Extinction Machine

Chapter Fifty-two

Turkey Point Lighthouse, Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 10:24 a.m.

“What’s wrong?” Junie asked as I came back into the house. “God, you look like you just saw a ghost.”

“That would be a comforting break, actually.”

I sat down and poured myself some hot tea, stared into the cup, and didn’t drink any of it. Ghost, roused by what he thought was the mention of his name, whined to be petted. I ran my fingers through his fur and stared into the middle of the air, hoping that answers would appear out of nowhere.

They didn’t. What a surprise.

“Joe?” murmured Junie, concern in her voice.

I rubbed my eyes. “Things have gotten worse.”

“Can you tell me?”

“I think we’d better leave that to my boss. I’m going to video conference him in now, along with a couple of other people from my team.”

“Okay,” she said dubiously. She fluffed her hair, which did not make any appreciable change—it was just as wild and lovely—and smoothed her skirt.

I hit some keys on the MindReader keypad and suddenly we had a very weird little party. The large computer screen was broken into several smaller windows, each filled with a high-res 3-D image. Mr. Church, Bug, Dr. Hu, and Rudy Sanchez—who I was gratified to see was at the Warehouse and no longer on his toilet at home.

“Wow,” said Junie Flynn. “I feel like I’m on a game show.”

The big guy took the lead. “Ms. Flynn … my name is Mr. Church. Before I make introductions, I need to know if you are willing to cooperate with us in this matter.”

“I am,” she said, “but only as long as I feel that I’m doing the right thing. I’ll tell you straight up front that I don’t trust most government agencies and I have good reasons for that. If I think you’re manipulating me or trying to pull a fast one, then we’re done. You can arrest me or whatever.”

Mr. Church gave her a small, faint smile. “That is acceptable.”

But Junie wasn’t finished. “I negotiated a consultant’s fee with Joe. He’s agreed to pay me what I asked.”

Church nodded but did not ask what that price was. I saw Rudy’s eyebrow lift a little; he must have caught some nuance to her tone. I gave him a tiny nod. Hu seemed to have recovered from his earlier shock and now contrived to look bored. Bug was clearly in love.

“You gave us your conditions, Ms. Flynn,” said Church, “now here are mine. I expect that the content of this conversation is to be kept confidential. It is not to be talked about, written about, or otherwise shared except with my permission. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“The names of any organizations I choose to share with you, and the identities of the people involved in this matter fall under that agreement of secrecy.”

“Agreed,” said Junie. “Do you need me to sign anything?”

Church shook his head. “I’ve found that a signature on an agreement of secrecy is no guarantee of anything other than a basic ability to write one’s name. Either your word is good or it’s not. From what I have heard about you, I believe you to be a person of integrity.”

That put a smile on Junie’s face. Mine, too. Church was actually being mildly charming. The scoundrel.

“Are you going to tell me who you people are?’ asked Junie.

“You won’t have heard of us,” said Church. “I am the director of the Department of Military Sciences, the DMS. We are a small agency that operates under executive order. We are answerable to no other agency within the government. We are not answerable to Congress. Does that disturb you?”

“Yes.”

“It disturbs me, too,” said Church. “There should be no need for an agency like ours to exist. However the world is not a calm or safe place, and there are many people who would like to see it burn. Just as there are people who would like to see everyone in chains—real chains or those created by political, religious, ideological, informational, or theological manipulation. I am not one of those people. I employ people who share my view of fairness, freedom, and justice. Does this sound corny to you?”

“Actually,” she said, “it doesn’t.”

Church gave her a small nod and another small smile, and I had a totally irrational flash of jealousy. I felt as if all three of my inner personalities suddenly looked askance at me.

“Very well,” continued Church, “let me introduce the others who are working on this problem.” His introductions were brief and moderately nondescript. “Bug, head of computer division. Dr. William Hu, chief of science and research. Dr. Rudy Sanchez, a psychiatrist who consults on matters related to trauma.”

