"Avert your eyes, ladies and gentlemen," intoned our driver, "and look neither to your right nor to your left. For what we are about to witness does not officially exist. And God bless the United States of America."
—Underground, by Andrew McGahan
...government officials denied the existence of an area of Bone County that isn't on the map. Someone, who was unprepared to be named, said, "The so-called place that isn't called anything doesn't exist. And if it did, we'd name it something."
—Leanne Forget, WCTR News
Liz: What is this place?
Ressler: DC Metro Sorting Facility, US Postal Service. It was abandoned and slated for demo twelve years ago. The Bureau acquired the building post-9/11 - been operating a variety of covert operations here ever since.
Liz: So this is a black site?
Ressler: We're sentimental. We prefer to call it The Post Office.
—The Blacklist, "Pilot"
Second only to the space-base at Baikonur, E-Branch was now housed in one of the best-fortified installations in the USSR. Certainly it vied favourably with the joint atomic and plasma research station at Gargetya, lost in the Urals, whose chief asset was its isolation; but in one major aspect it was superior to both Baikonur and Gargetya: namely it was “secret” in the fullest sense of the word. Apart from Borowitz's operatives, no-one but a double-handful of men even suspected that the chateau in its present for existed, and of these, only three or four knew that it housed E-Branch.
The POW camp on Dartmoor is a Potemkin village, built in the glare of media scrutiny to reassure the public that its inmates are secure, but Camp Sunshine is the real deal. A black site, an undisclosed location, the answer to a snare and a delusion: how do you confine the wizards who walk between the rain drops, that which is dead but dreaming, and those who by force of will alone can chew holes in the warp and weft of reality like moths in the fabric of spacetime?
