Extinction Machine

Chapter Thirty

The Warehouse, Department of Military Sciences field office

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 7:05 a.m.

I turned to Church, expecting to see him shaking his head in denial. Or smiling. Or telling Bug to stop shoveling the bullshit.

Instead he stood there, silent, the muscles at the corners of his jaw flexing.

After a long moment I said, “Oh, come on!”

“We need to remain open to any possibility,” said Church.

Bug said, “Junie Flynn says that M3 keeps adding to the Black Book. Stuff from other crashes.”

“Other crashes?” I demanded.

“Sure. There are UFOs all over the place. It’s in the news, Joe, and lately there have been a ton of new sightings in the Southwest, all over Mexico, in Canada, Russia, Europe. UFO sightings are way up.”

“Sightings or crashes?”

“Well, okay, sightings are up, but there have been bunch of crashes since the forties. The Black Book has data on all of them, and some stuff stolen from other governments, too. We’re not the only ones doing this, but we’re ahead of the pack because Roswell was the first crash in the modern era, and the first one where they were able to recover anything of value. The Black Book has specifications, schematics, analyses of materials, metallurgic reports, weights and measures. Everything. Like I said, the Majestic Black Book is the bible, Joe, the holy grail for reverse-engineering technology from alien spacecraft.”

“No way,” I said, shaking my head. “Maybe this book is packed with technological secrets but they’re going to be from pretty ordinary sources. This is weird enough now without bringing aliens into it.”

“Hey, man,” complained Bug, his face flushing, “I wasn’t the one who brought up the Black Book. The president himself just asked us to find it.”

“He didn’t say anything about little green men.”

“It’s implied, Joe, it’s implied.”

“Can we take a moment here,” I said, “maybe take a breath, return to the real world? We’re talking UFOs. We’re involved in a conversation in which UFOs are an actual thing. I know we deal with some very weird shit here in the old D of MS, but do you really think we should waste our time running down a lead like this? You want me to drop everything and go talk to a conspiracy theory nut who lives in a lighthouse?”

“Tell me, Captain,” he said quietly, “what other lead were you planning to follow?”

I opened my mouth to fire back a crushing reply, but there were no words on my tongue. Ghost gave a low, significant whuff.

To Bug, I said, “How many copies of the Black Book are there? Maybe we should send teams to every possible location and—”

But Bug was already shaking his head. “There’s only one copy. The copy. It’s supposed to be kept in this incredible safe with all sorts of booby traps and stuff.”

“Uh-huh,” I murmured skeptically. “And are there trolls and dragons guarding it?”

“I’m just repeating what Junie said. She also says that the Majestic charter does not allow the book to be photographed or copied in any way, and for anyone to see it the book has to be checked out by one of the three governors of M3.”

A knock on the door saved me from saying something that would probably have hurt Bug’s feelings. Gus Dietrich poked his head in. “Got some news about those four guys you tussled with, Joe.”

“What kind of news?” I asked.

“Bad, very bad, and strange,” he said, stepping into the room. “First the bad news—those names are bogus. Stephen Albert, Benjamin Carr, John Woods Duke, and Mark Bucci are names of dead American composers.”

“Somebody has an interesting sense of humor,” mused Church.

“Ha-f*cking-ha,” I groused. “What else?”

“That’s the very bad news. They were taken to the ER at Harbor Hospital. At least that was the plan. A pair of ambulances showed up, EMTs loaded them, and they took off with a patrol car leading the way. The ambulances made a sudden left and by the time the cruiser saw them turning and circled the block to find them, the two ambulances were gone. Cops tried to radio the EMTs and got nothing. Helicopter flyovers failed to locate the vehicles. Police are searching for them, but there are a million warehouses, multicar residential garages, and boathouses in that section of town.”

Bug looked at me from the big screen on the wall. “I can put somebody on that. Lot of ambulance services have GPS units, so we can probably track them. The ambulance company might also have a remote vehicle disabling system. Lot of them do because of all those warnings from Homeland about how easy it would be to use a vehicle like that as a car bomb.”

“Gus,” I said, “send everything you have to Bug and keep me posted.”

He nodded and headed for the door.

“Wait,” I said, “what’s the ‘strange’ news?”

