President Zweibel recovered his composure and yelled into the phone.
"WHERE have you been?!"
"Setting up the office", answered Director Klugeburger. "And don't worry about looking for a bunker; there's not one."
"But what was four hundred million spent on?"
"The decoy. We poured three floors and put up perimeters and guard shacks but rather than outfit, wire and furnish, we filled it up with ping pong balls and looped phony com traffic out of it. The real setup's in an abandoned parking garage in Baltimore; Gene Hackman mentioned it to me at a mixer at Will Smith's last spring."
"What's the report on the Pakistan crap?!"
"Oh, that - VP Uber's going slow on the Double-Secret clearance so I don't see it all yet, but they've been able to tell me that the baddies cycle between the Bolan pass and Peshawar dressed as fully-robed female tax accountants. Nobody is interested in talking with them."
"So how can Special Ops ID the ones they send across?"
"The radium tracers we impressed into the latest Urdu printing of Entertainment Weekly should set off border sensors. The boys in the KH-18 MOL use those sightings to tip off forward observers, airborne ordnance, whatever can take a look."
"What the hell's a KH-18?"
"Remember that stuff they cancelled? Someone forgot to cancel a few things..."
Tune in tomorrow when we'll hear press secretary Thrillhouse say:
"What the President REALLY MEANT was [insert attempt to make policy here]..."
