The Blackfire Protocol by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 63

International travel was always part of the job and as president, Frank was obligated to travel overseas. Most of the time, it was for the support of U.S. interests or that of its allies. This time he found himself flying to a meeting for the Paris Climate Accord. He honestly didn’t care about global warming, but as leader of the free world, he had to at

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least show up and pretend to be interested. While he was gone, the cleaning crew got to work in the west wing. Most nights they could be found hard at work cleaning, mopping, and scrubbing every surface, leaving the White House shining as a cut diamond. Part of the process was cleaning the Oval Office. Dusting, polishing, and vacuuming were done on a nightly basis as well. But tonight would yield something unusual as a cleaning woman dusted the bookshelves; she, as usual, made use of a small stepladder and, reaching the top, noticed a book lying flat across those standing side by side. Reaching further, she pulled it down and, reading the cover, was shocked at what she found. The president had kept hidden a copy of Mein Kampf. Being an avid reader of history, she knew the book on sight, and finding a bookmark tucked into the back pages opened it. The chapter that had been saved was titled ‘The Final Solution’. There had also been notes written in the margins, and upon closer examination, she noticed that where the word ‘Jew’ had appeared, it had been crossed out and substituted with the words ‘the poor’. Frank would never know it, but his dark agenda had been uncovered—not by a politician, not by one of the country’s enemies, but by a cleaning woman. Yet, there was something more to her than her nightly duties, and with the knowledge she had just uncovered, she quietly walked to the secretary’s office and taking out a wooden stick match struck it, blew it out and left it in the ashtray. She did the same thing at every ashtray she found in the corridors, the kitchen, and the security office. This was the signal that others would soon follow in their duty within a deep cover

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group that had been preparing for decades. Many were unknown to each other in order to maintain plausible deniability. Should one be apprehended, no one else could be identified. The operations of this tightly knit group were known only to them under a non-existent program called ‘The Blackfire Protocol’. They had been organized for years, waiting for the one signal that would lead them to action should the country’s leader be exposed as a fascist. Their members consisted of people from nearly every department of the White House— maintenance, security, housekeeping, and kitchen staff. All had been thoroughly trained by a highly classified unit of the CIA, and once their training had been completed, those who provided it were marked as retired assets and eliminated. Everyone had a job to do and their loyalty to the outcome of their mission was absolute.

Circulating through the west wing, the cleaning woman did the same with nearly every ashtray she encountered. Once this had been seen by others within the group, they in turn left the same signal in places considered ordinary, and by weeks’ end, every member had been signaled. The burnt matches had been collected so as not to raise suspicion the next morning. The only thing left was to organize and execute the mission, and everyone knew the consequences of getting caught.