There was a very brief flurry of greetings. Hu as dismissive, Bug was obsequious, and Rudy was charming. No one was paving new ground.

“For the most part these men are participating as observers,” explained Church. “Captain Ledger and I will ask most of the questions, but having the others here trims down the time we’d waste sharing your remarks with them.”

Junie took a breath, gave me a brave smile, and nodded to the wall of faces.

Then Church hit her with the problem. He told her about the abduction. He showed her the videos—the original one and the second video I’d just watched. I studied Junie’s body as the information and images slammed into her. She straightened and stiffened and all the humor drained out of her face, leaving her drawn and deathly pale.

“Oh my God,” she breathed.

“Indeed,” said Church. “Now you know what we know, and you can see why Captain Ledger arrived unannounced and in such an unorthodox manner. He probably did not mention that he was also attacked this morning by four men who claimed to be government agents and who subsequently vanished without a trace. Someone else knows what’s going on and they’ve already made a move to obstruct our investigation. We have no clue who they are or what their motives might be.”

Junie glanced at me. “You didn’t tell me you were in a fight.”

“It wasn’t much of a fight,” I said.

From her expression I could tell that she didn’t believe me.

“You’re not hurt?”

“Didn’t even get my hair mussed.”

“If we can stay on point,” interrupted Church. In his own little screen, Hu was making a gagging sound. Rudy looked amused.

“Yes,” said Junie. “This is all … just so much so soon.”

“I wish we could offer time for you to get up to speed,” said Church, “but we don’t have that luxury. We need to know about the Majestic Black Book.”

“How much do you already know?”

“Some,” he admitted, “but why not give us your take on it.”

She nodded, thought about it, then dug in. “Joe admitted that he doesn’t know a lot about UFOs and the related conspiracies. What about the rest of you?”

“I know a lot,” said Bug, beaming.

“So do I,” said Hu sourly, “but I think this is all a waste of time.”

“I don’t know a tremendous amount,” said Rudy, “but I believe we’ve been visited. However, I never heard of the Black Book before today. Neither, I believe, has Dr. Hu or Joe. So, please don’t assume any useful knowledge on our part.”

Church said nothing and when it was clear he was not going to comment, Junie said, “Then let me start with some things everyone needs to know.” She took a breath. “It started with a group called Majestic 12—or MJ-12. That was a group of scientists, government officials, military officers formed by a secret executive order from President Harry S. Truman. The initial agenda for MJ-12 was to investigate the recovery of the UFO that crashed north of Roswell, New Mexico. The government denies that MJ-12 ever existed, however UFOlogists uncovered a collection of documents in 1984 that state that the group was formed based on a recommendation by Dr. Vannevar Bush and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. In 1985, another document mentioning MJ-12, dating to 1954, was found in a search at the National Archives. The FBI naturally attacked these documents as fabrications and continues to deny their authenticity.”

“But you don’t accept that denial?” asked Rudy.

“Hardly. Since the eighties, thousands of pages of other government documents mentioning MJ-12 have leaked out. The preponderance of evidence shows that there is an ongoing government cover-up of the existence of UFOs and the recovery of technologies from crash sites. According to these papers, the members of MJ-12 were Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who was the first director of the CIA; Dr. Vannevar Bush, who chaired the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was the predecessor of the National Defense Research Committee. Dr. Bush also set up and chaired the postwar Joint Research and Development Board (JRDB) and then the Research and Development Board (RDB) and was president of Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. Then there was James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy and the first secretary of Defense. When he died, he was replaced on MJ-12 by General Walter Bedell Smith, who was the second director of the CIA.”

“Wow,” I said.

