Overview

"37-3"

When governments can't act.

When treaties don't apply.

Where greed is unbounded.

Somewhere, past the outer markers

of

propriety,

just beyond

reasonable risk

is the firm "37-3"

and

the solution to your problem.

----

Rick Rodgers joined the CIA in October 1981 and left 20 years, 7 passports, 12
operational aliases, 7 overseas tours and countless successful covert operations
later. Even his enemies, and of those there were legions, admitted he was one
of the finest counter terrorist officers the Agency had ever seen.

Introspective, brilliant, mystical, intuitive and above all, ruthless.

The Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Aleppo, Jenin, Beirut, Tikrit, Khartoum, and on and
on. He had been there, but not been there.

In November 2001, Rodgers founded the firm "37-3". His clients were
corporations who needed help with problems in foreign places. Places where
justice was a commodity and not an ideal. He was no mercenary. Not Rick. No
"ops" for sport shoemakers financing sweat shops through slave traders in Sri
Lanka. As an Agency officer, Rick's moral standards, by necessity, often shifted
as the needs of National Security hung heavy upon the Agency and its
practitioners of the Black Arts. For Rick one thing remained a constant: his
empathy for the downtrodden of the world, whom through he had passed so
quietly over the past two decades. Their contentment and willingness to offer
help when there was so little to give always amazed him.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

While the motives of men transcend time and space, the arena of economic
combat does not. Rick realized that to serve his clients and their peculiar needs,
he would need the next generation of combatants. Warriors armed with laptops
and I-Phones. So he began to look for help. Like the Agency, "37-3" did not
advertise, did not accept resumes and maintained a benign front of "no help
wanted" in its HR posture. Rather, Rick believed in finding good talent. The best
talent. But talent is not all the matters.

Astride every keyboard, behind every mouse-click sits a human being, with a full
array of psychological vulnerabilities, predictable patterns of behavior and
exploitable weaknesses. Man and machine. Rick, the Zen Monk, knew the two
were in actuality one living organism that, like most things in Rick's world, could
be used for good or evil.

---

Peachie Cardenas was born in a slagheap hut village in Quezon City in the
Philippines. Her black, US Navy, enlisted -man -on -shore leave father was long
gone by the time Peachie arrived. Somehow, her single mother worked three
jobs and tailored on the weekends to send Peachie to a private catholic school
for her primary education.

Peachie did the rest, with a little corporal discipline from her Jesuit missionary
schoolteachers.

Next stop was Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School for Girls in Washington
DC on an exchange student scholarship. Never mind the condescending pity
from rich kids and their bored mothers in J Crew, Donegal-plaid skirts. Peachie
buckled down and took from them everything they had to offer. Quezon City
gives one a unique philosophy of life. Peachie's ruthless streak was born.

Later, undergraduate work right next door at Georgetown University. Computer

Science with a minor in Far Eastern Religions.

Peachie was the all-conference, NCAA Division I, Women's Lacrosse Most

Valuable Player for her sophomore, junior and senior years. Georgetown women
won the title a record three seasons in a row.
Georgetown retired her number at the end of her senior year.

Peachie thought Lacrosse was a sissy's game, but needed the scholarship
money.

Peachie's exotic racial features evoked curiosity. When she delivered her
Valedictorian speech at Georgetown's white-shoe, old boy commencement
exercise, tongues wagged.

University of Chicago, Masters Degree. She did it in 18 months. To relax from

her grueling work and school schedule, she took up "Muay Thai" or Thai
kickboxing.

Finally, before entering the Real World, Peachie nailed down a PhD in Computer
Sciences and Engineering from the University of California at Berkley. Her PhD
thesis was entitled, "Hacking- A symbiotic component of linked systems
development."

Beautiful in an uncommon way. Tough exterior at first blush. Cynical, street-wise

and armed with a weapons-grade sense of humor. Quickly perceptive to the
foibles all humans carry with them, though try to hide. Less aware of her own
ambivalence over her Quezon City roots and those she left behind.

