Lean on Me (30 page)

“
I’m not going to ask how
you know this,” Alex said. “But we haven’t made any
decisions.”

“
I saved a chocolate for
you, honey.” Mammy brought the tray of doughnuts to her. She
slapped Raz’s hand away as it neared the chocolate doughnut.
Smiling at Mammy, Alex took the doughnut and split it with Raz. He
kissed her cheek. “Now none of that. I’ll get my feelings
hurt.”

With a flip of her apron, she took the empty
tray into the kitchen.

“
Who’s leading this
meeting?” Alex’s voice rose with anxiety.

“
No, Pumpkin,” Patrick
said. “We’re not going to make you lead us. We’re waiting for the
Mister. You know he does strategy and leadership. I get shit
done.”

Max came into the room. She pressed her
forehead into his in a moment of greeting. He broke a piece of her
doughnut and went to the couch. Still talking to Zack, the Captain,
one of the men who’d met them at the dock at Harkins Island,
touched her back and found a seat at the table. Zack tried to take
her last piece of chocolate doughnut but Alex held it away from
him. Laughing, he went to sit at the table. Mammy came in with a
couple of thermoses of coffee. The man they called “the Mister”
came in behind her. Mammy waved off everyone’s thanks and took a
seat by the fireplace.

“
We’ll do strategy
together?” the Mister asked.

“
How did you manage to get
away?” Alex asked.

“
I’m not here,” he said.
“In fact, we need to get this briefing over. I’m due for a meeting
in Washington.”

“
Everyone who’s here is
here,” Mammy said. “There are more coming, of course.”

The Mister nodded to her and then turned to
Alex.

“
Our plan is to work as two
separate yet integrated teams,” he said. “We’ll stay in close
contact via secure connection.”

“
Is that why you bought
this home?” Raz asked.

“
We piggy-backed on your
secure connection,” the Captain said. “We should be
undetectable.”

“
I’ll check,” Raz said.
“With Xavier’s help, we’re setting up a sequence of secure servers
today. You can patch into them.”

“
Alex’s assistant, Dusty,
dropped off the equipment around noon,” X said. “We’ll finish the
installation this afternoon. Should be operational tonight or early
tomorrow morning.”

“
This home was a stroke of
genius. It’s easy for some of the publicly known members of our
team to get in and out of Denver,” the Mister said. “We have ample
military bases as well as a state-of-the-art airport.”

“
You need to stop this
fussing and get this meeting started,” Mammy said.

“
Yes, ma’am,” the Mister
smiled at her. “Patrick, why don’t you start?”

“
Last Sunday, I received a
call from Alex telling me about her conversation on Harkers
Island,” Patrick said. “She, Max, and I have some previous
experience with the man who calls himself Eniac. She felt confident
that the man who set up this debacle and cleared the Intelligence
servers at JFCOM would leave behind a virus to destroy everything
if anyone really tried to look at what he’d done.”

“
I started a chain of
requests,” Patrick continued. “Within three hours, we had X and Y
on board and Anonymous willing to join in. By morning, and with
Alex’s help, we had a plan of attack. X?”

“
Even with the highest
security clearance,” X said, “we weren’t able to access the servers
remotely. This appears to have been sold as a ‘safeguard’ by Eniac.
Of course, it does stop people like Anonymous from hacking into the
servers. It also stops all external audit, thus leaving the servers
as free playing ground for a madman.”

“
A madman?” Sean Hudson
asked. “Are we certain?”

“
You have to hear what he
found,” Alex said.

“
Please go on, X,” the
Mister said.

“
I’ll start with the most
urgent human issue and move to the most urgent intelligence issue.”
Expecting resistance, X looked around the room. Seeing only
interested eyes, he continued, “Our most crucial human issue is the
loss of these men. And make no mistake; they are lost. No one seems
to know where they are. The paper trail of their mission and
mission approval is gone. The documents on who flew them and where
are gone. All of the usual, expected ‘machine-of-war’ paperwork –
equipment, food, shelter, clothing, or whatever – is
gone.”

“
And gone means?” Dominic
asked.

“
No electronic record. No
paper record.” X said. “When I say, no electronic record, I mean in
any country, anywhere.”

“
I was unable to find a
trace of the UK team in the Falkland’s,” James Kelly said. “That’s
where they filed their last report.”

“
It’s possible the
paperwork never existed,” Ben said. “It’s been a long, long time,
but in the old days teams assigned to intelligence had no paper
trail. It’s hard to believe it could happen in today’s military,
but it
is
possible.”

“
However improbable,” Raz
said. “It is possible.”

“
Please continue X,” the
Mister said.

“
Our biggest human concern
is finding the men and women,” X said. “Invisible to us, they are
under Eniac’s sole control.”

“
The Fey team was able to
pick up five teams last week,” Alex said. “They have debriefed
individually and as a team. We will begin work with their
information this week. When the soldiers are released from medical,
they are confined to base until this matter is
resolved.”

“
Why confined to base?” the
Mister asked.

“
They requested it,” Alex
said.

“
The men feel certain they
were not supposed to survive their missions,” Raz said.

“
And we were lucky to get
them,” Alex said.

“
This may be the time to
mention that Special Ops, as a service and in particular the
personnel, believe they have been betrayed by the intelligence
corps,” the Admiral said.

“
We need to keep that in
mind as we move forward,” the Mister said.

“
Our team is aware of this
situation,” Alex said. “For now, we feel strongly that we must
isolate this matter from the intelligence community in order to
resolve it.”

“
The mistrust is always a
challenge for the intelligence corps,” Ben said.

