George Bush Center for Intelligence
Langley, Virginia

Officer Johnston sat at her desk. Or at least, a desk. As a field operative who had been called back in for reassignment, she'd been given a desk and a computer, but she hadn't bothered to personalize anything, knowing what was actually coming a month ago.

And now she was just watching the clock count down. There was a variety of clocks on the wall with different timezones, her previous boss, Officer Connelly, had like them. But Connelly had quit, and the next in line, Officer Wei, had been let go for…The Trump Nonsense, as she had started calling it in her head. And the entire operations team had been dismantled and reassigned, because the CIA was refocusing on political nonsense and dumbass conspiracies.

A man politely cleared his throat behind her. "Johnston?" He asked.

She stood up, and turned. She very vaguely recognized him, as someone who worked in one of the many groups that the operations team had been reassigned to. "Volker, right?"

He nodded. "My boss has a few rather urgent questions for you." He looked around, as if he expected to see someone in charge, and visible frowned at the sparsely filled office.

"I can give you a couple of minutes." she said, honestly, and followed him.

It took a lot longer than a couple of minutes for them to even walk to the new set of offices, and Johnston, bemused, kept rough count of the time in her head…people weren't allowed to bring a cell phone inside, and she hadn't been there long enough to purchase an analogy watch like a lot of the analysts did.

But when she got there, it was clear they were in a hurry. She was ushered into an office immediately, and a man stood up and held out his hand. "Officer Johnston. I'm Officer Blake, the Coordination Director. Welcome to the team."

She shook it. "What is this about?"

"Can you confirm something for us?" he asked, and spun his computer screen around.

She leaned in and read it. "This is my report. Where they somehow drove Minerva Lapointe crazy. I know they were involved in that, Palomo used her real name and I manage to track down some of the others on the Atlanta crew working at the show, just not sure how they did it or anything illegal…oh." She frowned and read carefully. "This is wrong. The dates are wrong, the names are wrong, someone has invented a teammate called Hayley, this entire paragraph about a fire set backstage as a distraction is wrong and doesn't even make sense, and there was not any sort of fistfight…what is this?" She narrowed her eyes and read more. "Every part of this wrong."

"You see the problem." Blake said. "That's what's in the server."

"That's in the servers as my report?" Johnston said, astonished. "Well, what did the analysts say about my report? Did any of them point out it was nonsense?"

Blake chuckled, flipped to a different document, and let her read.

"So…they say they agree with me, but…it's all just as wrong, just…different wrong." She said. "This even has the name of the theatre wrong. I'm fairly sure the Beacon Theatre is in New York, on Broadway even."

"You can see our problem. Literally every document we have on Leverage is…full of gibberish. Misinformation. Vaguely plausible things, names, locations, looks reasonable at first glance, but you try matching it to each other or even the real world and it doesn't fit. There might be some true information in there, but we have no idea what." Blake said. "I think it was some AI, that scanned every document we had and replaced it with something that looks similar…if it was intended as disinformation it would have be consistent between reports, a consistent narratives." He shook his head. "No, these people wanted to completely destroy everything we had and _for us to know it_."

"They got the backups, too?"

"Yeah."

"And the…" Johnston hesitated, because technically none of them were supposed to know about this. "…offline NSA stuff?"

Blake sighed. "Yeah. And that…is why you in particular are here." He glanced at the door. "I would have asked you last week, but I had to fight to get clearance for this. The NSA backups were…under the CDC. There was an…incident there, someone turned off the security and escaped with some magnetic tapes. So not only did they wipe their backups, they stole something. Unfortunately, it's very hard to figure out what, because they replaced the tapes with blanks. We're still going through it."

Johnston blinked, and reflexively glanced at the clock, then back at Blake. "So you think the Atlanta team was involved."

"Maybe. You didn't report anything abnormal that day." Blake raised an eyebrow. "Or, at least, it's no longer in the reports. April 12th. 2025."

"My rules of engagement forbid me from following the team." Johnston said, trying to think about that date. There had been something around that time…she had reported it, but obviously it had been scrubbed…

Blake pulled up a picture of the bar. "A satellite happened to catch this on that day." he zoomed in. "Do you see this truck parked outside their HQ? It matches a truck we found later at Hartfield airport that had a decryption device in it, one that could have decoded the tapes. That device went missing from Kings Bay Naval Base hours earlier."

"So they stole that, then broke into the NSA?"

Blake shook his head. "Both at the same time. Might have been the Miami team, one of the people on it is a former Navy Seal."

That was it, Johnston remembered. She had spotted Sam Axe. She glanced at the clock again, smiled, and stalled for fourteen seconds. "You mean Commander Sam Axe? The guy who supposedly blackmailed us and the Navy to get an honorable discharge?"

"Yes." said Blake. "Did you see him or the Miami people that day?" he lean forward.

"Ah. Well. I think-" she paused as time was up, then stood up. "Can you get me a security escort off the premises? I was supposed to leave before now, and I'm not sure my badge will work anymore."

Blake stared. "What?"

She pointed. "Five o'clock. I don't work for the CIA anymore. This was my last day."

"You can't be serious, did you not understand why I called you here? We need to rebuild these records, as much as you can remember. We're not terminating you anymore. And your badge wasn't deactivated, I already made arrangements. You're now on my team, I said that."

"And I worked for you for…five minutes." She shrugged. "However, I believe I officially was already terminated. That already happened. Two weeks ago. The paperwork was filed out and everything. I already did my exit interview."

"Fine, officially consider yourself rehired."

"Yeah, I don't think so." Johnston said, pulling her CIA identification badge out of her pocket and looking at it.

"What?"

"I'm saying, I don't want to rejoin the CIA."

"So you're not going to tell us if you saw anyone from the Miami team. Or help us rebuild anything at all."

"I believe under the terms of my termination and security clearance, I'm not supposed to be talking about any of this." said Johnston, laughing internally. "It feels improper for you to ask me questions about classified material, I may need to consult a lawyer."

"What are you doing?" said Blake.

"And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free " Johnston said. "That's the motto, right? Written in big letters at the original HQ? We're supposed to be apolitical, tell truth to power, the world as it actually is, not how they want it to be or how other people present it to us. We go find out the truth, no matter how hidden, and tell the government." She looked at him. "We have a CIA director who lies under oath. We have a DNI director we all know is a Russian asset and also a liar. One of the few competent leaders in the intelligence community, General Haugh, just got fired from the NSA just got fired because of a lunatic who whispers in the President's ear about disloyalty. And need I mention that the Secretary of Defense is a sex pest and a drunk? Or why I got fired? Or Wei, for that matter?"

"I don't-"

"You probably do want to call for a security escort for me, because I am a very disgruntled ex-employee. And I have a valid badge, which I certainly shouldn't have." said Johnston, waving it. "In fact, I'm going to go turn this at the security desk down the hall, I don't want anyone accusing me of anything improper." And without waiting for a reply, she walked out.