“Now damn it or he’s going to die!” Gallono added when he did not see immediate movement from the guards.
“Let them in. Let them in and show them to the medical station,” the lead guard ordered his men.
As the guards opened the gates, Gallono and his two conscious companions loaded Frank’s limp body onto the stretcher. As they did so, one of the men used the moment of distraction to inject Frank’s arm with a small device that reminded Gallono of an EpiPen. It was in and out of sight in a flash before they followed their escort into the prison ward.
The group rushed through the shabby halls as if it were a hospital emergency room. They barreled their way into the medical ward and sent the attending doctor leaping out of the way. All the commotion gave Gallono the ideal chance to snatch one of the guard’s access badges without notice on his way into the room.
“This man fell against the fence and was electrocuted,” the lead guard explained to the doctor. “Revive him if you can.”
The doctor wasted no time and began performing CPR, but Gallono offered another suggestion. “He needs his heart rate reset, do you have a defibrillator?”
His question met with blank stares; something was lost in the translation. To get around the language barrier Gallono brought both fists up to his chest and acted like they delivered an electric jolt to his body. The doctor got his meaning and moved to grab the necessary piece of equipment. As all eyes fell on the doctor’s movements, Gallono dropped his confiscated security badge to the floor and nudged it underneath the stretcher with his foot.
The doctor tried several jolts with increasing voltage, but it was no use. He checked for breathing and a pulse one last time and then called it. “Time of death is 11:22.”
“You three,” the guard barked pointing at the remaining Red Cross team members. “You have five minutes to meet with the prisoner and not a second more. Now take your bags and go.”
“What about him,” Gallono insisted, pointing to Frank’s dead body. “You killed him. We’re not just going to leave his body with you.”
“The clumsy fool killed himself by assaulting one of my men,” the lead guard countered without remorse. “You will take him with you on your way out.”
The guard’s callused statement combined with him placing a hand on his holstered pistol let Gallono know that protesting the issue further would be detrimental to his own health. Instead, Gallono lowered his head in resignation. He paced over to the medical ward’s only bed, pulled away a clean white sheet and draped it over Frank’s dead body. The only thing left to do at that point was obey the guard’s instructions and pay Terrance a visit in his captivity.
**********
“Time of death is 11:22,” Frank heard a distant voice say as his mind came out of its temporary coma. Every instinct in his body demanded that he sit upright and draw a deep breath, but he knew he was still surrounded. Instead, he remained stiff as a corpse, even when a sheet tickled his nose when someone laid it over his body. The last to leave was the doctor saying something about needing to write up a report on the incident as he closed the door behind him.
Frank counted to ten before sitting up and swiveling his legs over to the side of the stretcher. His head was still awash with drugs and his chest felt like every rib had been dislocated by the doctor’s CPR attempt. He would have liked nothing better than to sit there for an hour or two and recover, but time was short and he had much to do. Frank tossed the sheet aside and rose to his feet.
He felt a nauseating wave of dizziness hit as he got down on one knee to retrieve the guard’s keycard that Gallono deposited beneath the stretcher. Frank then moved to the door where he spent a moment listening for any activity on the other side. Not hearing anything gave him leave to crack open the door to visually inspect the hallway. No one was there, so Frank stepped out into the hallway, and began following the distant sound of voices and footsteps heading for the detention cells.
Frank soon came to a ‘T’ intersection and stole a quick glance around the corner. The guards and his partners in espionage had turned right, but Frank knew better than to follow them from this point. The detention cells were to the right, but prior visits he had paid to this facility as an NSA interrogation ‘observer’ informed him that his target was to the left.
A quick glance down the hallway in that direction showed a set of side-by-side steel doors on either side of the hall. One door led to the interrogation chamber while the second opened into an observation room with a two-way mirror peering into the adjacent room where the gruesome business of this facility took place.
Frank waited until the cluster of guards escorting Gallono and company rounded another corner to pass out of view before stepping around the corner and heading left. He was about to enter the observation room on the left hand side, but spotted a few drops of blood on the floor outside the one to the right. Figuring that was the scene of the most recent activity, Frank changed course to the right.
He waved his confiscated access card in front of the reader and heard a soft click accompany a green light on the locking mechanism. This was the moment of truth. Frank expected all Egyptian intelligence operatives on site to be in the detention block hovering over their International Red Cross visitor’s activities. If that presumption was correct, then this observation room would be down to one occupant. If not, then Frank was entering a situation that would lead to either his death or capture. There’s no time like the present, Frank thought as he opened the door.
Inside he found one man in his sixties wearing a military officer’s uniform seated at a table reviewing a set of notes. The man was so engrossed in his work that he did not even look up to see who had entered the room. As Frank moved closer, he could see the rank insignia on the man’s shoulders. This was indeed his target, Colonel Azire.
“Get anything useful from the prisoner yet,” Frank asked in English upon final approach to the seated man.
