David Golemon - Ripper

“Yeah, Senator Lee once told me, ‘Jack, you’re in command, so goddamn it, command.’” With that and a return smile, Jack Collins closed the door and the car zoomed away down the centerline rail toward the city of Las Vegas and whatever future he could carve out for himself.

The same photo and trace technician who had questioned Hiram Vickers earlier about the chain of custody for the tracer tract forwarded to her department from the Cassini Corporation in Boulder stood at the far end of the hallway from Vickers’s office. She half turned with the large envelope in her arm, pressed it tightly to her chest, and then looked down on the signoff sheet. Only her department had signed the receipt of service from Cassini. There was a long red arrow from the top of the custody list straight down to Hiram Vickers’s name near the bottom. She looked at the name bypassed by the arrow — the person in charge of intelligence for the North American Desk, Assistant Director Lynn Simpson. Once again the woman bit her lower lip; after all, maybe Vickers had a point about not filling up the desks of people who didn’t have the time to look at test patterns from one of their CIA contractors.

“Penny for your thoughts,” came the familiar voice that had come up on her unawares.

The young girl looked at Hiram Vickers and the cold smile he always gave women he thought far beneath his station. While he looked at her chest, the technician easily pulled the chain-of-possession list from the front of the envelope. She then smiled and held out the large envelope.

“Ah, the second part of the test came through, excellent,” he said as he reached for the envelope. “Uh, do I have to sign for it anywhere?” he said as she released the intelligence report from Cassini.

“Since you said it was a test that came to you only, we didn’t bother, since here you are, and it is only a test, right?”

Hiram kept his smile on his lips far longer than was necessary. “Right, as I said, yours is the red-tape-cutting department. Thanks again for this,” he said holding the envelope up and then turning away.

The technician looked down into her hand at the chain of possession list and the first name at the top. She didn’t quite know how to handle Vickers and his test that didn’t seem to show up on their daily “to do” list. She thought about it and decided on what course of action to take. She turned and walked to the elevator and took it to the sixth floor. She saw the empty area where the North American Intelligence Department usually was, but saw that they must have gone home for the night. She looked at her wristwatch and saw that it was almost seven o’clock. She looked around and spied the old pigeonhole mail slots for the North American Desk. She went over and looked at box number one: Lynn Simpson, Assistant Director, North American Intelligence. She looked at the signoff sheet, folded it, and then placed it in Lynn’s mailbox. That ought to get her to wonder why her desk was bypassed on an intelligence target deep inside the United States … test or no test.

As the girl turned and left the large area, she only hoped she was doing the right thing. Unknowingly, she had placed the intelligence trace report coming in on compromised test subject Collins, Jack, U.S. Army, into the mailbox of Jack’s very own sister, the head of the North American Intelligence Desk, Lynn Simpson.

The young technician was wrong about the North American Desk having gone home for the evening. Since Lynn Simpson’s return from Texas, she had been steadily working on the Juan Guzman case and had every single one of her people in a large meeting room one floor up.

She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her brother Jack had been involved in the illegal rescue of Sarah McIntire and fifteen kidnapped girls. Lynn had managed to learn through her law enforcement contacts down in Texas that Jack and the mysterious entity he worked for had not been identified as being related to the U.S. government at all. There was only the fact that the rescue element had crossed the Rio Grande into United States territory.

As she read the statements of the fifteen surviving girls as told to the FBI and the Texas Rangers, she thought someone had been drugged or at the very least beaten until all reliability had vanished. Words such as monstruo, satanás , and criatura had come from the lips of the women being questioned about their rescue regarding the man who had abducted them. Lynn knew the three words most of the girls used to describe the Anaconda on their harrowing flight out of Mexico— monster, Satan , and creature .

The bulk of her staff recommended they should start looking into either the American military, or a corporate security group. “No,” she explained, “we’ll not follow that angle.”

Although Lynn knew her desk had to pursue answers to the raid into Mexico, she didn’t want to because she knew Jack, Carl, and Mendenhall were up to their eyeteeth in the cover-up. As she passed the mailboxes she noticed something in her box. She closed the folder on the Anaconda and pulled free the folded paper.

As Lynn walked to her desk she still hadn’t given instructions to her people as to where to start their search. She was hoping to buy time until she could get a hold of Jack, Carl, or Sarah. As she placed the thick file on her desk, she unfolded the piece of paper. It was a signoff chain-of-custody sheet that had been originated in the imaging and trace section. She scanned the sheet and then slowly sat down. She saw the person who had signed for the information received from that section. She also noticed that the subject header was “Surveillance and Tracking Test” from Cassini Space-Based Systems. Her brows rose as she reached for her phone. As she punched in the appropriate number for imaging her eyes roamed to the name that did eventually sign for the test results — Hiram Vickers.

“Imaging and Tracking,” answered the voice on the other end of the line.

“This is Simpson at the Intelligence Desk for North America; your section forwarded an intelligence package from Cassini Space-Based Systems in Boulder to Hiram Vickers.”

Suddenly and before she could continue with the person on the line in imaging and tracking, her awareness rose as she suddenly remembered who this man was. He had started at the company a year or so after Lynn herself. He had begun his intelligence career down in Games and Theory. Now there was a rumor of a new section, a small one to be sure, but new nonetheless — Field Incursions, a special operations teams used by the CIA to infiltrate any country, any place. She suddenly remembered she was talking on the phone.

“Listen, do you people understand your protocols down there? I know your department doesn’t get out much, but any intelligence that comes through North America, is about North America, or is even rumored to be information derived on this continent, gets forwarded to me.” Lynn stopped talking and listened. “Okay, I need the contents of both of these so-called test evaluations brought to me in five minutes. And Mr. Vickers is to know nothing of this.” Lynn hung up the phone and then wondered why Hiram Vickers would be interested in a test subject in Nevada.

As Lynn Simpson waited on the information from Imaging, those same tracking details were being passed to that organization that didn’t exist — the Men in Black.

“This is Smith,” said the deep voice of the large man who was now dressed in Levis and a pullover golf shirt. He glanced over at the door that opened to the hallway outside and the few guests he had over for dinner. He stepped to the den’s wide door and closed it as he pressed the cell phone to his ear.