Bodyguard of Lies

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

BODYGUARD OF LIES

COPYRIGHT © 2003 by Bob Mayer, Updated 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author (Bob Mayer and Who Dares Wins Publishing) except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Electronic ISBN 978-1-935712-05-3

Bob Mayer

The old man sat alone in the darkness contemplating failure on a scale that historians would write about it for centuries, and the subsequent inevitable need for change. He was one of the most powerful people in the world, but only a few knew of his existence. His position had been born out of failure over sixty years previously, as smoke still smoldered above the mangled ships and dead bodies in Pearl Harbor. For over six decades, he had given his life to his country. His most valuable asset was dispassion, so he could view his own recent failures objectively, although recent was a subjective term. He realized now it had all begun over ten years ago.

His office lacked any charm or comfort. There was a scarcity about the room that was unnerving. The cheap desk and two chairs made it look more like an interview room in an improvised police station than the office of a man so powerful his name brought fear throughout the government he served in Washington. The top of the desk was almost clear. Just a secure phone and a stack of folders.

There were, naturally, no windows. Not three hundred feet underground, buried beneath the ‘crystal palace’ of the top secret National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. And not that he could have used windows. The few who knew of the organization sometimes wondered if this location was what had led to its name. While the CIA made headlines every week, the Cellar was only whispered about in the hallowed halls of the nation's capitol. It might have been located underneath the NSA building but it was an entity unto itself answerable only to its founding mandate.

The room was lit only by the dim red lights on the secure phone. They showed the scars on the old man’s face and the raw red, puckered skin where his eyes had once rested. There was track lighting, currently off, all three bulbs of which were over the old man’s head and angled toward the door. When on, they placed his face in a shadow and caused any guest to squint against the light. The few who had the misfortune to sit across from him didn’t know whether the lighting was placed in such a way to blind them as if he was, or to hide the severity of his old wounds.

He was not a man given much too sentimental reflection, but he knew his time was coming to an end, which made him think back to his beginning, as he knew all things were cyclical. He opened a right side desk drawer and pulled out a three dimensional representation of an old black and white photograph. He ran his fingers lightly over the raised images of three smiling young men dressed in World War II era uniforms—British, French and American. He was on the right. The other two were killed the day after the photo was taken.

He left the image on the desktop and reached for the files. The ones he wanted were the first two. He placed them on his lap. Paper files, the writing in Braille. He’d never trusted computers, even though there were ones now that could work completely on voice commands and read to him. Perhaps that was part of the problem. He was out of date. An anachronism.

They were labeled respectively Gant, Anthony and Masterson. He ran his fingers over the names punched on the tabs. He was patient. He had waited decades for plans born out of seeds he had sown to come to fruition. Quite a few similar plans had failed, so there was no reason to believe this one would succeed. But this plan was now in motion, initiated by an event he had had nothing to do with, the way the best plans in the covert world always started to allow deniability.

Despite his gifts of dispassion and patience, he felt a stirring in his chest. It puzzled him for a few moments before he realized he was experiencing hope. He squashed the feeling and picked up the phone to set another piece of the puzzle in motion.

Neeley had not anticipated waiting to kill people to be so boring. Staying well back in the darker shadows, out of the dim reflection of the few working streetlights, she scanned the ghostly quiet alley. She used the night vision portion of her retina just off the center of vision as Gant had taught her. There was nothing moving. A dumpster, an abandoned car and intermittent piles of refuse dotted the pitted concrete between the two abandoned tenements. There was a way out on either end. She could hear the rumble of traffic from the Bruckner Expressway a few hundred yards away.

Neeley had been here for a day and a half and she could superimpose from memory the details that the night refused to divulge to her naked eye. Looking right, a couple of miles to the east, she could see the aircraft warning lights on top of one of the towers of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge crossing Long Island Sound.

She picked up a bulky rifle and pressed the scope on top to her right eye, twisting the switch to the on position. After a moment's hesitation, the black night gave way to bright green and she no longer needed her memory for the details the technology provided. Completing a second overall scan from her location in a corner apartment in the abandoned tenement, Neeley then zoomed in on the three locations she had noted during thirty-six hours of observing.

Two of the three men had arrived together four hours ago, just as darkness had slid like a curtain across the alley. Neeley had watched the two set up in separate rooms, on the second floor of the derelict building across the street.

The third man had shown up twenty minutes after the first two. If he'd tried the building, he might have bumped into the first two, but this last man wasn't very smart. He'd positioned himself inside the dumpster on the alley floor, leaving the top wedged open so he could observe the street, south to north. She gave the man an 'A' for effort, getting among the moldy garbage inside the large container, but an 'F' for tactical sense. True, the dumpster had a good ground level field of fire, but the man was trapped in a steel coffin if it became necessary to relocate. The two men in the building had the high ground, always a tactical advantage and the ability to move. Of course, they lacked the element of surprise but Neeley mentally gave them a few points anyway.

