He lifted the report from DORKA (Department of Research & Kinesthetic Application). Opportunity was here and he was the one to seize it.
As he thought these great thoughts, his left hand automatically went into a drawer and pulled out a Snickers bar. The big one. The one that sometimes made him a little sick before he finished it.
He took a big bite while he thought long and hard and dark about the future.
Hannah Masterson sat alone, as she almost always was, contemplating betrayal.
As she almost always did.
This combination was not unusual for this room, the office of the head of the Cellar.
The occupant of this position — Hannah being only the third since it was founded — spent considerable time searching the nooks and crannies of other people’s souls, often finding them lacking.
The office was devoid of all charm or comfort. It had been that way when she inherited it from her predecessor, Nero, and the only major change had been the addition of more lighting since she was not blind, like Nero. He had gone through considerable trouble to recruit the once-Mrs. Hannah Masterson to replace him, searching for a unique mixture of personality type and experiences, and then forged her in action with a form of assessment that included numerous bodies and betrayals.
Ms. Jones would have envied the exhaustiveness of Nero’s search methods. Of course, Nero had also found her and placed her in charge of the Nightstalkers, so there was more than just an organizational connection. In a way, Ms. Jones and the now-Ms. Masterson might be considered covert progeny of Nero. It was why there was an engineer from the former Soviet Union in charge of the Nightstalkers. And a former suburban housewife in charge of the Cellar. The person was much more important than the nationality. Those whom Nero sought out were very, very special and very, very rare, so one could not limit oneself to arbitrary borders set up by nations.
Unlike Ms. Jones though, Hannah disdained the formality of a title and went simply by her first name. The last name had been her husband’s and he was long dead. He had betrayed her, and she didn’t need the name to remember that betrayal. This was her new life and “Hannah” would do just fine, thank you.
The office lacked any feminine touch, which was a bit surprising considering Hannah had been that suburban housewife when recruited over a decade ago and teamed up with Neeley as they went through their “assessment” period.
They’d survived, which Nero had considered a passing grade.
Sometimes Hannah wondered if she had been Nero’s first choice or if there had been a long list of possibilities and none had passed before her.
The office was unlike the offices of most others in power as Hannah saw no need to impress and she very rarely ever met anyone here. There were no pictures with arms around persons of note, no plaques, no awards… nothing. Nothing but the drab gray of concrete walls.
This was a trait she shared with Ms. Jones.
But not because Hannah Masterson was ill and needed to project herself as a hologram. Indeed, now in her midforties, she would be considered attractive if she ever went out into the world and desired to present herself as such, as she once had. She had thick blonde hair, discovering the first gray just a year ago. It had not bothered her as she’d once feared it would when she had thought a normal life would be her fate. In fact, given the world she now lived in and the problems she dealt with, she thought her genetic code was working quite well in keeping the gray at bay.
The life she’d thought she’d have when she married as a very young woman — garden club, white picket fence, children, PTA, husband on golf trips while she flirted with the tennis instructor — all that had been torn asunder years ago by the secrets she had never suspected her husband held. Today, a lesser person’s hair would have turned white long ago with the knowledge now locked in her brain.
She had not been shocked at what she’d learned from Nero, her faith in mankind shattered well before by betrayal at a fundamental level, a trait she shared with Neeley. To accept betrayal as an integral part of the human race was a key attribute required of the head of the Cellar.
Beyond her hair, her eyes were the color of expensive chocolate. She had worry lines etched on her face, to be expected after a decade on the job. She hit the midway mark between five and six feet and still weighed what any self-conscious suburban housewife would weigh, but it was now the result of a desire to be healthy rather than look trim and keep up with the other wives in the homeowners’ association.
Like Nero, she kept her desk sparse. A wide space with just a secure phone and stacks of folders. She had added a computer, but like everyone else in the black world, preferred to deal in paper that could be shredded and contained. Since her office was three hundred feet below the “crystal palace” of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, her distrust of electronic communication was not paranoid but an acceptance of the modern world’s reality. She had no doubt those upstairs were very interested in what happened in her office. She was not of them, but separate, different, and in the world of government bureaucracy, such a thing was both dangerous and envied.
Some of the very few in the sort-of-know wondered if her organization drew its name from the location of the underground office, but of course it didn’t. The Cellar had been formed (although not mandated for another six years) in December 1941, as smoke still rose above Pearl Harbor and the last, desperate taps echoed out of the USS Oklahoma. (Some of the men trapped inside the capsized ship lasted two weeks before finally dying.) This was long before the NSA was founded and the building above her constructed. If the Nightstalkers could trace its lineage to Trinity, the Cellar could trace its heritage to Pearl Harbor.
Like the Nightstalkers, the Cellar had initially been housed where it was most needed: at the War Department in Washington, DC, in a basement office of the building that currently held the State Department. The years had brought many changes, one of them the founding of the NSA in 1952, growing out of and separating from its predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency.
The CIA have its Memorial Wall with a single star representing each of those who had fallen in service. The current total was 103. Many of the names those stars represented had still not been released and some would never be. The NSA had its National Cryptologic Memorial listing the names of those who had fallen in service, underneath an inscription which read: They Served In Silence. That current total was 163.
There were no stars or plaques or inscriptions or museums for Nightstalkers or Cellar employees who died in service.
What only Nero had known, and Hannah now knew, was that a handful of those stars and names had been the result of a Cellar Sanction, corralling in rogue agents.
Nothing was ever exactly as it appeared in the covert world.
The NSA had recently outgrown the facility above her. Interestingly the organization’s need for power had grown larger than the electrical infrastructure surrounding the facility, so an adjunct facility was being built in Utah. Hannah would remain here though. As the Nightstalkers needed to be near Area 51 because that’s where the initial problems they had to solve had originated, the Cellar needed to be near Washington, DC, because most of the problems Hannah had to deal with originated there.
The Cellar, the Nightstalkers, and other small but powerful secret agencies officially began sprouting like snakes on Medusa’s head in 1947 when President Harry S. Truman formed a committee named Majestic-12. That organization has long been cited by UFOlogists as having been started after the 1947 Roswell incident. Majestic-12 was accused of suppressing information of extraterrestrial visits and keeping aliens locked up in Area 51.