by Bob Mayer
Emily looked up at the wooden ring above her head, then at the planks making up the circular wall. She’d never seen anything like this. Had the crazy man built this just to stash her? It didn’t make sense, given that he had simply chained her to a tree at the last place.
She got to her feet and stomped down, listening to the slight echo. That meant there was empty space beneath her. A cellar? But then what had happened to the roof? Had there ever been a roof? And there were no doors. Emily walked to the end of the chain and was just able to touch the wall. The wood was old. Each plank was about eight inches wide. She slapped her hand against one and it felt very solid. She slowly walked the circumference of her new prison, checking each plank, one by one, hoping perhaps that one would be rotted or weak.
No such luck.
Emily returned to the center and sat down next to the bolt that held her in place. She had thought the tree was bad, but at least there had been things to look at and the feeling of space. Emily felt closed in, more imprisoned than she had before. She had no idea where she was, what was on the other side of the wooden wall.
“Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. She repeated the cry several times, but there was only silence, not even an echo of her scream. Which made her miss the sounds of the forest even though those sounds had turned threatening at night. All she had was a uniform wooden wall and the blue sky overhead.
Emily lay on her back and stared up at that sky and felt as if her heart were going to sink through her back, into the floor and keep going down into the earth itself.
* * *
It had taken the explosives experts three hours to remove the rest of the mines from the clearing. They were all not only rigged to trip-wires, they have been booby-trapped. Bailey recognized the handiwork and the pattern: it was the way Special Forces demolitions men were trained to prepare an ambush on a potential helicopter landing zone. It had just been pure luck that neither of the insertion choppers had hit a trip wire with a skid. If that had happened there would have been a very high body count and a destroyed chopper — stuff that would have been hard to keep out of the news.
Still, two men were dead and three wounded. Emily wasn’t here, nor was the target. Mister Nero would not be happy. Nor would he be particularly unhappy, Bailey knew. Bailey paused as he walked toward the oak tree as he suddenly remembered it was Ms. Masterson who sat behind the desk now, not Nero. Since joining the Cellar over thirty years ago, Bailey had known no other boss than Nero. In fact, to Bailey, Nero was the Cellar. Ms. Masterson’s placement behind the desk was the most disconcerting thing Bailey had ever experienced and he had seen many strange things in the employ of the Cellar.
Bailey had instructed Special Agent in Charge Bateman to keep her people at the perimeter after the area had been cleared. He wanted to see the site alone and without interference. She had not been pleased — with that or with two dead agents. Lots of paperwork, lots of explaining, lots of sadness over loss of life. Bailey wasn’t into any of the above so he didn’t concern himself.
Bateman had demanded more information, indicating a very strong desire to be ‘in’ on the mission of tracking down the target. Bailey had ignored her requests and told her to do as ordered. He would have thought she would have seen with what had just happened that this was something the FBI could not deal with. The HRT team was the best they had — what did she think they could do for an encore?
He surveyed the area, keeping in mind the site where they had found the Caulkins girl. Gant had found the surveillance position that had been used by one of the targets. Not only in advance of the cache being put in, but based on recent information, also manned while Caulkins slowly dehydrated and starved.
Bailey moved to his right, toward a clump of bushes and a large log. He clambered over the log and saw the carefully constructed surveillance position. It was, as he expected, sterile. Bailey stood where the target had been watching Emily Cranston chained to that tree.
It took a hard man to do that, Bailey knew. He’d served with and fought against many hard men. The closest person to the type of these targets was a man named Racine who the Cellar had used on missions for many years. When the job was particularly nasty, and especially if it involved women, Racine was the man Nero had turned to, even though both he and Bailey had detested the sociopath.
There were dangers to using such men, Bailey reflected as he looked at the oak tree. Unknown to Nero and Bailey, Racine had been doing un-sanctioned freelance work for a United States Senator. Work that had hurt the United States during the debacle in Mogadishu over a decade before. And Racine had eventually become more of a liability over the years, one that was terminated quite efficiently by Ms. Neeley and Ms. Masterson, sort of their final exam before joining the Cellar. And while the US Army and the US government had probably been more than happy with Sergeants Lutz, Forten and Payne and the work they had done over the years in the country’s service, they too were now liabilities. Liabilities with the best training in inflicting death and destruction in the world.
Bailey stepped back over the log and walked toward the tree. He side-stepped a splotch of still wet blood. When he got within ten feet of the tree, he halted once more. There was something white nailed to the tree, about eye-level.
A piece of paper.
Bailey nodded. The next step in the trail.
* * *
The compound was set on an island in the middle of a lake in Northern Maine. The island wasn’t large, barely four acres, but it was thickly covered with trees, which mostly hid the six buildings. The perimeter of the island was patrolled by guards, two in a small boat that circled the island in a random pattern and a shift of four on the land itself, set in small watch towers positioned to cover the entire shoreline.
