Bodyguard of Lies Read online

  That night, she slipped out of the little bunk bed and tiptoed to the other bedroom. She put her hand on the knob and slowly turned. The door silently opened onto more darkness. She felt in the dark for the furniture and, finding the bed, moved around to climb under the covers. Gant was a still form lying on his back. She started to slide her hand down his stomach but he stopped her with a firm grasp of her wrist. Holding her hand in his, he pulled her until his warm body was spooned behind her. "Why are you here?" he whispered in her ear.

  "Because you've been so good to me. Taken care of me."

  "I don't take barter, Neeley."

  She started to answer and he hushed her. "We'll call this rule number two. Never use your body when you can use your brain. And Neeley, next time you sneak up on someone in the dark, remember it's more than likely they have a gun pointed at your face. I'll let it slide tonight because that's how you learn. Now, get some sleep. Big day tomorrow."

  Neeley heard the soft click of the pistol hammer being lowered, then Gant's other hand was wrapped around her, holding her tight.

  The day after she had snuck into Gant's room, her life changed forever. Gant told her that both hers and his old lives were over. To try and go back would mean death.

  A new identity would just be a way for her enemies to find her one day. Gant offered her a different life. A life in the shadows with him with no identity. She wouldn't need all the names and numbers that held the normal people to their place on the planet.

  They disappeared together and started as teacher and pupil. They each had so much the other needed. Neeley remembered those years as physically exhausting yet intensely fulfilling. She traveled the world with Gant, learning the backdoors of most of the world's cities.

  Gant's business he kept to himself and she didn't pry but she knew he received money each month. He told her he was retired, but she wondered at that. She knew the less he told her, the more he was protecting her in the perverse way of the covert world where black was white and white was black and things only made sense to those who could think very differently from the average person in the street. He didn’t tell her much about the Cellar, the organization he had worked for, just enough to let her know it existed.

  The only constant was that Neeley learned and worked and sweated and every time she thought she couldn't possibly run another mile, do another pull up or strip down another weapon, Gant would be there, whispering encouragement sometimes, but always reminding her that she had to do it, she had no other choice. She had to be ready. It was strange, but Neeley had never pinned him down on what it was exactly she was supposed to be ready for. It just seemed a natural part of their strange life together to do all these things. It made the here and now important and deflected reflection on the past or concern about the future.

  Now, driving through southern Connecticut, she still had no choice. She and Gant had been one. His legacy was all she had left. And it wasn't a legacy he could have just handed her. She would have to earn it as she had in the Bronx. She knew that as instinctively as she had known it was a bomb on her lap on that plane so many years ago.

  Gant may have died, but she would go on. She would have to pick up all that he had once held and make it her own in order to protect herself. The money was the first part. John Masterson was the second.

  ***********

  Hannah wandered the house. Only the main floor. Not the upstairs. That reminded her too much of her earlier major failure. The room she had spent months on readying for the baby. And then the miscarriage that had stopped those plans and that work abruptly.

  That brought another choked sob to her lips. If they’d had a child would John have stayed?

  She stopped in front of the large mirror in the foyer, staring at herself. She didn’t have a clue why he had left; how could she know what would have made him stay? Her eyes shifted over her own shoulder to the wall behind her, the only one not coved in books. The photographs in the large frame. All of her and John. No one else. Not only no children, but no family for either of them.

  She’d had no one blood relations and neither had he. Another lock to chain them together. Two orphans against the world. John had never talked about his past before he met her and she had had no desire to talk about hers either. It was as if by being together they could start with a fresh slate.

  Hannah reached forward and placed her hands against the mirror, staring at the reflected palms that met her own. Another sob forced its way out her throat and she slid down to the floor, until she sitting in the foyer, her head against the glass, her palms still meeting the one of the crying woman the mirror showed.

  After a few moments, she pushed herself away from the glass. She went into John’s home office, where he had spent many nights working late. She’d never gone through his stuff, an implicit agreement between them that his space was totally his own. What she had learned in Howard Brumley’s office removed that agreement. If John wasn’t coming back, then he had no rights in this house.

  Hannah worked methodically, going drawer by drawer, file by file.

  Nothing. No sign of a mistress, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, trouble at work, blackmail. Nothing that would explain his sudden departure.

  There were a couple of odd things, though, that Hannah couldn’t figure out. One was a folder labeled H that held a thick sheaf of papers stapled together. On each page books were listed by title, author and publisher. Hannah recognized every title—they were the books that John had brought home to her over the years. Each one had a little check mark in pencil next to it. Where had he gotten such a list, she wondered. There was nothing else in the file other than the book list.

  She shrugged it off, realizing it wasn’t important at this point.

  She also found an old map, stuffed in the back of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. She took it out and opened it. It showed southern Asia. There were two red lines drawn on it, both originating in Turkmenistan. One went south and west, crossing Afghanistan and terminating at the Arabian Sea. The other went south and east across Afghanistan and ending in Pakistan.

