Lone Wolf
Authors: David Archer
Tags: #Action Thriller, #Fiction, #Mystery Thriller, #Crime Fiction, #crime thriller, #Thriller, #suspense thriller
Lone Wolf: A Noah Wolf Thriller
Lone Wolf
Copyright © 2016 by David Archer.
All right reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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Published by: David Archer
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I
n the course of protecting the security of a nation, governments must often make choices that are best kept away from public notice. Society being what it is, people are wont to believe that everyone has some innate good within them, and that when necessary, they will do the “right thing.”
Those who choose public service, however, whether it be through law enforcement or political office, soon learn the truth: that even the finest examples of men and women are capable of horrific acts under the right circumstances, while the worst examples view those acts as nothing more than taking care of business. Such people are often beyond redemption, and in many cases they are far enough ahead of the rest of society that they avoid being detected, exposed and caught. While it may be obvious to some of us that they are evil, the vast majority of society never sees it, and so would never sanction the kind of action that is necessary to eliminate such evil.
For this reason, such actions are carried out by shadows, people who do not exist as far as society is concerned. Every nation has had such people, including the supposedly civilized Western nations. Over the years, the United States of America has publicly denied the existence of assassins within the ranks of the CIA and FBI, which it can do because the Alphabet Soup Groups that are known to the American people honestly do not engage in such things, or at least, only when there is absolutely no other alternative at the moment when such action must be taken.
Instead, there is a special organization that is so secret that even most of the government knows nothing more about it than that it does exist, including some of those Alphabet Soup Groups. Whenever one of those organizations comes upon an individual whose departure from the world would leave it a notably better place, a request must be filed through a highly secure computer network. The request must include as much information about the person or persons to be eliminated as possible, an explanation in great detail as to why the requesting organization believes it necessary to resort to elimination, and a projection of the benefits to society if the request is granted.
That request will be delivered to a single person who has demonstrated a capacity for common sense and a willingness to accept responsibility. She alone will determine whether the request will be granted or denied, and if it is granted, she will assign the mission to eliminate the target or targets to one of several teams that work for her. These teams specialize in doing just that—eliminating those persons whose presence in the world can no longer be tolerated.
Her name is Allison Peterson, and she runs a nearly invisible department known as E & E, which stands for
Elimination and Eradication
. This department was established under a secret order from the president of the United States, and given absolute autonomy. Allison alone can grant or deny requests for elimination, and no one, not even the president, can order her to approve one.
The missions she assigns are carried out by teams that normally consist of only four people. One, the team leader, is the assassin. He or she is aided in missions by three support specialists: transportation, intelligence and muscle. Each team is named after something from mythology, which has led to her department getting the nickname of Neverland.
Noah Wolf is Allison's star pupil, recruited because of something that most people would consider a character flaw, but which she saw as potentially the greatest strength any assassin could have.
When he was only a child, Noah Foster was present when his father murdered his mother, and then committed suicide. Something inside the seven-year-old boy broke, and from that day on, he had been completely without emotion—or conscience—of any kind. He would probably have found himself in an institution not long after that tragedy, but for the help of a genius friend who he met in foster care. Her name was Molly, and she was one of those rare children with an IQ so high that it was almost impossible to measure. While she lived at the foster home with Noah and other children, she was taking high school and even some college classes in a special education program, and one of those classes was psychology. It didn't take her long to figure Noah out, and to realize that if he continued to act so differently from everyone else, he would soon find himself locked away.
Molly convinced him to use his own surprisingly intelligent mind to study the actions and mannerisms of people around him, and mimic them in order to conceal his emotional state. She compared him to Mister Spock from
Star Trek
, the famous Vulcan, because Noah had instinctively turned to logic. He naturally examined all sides of any given situation before attempting to react to it, and by the time he was ten years old, he could arrive at a conclusion so quickly that his reactions seemed natural and brilliant.
As he grew older, he continued to mimic others, keeping his logical nature as secret as he could. He was considered an asset to any task he undertook, because he would simply examine the problem, decide what needed to be done and then do it. He was never selfish, never lazy and always willing to do whatever it took to ensure the success of any project he was involved in, for himself as well as for others who worked with him.
A combination of circumstances led him to join the Army when he was only seventeen, and he found it to be exactly the kind of environment he needed. The rules, structure and discipline fit perfectly into his concept of how the world should be, and he excelled as a soldier. He rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant, served three tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and had more than a dozen different commendations in his file.
None of that did him any good, however, when his platoon leader, Lieutenant Daniel Gibson, one day decided to engage in sport with some Iraqi civilian girls that the platoon had stumbled across on a patrol. The girls, of course, objected to being raped, and so he ordered them killed. Noah had been assigned to sniper cover that day, and was unaware of what was going on until he was called down from his position. Only one of the girls was still alive, and Gibson offered Noah the chance to take advantage of her before she met her own fate.
Noah assessed the situation, and concluded that his commanding officer had committed and condoned the rape and murder of Iraqi civilians, which could be considered an act of war against Iraq by forces of the United States. He refused to participate, and demanded the situation stop, but Lieutenant Gibson told him to shut up and then shot the one surviving girl through the head.
Noah's computer-like brain saw that the situation was completely out of control, and took what he considered to be logical action. He shot and killed his platoon leader, and then attempted to place the rest of the platoon under arrest. The other men fought, and he was forced to kill several of them before the remainder surrendered.
Unfortunately, when they returned to their base, it was his word against theirs. When it turned out that Lieutenant Gibson was the son of Congressman Gibson, the up-and-coming presidential hopeful, the political pressure came down from Washington and Noah was arrested for multiple counts of murder. He was railroaded through court-martial and sentenced to die.
That was where Allison found him, sitting on death row at Leavenworth. She visited him there in disguise, explaining that if he was willing to put his talents and abilities to work for her, she could arrange for him to have a second chance. Of course, it would mean never having any contact with anyone from his past, since the official story would include that he committed suicide in his prison cell.
Noah made the logical choice, and agreed. Days later, he was taken out of his cell in the middle of the night and transported to the department's training compound in Colorado. The morning news carried the story that the renegade soldier who had murdered the son of Congressman Gibson had killed himself in his cell. His unclaimed body was interred in the prison cemetery only two days later.
Noah Foster became Noah Wolf, and his training as a professional assassin began.
His codename was Camelot.
N
ouakchott was the capital of the Northwest African nation of Mauritania, and its economic and political center. As such, it was also the center of international interest in the country, housing embassies and diplomatic missions from many other nations, including the United States of America.
