Time Patrol

by Bob Mayer

  The current President had protested, naturally, given her platform and background, about Sanctions. That one woman, the head of the Cellar, held the power of life and death over American citizens, the President found immoral, illegal, and repugnant. The Keep had shown her the presidential decree founding and authorizing the Cellar and its actions, and explained the necessity of such an organization, so the President had only been left with immorality and repugnance.

  And the Cellar.

  The rest of the White House, beyond the President, thought the Keep worked for someone else’s staff. She was bland, tiny, and didn’t make a fuss. Some even thought she worked for housekeeping.

  In a way she did.

  Just at a very high level.

  “I was in an important meeting,” the President said, more out of frustration than making any impact on the Keep.

  “There’s been an incident, Madam President,” the Keep said. She was sliding back an old framed print of the White House hanging on her wall, revealing a safe. The President recognized it as a twin to the one in the Oval Office. Top of the line and it could be opened only by authorized personnel, or else everything inside would be destroyed. The one in the Oval Office could only be opened by the President.

  “And the incident is?” the President asked.

  “We’re about to find out,” the Keep said. She went through the retina scan, the fingerprint scan, the voice analysis, and the rapid DNA check in thirty seconds. The red light on the screen remained on. “Your turn, Madam President.”

  “Dual safeties?” the President said as she walked around the desk. “How did you get my data?”

  “We copied your safe, Madam President,” the Keep said.

  “Of course.” The President went through all the checks and the red light went out, replaced by green, and there was a distinct click. “By the way,” the President said, “who is ‘we’?”

  The Keep ignored the question and opened the door. She pulled out a thin red envelope. It wasn’t stenciled with the usual Top Secret Or We Kill You markings like most of the manila envelopes the President handled on a daily basis. It had, archaically, a wax seal on the flap. The Keep sat down and the President resumed her seat across from her. Two Secret Service agents were outside the door, but no one sat in on a meeting between the Keep and the President.

  Using an ancient opener shaped like a saber—“Andrew Jackson’s,” the Keep informed the President—the Keep slid the blade under the flap and cut the wax. She opened the envelope and slid out a thin sheaf of papers. She scanned the top page while the President waited impatiently, a woman not used to waiting.

  The Keep pursed her lips. If the President had spent more time around her, she would have known that as a sign of extreme agitation, the equivalent of someone of lesser self-control running around in circles and screaming, “We’re all going to die!”

  “What is it?” the President asked, her mind racing ahead to having to go down to the Emergency Operations Center, open nuclear launch codes, start World War III, battle zombies, and who knew what else, given this was the Keep. After reading the Book of Truths, her imagination was open to anything.

  Or so she thought. She’d already forgotten that she’d thought she was ready for anything when she took office.

  “There’s been a breach of a facility,” the Keep said. “Actually”—she paused, a frown crossing her face as she flipped a couple of pages—“it appears a facility has disappeared. More importantly, the organization that was housed in the facility has disappeared.”

  “What organization?” the President asked.

  The Keep looked up from the papers. “The Time Patrol.”

  “Doctor Golden,” Hannah, the head of the Cellar, said. “Meet Frasier, the psychiatrist for Area 51 and the Nightstalkers.”

  Doctor Golden was not pleased that there was another person, a psychiatrist at that, in Hannah’s office. Not quite an affront to her professional integrity, but it threw her off. Then again, the man, Frasier, tended to throw everyone off when they first met him.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Frasier said in a tone that indicated neither pleasure nor any other emotion. A stating of a convention. He stuck out his right hand and Golden noticed that his left hand was covered with a black glove.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she lied in return, shaking his one live hand.

  Frasier was dressed in a black suit, black tie, and white shirt. He wore sunglasses, which was incongruous since they were three hundred feet underneath the crystal palace of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade.

  Forced pleasantries over, they both sat down in hard plastic seats facing Hannah’s desk. Unlike Moms, who went by the name the Nightstalkers gave her, or Ms. Jones, who’d been a bit more formal, Hannah was simply known as that. No last name, since it had been her husband’s and he was years dead after having betrayed her. Not a title, because how do you give a title to someone who ran an organization that no one was supposed to talk about?

  Hannah sat behind a wide desk that was devoid of any personal items. In fact, it was currently devoid of anything except a small stack of folders. Hannah was in her forties, fit and trim, but the line between the gray hair sprouting from her scalp and the blonde ends indicated she’d made a command decision to give up on coloring her hair anymore sometime in the past year. There are many reasons women make this decision, if they ever make it, and even Doctor Golden with her degrees would be hard-pressed to delve into Hannah’s psyche to determine hers.

  And there was no way Hannah would ever allow Golden, or anyone else for that matter, entry into her psyche. Her predecessor, Nero, had done that quite effectively, which is why he had chosen her to be his replacement.

  “I’ve asked Mister Frasier here,” Hannah said, “because there are some decisions that I need to make and I desire input.” She placed her hand on the stack of personnel folders to emphasize her point.

  The office was, naturally, windowless. There was a door behind Hannah, which led to her personal space where she spent her off-duty time.

  There wasn’t much of that.

