Bob Mayer
Bodyguard of Lies
CHAPTER 1
The old man sat alone in the darkness contemplating failure on a scale that historians would write about it for centuries, and the subsequent inevitable need for change. He was one of the most powerful people in the world, but only a few knew of his existence. His position had been born out of failure over sixty years previously, as smoke still smoldered above the mangled ships and dead bodies in Pearl Harbor. For over six decades, he had given his life to his country. His most valuable asset was dispassion, so he could view his own recent failures objectively, although recent was a subjective term. He realized now it had all begun over ten years ago.
His office lacked any charm or comfort. There was a scarcity about the room that was unnerving. The cheap desk and two chairs made it look more like an interview room in an improvised police station than the office of a man so powerful his name brought fear throughout the government he served in Washington. The top of the desk was almost clear. Just a secure phone and a stack of folders.
There were, naturally, no windows. Not three hundred feet underground, buried beneath the ‘crystal palace’ of the top secret National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. And not that he could have used windows. The few who knew of the organization sometimes wondered if this location was what had led to its name. While the CIA made headlines every week, the Cellar was only whispered about in the hallowed halls of the nation's capitol. It might have been located underneath the NSA building but it was an entity unto itself answerable only to its founding mandate.
The room was lit only by the dim red lights on the secure phone. They showed the scars on the old man’s face and the raw red, puckered skin where his eyes had once rested. There was track lighting, currently off, all three bulbs of which were over the old man’s head and angled toward the door. When on, they placed his face in a shadow and caused any guest to squint against the light. The few who had the misfortune to sit across from him didn’t know whether the lighting was placed in such a way to blind them as if he was, or to hide the severity of his old wounds.
He was not a man given much too sentimental reflection, but he knew his time was coming to an end, which made him think back to his beginning, as he knew all things were cyclical. He opened a right side desk drawer and pulled out a three dimensional representation of an old black and white photograph. He ran his fingers lightly over the raised images of three smiling young men dressed in World War II era uniforms — British, French and American. He was on the right. The other two were killed the day after the photo was taken.
He left the image on the desktop and reached for the files. The ones he wanted were the first two. He placed them on his lap. Paper files, the writing in Braille. He’d never trusted computers, even though there were ones now that could work completely on voice commands and read to him. Perhaps that was part of the problem. He was out of date. An anachronism.
They were labeled respectively Gant, Anthony and Masterson. He ran his fingers over the names punched on the tabs. He was patient. He had waited decades for plans born out of seeds he had sown to come to fruition. Quite a few similar plans had failed, so there was no reason to believe this one would succeed. But this plan was now in motion, initiated by an event he had had nothing to do with, the way the best plans in the covert world always started to allow deniability.
Despite his gifts of dispassion and patience, he felt a stirring in his chest. It puzzled him for a few moments before he realized he was experiencing hope. He squashed the feeling and picked up the phone to set another piece of the puzzle in motion.
CHAPTER 2
Neeley had not anticipated waiting to kill people to be so boring. Staying well back in the darker shadows, out of the dim reflection of the few working streetlights, she scanned the ghostly quiet alley. She used the night vision portion of her retina just off the center of vision as Gant had taught her. There was nothing moving. A dumpster, an abandoned car and intermittent piles of refuse dotted the pitted concrete between the two abandoned tenements. There was a way out on either end. She could hear the rumble of traffic from the Bruckner Expressway a few hundred yards away.
Neeley had been here for a day and a half and she could superimpose from memory the details that the night refused to divulge to her naked eye. Looking right, a couple of miles to the east, she could see the aircraft warning lights on top of one of the towers of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge crossing Long Island Sound.
She picked up a bulky rifle and pressed the scope on top to her right eye, twisting the switch to the on position. After a moment's hesitation, the black night gave way to bright green and she no longer needed her memory for the details the technology provided. Completing a second overall scan from her location in a corner apartment in the abandoned tenement, Neeley then zoomed in on the three locations she had noted during thirty-six hours of observing.
Two of the three men had arrived together four hours ago, just as darkness had slid like a curtain across the alley. Neeley had watched the two set up in separate rooms, on the second floor of the derelict building across the street.
The third man had shown up twenty minutes after the first two. If he'd tried the building, he might have bumped into the first two, but this last man wasn't very smart. He'd positioned himself inside the dumpster on the alley floor, leaving the top wedged open so he could observe the street, south to north. She gave the man an 'A' for effort, getting among the moldy garbage inside the large container, but an 'F' for tactical sense. True, the dumpster had a good ground level field of fire, but the man was trapped in a steel coffin if it became necessary to relocate. The two men in the building had the high ground, always a tactical advantage and the ability to move. Of course, they lacked the element of surprise but Neeley mentally gave them a few points anyway.
Through the scope, she could easily see the glow of one of the men across the street covertly smoking a cigarette, obviously thinking he was secure since he was well back from the window in the darkness of the room. The burning glow, barely visible to the naked eye, showed up like a searchlight in the night-vision scope. She shifted left two windows. The second man was watching the dumpster through a pair of older model, army-issue night-vision goggles. PVS-5s as near as Neeley could tell at this distance.
Nothing else was moving in the street and Neeley didn't expect to see anything until the deal went down. Alleys in the South Bronx were places even most bad people stayed away from at night. A few blocks to the south, prostitutes haunted the streets and docks of the Hunts Point section but this area was a no man's land. Which was why the two sides had chosen it.
The man across the street put out his cigarette. Neeley lay the rifle down and slid back from the window. Pulling a poncho-liner over her head, she completely covered herself. Only then, did she peel back the Velcro cover on her watch, and check the glowing hands. Twenty minutes to twelve. She considered the situation. At least six hours of darkness left. Neeley hadn't allowed herself to sleep since arriving here a day and a half ago. She'd drunk the last of the coffee from her thermos a while back and now her eyes burned with fatigue. Given the presence of the advance guards, odds were the deal would go down soon. She decided to take a calculated chance and pulled a pill out of her pocket. Popping it into her mouth, she washed it down with a swig from a water bottle. Four hours of intenseness. She would need at least an hour, preferably two, on the flip side of the deal to get out of the immediate area and be reasonably secure. Neeley reaffirmed the decision she had made during mission planning: 0300 and she was out of here, deal or no deal. Survival first and stick with the plan.