Legacy by David Lynn Golemon Page A

you in trouble, young man.” Rawlins stepped out onto the walkway and looked around. Then he removed the object he had retrieved from his desk. It was a small digital camera. He adjusted the automatic focus, zooming into the shocked and now strangled security guard. He snapped a picture and then looked down at one of the hundred security men he had on staff. “Your services will no longer be needed at my home.”
    Rawlins turned and stepped inside the French doors and closed them behind him. His anger was totally vented and the relief he felt was just this side of ecstasy. He turned the small digital camera over and looked at the picture he had just taken on the small LED screen. He smiled and half nodded his head. “Not bad.”
    He picked up the phone as he placed the camera on the desktop. He punched in a number and waited.
    “Security. Anderson speaking,” the voice said as Rawlins picked up the camera once more and studied the picture.
    “Ah, Mr. Anderson, one of your men seems to have had an accident right outside my study on the west side of the house. I think you better call for an ambulance—very quietly of course, I think he tripped and fell. Very good, no, please don’t disturb me. I have quite a bit of work to catch up on.”
    Rawlins set the phone down and smiled at the small picture of the dead security guard. He finally opened the drawer and shut off the camera as he placed it inside. As he did he saw the small framed photograph he had placed inside a few months earlier, meaning to get the frame changed. He had forgotten about it. He picked it up once more as he had a million times in his life and looked at himself forty-five years earlier. He was standing next to his father in the black-and-white photo. He himself was as unsmiling as the man standing next to him. The dark-haired man wore the uniform of an Army lieutenant colonel. The uniform was spit-polished and fit as snugly as a tailor could make it. They stood in front of an old castlelike structure that looked as if it had seen better days.
    “Nineteen sixty-five,” he mumbled.
    As he lay the picture back inside the drawer, he knew the old castlelike building was no castle at all. Nowhere close, in fact. It was a stone monstrosity made to keep men imprisoned and his father had been the gatekeeper of that fairy-tale place—the man with the key in a rotating nation-by-nation watchman’s role.
    He closed the drawer, shutting out the stern image of his father. Yes, his own flesh and blood had been the gatekeeper back in 1965, and that was how the events of today were related to Reverend Rawlins.
    The keys of the gatekeeper opened and closed the dungeonlike cells of Germany’s Spandau Prison.
    LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
     
    Jack Collins and Sarah McIntire stood on the large front porch of one of the more modest houses high in the hills just off Flamingo Boulevard in Las Vegas. Collins was a former black operations guru and a man with countless incursions behind enemy lines, and that was why Sarah McIntire could not figure out exactly why Jack was nervous about seeing his old boss, Senator Garrison Lee. Jack knew he was never one for watching people he loved and admired slip away. Sarah, her stature exactly one foot four inches shorter than the colonel’s, placed her hand through Jack’s arm as they waited for the door to be answered. They both wore civilian attire; the colonel in a button-down blue shirt and Sarah in a green skirt and white blouse. They both felt odd and out of place without the blue jumpsuit of the Event Group uniform, or at the very least their desert BDUs.
    Jack and Sarah were both officially on detached service to Department 5656. Collins was head of the large security force at the complex that provided security for all archaeological digs and the safeguarding of its valuable finds and equally valuable complex, while Sarah, an Army lieutenant, was head geologist assigned to the Earth Sciences Department. It had been the senator who