  The Cellar was founded in the dark days after Pearl Harbor, while smoke still poured out of damaged ships and desperate, trapped sailors pounded on armored hulls that had been designed to protect them but that became their prison instead. As those taps faded out over the days that followed, the sleeping giant that was the peacetime United States awoke and was filled with a terrible resolve. Which is exactly what Admiral Yamamoto, who’d planned the attack, had cautioned would be the ultimate result.

  The last three sailors trapped in the USS West Virginia survived sixteen days.

  One of Sun Tzu’s maxims was that: “Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.” Someone had been wise enough to realize that once organizations became secret, they became dangerous not only to the enemy but also to the country that had founded them, with the potential particularly for rogue individuals to cause harm. It was much like the armor hull that was supposed to protect those Pearl Harbor sailors, which instead ended up dooming them.

  So the Cellar was founded. The secret police arm for the secret agencies.

  The Cellar battled through World War II, riding herd on organizations such as the OSS, aka the Office of Strategic Services, later to become the CIA, and a cluster of other supersecret groups, which sprouted like the snakes on Medusa’s head in the burning exigencies of world war. But it was after the hot war ended with the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War began that the need for the Cellar blossomed because, paradoxically, the number of secret organizations increased dramatically.

  In 1947, President Truman formed a top-secret committee code-named Majestic-12 and headquartered it at Area 51. It dealt with things, well, things that go bump, slither, explode, infect, etc., in the night. Sometimes in the daytime too. And the committee also dealt with the screwups, intentional or not, of scientists, which were growing exponentially. That was
much more common, especially now that the atom had been split. With scientists pushing the edge of our knowledge, often venturing past that edge, the world was a more dangerous place than it had ever been.

  So units had been founded, such as the Nightstalkers, which Ms. Jones had commanded.

  All these secret if-I-tell-you-about-them-I-have-to-kill-you-and-cut-your-head-off-and-stick-it-in-a-safe organizations fell under the domain of the Cellar as far as discipline was concerned. Which meant Hannah held the life of every single person in the covert world in her hands. Well, her head actually, which was much better than any safe.

  Once a housewife in St. Louis, she’d been chosen, recruited, and tested by her predecessor, Nero, through a crucible of near death, with Neeley at her side.

  Like Nero, she could order a Sanction on anyone, which meant the field operative whom she dispatched, much like Neeley was doing in the Pacific Northwest with Roland, was judge, jury, and executioner. There was to be no formal trial, no lawyers, no mercy.

  The Cellar had been founded by Presidential Decree in order to legally do the illegal.

  “So.” Hannah said it as a statement and an inducement for input. “Moms is out. Who do we replace Ms. Jones with to command the Nightstalkers?”

  “Why is Moms out?” Frasier asked.

  Golden answered, “She’s too close to the members of the team.”

  Frasier smiled, without managing to convey any warmth. “She’s not as close to the team as you might think she is. Or she thinks she is.” And then Frasier pulled his patented move, removing his sunglasses and revealing his one solid black artificial eye, surrounded by scar tissue.

  Golden was ready for it. “Reading me, Mister Frasier?” She was referring to the eye’s ability to pick up changes in her body temperature and other data and feed it into his brain. A crude, but effective lie detector.

  “No, Ms. Golden.”

  “It’s Doctor Golden.”

  “Is there a need for me to read you?” Frasier asked, and it was unclear whether the question was directed to her or Hannah.

  “We’re all on the same side here,” Hannah said.

  “Right,” Frasier said. “By the way, Doctor Golden, I have a doctorate too, but I’ll go with Mister Frasier. On the team they just called me Frasier. But you’re not on the team,” he added, “so Mister will do just fine.”

  “And why did you get that name?” Golden asked. “The Nightstalkers christen each new member with a single moniker based on first impressions, don’t they?”

  Frasier smiled. “Guess they thought I was a bit like the character from that old TV show.”

  “Fussy, stuck-up, narcissistic?”

  “Maybe,” Frasier said. “Then again, maybe it was for my wonderful sense of humor and keen observation of the traits of others.” He shrugged. “The Nightstalkers make snap suggestions during the naming ceremony, working off first impressions, and we both know how misleading those can be.” He shifted his attention to Hannah. “And then Ms. Jones makes the final determination of each team member’s new name, and you’re stuck with it whether apropos or not.”

  “Sort of how we were burned by Burns?” Golden asked, referring to a not-too-long-ago mission.

  “Nice play on words,” Frasier allowed.

  “Did you handle his psychological vetting?” Golden asked.

  “I did,” Frasier said. “As they say in the artillery, looked good when he left me.”

  Hannah interrupted, getting them back on track. “We have been without Ms. Jones’s services for a bit too long now.”

  “Pitr has been doing an adequate job,” Frasier said. “Why not leave him in place? He knows the missions, he knows the history of the Nightstalkers, he knows the team.”

  “Adequate isn’t good enough,” Hannah said of Ms. Jones’s long-time assistant. She nodded at Golden, who spoke up.

  “The team will always see Pitr as a shadow of Ms. Jones since he was her attendant. Subconsciously they will not give him the respect he needs to command the team.”

