To Lilfluff’s Prompt, ” Something relating to the agencies discovering each other?” This is more of my Camp Nano project

The Joining

Cade Ferrel’s organization didn’t even have a name, just “Agency 3-1-7″ and “Protocols 7, 9, and 12″. They didn’t have a budget line, or at least not an admitted one, and the money they got wasn’t impressive by anyone’s standards.

(There was a rumor his predecessor had once turned a surveillance job, posing as a panhandler, into a hundred percent increase in the month’s budget. While Cade was pretty sure that was an exaggeration, it still remained a very telling story.)

What Agency 3-1-7 had was a very open-ended mandate and a couple extremely open-ended laws about how they performed that mandate.

And Cade was looking at a witch who swore up and down that magic was real.

Now, Cade had encountered lots and lots of people who swore just about everything was real, from the Moon Landing to aliens to brain-tapping via tap water (“why do you think they call it tap water?”) to a magical ritual being what really killed Kennedy. But most of them didn’t have Top Secret government clearances and badges that matched Cade’s for obscurity.

This particular so-called witch belonged to Agency 3-2-9, with a sub-reference to Protocol 19. Cade had actually heard of Protocol Nineteen; even though Agency 3-1-7 didn’t fall under it, sometimes they used it for this and that. Mostly that, lately, where that meant bending the law because we don’t have any funding.

The witch was telling Cade that there were things that could be done to surveil without equipment. With the only cost being in time and getting one of Agency 3-2-9’s workers in place for ten minutes.

Ten minutes! Cade was in love.

Cade wasn’t going to have to panhandle to make budget this quarter.

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