# 28: Viper- The head of the Viper was dead.

..............................................................................................................................................

---

months later

One would think that Viper itself would then die. One would be wrong. That’s not how government secret agencies worked. These kinds of Vipers are like Hydras in that they grow a new head and become more powerful than before the old head was removed. The Viper agency was part of a government department therefore if Viper was removed the department’s funding would suffer. That could not be allowed to happen.

A new director was selected by the Administrator. He was given Carte Blanche and an increased budget. Considering the weather problems it was deemed unnecessary to bother the Senate with something so minor as a confirmation. His job was to determine what his job was and then to carry it out as he saw fit.

Director McCarthy hadn’t left any records that he knew of. He didn’t trust them. McCarthy was a spook and knew full well that the only way that a secret could be kept between two people was if one of them were dead. All of his secrets had been kept when he died he would have thought. As far as he was aware and as far as he was able to control it he was correct. Unfortunately McCarthy’s paranoia had not kept abreast of the latest technology.

The room in which the director had died had been kept under armed guard at all times. The guards had been rotated quiet frequently so that they were always alert and they were videoed while on duty. Any later review of the video would identify anyone who’s attention lagged. Those individuals were replaced. No one entered the secure conference room without a separate armed escort. The door guards stayed at the door. The janitors, for example, were shadowed by additional guards who were VERY suspicious of their every move. All of the guards knew all of the other guards personally.

When the cleaning, or other service was done the service personnel were escorted to another room in which they removed all of their clothing and were decontaminated as if they had been exposed to Haz-Mat. Their clothing and the trash were burned in an incinerator in the very same room.

Immediately prior to any use of the room it was ‘swept’ by guards using the very latest multi-spectrum detection units. The detection equipment itself was carefully monitored and kept secure at all times.

The room was deep underground and built inside a hi-resolution well grounded Faraday Cage. Nothing could get in or out unnoticed larger than pollen.

That was actually true.

Unfortunately there were millions of pollen sized optical receptors embedded in the paint. The system was totally passive using nothing but ambient light. The light entered the receptors and was routed out of the room via undetectable hair thin glass fibers to a node hundreds of feet away. There the very faint light was converted to a full audio/video signal. The Administrator didn’t like anyone keeping secrets from him not even his Directors. He’d had the system installed off budget and without anyone’s knowledge. The workers who had installed it had been involved in a tragic, fatal accident, in fact the whole company had.

So sad.

When he wanted to the Administrator could join the proceedings. He might as well have been sitting in a lounge chair in the middle of the meeting. It wasn’t VR but it was damn close. No one knew he was there.

That fatal night the Director was halfway thru a meeting regarding a SWAT team operation when the he lost his head, literally. The video showed his head twitching to one side, then lifting off his neck in a fountain of blood. The head then vanished from sight.

Upon examination of the neck cut it was discovered to be very precise. What ever had cut his head off had been so sharp that the finest surgical steel scalpel might as well have been a chain saw by comparison.

For months afterward, the video had been folded, spindled and mutilated in the lab. Finally it submitted to their tender loving ministrations and showed them what they wanted to see. An indefinite, indistinct, unclear, ill defined, hazy, faint, nebulous, amorphous shadow of something remove the director’s head.

The video showed the shadow of a shadow then floating near the ceiling, avoiding all contact with people until the door was opened, then it too, vacated the room. Additional ministrations to all of the pertinent video monitoring sites for the rest of the building showed the same thing. The hazy, indistinct, barely detectable, shadow casually made it’s way to the front door.

When the door opened it was gone.

The new director had been given carte blanche, or so he thought, to solve the mystery. In addition to the video he had two other pieces of information. One was a damaged audio recording the other was a data card. The audio was barely comprehensible but the data card had been trashed.

........................
The Next Episode will be
#29: Naomi: I'm Listening…
The Previous Episode was
# 27: Viper- Cut Off One Head…
The First Episode was
# 1 : Prologue…
..............
Book One: SoulStone
..................................................
I'm

@everittdmickey
.
I write
SPECULATIVE FICTION
My books on Amazon.
I engage in political commentary
and
generally talk about anything that strikes my fancy
on
Steemit
and
Sola

When watching the LameStream FakeNews Media

it's hard to tell what’s true or when they are lying isn’t it? It seems that they are more interested in influencing public opinion than they are reporting the facts.
SteemPunk Snail Image from Pixabay