The term “shadow ops” crept into his mind, and immediately he tried to push it from his thoughts. There was no such thing. There wasn’t a black operations bureau somewhere that had stealth choppers flying overhead…
Connor looked out the side window. The sky was clear. Still, the thought was unnerving.
“You won’t see it,” Thompson said.
Connor turned away from the window, and the man grinned.
“I’m not psychic, I swear. But you’re looking for a chopper, right?”
The two men in the front looked over their shoulders, as if anxiously awaiting Connor’s answer.
Connor couldn’t prevent the half-smile forming at the side of his mouth. He sniffed. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“Damn it,” Richards said, slapping the wheel.
“I told you he’d go all paranoid on us. Pay up,” Henderson said, holding out a hand.
“I’m kind of busy right now.”
“Yeah, well, don’t forget like the last time.”
“I didn’t forget anything.”
“Uh-huh.”
Connor shifted in his seat. “All right, enough of this crap. What is this all about? How the hell do you know so much about me? Who are you people?”
“Right,” Thompson said. He cleared his throat. “First of all, we wouldn’t be using a chopper to track you. That’s the kind of crap we’d leave to the bureau. We’ve had you under satellite surveillance for quite a while.” He pointed up at the roof. “About seven hundred miles up, there’s a spy satellite we’ve borrowed for just this encounter. Anyway, there’s really no point in beating around the bush here, and I’m sure that most of the answers we give you will just lead to more questions. Suffice it to say that we’re not the enemy here. Not by a long shot.
“Our employer doesn’t have a name in the traditional sense of the word. Richards and I are case managers, to be honest. We team up to manage operations for a handful of cases, and you happened to drift into our radar. We’re all patriots, just like you, and while we serve the good ole US of A, we don’t work for the government. At least, not directly.”
“Well, that just clears everything up, doesn’t it?” Connor said.
“We’re also aware of your situation at work,” Richards said from the front seat. “We know you’re having trouble cutting through all the agency’s BS and red tape. We know you’re onto something big, something that could potentially change the geopolitical landscape, and we know that you’re being effectively shut out of the process.”
Connor was speechless. There was absolutely no way anyone outside the agency could’ve known about Hakimi, or about Connor’s problems with Pennington. No one inside the agency would have shared that information. Well… except for him. He’d been on the verge of leaking national security secrets to the press.
He shifted in his seat again, consciously restraining himself from reaching for his gun. Who would have the resources to know all this? If the crap about the satellite was true, these guys had to be Russians.
The tips of Connor’s fingers tingled as he studied these people. A firefight in such a small space would be a disaster. He’d have almost no chance of getting all three before being plugged with all sorts of holes, and he wasn’t even wearing a vest.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Thompson said.
“You have no idea what I’m thinking,” Connor replied, keeping his tone level despite his rising anxiety. “You guys sure do talk a lot without saying very much. And I’m not the only one at the agency dealing with red tape. In fact you could say the same about half of the analysts. You guys are on a fishing expedition.”
Thompson cleared his throat again. “Mohammad Hakimi, connections to Hamas, ISIS, all the cool kids on the terrorist lists. Identified as a person of interest in multiple suicide bombings throughout the world. Disappeared off the radar until recently and is most likely in possession of a nuclear bomb recovered from the East China Sea.”
Connor sat in silence, not believing what he’d just heard. His mind raced with possibilities, none of which he particularly liked. The most obvious was that the agency had been hacked, which meant very real national security issues. The CIA, even more so than its sister organizations, prided itself on its ability to keep secrets. That was the entire game at the CIA. Keep secrets. They did it better than anyone else in the world, sometimes to their own detriment. The fact that this operation—the most important operation Connor had been involved with—was known outside the walls of Langley troubled him on numerous levels.
“How the hell—” Connor stopped himself before he could say anything else.
Thompson’s smile seemed genuine, and he patted the air as if sensing Connor’s anxiety. “It’s not what you’re thinking. We’re not the enemy here. You have to trust me on this.”
Connor’s mind drifted back to his gun. “You guys better start saying words that make sense or this is going to end badly for all of us.”
“Okay, listen,” Thompson said. “Like I said before, we don’t work for the government. Not directly. The organization we work for is off the books. We’re so far off the books that our name doesn’t appear on any government document, regardless of compartment or classification level. No one knows who we are, no one cares who we are, and no one ever sees what we do.” He cracked a smile. “Have you ever watched that movie Men in Black?”
The sniper turned, chuckled, and shook his head before turning back toward the front.
“You mean the flick about a secret agency tasked with fighting aliens. That movie?”
“Exactly,” Thompson said. “Well, we don’t fight aliens, but just think of our little organization as being the one who does the right thing when all the bureaucratic nonsense prevents others from doing it.”
Connor laughed nervously, mostly at how ludicrous this guy sounded, but partially because he wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure Thompson wasn’t telling the truth. “You’ve got to be kidding me, right? I mean, come on, this is like a Candid Camera thing, right? Someone put you guys up to this to mess with me?”
