by David Archer
Noah raised his eyebrows, and took out his phone and called his boss. She answered on the first ring.
“Put me on speakerphone,” she said, and Noah did so.
“Okay, everyone can hear you,” he said.
“Team Camelot, I just want to tell you—well, those of you who are there—that your first mission has been an unequaled success. We've never had a first mission go so well, let alone produce so many side benefits.”
“Side benefits?” Noah asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I just got word from another agency that Raul Delgado was found dead this morning. It appears that someone he owed money to was quite upset that the money wasn't available. Delgado was one of the major distributors of methamphetamines coming across the border into the USA. Excellent work, Camelot. I'm looking forward to debriefing you when you get back.” The line went dead.
They went to their rooms after that, to get packed and ready to leave in the morning. All of them were tired, as much from the stress of the last two weeks as from anything else. They went down to dinner a little later, and when they came back up, Sarah walked into Noah's room with him.
“Would you mind if we didn't have sex tonight?” Sarah asked him. “I'd really just like to cuddle with you, if that's okay?”
He turned down the covers and slipped out of his jeans and shirt, but left his underwear on as he got into bed. A moment later, she shed everything but her panties, and slid into bed beside him. Noah turned on his side and wrapped her in his arms, and just held her until she drifted off to sleep.
Once he heard her breathing slow, he allowed himself to go to sleep, as well. They awakened the next morning, shoved down a quick breakfast, and then climbed into Jefferson's van for the ride to the airport.
Noah came back to the present. He had been sitting in his library for a few hours, reading Swiss Family Robinson with part of his mind, while he was going over the mission with another part. He wasn't concerned about the debriefing, but wanted to be sure he had the mission firmly fixed in his memory before he got there.
As the sun was going down, he decided to go and grab a shower, so he walked into his room and stripped. In the bathroom, he turned on the shower so that it was hot and filling the room with steam, then stepped into it a moment later.
The tap on the glass of the shower door came as a slight surprise, and he pushed it open, ready for violence if it came his way, but it was only Sarah. “The door was unlocked, I hope you don't mind.”
She was standing there naked, and he swung the door wider so that she could step inside with him, then pulled her close and kissed her under the spray. They washed each other, and when they were done, Sarah took Noah by the hand and led him to bed. She pushed him back onto the bed, then climbed into it beside him, pulling herself up onto him.
The sun woke them as it came through his bedroom window, and Noah was surprised that he had slept so late. He chalked it up to being comfortable and secure, and decided he must have needed the extra rest. They got up and went to the kitchen and made coffee, but then they both said they were too tired to bother fixing breakfast. They went back to the bedroom and got dressed, then got into Sarah's car and drove to Kirtland. A couple of fast food breakfast sandwiches hit the spot, and by the time they were done it was time for the debriefing.
They parked in the underground garage, and rode the elevator up to Allison's floor. Jenny the secretary smiled as they came in, and told them that they were being awaited in the conference room. They went down the short hallway and entered the room, where Allison was waiting.
Neil was already there, and they sat down at the table across from him. Moose showed up only a minute later, and took the seat next to Neil.
“This is going to be one of the most informal debriefings I've ever done,” Allison said. “More than anything else, I just want to tell you again what a fantastic job you guys have done. You have lived up to my expectations, and even exceeded them. I've been hearing from every department head today, and they're all saying the same thing.”
Noah raised his eyebrows. “Which is?”
Allison grinned. “That I'm a freaking genius for recruiting you, and then giving you three of our best for your support team. You guys have done more than just carry out your mission, you've also made the world a safer place for all of us, and in several different ways.” She looked at Neil. “That little program of yours is pretty exciting,” she said. “I've already had other agencies asking if I know anything about all of these drug dealers who are suddenly complaining that their money is vanishing. I'm telling them I don't know anything, and I want to keep it that way. This is a tool that could be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands, and while I may be an egotistical bitch, I personally believe that the wrong hands would be any hands other than mine. We're just going to keep that our secret, okay?”
Neil smiled from ear to ear. “Yes, Ma'am,” he said. “I'm actually very glad to hear you say that.”
Allison turned to Moose. “Moose, I want to give you a special pat on the back. You went halfway around the world into a completely unknown situation, impersonated an international arms dealer, secured and delivered a fissionable quantity of nuclear material, all without batting an eye, when you were ordered to do so by your team leader. As I recall, just a few weeks ago, you pretty much hated his guts, didn't you?”