  “So Pitr is out just like that?” Frasier said. “I assume his folder is not in that pile.” He nodded toward the desk. “Although, I’m not sure I agree with Doctor Golden’s reasoning about either Moms or Pitr. The team members are professionals, and they’ve had no complaints about Pitr. Or his shadow.”

  Golden shrugged. “We wouldn’t be sitting here if Pitr was acceptable to Hannah.”

  Frasier reluctantly accepted that reasoning.

  “Outside of Pitr,” Hannah asked Frasier, “do you have a suggestion?”

  Frasier turned to Golden. “How is Neeley’s therapy going?”

  “She’s killing someone as we speak. She and your man Roland.”

  “That’s not answering the question,” Frasier said. “Although the fact she’s working in concert with another operative is a change for her.”

  “It is,” Golden said, and her tone indicated displeasure, but whether it was at someone being killed (doubtful), Neeley working with someone else (possible), or just Frasier in general (likely) wasn’t clear.

  Hannah spoke up. “Neeley is an excellent field operative, but she isn’t managerial material.”

  “You don’t want to let her go,” Frasier said.

  “My desires play no role in field decisions,” Hannah said in a voice that dripped ice.

  Frasier backtracked slightly. “Certainly.” He gestured at the folders. “It’s obvious you have candidates,” Frasier said. “If we knew who they were, we could—”

  Further words were forestalled as a strip of red light all around the edge of the ceiling began flashing, accompanied by a klaxon. For the first time in the presence of others since taking this position, Hannah was rattled. She stared at the light, mouth slightly open, eyes blinking. Then she shook her head, gathering herself, and opened the top, right-hand drawer of her desk. She pulled out a leather-bound file secured with a red ribbon, which was sealed with, of all things, wax. Hannah ran a finger under the ribbon and broke the wax seal. She flipped the file open.

  Frasier and Golden exchanged glances, the klaxon resounding in their ears, but Hannah was focused on reading.

  Hannah stood up abruptly and walked across the office. She slid aside a panel that had appeared to simply be part of the drab gray metal wall, exposing a switch. Hannah pulled the switch and the klaxon stopped. The red light stopped flashing but it stayed lit, tainting the room with its glow. Another panel slid down just above the switch and an old red bulb display appeared; a countdown apparently from the time of Dr. No.

  12:00

  As they watched, the first second counted off.

  11:59:59

  Hannah stared at the timer for five seconds and then returned to her desk. She sat down, and the look on her face dissuaded either of the two psychiatrists from asking any questions. She read some more from the file, slowly, steadily, before putting it on the desk and raising her eyes to her guests.

  “What is it?” Doctor Golden asked, having never seen her normally somber boss so grave. It was as if a statue had frozen into diamond. “What happens in twelve hours?”

  “Unless we stop it,” Hannah said, “the end of our existence.”

  Eleven Hours

  Scout was riding Comanche through the neighborhood, glad that the construction boom that had started this housing enclave over two years ago had ground to a standstill along with the economy. When her family had moved in, the latest construction, five empty lots down, had been proceeding furiously, even on Thanksgiving, but then it had suddenly ceased and the house remained almost complete. This gave Scout quite a few empty lots to race her horse across when she was home.

  And fewer neighbors to give her grief.

  She was still mightily puzzled and disturbed by her late breakfast. More accurately, her mother’s cooking of the late breakfast: the food and the singing. And then there was the strange text from Jake who’d ignored her calls this afternoon. She hoped Nada would give her a ring and she co
uld run it all by him. He was always a voice of reason and reassurance.

  She heard a helicopter in the distance, but that was nothing unusual. A unit of Army Air National Guard was based at Knoxville Airport and OH-58 observation helicopters flew over all the time.

  Scout knew what kind of aviation they were because she’d flown in enough copters during her training to be able to differentiate. Scout halted Comanche and cocked her head to the side to hear more clearly. There was something different about this helicopter. A different thrum to the rotors and engines. A UH-60 Black Hawk, and it was coming closer.

  Comanche was startled as the Black Hawk helicopter raced in, just above the treetops, and banked hard barely thirty feet overhead. Scout got the horse under control with great difficulty as the chopper landed in the field in front of her. A side door slid open and a man in camouflage fatigues hopped off. He jogged toward her with the gait of a man who wasn’t used to jogging. He had a small camouflage bag in one hand.

  His face was flushed red when he reached her. “Scout, I’m Colonel Orlando. I’m here from the Nightstalkers.”

  Scout slid off her horse. She looked past Orlando at the chopper. There was a door gunner, weapon at the ready, and Scout had no doubt there were real bullets in the machine gun. “Where’s Nada?”

  “He’s en route to the rally point,” Orlando said. He gestured toward the chopper. “We need to go now.”

  “What about Comanche?”

  Orlando put a hand on her elbow. “I’ve got Acme support coming. They’ll find your horse and stable it. You can count on it.”

  “But—” Orlando cut her off.

  “Scout, I’m sorry, but we don’t have time to discuss this. We have to move now.” He reached into the bag and pulled out a piggy bank. “Nada said to give you this.”

  Scout reluctantly let go of the reins and took the bank. She allowed Orlando to lead her to the chopper.