Hearing the foreign words caused the colonel to pause for a moment and process their meaning. This gave Frank an opening to lunge forward and bury a syringe full of Propofol into the man’s neck. The tranquilizer was fast acting and gave the recipient just enough time to look up at Frank and whisper, “You…”
The next sound in the room was Colonel Azire’s head falling forward and hitting the tabletop. Frank then moved in and hoisted the unconscious man over his shoulders into a firefighter’s carry draped behind his neck.
The extra one hundred and fifty pounds made the short walk back to the medical ward feel like a marathon, but he made it. There he pushed and pulled at the colonel’s unconscious form until he squeezed Azire’s body onto a second tier of the stretcher constructed only inches beneath the padded bed top. Frank then laid flat on the stretcher and pulled the sheet over himself once more so that the room looked exactly as it did before his post mortem excursion.
Less than five minutes later Frank heard Gallono and his men return under armed escort. They placed their medical bags on top of Frank’s aching chest and wheeled the stretcher out of the prison facility and back into their awaiting ambulance.
Frank continued playing the part of a corpse until they were completely clear from the confines of the prison walls. On the highway heading back to the airport, Frank tossed the bags aside and coughed his way up to a seated position. “Did you have to place your bags on my chest? For Christ’s sake, you know damn well what they did to my chest in there.”
“Oops,” Gallono mocked with a sly grin. “Must have slipped my mind.”
“Well did you at least remember to slip Terrance his medication?” Frank asked.
Gallono looked almost insulted at the question. “Of course. The trick was getting him to understand not to swallow the cyanide capsule until after our team got clear of the facility with all those guards looking on.”
“Did he get the message?”
“Do you think we would’ve been allowed out of that prison if Terrance had suddenly dropped dead after we paid him
a visit?” Gallono asked.
“Maybe he didn’t take it at all,” Frank countered.
“Oh I can guarantee he took it,” one of Frank’s men interjected. “They were well disguised, but there were tell-tale markings that his genitals had been electrocuted several times. They were going to put Terrance through absolute hell while interrogating him for information. There is no doubt in my mind that he wanted to end things as soon as possible.”
“I’m not sure he deserves a quick end, but we didn’t have much choice in the matter now did we? At least we got who we went there for,” Frank said as he helped Gallono drag Colonel Azire’s limp body out from the cramped lower shelf. “He knows entirely too much about our business to be a free man.”
Chapter 8: Aggregation Point
Colonel Azire awoke to the muffled sound of a high-pitched whine and his eardrums feeling as though they were about to explode. He drew a deep breath while yawning causing his ears to pop relieving the internal pressure. It also cleared his hearing to the point he now recognized the whine as the hum of an aircraft engine.
That realization snapped his eyes wide open to confirm that he was onboard an airplane in the process of climbing to cruising altitude. The last thing he remembered was reviewing his notes from the first interrogation session of the American NSA director. He recalled looking up from his pages in time to see an American sticking a needle into his neck. The next thing he knew he was onboard this plane.
Realizing he must have been abducted, Colonel Azire tested the mobility of his hands and legs to find neither were bound. In fact, he found himself reclining comfortably in a plush, leather seat with a pillow under his head.
“He’s awake,” a male voice announced from across the aisle.
Colonel Azire did not recognize the voice’s owner, but the man walking down the aisle toward him he recognized as NSA agent Frank Graves.
“Ah colonel,” Frank sighed with his heavy Texas accent. “I was startin’ to think you’d sleep the entire way to DC.”
“Washington, D.C.?” the Colonel asked for clarification and received an affirmative nod. “Why have you taken me? Why didn’t you just free your NSA director; why bring me along as well?”
“Terrance wasn’t our target, you were,” Frank said as he knelt into the seat in front of Azire and peered over the backrest as a curious child might do.
“Me? I am afraid you erred badly then since I’m not the one capable of divulging every secret the NSA keeps. You needed to free the director.”
“No, I needed to silence the director,” Frank corrected.
Colonel Azire paused a moment to think the situation through and then stated in an accusing tone, “You killed him. You couldn’t get him out of our custody, so you killed him instead.”
“Technically, Terrance killed himself. My men just used the prisoner inspection as an opportunity to give him the means to do so.”
Colonel Azire could not suppress a snarl at the casual brutality of the man before him, but he would expect nothing less from a member of the covert American agency. “You people and your lack of empathy for your common man.”
“We weren’t the ones attachin’ electrodes to his undercarriage,” Frank fired back, drawing a look of surprise from the colonel. “Yeah, my men saw the markings. Now if that’s what you call empathy for your fellow man, then I for darn sure don’t wanna ever get on your bad side.”
“Abducting me isn’t a good start in that pursuit,” Colonel Azire fired back. “Why go to all the trouble of taking me?”
“Because you know all about the truly important secrets,” a mystery man from across the aisle said in a calm, level voice. “Aliens on Earth, their advanced technology, the pyramid weapon, and the chamber inside the Sphinx. These are all very sensitive secrets that need containing.”
“And who are you?” Colonel Azire demanded.
Before the man could answer, Frank jumped in. “He may look like you and I, but Commander Gallono seated over there is actually one of them. A bona fide extraterrestrial who also happens to be a real standup fellow.”
