The Chevy Suburban pulled into the drive and I knew that something was wrong. It wasn't the car itself; it was the fact that only a select few people knew where to find me and fewer still had the code to get through the front gate without setting off the alarm by the front door of the house. This visitor was at least very close to one of those very few that I actually trusted.
How did a 42 year old get to this state of paranoia? It is fairly easy I guess when you make a couple of choices when you are young and they blossom for the productive part of your life and then overnight, things disappear in a maelstrom of things that are not of your doing. Then you are retired not by your choice and are not employable by dictate. Every month a check is deposited in your bank account and a note arrives in the mail to remind you to keep your nose clean. At least, that is what the words mean.
So you find a quiet place where no one will bother you and you build yourself a fortress of solitude out of bricks and mental energy and you hope that a day like this never happens. Confused? So am I.
I graduated from college twenty one years ago with a degree in modern history and political science. With job prospects severely limited, I took an entry level job with an innocuous government agency. Three years later, my agency was absorbed by another one whose mission was virtually identical to ours. Five years and two more absorptions later, I was elevated to the rank of section leader and became privy to the real mission of our agency.
My original agency was organized to monitor local and regional economic and political movements in various countries which at the time seemed friendly and politically safe and write reports which went into some data bank or another. We never really knew where. The second iteration added social trends to these reports. By the time I made it to the level of section leader, we were compiling data on everything from marriages and divorces to the number of condoms purchased and the number of birth control pills prescriptions written and sold. In short we were compiling an in depth of reports on the social, political, and cultural practices of our supposed allies but who now appeared to be on the verge of wanting to expand their political influence in a number of directions, some of which were not in our national interest. In short we were the social spies for our overseers on our former friends and potential enemies. We weren't foot soldiers on the ground but historians, social scientists, statisticians and others who collected available data and put into a form that our mentors could decipher.
One of the great dichotomies of our time is that before the internet, a huge amount of money was spent gathering and assimilating limited publically available information and making sense out of it. After the development of the internet, we had access to more information than we could process with three times the number of people. Much of the information was inaccurate and mostly useless but you really can't put that stamp on it until you have at least looked at it. So the truth is that today we are awash in information, too much information. And that is the heart of my rise and fall.
The problem in the intelligence business is that you never want to be blatantly wrong or inconveniently right. Either condition makes you look bad in the eyes of those who authorize your paycheck. I had advanced and I had more and more responsibility and therefore more people looking over my shoulder. I had never been a political person and had always focused on the quality of my work and reports with generally acceptable results. My wrongs had never been blatant and my rights had usually been inconvenient but lost in the morass of secrecy. That was until the day that one of my inconveniently correct reports surfaced on page one of a major newspaper. For over a week the pseudo news talk shows had a field day condemning one branch of the government for their oversight. It took a week for another story to be planted that changed the focus from my report to a non-existent one that polarized more people than the original. The press had a feeding frenzy for those several weeks.
That proved to be just long enough for me to be retired and shuttled off to a state of non-existence with a warning to keep my mouth shut or vile things would befall me. The Congressional hearing that followed proved to be the usual mish-mash of conflicting ideologies and resulted in a total waste of taxpayer money with no resolution of any kind except for promises that no stone would be unearthed until the truth was discovered. That meant that nothing would happen until they could come up with a plausible story to baffle the most people. By then I was in a small two bedroom house on five acres in the country with limited phone and internet service. I became an instant and invisible non-entity.
For me, this change in life wasn't horribly traumatic because I had never married and had no family to force into exile. Others were not so fortunate. As the agency had grown and matured, several "benefits" had been introduced that I found handy. One was an unwritten and easily deniable policy that social contact with outsiders was discouraged for fear of leaks. As a result, single people like me were encouraged to date within the junior pool of analysts and if a married person wanted diversion outside of his or her marriage, they should seek it from this source also. This junior pool consisted of a wide variety of smart younger men and women all of whom had been vetted and trained and were considered safe. Being single, I had restricted my dating to within the pool for simplicity's sake.
As a result, when I retired, I had about a dozen women who I could call depending on what my interest was at the time. One woman loved to go to the theater and opera and she was my date for this events. Another was a sports fanatic and would be my date to any game that involved a ball. A few of the women the dozen women I had access too were not sexually active but most were. There were rumors that the girls had an informal sex club where they talked and trained using various techniques to insure that they were good lovers for their partners. There were also rumors that they kept score on the performance of their partners although no one ever admitted that this actually existed. This benefit continued into retirement to help insure that the retiree could have a social life without having to go through the usual "what did you do before you retired" conversations.
Related to this program was that a single senior analyst who wanted to be marry usually married a "safe" junior partner. The partner had the choice of "being retired" with a stipend when they married or he or she could continue working until children became involved. At that time, the partner was retired with a pension and an allowance for each ensuing child. While this program might offend a large number of people, it actually worked very nicely. Everyone knew the rules of the game and could find satisfaction within the framework of the game. To my knowledge, there had been no serious leak of any kind resulting from this arrangement. Even the few divorces that inevitably occurred were not overly contentious or public.
As a retired senior analyst, I still used the service regularly except that with my remote location, I only had easy access to three junior analysts within a reasonable drive. All three were fun dates and we enjoyed our time together when I took advantage of them.
The other benefit was one that appeared to be good but I felt was a double edged sword. We each had a mother with whom we maintained all contact with the agency. The mothers were experienced junior analysts who had never made the rank of senior analyst but who were transitioned into the role of administrative mentors for retirees. Most of them were women and they were our sole contact to the agency on everything from paycheck problems, insurance issues, and other such mundane matters. They also maintained a website that we could visit for a sanitized version of agency news and PR. The other edge of the sword was that they most certainly were reporting our status and attitude to their superiors. A regular report of a bad attitude generally led to a visit from "counselor" to discuss an attitude adjustment. I didn't worry much about that since, once I was out, I tended to look forward and didn't spend much time looking in the rear view mirror.
I had settled into a sedate life as a retired hobby farmer who puttered around on my John Deere tractor and planted various vegetables and herbs that I sold at the local Farmers Market. I also made several homemade candies that sold fairly well at the market. I didn't need the money but the money was a convenient way to measure the success of my ventures. Most of the money I made was re-invested in things to use around my homestead or just parked in a saving account I had. This was my life after retirement or at least the part of my retirement that anyone knew about.
The other part of my life was the paranoid part. While roaming the area around my property, I had discovered that the adjacent property had a series of caves carved out by eons of weather and erosion in a solid rocky outcrop on top of a hill. They weren't deep as caves go but they were fairly tall and could provide shelter and protection from the elements and man if necessary. I realized that I was an open and easy target for anyone if they choose to make me one.
At this point someone might ask why I might become a target since I wasn't involved in external activities and overt actions. But the truth was that once we delved into the social, political, and especially the religious fabric of the countries we studied, we began playing with fire. The rise in fundamentalist religions worldwide also brought about the rise in the age old tradition of revenge. Revenge was especially strong in those highly placed individuals whose lies and fabrications were brought to light. My highly publicized inconvenient truth had put a spotlight squarely on a well established family whose history was filled with stories of intimidations, manipulations, and outright corruption. Even with the cloud of the following cover-ups and distractions, I had a feeling that there were people afoot trying to locate and cause me great discomfort.
