The Book of Truths

Chapter 5

Neeley had long ago learned that waiting to kill people could be boring. Technically her mission here was recovery, but she’d accepted during Isolation that it would inevitably involve killing at least a few people. Since she’d been on the ground, she’d revised that number upward, because all was not as it had seemed in Isolation.

It never was.

She used the night-vision portion of her retina, just off-center of vision, as Gant had taught her so many years ago. She was experiencing déjà vu, and for good reason. The alley running between ramshackle concrete buildings held several Dumpsters, a burned-out car, and piles of refuse, very similar to an alley in the Bronx so many years ago. Except tonight she was in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the clock was ticking on making contact with the extraction package.

Except there was a problem, one which Neeley had raised to the dismissive CIA liaison in Isolation. This was an ambush. It was a proven tactic of terrorists to draw in rescue forces and hit them hard. Except forces in this case was “force,” singular, in the person of Neeley, primary operative of the Cellar and the closest thing Hannah back at Fort Meade had to a friend.

Which meant not much of a friend at all, except they’d saved each other’s lives years ago and they’d die for each other. Hannah also sent Neeley on missions like this, where she could get killed.

It was all part of being in the Cellar.

Neeley was buried inside one of the six-foot-high mounds of refuse. She’d squirmed her way in twenty-four hours ago, stayed in it without moving all day as more trash was heaped on top, including various liquids that seeped down on her. She actually appreciated the fouler-smelling and disgusting items because it made it that much less likely someone would come rooting through.

Living was worth a little, and a lot, of discomfort.

Neeley leaned her head to the right, pressing her right eye socket up against the rubber socket on the end of the thermal scope mounted on the sniper rifle. A tiny switch inside automatically turned the scope on.

With little twitches, making sure she didn’t disturb the trash surrounding her hide site, she peered out the tunnel she’d poked clear with a stick just after dark to get a field of fire.

She had three positions identified from the previous night. She’d picked them up as she maneuvered into the alley. They were careless, but they could afford to be. They were in friendly territory and Neeley had picked up the distinct impression that they hadn’t expected any action the previous evening.

Which was interesting.

Actually, disturbing was a more accurate word.

If they knew which night to expect extract, it meant the mission was compromised. Which meant she should back out and call for exfiltration and forget about extraction of the package.

Neeley wasn’t a big rule follower for those other than the ones Gant had given her.

The Cellar did not have Protocols like the Nightstalkers.

It had Sanctions, which this wasn’t, so that didn’t factor into it.

Neeley didn’t ruminate on why or how the mission was compromised. The very fact the Cellar had been called in to do this had been an indicator. Hannah would deal with it.

There were four men in a second-story apartment across the street from the package. They had two light machine guns, AK-47s, and one RPG rocket launcher. Of more danger were the half-dozen “insurgents” in a minaret towering over the mosque at the end of the street. They had a cluster of RPGs and, ominously, at least two SA-24 Grinch shoulder-to-air missiles. The Grinch was the latest variant of Russian surface-to-air missiles, technically not available for export, but what were rules to bad guys? You could buy anything in Russia these days.

Who named a missile a Grinch? Neeley wondered as she scanned the minaret. Really, not long till Christmas and she was literally going up against the Grinch? She rarely considered irony, since it was often the baseline of any operation she was on, but this time it seemed a bit over the top.

She counted six heat signatures in the minaret. All awake and alert, unlike last night.

They were waiting.

As were the last two. They’d come just after dark, like last night, and crawled into one of the Dumpsters next door to where the package was. They’d wedged the top open six inches and were peering out with night-vision goggles, the latest American version, most likely stolen by an Afghan soldier from his American counterparts and sold on the black market.

An old woman came walking down the street, the weariness in her step indicating a long day at work. She had little clue about the firepower amassed all around her and disappeared into one of the buildings on the left side of the street.

A voice crackled in Neeley’s ear. “Status?”

She whispered her reply, picked up by her throat mike and encrypted and transmitted back to Hannah while being frequency hopped and relayed through several Milstar satellites. “Go. Status of Pakistani air defenses?”

That was the key question. How far up did the betrayal go and who was involved?

“Inactive. You’ve got a local problem.”

“Roger,” Neeley said. “But we kept this tight, so the only way word was leaked was via the Agency.”

“Naturally. I foresee a Sanction in the future, but for now it is your call whether to proceed or not.”