“We’re deadly serious, Mr. Sloane. And everything I’ve told you is the truth.”
“I have a hard time believing that.”
“Do you though?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have a hard time believing it?”
Connor frowned. “I’m pretty sure I just said that.”
“We’ve told you that we know about Hakimi, we know about the nuclear bomb, hell, we know about how you got detention for kissing Melanie Kolifrath in your ninth-grade social studies class. Do you think we’d come to you with any of that if we weren’t deadly serious? We didn’t just see you in the parking lot and think to ourselves, ‘Hm, he looks like he’s in the CIA, let’s tell him a bunch of classified information that we shouldn’t even know and see how he reacts.’ We’re one-hundred-percent real, and we think we can help you with some of your… problems.”
“My problems?”
“The problems you were getting ready to spill to the unscrupulous Miss Cooper from the Washington Herald,” Richards said, glancing over his shoulder.
Chapter Fifteen
Twenty minutes later, after crossing the Potomac River, the car slowed, and Richards pulled to the curb. They were in Georgetown, one of the older sections of DC, and had stopped in front of a row of stores. Connor purposefully refrained from coming near these areas because of the crowds of tourists.
Richards shut the car off, and they all got out. Henderson carried the navy-blue bundle like an umbrella.
Connor raised an eyebrow at Thompson. “What are we doing, shopping?”
The man smiled, sliding on his sunglasses. “In a manner of speaking… yes.” He waved for Connor to follow. “Come on.”
Connor followed the men down the sidewalk, ignoring the signs advertising discounts and exclusives, instead focusing on his surroundings. They’d already gotten the drop on him once; he wasn’t going to let it hap
pen again.
They stopped in front of an old wooden door. A sign above the door featured a faded profile of a rooster on the left, and the head of a longhorn bull on the right.
“The Rooster and Bull?” Connor said, the corner of his mouth turning up in a half-sardonic smile. “Come on. Cock and Bull—is this some kind of joke?”
Thompson shook his head. “I didn’t pick the name, trust me.”
Richards held the door open and motioned for others to enter. “If Thompson named it, it’d probably be called the Ben and Jerry’s.”
The place was like any other dive bar. Dimly lit, several empty tables and booths, a handful of people sitting at the bar, and a gray-haired man behind the counter toweling a glass dry. None of them seemed the least bit interested in the four men who’d just stepped in.
“So, what, we’re going to talk national security in a dive bar?”
“Dive bar?” Richards said. “This is a classy place.”
“You definitely need to get out more,” said Connor.
As Thompson led them through the tables, he nodded at the bartender, who returned the gesture without so much as a “Hi, can I get you a beer?” Thompson continued into a hallway at the back of the bar, which turned a corner and dead-ended at two restroom doors. He pushed open the door to the men’s room and motioned the others inside.
Connor stopped short, more than a little bit confused. “What the hell is this? I’m not into that kind of thing if you were wondering.”
Thompson rolled his eyes and jerked his head toward the bathroom. “Come on, you’ll see.”
Three closed stalls and two urinals took up the left side of the room. An “Out of Order” sign was taped to the last stall door. At the far end, just past the sinks, a white-haired man sat on a stool, dressed in tan slacks and a plaid button-down shirt. He nodded at Thompson, then looked over his John Lennon–styled spectacles at Connor, as if sizing him up for a fight.
“This the new guy?” the old man asked.
Thompson shrugged. “I guess that’ll be up to him.”
“What is this?” Connor asked. “Some kind of hazing thing? Aren’t we all a little old for that kind of nonsense?”
“Who you calling old?” the white-haired man asked, crossing his arms.
Thompson raised an eyebrow at Connor. “I wouldn’t recommend pissing Harold off on the first day.” He shook Harold’s hand and took the towel the man held out. “He might give you the wrong one.”
“The wrong one?” Connor asked.
“It’s only happened once or twice,” Thompson said as he pushed open the door marked “Out of Order.” He shut the door behind him. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”
From inside the stall came a loud metallic click, followed by a long whooshing sound.
“Those rumors were never substantiated,” Harold said, holding out another towel.
Henderson stepped past, took the towel, then entered the same stall. When he opened the door, Connor saw that the stall was empty.
“What the hell?” he said, taking a step forward.
“Ah ah, one at a time please.” Harold raised a finger. “Sorry, company policy.”
“Company policy?”
Harold held out a third towel. “This one’s for you, Sonny.”
Connor took the towel. It was heavier than he’d expected it to be, but otherwise it was soft and fluffy and felt just like a… well, a towel. “Okay?”
Richards pushed the stall door open and stood to one side. “Put the towel on the lever and flush. It’s really that simple. Just make sure the towel is in contact with the lever.”
Connor didn’t move. “And then what? Scotty beams me away in the toilet? A sewer alien comes up to eat me? Where the hell did the other two guys go?”