Through the scope, she could easily see the glow of one of the men across the street covertly smoking a cigarette, obviously thinking he was secure since he was well back from the window in the darkness of the room. The burning glow, barely visible to the naked eye, showed up like a searchlight in the night-vision scope. She shifted left two windows. The second man was watching the dumpster through a pair of older model, army-issue night-vision goggles. PVS-5s as near as Neeley could tell at this distance.

Nothing else was moving in the street and Neeley didn't expect to see anything until the deal went down. Alleys in the South Bronx were places even most bad people stayed away from at night. A few blocks to the south, prostitutes haunted the streets and docks of the Hunts Point section but this area was a no man's land. Which was why the two sides had chosen it.

The man across the street put out his cigarette. Neeley lay the rifle down and slid back from the window. Pulling a poncho-liner over her head, she completely covered herself. Only then, did she peel back the Velcro cover on her watch, and check the glowing hands. Twenty minutes to twelve. She considered the situation. At least six hours of darkness left. Neeley hadn't allowed herself to sleep since arriving here a day and a half ago. She'd drunk the last of the coffee from her thermos a while back and now her eyes burned with fatigue. Given the presence of the advance guards, odds were the deal would go down soon. She decided to take a calculated chance and pulled a pill out of her pocket. Popping it into her mouth, she washed it down with a swig from a water bottle. Four hours of intenseness. She would need at least an hour, preferably two, on the flip side of the deal to get out of the immediate area and be reasonably secure. Neeley reaffirmed the decision she had made during mission planning: 0300 and she was out of here, deal or no deal. Survival first and stick with the plan.

Her pulse quickened as the speed hit the blood stream. Neeley pushed aside the poncho liner and crammed it into a stuff sack, placing the sack inside a small backpack. She felt around the floor with her hands. Nothing left out. Just the pack and rifle. Methodically, she did a mental inventory of her actions of the past day and a half and all the equipment she had brought with her. The room was sterile, everything accounted for. Rule number four: Always pack out what you pack in. There were some rules you just couldn't break and the remembrance of one of Gant's rules brought a wry smile to Neeley's lips.

Neeley laid the pack down three feet inside the window and sat on it, laying the rifle across her knees. She was used to waiting. She'd spent most of her thirty-two years learning that patience was a virtue; a life-saving one.

She picked the rifle back up, the feel of plastic and steel a familiar one. It was an Accuracy International L96A1, a venerable sniper rifle of British design, firing NATO standard size 5.56mm by 51mm rounds, each of which Gant had reloaded to reduce velocity to sub-sonic speeds. A bullet that broke the sound barrier made a cracking noise as it left the muzzle and the special load eliminated that noise. On the end of the barrel was a bulky tactical suppressor, which absorbed the other large noise source for the rifle, the gasses that came out of the end of the barrel upon firing. In essence, the suppressor was a series of washer-like baffles around the end of the barrel that took the force of the expelling gasses. It was good for about ten shots before it had to be retooled. The combination of the two made the rifle almost noiseless to operate although they did drastically reduce the range and change the trajectory of the rounds, both of which Neeley was prepared for after many hours on the range firing it.

A pair of headlights carved into the northern end of the alley. Neeley tried to control the adrenaline that now began to overlap the speed. She watched the car roll slowly down the alley and come to a halt, the dumpster and its hidden contents thirty meters ahead.

Looking through the scope, Neeley saw one of the men in the building across the street, the one on the left speak into his hand.

The car was an armored limo. Another pair of headlights came in from the south. This one was a Mercedes. Not obviously armored, as it rode too high for that. It came to a halt thirty-five meters from the limo, headlights dueling. The dumpster flanked the Mercedes, to its right front.

The doors on the limo opened and four men got out, two to a side. Three had submachineguns. The fourth a large suitcase. The Mercedes disgorged three men, all also heavily armed. One went back and opened the trunk.

"I want your man out of the window up there," one of the men from the Mercedes yelled. The guy in the dumpster had seen the glow from the same cigarette that Neeley had. This also confirmed that the man in the dumpster had communication with the Mercedes.

After a moment's hesitation, the man with the suitcase pulled a small Motorola radio off his belt and spoke into it. A minute later, the man who had been smoking walked out of the building and joined the other four.

"Satisfied?" the suitcase man yelled back.

"Yes," the chief Mercedes man answered.

Neeley adjusted the scope's focus knob, zooming in. The remaining man across the way was now resting the bipods of an M60 machine gun on the windowsill. She shifted back to the standoff in the alley.

The men from the Mercedes unloaded two heavy cardboard boxes from the car's trunk and stacked them ten feet in front of the headlights. The five men from the limo side moved forward, fanning out, the man with the suitcase in the middle.

Neeley placed the crosshairs of the night-scope on the head of the suitcase man. She began to note the rhythm of her heart. The tip of her finger lay lightly on the trigger, almost a lover’s caress. She slowly exhaled two-thirds of the air in her lungs, to what Gant had called the natural respiratory pause, and then held her diaphragm still. In between heartbeats, she smoothly squeezed the trigger and, with the rifle producing only the sound of the bolt working in concert with a low puff from the barrel suppresser, the 7.62-millimeter subsonic round left the muzzle. In midstride, the target's head blew apart.