“I’m on mission,” Neeley said.

“The missile countdown has begun and exfil is inbound,” Hannah said and nothing more, because after so many years and so many missions, there was nothing they could say. It was all down to the execution now.

Neeley pulled her eye back from the rubber gasket, the ease of pressure automatically turning the scope off. She slithered one hand into a pocket and extracted a pill. She carefully put it in her mouth and, twisting her head to the left, took a sip of Gatorade from the CamelBak built into her MOLLE combat vest.

The pill would give her four hours on the edge. Since she hadn’t slept since infiltration, going on fifty hours now, she would need that edge. But if she weren’t out in four hours, the crash would be bad. She didn’t worry about that because if she weren’t out in four hours, she’d be dead.

Her pulse quickened as the speed hit her bloodstream.

She didn’t need to check her hide site. She’d taken nothing out, so there was nothing to indicate she’d been here. Gant’s rule number four: Always pack out what you pack in. They were Neeley’s rules now, as much of her as they had been of Gant.

In fact, there was nothing on her to indicate who she was or where she was from. Well, there was DNA, but it wasn’t like the Taliban or Al Qaeda or whoever was waiting to kill her was going to run that, and even if they did, she wasn’t in any database. She didn’t exist and hadn’t for a long time.

She pressed her eye back against the rubber, the alley coming alive in heat once more. The rifle was an old one. She knew there were better models now on the market, but Gant had also impressed on her that familiar was sometimes better than newest. It was an Accuracy International L96A1. British made, it chambered the NATO standard 7.62 by 51mm round.

The rounds loaded in this rifle, though, were anything but standard.

Neeley had prepared the rounds herself, building them to be subsonic so they wouldn’t produce the distinctive crack of breaking the sound barrier. A bulky suppressor on the end of the barrel would reduce the sound of the gasses propelling the bullet as they escaped the barrel. There is no such thing as a true silencer, but her rifle was pretty damn quiet.

A new voice crackled in her ear. “On station. Target Alpha locked in. Fifty seconds.”

Of course the suppressor combined with the low-power bullets meant a greatly reduced range, but that was why Neeley was in the pile of rubbish, needing to be close to the package.

“Forty seconds.”

Neeley placed the crosshairs right between the goggled eyes of one of the men peering out of the Dumpster.

“Thirty seconds. Missile away.”

Her finger caressed the trigger. While she remained focused on target, part of her mind began to monitor her breathing and heartbeat.

“Twenty seconds. Tracking positive.”

She knew that the Global Hawk that had fired the Hellfire missile was already roaring back toward Afghanistan. The “pilot” flying it was safely ensconced in a bunker on the other side of the world at Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of Las Vegas.

“Ten seconds. Tracking positive. Eight. Seven. Six.”

Neeley slowly exhaled two-thirds of the air in her lungs to her natural respiratory pause and paused her breathing.

“Three. Two.”

Neeley fired in between heartbeats, the round ripping through the target’s NVGs and his skull, splattering the lid of the Dumpster with brain, blood, and bone matter.

The minaret blossomed in an explosive ball, and as Neeley worked the bolt, she wondered if Allah would curse her. Then she figured she’d pissed off pretty much every god on the planet if there was a higher power, so it was a little late to worry now. She fired, killing the other man in the Dumpster while he was staring to the side, trying to see what the cause of the explosion was.

She stood, garbage falling aside, and slung the sniper rifle over her shoulder. She pulled a short, stubby grenade launcher out of a sheath on the side of her pack. She’d bought it on the black market in Kabul, then spent time modifying 40mm rounds for it. She had six rounds in loops on the front of her vest and one in the chamber. The first thing she’d done to the rounds was remove the safety that only armed the round after a hundred feet. These were live as soon as they left the barrel.

As she dashed down the alley, she pressed herself against the right wall and fired the first round. Right into the window where the four men were. It exploded while she broke open the M79 and loaded another round, still moving rapidly down the alley. She put a second round into the room for good measure and a body came flying out of a window, landing on the concrete with a solid thump.

Neeley dropped the thumper on its lanyard and drew her MK23 .45-caliber pistol. As she passed the body, she put two rounds into its head, then pivoted right and kicked open the door where the package lived, weapon at the ready, the muzzle following her gaze.

The package had one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter. His eyes widened as he met Neeley’s and she had no time to deal with his surprise that it was a woman coming for him. She was focused on the two men standing behind the family, scimitars in hand, raised for head-chopping strikes at the neck of the two adults.