She began ticking the others off on her fingers. “Next you have General Nathan Twining, who headed Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson AFB, and who was later the Air Force chief of staff from 1953 to 1957, and then the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff from ’fifty-seven to ’sixty-one. General Hoyt Vandenberg, who directed the Central Intelligence Group in ’forty-six and ’forty-seven and was Air Force chief of staff from ’forty-eight through 1953. General Robert M. Montague, a noted guided-missile expert and commander of the nuclear Armed Forces Special Weapons Center, Sandia Base. Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, an aeronautical engineer from MIT. Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, first director of Central Intelligence Group and first executive secretary of National Security Council. Gordon Gray: secretary of the Army and a top intelligence and national security expert as well as a CIA psychological strategy board. He was also the National Security advisor from 1958 through ’sixty-one. Harvard astronomer Dr. Donald Menzel, who was also a cryptologist during World War II and a security consultant to CIA and NSA. Dr. Detlev Bronk, a medical physicist and aviation physiologist who went on to chair the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, and become president of Johns Hopkins and Rockefeller universities. And last, but not least, Dr. Lloyd Berkner, a physicist, radio expert, and the executive secretary of Bush’s JRDB.”

“Again I say … wow.”

Dr. Hu looked like he’d rather be arranging his sock drawer than listening to any of this. He kept rolling his eyes like a thirteen-year-old girl.

Junie shook her head. “The point is that they were only the top level of administration. Advisors more than players. They never got their hands dirty beyond writing policy for the government on how it would handle UFOs and alien technology. These are the people who created the levels of misinformation and disinformation. They created Project Blue Book and commissioned the Condon Report, both of which were never intended for anything else except to present to the public a fabricated message that UFOs don’t exist. These men paved the way for generations of credible witnesses to be discredited, humiliated, maybe even killed. They are the ones who created the image of the aluminum-foil-hat-wearing delusionists who claim to have seen little green men. And yet all along they knew the truth. The MJ-12 documents include diagrams and records of tests on UFOs, memos on measures to prevent leakage of information, and descriptions of the president’s statements about UFO-related issues.”

“And they keep that truth from everyone?” suggested Rudy.

“Not from everyone,” said Junie. “There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who work for some aspect of the part of the defense industry that exists to exploit these alien technologies. Some people believe that a lot of the R and D is done by private companies in order to keep it outside of government oversight and to smooth the way for plausible deniability.”

“Absolutely,” agreed Bug. “I started a pattern search for people and businesses who fit this kind of profile. I’ve … um … been trolling your Web site for keywords to use as search arguments.”

“Fine by me,” said Junie.

I said, “And M3? Where does that come in?”

“They are the ones doing the actual work,” she said. “MJ-12 is the bureaucracy, but the Majestic Three are the true research and development people. They’re called ‘governors,’ and each one handles a specific area. Acquisitions, Research, and Development. The head of Acquisitions is generally the only nonscientist of the group, though occasionally the governor in charge of Development is more of an industrialist than an actual scientist. He or she hires scientists to develop the products that come out of the Research.”

“How do you know this?”

Junie paused and drummed her fingers on her knee for a long time before answering. “I … had a source.”

“A source?” asked Church. “What kind of source?”

“Someone who was on the inside,” she said evasively.

“‘Was’?” asked Hu, jumping on that.

“Was,” confirmed Junie, but she didn’t immediately explain. “My source was involved in the active R and D on recovered artifacts. That research required that he consult generations of notes that had been entered into the Black Book. Interesting to note that no one ever called it the Black Book, of course, and it was absolutely forbidden to mention words like ‘alien’ or ‘UFO’ at any of the labs or testing facilities. It all had to seem very normal, like they were reverse-engineering a captured MIG or some piece of Chinese spy technology.”

“Which it probably was,” muttered Hu, but everyone ignored him.

“All the research and development fell under one umbrella, though,” continued Junie. “They called it ‘the Project.’”

Church asked, “Your source was on the inside of this Project?”

“Very deep inside,” she said. “He was a senior researcher and designer. He led one of the most important teams, though like most of the senior scientists he consulted on several projects because so many research lines overlapped. They had a lot of these experimental lines going at once. Radical engine design, artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, organic computer memory, biological hybridization, even some work on psychic enhancement.”