Rick met her at a Georgetown University Basketball game.

She signed on with "37-3" two weeks later. After she laid her pen down, she
asked Rick, "What does "37-3" stand for?"

---

Matt Starson was born in Pittsburgh, PA, the first and only son of Pittsburgh cop
and his absent minded, vapid childhood sweetheart. Matt's father was a hard
drinking, small hearted, incipiently violent man, who turned bitter near the end of
his life.

Matt left home as soon as he could. He was nineteen and received a scholarship
to Middlebury University in Connecticut. Matt, you see, was one of those strange
people whose cortical wiring allowed him to soak up foreign languages. One
after another. Accents intact. He was, by all accounts, a linguistic genius.

And Middlebury, self-proclaimed foreign language Mecca of academic America,

wanted him.

Matt tore through Middlebury, effortlessly taking in Arabic, Japanese, Latin and
Khmer. He didn't think Latin was a dead language. His academic advisor was
nonplussed when Matt told him it was alive with "wisdom."
Matt's psychological metabolism resonated on a different frequency. He dwelled
on a different plane, close but separate. He liked going to Japanese restaurants
and correcting Japanese grammar errors on the menu, preferably in front of a
large group of patrons and the Japanese restaurant owner.

While at Middlebury, Matt developed two outside interests: competition shooting

and computer hacking.

While personable, articulate and polite, at bottom Matt is a loner. He did not want
to participate in college team sports. Like Peachie, his blue-collar roots made
him feel both awkward and defiant in the class-conscious milieu of Middlebury.
His academic achievements widened the social gap.

His "competition" shooting was with an informal group of good-ole-boys, who

taught him the subtleties of handling a shotgun; be it aimed at rapidly moving
clay skeets, ducks, pheasants, speed limit signs or pictures of Osama bin-Ladin.
He liked the camaraderie of hanging out with rural Connecticut blue-collar beer
drinkers. They were, in some respects, the collective father he never had. By
the time he graduated, Matt Starson's shootin' buddy clan proclaimed him a
“quick loadin', rapid shootin', hard drinkin' one-man army."

And indeed he was.

Computer hacking seduced Matt quickly and easily. His strict upbringing by his
authoritarian, do-as-I-say and not-as-I-do father made him an easy mark for
taking up some sort of illicit activity. Hacking was deliciously forbidden and a
solitary pursuit that could be pursued during down time, when Matt often felt
restless.

At first, his knowledge of languages gave him early success in the hacking field.
Most hackers are US based and showed no interest or ability in tampering with
web sites in Chinese or Japanese or Arabic. He gained access easily and felt
the first, addictive rush of an electronic thief in the night. Later, he built on his
skills with foreign sites to attain virtuoso abilities at breaking into government,
banking and infrastructure sites around the world.

His secret life fed the atrophied shadow side of his persona, stifled by the need to
conform to his father's rigid, paranoia based code of conduct.

After graduation, Matt turned down a blizzard of scholarship offers for graduate
work in foreign language study. He instead accepted a partial scholarship at
Carnegie- Mellon in Pittsburgh, where he undertook a dual Masters program in
Asiatic languages and Business Administration. Matt knew that one day he
would need to find a job and he did not relish the prospect of translating
bombastic monologues at the United Nations.
Matt chose Carnegie because it was close to home. His father was dying of
cancer.

Many of his father's friends attended the funeral. They looked old and frail,
compared to the threatening, drunken men he remembered holding forth on
issues of the day in his father's basement bar: uniform shirts unbuttoned, guns
casually slung over coat racks.

Matt left again, this time for Cornell University, where he obtained his PhD in
Sanskrit languages. His PhD thesis was entitled: Indo-Tibetan roots of the word
Tea: 'Cha' Across Time and Space." He graduated Summa Cum Laude and
refused an immediate offer of a tenured teaching position at Yale.