Richards laughed. “You’re not going to get beamed up or eaten, I can tell you that. Trust me, it’s going to be fine.”
Reluctantly, Connor stepped into the stall and shut the door behind him. He inspected the toilet, looking behind the tank and around the underside of the bowl. It looked like an ordinary toilet. He felt the towel in both hands, running it through his fingers, feeling for anything out of the ordinary.
“Put the towel on the flushing lever,” Richards said from outside the stall.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, Connor thought. But he put the towel on the lever. “And then what, I just flush like normal?”
“That’s the idea.”
“He’s kind of slow, isn’t he?” the old man said.
Connor shook his head and pushed down on the lever.
Chapter Sixteen
The instant the toilet flushed, the floor dropped—taking Connor and the toilet with it. He put his hands on the tank to steady himself as he dropped down some kind of elevator shaft.
His stomach lurched at the sudden movement. “What the hell?”
The brown walls of the toilet stall had been replaced by slate-gray concrete marked with alternating yellow and black stripes. Then the walls rose away, and the toilet-elevator slowed as it entered a featureless room about as large as the restroom above. The entire rig settled into a recess in the floor, and stopped.
Connor turned to see Thompson and Henderson smiling at him.
“Nice work,” Thompson said. “Most people fall over on their first time.”
Connor backed away from the toilet. As soon as his feet cleared the platform it launched itself upward, disappearing into the ceiling. A series of clicks echoed down the shaft as it locked into place above.
Other than a wastebasket filled with hand towels, there was literally nothing in the room they’d descended into, but a plain steel door stood on one wall, with a hand scanner beside it. The place reminded Connor of a fallout shelter—and the whole experience made him think of the old sitcom Get Smart and the series of security doors Maxwell Smart was required to negotiate before entering Control’s headquarters.
Hydraulic pistons hissed, and the toilet platform descended, bringing Richards with it.
Henderson patted Connor on the shoulder. “I just got called into something, so I have to get going. I hope to see you again soon enough.” He took Richards’ place on the toilet platform and almost immediately vanished up into the ceiling.
Richards stepped up to the door and placed his palm on the reader. A blue line passed beneath his hand, and a click echoed from inside the door. Richards stepped back, and three massive locking bolts slid out of their retaining blocks on the right side.
“Stand clear,” a digitized voice warned, and the door began slowly opening outward.
Richards rapped his knuckles on the side of the door as it swung open. “Four feet thick, reinforced steel. This baby will stand up to a nuclear blast. Just don’t get your fingers caught in it. You’ll be using your toes to paint with for the rest of your life.”
Connor laughed. “Yeah, no kidding.”
Beyond the blast door was a corridor that ran straight for about a hundred feet before making a right turn. There were no markings or signs, no emergency exit directions, nothing. Just a plain, bare hallway with track lighting illuminating the way.
“I guess you guys couldn’t afford an interior decorator,” Connor said, following Richards down the hall.
“We’ve got better things to spend our money on.”
Connor jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Like toilets that drop into the floor?’
“Exactly.”
“So now that we’re here, is someone finally going to tell me what this place is? Who you guys really are?”
They turned the corner, and the hall ended at a door. Richards put his eye up to a box on the wall next to the door, and a green light scanned his eye. The door clicked, and he pushed it open.
“Welcome to the Outfit, Mr. Sloane.”
Connor hesitated, then stepped through.
He found himself standing on a metal walkway twenty feet above the floor of a vast room, larger than most warehouse
s. On the floor below him, cubicles were arranged in a grid as far as he could see, with men and women working busily at computer screens or talking amongst themselves. Up here, at Connor’s level, metal walkways led to offices positioned all around the edges of the room, looking down on the central work area. Through the office windows, Connor could see more people working at computers.
And in the center of the room, four huge display screens, each easily fifty feet across, hung from the ceiling, displaying information, maps, photographs, satellite feeds, and more.
“It’s like something out of a movie,” Connor said.
Thompson stepped around Connor, smiling. “Yeah, I had the same reaction the first time I saw the place. It’s a little overwhelming at first, but you get used to it.”
“Hold on,” Connor said. “What’s the deal with the big eye painted on the ceiling with the Latin?”
Thompson looked up. “Oh, that’s the Eye of Providence. When our little organization was created, this was the logo the founders felt embodied who and what we are. Novus Ordo Seclorum means ‘New Order of the Ages,’ and Annuit Coeptis means ‘providence favors our undertaking.’” He grinned. “You should recognize it. Our logo eventually was used for the Great Seal of our good ole US of A. You’ll see it everywhere in DC if you pay attention. It’s even on our dollar bills.”
Thompson started for the stairs leading to the floor below.
“Wait,” Connor said, grabbing his arm. “Level with me, please. What is this place? Who are you people?”
“We are the Agents of the Revolution,” Thompson said. “Don’t laugh. Nobody calls it that anymore. Nowadays, we just call ourselves ‘the Outfit.’”
“And what the hell do Agents of the Revolution do?”
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