Highest Order

by David Archer

  “We’re going out to the Sagebrush Saloon,” Sarah said. “Kind of our favorite watering hole, and they know us well enough to always give us a table off to ourselves.”

  “Sure, I’ll go,” Allison said. “Donald?”

  “I hate to do it,” Jefferson said, “but I’ll need to take a rain check. I’ve got a little bit of paperwork I want to finish in my office, and then I promised my wife and daughter I’d come home at a reasonable hour tonight. It’s my wife’s birthday, and we’re celebrating at home. I’d love to come another time, though.”

  “We understand,” Sarah said. “Tell her I said happy birthday, okay? And tell Elaine that we miss her.”

  Jefferson smiled softly. “I sure will,” he said.

  “Can you kids give me ten minutes before we go?” Allison asked. “I need to finish up a couple things myself, just so I can pretend to earn my paycheck.”

  “Sure,” Sarah said, and Jenny echoed her. “We’ll wait in your lobby. By the way, who’s the new secretary?”

  “Hell, I can’t remember her name,” Allison said. “We rotate them through a pool, now, because we found out that blasted Monique actually had my secretary spying on me. As it stands now, not even I know who will be on duty from day-to-day. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen the same girl twice in the last month.”

  “That’s one way to keep everybody confused,” Marco said.

  “Sure does keep me confused,” Allison said. “On the other hand, none of the girls in the pool are ever likely to overhear anything critical, and probably wouldn’t recognize it if they did. it’s really not that bad an idea, and I’m grateful to Donald for thinking of it.”

  Noah, Sarah, Neil, Jenny, and Marco all walked out of the office and settled into the chairs around the lobby. The current secretary, a middle-aged brunette, just smiled at them and said nothing.

  Marco couldn’t leave it at that. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “Allison was just telling us that you secretaries are all on some kind of rotation, now?”

  The woman smiled at him again. “Yes,” she said. “It’s a security precaution.”

  “Okay, yeah,” Marco said. “Only I’m just wondering, is it confusing when you come up here for the first time? I mean, how do you know what to do?”

  She reached into the upper right drawer of her desk and picked up a small ring binder. “Orders of the day,” he said. “We are told to check this book before doing anything else. It tells us where the appointment calendars are, what the computer password of the day is, who sits in what office on this floor and what their telephone extensions are. Pretty much everything we need to know is in this book.” She dropped it back into the drawer and shut it.

  “Well, now, ain’t that a thing,” Marco said. “Makes sense to me, I guess.”

  “Even better than that,” the secretary said, “it makes sense to us. Imagine what a nightmare this would be if it didn’t.”

  “That’s a good point. Has anyone ever gotten it confused up here?”

  She looked at him askance. “Do you think they would admit it if they had? I know I wouldn’t. Far as anybody downstairs needs to know, I aced it up here today. And since it will be at least two months before I ever sit in this chair again, who’s going to argue the point?”

  “Marco, you might want to stop,” Neil said. “I’m pretty sure she’s smarter than you are, and it’s starting to show.”

  Marco gave him a dirty look, but sat back in his chair and was quiet.

  Allison came out a few minutes later, and they all went down the elevator together. Neil offered to let her ride with him and Jenny, but she insisted on taking her own car. They made their usual little convoy, with Noah’s Corvette out front, Neil’s Hummer behind him, Marco’s Chevelle on his tail, and Allison’s Cadillac bringing up the rear. Marco called Renée, who promised to meet them there.

  There was a bit of construction on the road to the Sagebrush Saloon, so the drive took almost an hour. By the time they got there, it was nearly six o’clock. Renée had already arrived, so they waited until everyone was parked and all walked in together.

  The hostess, whose name was Carla, knew Noah, Sarah, Marco, Neil, and Jenny as regular customers, but it turned out this was Allison’s first time out to the place. Sarah introduced her to Carla as “the Boss Lady,” and they were led to a large, round table in a corner of the dining room that was partially isolated from the rest of it by the layout of the building.

