by Bob Mayer
Mrs. Sanchez did. She knew to which person/agency/entity every single dollar went, all overseen from this tiny office on a level of the Pentagon that wasn’t listed on any official description of the Pentagon.
That was because it had been built using funds from the Black Budget. There’s a synchronicity to it all.
Mrs. Sanchez checked her clipboard. “You requested two dozen ancient Egyptian bronze coins, Amin-Zeus stamped.” She dropped the clipboard. “Two dozen. Egyptian. Original. Amin-Zeus stamped.”
“You fool!” Foreman shouted. “But Ptolemy? That’s third century BC. After the time period I need them for.”
Mrs. Sanchez shrugged. “You didn’t say anything about the flip side, Mister Foreman. Every coin has a flip side, you know.” It was not a question. And like someone behind the counter at the DMV, she proceeded to give him the same lecture she gave him almost every time he came in. “You have to be very, very specific when you fill out the form. It’s not our job to interpret your requests.”
Mrs. Sanchez was in Southwestern apparel, with flowing white hair, dark skin, and an angular face. Silver and turquoise jewelry adorned her fingers, wrists, and neck. Colorful rugs decorated the walls along with etchings of the desert. She was in her late sixties and retirement wasn’t even on the horizon for her, although she had no doubt when she did retire, her daughter would fill her shoes quite nicely, thank you, just as Mrs. Sanchez had filled her own mother’s so many years ago. The Sanchezes had carved out their own unique place here in the bowels of the Pentagon.
Foreman had done the same, except in a quite different direction. He was muttering to himself as he put the coins and leather sack down on the counter.
“Do you have the new order?” Foreman asked.
Mrs. Sanchez put a briefcase on the counter and opened it, turning it so Foreman could inspect it. He searched through the objects in the briefcase with shaking hands. They represented currency across the spectrum of history, from BC to current day.
“I’ll need the older Amin-Zeus coins,” Foreman said. His old, once-thick white hair was beginning to give way to a liver-spotted scalp. His face was like a hatchet, no softness in it at all. His eyes, once like steel, had softened over the years with cataracts, and he wore a pair of thick spectacles that were smudged with fingerprints.
“What’s the special word?” Mrs. Sanchez asked, as if speaking to a child.
“Please,” Foreman said.
“I’ll work on it,” Mrs. Sanchez said. “Is the rest in order?”
“It appears to be,” Foreman grudgingly said.
“You’re welcome,” Mrs. Sanchez said as she slapped the top of the case shut. She placed her hand over a sensor and a red light flashed. “I’ll have it shipped to New York by courier, as per Protocol.”
“Yes, yes,” Foreman muttered. “But the Egyptian currency. It’s important.”
“It will be here when it gets here,” Mrs. Sanchez said. “There are some things that take time. Finding the original currency, especially such rare and valuable coins, isn’t easy.”
“Time?” Foreman gave a snort. “You know nothing of time!”
“I believe we’re done here,” Mrs. Sanchez said. She hit a button under her side of the counter and the door behind Foreman slid open, revealing his transportation.
“Yes, yes.” Foreman turned around and went into the room, taking the chair that awaited. The door hissed shut.
“Have a nice day.” Mrs. Sanchez sighed as she took the briefcase to a glass door, which she opened, and then slid the case in. It was gone in a second, whisked away by some hidden mechanism.
“That crazy old man scares me,” Mrs. Sanchez’s daughter said.
“His budget last year was one hundred forty-six million, two hundred and twelve thousand, five hundred and forty-five dollars,” Mrs. Sanchez said. “He doesn’t file a breakdown on how it’s spent. But it’s appropriated every year, grandfathered in.”
“What exactly does he do?” the daughter asked. “Who does he work for?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Sanchez said, and that was the scariest thing her daughter had ever heard her mother say.