He was restless, unsatisfied and unfulfilled, but did not know why or what to do
about it.

He had never left his secret life of computer hacking, which he continued to
develop and refine. He wore a "white hat", in the sense that his thrill came from
navigating around complicated firewalls and intrusion alarms to enter a site. He
never considered doing mischief once inside.

It seemed unsportsmanlike.

His "hobby within a hobby" was to hack into the personal computers of
colleagues or persons he encountered who pissed him off. Email records,
passwords and the all important porn picture photo library were fair game and
easy marks.

Matt Starson is quiet but exudes confidence and stability. His brilliance is not
immediately discernable, and paradoxically serves more as an embarrassment
than accomplishment underlying Matt's partial shyness. His hacker shadow
persona, when activated, animates his entire countenance, almost to the point of
creating an outspoken, hip-shooting, cowboy Mr. Hyde to the more staid Dr.
Jekyll linguistics expert.

Treading water after Cornell, he took a job as a barista at Starbuck's. Rick saw
him speaking Tibetan with a Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, while Rick was pouring
sugar into his latte. They were discussing an arcane point of "dharma" found in
the Tibetan Book Of Living and Dying.

Twenty-one days later Rick signed on with "37-3."

----
"37-3"

Rick, Peachie and Matt comprise the main characters and sole principal
employees of "33-7."

Rick is the driving force in the company. He is the reason clients sign up. His
Agency background, rarely referred to and hardly discussed, nonetheless
permeates most of the story lines. It is a mysterious, omnipotent though
unstated force that informs Rick's efforts to teach, coach, cajole, criticize and
ultimately dispatch Peachie and Matt into life threatening, hyper-risk situations.

Rick is the boss and there is no doubt about this. His life experiences and his
ability to discern light from darkness in complicated, opaque international
dealings make him the absolute guru of "33-7." Peachie and Matt are bright,
outspoken, savvy operators, but do not question Rick's calls and regard him as
something of a living deity.

All three characters are socially dysfunctional in some way, often with
complimentary though at times dissonant results.

Years of secrecy and lone wolf operations have made Rick deeply introspective,
abrupt and intolerant of mistakes. Corrosive aloneness has produced in him a
surprisingly child like vulnerability to the opposite sex, which runs counter to his
otherwise macho image. Peachie has picked up on this and finds Rick extremely
attractive, despite the yawning age difference between the two.

Matt, the natural selection mate for Peachie, indeed does admire her though is
wary of her scorpion-like humor, used most effectively against men seeking her
obvious charms. Matt's professional demeanor, and relatively low key
personality act as an anchor for the high strung, shoot now, ask questions later
Peachie. He is a swan, who still sees the ugly duckling in the mirror.

Peachie is infatuated with Rick and fails to see Matt's occasional romantic
interest. She processes quickly and is impatient with those who don't keep up.
She maintains nostalgic regard for the "simple though poor" life of her youth in
Quezon City, but has not yet accepted that she can and will never go back.

Rick molds them into a seamless, instinctual, operational team of exceptional

competence. They can, quite literally, operate against overwhelming odds in
extreme conditions under very tight clocks.

The company takes assignments from corporations in deep trouble around the
world. They are selective in their clientele and do not accept all requests for
assistance. Companies that profit from enterprises that damage the
environment, further social injustice or exploit the impoverished are turned away.

Sometimes they are targeted.

37-3 also maintains a small but elite list of special clients. Among them are
government's of nations whose structure and politics do not allow quick,
responsive action to potential threats. Rick was well aware that in the 21st
century, pluralistic debate over the best means of averting a terrorist attack was a
nostalgic luxury.

The US Government is one of Rick's oldest and best clients. And, why not? They
were like an old married couple in many ways, quietly used to each other’s
eccentricities and habits.

When the USG decided to outsource some of the more controversial aspects of
its "war on terror", 37-3 was on the top of their list.

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