One of them started to shout something, but the second syllable never left his mouth because the first .45-caliber round Neeley fired hit right between his eyes. She spared him the double-tap in the name of expediency and to help the wife keep her head. As blood and brain and bone still flew out of the back of the first man’s head, Neeley had shifted right and fired, this time double-tapping, the bullets blowing apart the second man’s head and flinging his body back, the scimitar flying away with the body.

Neeley shifted back left and fired a fourth time, hitting the first man as the body crumpled back, the bullet passing the package’s side by less than an inch.

One of Gant’s rules was always make sure with an extra round.

She was making sure because she’d passed up the first double-tap. She was sure Gant would have approved. Neeley strode into the shack, taking charge with action and presence, not words. She was tall, just under six feet. Her short hair was still dark; she dyed the gray because it made her stand out and she was distinctive enough as it was. Her face was all angles, no soft roundness. The lines deeply etched around her eyes told of years of stress living on the edge.

She gestured and the family ran toward her. She exited the building, glanced over her shoulder to make sure they were following, and then began to jog at a steady rate, pistol at the ready, weaving through the alleys and streets of the slum as if she’d been born there. It wasn’t far, three blocks, and she counted on the explosion to keep everyone indoors for a little while. She had a good idea of response time and felt she had a sufficient window.

She reached the soccer field, sirens wailing in the near distance. Neeley shrugged off her pack as the three Pakistanis caught up, breathing hard. They were staring about fearfully, looking for the helicopter they and the ambush team had expected, Neeley supposed.

They were out of luck in that regard.

Neeley signaled for them to put their hands over their heads. They hesitated and she gestured with the .45 and they complied. She pulled harnesses out of the pack and quickly snapped them on the man, woman, and terrified child. The harnesses were already linked with twelve-foot lengths of high-strength rope. One end was still in the pack and the other end had twelve feet and an empty loop.

“Thirty seconds,” a different voice whispered in her ear.

She reached in her ruck and pulled a cord. A large balloon blossomed forth from the tank that had taken up half the space in the pack, rising rapidly into the air and lifting the rope still in the ruck. Neeley went to the free end and buckled in.

“What are you doing?” the man demanded in Pashto.

Neeley didn’t answer. Coming in from the south low and fast, its dark form barely visible, was an MC-130J Commando II. It was the Special Operations — modified version of the venerable Lockheed C-130 Hercules cargo plane, first deployed in 1956 and still the workhorse transportation vehicle of the air force. This version was capable of all-weather flight and loaded with enough navigation, communication, and countermeasure electronics to make Apple headquarters in Cupertino weep with envy. A pair of metal whiskers protruded from below the nose of the aircraft. The pilot centered on the blimp and dove down an extra fifty feet, barely missing rooftops.

The whiskers caught the rope and it immediately slid to the center where a sky anchor locked onto the rope.

The Pakistani was opening his mouth to say something else when the rope tightened and he abruptly left the ground, followed by his wife, child, and then Neeley.

The MC-130 gained altitude and speed, turning for the Afghan border as its forward momentum swung the rope along the belly of the plane. On the open ramp in the rear, several air force crew manned a crane. They expertly snagged the rope, then began hauling it in along with its passengers.

At the very end of the rope, buffeted about, Neeley spread her arms to reduce the spinning and stared down at the lights of Abbottabad as they began to recede.

Despite the air whistling around and the roar of the engines, she heard Hannah’s voice in her earpiece.

“Good job.”

As she was reeled into the MC-130, Neeley finally allowed her thoughts to drift, to naturally think of Gant as the freezing wind ripped into her. Of his strong arms around her, holding her tight against the Vermont winter that penetrated the stout walls of the cabin he’d built. And then how it had been her holding him, keeping him warm, as his body wasted away.

Those thoughts always led to one place, one she was visiting in her mind more and more often: the grave they’d dug together that last year, in the early fall before the ground froze. Gant always thought ahead and he’d known he would not be around for the spring thaw and this was something that had to be done now. She’d done most of the digging, as he tired easily at that point. Resting, he’d sit on the growing pile of dirt, which he’d soon be part of, drinking a beer, telling morbid jokes and mixing in his Rules, knowing she was soon going to need them more than ever before. They’d had ten years together, long enough for Neeley to learn all his Rules and be taught all his tricks and tactics of covert operations.