  Carla, they had learned, was the wife of Jack Zigler. Jack was the security chief at R&D, and so Carla had enough of the security clearance to know that her husband worked for a secret government organization. She also knew that Noah and the rest worked for that organization, so meeting “the Boss Lady” seemed a bit exciting to her. In the circles that she and her husband ran in, there were rumors about the infamous Dragon Lady who ran the whole operation. Carla privately thought that Allison didn’t look nearly as vicious as rumor would have one believe.

  “This place is pretty nice,” Allison said. “I’ve heard of it, of course, but I’ve never been here before.”

  “It’s a good place to relax and have a good meal,” Noah said. “They do serve alcohol, and they even have a band on weekends, but we never do any actual drinking out here.”

  Allison looked him in the eye. “Glad to hear it,” she said. “That’s what the Assassin’s Club is for. I put it in because I know that everybody, even people in our business, have to be able to let their guards down once in a while.”

  “Oh, we love the place,” Sarah said. “Especially when it has a good band, so we can get up and dance.”

  “Yeah,” Renée said. “You should see Marco dance, he’s really very good.”

  “I don’t dance,” Neil said, “but Jenny likes to drag me out there and dance around me. I just kinda keep my feet planted and sway to the music, but everybody ends up watching her, so nobody really notices me at all.”

  “God, I haven’t been dancing in—a really, really, really long time,” Allison said.

  “Well, you should come with us, sometime,” Jenny said. “There’s probably a hundred guys out there that would love to dance with you.”

  Allison gave her a mock scowl. “Somehow I doubt it,” she said. “I don’t think too many guys go for middle-aged blondes, especially when she’s also the boss.”

  “Okay, but that’s where you’re wrong,” Renée said. “There’s a lot of guys out there that don’t work for you. We’ve got military officers, people from other sections of the government, even a few from the CIA. From what they say, the Assassin’s Club is about the only bar of its kind in the entire world. My roommate met her boyfriend there, and he’s with the DEA.”

  “DEA?” Allison asked. “What was he doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Renée said. “Oh, he was here to talk to that kid Noah brought back a few months ago. I guess that boy has turned out to be a treasure trove of information on drug trafficking in the south. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

  “Hrmph,” Allison said. “Any other agency that sends people in to Neverland is supposed to check with my office first. Maybe I need to look over some of our security and see who might be sleeping on the job, because I don’t remember any DEA requests coming through in the past few months.”

  “Is it something only you can approve?” Noah asked. “Couldn’t Mr. Jefferson handle it?”

  “He can, and he would,” Allison said, “but he’s always let me know about it when a request comes in. He knows that I sometimes come up with ideas on the spur of the moment, and it could be necessary for me to know about an outside officer being on site. I suppose it’s possible he did tell me, and it really slipped my mind. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have other things to think about, right?”

  “Oh, no,” Neil said, “not you. I couldn’t believe you might forget something.”

  Allison stuck her tongue out at him. “Go ahead, poke your fun,” she said. “I’ll have you know there isn’t
a lot that I ever forget. For example, your high school locker number was 451. You lived at fifteen forty-nine Baker Street, and you had a cat named—don’t tell me, I know this—its name was Charlie, because you said it reminded you of Charlie Brown.”

  Neil was grinning and nodding. “Yeah, I found him when other kids were kicking him around in the street. Seemed like Charlie Brown was always getting picked on, so it was the first name that came to mind.”

  “See? I don’t forget very many things. Once I know something, I pretty much know it for life.”

  “That’s interesting,” Noah said. “I didn’t know you had a photographic memory.”

  “Oh, I don’t,” Allison said. “I just took some courses on memory management several years ago, and they stuck with me. I learned how to build a mental mansion, and put every little thing I learned into its own place in the mansion. You’d be shocked at how easy it is to remember things using that little trick.”

