Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (10 page)

Nada had never made such an appeal before.

Moms looked at the picture, at the happy family, and then slowly closed the album with a shaking hand.

It had changed for Foreman, closing in on seventy years of service, in February 1945 in an area called the Devil’s Sea, off the coast of Japan, in the waning days of World War II. The event was after he and his pilot were forced to ditch because of engine trouble. Minutes later, the rest of their squadron simply vanished into a strange mist in that enigmatic part of the world. No trace of the other planes or crews were ever found.

Then it was reinforced in December of that same year, the war finally over, on the other side of the world, when he begged off a mission because of the same premonition he’d had before the Devil’s Sea flight, and watched Flight 19 disappear from the radar in an area called the Bermuda Triangle.

He’d determined then and there that he had to know the Truth.

So he’d gone from the Marine Corps into the short-lived precursor to the CIA, the Central Intelligence Group, in 1946, then morphed with it into the CIA, where he moved upward, and, much more importantly inward, into the darkness of the most covert parts of various branches whose letters and designations changed over the years. But their missions grew more and more obscure, to the point where he’d outlived and outserved all his contemporaries so no one in the present was quite sure who exactly he worked for anymore or what his mission was.

If he worked for anyone at all.

Not that anyone really cared.

They should.

He was now known as the Crazy Old Man in the covert bowels of the Pentagon and by some other names, associated with bowel movements.

How crazy he was, some people were about to discover.

Foreman had to use a cane, a concession he’d made most reluctantly a year ago. He had to give the cane up at every security checkpoint he went through at the Pentagon as he worked his way further and further into the belly of the beast. He was dressed in a suit, only a decade out of fashion and, strangely, wore a small black porkpie hat, à la
Breaking Bad
. He’d enjoyed that show and had taken up wearing a hat similar to Walt’s because he liked it, he identified with Walt, and because it made him look crazier than usual. Besides, the fedora he’d worn for several decades had become passé with
Mad Men
. The changing of fashion with time was something that amused Foreman. What was old is new again and vice versa.

He’d found
crazy
kept people away, and Foreman didn’t particularly care for people.

World War II was history to the people in this building, ground having been broken on the building just a few months prior to Pearl Harbor. It was completed in the beginning of 1943, in time to see service during the conflict. Foreman’s first visit had been in 1946, at the beginning of his career in covert operations.

He felt his age as he limped up to a desk manned by two military police. It blocked the corridor on the supposed lowest level of the Pentagon. With a sigh, he pulled out his identification card and showed it to them.

It was one of those strange identification cards, designed for the handful of people who had the highest security level possible but were not formally affiliated with any agency that these guards would be aware of. Both MPs snapped to attention. One of them scanned the QR code on the ID and got a green light. Then he took another scanner.

“Your glasses, sir?”

Foreman removed his thick spectacles, another concession to age.

The guard checked both retinas and got two more green lights.

“Good to go, sir.”

Foreman put his glasses back on, retrieved his card and his cane. He walked past, aware that cameras were tracking him. With another sigh, this caused by the pain in his replaced knees, he took the stairs down to a sublevel of the Pentagon that wasn’t supposed to exist.

In stark contrast to the hustle and bustle of the corridors above, this level was eerily quiet. At the end of the corridor was an old metal desk. An old man, young to Foreman, sat behind it, doing a crossword puzzle. He peered up over his reading glasses.

“Good day, young fella,” he greeted Foreman.

“Same to you, old man.”

“Here to see anyone in particular or stopping by your office?”

“I need to chat with Mrs. Sanchez. Then go to my office and clean out the inbox. Perhaps nap for a bit.”

The last guard laughed. He didn’t pull out a folder with personal, obscure questions to ask Foreman as he did with everyone else who approached his desk, questions only someone who had lived the answers could correctly reply to. He was facing the only person who predated his position as the last check before entry into the covert world attached to, or, more accurately, underneath the Pentagon. While there were rules, there was also the reality that Foreman was an institution. Or at least he was to another human institution, of which there weren’t many left in an increasingly technical world.

“How are the knees?” the guard asked, looking down at something behind his desk.

“You tell me,” Foreman said.

The man looked up from the scanner. “They look good.” He reached underneath his desktop and hit a button. A door behind him swung open, revealing a telephone-booth-sized room.

Foreman got in and sat down in the chair, grateful for the relief of pressure off his knees. He’d had them replaced decades ago and the doctors had told him the replacements needed to be replaced; he’d worn out the metal and plastic.

But Foreman was realistic enough to know he didn’t have the energy, strength, or patience to go through two more surgeries. Plus he didn’t have the future.

Reality sucks.

The door shut and with a slight jolt, the box moved sideways. It halted abruptly and then moved backwards, riding along a unique rail system, the only means by which someone could get to the buried offices of the denizens of the darkness underneath the Pentagon.

Foreman also understood another reality of the rail/booth system. Once seated inside one of the booths, the occupant was at the mercy of the system. Foreman had no doubt that there was a detour that ended with some grim folk on the other end who made sure the occupant was never seen again.

The booth came to another abrupt halt and the door opened, not at some executioners’ post, but at the comptroller’s office. Foreman slowly got to his feet, using his cane as a prop. He walked up to a chest-high counter, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a leather sack.