In the box, Foreman was moved horizontally and vertically along tracks, one box among several underneath the Pentagon. It wasn’t the smoothest ride, with some starts and stops and the occasional backwards movement. In a sense, the covert world that was literally underneath the Pentagon had mastered the concept of cubicles.
The box came to a halt and the door opened—once more where it was supposed to and not at the “final destination.” Foreman stood up as the box door opened, and then a door beyond it slid aside. Before stepping out, Foreman reached around the doors to the left and blindly flipped off an infrared sensor. Then he entered the windowless cube that had been his Pentagon office for over fifty years.
It made Mulder’s fictional basement room underneath FBI headquarters look chic, clean, and modern. Files were stacked everywhere. The walls were lined with tin foil, which might make a visitor wonder, but there hadn’t been a visitor here to wonder in a quarter century. Foreman was buried deep, literally and figuratively.
He’d put the foil up one day in a fit of frustration at his lack of knowledge, not because he thought it did anything to protect him, but because it had given him something to do. He figured if anyone did bother to visit him, it would rattle them, make them think he was nuts, and they’d be anxious to leave. All good things in his opinion.
On top of the foil on one wall was a large-scale map of the entire world. It was covered in writing and post-its. Several highlighted areas seemed to be the focus of a lot of attention: the Bermuda Triangle; an area in Cambodia near the location of the ancient, abandoned city of Kol Ker, also known as Koh Ker, depending on who one spoke to; Lake Baikal and the Chernobyl areas in Russia; and some others, including the Devil’s Sea off of Japan. In all those places, written in red marker was: Here There Be Monsters.
Seventy years earlier in the vicinity of the Devil’s Sea, Foreman’s squadron hadn’t contacted the enemy and been lost to combat. He would have heard that over the radio. His own pilot had been forced to ditch their plane due to engine problems, and they’d bobbed in the ocean for almost an hour before being forced to take to their life raft. Eventually they were picked up by a destroyer.
In reality, the rest of the squadron had simply gone silent a few minutes after Foreman’s plane went down, heading in the direction of a strange cloud formation. Gone. Disappeared. Never heard from again. No sign of them ever found.
Foreman had done research and learned that the location where his fellow Marines disappeared was called the Devil’s Sea. Then, after the war, he’d been reassigned to Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale. Just before a routine training mission, Foreman had been overwhelmed with a feeling of dread. He’d begged off the mission, instead spending the time in the tower. When all five planes of Flight 19 disappeared, and a PBM Mariner Flying Boat sent to search for them exploded with all hands lost, it initiated a lifetime of obsession.
Also on the map were thumbtacks with different colored string stretching between them, arcing across the globe from point to point. There was almost a pattern to the lines.
Almost, but not quite. Another frustrating thing for Foreman. It seemed the motto of his seventy years of research: Almost, but not quite.
There was no “The Truth Is Out There” poster hanging on the wall. He’d hated that show, because he believed it trivialized matters that were critically important. And it had never revealed its fictional truth. Foreman had yet to find his real truth, but he was going to try every day until he died.
He got along okay with Edith Frobish.
There were a couple of posters, though. One had a famous saying from Shakespeare, more a quote since it was longer than a saying:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
An
d all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death!
Not exactly the most cheery words, but it had kept Foreman sane all these long decades, because while he believed one hundred percent that his mission was critical, he also accepted that in the big scheme of things it was all going to end in death.
For everyone.
Thinking of death, Foreman opened a folder and pulled out an MRI image of a head. He walked over to the saying and tacked the image at the bottom of Shakespeare’s famous lines. He stared at it for a few minutes, and then reached out and ran his finger over a dark mass at the base of the brain.
So small in the big scheme of things.
Which reminded him. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. He carefully unfolded it in the palm of his hand. He counted six pills of varying sizes and hues. Carefully, fingers shaking, he put each one in his mouth one by one, until he had them all. He grabbed a bottle of water and took a swig and swallowed with a grimace.
Another day.
