
Four hours later, he activated his comm, requested a secure line to the Strike Commander’s office, and waited patiently while it went through. “Gabe?”
“Well, I’m going to tell you right now that the Agent in Charge there in Santa Fe might have been onto something about that earlier message, Jack.” Gabriel replied, by way of greeting. “And she’s completely right about this one.”
“You cracked it?” A pause. “How long have you been working on this? Jesus, Gabe. Have you even slept?”
“Look, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, okay?” He punched open a secure data connection and sent over what he’d found. “Also: whoever sent this is either a math genius, a historian, a linguist, or some combination of thereof. Take a look.”
The line was silent for some moments as Jack opened the file and examined it. “What language is that? I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“It’s Navajo. Diné bizaad. The frequency analysis was pinging on the fact that the written language uses a modified Latin alphabet -- but with thirty-six letters instead of twenty-six, which threw any modular mathematical attempt to decipher it off by a factor of ten. It is a relatively simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher, at base.” Gabriel leaned back in his chair. “It’s the translation, in this case, that’s interesting.”
“You’re enjoying this entirely too much.” Jack informed him and he had to allow there was a certain amount of truth to that.
“The message was: Want to help. Text this number when this message is received.”
“...You already texted it, haven’t you.” It wasn’t actually a question.
“I have! And I received a very interesting response, too.” He forwarded the rest of the information: message, translation, satellite overflight maps, preliminary analysis. “In brief: the coordinates translate to a place in the hills near where Alamogordo used to be before the Crisis. I requested any recent satellite overflight images, ran some historical comparisons against archival data, and I do believe what we’re looking at here is a man-made structure. More specifically, it’s a drop point of some kind. And that word, right there, is Deadlock.” He pulled up the video feed so he could watch the information filtering into Jack’s head. “This is me formally requesting permission to detail a Blackwatch operations team to investigate.”
“I never should have given this to you.” Jack looked up from the documentation. “You think there’s something actionable on this? We can spin the DHS field office in Santa Fe passing this along into a de facto request for intervention, if necessary, provided we keep it on the down-low -- Washington’s been getting pretty hissy about having all the legalities tucked neatly in order before they’ll sign off on our involvement in domestic law enforcement issues.”
“The Central American Collective has already formally requested intervention on the issue of cross-border contraband smuggling -- and if the smugglers, and the contraband, originate north of the border, that means the issue has passed domesticity and into our remit.” He laced his fingers together to keep them from fidgeting. “And, yes, I think it’s something. There are roads coming in and out of that place that are visible from orbit, which means they’re traveled semi-frequently. Someone in a position to know where it was reached out about it and the means they used to do so argued that they’re also in a position of risk as well as knowledge. I’m not suggesting we go in guns blazing, but putting some eyes on the situation couldn’t hurt.”
“All right. Pick your team. I’ll cut the orders -- observation only, for the time being. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”