  “You got any tidbits on me?” Jenny asked.

  “You,” Allison said with a grin, “are an entire collection of tidbits, as you put it. Your first car was a Toyota Prius, and your license plate number was 465-WXR. You were a cheerleader your freshman and sophomore year in high school, but you dropped it in your junior year because you wanted more time for your drama club. You played the Ghost of Christmas Present in your senior class play, which was, of course, A Christmas Carol. Oh, and you can’t stand red M&Ms. You pick out the red ones and throw them away.”

  “Holy moly,” Jenny said, her eyes wide and mouth hanging open. “How do you even know all that stuff?”

  “Honey, did you think we only grab you because you’re a killer? It takes more than that to become one of ours. We went through a complete background investigation on you, even down to interviewing some of your friends. Of course, they thought it was a pre-sentence interview. They kept hoping that something they said would make the court go easy on you. Pretty much everyone you knew felt like you should have been given a medal, rather than being arrested for murder. I guess they all knew your sister and liked her, so they figured those boys got what was coming to them.”

  “They all would have,” Jenny said, “if I hadn’t been interrupted. But, hey, I’m not complaining. If it hadn’t been for you getting me out of that prison, I never would have met Neil.” She looked up at him adoringly.

  “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you kids,” Allison said. “How is it all working out for you? I mean, Neil works for Noah on Team Camelot, but you, Jenny, you are the leader of Team Cinderella. And yet, when I see the two of you together, you look like a perfectly normal couple. How do you do that?”

  “It’s not always easy,” Jenny said. “I’ve had a few rough moments, when Neil and I would get into a fight and I would start to think violently. I found a way to stop that, though, by just leaving Cinderella outside the door. When I’m with Neil, I’m not Cinderella anymore, I’m just plain old Jenny. Scared, insecure, submissive little Jenny.” She smiled, and her nose crinkled. “It makes it all work, because I have to be all tough and in charge when I’m Cinderella. Jenny can just be—she can just be me.”

  Allison looked at her for a moment, nodding slightly. “And are the two of you thinking about making a permanent relationship, like Noah and Sarah did?”

  Neil and Jenny looked at each other, then turned back to Allison. “We talk about it,” Neil said. “I think it might be something we want to do, but neither of us is sure that we want to do it very soon.”

  “Yeah,” Jenny said, “and besides, it’s not like we can really be normal. I mean, I always thought I’d have a couple of babies someday, but I don’t see that happening now.”

  Allison looked at her for a moment longer, then turned to Sarah. “What about you? Do you think about babies?”

  Sarah looked up like she was a deer caught in headlights. “Um—I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, yes, I think about it, of course I do. I think it would be abnormal if I didn’t think about it, don’t you?”

  “Of course it would,” Allison said. “Do you want to be a mother?”

  Sarah’s eyes got even wider. “I, well, I—I guess I always thought I would be, sometime. I mean, is it something I’d want? Sure, if it was possible. I just don’t see it working out too well when Noah and I don’t even know if we’re both going to come home alive. In this business, you just never know, right? I don’t think it would be fair to bring a child into our marriage, our family.”

  Allison looked at her for another moment without saying anything. They were interrupted a few seconds later by the arrival of the waitress, who took their orders and was gone again.

  “I think you’re actually right,” Allison said. “It wouldn’t be fair to the child, when it could lose one or both parents at any time. Of course, now that I think of it, that could happen even if you work at a factory, or at a fast food joint. With the way the world is nowadays, everyone is a target, everyone is at risk. You simply have the benefit of knowing that the work you do carries certain extreme inherent risks. On the other hand, you are basically just intelligence agents. There are an awful lot of intelligence agents who have children.”

  Sarah, Jenny, and Renée were all staring at her, while Neil and Marco were doing their best to look anywhere else. Noah seemed to be studying the three girls.