Reacting instinctively, not knowing where death had winged its way from, the other four men swung up their submachineguns and fired on the Mercedes crew. The dumpster man replied, only to be lost in the roar of the machine gun in the window. In the ensuing confusion, and on the same paused breath, in between new heartbeats, Neeley put a round into one of the limo men.

After ten seconds of thunderous fire, an echoing silence enveloped the street. All the Mercedes men were down. The M60 had swiss-cheesed the dumpster. Two of the limo men were still standing.

Neeley took another breath and slowly exhaled, then paused. In between the next three heartbeats, she fired three times. First round, a headshot blowing the M60 gunner backwards into the darkened room across the way. Second and third rounds finishing the two-left standing before they even realized that death was silently lashing out of a window above their heads.

Satisfied that all were down, Neeley pulled out a red lens flashlight and searched the dirty floor of the room. She collected the five pieces of expended brass and placed them in a pocket on the outside of the backpack, insuring the Velcro cover was tightly sealed. She listened to the earpiece from the portable police scanner in her pocket as she swung on the backpack and started down. She was on the street before the first call for a car to investigate shots fired came over the airway. The police would not respond with any particular alacrity. Shots fired were common calls in the South Bronx at night. Cops tended to band together here and only became excited if the radio call was ‘officer down’.

As she headed toward the Mercedes, movement from one of the bodies caused her to swing the muzzle up; one of the men was still alive. Neeley watched the figure writhing on the ground for a few seconds. She stepped forward, and with one boot, shoved the body over, keeping the muzzle pointed at the man's head. The man's stomach was a sea of very dark, arterial blood: gut shot. Neeley's training automatically started scrolling through her consciousness, outlining the proper procedures to treat the wound.

The bulky barrel of the rifle mesmerized the man’s gaze. Looking above it, into Neeley's dark pupils, his own widened with surprise. They searched for mercy in the depths of Neeley's thickly lashed eyes. Neeley's entire body started sweating and the adrenaline kicked up to an even higher level. The muzzle didn't waver.

The round entered a small black dot between the man's eyes. The bullet mushroomed through the brain and took off the entire rear of the head, spraying the dirty street. Neeley watched the body twitch and become still. She automatically scooped up the expended brass casing and stuffed it into her pocket.

Moving to the cardboard boxes, she pulled a thermal grenade out of one of the pockets of her loose fitting black leather, knee-length overcoat and pulled the pin. She placed the grenade on top of the boxes and released the arming lever, pocketing both it and the pin. Acting quickly, trying to make up for the seconds lost dealing with the wounded man, she tore the briefcase out of the limp hand still holding it and jogged to the end of the alley. A subdued pop and a flicker of flames appeared behind her as two million dollars worth of cocaine began to go up in flames.

Satisfied she was out of immediate danger, and before reaching the corner, Neeley twisted the locking screw and broke the rifle down into two parts. She hung the barrel on the inside right of her coat and the stock on the left, securing them with specially sown in bands of Velcro.

Turning the corner, Neeley settled into a steady, swift walk. From the confused babble on the scanner, she had six to eight minutes before the first police arrived.

She made three blocks and then turned left. Here were the first signs of life. This area was more populated, but still well within the urban battle zone known as the South Bronx. Covert eyes watched her as she moved and Neeley slid a hand up, loosening the 10mm Glock Model 20 pistol she wore in a shoulder holster.

Her purposeful stride and appearance deflected any thoughts of evil intent from those lurking in the shadows. Neeley was tall, an inch shy of six foot. She had broad shoulders and a slender build. Her short, dark hair had seen better days and could use styling. Her face was all angles, no soft roundness, with two very dark eyes that took in everything in her surroundings. She moved with a sense of determination, her long overcoat half open, allowing her easy access to the weapons inside.

Two more blocks, no interference encountered, and she reached her parked pick-up truck, nestled among other battered vehicles. She unlocked the door and threw the suitcase in. The first sirens were wailing in the distance as Neeley got behind the wheel and cranked the engine.

For the first time she paused. She held her hands in front of her face. They were shaking slightly. Neeley took a deep breath and held it. The vision of the man looking up at her flickered across her eyes, then was gone. She shivered; shaking her head in short violent jerks, then was still again. She put the truck into gear and drove off.

Sticking with the route she had memorized, Neeley drove, keeping scrupulously to the speed limit. After ten minutes of negotiating side streets, she reached an on-ramp for the Cross Bronx Expressway and rolled up it, heading northeast for New England.

The suitcase on the passenger seat nagged at her. Neeley held her patience for two hours, until the city was over eighty miles behind her, and she was well into Connecticut, just south of Hartford. Finally, she pulled into a rest area. Parking away from other vehicles, Neeley turned on the dome light and put the suitcase on her lap.

She checked the exterior for any indication it was rigged. Nothing. Flipping both latches, she slowly lifted the lid an inch. She slid a finger in and carefully felt the edges. Then she opened it all the way. A wadded piece of cloth lay on top, covering the contents. Neeley peeled the cloth away. Stacks of worn hundred dollar bills greeted her. She didn't count it. She knew exactly how much was there.