Neeley closed her eyes. More dead and she’d failed. The number of ways in which she’d failed was as overwhelming as the pain in her chest.
“How long since the helicopter crashed?” Neeley asked.
“’Bout fifteen minutes,” the nurse replied.
“It won’t be long now,” Neeley whispered.
“Who loved you?” Hannah asked Moms.
Moms sat in the seat facing Hannah’s desk deep underneath the puzzle palace of the NSA, feeling very different than when she faced Ms. Jones at the Ranch. Jones was a known, after working together for so many years. Hannah, while Moms had heard rumors, was a wild card. Her youth and attractiveness disconcerted Moms. Hannah was everything that Moms wasn’t, physically, at least.
The one certainty was that the Cellar ruled alclass="underline" the Nightstalkers and the cluster of other organizations, many of which Moms assumed she had no clue about or what they did.
The person and the setting were unsettling enough, but the question was bizarre.
“Why don’t you ask me who I loved?” Moms countered. “Can one really know if someone loves them?”
“You can save the question-answering-the-question for Dr. Golden,” Hannah said. “That’s shrink play.” She leaned back in her chair, steepling her fingers, regarding the woman across from her. “You receive a stipend every month. You went to see Mrs. Sanchez about it.”
They were not questions, so Moms followed a Nada Yada and said nothing.
Hannah continued. “She couldn’t help you. It’s a survivor’s benefit. Someone thought enough of you to put your name in that particular box on that particular form. It seems such a simple thing, filling out a form. But it isn’t for that form. The survivor benefits form is asking a person to rank-order those in their lives in case of their own death. But the ordering can have different meanings. For example, the man you call Kirk on your team, he rank-ordered his family. His siblings that he has to take care of. So much so, he took part of your team off the reservation on an unsanctioned operation.”
“That’s being dealt with,” Moms said.
“Yes, yes,” Hannah said. “Sending them like wayward schoolchildren to Fort Bragg. Do you know that what your Mr. Roland did with my agent Neeley in South America was the first time in years she’s ever brought someone on a Sanction with her?”
“So it was a Sanction?” This time it was a question.
“Of course. Neeley would never stray. But it crossed the line between Cellar and Nightstalker missions.”
“As you’re crossing them now going after Burns. And we already crossed when you brought me into the White House last year.”
Hannah smiled, revealing even, surprisingly white teeth. “Touché. The world is changing. Our areas of operations are increasingly overlapping. But that isn’t why I wanted to speak with you.”
Moms folded her legs and put her hands in her lap, like an obedient schoolgirl summoned to the principal’s office over the PA system. To be praised or punished, it wasn’t clear yet.
Hannah said, “Ms. Jones has a speech she likes to give your team. Why we are here.”
“You don’t have to repeat it,” Moms said.
“I’m not Ms. Jones and my reasoning is different from hers,” Hannah said. “People like us, you and me, we’re the broken ones. The ones not in the bell curve and not necessarily on the good side of the curve.”
“And we protect those inside the curve,” Moms said. “The average person who goes through their day not knowing how close they come to extinction. How many dangers are out there.”
Hannah smiled. “That there are boogie men in the closet.” She tapped her desk. “Do you know why I’m here?”
“To police the world of covert ops,” Moms said.
“On a base level, yes,” Hannah agreed. “But as you tend to go deeper with your own why we are here, beyond the Rifts and Fireflies to the Trinity Test as the start point for the Nightstalkers, I like to go back and examine history and determine why an organization like the Cellar was and is needed.”
Moms waited, ready to be schooled, because no matter how high up you went, someone was always there above you, and every once in a while you got called in.
She wondered who schooled Hannah.
“As you know, there is evil in the world,” Hannah said. “You focus on the abnormal evil. Rifts, Fireflies, and the sort. And other problems. Rogue scientists. Stupid scientists. Nature gone amok. But there is a much more insidious evil. The worst kind. The one that hides inside men’s souls. In the dark corners of their hearts. The latent evil, the truly dangerous inside of people, which the psychopaths can tap into. And that evil can spread rapidly among those who are not necessarily evil to begin with. I learned this the hard way as a young woman, being drawn into something terrible because I loved someone. Sometimes love can be turned, twisted.”
Hannah smiled at Moms’s expression. “Don’t look so shocked. We all had lives before we were sucked into this dark world we inhabit. I know that sounds simplistic, but if you look at some of the more dramatic examples in the past hundred years and then factor in the speed with which we can interact with each other now via digital means, the world has become a much more frightening place. Where evil people can spread their message much more effectively and quickly.
“We’ve had Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hussein, bin Laden, and others. When will the next version of those arise? Where? And how much more effective will they be with access to the Internet? I believe legends and dogma exist for a reason. The concept of an anti-Christ has its roots in a base fear we all have.”
Hannah tapped her desk once more. “The person who sits here has the power of life and death. Judge, jury, and then send the executioner on a Sanction. How different does that make me from those evil people?”
“Your motivation for what you do,” Moms said. “You’re protecting people from the evil.”
“Perhaps. I sometimes think,” Hannah said, “that if the Cellar had existed before World War Two, it might have been able to stop some of the carnage. Most likely not the war itself, but some of the horror perpetuated under the cover of the war.”
“Can you separate the two?” Moms asked.
Hannah sighed. “I certainly hope so.”
“You think the Cellar would have taken out Hitler?”
Hannah shrugged. “Perhaps. But we didn’t take out Hussein. So who knows?”
“War has never been clean,” Moms said. “I’ve seen it firsthand. I watched a sniper in Baghdad one time. A simple thing. Most Iraqis can’t swim, but they were fleeing us, trying to cross the Tigris. So there was a group. Five. Grabbed on to a large beach ball and were using it as a float to get across the river. A man, two women, and two children.
“And the sniper. He shot the ball, laughing as he did so. A ‘good’ American boy. From Nebraska or Idaho or one of those wholesome states. He watched those people drown. He put down his rifle and took pictures.”
“And what did you do?” Hannah asked.
“I almost shot him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Because you are not evil. Was he?” Hannah asked.
“He was caught up in it. You do become inured to it. Callous.”
Hannah leaned forward. “Does that scab you cover yourself with grow thicker or thinner with time?”