Penguins, Spycraft, and More in the Nation's Capital!

More 2024 Adventures

Vienna, VA → Washington, DC → Vienna, VA
32.8 mi (52.8 km)

There’s shady dealings afoot, everyone!

I was just getting ready to hang up my hat for the season when I got a sudden surprise call from Washington, DC. My good friend, Dudley Dinsdale, was certain a monster had busted through the floor of his home and begun running amok among his friends. And the first person he thought of to put a stop to it was me!

Personally, I would have gone with a more local monster hunter, but Mr. Dinsdale is friends with very tech-savvy polar bears. Luckily, he’d gifted me a teleporter for quick visits a few years back, and within seconds, I whizzed all across the country only to get a real kink in the neck on the other side. It was still more pleasant than going through TSA, though!

After thorough investigation, I found no monsters in Mr. Dinsdale’s basement. He suspected giant faster-than-light sloths who were very tidy in cleaning up their messes, but I had to break it to him: I couldn’t see faster than light! Then, my old friends, Penguin, Jr. and Penguin III, came on down, drawn by the commotion, and sure enough, after trying to block April’s eclipse, they were hatching yet another scheme. It was too secret to discuss here. They gave me an invisible wrist watch—how do they even get this technology?—and told me to use it to reconvene with them downtown.

I made my way to the Orange Line and headed into DC proper, disembarking at L’Enfant Plaza station with specific instructions to meet the Penguins at 700 L’Enfant Plaza SW. The watch buzzed as I got closer, which was really confusing for about ten minutes. Had I broken it already? I’d already broken my prototype Flutter Phone back in 2022!

At last, the Penguins spotted me and ushered me into a hidden corner. It was too risky to be seen out in the open. They were out to apprehend a rogue penguin! A rogue penguin?! There are penguins out there who are even more mischievous than these two? This one was a member of the notorious Jingle Bell Gang—wanted by the FBI and Interpol—and had apparently created a cloning device that spawned a monstrous bear named Damien! Was that Mr. Dinsdale’s monster, I wondered? And was I equipped to track such a villain? The Penguins assured me I’d be fine and backed slowly away.

As far as any of us could tell, this Jingle Bell scheister was preparing to do some sort of holiday shopping at Washington, DC’s International Spy Museum! And he didn’t even pay admission! That sneaky bird… I promised my friends I would do my best to apprehend the rogue penguin by any (humane) means necessary!

It wasn’t easy from the start. After infiltrating the museum and watching an orientation video on spycraft and intelligence gathering, I had a mission added to my mission! Museum staff issued me a special RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) badge, that gave me access to my undercover identity. For today, I was Roux Torres, a teacher from Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a mission to locate an arms shipment in Mumbai and the secret codeword: VECTOR. How the heck was I going to remember all of that while tracking a rogue penguin?

I memorized the secret information in the hope that it would throw the rogue penguin off my scent. I didn’t know how an internationally hunted, monster-making rogue penguin would react to being followed by an eager beaver, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out! I kept my Five Deadly Arts at the ready, just in case.

I was so focused on memorizing my mission that I lost track of the rogue penguin in front of Tools of the Trade! There was plenty here to distract me, like microdots, tiny, 1-mm compressions of photos that could be hidden inside postcards, pens, pipes, and even false teeth! There were maps disguised as playing cards, cameras hidden in coat buttons, and Li Bai’s 1942 “Shapeless Radio,” which could flip between regular radio and transmitter with one hard to detect wire! Plus, the section on disguises featured Jonna Mendez, former CIA Chief of Disguise, who was so skilled at her job that she even bamboozled President Bush, Sr. by wearing a lifelike face mask so classified it’s still kept under lock and key at CIA Headquarters!

There were more masters of disguise in the Spies and Spymasters gallery, which featured famous spies like Mata Hari, James Lafayette, and Dmitri Bystrolyotov, a Soviet “illegal” who’d mastered many identities! Able to speak multiple languages, he took on the roles of a British nobleman, Hungarian count, Dutch artist, and more to steal British, Italian, and German military secrets in the years before World War II! But in 1937, his own country reclassified him as an enemy of the people, and he spent 17 years in a Siberian gulag! I wondered if that was the same fate awaiting the rogue penguin!

The perpetrator paused in front of one particular section for quite a while: animal spies with penguin-sized gear! There were no other penguins on display here, but famously, in the age before drones, air surveillance was the job of pigeons that had cameras strapped to their chests, birds that took great risks flying over hostile territory! Cats with transmitters in their ears and robotic catfish have also been used to listen in on unsuspecting folks. Coolest of all, though, was a huge, robotic ATS (All Terrain Snake) whose role was to crawl through tunnels and debris, to rescue earthquake survivors and inspect nuclear power plants!

There were so many gadgets on display here, from a confiscated German Enigma machine to the Sleeping Beauty, an underwater canoe used by British Special Operations in World War II! Wearing an oxygen mask, pilots would dive underwater and cruise along silently to spy on enemy ships overhead! This didn’t seem right for a rogue penguin, who would already have underwater spying skills mastered. I checked in with the other penguins on my invisible watch. The rogue penguin hadn’t stolen anything yet. They insisted I keep following!

Spycraft and information control have spanned long spans of history, from the Trojan Horse to magnetized stones used by the Mongols for border control to modern day cybercrime! Eerily, in our digital age, history itself can be reshaped, like this example of North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, editing his assassinated uncle out of official records and video documentaries! Editing folks out of photos has been going on since at least the ’30s, which really made me wonder what pieces of history we’re sure are true might have been doctored this way? Luckily, today, with so many cell phones, it’s harder than ever to get away with this kind of thing. Wait, I’ve been spotted!

The rogue penguin distracted me and ran, right past the exhibits on the Cold War, capturing Osama Bin Laden, and how Pearl Harbor and September 11th were both very similar failures of intelligence! By the time I caught up to the scallywag, he tried to give me the slip by hiding behind a sign in front of an inflatable tank. This itself had been part of a huge historic dupe! Starting on January 20, 1944, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops under Colonel Harry L. Reeder got to work deceiving Nazi intelligence. With just over 1,000 troops, they assembled a “Ghost Army” of inflatable tanks and planes, unoccupied tents, and falsified radio transmissions to make German forces think there was a force, 30,000-strong, ready to attack, while no actual force existed there!

I finished up my sub-mission by identifying a special kind of curry to get the coordinates of the arms shipment in Mumbai, then set to solving my main mission. So far, the rogue penguin had not gotten his flippers on any secret tech for Christmas. Was it because all of the trickiest gadgets were behind glass, or was this penguin just casing the joint? I’d have to spring into action quick, because who knows what danger would await if the rogue penguin returned to collect a prize? This was going to be a major risk, but I took out my memory card, pretended to drop it on the sidewalk, and walked away. As soon as I rounded the corner, I signaled to my friends what was going on.

Sure enough! The rogue penguin couldn’t resist the temptation of ill-gotten information and went for the card! As soon as he bent down to pick it up—not too easy with slippery flippers—hi-ya! Penguin, Jr. and Penguin III sprung into action, trapping the rogue penguin and disrupting what was surely the caper of the century!

The Penguins thanked me quickly for my service and hauled off the ne’er-do-well to face penguin justice. While I hope to never face that kind of justice myself, the matter was now out of my hand, and I was left standing alone in the nation’s capital with my new invisible watch and plenty of curiosity. That made it a good time to go visit my friend, Rose, for tapas. What will happen to the rogue penguin? We’ll find out soon!

I was never here!