“
The intelligence corps has
lost credibility with the men and women who act on their
information,” Alex said.

“
This is a major concern
but, sadly, not our highest intelligence challenge,” X
said.

“
What is that?” the Mister
asked.

“
Our highest intelligence
challenge comes out of the servers at JFCOM,” X said. “Eniac
planned and executed a significant attack on the international
intelligence system. If we hadn’t been there, and the Fey team
hadn’t been on the scene, the cascade would have shut down the
United States and the world. A kind of global intelligence
Armageddon that would eventually affect the world financial
markets, all shipping, air traffic, and potentially the
Internet.”

No one seemed to breathe. They stared at X.
He shifted uncomfortably under their stark scrutiny.

“
But… but... why would
anyone
do
that?”
Mammy asked.

“
As hard as it is to
believe,” the Mister said. “There are a number of… forces, I guess,
in the world who wish to take everything down.”

“
Ayn Randian utopia,”
Patrick said. “They don’t care what happens because they are pretty
sure the destruction will impact the poor and working people, not
them.”

“
We must consider…” Used to
her usual authority, Alex spoke before realizing who she was
speaking to. She’d grown up around these people. To them, she was
Patrick’s kid, one of his wild twins. “Sorry sir, I didn’t mean to
interrupt.”

Her eyes fell on Max and he gave her a
crooked smile. She felt the tingle of Jesse’s hand on her back.

“
We have to consider what?”
Patrick asked. “Please finish, Alexandra.”

“
Yes sir,” Alex cleared her
throat. “We have to consider that we’re wrong here. The goal is not
to take the entire system down, to return the world to
pre-industrial-era days. If that’s the case, then what is the
goal?”

“
But what could that be?” X
asked.

“
Prove you’re right?” the
Mister asked. “Take over? Control the world?”

“
I don’t think Alex knows,”
Steve said. “But I agree with her. We must be willing to ask to
keep the question open.”

“
He’s right,” Mammy
said.

“
This is what we know so
far.” Steve held up a finger. “We know about the planned
destruction of the intelligence network.”

He held up another finger. “We have the
destruction of trust between intelligence corps and soldiers.
Anything else?”

“
Someone is trying to take
the world order down,” Sean Hudson said.

“
That’s not a fact,” Steve
said. “I believe that’s what Alex is saying. We may have more facts
to add to this scenario. So far, we’re working to thwart the
computer crisis and setting up a system to get around the trust
crisis.”

“
But we’re chasing
shadows,” Dominic said. “Reacting to one crisis after another, not
acting. Yes, I see what you mean.”

“
So we must ask the
question…” Steve said.

“
What have we missed?” Alex
asked. “Ben taught me that when everyone is looking in one
direction, the place to find the truth is to look at what everyone
isn’t looking at.”

“
Where has he been
successful?” Ben asked. “That was my question. This lunatic has had
decades to prepare. While we run around cleaning up his mess and
chortling over our successes, he may be succeeding somewhere
else.”

“
Right,” Alex
said.

“
Do we know anyone who
writes those doomsday comic books anymore?” the Mister
asked.

Ben nodded.

“
Let’s get them in the
loop,” the Mister said. “They have a finger on a certain pulse that
most of us miss.”

“
We must act on what we
know.” Patrick’s fist hit the table. “We cannot sit around with our
thumbs up our asses until someone figures out what, if anything,
these cretins might be up to.”

Alex blinked with surprise at her father’s
outburst. Max gave a soft chuckle.

“
My team is looking for the
soldiers,” Alex said. “Our main focus is to bring as many of them
home as possible.”

“
We cannot allow another
Vietnam scenario,” Patrick said.

“
We will bring these men
and women home, Patrick,” the Admiral said.

“
To that end,” Alex said.
“I need a trusted team from every country willing to interview the
families. As my husband often reminds me, families know quite a bit
about secret missions.”

“
Done,” Dominic
said.

“
We will assist you as much
as we can in finding the soldiers,” the Mister said. “Our main
focus will be on uncovering the end game.”

“
I am able to dedicate some
of our resources to assist you,” Alex said.

“
Seems like you’re plenty
busy,” the Admiral said.

“
I just wonder…” X
said.

Every eye in the room turned to him.

“
It’s probably nothing,” he
said.

“
Tell us your ‘probably
nothing’ and we will decide,” the Mister said. “No one’s shy here.
They will tell you if you’re speaking nonsense.”

“
I wonder what, if
anything, this has to do with the murder of the Fey Special Forces
Team,” X said.

As if his words were bullets, Alex’s body
jerked. She turned to look at him.

“
What do you mean?” Max
asked.

“
I didn’t think of it until
the Mister said something about comic books,” X said. “But if you
take a step way back, you see the assault on the Fey Special Forces
Team…”

“
And these ongoing attacks
on Alexandra,” Patrick nodded.

“
Right,” X said. “All by
either the same group or…”

“
Someone using the ‘kill
Alex’ group to continue this plan,” Mammy said. “You know what that
means?”

Every eye in the room turned to look at
Alex. She swallowed hard.

“
What does it mean?” Max’s
voice was defensive.

“
Someone believes that Alex
can figure this whole thing out,” X said.

“
So they eliminated the
threat before it was a reality?” the Admiral asked.

“
Maybe I already figured it
out,” Alex said. “I was working on something the six months or so
before the assault. I don’t remember what it was. Anyone
know?”

Alex’s eyes flitted from face to puzzled
face until they rested on Ben’s face. He smiled at her.

“
I need to get going,” the
Mister said. “Is there anything else?”

He looked around the room.