The inhabitants of the compound lived in a limbo between prison and protection. It was debatable whether the guards where there to protect them or keep them from leaving. It was also debatable how many of the two dozen inhabitants had any desire to leave given their life expectancy would probably be hours, at best days, if they were spotted by the wrong people out in the real world. The wrong people being those they had betrayed in order to save their own hides.
The compound was under the control of the CIA although the guards were contracted from private security firms, mostly ex-Special Operations Forces types. It was considered plush duty, beating work in Iraq or Afghanistan, where most of them had spent several tours of duty. The CIA used these contractors not only because its own ranks were stretched thin, but for deniability in case the compound was ever exposed in the media. In the same manner the CIA had gotten the Army to take the fall for Abu Gharif in Iraq.
This was because the compound was quite illegal as none of the twenty-four people being held there had ever been charged with a crime and had been secretly brought into the country. The compound did not ‘officially’ exist on paper. It was funded by the multi-billion dollar Black Budget that saw little government over-sight. The same budget that funded the Cellar.
Spotter was on the top of a mountain on the shoreline three quarters of a mile from the island. He and the Sniper had checked out the area extensively during their mission preparation. They’d spent three months getting ready before snatching the first girl, carefully preparing their primary plan and the numerous contingencies. Things were moving fast now. The lack of an after-action report from the Security in Virginia meant he was most likely dead.
This did not bother Spotter. Indeed, it had been anticipated that they would lose at least one of their number by now. The plan would still go forward. And death was preferable to what they had experienced in Colombia. And even more so for what they had experienced when they came back to the States.
He had a large spotting scope set up on a tripod in front of his field chair and had been using it to survey the island for the past twenty-four hours after arriving here from the Gulf Coast. The guards were good, rotating their patrol so that there was no distinguishable or predictable
pattern to it. Also, one of the guards was on a small knoll on the north end of the island, the highest point on it, armed with a sniper rifle with which he could cover the entire island.
Frankly, though, Spotter didn’t care about the guards. He was more concerned with the people being held there. One in particular. This was the man who the scope was trained on as he sat at a small table, reading a book.
Spotter knew the man’s face intimately.
The small radio earplug in Spotter’s ear crackled with a brief break of squelch and he pulled his eye back from the scope and looked in the other direction, downhill. Within a minute the Sniper appeared, striding up the slope, a backpack over his shoulder and his black metal case containing his rifle in one hand.
The Sniper nodded as he came up next to Spotter, putting the case down and taking the backpack off. “Any change?”
“No.” Spotter vacated the seat. “He’s in the scope.”
The Sniper took the chair and put his eye to the spotting scope. He remained still for a long time, then pulled back. “You pin down where he sleeps?”
“Third building, second window. He’s the only one in the room.”
“Good.”
“Do you know what happened in Virginia?” Spotter asked.
The Sniper shook his head. “No after-action report, so I assume he’s dead. I wasn’t able to pick up much information. They’re not making it public, that’s for certain.”
“And the girl?”
“She’s in position.”
“The video?”
“En route with further instructions.” The Sniper leaned over and opened up the metal case, extracting the rifle. A thermal scope was mounted on top and a bulky suppressor graced the end of the barrel. He removed the spotting scope from the tripod and replaced it with the rifle.
“We should make him suffer first,” Spotter suddenly said, earning him a surprised look from the Sniper.
“We agreed. That’s not the plan. Too dangerous.”
“He’ll never know it was us,” Spotter argued. “He’ll die not knowing.”
“We’ll know,” the Sniper said. “That’s the important thing. And he’s only a bonus hit.” He tightened down the bolt holding the rifle in place. “Come sun-down, he dies.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The CIA hated the Cellar. At least, those with high enough clearances to know of the Cellar’s existence hated it specifically. The rest of the employees of the sprawling intelligence organization only heard whispers of the Cellar and few had ever encountered one of its handful of operatives. And such encounters were never welcomed. The CIA liked to think of itself as the biggest, baddest man on the block and the concept, even if whispered, that there was someone, not as big, but meaner, out there did not sit well. That someone from another organization could slap down anyone in the CIA riled its members.
This, of course, was part of the overall problem that the Cellar was trying to overcome. The rivalries, the egos involved, between people and organizations that were supposed to work together in defense of the country.
Gant knew all this as he walked into the lobby of the new CIA headquarters in Langley. There were people he knew who served in Able Danger, a highly classified and compartmentalized part of Special Operations Command, that had identified a cell of the nine-eleven hijackers over a year before the event and wanted to relay the information to the FBI but had been denied permission to pass it on. Gant knew that Nero was chafing at the bit to expand the role of the Cellar from chasing down rogue operatives to breaking down the walls between the bureaucracies.
It was not something Gant felt positive about because he had a feeling that attempting to do that would have the reverse effect: suck the Cellar into the world of bureaucracy. He shoved these thoughts from his mind as he walked through the lobby and focused on the current situation.