Moose shrugged. “I guess it's hard to stay mad at a guy who can kick your ass. Besides, I completely understood where he was coming from. We had the chance to get that stuff off the market, we couldn’t pass that up.”
Allison looked at him for another second, then turned to Sarah. “Sarah, I was particularly proud of you on this mission.”
Sarah's eyes went wide. “Me? Why me?”
Allison grinned. “Because you handled it, my dear. And if you think about it, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.”
Sarah turned pink, but grinned.
“Noah,” Allison said. “You surpassed every expectation I had. That logical brain of yours caused you to see and take advantage of opportunities that the rest of us overlooked. Because of that, the DEA has managed to take almost twenty million dollars worth of drugs off the street in the last two weeks, and we've managed to secure nuclear material that could have been used to make more than one small nuclear device. On top of that, we now know who that supplier is, a known antiquities dealer from Egypt. Moose actually carried the material out of that hotel, because it was packed inside an ancient leaden urn.”
Noah nodded. “It's like I told you, Ma'am, I'm just here to do a job. We all are.”
Allison looked at them all for a few moments, and then smiled once more. “That's very good,” she said. “That's very good, indeed, because I'm already working on your next mission, and it's one that all of us believe only Team Camelot can pull off. Unfortunately, you're not going to get a lot of time to train.”
Noah looked at the other three, who all looked to him, then turned back to Allison. “Can you tell us anything about it?”
She looked at them for a moment longer, then nodded. “The president of an African country is being pressured to form an alliance with Russia and Syria. That's an alliance the United States does not want to see happen, but we've just learned that the man's daughter is being threatened by some outside force. If he does not agree to the alliance when the summit meeting on it is held in three weeks, our intelligence indicates that she will be murdered. In a moment of weakness, he confessed this situation to one of our diplomats over there, and when it was sent back to the State Department, our president got hold of it. He called me and asked me to step outside our normal operations, and send a team in to find out just what kind of threat it is, and eliminate it.” She paused for just a moment, looking at each of them in turn. “The problem is that you'll be going in with less than optimum intelligence. At this point, we don't even know for sure where the girl is, so this is as much an investigative mission as anything else.”
“I'm just curious, bu
t wouldn't this be something more suited to an outfit like the CIA?” Noah asked.
Allison gave him what he interpreted as a sad smile. “Normally, it would be,” she said. “Unfortunately, in this case, we cannot risk whoever is behind this pressure finding out that we even know about it. That means we can’t use any asset from an agency that our enemies know anything about, and so far, the only one they don't know about is us.” She got to her feet, and stood there looking at them. “I'm afraid that this is going to be your next mission. Your briefing, such as it is, will take place the day after tomorrow.”
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EXCERPT OF BOOK TWO...
PROLOGUE
In the course of protecting the security of a nation, governments must often make choices that are best kept away from public notice. Society being what it is, people are wont to believe that everyone has some innate good within them, and that when necessary, they will do the “right thing.”
Those who choose public service, however, whether it be through law enforcement or political office, soon learn the truth: that even the finest examples of men and women are capable of horrific acts under the right circumstances, while the worst examples view those acts as nothing more than taking care of business. Such people are often beyond redemption, and in many cases they are far enough ahead of the rest of society that they avoid being detected, exposed and caught. While it may be obvious to some of us that they are evil, the vast majority of society never sees it, and so would never sanction the kind of action that is necessary to eliminate such evil.
For this reason, such actions are carried out by shadows, people who do not exist as far as society is concerned. Every nation has had such people, including the supposedly civilized Western nations. Over the years, the United States of America has publicly denied the existence of assassins within the ranks of the CIA and FBI, which it can do because the Alphabet Soup Groups that are known to the American people honestly do not engage in such things, or at least, only when there is absolutely no other alternative at the moment when such action must be taken.
Instead, there is a special organization that is so secret that even most of the government knows nothing more about it than that it does exist, including some of those Alphabet Soup Groups. Whenever one of those organizations comes upon an individual whose departure from the world would leave it a notably better place, a request must be filed through a highly secure computer network. The request must include as much information about the person or persons to be eliminated as possible, an explanation in great detail as to why the requesting organization believes it necessary to resort to elimination, and a projection of the benefits to society if the request is granted.