  Hannah frowned. John’s work at Tyro involved pipelines so she assumed that’s what these lines represented but she had never heard of any such lines being built. The map was old so she had to assume these were proposals that had never come to fruition. She folded the map up and put it back in the rear of the drawer.

  The thing that was curious to her was that there was nothing in John’s office that predated the time they met. No school records, photos, army records—nothing. John had always kept a veil around his past, but it had never bothered Hannah because she felt the same way about her past. The last thing she had wanted to do with John was discuss her childhood. They’d met in college and for her all that had occurred since then had been enough. Apparently not, she thought as she slammed shut his file drawer.

  She looked at his computer. She pushed the on-button and waited. It booted, but instead of getting a desktop, it stopped loading and a flashing box appeared, asking for a password. Hannah knew John worked with classified material at his job, so she figured this was just an extension of that. She tried his birth date, their anniversary, every name or number combination that came to mind. None worked.

  Hannah sighed and leaned back in the chair. She was no closer to understanding why John had done what he did.

  How could she have been so ignorant?

  CHAPTER 5

  The man had been in the tree line for four hours, since well before dawn. It was cold in Vermont, especially at this elevation, but he wore heavy clothing underneath his white camouflaged Gore-Tex pants and parka. There had been no sign of life in the cabin. The information he'd received had listed a pickup truck as current mode of transportation for the owner of the cabin, but there was nothing parked outside.

  There were tire tracks. As near as the man could tell from his position, they had been made before last night's light snowfall.

  He scanned the cabin with the thermal scope one mo
re time, picking up no heat sources. Still, he took no chances as he moved forward. He kept his silenced submachine gun at the ready as he crept to the cabin. It took him forty minutes of stealthy crawling to make it to the back wall. He waited there another fifteen, listening. Nothing.

  He entered via a window, watching carefully for tripwires. He hated jobs like this, checking on another professional.

  But there were no traps. The interior was empty except for an old double bed. There wasn't even any food in the cabinets. He began his search, top to bottom, in a clockwise direction as he'd been taught and as he'd taught others. If there was anything hidden in the cabin, he knew he'd find it. After several hours he came to the conclusion that the place had been swept, and, most interestingly, swept by a professional.

  Finally he paused at the small window and looked at the small mound of frozen dirt. He walked outside. Sighing, he pulled the head of a pick out of the backpack he wore and slid it onto the wooden handle that had been tied on the side of the pack.

  Leaning the pick against his leg, he pulled out a pack of gum. Methodically, he unwrapped one stick, rolled it into a tight log and popped it into his mouth. He was careful to push the wrapper deep into his pocket and seal the Velcro flap before retrieving the pick.

  He took off the parka. He was in good shape despite being in his mid-fifties. He had sandy hair, lightly tinged with gray and a bland face, one that would never be noticed in a crowd.

  He began digging, eventually stripping down to his t-shirt as the work progressed. The dirt was like concrete for the first two feet, grudgingly chipping away. Then the going got easier. Eventually he got to the frozen body. He carefully brushed dirt away from the corpse. It was wrapped in a camouflage poncho liner. He peeled the liner away and looked at the face. The cold had preserved it. He stared at it for a minute, remembering other times he had seen that face, alive.

  With great difficulty, he checked the corpse's clothes, going through the pockets. The only thing he found were a few strands of dark hair on the man's clothes. He peeled one loose and put it in a plastic bag, inside his backpack.

  Satisfied, the man stood in the grave, straddling the corpse. He pulled a specially modified satellite phone out of his backpack and punched in a number. The signal was up-linked to a military MILSTAR satellite, frequency hopped and scrambled and then broadcast on a tight beam down to a receiver at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, and then relayed to the bunker below ground.

  "Yes?" a strangely mechanical voice asked.

  "Anthony Gant is buried here, Mister Nero." The man’s accent was English, filtered by years of living in the States.

  "You've confirmed this?"

  "I'm standing on top of his body."

  "How long has he been dead, Mister Bailey?"

  Bailey looked at the body. "Hard to tell. He's been in the ground for a while, but it's cold up here."

  Even through the cipher scrambling Bailey picked up the sarcasm in the voice that rasped at him-- no one else might have, but Bailey had known Nero for many decades. "More than a day? Less than a week? A month? A year? Since the Second World War?"

  "I'd say about a week."

  "Cause of death?"

  What am I, Bailey thought, a pathologist? But he kept his tongue. "I can't tell."

  There was a spate of coughing, and then the voice came back. "Is there a bullet hole in his forehead? Did he die violently?"

  Bailey clenched his teeth, more from the cold than his superior’s harsh words. The corpse looked gaunt, as if it had suffered a terrible disease. Bailey knelt down, tucking the phone under his chin. He lifted the body up, ignoring the cracking noise it made as it broke contact with the ground underneath. "No sign of violence. Looks like he was sick. He's wasted away. I'd say he weighed less than one-twenty pounds when he died."