“‘Psychic’?” echoed Hu, smiling. “Please.”

“Doctor,” said Church quietly. The smile vanished from Hu’s face.

“Yes, psychic,” said Junie with a bit of frost. “They wanted to develop pilots who were completely integrated with their craft, and who could think their commands instead of using control panels or joysticks. That was a big part of the Project. It was way more practical than the eye-head controlled operations we use now. It would have been the most important military development since the invention of the airplane. Maybe more so. It would be an incredible leap forward. A quantum jump forward in terms of the arms race.”

“How so?” I asked.

“The human mind is so much faster than a computer,” said Junie. “Not in data recall, of course, but in reaction time, decision-making, intuition, and creative reactions to critical encounters.”

“How much information did your source share with you?” asked Church.

“Yeah,” said Bug, “it sounds like a lot.”

Junie glanced at me and then down at her hands, which were folded nervously in her lap. “It was a lot.”

“Did he write any of it down?” asked Bug.

“He had notebooks,” she said, nodding almost absently. “Over a period of fourteen years he managed to copy every single entry in the Majestic Black Book.”

We all came to point like a pack of birddogs.

“Ms. Flynn,” said Church very quietly, “where are those notes?”

She raised her head and met his eyes. “Destroyed,” she said. “They’re all gone. My source was in a car accident and the notes were incinerated.”

The silence was crushing. I felt like I’d been hoisted up into the sunlight and then dropped right back down into the slime.

Rudy said something under his breath. Bug looked away; Hu gave a triumphant smile as if this was the kind of news he wanted. The man was deranged.

But Church continued to study Junie.

“What exactly happened to your source?” he asked. “How was it that all his research notes were with him when he had his accident? That seems strange to me.”

Junie nodded. “They found out that he was duplicating the Black Book. When he realized that they knew, he gathered together everything he had, notebooks, printouts, drawings, flash drives, all of it and took off. This was in Virginia, in a lab in Arlington. My … source … tried to make it all the way to D.C.”

“What did he hope to accomplish there?” I asked.

“Exposure,” she said. “There was an important bill being debated in the Senate. It was all over the news. That jobs bill a couple of years ago. My source wanted to get to the Capitol building and … I don’t know … crash the Senate.”

“The security would have stopped him.”

“He was terrified, he didn’t know where else to go. He thought that if he yelled out the right names right there, with all those congressmen and all that press, then maybe he could force his way into the public eye. He thought that creating a media sensation would keep him safe long enough to get the truth out there.”

“Guy sounds like a f*cking idiot,” said Hu.

Junie gave him a withering look. “He was naive. About that kind of thing … he was very naive. That’s how they hooked him in the first place. They played on his idealism. They sold him on a story that he was working on a project that would help save America and maybe even prevent future wars. Considering what he was working on, that seemed reasonable. It still could be, or would be in there was a genuine public welfare in the minds of those bastards in M3.”

“How so?” asked Rudy. “What were they working on?”

“In simplest terms they were trying to re-create the engine of the crashed UFO. That engine is enormously powerful, capable of flying all those light-years across space. My source was told that if this power could be tapped and controlled, then it could be the basis for an entirely new kind of clean, renewable energy.”

“Oh, wow,” said Hu, “a cliché.”

“Doc,” I said, “if you make one more crack I’m going to beat the living shit out of you. Tell me if I’m joking.”

“That’s enough,” barked Church, though I don’t know if he was directing that at Hu, me, or both of the yapping dogs.

In the ensuing silence, Church focused all his considerable personality on Junie.

“Ms. Flynn,” he said, “we know that your source never made it to Congress. What happened to him?”

“They got him,” she said.

“Who got him?” asked Church. “Specifically who?”

“The Closers.”

“And they are?”

“Most people call them the Men in Black.”