Page 53 - My FlipBook

was to let his superiors know when he had found the
unspecified thing and not to handle it. They would send
someone else to do that. The entire operation was surreal. The
best lead they had was that the only employee of the building

who was MIA, one Tommy Woodhead, made a call from his cell
phone in New Jersey and then a few hours later checked his
messages from Maine. He was scheduled to work and so his
absence was odd, but certainly did not look like the actions of a
thief. He had no prior arrests and the only listing in his file was
that he was a gay activist wannabe. It was a meaningless lead
as far as he could tell, but it was the only thing they had
remotely resembling a lead. Why, if this thing was so
important, was it not kept in an area with cameras and guards?

Why was it not locked away? The only explanation he could
entertain was that it was so secretive that nobody who
understood security even knew of it. That made it very
dangerous, indeed. It meant that whoever had knowledge of
the item was keeping it secretive from everyone else, even
those on their own side. Such secrets were never good ones,
to his knowledge. Being the professional patriot he was, he

would give his best to the task assigned to him without
complaining or questioning, until he had such information he
could reasonably question or complain. At this point he knew
nothing except what he could infer from knowing very little.
Within five minutes he had assembled a team of his finest
agents and herded them into a helicopter. At 2:24 am they
transferred into a convoy of black government vehicles and
hurried from the Coast Guard base at the Massachusetts

Allan R. Emery 43