  There was a pause as Nero digested that information, then his rough voice came back. "Did you find the videotape?"

  "No."

  "You searched thoroughly?"

  "Yes."

  "Then we will have to assume whoever buried him has the object in question or at least knows where Mister Gant hid it. Any clue as to that person’s identity?”

  “I would assume it is the woman from Berlin-- Neeley.”

  “All right. That's all."

  "What do you want me to do with the body?" Bailey asked.

  "Rebury him. We will let Mister Gant go in peace. We owe him that at least and his brother would expect us to." The phone crackled with what sounded like coughing before the voice came back. “Miss Neeley is another matter.”

  Bailey looked at the large pile of earth and shrugged. “Anything else?”

  “Rebury him and return here.” The phone went dead.

  Bailey folded the phone, put it away and returned to his work.

  ***************

  Over six hundred miles away, three hundred feet underground at Fort Meade, a wrinkled hand cut off the speakerphone that had been connected to Bailey. The hand then retrieved a burning cigarette and brought it to his lips.

  The other man in the room watched as filaments of smoke escaped through the permanent tracheotomy in Mr. Nero's throat. The fingers that reached up to cover the hole were gnarled with age and tinged with nicotine. The face was hidden in the shadows, the three lights tilted toward the visitor. The tracheotomy was something that had gone into place when Nero had been out of action for several critical months prior to the 9-11 disasters.

  When the cigarette was done, Mr. Nero capped the hole in his throat and reached for the hand-held voice box that substituted for his larynx. Nero's voice through the wand was harsh and crackly.

  "As we suspected, Mister Anthony Gant is no longer with us. There is no sign of the object you are concerned with and we do have to assume that someone was with Gant at his death due to the fact that he was given a proper burial."

  The other man finally spoke. "Then we must act."

  Nero placed the fingers of his free hand along the side of his face. "Senator, I understand you are concerned, but premature action might upset the balance we have so delicately maintained all these years and bring about that which you most fear. Gant did nothing to upset things all these years; I do believe the chances are his legacy will do nothing either."

  The most powerful man on Capitol Hill shifted in his seat, trying to restrain his anger and concern. "I wouldn't have to be afraid of the past if we had terminated everyone who was involved in the incident and collected all their various objects of blackmail."

  "Does everyone include you?" Nero asked.

  "Don't get smart with me, Nero. I'm going to be nominated by the party. This couldn’t have come at a worse time. I've got all sorts of Congressional Staffers from the other party sniffing around, looking for dirt."

  "Nothing has happened," Nero noted, "other than Mister Gant expiring, for which you should be grateful. If you wait long enough, this will most likely go away as the others die natural deaths also and their secrets die with them."

  “Including you?” Collins snapped.

  “Including me,” Nero acknowledged. “Everyone has their time. I’ve been living on borrowed time for decades. The difference between me and you is that I am aware of it.”

  “What does that mean?” Collins demanded.

  “You know so little,” Nero said.

  Collins didn’t take the bait. "We don't know where Gant's videotape or the plans and contracts are. We don't know how the others are going to react to his death. I can't afford to sit around and have this hanging over my head. And remember, there are others besides me who were involved in this. A lot of powerful people who never agreed with the way you handled this."

  "The way I've handled it has been successful so far," Nero said. “Every action has a reaction, even if it takes decades for that reaction to occur. The CIA has a term—blowback. I assume since you’re on the Select Intelligence Committee, you’ve heard of it.”

  “When weapons we’ve sold end up get
ting used against us,” Collins said.

  Nero nodded. “I like to think in larger terms than simply weapons. The world is changing. As is apparent now that our enemies take different forms. Therefore we must take different forms.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Collins demanded, confused by the change in directions.

  Nero ignored the questions. "I recommend we do nothing until something happens to force our hand.”

  Collins stood. "I'm not going with your recommendation. I want the others terminated and I want everything collected like it should have been years ago."

  "Are you ordering me to do this?" Nero asked.

  "Yes."

  "You don't quite have that power."

  "I speak for those who do and you know who they are," Collins hissed.

  “You also understand my mandate,” Nero said. “I am to do as ordered as long as it is in the best interests of the country.”

  “We--” Collins thumped his chest-- “the politicians are elected to determine exactly that.”

  “In most cases that is true,” Nero said, “which is why the Cellar takes action only infrequently. However, political squabbling between the parties might not be in the best interests of the country.”

  “You went along with the initial mission,” Collins noted.

  “The mission was recovery of damaging material,” Nero said.

  “The recovery turned out to be a disaster,” Collins said.

  “Everyone knows what happened in Mogadishu,” Nero said. “They even made a movie about it.”

  “But people don’t know the real reason it happened.”

  “The fake reason was real enough,” Nero said. “Or else I would not have allowed the mission. The failure had nothing to do with the fake or real mission. That was the vagaries of battle.”