Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (12 page)

As if there were only one.

The problem the President had with the Keep was the information she held in her brain and in a leather-bound book she kept close by her side. The first month in office, the President had received a private briefing from the Keep, who’d shown her the Book of Truths. It was a compilation from every president starting with Thomas Jefferson forward, consisting of the top ten lessons learned in office, written down by the Keep and then passed on to the incumbent.

A way of preserving institutional knowledge. In the book were truths presidents would never put in their memoirs or have in the archives of their libraries. Here were listed the brutal realities of the office and the secrets that had to stay within the confines of the White House and the Oval Office.

The briefing had been a shock, as it was for every new president. Entering office they were expecting secrets, of course. But the harsh truth about the way the world really worked was more than any had nightmared about. The Keep had briefed the President on the Cellar, the Nightstalkers, and various other secret organizations and what it was they fought against. Some of it ventured into the realm of science fiction, such as Rifts and Fireflies. Some of it was brutal, such as Cellar Sanctions.

The current President had protested, naturally, given her platform and background, about Sanctions. That one woman, the head of the Cellar, held the power of life and death over American citizens, the President found immoral, illegal, and repugnant. The Keep had shown her the presidential decree founding and authorizing the Cellar and its actions, and explained the necessity of such an organization, so the President had only been left with immorality and repugnance.

And the Cellar.

The rest of the White House, beyond the President, thought the Keep worked for someone else’s staff. She was bland, tiny, and didn’t make a fuss. Some even thought she worked for housekeeping.

In a way she did.

Just at a very high level.

“I was in an important meeting,” the President said, more out of frustration than making any impact on the Keep.

“There’s been an incident, Madam President,” the Keep said. She was sliding back an old framed print of the White House hanging on her wall, revealing a safe. The President recognized it as a twin to the one in the Oval Office. Top of the line and it could be opened only by authorized personnel, or else everything inside would be destroyed. The one in the Oval Office could only be opened by the President.

“And the incident is?” the President asked.

“We’re about to find out,” the Keep said. She went through the retina scan, the fingerprint scan, the voice analysis, and the rapid DNA check in thirty seconds. The red light on the screen remained on. “Your turn, Madam President.”

“Dual safeties?” the President said as she walked around the desk. “How did you get my data?”

“We copied your safe, Madam President,” the Keep said.

“Of course.” The President went through all the checks and the red light went out, replaced by green, and there was a distinct click. “By the way,” the President said, “who is ‘we’?”

The Keep ignored the question and opened the door. She pulled out a thin red envelope. It wasn’t stenciled with the usual Top Secret Or We Kill You markings like most of the manila envelopes the President handled on a daily basis. It had, archaically, a wax seal on the flap. The Keep sat down and the President resumed her seat across from her. Two Secret Service agents were outside the door, but no one sat in on a meeting between the Keep and the President.

Using an ancient opener shaped like a saber—“Andrew Jackson’s,” the Keep informed the President—the Keep slid the blade under the flap and cut the wax. She opened the envelope and slid out a thin sheaf of papers. She scanned the top page while the President waited impatiently, a woman not used to waiting.

The Keep pursed her lips. If the President had spent more time around her, she would have known that as a sign of extreme agitation, the equivalent of someone of lesser self-control running around in circles and screaming, “We’re all going to die!”

“What is it?” the President asked, her mind racing ahead to having to go down to the Emergency Operations Center, open nuclear launch codes, start World War III, battle zombies, and who knew what else, given this was the Keep. After reading the Book of Truths, her imagination was open to anything.

Or so she thought. She’d already forgotten that she’d thought she was ready for anything when she took office.

“There’s been a breach of a facility,” the Keep said. “Actually”—she paused, a frown crossing her face as she flipped a couple of pages—“it appears a facility has disappeared. More importantly, the organization that was housed in the facility has disappeared.”

“What organization?” the President asked.

The Keep looked up from the papers. “The Time Patrol.”

“Doctor Golden,” Hannah, the head of the Cellar, said. “Meet Frasier, the psychiatrist for Area 51 and the Nightstalkers.”

Doctor Golden was not pleased that there was another person, a psychiatrist at that, in Hannah’s office. Not quite an affront to her professional integrity, but it threw her off. Then again, the man, Frasier, tended to throw everyone off when they first met him.

“Pleased to meet you,” Frasier said in a tone that indicated neither pleasure nor any other emotion. A stating of a convention. He stuck out his right hand and Golden noticed that his left hand was covered with a black glove.

“Pleased to meet you,” she lied in return, shaking his one live hand.

Frasier was dressed in a black suit, black tie, and white shirt. He wore sunglasses, which was incongruous since they were three hundred feet underneath the crystal palace of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade.

Forced pleasantries over, they both sat down in hard plastic seats facing Hannah’s desk. Unlike Moms, who went by the name the Nightstalkers gave her, or Ms. Jones, who’d been a bit more formal, Hannah was simply known as that. No last name, since it had been her husband’s and he was years dead after having betrayed her. Not a title, because how do you give a title to someone who ran an organization that no one was supposed to talk about?

Hannah sat behind a wide desk that was devoid of any personal items. In fact, it was currently devoid of anything except a small stack of folders. Hannah was in her forties, fit and trim, but the line between the gray hair sprouting from her scalp and the blonde ends indicated she’d made a command decision to give up on coloring her hair anymore sometime in the past year. There are many reasons women make this decision, if they ever make it, and even Doctor Golden with her degrees would be hard-pressed to delve into Hannah’s psyche to determine hers.