With a sigh, Foreman walked away and sat behind the gray metal, government-issue (circa 1978) desk. He retrieved his keyboard from underneath several folders. The software on the computer was up to date because every year Foreman unplugged the whole thing and hauled it out to the security post and turned it over to IT for service.
A series of emails from the National Security Agency were piled up in his inbox, all part of the results of his daily requests for information. That no one in the NSA apparently cared that somebody in the Pentagon (or technically underneath the Pentagon) was interested in subjects as diverse as the Bermuda Triangle, ley lines, unexplained disappearances of ships, planes, Amelia Earhart, Atlantis, strange cloud formations, and a couple dozen other topics spoke to a level of bureaucratic apathy. The kind that led to events like 9/11. And Foreman being left alone.
Foreman clicked on the first one to begin his reading when he suddenly looked up from the smudged computer screen. He cocked his head as he closed his eyes, as if listening. He opened his eyes as the computer screen went blank and then began flashing bright red, bathing his haggard, lean face with the blood light.
He reached into a drawer in the desk and took out an ancient Egyptian coin. One with Amin-Zeus on one side, but no Ptolemy on the other. He expertly flipped it through his fingers, calming the shake that was normally in them.
“So it begins,” he whispered as he got to his feet and picked up his cane.
He actually seemed kind of happy.
“Where is the American?” the Russian asked.
“Not here,” the woman replied.
“I can see that,” the Russian replied. “Get him.”
“I do not fetch like a dog,” the woman said. She was seated behind a desk in the corner of a quiet warehouse, not far from the airport on Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean. Across from her was the Russian, a cadaverous man, whom she knew to be former Spetsnaz. He had two comrades flanking him, both also emaciated. They were not openly brandishing weapons, but Sin Fen knew men like that didn’t go to the bathroom without at least a gun and a knife and a hair trigger of anger. Strange for the warm clime, all three men wore slacks and long-sleeve shirts. Both of the flanking men wore hats with wide brims, pulled down low over their faces. They also wore gloves. Strange indeed.
The Russian smiled, which obviously required a lot of effort. His face was stretched tight as if it were a mask, the skin pale and unmarked. “No. You do not look like someone who would fetch.” The oddest thing about the man was that his eyes were different colors: one blue, one brown.
Sin Fen was six feet even, slender, dressed in tight black slacks and a red, loose blouse. Her face was exotic, a mixture of various cultures: Chinese, Cambodian, Thai, French, and traces of others were mixed in her genes. She had high cheekbones and almond-shaped dark eyes. Black hair, cut short and efficient, framed her face. Her skin was smooth, making it impossible to determine her age; anywhere from twenty-five to fifty and one could still be wrong.
The Russian, his face weathered from time spent out in the vagaries of weather, from the steaming desert of southwest Asia to the icy blast of the Siberian tundra, gave a half bow. The left side of his already-worn face was seared with burn lines, just outside his eye socket, running down to his jaw.
“I am Serge. May I have the honor of your name?”
“I am Sin Fen,” she replied. “Are you named after Saint Sergius of Radonezh?”
Serge slowly straightened, and there was no trace of the smile. “So you are an educated as well as a beautiful woman. A dangerous combination. But assumptions about assumptions can be dangerous. Where is the American?”
“He’s gone.”
“Where?”
“Back to the United States.”
Serge looked over his shoulder at the man to his right, who shrugged. Then back at Sin Fen. “That is a problem. We have some merchandise that was commissioned by the American. We require payment.”
It was Sin Fen’s turn to shrug. “I cannot help you with that. The American is gone. And he will not be coming back.”
“How do you know that?” Serge asked.
Sin Fen stood and the Russian looked her up and down, impressed with her height. “I know.”
“You are sitting at his desk,” Serge said. “Perhaps we can deal with you?”
“It is my desk. It always was my desk.”
Serge frowned. “Then—”
Sin Fen held up her left hand, one slender finger extended. “I do not like having weapons pointed at me.”
