by David Archer
“Did you ever read his after action reports? Do you know how many times he went off orders, did things his own way? Now, sometimes it paid off, but other times he left us with a mess we had to clean up. That Arkansas mission you mentioned; he actually brought back a teenage boy that he thought would make a good assassin. Can you imagine what I went through, trying to justify all that with the paperwork?”
“This is bullshit,” Borden said. “Let’s just get down to the serious business. Are you going to accept the oversight of the committee, or not?”
Allison continued looking at Lindemann. “The monkey is making noise again,” she said. “Apparently he didn’t hear me when I said I’d be glad to let you guys make the hard decisions for a while.”
“It’ll be more than a while,” Borden shouted. “We’re talking about a permanent…”
Allison turned and looked him in the eye. “Do you think so? Do you honestly think that any of you really have what it takes to make those decisions, day in and day out? I give it six months before you’re ready to hand it all back to me again. Hell, maybe less than that.” She turned back to Lindemann. “I’m willing to play ball however you want me to. My biggest concern is taking care of my teams, and I can’t do that from a jail cell. Not even one as luxurious and nice as this.”
Lindemann looked at her for a moment, then nodded his head. “Okay, that’s good enough for me. I’ll be reporting back to the committee this afternoon, and we should be able to make arrangements to get you back to your office by tomorrow morning. And don’t worry, you’ll be dealing mostly with me or Barbara Holloway. We’ll be the co-chairs of the new oversight committee for your division.”
Allison let out a sigh. “That,” she said, “I can live with. Let’s get this show on the road.”
* * * * *
“Parker,” said Doctor Nathan Parker as he answered his phone that afternoon.
“Nathan, it’s Barbara,” Holloway said. “We got it done. She’ll be back tomorrow morning, bright and early. I’m actually going to fly out and bring her home this evening.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Parker said. “She said anything about her trip?”
“The only thing she told me was that it was a good one,” Holloway said. “That was when she called for a ride home the other day. I haven’t really had the chance to speak with her since then, so why don’t you meet us for dinner somewhere tonight?”
Parker glanced at the clock on his office wall. “What time are you picking her up?”
“Should be about four thirty. Why?”
“Let’s meet up in Fort Morgan at about five thirty. There is a hotel with a restaurant where I-76 crosses Highway 20. We should be safe enough there, and can actually talk.”
“Alright. You’re buying, I don’t want it showing up on my expense accounts or credit cards.”
“Damn, you’re a cheap bitch, aren’t you? Fine, I’ll buy. See you then.” He ended the call and went back to the paperwork he had been doing before the phone rang.
Because Kirtland was situated in what Parker thought of as “the middle of nowhere,” he left his office at four and started to drive toward Fort Morgan. The trip should only take an hour, but he wanted to allow plenty of time to shake a tail, if necessary.
Twenty minutes later, he was glad he had taken that precaution. He had spotted the black SUV before he even got out of Kirtland, and had placed a call to one of the few people he thought he could trust.
“Wally? Nate Parker. I got a situation, old buddy.” He explained about the tail and asked Wally if he could think of a way to get them off him. Wally had burst into hysterical laughter, and told him to drive slowly for a while.
He done just that, cruising the curvy two-lane blacktop that led up to the interstate at just over forty-five miles per hour. The big, black SUV stayed behind, about three car lengths back, but suddenly another car appeared in the rearview mirror. It was a big, black Dodge Charger, and it rode the bumper of the SUV for a couple of miles, then suddenly swung out to pass.
And then the most amazing thing happened. The SUV suddenly started slowing down, as if it were losing power. Parker watched in the rear view mirror as it moved to the side of the road and came to a stop on the shoulder. The Charger, on the other hand, sailed around Parker without even slowing down.
Parker watched for a couple of minutes, and then his phone rang. He glanced at the display and saw that it was Wally calling and put it to his ear.
“Whatever you did seems to have worked,” he said without preamble.
“Oh, of course it did,” Wally said in his inimitable, high-speed way. “Some of my kids came up with a new EMS gun, so we stuck it on the back of that supercar Noah likes so much and I sent it after you. I had Rodney drive it, he’s the guy who designed it. He can handle it better than anybody else, and I wanted to get to you in a hurry. All he had to do was pass the car following you, and push a button. It shot an EMF pulse out the back that fried all the electronics in the car instantly. Those poor guys can’t even call for a tow truck.” He burst into laughter again.
“Good work, Wally,” Parker said. “I’ll talk to you later on, gotta go.”
With the tail off him, Parker put his foot down on the accelerator and got back out to reasonable highway speeds. He made it to the interstate only a few minutes later and took a left onto the ramp, then set the cruise control at eighty and gave the car its head.
He arrived at the restaurant at a quarter after five, and went ahead inside to get a table. There was no sign of Holloway or Allison, but he asked the waitress for a table off by itself, explaining that he was expecting to meet some business associates who needed to discuss something very private. That wasn’t much of a problem, since the place was almost devoid of customers. She led him to a table in the far corner, and promised to keep everybody else away.
Barbara Holloway, Allison, and the seemingly ever present Marshal Howard arrived about twenty minutes later. Parker waved as they entered the restaurant, and they came over to join him.