But not long enough for her to grow tired of his arms.

As gloved hands reached out and pulled her into the cargo bay of the Commando, she pictured his lined, aged face, peering out the window at that dark hole as winter set in. She’d kept the fireplace blazing, the red glow flickering on his skin. She’d used so much wood, she knew the pile wouldn’t last the winter, but neither would he, and once he was gone, she would be too.

There had been more than the cancer and the specter of the hole eating at him though. He’d been unable, even in love and even dying, to break his oath and tell her of the organization he worked for, the Cellar, and why her life would now be in jeopardy.

As the back ramp rose up into the tail and shut, Neeley shrugged off the harness. Had he known where the journey he’d sent her on would end? Had he known she’d end up taking his place in the Cellar? Had she even had a choice? It was a question she asked herself more and more as she grew older and knew her life options were closing off with each year.

Neeley sat on the red web seating lining the side of the plane as the three Pakistanis were met by an interpreter, the parents’ arms gesturing on all sides, mouths open in argument. She tuned out the voices already muted by the roar of the turboprop engines and inadequate insulation of the Special Operations plane. The front half of the Commando’s cargo bay was hidden behind a curtain, covering the screen watchers and countersurveillance experts who kept the plane cloaked from electronic detection and helped the pilots navigate a spiderweb route back to safety. The pilots were flying 250 by 250: 250 feet above the ground at 250 knots, which made for interesting maneuvering as they reached the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Neeley leaned her head back, still feeling the speed surging in her veins.

Had she ever had a choice? Maybe, but it was so many years ago, well before the Cellar. Everyone has a key point, a golden moment in their life, where there is a fork in the road and sometimes we make that choice and sometimes we’re shoved onto a path.

Ten years before Gant’s death, she’d been a teenager, living in Berlin. She liked to think she’d been innocent and naive, but as the years passed, her retrospect shifted also. She’d been walking through Tempelhof Airport, a large, brightly wrapped package in her hands. She could understand the lilting Berliner accent of the natives, and even then, so many years after the blockade and the airlift, there were still those who remembered and gave Americans, like Neeley, an extra smile.

The men had also noticed her because of her cut-off Levi’s and tight T-shirt. Inappropriate attire for the first week of October in Berlin, but she knew now it was a diversion, set up by her boyfriend who’d given her the package to take to England. It was before 9/11 and security at airports was almost nonexistent.

Except for Gant, for whom there was no such thing as a lack of security. He’d later told her he spotted her right away. Not because of the long, lean legs or taut breasts straining against the thin shirt, but because she clutched the package to her, just below those breasts. It was a tell those who worked in counterterrorism easily recognized.

His row had been called, but he had not boarded. He always joked the plane would leave when the last person boarded, so there was no point rushing, but the reality was, he watched every single person as they entered the gangway.

He had reason to be extra vigilant that day. It was 1993 and the news was full of stories of the Battle of Mogadishu. Helicopters shot down, soldiers dead, bodies being dragged through the streets by angry mobs.

His role in that affair, he’d never been very clear on.

Neeley had paused, short of the entrance to the tunnel that would take her onto the plane. Gant had walked up to her, eyes hidden by dark aviator glasses. For such a hard man, his face lit up when he smiled.

She’d always remember that smile in Berlin, as much as she remembered the look on his face peering out at his waiting grave in Vermont.

And that was why she’d handed him the package and said: “It’s a bomb.”

Neeley realized she was staring at her hands. She shook her head, as if she could dislodge all those memories. The memories that she called “no do-over.” Where a decision was made, an event happened, a path was taken, and you could not go back.

Death was the ultimate no do-over. She’d knelt next to Gant’s grave after filling it, howling at the moon all night, shrieking and pounding the ground until her hands bled and the tears froze on her face.

“You all right?”

The crew chief was leaning over her, hanging on the straps as the plane banked hard, flying up a valley between high peaks.

Neeley blinked. She reached up and wiped her eyes and looked in confusion at the moisture on her fingers.

It was only then she accepted that she’d been crying. Just two tears but it was the most since that night.

This was not good.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Riggs, knew there was stuff going on that people were hiding from him. Not just here in the Pentagon, but throughout the government. The Clowns In Action over at Langley liked to act like they knew what they were doing, but really, ever since 9/11, the military had taken the lead not only in terms of covert action but also intelligence gathering.

