Extinction Machine

Chapter Twenty-eight

The Warehouse, Department of Military Sciences Field Office

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 6:55 a.m.

I looked at Church. “What the hell was that?”

“What does it look like?” he asked.

“If this was any other day … I’d say it was a joke.”

“I seriously doubt we are being punked,” he said. Church was a big man in his sixties who looked like someone who had spent his life doing the kind of stuff I do now. Age didn’t have its claws in him yet, and he still looked like he could give anyone in the DMS a serious run for his money. Myself included. Dark hair shot with gray, a blocky build, and calculating eyes behind tinted glasses.

Right now, though, he looked more stressed than I’d ever seen him. A stranger couldn’t tell—to anyone else Church looked like a man in complete control of every aspect of his life—but I could see the cracks at the edges of his calm.

“Who sent it to us?”

“Unknown. I’ve tried to backtrack it but MindReader keeps coming up with an error message.”

“I thought MindReader could track any e-mail or Web site.”

“So did I.”

That hung in the air for a moment, weird and ugly.

“That footage of the wave hitting New York,” I said. “That’s from a movie. I recognize it but I can’t grab the name.”

“I thought so, too. A film about the end of the world. Bug will know. I sent this to him, so we can expect his call any minute.”

Bug was the DMS computer supergeek who was also a pop culture nerd of legendary status.

“Who else has seen this?” I asked.

“I forwarded it to Aunt Sallie at the Hangar, of course, and to Linden Brierly. Otherwise, no one.”

He sent the video from his laptop to the big HD screen on the wall and we watched it a couple of times. It didn’t make any more sense the third time than it did the first time. It was equally freaky and equally frightening.

“The name the president used. Rector? That’s you, right?”

Church nodded. He had a lot of names and as far as I’ve been able to determine, none of them are his real name. Most folks in government circles refer to him as “Deacon.” I often wondered if his own daughter, Circe, knew her father’s real name. I doubted it.

“It’s a name I haven’t used in a while,” he said. “The president knows it from a matter that predates his presidency and may have chosen to use it as a code. However, if I am supposed to infer a specific meaning from it, then so far I am drawing a blank.”

“You’re going to have to show this to Bill Collins, you know.”

Church nodded. “That’s something Linden Brierly will have to manage. I am officially barred from this case.”

“Barred? Why?”

“The acting president has some doubts about my loyalty.”

“Shame I’m not drinking coffee,” I said. “This is a classic moment for a spit-take.”

He almost smiled. “Apparently President Collins variously believes me to be the villain who has been using MindReader to launch the cyber-attacks or a fool who has mismanaged access to MindReader.”

“Remind me again—I know assassination is against the law, but is there a rule against slapping some stupid off of an idiot playacting at president?”

“He is a difficult man to admire,” conceded Church.

I stared at the screen. “What’s this book the actual president kept mentioning?”

“The Majestic Black Book,” Church said, putting the full name out there.

“Which tells me nothing. What is it? What’s in it? Who wrote it? And why would you capture the president of the United frigging States to get a copy? I’m guessing it’s not available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.”

You can’t read Church’s eyes. He wears tinted lenses for that very purpose. It’s impossible to guess what he’s thinking or where his thoughts are wandering. While he considered my question he used the tip of his index finger to trace a slow circle on the desktop.

“Until now I believed that it was an urban myth,” he said slowly. “One of those elaborate conspiracy theories that have grown up around secret governments.”

“Ah, secret governments,” I said glumly. “I never get enough of secret governments.”

“They do exist, Captain,” said Church. “Any government as large as ours is compartmentalized. Divisions, departments, and groups splinter off, sometimes because they’ve been authorized to go deep and remain off the bureaucratic grid and sometimes to pursue other less official agendas. Congress knows about some of these and provides a degree of oversight, even if buried under layers of secrecy. Others manage to function within our government but without oversight. A case can be made that America would never have become a country had not a secret society of Freemasons taken charge.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve read Dan Brown.”