“Doc,” Allison said, “if you ever get your ass arrested, I hope they put you in the same jail I was in. It was damn near like taking a vacation.”
“They ever come to arrest me,” Parker said, “they better bring a gun, because I’m not going to go quietly. I’ve given this country my whole damn life, and I’m not putting up with any of their political bull crap.”
Holloway grinned at him. “It’s not all political,” she said. “Some of it’s just plain insanity. Doctor Parker, this is U.S. Marshal Glenn Howard. Glenn, Doctor Nate Parker. If he ever gets you on his couch, you are probably on your way to the loony bin. He’s the psychiatrist who works with Allison at Neverland.”
“Good to meet you, sir,” Howard said.
“Yeah? Why?” Parker asked.
“Because he’s working for us, now,” Allison said. “Or he will be, in a few days. It took some shenanigans, but I arranged for him to have the security detail in the headquarters building. He’s one of the few people Barbara says we can trust, and he’s Duckworth’s nephew. He’ll be our liaison with their little fifth column inside the conspiracy.”
“Long as he understands it’ll probably get him killed,” Parker said. “Welcome aboard the hell-bound train. Now, be quiet so the grown-ups can talk.”
Howard chuckled, but said nothing. Parker turned to Allison.
“So, how’s the kids?”
Allison knew exactly who he was asking about. “They’re doing well,” she said. “I explained the situation, and they agree that it has to be taken care of quickly. I’m leaving the planning up to them, but we were able to work out a way to communicate. I’m going to leave it up to Wally to figure out how to get them money and equipment.”
“Smart move,” Parker said. “If anybody can do it, he can. We just need to be kind of careful not to let him get caught. Wally is the last person we could stand to lose.”
“I agree. Listen, we also ran into a little bit of a
n issue. You know that we have a liaison in the British intelligence services, right? Well, she’s a little concerned about not letting her office in on what’s happening, but I think we got her to agree not to say anything unless it becomes absolutely necessary. She’s also going to help with another little issue, which is our communications. Molly and Neil came up with a code program, something they’re fairly certain none of the other agencies will be able to crack. We bury messages to our kids in the dispatches that go to our liaison, and she will forward them on. Both Molly and Neil have the program, and so they won’t have any trouble encoding and decoding the messages.”
“Sounds like her loyalties are a bit torn,” Parker said. “Is she theirs, or ours?”
Allison shrugged. “I figure we’ll know the answer to that soon enough.”
Chapter EIGHTEEN
Donald Jefferson was sitting in front of Allison’s desk at seven thirty the next morning when she came walking through the door. He jumped to his feet and stood there, staring at her, until she finally walked over and put her arms around him.
“I understand you held everything together while I was gone,” she said. “Thank you, Donald.”
Jefferson held her close for a couple of seconds longer than necessary, then let go and stepped back. “Just doing what I felt I had to do,” he said. “How are you? Was it bad?”
“Bad? Goodness gracious, I should get locked up like that once a year. They took me to someplace in Denver, a place where they hold high-level prisoners, I guess. I was in a cell, but it looked more like a decent hotel room. Had a TV and everything, and they had people come around two or three times a day to see if you wanted a snack or a soft drink or a book to read. Other than being locked into a room, it was like a vacation.”
Jefferson’s eyes were wide. “Seriously? Well, I’m glad it wasn’t something awful. Did you at least miss being here?”
“More than you can imagine,” Allison said. “Now, do you know what’s going on?”
He shook his head. “All they told me was that you’d be coming back this morning,” he said. “I gather it means we have to live under some new rules?”
“Yes. There’s a new Senate committee that will handle vetting the elimination requests, and every agency has to send them up there, first. Once they decide which ones we act on, they’ll hand them off to me for assignment.”
Jefferson glanced at the door, which was closed, then turned back to Allison and lowered his voice.
“And what about Noah and the others? Are they off the hook, now?”
“No. In fact, I was informed last night that they’ve gone completely off the reservation. Team Camelot is no longer with us.”
This time, Jefferson’s eyebrows tried to climb over the top of his scalp. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “Noah would never…”
“Donald, I’d rather let them retire and live their lives the way they want to than ever let these people get hold of them. We’re talking about politicians; do you honestly think it would be good for them to know that we had a man with absolutely no conscience or moral compunctions? We wouldn’t be able to keep him, anyway, because they would decide he needed to be assigned directly to their committee. Noah would be their personal hit man, and that’s the last thing I want to see happen to him.”
Jefferson stared into her eyes, and his face slowly relaxed. “Yeah, I guess I can see your point,” he said. “It’s just hard to think of this place without Noah and his team. Hey, what about Jenny? Will she be coming back?”
“You know how she feels about Neil,” Allison said. “I suspect that if he can’t come back, she won’t. The only thing about that that worries me is her proclivity for murder. Noah might be able to retire, go without killing anybody, but she couldn’t. She probably will end up hiring out to the highest bidder, and I just hope she doesn’t get herself caught.”
“If she does, I would imagine Neil will end up going with her.” He shook his head. “They made a hell of a team, didn’t they? We’re going to miss them around here.”