“Are you trying to get my agent killed?” Foreman demanded of Mrs. Sanchez. He held up the leather bag of coins and shook one out. “This is Amin-Zeus!” he exclaimed, shoving it in her face. He flipped it. “This says
Ptolemy
in Greek!”

The two might have been in the DMV. Mrs. Sanchez was on one side of the counter, and Foreman was on the other. She never allowed him on her side, as she did many other visitors who were more amiable and less apparently demented. And her daughter was at her desk, not pretending to be focused on her work as she usually was, but watching warily, one hand underneath the desktop on the alarm, which would bring a dozen heavily armed guards to the room.

She really wanted to press the button.

Mrs. Sanchez was the comptroller for the Black Budget, currently estimated to be 52.8 billion dollars. But it was so highly classified, who knew exactly how much it was?

Mrs. Sanchez did. She knew to which person/agency/entity every single dollar went, all overseen from this tiny office on a level of the Pentagon that wasn’t listed on any official description of the Pentagon.

That was because it had been built using funds from the Black Budget. There’s a synchronicity to it all.

Mrs. Sanchez checked her clipboard. “You requested two dozen ancient Egyptian bronze coins, Amin-Zeus stamped.” She dropped the clipboard. “Two dozen. Egyptian. Original. Amin-Zeus stamped.”

“You fool!” Foreman shouted. “But Ptolemy? That’s third century BC.
After
the time period I need them for.”

Mrs. Sanchez shrugged. “You didn’t say anything about the flip side, Mister Foreman. Every coin has a flip side, you know.” It was not a question. And like someone behind the counter at the DMV, she proceeded to give him the same lecture she gave him almost every time he came in. “You have to be very, very specific when you fill out the form. It’s not our job to interpret your requests.”

Mrs. Sanchez was in Southwestern apparel, with flowing white hair, dark skin, and an angular face. Silver and turquoise jewelry adorned her fingers, wrists, and neck. Colorful rugs decorated the walls along with etchings of the desert. She was in her late sixties and retirement wasn’t even on the horizon for her, although she had no doubt when she did retire, her daughter would fill her shoes quite nicely, thank you, just as Mrs. Sanchez had filled her own mother’s so many years ago. The Sanchezes had carved out their own unique place here in the bowels of the Pentagon.

Foreman had done the same, except in a quite different direction. He was muttering to himself as he put the coins and leather sack down on the counter.

“Do you have the new order?” Foreman asked.

Mrs. Sanchez put a briefcase on the counter and opened it, turning it so Foreman could inspect it. He searched through the objects in the briefcase with shaking hands. They represented currency across the spectrum of history, from BC to current day.

“I’ll need the older Amin-Zeus coins,” Foreman said. His old, once-thick white hair was beginning to give way to a liver-spotted scalp. His face was like a hatchet, no softness in it at all. His eyes, once like steel, had softened over the years with cataracts, and he wore a pair of thick spectacles that were smudged with fingerprints.

“What’s the special word?” Mrs. Sanchez asked, as if speaking to a child.

“Please,” Foreman said.

“I’ll work on it,” Mrs. Sanchez said. “Is the rest in order?”

“It appears to be,” Foreman grudgingly said.

“You’re welcome,” Mrs. Sanchez said as she slapped the top of the case shut. She placed her hand over a sensor and a red light flashed. “I’ll have it shipped to New York by courier, as per Protocol.”

“Yes, yes,” Foreman muttered. “But the Egyptian currency. It’s important.”

“It will be here when it gets here,” Mrs. Sanchez said. “There are some things that take time. Finding the original currency, especially such rare and valuable coins, isn’t easy.”

“Time?”
Foreman gave a snort. “You know nothing of time!”

“I believe we’re done here,” Mrs. Sanchez said. She hit a button under her side of the counter and the door behind Foreman slid open, revealing his transportation.

“Yes, yes.” Foreman turned around and went into the room, taking the chair that awaited. The door hissed shut.

“Have a nice day.” Mrs. Sanchez sighed as she took the briefcase to a glass door, which she opened, and then slid the case in. It was gone in a second, whisked away by some hidden mechanism.

“That crazy old man scares me,” Mrs. Sanchez’s daughter said.

“His budget last year was one hundred forty-six million, two hundred and twelve thousand, five hundred and forty-five dollars,” Mrs. Sanchez said. “He doesn’t file a breakdown on how it’s spent. But it’s appropriated every year, grandfathered in.”

“What exactly does he do?” the daughter asked. “Who does he work for?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Sanchez said, and that was the scariest thing her daughter had ever heard her mother say.

In the box, Foreman was moved horizontally and vertically along tracks, one box among several underneath the Pentagon. It wasn’t the smoothest ride, with some starts and stops and the occasional backwards movement. In a sense, the covert world that was literally underneath the Pentagon had mastered the concept of cubicles.

The box came to a halt and the door opened—once more where it was supposed to and not at the “final destination.” Foreman stood up as the box door opened, and then a door beyond it slid aside. Before stepping out, Foreman reached around the doors to the left and blindly flipped off an infrared sensor. Then he entered the windowless cube that had been his Pentagon office for over fifty years.