I have to say, I like the way I see this dynamic shaking out. I randomly and without much thought or structure toss around ideas, and Russ makes sense of it all and provides us with order and elegance.
So, I've got some more "What Ifs".
I know I said I liked the War Games model, but I can also see an Enemy of the State approach going something like this:
What if -- as Russ concocted like a champ -- Jordi is searching for information about a long-lost parent, when she accidentally intercepts a satellite transmission. The transmission is captured, decoded, and saved to her hard drive.
When she looks at it later, what if she sees that it is both audio communication and satellite surveillance of a domestic, radioactive waste disposal facility. What if it's similar to this one in Barnwell, South Carolina, which happens to be one of only a couple radioactive waste disposal facilities owned by a public sector company. And what if the satellite feed she intercepted contains the set-up and detonation of explosive devices in the facility, causing massive collections of radioactive material to ignite, creating a mini nuclear ground zero.
Satellite images of the facility could look something like this. And a closer view might look something like this.
So, who would be attempting to sabotage this sort of facility? Well, what if we model it a little further on the company that owns the Barnwell facility and say that company is owned by a larger company. And let's take it one step further and say that the larger company was owned by a great big military-industrial behemoth. For reelz.
So maybe what we unravel over the course of the story is that our fictional facility had been leaching into the neighboring groundwater and was about to be exposed to a massive Erin Brokovich style lawsuit. So the corporate daddy rigged the destruction of one of its subsidiaries to avoid a lawsuit. But there's also a small residual benefit, because they also own the company that can provide emergency response up and down the Atlantic coast to the tune of who knows how many billions.
One benefit that I can see in tackling the story this way is that it gives her more to discover and reveal as the story progresses. You know, a la Chinatown -- follow the money.
Oh, and one other thing. I know that simply by typing many of these words -- like det*nate, radi*active, and n*clear -- that this site is now prime reading material for somebody in Forte Meade. So consider this a virtual wave from all of us to the good people in crypto city. Not to worry, we're just creating a story. Fiction. But if you have any cool ideas, feel free to add them in the comments section. Now get outside and enjoy a beautiful spring Maryland day.
-- Dave
Labels: Carlyle Group, It's just fiction, NSA
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