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The president saw the skepticism in Collins’s face.

“Yes, it is illegal to a certain degree.” He laughed. “Hell, the whole department has been illegal since its inception. Either the Event from Lincoln’s time or the formation of the Group by Mr. Wilson, every action by your Group could be construed as illegal, at least in the eyes of the House and Senate.”

“Perhaps we had better explain to Colonel Collins the reasoning behind this one-hundred-hour window.” Niles looked to his right and half smiled at Jack, who sat and waited.

The president nodded. He made sure his Secret Service detail was looking elsewhere as he leaned in toward Collins like a conspirator. “This window is to allow your department to do things”—he stalled and looked from Jack to Niles and then back—“that may be lacking somewhat in its interpretation of legal action. For instance, the mission that is currently taking place in the Middle East that I know absolutely nothing about.”

“Middle East?” Jack asked, looking from his commander-in-chief to Niles, who looked at him with a wry smile.

“I’ll let you tell him,” the president said as he pulled the small box over and then lifted the hefty sandwich and bit into it.

“At this moment we are chasing down a lead in Israel that may help us with a possible action that the president has ordered to be explored to its fullest. The one hundred hours is meant to make sure that when the CIA comes to the president and says, ‘someone is messing around in our garden,’ he can have total and complete deniability, which may happen in a few hours if our plan fails.”

“What action and what plan?” Collins asked, looking from his boss to a satisfied president as he chewed.

“We have sent Anya Korvesky back home. She, the president, and myself didn’t think you would have allowed her to go, so we kept it from you.”

“What is the reason you sent the woman who Carl Everett loves back to a place where she is considered a danger to their security for choosing to leave them for a love that is now lost?” Jack asked, growing angrier by the minute for the way these men bypassed him and placed his best friend’s woman into harm’s way.

“Told you he would have a stick up his ass about this,” the president said with a mouth full of corned beef.

“Jack, we had to take a chance. If the stories she’s heard over the years are true we have a window of opportunity here.”

“A window for what?”

Niles glanced at the president and then raised his brow over his glasses and eye patch.

“If this works out, we may have a chance at bringing home an old friend.”

The president placed the sandwich down with much regret.

“I personally owe this man, as I owe all of you.” The injured leg kept the movement slow but the president eased himself closer to Jack. “I don’t have much time left in office, Colonel, you know it and I know it. In the time I have remaining before someone else moves into the White House I want my desk cleared, and to accomplish this I will not go out without trying to do everything I can to account for those people I lost in the recent war.… I owe them.”

“What are you two telling me?” Jack asked, looking at Niles.

“We are going after Captain Everett, Jack.”

Collins had to stand after the amazing statement from Compton. The president took that opportunity to retrieve the sandwich and begin his assault once more.

“During Anya’s debrief she mentioned she had begun her Mossad career at the very bottom of their food chain. She was an analyst, though that has little to do with the tale she told me during her debrief after Operation Overlord. It seems she caught wind of a legend, a rumor, a tale that seemed made up to tell children at bedtime. The search for alien power plants to assist in Overlord reminded her of this legend. It was a long shot that she considered too outlandish to help, and it wasn’t until she mentioned it to me during her debrief that we began to see a chance, just a possibility that this may actually be real.”

“What in the hell are you two talking about?” Jack asked, looking at the president. “With all due respect of course.”

The president only nodded as he continued eating. It was Niles who braved the telling to Jack.

“I think we better start with explaining Anya’s role in this first.”

ISRAEL STATE ARCHIVES (ISA)
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

The raven-haired woman sat upon the bench outside of the large, extremely ugly concrete and steel building, which looked like an old bank that would have been robbed during the Depression in American gangster films.

The moon just started to rise over the holy city of God. She was dressed in a navy blue suit with wide-legged pants, necessary for the two ankle holsters she wore beneath them. Her eyes watched the front doors of the building as men and women of the archival staff prepared to leave after their evening shift. She watched as the two very-well-armed guards waved at the departing employees and then securely locked the front doors. The two guards looked through the glass and then turned back to their duties. The woman knew that security here wasn’t as tight as at other government facilities, as this operation was more a written and oral history of the State of Israel. So, if you wanted someone’s eyewitness testimony in regard to the Holocaust this was the place to go. Any other secrets were stored in many more highly secured facilities across the country. The dark-haired woman could only hope the files had not been transferred over the years.

She saw the young man with the thick horned-rimmed glasses as he also separated from the rest of the archive staff as they made their way to the parking area beside the building. Through years of training she was able to keep her heart from racing faster as she anticipated what the employee had to say. He was obviously up to no good as she took in the frightened way the boy moved. His head flitted left and then right as he approached her and then sat.

“Look, Sami, relax, this is not a facility that houses nuclear secrets. It’s just a records storage unit, you said so yourself.”

The boy who had just graduated from Tel Aviv Technical Institute frowned as he looked around the park area nervously.

“I said relax.” The woman patted the boy’s leg. “Do you have the file?”

The young man looked around and shuffled his feet as he clutched his backpack closer to his body.

“Sami, you’re not steeling state secrets, it’s only concentration camp testimony.”

“Yeah, then why was this file cross-referenced with another, and that one is flagged as secret? Secret and no longer in this building.”

“Cross-referenced with what?” she asked, becoming concerned.

“A file code-named ‘The Traveler.’”

The boy could see something register in the woman’s eyes, which were the strangest he had ever seen. In the defused moonlight he could swear she had one green and one brown eye. He decided that this dark-haired woman scared him and he wanted to leave. The beautiful woman was holding out her hand as she was deep in thought.

“Uh, are you forgetting something?” he said as he shied away from her elegant hand.

The woman came back to the present, frowned, and then handed the boy a white envelope. He accepted it and placed it in his backpack and in the same motion brought out a file folder and handed it to her.