He turned with an enigmatic smile. “Oh yeah … that little metal doodad you found? I had the geek squad look it over. Get this … they can’t identify the material. They’re not even sure it is metal. But it might take a while for them to figure out what it is.”

“Why?” asked Church.

“Because X-rays won’t penetrate it and when they tried to run it through the MRI there was some kind of system failure. The geeks are trying to reboot the medical computers now.”

“What happened?” I asked. “Did that metal thing cause the crash?”

“That’s what they’re trying to figure out now.”

Church pursed his lips for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, Gus, keep us posted.”

But Gus lingered for one moment more. “Oh, and Joe—your bird’s smoking on the roof. You want Echo Team on deck?”

“No, this is just a pickup. We don’t want to scare our expert more than we have to. Flight crew only. I’d rather have Top meet with the cop who lost the ambulances. Tell him to spread the team out and help with a search of the harbor area. I want those vehicles found.”

“You got it.” He left, closing the door firmly behind him.

To Church I said, “We need to add more numbers to today’s weird-o-meter, ’cause that just pushed it past ‘ten.’ I got a bad vibe from those four jokers from the jump.”

His answer was a stern grunt.

“Is that connected to the president’s abduction?” asked Bug. “I mean, I’m with you on not liking the coincidence, Joe, but I really don’t see how those two fit.”

“Neither do I, Bug. All I have to go on here is gut, and my gut is telling me that there has to be a connection. Has to be.”

“Then we need to find it,” said Church. “I’ve called Dr. Sanchez and he’s on his way in. I believe he has some interest in this field and—”

I was surprised. “He does?”

“Sure,” said Bug, “he and I talk about it a lot.”

“You do?”

“I’ve participated in some of those discussions,” said Church. “It’s by no means an uncommon topic around here.”

“It isn’t? Where the hell was I when all this was going on?”

Bug shrugged. “Out shooting things, probably.”

When I looked at Church, he spread his hands. “You would probably be surprised at how the support staff manage their time while the field teams are going to or coming from the field.”

I grunted.

“My point,” said Church, “is that Dr. Sanchez will want to help and right now information gathering is going to be a primary concern. Knowing that the Black Book is our focus helps us make some decisions about which other elements of this may be related. I’ll draw up a list of useful contacts for him to call.”

“Okay, but if we get our hands on the Black Book—then what? How do we let the kidnappers know?”

“Presumably they will contact us. I don’t want to be caught empty-handed when they reach out.”

“No shit. Then I guess I’ll go and see if Junie Flynn will help us.”

I could think of twenty reasons why this was a bad idea and a waste of time.

But I was already out the door.

Four minutes later Ghost and I were in a big UH-60 Black Hawk, lifting off from the roof of the Warehouse. The DMS birds were as black as their names except for thin red lines around the doors and along the tail. The muscular General Electric engines raised the six tons of mass into the morning air and the pilot turned the nose toward the northeast. Elk Neck State Park was sixty miles away. In scant minutes we were screaming through the air at two hundred miles an hour, racing as if the tick of each fragile second was one digit less on some bomb that we couldn’t see.

The president was missing. Taken from the White House in a scenario we all agreed was impossible. Actually impossible.

A mysterious video from a source even MindReader couldn’t trace threatened terrible destruction if we didn’t obtain a copy of a book that, fifteen minutes ago, even Mr. Church believed was a myth. A book I’d never heard of. A book that, had I first heard about it on one of those cable science shows, I would have dismissed with a laugh and channel-surfed over to an old Baywatch rerun.

A book that was supposed to hold secrets.

UFOs.

I mean … seriously? UFOs? Did I have to start believing in them now?

Or was this one of those things—like the Seven Kings—where it was misinformation layered over disinformation layered over insane conspiracy theory mumbo jumbo? The Kings had wanted us to believe that a goddess was punishing human iniquity by sending new versions of the old Egyptian Ten Plagues. When all the smoke cleared, that was just another bunch of terrorists playing on human fear and paranoia in order to make a buck.

Was that what we had here? Were we catching the outside edge of another massive con game?

I actually hoped so. The alternative was …

I looked at Ghost, who was crouched down on the helo’s deck. He felt me watching him and stared up at me with big, brown, bottomless eyes.

“This is nuts,” I said.

Ghost gave me another whuff, and left it entirely up to me how to interpret it.