The Menagerie 2 (Eden) (7 page)

“I understand.”

“Give Ms. Moore whatever she needs to widen that fissure enough for our people to get inside and engineer that technology—whatever she needs. She . . .
is
. . . the key.”

“And then what? She’s not TS clearance. Neither is Savage.”

“Don’t worry about them,” said McCord. “The proper steps have already been taken to wash away any trace of their communication with you. The money wired to their account has already been retrieved without leaving so much as a cyber fingerprint. Our people have seen to that.”

“There was a secretary there as well.”

“Ms. Jennifer DeNardo,” he stated quickly. “Unfortunately for Mrs. DeNardo and her family, it appears that she left the motor of her vehicle running in her garage. While they slept the entire residence filled with noxious fumes, killing everyone. Such a terrible tragedy.”

“Nevertheless, I want a DSRV here at the platform.” DSRV was an acronym for Downed Sub Rescue Vehicle. “All pertinent information comes to me directly. Everything. I will not send them through cyber channels for fear of appropriation by intercepting organizations. I will give them to you directly.” O’Connell held up a flash drive between his thumb and forefinger and wiggled it in a seesaw motion. “I will
only
deliver this into the palm of your hand. So that sub needs to get here.”

 “You’ll have your sub,” said McCord.

“Then that’s when you’ll get your information.” He put the flash drive down. A DSRV, he knew, had a capacity to transport as many as nine people. With the remnant holding forty-two personnel, and regardless of their brilliant minds and potential, the government could always find more since the country was full of them. Life had little worth. Military applications, however, held worth far greater than the value of gold.

“Do the job you were tasked to do, O’Connell. Certain gods residing in the House on Olympus Hill are depending on you.”

O’Connell nodded, and then hit the ‘off’ button. When the connection was severed he fell back into his seat, picked up the flash drive, and toyed with it between his fingers. Around him he could hear the walls shift against the weight of the water, the corrugated sides creaking like ancient timber, an unsettling noise.

O’Connell sighed as he held the flash drive before him, so small but capable of holding countless secrets.

And then he closed his eyes.

And listened.

Around him the walls continued to groan.

#

The Tally-Whackers
were a highly specialized wetwork team sanctioned by the DOD and the JCS, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

At the team’s ruling head stands Marshawn Whitaker, a man of brutish nature whose answer to any threat is by the approach of lethal force, foreign or otherwise. Asking questions first was not even a consideration. Killing, however, was the answer to everything—pure and simple.

His detachment had worked the jungles in the Philippines and in South America, in the Middle East, and along the border between North and South Korea, working covert operations requiring TS clearance. In situations where assassinations were sanctioned by the political brass, these guys were it, a team of polished killers who murdered because the political giants always turned a blind eye to their deeds, the powers that be later pointing an accusing finger at a faction not their own after a kill was made.

In other words, they denied everything.

And the Tally-Whackers would quickly ready themselves to serve again when called upon.

Whitaker stood in full military wear, wearing his specialized helmet and composite armor, watching and observing those around him. Even those with TS clearance were sometimes susceptible to the appropriation of data and selling it to third parties. It happened all the time. And Whitaker’s team served as the scarecrows to keep this from happening.

“So you’re a Tally-Whacker.”

Whitaker saw John Savage approach from the corner of his eye but never acknowledged the man until he stood next to him. The men were of equal height and lean, facsimiles of each other and just as deadly.

Whitaker scoffed and shook his head. “There’s no such thing, man.”

“Really.” Savage crossed his arms and maneuvered next to Whitaker until they were almost shoulder to shoulder, both watching Alyssa work the console. “That emblem you’re wearing—the grinning skull and beret over the crisscrossing tantos, the eye patch representing the blind eye as to what you really do for your government, the employment of assassination schemes.”

Whitaker turned to Savage with his facemask up, the color of his eyes so powder blue they nearly appeared white, a frosty hue. “Something I can do you, Mr. Savage?”

“You know who I am?”

He nodded. “That’s my job,” he said. And then he forwarded a verbal dossier of Savage’s life, beginning with Savage’s employ as a Navy SEAL. “You were once a stellar commander of your unit who fell to drink after your wife left you. In your own self-loathing and self-pity you headed an operations unit into the southern part of the Philippine islands where a terrorist faction was holding a family hostage. You failed to follow the required protocol because you weren’t in the proper frame of mind to lead. And in doing so you lost your team and the targets you were sent to rescue. How am I doing so far?”

Savage’s mouth dropped a bit, obviously taken by surprise.

“On your return you were deemed unfit to command,” he continued. “However, given your prior calls to duty for your government, you were granted a release with full honors and disappeared. Only you didn’t disappear. You wound up working under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church as a member of the SIV, the
Servicio de Inteligencia del Vaticano
, their Intelligence Agency. And then one day you’re called upon to keep a woman—Ms. Moore over there—from entering Eden and the secrets within. You went to kill her, Mr. Savage. But in the end you found salvation.”

“Well,” he finally said, “it seems that you have me at a disadvantage.”

“The only thing you need to know about me, Mr. Savage, is my name. It’s Whitaker.”  He turned his attention back to Alyssa, who appeared lost in her work.

“But you are a Tally-Whacker, aren’t you? Between us. Between soldiers.”

“I’m a soldier,” he answered. “You’re just an attachment to a woman who’s deemed necessary to the cause. What your purpose is, Mr. Savage, is beyond me since you don’t have TS clearing. You’re only here at the asking of Ms. Moore and that’s it.” He faced off with Savage once again. “The man who was once a soldier in you, the man who led his unit to their end, died in the jungle that day along with his team. So don’t think for one moment that I consider you a soldier, Mr. Savage. You never would have made it under my command.”

