Author Description

There are eight of them, eight not quite strangers who twice a year gather at the off-site as directed by their respective management. The meetings are secret, with a standing policy that they are not to be mentioned, let alone discussed, even with fellow employees. As a result of the secrecy, Mark doesn't know if those he works with attend similar sessions or not, but then the National Security Agency was like that, with lots of secrets whether they mattered or not. As usual, during the brief time they are gathered waiting to be called to their respective rooms for debriefing, Mark wonders about the others. For whatever reason, he doesn't think about them after the meetings, happy to be able to simply go home, drained by the stresses of the day. The others must have felt the same, as no one was ever present in the waiting area when he finishes up late in the afternoons. This time the meetings end differently as unanticipated weather conditions unexpectedly bring all of them together at the end of the day. As a result of their impromptu discussions, they learn things about themselves and one another that are quite concerning."We're spies," Stephanie exclaims unhappily."Worse," argues Glen. "We're traitors of some kind." A career Navy pilot, he couldn't imagine himself as such."It can't be," Jessie disagrees. "We'd have to be aware of the fact, or that we've been doing anything illegal. None of us know of anything, right?"But a careful look at their positions in government and the activities they are involved in suggests her reasoning might be flawed. The need to find out forms a group bond as they promise to investigate more than they currently knew about the meetings, and who might be controlling them.Their path becomes more tangled and difficult the more they learned. They encounter a weapon that requires technology that simply doesn't exist. Worse, they learn that each of them been physically altered, and in the course of their investigations find themselves bein