She forced a smile on her face and said, “I wish that were the case. Actually, I’m here because we were hoping you’d found something new. I understand from Mark that you guys, um, have some collection tools that aren’t exactly at our disposal. For the record, he didn’t specify what those tools were, only that they defy and sometimes supersede even the best SIGINT collection technologies in our arsenal.”

This comment was met with nods around the table.

“That’s true,” Julia said. “And while we’re certainly going to task our Watcher program to start looking, we have nothing fresh and actionable now.”

Something in her face suggested there was more to that story, but Gayle shook the feeling off. If so, she’d never know. That was the game, right?

Gayle exhaled, trying not to look too deflated. She was about to say something vague when Jed spoke up.

“Gayle, what you need to know is that we’ve stood up a dedicated special task force for prosecuting this threat. My team—including Eli, Nisha, and Bex—will be the field component, while Julia and Damien spearhead things from here. The problem is, we’re a heat-seeking missile without a heat signature to home in on,” he said.

“What about that guy from Cuzco that you black-bagged? Were you able to extract any actionable intelligence from him?” she asked.

“Not really,” Julia said, answering for Jed. “All we did was confirm our suspicions that we’re dealing with a directed energy weapon of unknown technology, that it was fired from altitude and not line of sight from the ground, and that it was acquired by a well-financed terrorist organization we monitor closely. But like Jed said, that still doesn’t give us the next bread crumb to follow.”

Gayle nodded and sat, lips pressed tightly together, in the uncomfortable silence that followed. Before leaving for Nashville, she’d met with DS&T and they’d discussed the incident in the mountains. The guru from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology had been visibly shaken by Gayle’s retelling of the event. As the lead investigator researching the growing number of reports of Havana Syndrome at State, inside the IC, and at active-duty military stations overseas, the team was an expert in directed energy weapon attacks. The microwave emitters believed responsible for the crippling neurological symptoms suffered by those targeted were portable and difficult to detect. This weapon, however, was a completely different beast altogether. When pressed, the team had reluctantly read Gayle in on a recent development concerning a Chinese scientist working at the Scientific Research Steering Committee—the PLA’s version of DARPA—who had recently been in contact with a CIA asset inside China with concerns about lethal high energy weapons research and had asked to defect, but he hadn’t been taken seriously.

But now . . .