Savage was taken aback, Whitaker’s words biting deep.

“Anything else I can do for you, Mr. Savage? If not, then have a good day.”

John took Whitaker’s abrupt dismissal as a cue to leave.

And he did, walking along the aisle until he reached Alyssa, then placed a warm hand on her shoulder, giving her a light squeeze.

She reached up and grabbed it. “I’m starting to piece the symbols together,” she told him. She then pointed to the characters in the upper left hand side of the monitor. “The problem is there are so many unfamiliar symbols that it’s almost impossible to determine the proper syntax. This could take days, weeks—”

“Honey—”

“John, you have a photographic memory. In Eden, do you recall these symbols in the arrangement—”

“Honey.”

When she heard the hard edge of his tone she faced him. “John, what’s the matter?”

He turned to Whitaker, who stood as still as a Grecian statue maintaining a keen watch with those marble-white eyes.

“Nothing,” he finally said. “Go ahead.”

But when he feigned a smile she knew something was up.

Whitaker, observing closely, never turned away.

CHAPTER EIGHT

John Savage sat on the edge of a cot sequestered from the workstations of the compound for those to rest their minds. He, however, sat there with his eyes to the floor living the stain of his past brought up by Whitaker, something that never left him.

. . .
You were once a stellar commander of your unit who fell to drink after your wife left you. In your own self-loathing and self-pity you headed an operations unit into the southern part of the Philippine islands where a terrorist faction was holding a family hostage. You failed to follow the required protocol because you weren’t in the proper frame of mind to lead. And in doing so you lost your team and the targets you were sent to rescue
. . .

He recalled every word, every pronunciation, with every syllable biting deep. And of course he tried to play it off, not wanting Whitaker to see that his words stung him to the core.

Slowly, Savage closed his eyes with images of recall coursing through his mind—the colors, the smells of the jungle, becoming all too real.

After his wife left him for the clutches of another man, his mind had been in disarray with decisions difficult to make, always questioning whether or not he was making the right move, the wrong move, or whether or not he should be in the position to make a decision at all when commanding a SEAL team on a mission.

Emotionally lost and racked with pain far worse than any broken bone, he had worn his best bravado face as he and his team went to the southern Philippines where a Muslim faction was holding four American hostages and demanding a seven-figure sum for their release. The American government, however, always maintaining the platform to never pay such demands, opted to use military force instead.

Heading up his team to the southern part of the country, through the dense forest and high humidity, under the most atrocious conditions, he could only think of
her,
his ex
.
When they discovered the encampment his unit surrounded the area. In the center were the hostages: the mother, the father, and two teenage children, both boys. They looked thin, pale and war torn; their bodies wasted. But they sat there as if they belonged—the Stockholm syndrome.

Having lost the keen edge of prudence, his thoughts not completely aware or focused, he neglected to examine the perimeter and never realized that his team had been spotted by those hiding within the trees far beyond the outskirts of the camp. The rebels had moved up behind them, surrounding them in a pincer move, covering them from all sides
.

Whereas the sixth sense of his teammates kicked in, his did not until the first volley of bullets stitched across the backs and chests of his teammates, killing them. What was left of his unit formed a wedge-shaped offensive and moved into the stronghold with their weapons raised and firing, picking off the insurgents
.

One rebel lifted his weapon, an AK-47, and shot the hostages dead with one pull of the trigger, blood everywhere
.

Savage lifted his own weapon with deadly precision and fired, taking out the left side of the rebel’s head in a splash of blood and gore as his body tumbled back into those he just executed, a soft cushion
.

And then time seemed to crawl, his world suddenly moving with the slowness of a bad dream. It was surreal, with gunshots going off around him; the waspy hum of bullets flying past him but none finding their mark; the cries and agony of his teammates as they went down.  He looked at the victims as they lay dead, their eyes and mouths open at the shock of their mortality.

He had failed them. He failed his team.

He was not sharp while taking point.

And it cost him valuable lives.

When it was over and done with, as he knelt by the bodies, with patches of blood that were not his own glistening off his skin, he dared not look around, did not want to see his dead or dying teammates. In fact, he was waiting for the kill shot, the one bullet that would take him away from all this. But it never came.

The one salvation—just a single bullet—never came
.

When he returned to the States he lost his command, sending him deeper into despair. His wife, his job, and now his life, were gone. He had never felt so lost or so alone
.

 
When the commission to work for the Vatican Intelligence presented itself, he saw this as the perfect escape. He’d be worlds away from the problems that had dragged him down. But he soon realized that he could not run far enough. Wherever he went his problems followed and weighed him down even more
.

Under the auspices of the Church, however, he believed in his own redemption by taking direction from those who could show him the way of Light
. Simple direction!
That’s all he wanted.
But it seemed to be something well beyond the capability of the Church to grant
.

In the end salvation—at least a portion of it—came in the form of a young woman he was sent to dispatch, in order to hide the truth about Eden. Instead he became the fulcrum between sinner and saint, opting to save the woman’s life rather than terminate it. What followed was the self-discovery of a man who found goodness within his own heart rather than the darkness that enveloped it. She made him see the person he once was, someone dedicated to overseeing the deliverance of those who could not defend themselves. And depending on those he dealt with, in the circles who knew him best, it was said that John Savage was a demon to some but an angel to others. What Alyssa Moore did was to open his heart once again, completing him.

But the stain of his command continued to follow him like an embarrassing pall.  

“John?”

He opened his eyes. He did not hear Alyssa walk up on him. He feigned a smile.

“What’s the matter?” she asked him. In her hand was a laptop. “John.”