The Phoenix Affair

  *****

  Just about twenty miles due East at Fort Meade, Maryland, a room stuffed with Cray supercomputers hummed away, working hard on their task to sort, categorize, prioritize, interpret, and route telephone intercepts to and from all over the world. Well, almost all over. Technically, the NSA was not allowed to record phone calls originating in the United States without a warrant from a court somewhere. Technically.

  The third machine on the left, the one the day shift had nicknamed “Fluffy”, finished it’s current call, deciding it was of no immediate interest to anyone, and moved on to the next one, which was provided by its nearest neighbor, incongruously named “Ingrid” by its own set of geeks. Fluffy compared the English text of the transcript to its list of words of interest and discovered that there were ten word matches in the forty-one-word transcript referring to an Air Force General and some Americans and Saudi Arabia. It noted that the original audio had been in Arabic, which set another flag. It noted that the call had originated with a cellphone at a Saudi tower and that it was placed to a landline in Dhahran. Neither line was under deliberate surveillance according to the data in the record. Fluffy was not possessed of any great intuition, in fact none at all, but that final discouraging fact was not enough to overwhelm the other interesting characteristics of the call. Instead, it only dropped it from FLASH importance to a fairly high-priority for the attention of a linguist/analyst at NSA, and Fluffy duly sent it to one of its neighbors, which in turn routed it to a cue that would come to the attention of the analyst team at some point. If the call had been rated FLASH, it would have gone direct to the Counter Terrorism Center, to the CIA Intel Directorate, to the DNI, and to Homeland Security immediately. As it was, the cue for the analyst team at NSA was running about two days wait time, occasionally less depending on volume and manning. But it was also Friday afternoon, and the majority of the team was heading home. The weekend watch crew was smaller and therefore slower.