Security Breach Check

He knew from past experience that when the incoming data showed symptoms of covert deception that their was a high likelihood of danger. In this case, the danger was to an inexperienced operative in the field. As yet, there was no clear direct evidence that the deception was specifically targeted to the current mission.

It is important to give young operatives the autonomy to discover how to adapt by giving them the opportunity to adjust to the inherent uncertainty of this type of work. The earlier a mindful detachment can be cultivated the more effective the resulting framework is at supporting the accumulated wisdom. There was always a small but measurable outlier that could upset this normally fast-paced process. And such seemed to be the case here.

Just a matter of days to several weeks ago, detectors were going off at an above normal false alarm rate. It was not a sustained level jump and not periodic but considered as a whole the situation deserved further investigation.

Competing agendas proved even more elusive in this part of the mission for a reason. That reason was the objective to operate at a level of indirection that distanced the team from example specific nuances. Knowing the difference between the specific and non-specific was a constantly moving target.

It was her somewhat odd behavior that had pushed the issue to the tipping point. Looking back, something was amiss in the response time during discussions. Not so much that it would have been noticed without the associated hyper-sensitivity. What adjectives he would add to using the word confusion were, at best, still vague in his mind and in the still-nameless machine model.

Now that a set of clues in the case were available and a briefing to the crew at HQ was complete it was time to discover the degree to which the communications channels had been compromised.