Good Lord, Allison thought, this is Donald Jefferson I’m talking to. Don has never been anything but loyal to me, so why am I holding back the truth instead of trusting him?
“Yes,” she said simply. “We are. Now, what’s the situation around here?”
“I’ve been keeping the FBI at bay for the most part,” he said. “They’ve been trying to get into our files, but the lawyers have done a good job of keeping them out of anything that’s classified special. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to send them in here, anyway, because they don’t have what it takes to really understand what we do. The NSA guys have been a bit less demanding, but I haven’t been able to keep them from getting into the stuff they want. Luckily, they seem to have come to the conclusion that we’ve been doing our job exactly the way we were supposed to.”
“Yeah, they would,” Allison said, “especially since half our requests seem to come from them. They are not going to want too much exposure on their own activities, so they’re not going to push that hard on ours.”
“Right,” Jefferson said. “Have you spoken to Doc Parker yet? He’s been screaming at everybody from the president on down, trying to get you back here.”
“So I heard. Yes, I actually talked to him last night on the phone. He knows I’m back, but he doesn’t think we should let our guards down just yet. I told the committee I want all these other feds out of here ASAP, and they said they’ll start pulling them out today. Hopefully that will make a difference, and we can actually get back to work. I know they’ve got a couple of assignments they want to send down today, but I don’t know who the targets are yet.”
“Okay. The only teams we’ve got at the moment are Aladdin, Robin Hood, Hercules, and Unicorn, but they are still in West Algeria. Most of the targets have been terminated, and President Abimbola is alive and well. Unicorn is fairly certain he’s gotten all of the conspirators, so we could probably pull him out at any time.”
“Good, do it. The committee has already taken away the requests we had, and the four that we are getting are out of that batch. I was planning to activate Team Pegasus in a couple of months, but we may need to go ahead and put the kid out there. Have we got a team assembled for him yet?”
“No,” Jefferson said. “I had prepared you a list of candidates, but you never got a chance to look it over.”
“Well, with Jenny gone, we’ve got an experienced team that’s just sitting around on their thumbs. Let’s put them over in Pegasus. Call them in this afternoon, and I’ll explain the situation.”
“Okay, that solves that problem. Only four assignments? You think this committee is going to slow us down?”
“Probably, for a little while, anyway. To be perfectly honest, Donald, I’m glad to let somebody else make the decisions for a while. I told Anthony Borden, he’s apparently on the committee, that I don’t give it six months before they want to hand it all back to me. I’ll be glad to take the reduction in stress for as long as I can have it.”
“I can understand that,” Jefferson said. “I’ve never understood how you could cope with it, anyway. Not so much the decisions themselves, as the sheer volume they kept hitting us with. It always seemed to me you were constantly overworking yourself.”
“I don’t need a nursemaid, Donald,” Allison said. “I assure you, I’m a lot tougher than I look. We’ll just go back to doing our jobs, and if the jobs are a little easier to do for a while, be grateful and take what we can get. That’s how I’m looking at it, and you should, too.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Jefferson said. “Okay, I’ll call in the boys from Cinderella and tell them to get here after lunch. You know they’re not going to like this, right?”
Allison looked up into his eyes. “Since when has that ever bothered me?”
* * * * *
Randy, Dave, and Jim, who had been Jenny’s support team for well over a year, didn’t like it even a little bit. The thought of being w
ith the new team leader, and especially an inexperienced twenty-year-old kid, set them all off. Allison let them rant and rave for half an hour, then shut them down.
“At what point did you decide this was some kind of a damned democracy?” she asked. “Despite the fact that we wage an entirely different kind of warfare, you are all soldiers, and soldiers take orders. Your orders, gentlemen, are to support Ralph Morgan and make sure he’s able to complete the missions we assigned him. Do you understand me? I assure you, you will not like the alternative if you were thinking of disobeying my orders.”
It was Jim Marino who spoke up. “Ma’am, we wouldn’t consider disobeying,” he said. “To be honest, we’re just trying to wrap our heads around this. Until just now, we still thought Jenny was going to be coming back.”
“Well, we live in a new reality. I suggest you get used to it. You will report to Mr. Jackson tomorrow morning to begin physical training with your new team leader.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they all said. They filed out without another word.
Allison leaned back and watched them go, mentally kicking herself for being so rough on the poor guys. This wasn’t their fault, after all. She just wasn’t going to be able to let them know that they might someday be back with Jenny again. There was too much of a risk that one of them might slip and let it out that Jenny might be returning.
The federal agents were almost all gone, with only a few from the NSA still wandering around in Kirtland. A couple of them had been up to see her, but they were staying out of her way for the most part. Donald Jefferson let slip the opinion that that might have been the smartest thing they could do.
Once those men were gone, Allison went down to Molly’s office and invited her out to the Assassin’s Club for a drink. Molly accepted with a big smile, and the two of them left the office an hour before quitting time.
On the way to the club, Allison called R&D. The receptionist answered and Allison simply asked her to tell Wally that he ought to come and join them. Since it wasn’t uncommon for Wally to go to the club, she didn’t think anyone would pay any particular attention to it.