Bodyguard of Lies

CHAPTER 1

The old man sat alone in the darkness contemplating failure on a scale that historians would write about it for centuries, and the subsequent inevitable need for change. He was one of the most powerful people in the world, but only a few knew of his existence. His position had been born out of failure over sixty years previously, as smoke still smoldered above the mangled ships and dead bodies in Pearl Harbor. For over six decades, he had given his life to his country. His most valuable asset was dispassion, so he could view his own recent failures objectively, although recent was a subjective term. He realized now it had all begun over ten years ago.

His office lacked any charm or comfort. There was a scarcity about the room that was unnerving. The cheap desk and two chairs made it look more like an interview room in an improvised police station than the office of a man so powerful his name brought fear throughout the government he served in Washington. The top of the desk was almost clear. Just a secure phone and a stack of folders.

There were, naturally, no windows. Not three hundred feet underground, buried beneath the ‘crystal palace’ of the top secret National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. And not that he could have used windows. The few who knew of the organization sometimes wondered if this location was what had led to its name. While the CIA made headlines every week, the Cellar was only whispered about in the hallowed halls of the nation's capitol. It might have been located underneath the NSA building but it was an entity unto itself answerable only to its founding mandate.

The room was lit only by the dim red lights on the secure phone. They showed the scars on the old man’s face and the raw red, puckered skin where his eyes had once rested. There was track lighting, currently off, all three bulbs of which were over the old man’s head and angled toward the door. When on, they placed his face in a shadow and caused any guest to squint against the light. The few who had the misfortune to sit across from him didn’t know whether the lighting was placed in such a way to blind them as if he was, or to hide the severity of his old wounds.

He was not a man given much too sentimental reflection, but he knew his time was coming to an end, which made him think back to his beginning, as he knew all things were cyclical. He opened a right side desk drawer and pulled out a three dimensional representation of an old black and white photograph. He ran his fingers lightly over the raised images of three smiling young men dressed in World War II era uniforms — British, French and American. He was on the right. The other two were killed the day after the photo was taken.

He left the image on the desktop and reached for the files. The ones he wanted were the first two. He placed them on his lap. Paper files, the writing in Braille. He’d never trusted computers, even though there were ones now that could work completely on voice commands and read to him. Perhaps that was part of the problem. He was out of date. An anachronism.

They were labeled respectively Gant, Anthony and Masterson. He ran his fingers over the names punched on the tabs. He was patient. He had waited decades for plans born out of seeds he had sown to come to fruition. Quite a few similar plans had failed, so there was no reason to believe this one would succeed. But this plan was now in motion, initiated by an event he had had nothing to do with, the way the best plans in the covert world always started to allow deniability.

Despite his gifts of dispassion and patience, he felt a stirring in his chest. It puzzled him for a few moments before he realized he was experiencing hope. He squashed the feeling and picked up the phone to set another piece of the puzzle in motion.