Extinction Machine

Chapter Seventy-one

The Warehouse

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 11:32 a.m.

Rudy’s next call was to Bill Birnes, publisher of UFO Magazine and, like Rudy’s fiancée Circe, a New York Times bestselling author. Although Rudy had seen Birnes several times on UFO specials and shows, it took Rudy a moment to realize that this was the same William J. Birnes who had written several landmark books on a completely different subject—serial killers. One of those books, The Riverman, coauthored by detective Dr. Robert Keppel, described how serial killer Ted Bundy helped police track Green River Killer Gary Ridgway. Rudy had read that book twice while working as a police psychologist prior to his being hired by Church for the DMS.

He used his laptop to run through Birnes’ other publishing credits and noted that he’d coauthored books with George Noory as well. That was good. The conversation with Noory had yielded a great deal of information. About M3, about the Black Book, and about the Closers—those fearsome Men in Black. Everything, along with Rudy’s notes and observations, had already been passed along to Mr. Church, Aunt Sallie, and Bug, and so the great investigative machine that was the DMS was already turning.

Rudy dialed the number and got Birnes on the line.

“How’s the Deacon doing these days?” asked Birnes after the introductions. “Still tilting at windmills?”

“Every day.”

“I’d expected nothing less. Tell me what you need and I’ll tell you if I can help.”

“I don’t know what Mr. Church knows,” confessed Rudy, “and he’s not available right now. I am attempting to gather as much information as possible to assist one of our field agents. One area in particular seems to make no sense to me.”

“Which is?”

“Funding. If a group like M3 exists, and they have been working for half a century to reverse-engineer technology from crashed alien craft, surely that would have to be an enormously expensive undertaking.”

“Very.”

“So—where is that money coming from? I know the popular belief is that it’s all buried beneath levels of secrecy as part of Depart of Defense funding, but—”

“Some of it is, sure,” said Birnes, “but not the bulk of it. And, you have to understand that we’re not really talking about work being undertaken by hidden divisions within our own government. That would be a logistical nightmare. It’s hard to hide something that big—and that interesting—inside a red-tape bureaucracy. No, a lot of this kind of R and D was transferred out of the government and into the hands of private contractors.”

“Defense contractors?”

“Mostly.”

“But that would still necessitate a lot of monies going to those companies as government fees.”

“Sure, but not for what we’re talking about. We’re talking about companies that have massive projects under way that are totally legitimate. We contract out everything of military importance to whoever can design and build it according to the right timetables and price tags. Alien tech notwithstanding, we still need jet fighters and satellites and submarines, and that sort of thing. However, private corporations, even defense contractors, have other sources of funding, and this is where this all starts to get dirty.”

“And that’s probably the part I need to hear.”

“I’ll give you the short course in illegal black budget cash flow,” said Birnes. “Each year the Department of Defense lists several coded entries that have nondescript names, like ‘special evaluation research program,’ that don’t clearly relate to anything that sounds like any known new weapons system currently in development. These entries are simply covers for black budget items, and this provides a hefty slush pile for all sorts of things including covert operations, intelligence activities, and classified weapons research to be conducted without congressional oversight on the grounds that such oversight would compromise the secrecy essential for black ops. And to a degree that’s true. However, some watchdog groups have tracked some accounting anomalies in the DoD budget that suggest that as much as a trillion U.S. dollars is annually being siphoned by the CIA into the DoD for secret distribution to unknown projects.”

Rudy whistled.

“It gets better,” said Birnes, warming to his topic. “Congress is always looking for a way to chop the DoD budget and to put a tighter leash on black operations of all kinds, especially anything connected to the CIA. At the same time, there are things the DoD and other groups want to work on that they know for a fact would never get official sanction or funding and, if it was discovered that they were being secretly funded, they would get the ax and some heads would roll. So, that’s part of why we’ve seen the movement of critical and you could say ‘radical’ R and D away from the DoD and into private labs. Now, those labs still need to be funded and this kind of research is enormously expensive. We’re talking amounts bigger than the national debts of some of our allies.”

“Why so much?”

“Because a lot of these research projects chew up money and then hit a developmental dead end. Which means there are no items to sell to Uncle Sam and no items that can be repurposed and sold to the global nonmilitary technologies markets.”

“So where does this funding come from?”

“Drugs.”

“Drugs?”

“Sure,” said Birnes. “Look, to understand it you have to realize that this has been going on for a long time and that the money doesn’t go to fund a single project or even a related group of projects. A lot of it goes to funding any kind of operation that is so secret it needs to stay totally off congressional or public radar. That means there are a lot of dirty deals being made. During Vietnam—even before Mr. and Mrs. America knew we had an interest over there, the CIA was taking control of the flow of drugs as a way of funding our developing involvement. That includes everything from bribe money to providing weapons for locals who we’d turned into allies, to all sorts of things. That process didn’t start there and it sure as hell didn’t end there. CIA and other agencies have been managing the world narcotics market for decades because that is an inexhaustible and unregulated source of income.”

“You’re killing me with this,” said Rudy.

Birnes laughed. “You asked. But I’m not taking wild shots at America. This isn’t national policy, this is backdoor stuff and when the right people in Congress find out about it they shut it down.”

“It doesn’t sound like it goes away, though.”

“Of course not,” said Birnes. “Too much is at stake.”

“National security?” Rudy said, pitching it as a sour joke.

“Actually, yes, to a degree. Some of it does serve the common good. But no government has ever been entirely honest, and there are all kinds of groups, big and small, that have their own agendas, and they know that they can’t go to Congress to get funding. The fact that drug money can be used to fund these projects is too tempting to ignore. Even for those persons who abhor the damage drugs do, they often look at the risk-reward ratio. Many of them are absolutely convinced we’re involved in a very serious arms race, and if we lose that race we’ll lose more than economic superiority.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that whoever cracks the alien technology in a practical way that allows mass production of a new generation of weapons of war will end the arms race right there and then.”

“How? By shaking the biggest stick?”

“No,” said Birnes, “through conquest. We could easily see a new age of empire that would reshape every map on Earth.”

“With alien technology?”

“With alien technology,” said Birnes.