But closer to home and heart, he’d known there was some secret around him, spreading from one person to another like a game of telephone and he wasn’t in the loop. No one was going to whisper it in his ear.

But this time, it was real bad.

He’d gotten the report on the Bent Spear in Nebraska. Cleaned up by the Nightstalkers. He could care less about that and more about the inquiries going on about how that damn nuke had been left there. Simple oversight, incompetent bureaucracy — all the usual excuses were going to have a hard time holding up on this one.

The general looked like a classic Roman senator. With hooked nose, silver hair, high brow, and tall, erect carriage, he exuded, “Don’t fuck with me, because you can’t, and pray I don’t fuck with you, because I can.”

He was also like a Roman senator in that he was overweight, his uniform jacket stretched to the limits. The upside of that was there was plenty of room for all the ribbons and badges that crowded the cloth. A smaller man would have had to leave some off.

He had a tingling in his fingers and in his toes that reminded him of that night sitting in a bunker, body armor strapped on, helmet cinched tight, waiting to die. His fingers twitched and he yearned for a weapon. His feet ached to run. It didn’t matter which way. They just wanted to move.

Nothing was right. Nobody was where they should be or doing what they ought to be doing.

Pinnacle was threatened. On top of the looming treaty, that was a double blow that the country simply couldn’t absorb. Those fuckers from Area 51 thought they were saving the day when actually they were sitting on top of a danger to the country as bad as the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians, and definitely worse than those fools in North Korea.

Riggs leaned back in his chair and it squeaked loudly in protest. He considered how fat he’d gotten in the past year.

It was the first time he’d ever accepted the reality that everyone else could clearly see.

And he even accepted the obvious reason.

He was fat because he’d quit drinking and switched over to eating.

Odd. He’d never thought about how easy that explanation was. When he’d accepted there was a higher power, he’d accepted he’d have to give up the flask he’d kept in his top right drawer, and, when outside the office, inside his dress coat pocket, covered by all those colorful ribbons. It was surprising how many hoagies it had taken to replace the bottle, but who cared about that now?

He swiveled in the chair, the springs protesting. He’d have to get his aide to oil the damn thing, and why the hell hadn’t the man taken the initiative and done it the first time it started making noise? He looked at the saber in the frame on the wall, the one his parents had gotten him his Firstie year at West Point. Across the top of the blade were all the insignia of rank he’d earned over the years: butter bar of the second lieutenant, shifting to the silver of first lieutenant; captain’s bars; gold oak leaf of major, when he’d turned down the job of being the aide to the commanding general of the 101st and earned his Combat Infantry Badge; silver oak leaf of lieutenant colonel, when he’d commanded the Third Airborne of the 187th Infantry in the Screaming Eagles; full bird colonel and a brigade command of the 187th, the Rakkasans. First star. Second star and so on through three with his corps command and now he wore the fourth.

You couldn’t go higher, unless World War III broke out and they decided to bring back a general of army. Ulysses S. had been the first. Omar Bradley had been the last.

It had never occurred to Riggs before about attaining the fifth star.

Not consciously that is.

Riggs was rubbing his ring finger as he reflected on the saber and his career and rank, and that reminded him of what was missing on that finger.

His ring, the ring, was in the same drawer the flask used to rest in, next to a bag of chips. His finger had outgrown it and he’d had it cut off because he’d gotten fatter faster than he’d realized he needed to take off the ring. He’d never taken it off in thirty-plus years. Not in the shower, not in bed with his wife, not in combat. He slid the drawer open and stared at the gold ring adorned with diamond set in black hematite. The thin slice in the gold band. He’d had them press the ring back to size for now, an empty oval where his finger had once been.

He still had an indent on the finger that had once been adorned with the ring — Academy crest turned the heart, class crest out, done immediately upon graduation — and his wedding band. (He was damned if he could remember where that was.) He’d simply given up trying to put it on one day, and now that he considered it, that should have been his warning about the ring.

There was no point getting the ring resized until he finished expanding, and Riggs wasn’t quite sure that would ever happen. It just seemed that there was something bigger than him making him larger.

He frowned at that thought, then smiled, because he knew it was part of his destiny. He’d sensed it on the Plain at West Point so many years ago, right hand raised, getting sworn in, head shaved, head buzzing from the screams of upper-class hazing, ill-fitting uniform hastily thrown on.

Everything was destiny.

