[b]Triskelion
Washington D.C.
13:15 Local Time[/b]


George Smiley sat behind his desk and ruminated on the nature of human weakness.

It was common that there were flaws amongst those in his profession. One did not become a spook if they were a well-adjusted individual. Plenty of them were obsessive like Smiley, but plenty more were out looking for some thrill. All they knew of the trade was from movies. They thought spy work entailed walking around in a tuxedo and bedding beautiful Russian women. They fond out the hard way that the tuxedos were nowhere to be found, and the Russian women they encountered looked more like Russian men. The strains of the job, mixed with the flawed people doing them, made it very easy for betrayal to take place.

M.I.C.E. was the acronym Smiley learned at the Circus. The four main reasons intelligence officers began to work for the other side. Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego. With the small salaries government work provided, accepting money to betray ones country was the most common cause behind double agents. Ideology was few and far between, Smiley himself had only once witnessed a full-on fanatic dedicated to the cause he served. Coercion was very common as well, it and money were the two tools the Circus used to turn Soviets to their side. Run a honeytrap and catch a KGB Lieutenant Colonel with his pants down and with a nice young man. If Boris didn't play ball, he would be outed. The ego motive played back to the thrill seekers. They got off on playing the game at such a high stake. They wanted to prove how clever they were. It wasn't enough to pull one over on the enemy, but to take it further and pull one over on your own country.

Smiley thought about M.I.C.E. as he looked at the six folders spread out on his desk. He'd narrowed the potential leak down to six SHIELD agents who all occupied communications related posts in Eastern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Through careful inspection with the tech team, Smiley whittled down his list from ninety-two to just six. One of these agents was Tiger Shark's man inside SHIELD. One of them had given him or his people access to the network, allowing him to hijack a drone strike. 

He placed a pudgy hand on a folder. Money: The chief of station in Nairobi had big debts to his name. He had three ex-wives and seven children back in the States, four of those children near college age. Along with him, the communications specialist SHIELD stationed at Diego Garcia had over one hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt, the consequence of acquiring a doctorate in electrical engineering. 

Ideology: Nothing there. HYDRA's fascistic bent did not resonate with any of the agents on his list. Nothing in any of their histories even suggested a ideological sympathy with HYDRA.

Coercion: Three there. An agent working out of the Mumbai Station battled drug addiction off and on. It was something on few people in SHIELD knew. If he was off the wagon, he may very well trade his soul for free drugs. A driver for the chief of Johannesburg Station was a closeted homosexual. The one that leapt out to Smiley the most was the agent stationed in Jakarta. The man had a secret second family in Indonesia. Secrets and the need to keep them hidden was often a motivation to commit treason.

Ego: Just one agent met that standard. The roving martial advisor in the Middle East. The man was a full on action junkie. He loved being a spy, he lived it and breathed it. The only thing that would complete his perfect picture of espionage was to in fact be a double agent.

Six agents, six possible leaks. Smiley gathered up the files and stacked them neatly on the desk. Each and every person had a weakness, that flaw that was the chink in their armor. Everyone had one, Smiley included. His had always been his wife. No matter how much Ann ran around on him and turned him into a cuckold, he always welcomed her back home with open arms. That weakness had been exploited by Karla and his man in the Circus for years. He'd purged himself of Ann not long after he retired from the Circus, but he still knew that he would always love her. Even if she came back to him here in America, he would welcome her into his home.

"Ms. Henderson?" Smiley said into the intercom on his desk.

"Yes, sir?" The secretary down the hall replied a few moments later.

"I have some cables I need sent immediately."

Smiley prepared the dispatches while she came to his office. Six different cables about six different subjects. Everything from scraps of intelligence to specific orders. Each dispatch would go to one of his six suspected traitors. How the events of the next twenty-four hours played out would mark his man in a way that Smiley would know for certain who had betrayed SHIELD. The trick was known as a barium meal, one of the oldest counter intelligence moves in the book and it was still an effective weapon, even at a time when robots flew in the sky and rained death and destruction from the sky.

"Yes, sir?" Ms. Henderson asked as she came through Smiley's soundproof door.

"There are specific coding and handling instructions for each one," Smiley said as he handed her the sealed pouches. "I'd like to supervise transmission of them myself."

"Certainly, sir. Follow me."

Smiley glanced down at the six folders one last time before he followed Ms. Henderson out of his office and to the communications center. With good luck on Barnes' end, Tiger Shark and his whole bloody network would be dismantled in just a few short hours.