Church didn’t smile. “Some of these groups believe—or claim to believe—that they are acting in the best interests of the nation. A case can be built to substantiate some of those claims, just as a case can be built that such manipulation generally has a profit-based agenda attached at some level.”

“And this Black Book? How does this tie into that?”

“To be determined. What little I know of the Black Book comes secondhand from a more knowledgeable source.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “You have a friend in the conspiracy theory industry?”

“Actually, I have several,” he said, reaching for his cell phone again. This time, however, he surprised me. The image on the HD screen changed and suddenly there was Bug.

“Dudes!” he said brightly. “The Majestic Black Book? Are you freaking kidding me here? How cool is my job?”

His name was Jerome Taylor, but everyone called him “Bug.” Even his mother. He’s the only person, aside from Church, who has total access to the MindReader computer system. Bug was a former child-star computer genius who hacked his way into Homeland because he thought it would make a good senior project if he found Bin Laden. He’d been arrested and then Church hijacked him for the DMS. Even though Bug’s early attempt at taking down the head of Al-Qaeda hadn’t worked, years later when he had the full resources of MindReader at his disposal, he was largely responsible for putting Uncle Osama in the crosshairs of the heroes on SEAL Team Six. Bug currently ran the MindReader center at the Hangar in Brooklyn. The high-def screen made it look like he was right there in my office.

“Glad you’re amused,” said Church. “However, we do have a national crisis on our hands.”

“Yeah, I know. The president, end of the world. Sucks. But … the Black Book? So cool.” He beamed at us like it was Christmas morning. “Tell me we’re really going after it.”

“First things first,” said Church. “Give me your assessment of the video.”

Bug gave a dismissive shrug. “Meh. It’s poor-quality alarmist trash. Crap like that wouldn’t even get much play on YouTube.”

“Pretend it’s real,” I said.

“Oh, I have no doubt it’s real,” Bug amended, “it’s just that terrorists always make crappy videos. Kind of disappointing because anyone can buy the right software and do a decent job. It speaks to standards and—”

“Bug,” said Church very quietly.

Bug blinked in a very buglike way. A cartoon bug. “Um … right. Sorry.”

“The disaster clips?” I asked. “Are they—?”

“Most of them are real, sure. News footage. I can locate the sources, that won’t be a problem. I’m doing a search now to find the island with the volcano. Oh, and that last clip they showed was from the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Made by the same guys who did Independence Day and 2012. They got this thing about destroying landmarks.”

“Do any of those movies deal with the Majestic Black Book?” asked Church.

“Nah.” Bug screwed up his face as he thought about it. “Actually … I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the book mentioned in a movie. Well, not in a theatrical movie. Not in fiction. You see it all the time in documentaries and on TV, though. Lot of nonfic books about it.”

“Get me a list of those books and documentaries,” said Church. “And the names of any experts associated with the Black Book.”

“That’s easy,” snorted Bug. “But why not go straight to the source?”

“Source?” Church and I asked at the same time.

“Sure. Junie Flynn.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“She’s the one who first broke the story about the existence of the Black Book,” said Bug. “She’s on all those documentaries.”

Bug tapped keys and suddenly his image shifted so that he shared a split screen with a photo of a beautiful woman who looked like a 1960s flower child. Masses of long, wavy blond hair, sky-blue eyes, a smile so wholesome it could cure cancer, and a splash of sun freckles across her nose. The photo had been taken against a field of daisies, daffodils, and sunflowers.

“Wow,” I said.

“I know,” said Bug with enthusiasm. “She’s hot, right? She’s also one of the top experts on conspiracy theories—I mean she’s up there with George Noory and Bill Birnes and guys like that. Written like twenty books and she’s been on Nat Geo, the History Channel, Discovery, and all the others. Junie tracks all of the conspiracies. Her Web site has this great searchable database and there’s tons of stuff about the Majestic Black Book. I’m telling you, man, she’s like a hot version of Yoda.”