They could fix the ring after his hand finished expanding. Everything had to expand to its largest point until it could be fixed. And the president and his treaty was all for decreasing. Making everything smaller.

His army. His nukes. His defenses against all enemies, foreign and domestic and whatever the fuck Fireflies were and whatever else was on the other side of those Rifts.

Oh yeah, the top people at the Pentagon knew about all that Area 51 hush-hush bullshit. They’d known from the start.

It had to be fixed.

Soon. In one fell swoop. He could wipe the table clean for America.

Riggs smiled. Destiny. All great men believed in it. And the greatest of the great seized it when the opportunity presented itself.

The country was lucky to have him. Really. One might consider the United States blessed that General “Lightning Bolt” Riggs was in the right place at the right time.

He lifted the report from DORKA (Department of Research & Kinesthetic Application). Opportunity was here and he was the one to seize it.

As he thought these great thoughts, his left hand automatically went into a drawer and pulled out a Snickers bar. The big one. The one that sometimes made him a little sick before he finished it.

He took a big bite while he thought long and hard and dark about the future.

Hannah Masterson sat alone, as she almost always was, contemplating betrayal.

As she almost always did.

This combination was not unusual for this room, the office of the head of the Cellar.

The occupant of this position — Hannah being only the third since it was founded — spent considerable time searching the nooks and crannies of other people’s souls, often finding them lacking.

The office was devoid of all charm or comfort. It had been that way when she inherited it from her predecessor, Nero, and the only major change had been the addition of more lighting since she was not blind, like Nero. He had gone through considerable trouble to recruit the once-Mrs. Hannah Masterson to replace him, searching for a unique mixture of personality type and experiences, and then forged her in action with a form of assessment that included numerous bodies and betrayals.

Ms. Jones would have envied the exhaustiveness of Nero’s search methods. Of course, Nero had also found her and placed her in charge of the Nightstalkers, so there was more than just an organizational connection. In a way, Ms. Jones and the now-Ms. Masterson might be considered covert progeny of Nero. It was why there was an engineer from the former Soviet Union in charge of the Nightstalkers. And a former suburban housewife in charge of the Cellar. The person was much more important than the nationality. Those whom Nero sought out were very, very special and very, very rare, so one could not limit oneself to arbitrary borders set up by nations.

Unlike Ms. Jones though, Hannah disdained the formality of a title and went simply by her first name. The last name had been her husband’s and he was long dead. He had betrayed her, and she didn’t need the name to remember that betrayal. This was her new life and “Hannah” would do just fine, thank you.

The office lacked any feminine touch, which was a bit surprising considering Hannah had been that suburban housewife when recruited over a decade ago and teamed up with Neeley as they went through their “assessment” period.

They’d survived, which Nero had considered a passing grade.

Sometimes Hannah wondered if she had been Nero’s first choice or if there had been a long list of possibilities and none had passed before her.

The office was unlike the offices of most others in power as Hannah saw no need to impress and she very rarely ever met anyone here. There were no pictures with arms around persons of note, no plaques, no awards… nothing. Nothing but the drab gray of concrete walls.

This was a trait she shared with Ms. Jones.

But not because Hannah Masterson was ill and needed to project herself as a hologram. Indeed, now in her midforties, she would be considered attractive if she ever went out into the world and desired to present herself as such, as she once had. She had thick blonde hair, discovering the first gray just a year ago. It had not bothered her as she’d once feared it would when she had thought a normal life would be her fate. In fact, given the world she now lived in and the problems she dealt with, she thought her genetic code was working quite well in keeping the gray at bay.

The life she’d thought she’d have when she married as a very young woman — garden club, white picket fence, children, PTA, husband on golf trips while she flirted with the tennis instructor — all that had been torn asunder years ago by the secrets she had never suspected her husband held. Today, a lesser person’s hair would have turned white long ago with the knowledge now locked in her brain.

She had not been shocked at what she’d learned from Nero, her faith in mankind shattered well before by betrayal at a fundamental level, a trait she shared with Neeley. To accept betrayal as an integral part of the human race was a key attribute required of the head of the Cellar.

Beyond her hair, her eyes were the color of expensive chocolate. She had worry lines etched on her face, to be expected after a decade on the job. She hit the midway mark between five and six feet and still weighed what any self-conscious suburban housewife would weigh, but it was now the result of a desire to be healthy rather than look trim and keep up with the other wives in the homeowners’ association.

