Kyle snickered, and I was quick to defend myself. “Okay. I feel like I did a slightly better job of explaining it than saying we hunted bad guys.”
“Sorry. Just trying to wrap my head around you guys and your littleX-Filesmission.”
“X-Files, huh?” Mick said. “I like this kid. You can think of me as Scully.”
“You haven’t told this kid about Area 51, have you?” Kyle asked.
“Holy fucking shit,” Ty said.
“Kyle,” I said sternly.
“Wait. Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Kyle, you know we don’t have clearance to discuss that,” Tara chastised.
They all glanced at one another, donning expressions as serious as I was sure they could muster before Mick cracked, followed by the rest. And as much as they were giving Ty hell, it was kind of funny to see how freaked out he looked.
“Wait.” Ty searched around uneasily, looking even more panicked than he’d already been. “Someone needs to tell me if Area 51 is really a thing.”
“Of course it’s a thing,” Mick said, “But not aliens. Although, if I knew anything about aliens, would I tell you?”
“At this point, that seems about as plausible as everything that’s been happening in my life so far,” Ty said, and he had a point.
“Okay, guys.” I felt like I had to step in. “Leave him alone. He’s had a rough few days, and he has too many actual bad guys to worry about without needing to stress about extraterrestrials.”
“Now, Liam, you know that’s not the official term for them,” Kyle said, winking.
“Enough jokes!” I insisted.
At the same time, maybe we needed to have a good laugh, considering all we were dealing with at the moment.
“Ty, we specialize in a variety of tasks,” I explained. “Throughout US history, these organizations—CIA, FBI, DHS, NSA, all the acronyms standing for the fleet of agencies necessary to maintain order—have had their share of corruption, been involved in shady enterprises. And also, a desire to not be held liable for certain activities.”
“Like with the CIA hiring Blackwater to carry out assassinations,” Mick interjected.
“Ty, do you know what Blackwater is?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“It’s a mercenary army—think protection and hits for hire. The CIA commissions them when they don’t want to get their hands dirty. Think of us as an early FBI version of the same thing. Back in the day, the IPB was initially intended to root out certain powerhouse KKK crime bosses in the US, then the responsibility shifted to hunting Nazis, both within the US and outside of it. But also, along with all that, we became responsible for helping the FBI handle corruption within the CIA, including some heinous studies they were doing on civilians. You heard of MKUltra?”
“Yeah,” Ty said. “That’s where the CIA was testing the effects of LSD on people.”
“It was more than LSD, and testing on civilians, to be clear,” Mick said. “The mind-altering drug experiments were just part of the corruption that was exposed to the public. There’s a whole lot more that no one ever heard about. The sorts of human experimentation that would make your skin crawl, done by agents with too much power and too little interest in ethics or morality. The IPB stepped in, shut the operations down, and kept it quiet for the organizations. In the process, the IPB became the most important secret government agency. Integral in acting as a sort of checks and balances within these powerful government agencies.”
Checks and balances? Seemed like a joke to me at this point in my life, after everything I’d seen.
“So keep in mind,” I continued, “every time you hear about some dirty dealing with narcotics and firearms, or about a Snowden-level government agency leak, there’s something much worse going on at the expense of the people they are set up to protect. One of the IPB’s jobs is to keep these guys in check. Tara, Mick, Kyle, and I are just one task force, part of a much larger organization.”
“They call us F5,” Mick said.
“But there are only four of you,” Ty noted.
“It stands for Force 5,” I explained. “The five is our level of clearance, on a scale of one to five. So there are F1s, F2s…”
“I think whoever came up with the name must’ve had a thing for tornadoes,” Mick chimed in, “because F1s and F2s are gonna cause you some problems, but an F5 will fuck you up.”
“How many F5s are there?”