That request will be delivered to a single person who has demonstrated a capacity for common sense and a willingness to accept responsibility. She alone will determine whether the request will be granted or denied, and if it is granted, she will assign the mission to eliminate the target or targets to one of several teams that work for her. These teams specialize in doing just that—eliminating those persons whose presence in the world can no longer be tolerated.
Her name is Allison Peterson, and she runs a nearly invisible department known as E & E, which stands for Elimination and Eradication. This department was established under a secret order from the president of the United States, and given absolute autonomy. Allison alone can grant or deny requests for elimination, and no one, not even the president, can order her to approve one.
The missions she assigns are carried out by teams that normally consist of only four people. One, the team leader, is the assassin. He or she is aided in missions by three support specialists: transportation, intelligence and muscle. Each team is named after something from mythology, which has led to her department getting the nickname of Neverland.
Noah Wolf is Allison's star pupil, recruited because of something that most people would consider a character flaw, but which she saw as potentially the greatest strength any assassin could have.
When he was only a child, Noah Foster was present when his father murdered his mother, and then committed suicide. Something inside the seven-year-old boy broke, and from that day on, he had been completely without emotion—or conscience—of any kind. He would probably have found himself in an institution not long after that tragedy, but for the help of a genius friend who he met in foster care. Her name was Molly, and she was one of those rare children with an IQ so high that it was almost impossible to measure. While she lived at the foster home with Noah and other children, she was taking high school and even some college classes in a special education program, and one of those classes was psychology. It didn't take her long to figure Noah out, and to realize that if he continued to act so differently from everyone else, he would soon find himself locked away.
Molly convinced him to use his own surprisingly intelligent mind to study the actions and mannerisms of people around him, and mimic them in order to conceal his emotional state. She compared him to Mister Spock from Star Trek, the famous Vulcan, because Noah had instinctively turned to logic. He naturally examined all sides of any given situation before attempting to react to it, and by the time he was ten years old, he could arrive at a conclusion so quickly that his reactions seemed natural and brilliant.
As he grew older, he continued to mimic others, keeping his logical nature as secret as he could. He was considered an asset to any task he undertook, because he would simply examine the problem, decide what needed to be done and then do it. He was never selfish, never lazy and always willing to do whatever it took to ensure the success of any project he was involved in, for himself as well as for others who worked with him.
A combination of circumstances led him to join the Army when he was only seventeen, and he found it to be exactly the kind of environment he needed. The rules, structure and discipline fit perfectly into his concept of how the world should be, and he excelled as a soldier. He rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant, served three tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and had more than a dozen different commendations in his file.
None of that did him any good, however, when his platoon leader, Lieutenant Daniel Gibson, one day decided to engage i
n sport with some Iraqi civilian girls that the platoon had stumbled across on a patrol. The girls, of course, objected to being raped, and so he ordered them killed. Noah had been assigned to sniper cover that day, and was unaware of what was going on until he was called down from his position. Only one of the girls was still alive, and Gibson offered Noah the chance to take advantage of her before she met her own fate.
Noah assessed the situation, and concluded that his commanding officer had committed and condoned the rape and murder of Iraqi civilians, which could be considered an act of war against Iraq by forces of the United States. He refused to participate, and demanded the situation stop, but Lieutenant Gibson told him to shut up and then shot the one surviving girl through the head.
Noah's computer-like brain saw that the situation was completely out of control, and took what he considered to be logical action. He shot and killed his platoon leader, and then attempted to place the rest of the platoon under arrest. The other men fought, and he was forced to kill several of them before the remainder surrendered.
Unfortunately, when they returned to their base, it was his word against theirs. When it turned out that Lieutenant Gibson was the son of Congressman Gibson, the up-and-coming presidential hopeful, the political pressure came down from Washington and Noah was arrested for multiple counts of murder. He was railroaded through court-martial and sentenced to die.
That was where Allison found him, sitting on death row at Leavenworth. She visited him there in disguise, explaining that if he was willing to put his talents and abilities to work for her, she could arrange for him to have a second chance. Of course, it would mean never having any contact with anyone from his past, since the official story would include that he committed suicide in his prison cell.