Like Nero, she kept her desk sparse. A wide space with just a secure phone and stacks of folders. She had added a computer, but like everyone else in the black world, preferred to deal in paper that could be shredded and contained. Since her office was three hundred feet below the “crystal palace” of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, her distrust of electronic communication was not paranoid but an acceptance of the modern world’s reality. She had no doubt those upstairs were very interested in what happened in her office. She was not of them, but separate, different, and in the world of government bureaucracy, such a thing was both dangerous and envied.

Some of the very few in the sort-of-know wondered if her organization drew its name from the location of the underground office, but of course it didn’t. The Cellar had been formed (although not mandated for another six years) in December 1941, as smoke still rose above Pearl Harbor and the last, desperate taps echoed out of the USS Oklahoma. (Some of the men trapped inside the capsized ship lasted two weeks before finally dying.) This was long before the NSA was founded and the building above her constructed. If the Nightstalkers could trace its lineage to Trinity, the Cellar could trace its heritage to Pearl Harbor.

Like the Nightstalkers, the Cellar had initially been housed where it was most needed: at the War Department in Washington, DC, in a basement office of the building that currently held the State Department. The years had brought many changes, one of them the founding of the NSA in 1952, growing out of and separating from its predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency.

The CIA have its Memorial Wall with a single star representing each of those who had fallen in service. The current total was 103. Many of the names those stars represented had still not been released and some would never be. The NSA had its National Cryptologic Memorial listing the names of those who had fallen in service, underneath an inscription which read: They Served In Silence. That current total was 163.

There were no stars or plaques or inscriptions or museums for Nightstalkers or Cellar employees who died in service.

What only Nero had known, and Hannah now knew, was that a handful of those stars and names had been the result of a Cellar Sanction, corralling in rogue agents.

Nothing was ever exactly as it appeared in the covert world.

The NSA had recently outgrown the facility above her. Interestingly the organization’s need for power had grown larger than the electrical infrastructure surrounding the facility, so an adjunct facility was being built in Utah. Hannah would remain here though. As the Nightstalkers needed to be near Area 51 because that’s where the initial problems they had to solve had originated, the Cellar needed to be near Washington, DC, because most of the problems Hannah had to deal with originated there.

The Cellar, the Nightstalkers, and other small but powerful secret agencies officially began sprouting like snakes on Medusa’s head in 1947 when President Harry S. Truman formed a committee named Majestic-12. That organization has long been cited by UFOlogists as having been started after the 1947 Roswell incident. Majestic-12 was accused of suppressing information of extraterrestrial visits and keeping aliens locked up in Area 51.

If only that were true.

Although it also wasn’t totally false. The opening of the first Rift at Area 51 in 1948 and the “invasion” of Fireflies had caused great concern throughout the highest echelons of the government. Scientists, working on the cutting edge of physics combined with the new field of nuclear power, had opened a Rift, best speculated as a tear in our universe. Fireflies came through, beings of pure energy that took over animate and inanimate objects. Since 1948 there had been twenty-seven recorded openings of Rifts. Each had been shut, and the Fireflies annihilated (along with whatever they possessed), but it was a threat that no one knew the full scope or nature of.

Majestic-12 were the most powerful men in the United States intelligence and military communities. Truman gave them the mandate to bridge the gap between domestic and international security (and into whatever space a Rift consumed), in essence covering what the FBI and CIA couldn’t quite grasp and protecting the world from threats that might be, well, not human. Like Fireflies. Overall, Majestic-12 operations were meant to transcend petty bureaucratic infighting, and even national enmity, and look to the greater good. While the Nightstalkers focused on scientific mishaps, the Cellar was on top of all Majestic-12 groups, because any elite operative or organization can be a double-edged sword.

The secret cops for the secret agencies.

The ones who tracked down and took care of transgressions by highly trained operatives that no normal police force could capture. The specialists who could never see the inside of a courtroom because of the secrets they knew — thus producing stars on the wall at CIA headquarters, those who were now serving in eternal silence.

The Cellar operated outside of most laws because it had been formed directly by presidential decree, which made it legal for the operation to do the illegal.

Wrapping one’s brain around that was difficult, so Hannah Masterson believed in working with a light touch.

Until a sledgehammer was needed.

She had a feeling hammer time was approaching.

Hannah’s phone buzzed. She hit the speaker. “Yes?”

