“The Misfits makes use of the fact that people are easily blinded by their own preconceptions and misconceptions of what spies should look like and who they think is a reasonable opponent,” Lorna laid out a popular fashion magazine between them on the table. She leafed through a few pages, and swept her hand over a layout with a number of people posing in a park, an ad for some clothing line. “Is this real? Is what we perceive as what we should buy actually true?”
“Ads are never real, and even article photos in magazines are often faked. But it’s not like that’s a surprise to most people.”
“We’ve built billion-dollar industries out of telling people what they want, and millions goes into advertising every year on how to best fool them into believing it.” She turned a few more pages, and pointed at a model holding a makeup compact. “Much of what’s advertised is also to hide our own flaws and problems. So we capitalize that on the Misfits. People who are different are considered ineffective. People who can’t hide their shortcomings are not considered a threat. A lot of spies rely on being unobtrusive, but we flat out flaunt the fact that we’re different, and those we try to get information from put us on an even lower level than the ones they don’t notice. They don’t believe we’re even capable of being a threat, and they misstep more than they might with someone they simply don’t know.”
Many tourists and non-locals in Hawaii that believed money and expensive clothes bought them the right to trash everyone else. For that matter, college students were pretty much the same way. If you didn’t have the goods, then you must be subservient.
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“So, perhaps I could pretend to not speak English, or speak it very poorly?” asked Arena. “I speak Japanese without an accent, so if someone did know Japanese, they could speak to me easily enough.”
“That’s one possibility,” said Lorna. “It will probably depend on the situation and where the mission is located. You may even be able to just play dumb college student, too. That appears to be what your roommate was doing.”
Arena jumped. “Sophia? What do you mean?”
Lorna was smug. “You didn’t see it did you? Not in the least. She was rooming with you because she was assigned to recruit you to the CIA.”
“Nate said they were planning to recruit me next year. She would have been graduated by then.” Arena was even more confused.
“I don’t know what the plan was, but she was planning to go to grad school, wasn’t she? Maybe she was going to ask you to room again. I really don’t know. We believe she had a handler on campus, and it’s clearly in her file that you were part of her assignment there. Unfortunately, the departments don’t like to talk to each other all that much, so there’s not much more we can find out. Another unit is assigned to her recovery.”
“She’s in real danger, isn’t she?” Arena was trying to work through all the pieces of information, but her heavy heart was blocking the way.
“We don’t really know. They might know her background, or they might not. She may just be a bargaining chip. Or maybe they want to turn her. Make her a double agent or just recruit her entirely. Getting her back has become a top priority, but it’s still not as much of a priority as recovering the other two hoverboards.”
Lorna closed the magazine and dug out a flash drive. She pulled out a new netbook and pushed both toward Arena. “These are to help you study. I set you up an internal email address as well, and loaded the flash drive with some videos and other resources. You might want to look them over; we’ll be talking about all this again.”