David Golemon - Ripper

“I believe she was bypassed because of the unimportance of the test and also because, as I understand it, Ms. Simpson is currently visiting relatives in Texas.” He smiled and then started to turn away. “But if you would rather wait until she gets back, it’s up to you. I can wait for these mundane and boring results.”

The courier bit her lower lip and then smiled. “I guess since it’s only a test trace it doesn’t matter.”

Hiram stopped and then turned with his best smile planted on his features. “Now that’s the red-tape-cutting imaging department we have come to love around here,” he said as he took the offered envelope. “If not for people like you, nothing would ever get done.”

The young technician smiled and then turned away. The smile on Vickers’s face left as easily as it had come as he reached out and pulled the door closed. He ripped open the sealed envelope instead of untying the string that secured it; after all, the envelope and its contents would be destroyed. This action was something totally against agency policy. He quickly read the transcript of the trace his Black Team had placed on subject one from the Mexico raid. His brow furrowed as he read the report.

“What in the hell is this?” he asked himself aloud as he sat back behind his desk. His fingers followed the line of the track from Laredo, Texas, to Nevada.

“Okay, they obviously landed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. But what in the hell is happening here?” he asked himself as he pulled up a computer-generated and much-classified map of Nellis on his computer. He studied the map and saw where the trace was still operating. His eyes told him he was looking at a firing range that hadn’t been in use since World War II. He then punched in a few commands and a real-time image of the base came up. He used his mouse to zoom into the area of interest. All he saw was a large series of dilapidated hangars that looked as if they had seen far better days. The largest hangar was missing most of its rounded roof and he could almost see into the interior.

He looked at the coordinates that had been time stamped onto the first picture he pulled out of the envelope. Then he cross-referenced those coordinates with what he was looking at. He shook his head and then reached for the phone. He called the number he had memorized in just the last two days.

“Johnson,” came the reply on the other end of the phone.

“I have the trace report,” Vickers said as he continued to look at the picture of the high desert surrounding Nellis Air Force Base.

“So, where do our mysterious heroes live and work?”

“Before I give you the answer, I have a question, and it comes directly from our British friends.”

“Go ahead.”

“They want to know what preparations you’ve made in connection with the Perdition Hacienda. If we complete this assignment for them, there will be no end to their gratitude, which may come in handy for our new operations.”

There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone. Then the large man who had just arrived home from Texas cleared his throat. “You can pass it on to those interested parties that the hacienda will cease to exist in just about twenty-seven minutes, compliments of the government of Mexico.”

“And this will eliminate any possibility of the drugs getting out into the open?”

There was a small laugh on the other end of the phone. “You can say that, yes.” The man became silent as he waited. He knew he didn’t have to press the man at Langley for information on the trace because the man he had tagged outside of Nuevo Laredo was now under intense scrutiny by one of the darkest forces in American intelligence.

“The tracer report says that your target landed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and then according to what amounts to guesswork, the hard target vanishes beneath the high desert.”

“Obviously I can’t get a straight answer out of anyone in Washington. I don’t send my men anywhere on guesswork. That kind of stuff went out of favor a long time ago. If you want us to recover what was taken from that hacienda, you damn well better get me some reliable intel as to who these people are and who they work for. We were lucky to get the body of Guzman reduced to ruins, but they have a sample of the product your British friends want destroyed. Now, I’ve been doing a little homework myself. The man who led the rescue attempt across the border, I thought I recognized him, but couldn’t place him until now.”

As Hiram Vickers waited, his incoming e-mail chimed. He opened it and then saw it was from the very same man to whom he was speaking at this very moment. He clicked on the attachment and a picture began downloading.

“Find me this man, and I’ll find that jar they took out of Perdition’s Gate. Don’t find him, and I guess the Brits’ dirty little secret will not be so for long.”

Hiram regretted having told the Black Team operative everything about who requested their assistance. But the new operating parameters of the Black Teams prohibited them from operating without the full range of intel on their prospective target. He knew this man was determined to keep the Men in Black far more secretive than they had been in the past before they had been dismantled by the federal authorities.

As Vickers watched his computer screen he saw a herky-jerky video of what looked like a C-Span broadcast. As the camera zoomed in on a man in the uniform of a United States Army officer, it cleared up and then the picture froze as the generated name came on below the frozen picture of a big man as he packed up a briefcase with papers. Vickers saw that the video had been purloined from a C-Span broadcast of a senate hearing on the Afghan conflict. Then he looked at the name on the bottom and a flitting memory came to him.

“I think this will help a great deal, if you’re sure this is the man you tagged?”

“Anyone in our line of work knows exactly who this man is and what he brings to the table. He’s dangerous, not only to me, but to you and anyone who crosses him. If he still has Perdition’s Fire it will be hard to get from him. Now send me what you have so I can work from my end.”

“Right,” Vickers said and then terminated the call. He looked closer at the sun-hardened features of the man frozen in time on his monitor. He then glanced at the printed name below the picture as he placed the yellow envelope and its contents under his arm in readiness to forward what he had to the Black Team in Denver. He reached out and hesitated before he turned off his monitor, but not before Hiram Vickers memorized the hard features of the man.

The C-Span freeze-frame of the soldier known six years before as Major Jack Collins faded to black.

Jack sat at his desk inside the security department cut off from the rest of his people. He stared at the computer screen for the longest time in an attempt to make the words he had written make sense. They were words he thought he never would have placed end to end in his entire life.

They had been in the complex for the past eight hours, and he was waiting for the call that would send him into the director’s office. Collins closed his eyes in an effort to make the last few words in the document he had written fade away along with the sight of them.

A knock sounded at the door.

“Come in,” he said as he leaned slightly toward the monitor and spoke softly as Captain Carl Everett entered his office. “Europa, file and code document 1877, security one, Collins.”

“Document filed, Colonel Collins,” answered the Marylyn Monroe voice, one that Collins had finally gotten used to. He had hated it, but finally came to terms that everyone in the complex liked the sexiness of the computer-generated voice synthesizer.