Internecine by David J. Schow

foreign leader who might be getting too feisty.”
    “Maximally demoted” them,
he meant.
Killed them.
In my business, when you were beheaded or chopped off at the knees, it was called “administrative leave.”
    “The hundred and thirty-seven ratpacks got winnowed down to a hundred and two, after which the umbrella designation for all of them was CII—not an abbreviation, but a Roman numeral.” He wrote it on the napkin under the others. “One operative quite rightly called it a ‘bureaucratic malignancy.’ There was a similar mirror organization in Great Britain about the same time.”
    “Another hundred and two . . . spy groups?”
    “And just multiply by country, as needed. To shut them all down meant the excision of hundreds of chains of command. Thousands of jobs, evaporated. It was like the French Revolution. Heads rolled.”
    It was an industry unto itself, I thought. And when industries become top-heavy and wasteful, they cave in or self-destruct. I’ve read Marx. Rather, Lenin.
    He dunked the napkin in his water glass and the ink blotted away to a Rorschach abstract. He balled it up, wrung it out, and pushed it aside.
    “Like a whole bunch of businesses competing for a tiny market.”
    “You’ve got it. Today there’s only a few cells left with any power or leverage—the meanest, the cutthroats, the survivors. After I/KON and MORG became ‘subpotent,’ as they say, this week’s winner was something called NORCO .”
    “Like the Impossible Missions Force?” I said.
    Dandine wrinkled his brow.
    “You know—” I said, flustered.
“Your mission, should you decide to accept it . . .?”
    “Oh. TV.” I suppose it was irrational to expect someone like Dandine to be fluent in what is oxymoronically termed “television culture.” More reminders of other worlds, coexisting invisibly with what
he
called the walking dead. Parallel planes, like the gaps in a venetian blind. Head-on, it looks solid, but there are all kinds of slats to slip through.
    Our meal materialized with admirable speed. It really was an impossiblemission
not
to look at our waitress’s navel, and she knew it. A sterling silver stud lived there, to catch the light and prompt the show. I cursed my male coding while she slid Dandine’s plate into place, casually touching him on the shoulder and calling him
doll.
I thought about alpha wolves and swirling clouds of pheromones.
    “Think of it this way,” he said. “Most ordinary citizens’ concept of enforcement goes like this: Cops, detectives, undercover cops, FBI, then CIA . . . and after that, it gets hazy. Maybe they’ve heard of the Division.”
    “What does it divide?” I tried, but he didn’t laugh.
    “Sits between the FBI and CIA. Now, think of all the subterranean cells as being in the same order, but starting with the CIA at the
bottom.
It helps to remember all the clubs essentially mistrust and despise each other, and that’s a chink that can be exploited.”
    “What about the National Security Agency?” I hazarded a bite of club sandwich, and I don’t know why it
bothered
me that it tasted pretty damned good.
    “Not players. Remember, the NSA started out as ‘codebreakers and codemakers,’ ever since the end of World War Two. They umbrella SIGINT and INFOSEC . Did you know the NSA employs more mathematicians than anyone else? People got the NSA confused with subterranean ops back at the turn of the century—all that so-called ‘terrorist’ shit.”
    “It’s sexier now,” I said. “Now that we live in a world of red, white, blue, and yellow alerts.”
    “Bottom line: The more agencies there are, the more time they have to spend spying on each other instead of doing any sort of sociopolitical work. Then they have to police themselves for suborganizations
within
their own clubs. So you stand a decent chance of getting misfiled, or slipping through some loophole, I know not what.”
    It sounded as though he was trying to soften some blow, or set