Gallono cracked a smile at the compliment, then looked around at his surroundings and eventually back to Frank before saying, “To answer your question, Colonel, I’m apparently a captive of the NSA much like yourself.”
“So are we,” a female voice seated a row behind added to the conversation. Azire sat up in his seat and turned around to confirm the voice belonged to Alex and seated next to her was Professor Russell.
The colonel looked back at Frank to say something, but the sassy NSA operative beat him to it as he opened his arms out wide and sported a bright smile. “The gang’s all here.”
“How convenient,” Colonel Azire growled while scratching at a spot on his left shoulder that felt like a mosquito bit. “Everyone who knows anything is on this flight. I can’t say that makes me feel very safe.”
“Not quite everyone, but come on now, think about it. If we wanted you dead then you would be. That goes for all of you. You’re not so much our captives as you are our esteemed guests.”
“Then we’re free to go once we land on U.S. soil?” Alex asked.
Frank drew a loud breath through the side of his mouth as he reluctantly shook his head from side to side, “I’m afraid not.”
“Then the word is still captive,” Colonel Azire concluded.
“We land in about ten hours,” Frank said as he got back to his feet. “In the meantime, can I get you anything?”
Colonel Azire had never visited the United States, so when Frank announced they were approaching the capital city of Washington, D.C. he could not resist the temptation to stare out the window. He was treated to a spectacular view of the National Mall grounds. The museums, the monuments, the capital building, the reflection pools were almost too much to take in. The most striking feature of the landscape, he noticed, drew its design from his own heritage.
The five hundred and fifty foot obelisk named after the nation’s first president towered over the skyline. This gave the colonel a certain measure of pride that his cultural influences were featured so prominently in the new world. Even their currency drew imagery of the great Egyptian pyramids.
All too quickly, the peaceful view drifted out of sight as the plane descended and touched down at Andrews Air Force Base just outside the city. From that point on it was a hurried dash to get them all to the White House’s West Wing and ultimately into the Cabinet Room adjacent to the president’s Oval Office.
The gigantic room featured an oval shaped table with twenty chairs around it. Along the far side stood a wall of windows overlooking the Rose Garden. The floor was hardwood covered by a custom-made carpet with shades of carmine, gold, sapphire and fern green with a pattern of oversized stars and olive leaves running round the perimeter. Everything about the room projected power and demanded respect from its occupants.
Seated in one of the chairs was a middle-aged man who Commander Gallono spoke to in a voice laced with familiarity. “It’s good to see you again doctor.”
The man rose to his feet and accepted Gallono’s handshake with apprehension. “Have we met before?”
“Dr. Holmes, you can’t tell me you don’t recognize your former secretary. It’s only been a few days since we last saw each other.”
The doctor narrowed his eyes and stared intently at Gallono’s face for several seconds before saying with wonder in his voice, “My god, Tara, it is you isn’t it. I…I’m speechless. I mean, I saw you die right there in my office.”
“You should know full well how temporary a condition death is to us by now,” Gallono replied with a playful wink and tap on the shoulder. “I’ll forgive you this time since my beard is longer, and my breasts are smaller now.”
“And you have an Adam’s apple,” the doctor teased as he mentally settled into the notion that the man in front of him had been his female assistant only days before.
“Where’s Captain Hastelloy and your brother?” Gallono asked
while taking a seat next to Dr. Holmes.
“They’ve been next door with the president all day. They seem quite intent on keeping me out of the way while they do whatever they intend to do about this pending first contact with your people.”
“I take it you know all about this alien situation then?” Colonel Azire asked of the doctor as he took a seat on the other side of him.
“Oh yes. Their commanding officer, Captain Hastelloy, used me to reach my younger brother who is apparently Frank’s boss in the NSA.”
“And you got to hear and see a little too much for your own good I take it,” Azire sighed.
“I’ll say. Two weeks into all of this and my head is still spinning to try and make sense of it all.”
Colonel Azire looked over at Frank with accusing eyes. “Now do you have everyone in the know in the same room?”
“Yes actually,” Frank confirmed a moment before the American president, NSA agent Mark Holmes and Captain Hastelloy entered through a side door. Everyone in the room: Frank, Alex, Professor Russell and Gallono sprung to their feet out of respect, but Colonel Azire remained seated. The man may have been the head of state, but it wasn’t his state and he still considered himself a captive.
“Good afternoon everyone, welcome to the White House,” the President said with gusto. “I want to assure all of you that you are honored guests under the protection of the United States. For obvious reasons of national security we can’t allow you to leave our custody, but I assure you that I will do everything in my power to make you as comfortable as possible.”
“What about our families?” Dr. Holmes asked.
“To be honest, I’m not entirely sure,” the President admitted. “This may only be a matter of a few days and there will be no need to trouble your families. If it does turn into a long-term situation, we will come up with an agreeable solution for everyone.”
“So what you’re saying is you don’t know,” Colonel Azire stated from his seated position of protest.
Origins: A Greater Good Page 5