C3 Deep 6

Sometimes known as a boil on the ass of an angel, Dinkleberry worked the night shift in the lowest personnel level of Deep 6. The levels beneath him were storage areas and finally the Underground out of the desert, back to civilization.

Deep 6 was located in the bowels of a remote desert, its existence unknown to even the official powers of the government.

It was unknown to the CIA. It was unknown to Mossad. It was the most important intelligence operative of the Shadow State, whose membership consisted of the people who actually called the shots on the planet.

Dinkleberry was in charge of sorting the lowest level of information coming into Deep 6. It was his job to collect raw data and simply archive it for future use.

Nothing that went near Dinkleberry was consequential. Since no one considered what he was doing to be important, he was never called on for accountability.

Daily tabulations on the number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan; in one column, the host government’s calculation; in another, the occupier’s numbers, and in the last, the native population’s estimates.

None of it mattered.

No one upstairs concerned themselves with these things. They were not critical of policy. A war was a war was a war.

There had been other wars in the past and there would be others in the future.

The Shadow State always needed somewhere to dump its weapons to exhaust inventory, so other weapons could be moved up the production queue, from design to testing to implementation.

It kept the military motivated.

It kept the manufacturers motivated.

That’s where the money was.

Dink had a hangover. He’d spent most of his sleep shift in the Porn Parlor. He finished a couple of six-packs, slumped on the felt couch, watching images that barely excited his eyes, let alone anything else.

But then he felt a small boner rise up as the scenes became more gruesome.

Carnivorous slave sex, Dink’s favorite.

Still, it was not enough to join the other stiffs who sat around on velvet couches with open beers, visibly more active.

Everyone in Deep 6 was referred to as stiffs, due to their extreme paleness from a complete lack of sun.

He went to the Slave Quarters for a quicky and picked a Polish girl.

But she didn’t inflame him enough. He blamed her. He beat her.

The slave humbled herself beneath him, begging him not to report her for Insufficient Excitement.

He left the Porn Parlor for a couple hours of shut-eye, but made a stop at the 14th Level Lounge and finished off a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Now he was on his third cup of coffee and it wasn’t even 3 a.m.

He’d eaten nothing before his shift. The chocolate bar and coffee were about all he could handle.

His job was to read the coded messages on the numerous monitors in front of him.

He checked, he clicked, he scanned, he clicked again, he moved something to its appropriate folder.

It was hard to believe that he once considered this a dream job, a way to get away from the rest of the world, a mind-numbing repetitive motion that screened out all romantic distractions.

Dink had failed at love too often in the real world. He wanted nothing to do with it, even if it cost him a life of deadly boredom.

Then the Green Code came up.

The money code.

Dinkleberry envied the rich and loved to read about their numbers.

He read numbers with the enthusiasm of a celebrity magazine reader—with that same slight undertone of eroticism, which seemed to fill exciting lives.

Of course, none of this diminished his devotion to Britney Spears.

Britney was the bomb, as far as Dink was concerned.

The Shadow State could sink if its needs were required while Dinkleberry hid under the covers with a flashlight and a People magazine story on Britney.

Britney always looked cheap in her photographs. That’s what he liked about her.

But now the green code.

He typed a code that allowed him first-level access to the information at hand.

He determined that large amounts of money were moving out of six companies at an unusual rate, even for the big players who could move a hundred mill a minute.

Still, it might have been a heavy trading day.

It might be a reflection of several members of the Shadow State in collusion.

It was dangerous to bother Shroud with uncertain information. Punishment for pushing weak information on Shroud could lead to severe punishment.

Dink had already sacrificed a few sleep shifts for a night in the Dungeon on Level 85. He was not prepared for the consequences of another mishap.

At the time, he was grateful for the mercies Shroud extended him, in rescinding the Torture Test from his sentence at the last moment.

The Dungeon on Level 85 was just below Dink’s level. On bad days, he could hear the screams and then the abrupt silence. Sometimes it went on through his entire shift.

The Dungeon on Level 85 was often the last place a colleague could be traced before being outsourced.

Dink had no desire to be outsourced.

Dink closed his eyes and deliberated whether to forward the information to Shroud or wait for more supporting information to show up.

It wasn’t a good idea to bother Shroud with trivia, if he was in a bad mood.

He might have a coke hangover.

He could be ferocious then.

Everybody got fucked up in Deep 6. It was the only way to survive in this bleak hellhole.

Shroud was top man at Deep 6. He was Level 1. He was the law here.

Shroud was the only one who interfaced with the Shadow State and even that came down to a quarterly visit by a panel of three strangers.

They arrived on the Underground in leather masks, with only their eyes peering out and their tiny mouths drawn back behind a slit.

Even Shroud didn’t know who they were.

They’d lunch with him in his private Diner and then board the Underground back to civilization.

A yellow code came up.

Dink coded himself to a deeper level and got to the heart of the matter.

A slave ring in Israel had been shut down overnight by a commando raid on a network of brothels.

Twelve hundred young women from Eastern Europe were liberated and secreted out of the country.

That was a new one.

For a fleeting second, he wondered if the green event and the yellow event had anything in common.

But Shroud might tell him it was just another Cartel spat in the arena of the slave traffic trade, and that big money movers had quirky days.

Dink also knew that a third visit to the Dungeon would surely include a Torture Test.

Still, there was no sign of either situation in the newspapers he searched.

Had the Israeli Elite smothered the event?

Had the United States?

There were numerous actions by the Shadow State that the public never knew about.

The Shadow State decided who knew what, when and where.

It was not the people’s business, or right, to be privy to the truth of what drove their daily lives.

It wouldn’t be good for them.

It wouldn’t be good for Global Security.

There could be resentment, uprisings, chaos in the streets.

Revolutions.

A little lying kept things moving forward in an orderly way.

Best to keep passive populations under the sedation of comfort, fear, or belief.

What kept them happy was of no concern to the Shadow State, as long as it could promote its agenda.

Dink dialed the 14th Level Lounge and had a case of beer delivered.

By the end of the first six-pack, he had forgotten his confusion and was assembling data from the Horse Racing Division, regarding how all the ponies finished, at all the racetracks in the world in the last twenty-four hours.

It was one of those quirky, personal requests, by a member of the Shadow State.