  “Allison,” Jenny said softly, “are you implying that it might be possible for us to have children?”

  “Well, that would be for your doctor to decide,” Allison said. “All I’m saying is that if it were to happen, I don’t think it would necessarily be the end of the world. Sarah, you could probably stay home; I’m sure I could find Noah another transportation specialist. Jenny, I’d probably move you into training, or use you for some of the simpler assignments that come in, if you had a baby waiting at home. I would certainly increase your team. However, before either of you starts decorating a nursery, let me make something perfectly clear. I would want advance notification, as far in advance as you can possibly give it to me. Do you understand?”

  Sarah managed to close her mouth after a couple of tries, then opened it again. “I understand,” she said. “But, I’ll be perfectly honest and tell you that I don’t think I’m ready for that just yet. Maybe I need to see how Noah and I do for a while, first. I don’t mean how we do as a couple, I mean how we do on coming home alive. Does that make sense?”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Jenny said, “because it’s exactly the same thing I was thinking. Noah may be the assassin, but Neil is at risk every time he goes out, too. And, while the thought of a little blessing has its appeals, I’m not ready for diapers and three a.m. feedings right at the moment.”

  “And you’ll give me warning, if you change your minds?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Sarah said. “We definitely would.”

  Allison grinned. “Well, that’s one worry off my mind, then. Now if I could get rid of a few hundred others, I could really relax and have fun.”

  “Is something causing you a problem?” Noah asked.

  “When is it not? I’ve got eighteen sanction requests sitting on my desk, and only four working teams—well, five, if you count the new one that we just approved for the field. We’ve reactivated Team Unicorn with a new group. The assassin came to us from the U.K., a former member of Group 13, Britain’s version of E & E. They apparently downsized a couple of years ago, and this fellow decided to go independent. We caught him through a sting operation that was tracking hit men in New York. Once we realized who we had caught, I went to pay him a visit.”

  “Well, he ought to be good at what he does,” Noah said. “Are there any others coming online anytime soon?”

  “Well, yes,” Allison said. “That kid you brought in a few months back, Ralph Morgan? He’s actually done well in training. He’ll be heading Team Pegasus in about three more months. The problem is that I’m getting more requests than we can handle. Andropov really did a number on us last year. It’s almost like we’re star
ting over.”

  “That would bring you up to six,” Noah said. “Has Ralph been out in the field at all?”

  “Actually, yes,” Allison said. “I sent him out with Hercules last week, just as additional muscle. Hercules said he did exceptionally well, though there was no wet work involved. I just thought he ought to get a taste of it, and he came back rather enthusiastic.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Noah said. “Like I said when I brought him in, the kid seems to be a natural.”

  Chapter THREE

  The team, loaded down with luggage and equipment, boarded a 747 at the Kirtland airfield on Saturday evening. The flight lasted almost 20 hours, and they arrived at the Tindouf airport at just after eight p.m. on Sunday. While they slept through a good part of the flight, each of them spent time studying the files they had been given. It was important for each of them to be able to recognize the targets, so that none would be missed. They had seven targets with photographs, though it was possible they would learn of even more potential targets once they were on site.

  Four rooms, including one that would be used as an office, were already reserved for them at the Hotel Bijou de Tindouf. They made up an entire floor in the hotel, which was not far from Abimbola’s offices. That floor had been officially designated as short-term diplomatic headquarters of the U.S. A large parcel van that had obviously been hastily painted with the emblem of West Algeria was waiting to transport them and their luggage and equipment to the temporary embassy.

  Nine U.S. Army soldiers accompanied them on the journey, to serve as security for the diplomatic mission. Each of them, while they were on the plane, had quietly identified himself as an Army intelligence officer, even though most of them were posing as NCO’s. Officially, there were three lieutenants, three sergeants, and three corporals. They would stand guard in three-man teams at the temporary embassy, adding to the cover Noah and the team would have for carrying out their real mission.