“Ms. Jones for you, ma’am,” said Lois Smith, the ancient secretary who had served Nero for decades and now served Hannah. Smith was no Miss Moneypenny. She was the type of old woman with a graying bun and functional clothes you’d walk by on the street and not give a second thought to. She was efficient and, most importantly, could keep secrets.

“I’m not running a whorehouse, so don’t call me ma’am.”

“That would be madam,” Smith corrected her. It was a game they played every so often, a very subtle way, after years of interaction, of judging the forecast. Today it was stormy, with a chance of a tropical storm blowing in, if not a hurricane.

“Connect me, please,” Hannah said. There was a click, then the secure line was open to the Ranch. “What can I do for you, Ms. Jones?”

“My people just did an operation in Nebraska. A Bent Spear.”

“Summarize, please.”

Ms. Jones did so in three minutes, even more succinct than Moms had been in her office upon returning to the Ranch during debrief.

“And your concerns?” Hannah asked when Ms. Jones came to an end.

“Naturally, my first priority is that a nuclear missile under the control of SAC was targeted at Area 51.”

“That is troubling,” Hannah murmured.

“I have not been able to ascertain what Pinnacle refers to,” Ms. Jones said. “I am also concerned about the weapon being reported as destroyed. Forgotten or lost is one thing. But someone deliberately covered this up.”

“Someone quite a while ago,” Hannah said.

“This incident happened this week. Over the years I have had concerns about the handling of nuclear warheads. There have been too many incidents. Perhaps there are more warheads that are believed dismantled that were never taken to depot?”

Hannah leaned back in her chair and considered that as she hedged on answering. “The impending treaty has everyone on edge.”

“Do you know what Pinnacle is?” Ms. Jones asked.

Hannah closed her eyes. It had just been a matter of time before the Nightstalkers crossed paths with Pinnacle.

“The Cellar has lost four agents investigating Pinnacle over the years,” Hannah replied. “Mr. Nero advised me to leave it alone, but perhaps times have changed.”

There was just the slight hiss of static on the phone as Ms. Jones waited for clarification.

Finally Hannah spoke again. “Pinnacle is a program the military started in the very beginning. Our very beginning, right after World War II. When that first Rift opened and Majestic had to deal with it, and other problems. Some of the men on that committee were military and while they were handpicked by Truman, they still owed allegiance to their services.”

Ms. Jones was quick to the mark. “They didn’t trust we could handle a Rift. So they targeted Area 51 with a nuke.”

“No one knew what a Rift or Firefly was,” Hannah said. “We still don’t. And the unknown frightens people. And frightened people act in irrational ways.”

“The question I have,” Ms. Jones said, “is that the only nuke in Pinnacle?”

“No.”

“How many are targeted at Area 51?”

“We don’t know.”

“And how many more are targeted elsewhere?”

“We don’t know. But Pinnacle is concerned with more than just Area 51. Treaties such as SALT, START, RAD, and others always bothered many in uniform.”

“That is troubling,” Ms. Jones said. “How can my team help?”

“I’ll contact you when needed. Until then, call off your Acmes checking on Pinnacle, please.”

Hannah cut the connection and leaned back in her seat. She felt the buzz. Misanthropes might call it woman’s intuition, but Nero had described it to her and it was not gender specific. It was a sixth sense of information beginning to coalesce into intelligence. The world was full of information; the Internet boiled over with more than any human could ever dream to process even in a thousand lifetimes.

Intelligence was useful information. Hannah had the ability to process large amounts of information from sources, both deliberate and random, and distill out of that quagmire threads to be pursued. Sometimes they led nowhere. But sometimes they led to great unravelings. The fact that Ms. Jones had seen fit to call about this was part of it. But there were rumblings in DC and Hannah paid attention to that.

Hannah knew from Neeley’s report of the package being compromised that someone in the CIA wanted that family dead. They never planned on paying out 25 million to some Pakistani garbageman and, more importantly, they wanted to keep their Zero-Dark-Thirty glory. That was very apparent. It was why she had co-opted the extraction mission rather than let the CIA send in a merk team to be massacred with the resulting bad press. She knew she’d made more enemies over at Langley by doing so, but it was better to know one’s enemies and accept there were no friends.

Hannah had already made some slight nudges, some pebbles thrown into the dark, scummy surface that covered covert operations.

It was going to be interesting to see which of the ripples brought the desired results.