“Then we need to talk to her,” I said. “How fast can you get me her contact info?”

“Pretty fast, Joe, she’s right here in Maryland. She lives in that old lighthouse in Elk Neck State Park.”

“Turkey Point Lighthouse? Right at the head of the Chesapeake Bay?”

“That’s the one.”

“I thought the lighthouse was decommissioned,” I said. “They turned it into a light station.”

“No, they put it back into operation a year ago and she’s the official keeper.”

Church turned to me. “You can find this lighthouse easily?”

“You kidding?” I asked. “I know every inch of that place. I camped at Elk Neck with my family all my life. I took my nephew there half a dozen times.”

“Good,” he said. “Take a helo and go out there. If you think she’s a viable information source—and if she’s cooperative—then we’ll set up a coded video conference call with her, Bug, Dr. Hu, and Dr. Sanchez. If she stonewalls you, arrest her and bring her back here.”

“‘Arrest her’?” I asked, smiling.

“Feel free to use charm if that will work better, Captain. Whatever gets the job done. If this threat is real then we need to get ahead of it and we don’t know what our timetable is.”

Before I could even reply Church called Gus to prep my Black Hawk.

“Whoa, hold on,” I said. “Before I go gallivanting off I’d like a few answers. I mean, what the hell is this book? What’s the connection to all of those natural disasters? And why would someone go to such insane lengths as to capture the president of the United States in order to get it?”

“Are you serious?” Bug asked, appalled at my apparent stupidity. “There are people making billions off that book.”

“According to rumor and speculation,” murmured Church.

“Who’s making that kind of money?” I asked. “And how?”

“Probably half the big shots with defense contracts,” Bug said. “Anyone working on advanced stealth technology, space-based phasers, military space fleets, hypersonic technology vehicles, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, cloaking devices, antigravity drives—”

“C’mon, Bug, we can’t do most of that stuff yet.”

“You don’t know that, Joe,” said Bug. “We’re researching all of it. And, hey, that nifty microwave pulse pistol you brought in the other day? That’s the sort of thing people like this would build.”

“Wouldn’t most of that fall under DARPA’s umbrella?” I asked.

DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—is a big group within the Department of Defense. They’re the geeks responsible for a lot of major scientific breakthroughs from the Internet to combat exoskeletons.

“DARPA works with independent contractors, too,” said Bug. “GE, Shelton Aeronautics, and like that. DARPA doesn’t do all of its own research in-house, and it sure as heck doesn’t do its own manufacturing. It only has a three-billion-dollar budget. And, there’s a lot of extremely weird and highly profitable stuff being done in the private sector based on ideas either borrowed from DARPA or gotten from some other source—like the Black Book. And I’ll bet that’s where DARPA got most of its stuff, too. It’s all there in the book, man, that’s the bible for weird tech.”

“You’re talking like I should know what that book is and I don’t, Bug. What the f*ck is it?”

Bug took a breath. “Okay, Cliffs Notes version. On September 24, 1947, President Harry Truman convened a special group of scientists, military leaders, and government officials—a dozen of them—for the express purpose of studying wreckage recovered from a crash site in New Mexico. This group was called ‘Majestic Twelve,’ or MJ-12. However, according to Junie Flynn, MJ-12 was only the front for an even more secret group, a deeper level of shadow government called ‘Majestic Three,’ M3. A trio of people who had been given control of an enormous black budget to study the wreckage in case there was anything of military value. Bear in mind, these were the early days of the Cold War. The international arms race was already spinning out of control. Junie says that the members of M3 created a book that was a catalog of all parts recovered from the crash. The only complete catalog, they say, with exact specifications, which makes it particularly valuable.”

“Whoa, slow down—what crash site in New Mexico? Are we talking Russian spy planes or—”

“Joe,” said Bug, amazed, “haven’t you been listening? This is the Majestic Project. The Black Book is a complete catalog of all the parts salvaged from the UFO that crashed in Roswell.”