Serge held up both his hands, empty palms exposed. “There are no—”
“I like lying even less,” Sin Fen said.
The Russian to Serge’s right finally spoke, his voice hoarse. “Let’s cut this bitch’s throat and find someone with money.”
Sin Fen’s extended finger slowly went from vertical to angled, pointing out the open warehouse doors to the building across the street. “If I raise my other hand, your man on the second floor, who has been holding a sniper rifle aimed at me, will be dead. Then all three of you will be dead.”
“There are more of us,” Serge said.
“I know. That’s why your man, and the three of you, are not dead already.”
“You are a fool,” Serge said.
“You are ignorant,” Sin Fen returned.
“Not as ignorant as you are,” Serge said. “After all, my comrades and I are here, when we should not be.”
“You threaten the entire world for money?” Sin Fen shook her head in disgust. “You will be tracked down and destroyed. In fact, that process has already begun.”
Serge smiled. “You can lower your hands. You have this situation under control. This situation. But the larger situation? We have it under control.” He looked at his watch. “And as far as being tracked down? We’ve already dealt with that. What we’ve come out of, your threats mean nothing to us.”
“But it’s not really money you’re after, is it?” Sin Fen asked.
Serge glanced over his shoulder. “What we need is none of your business.”
“You use the money to get what you want,” Sin Fen said. “People.”
A nerve on the side of Serge’s face spasmed, but he said nothing.
“You’re reaping,” Sin Fen continued.
Serge was startled for the first time. “I don’t know of what you speak.”
“You lie poorly. Most Russians do.”
“Who are you?” Serge demanded.
“Your comrades look like extras in a television show,” Sin Fen said. “Walking Dead.”
The side of Serge’s face twitched. “We can still kill you.”
“You could try,” Sin Fen said.
Sin Fen’s cell phone urgently buzzed, the sound echoing in the warehouse.
“I suggest you deal with your problem,” Serge said. He turned and left the warehouse, his two comrades following.
Sin Fen turned the phone on. “The Russians were just h
ere. I could stop them before—” She was cut off.
She listened and then grimaced. “This is dangerous.” She spoke quickly, stopping a reply from the other end. “I know it’s necessary. But it’s still dangerous.” She looked at her watch. “The clock has begun. Let us hope all works as planned.”
On the top floor of the White House, in a tiny office with no number or name on the door, the Keep was meeting with the new president. It was their third meeting this year since the first female president had taken office, which was about the norm, since there was usually only the inbrief, then the outbrief, and a few incident briefings. No previous president had wanted to spend any more time around the Keep, except for those essential briefings as they arose.
A need had arisen.
This desire for distance was not because the Keep was unpleasant in appearance or demeanor. She was a relatively young woman, in her mid-thirties. She had short dark hair, cut close to her skull, and pale skin. She was petite, barely crossing five feet in height. Her name badge simply said Elle, but the President knew her as the Keep.
As if there were only one.
The problem the President had with the Keep was the information she held in her brain and in a leather-bound book she kept close by her side. The first month in office, the President had received a private briefing from the Keep, who’d shown her the Book of Truths. It was a compilation from every president starting with Thomas Jefferson forward, consisting of the top ten lessons learned in office, written down by the Keep and then passed on to the incumbent.
A way of preserving institutional knowledge. In the book were truths presidents would never put in their memoirs or have in the archives of their libraries. Here were listed the brutal realities of the office and the secrets that had to stay within the confines of the White House and the Oval Office.
The briefing had been a shock, as it was for every new president. Entering office they were expecting secrets, of course. But the harsh truth about the way the world really worked was more than any had nightmared about. The Keep had briefed the President on the Cellar, the Nightstalkers, and various other secret organizations and what it was they fought against. Some of it ventured into the realm of science fiction, such as Rifts and Fireflies. Some of it was brutal, such as Cellar Sanctions.