They had parted company with Neeley at the airfield — she was on her way to the cache site to meet Bailey who had found a partial cache report. Once more the partial was worthless by itself listing only and Immediate Reference Point (IRP) of a road crossing railroad tracks and an Azimuth and Direction (A/D) of one hundred and sixty degrees and four hundred and twelve meters to the cache.
Given there were tens of thousands of rail-lines crisscrossing the country, this information was of little aid. It was another taunt according to Golden. Gant had not found that observation very insightful.
Golden was still with him, but so far she had been of limited use. If he took away all her contributions to the mission so far, nothing would be different in his opinion other than a couple of the people they had interviewed might feel a bit worse for the process. She had come up with the names of the three targets, but only as part of a possible group of sixteen. Gant had gotten the three names much more easily and quickly.
So Gant was ignoring her, focusing his attention on the mission. Two men had died today at the cache site — two innocent men who had only been doing their jobs. Two more innocent men had died this morning at the farm. So he was not in the best of moods when one of the many suits moving through the lobby came toward him and stuck out his hand.
“Mister Gant?”
Gant ignored the hand. “Yes.”
“Deputy Director Roberts is waiting for you.”
Gant simply nodded and the agent, after a moment of confusion, lowered his hand and turned on his heel, leading them toward an elevator. As they walked Gant glanced to his right at the memorial wall. He’d seen it before. Eighty-three stars adorned the wall, one for each CIA officer who’d been killed in the line of duty. Gant knew that even today, thirty-five of the names represented there had never been made public, still classified, even in death.
Memorials to the dead, he mused, thinking back to the wall at Bragg, as they got into the elevator. Bureaucracies seemed to go for those. While they were touted as testaments and honor to those who they represented, Gant believed they were designed more with the living, who would see them, in mind. Everyone wanted to be immortal, at least in thought.
The Cellar had no such memorial. In fact, Gant had no idea how many people were in the employ of the Cellar. He worked for Nero and he had always worked alone prior to this mission. Bailey had always been his mission briefer. When he needed logistical support, he used the power of the Cellar to commandeer it from whatever various government agency he needed to.
The elevator came to a halt and the nameless flunky led them down a carpeted corridor to a door, which he rapped on lightly, then opened, beckoning them in. Gant slid by the man, Golden following and the door was shut behind them.
The room was dimly lit, the shades closed, only a small light in the corner pointing up illuminating it. A figure was seated in the chair behind the desk but that was all Gant could make out. He had memories of meeting Nero in his dimly lit underground chamber.
“Deputy Director Roberts?” Gant asked.
“Yes.” The voice was low, almost a whisper.
Another father in pain, Gant thought. He couldn’t see Roberts’ face as the man was deep in the shadow of his chair.
“My name is Gant. I’m from the—“
“The Cellar,” Roberts interrupted. “I’ve been waiting for someone to show up from that place.”
“If you’ve been waiting,” Gant said, “then you know who they are.”
“I’ve been getting reports,” Roberts said. “Lutz, Paine and Forten. We thought they were dead.”
Gant walked forward and sat down in one of the two seats in front of the desk. Golden took the other. He hoped that as a shrink, she would appreciate the importance of silence and waiting, letting the other person do the talking. So far, she seemed to.
Roberts reached forward and turned on a desk lamp. Gant wasn’t surprised by the man’s appearance. His face was long and drawn with deep, dark pockets under his eyes.
“My wife — ex-wife — is making all the funeral arrangements. I’m not invited.” He sighed deeply. “She doesn’t know, but
she does know. She knows this had something to do with the job. I loved that about her when we were first married. That she knew things without me having to tell her. You know. Because I couldn’t tell her much at all about what I was doing. Now I hate it.”
Roberts reached out and picked up a letter opener, a miniature Samurai sword that he began to play with, flipping it through his fingers. “Yesterday I wondered if this was some sort of, I don’t know, mis-direction mission. A test. To see how I handled things. I’ve seen some strange shit in my time here at the Agency. But when my ex called me, I knew it was real. She was with the body in Alabama. I knew she’d never go along with anything about Caleigh. I knew then she was indeed dead.”
Gant glanced over at Golden. She looked thoughtful and concerned and he realized she was slipping back into her therapist mode. He turned back to Roberts. The man wasn’t looking at either of them. His eyes were on the flashing metal blade of the letter opener as he moved it about under the light.
“She’ll never forgive me.” He laughed, a dry, forced noise. “Not that it matters with Caleigh dead. I guess Caleigh will never forgive me either.”
Gant stirred. The waiting thing was all right, but it was time to get on task.
Roberts looked up. “Which one of them killed her?”
“We don’t know,” Gant lied. “One of them is dead now. Lutz.”
Roberts looked surprised, lifting ever so slightly out of his despair. “I didn’t hear that.”
“He died this morning,” Gant said, “trying to attack Lewis Foley of the State Department and his wife. Unfortunately, Foley and his wife were killed in the attack. As were two State Department security people. And two FBI HRT team members were killed today trying to find another girl who was kidnapped by these guys.”
Roberts slumped back in his seat, dropping the letter opener to the desktop. “Fuck.”