And there was no way Hannah would ever allow Golden, or anyone else for that matter, entry into her psyche. Her predecessor, Nero, had done that quite effectively, which is why he had chosen her to be his replacement.

“I’ve asked Mister Frasier here,” Hannah said, “because there are some decisions that I need to make and I desire input.” She placed her hand on the stack of personnel folders to emphasize her point.

The office was, naturally, windowless. There was a door behind Hannah, which led to her personal space where she spent her off-duty time.

There wasn’t much of that.

The Cellar was founded in the dark days after Pearl Harbor, while smoke still poured out of damaged ships and desperate, trapped sailors pounded on armored hulls that had been designed to protect them but that became their prison instead. As those taps faded out over the days that followed, the sleeping giant that was the peacetime United States awoke and was filled with a terrible resolve. Which is exactly what Admiral Yamamoto, who’d planned the attack, had cautioned would be the ultimate result.

The last three sailors trapped in the USS
West Virginia
survived sixteen days.

One of Sun Tzu’s maxims was that:
“Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.”
Someone had been wise enough to realize that once organizations became secret, they became dangerous not only to the enemy but also to the country that had founded them, with the potential particularly for rogue individuals to cause harm. It was much like the armor hull that was supposed to protect those Pearl Harbor sailors, which instead ended up dooming them.

So the Cellar was founded. The secret police arm for the secret agencies.

The Cellar battled through World War II, riding herd on organizations such as the OSS, aka the Office of Strategic Services, later to become the CIA, and a cluster of other supersecret groups, which sprouted like the snakes on Medusa’s head in the burning exigencies of world war. But it was after the hot war ended with the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War began that the need for the Cellar blossomed because, paradoxically, the number of secret organizations increased dramatically.

In 1947, President Truman formed a top-secret committee code-named Majestic-12 and headquartered it at Area 51. It dealt with things, well, things that go bump, slither, explode, infect, etc., in the night. Sometimes in the daytime too. And the committee also dealt with the screwups, intentional or not, of scientists, which were growing exponentially. That was much more common, especially now that the atom had been split. With scientists pushing the edge of our knowledge, often venturing past that edge, the world was a more dangerous place than it had ever been.

So units had been founded, such as the Nightstalkers, which Ms. Jones had commanded.

All these secret
if-I-tell-you-about-them-I-have-to-kill-you-and-cut-your-head-off-and-stick-it-in-a-safe
organizations fell under the domain of the Cellar as far as discipline was concerned. Which meant Hannah held the life of every single person in the covert world in her hands. Well, her head actually, which was much better than any safe.

Once a housewife in St. Louis, she’d been chosen, recruited, and tested by her predecessor, Nero, through a crucible of near death, with Neeley at her side.

Like Nero, she could order a Sanction on anyone, which meant the field operative whom she dispatched, much like Neeley was doing in the Pacific Northwest with Roland, was judge, jury, and executioner. There was to be no formal trial, no lawyers, no mercy.

The Cellar had been founded by Presidential Decree in order to legally do the illegal.

“So.” Hannah said it as a statement and an inducement for input. “Moms is out. Who do we replace Ms. Jones with to command the Nightstalkers?”

“Why is Moms out?” Frasier asked.

Golden answered, “She’s too close to the members of the team.”

Frasier smiled, without managing to convey any warmth. “She’s not as close to the team as you might think she is. Or she thinks she is.” And then Frasier pulled his patented move, removing his sunglasses and revealing his one solid black artificial eye, surrounded by scar tissue.

Golden was ready for it. “Reading me, Mister Frasier?” She was referring to the eye’s ability to pick up changes in her body temperature and other data and feed it into his brain. A crude, but effective lie detector.

“No, Ms. Golden.”

“It’s Doctor Golden.”

“Is there a need for me to read you?” Frasier asked, and it was unclear whether the question was directed to her or Hannah.

“We’re all on the same side here,” Hannah said.

“Right,” Frasier said. “By the way,
Doctor
Golden, I have a doctorate too, but I’ll go with Mister Frasier. On the team they just called me Frasier. But you’re not on the team,” he added, “so Mister will do just fine.”

“And why did you get that name?” Golden asked. “The Nightstalkers christen each new member with a single moniker based on first impressions, don’t they?”

Frasier smiled. “Guess they thought I was a bit like the character from that old TV show.”

“Fussy, stuck-up, narcissistic?”

“Maybe,” Frasier said. “Then again, maybe it was for my wonderful sense of humor and keen observation of the traits of others.” He shrugged. “The Nightstalkers make snap suggestions during the naming ceremony, working off first impressions, and we both know how misleading those can be.” He shifted his attention to Hannah. “And then Ms. Jones makes the final determination of each team member’s new name, and you’re stuck with it whether apropos or not.”

“Sort of how we were burned by Burns?” Golden asked, referring to a not-too-long-ago mission.

“Nice play on words,” Frasier allowed.

“Did you handle his psychological vetting?” Golden asked.

“I did,” Frasier said. “As they say in the artillery, looked good when he left me.”

Hannah interrupted, getting them back on track. “We have been without Ms. Jones’s services for a bit too long now.”

“Pitr has been doing an adequate job,” Frasier said. “Why not leave him in place? He knows the missions, he knows the history of the Nightstalkers, he knows the team.”

“Adequate isn’t good enough,” Hannah said of Ms. Jones’s long-time assistant. She nodded at Golden, who spoke up.

“The team will always see Pitr as a shadow of Ms. Jones since he was her attendant. Subconsciously they will not give him the respect he needs to command the team.”