Extinction Machine

Chapter Seventy-five

Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 11:46 a.m.

“You know, Junie, 1947 was a long damn time ago. What’s taking this project so long? If there are supergeniuses like your father involved, what’s taking so long?”

“Think about what they’re trying to do,” she said. “The science is so completely different than ours, the whole design philosophy follows a way of thinking that simply does not harmonize with human thought. Even their methods of communicating are so … well, so alien that it doesn’t in any way mesh with ours. Think of it in terms of the way we study languages in animals like dolphins and whales. We can record their language and we think we can understand some of the gist of it, but that’s not the same as being able to actually communicate with them. Not in any meaningful way. The differences are too great, there’s no commonality. We don’t have a Star Trek universal translator, and I don’t think the aliens do, either. I think … I think that’s one of the problems. I think that’s one of the reasons there hasn’t been any true or meaningful communication between them and us. We don’t have a shared language.”

“What about the crop circle? The pi thing. I thought math is the universal language.”

“It is and it isn’t,” said Junie. “Sure, we can both look at a simple equation—two plus two equals four—and that will be a universal constant, but what does it tell you about them? Or us? How does math explain Van Gogh or Lady Gaga or hot chocolate? How does it explain how the love you have for your country is different but equally as important as the love you have for your family or a puppy? How does math give insight into why you like one TV show over another? Or why you think baseball is a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon when I’d rather shop on Saturday and watch football on Sunday. Math is a common ground, but it isn’t a language.”

“Let’s go back a bit,” I said. “You said that at first your dad was dedicated to the Project. What changed? Why’d he lose faith in the space race?”

She gave me a sharp look.

“This isn’t a space race,” she said. “It never was. Even the space race of the 1960s was never about simply going to the moon. God, do people still really think that? This is an arms race, Joe. That’s what it was then and that’s what it is now. It’s about having the most powerful weapons, because weapons equal power on the global scale. Before World War II, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, do you think we were viewed as a superpower? No, we were one of many powerful nations. Those bombs changed the game. Everyone knows that. Now we’re in an age where the technology race is getting too close to call. China is becoming the world’s leading economy and it’s almost reached the point where it is the most powerful nation. Do you think our government—your government—will sit by and let that happen if there’s any way to give us back our edge?”

Her eyes were fierce even in the darkness.

“Truman foresaw this time,” she continued, her words whispered but her tone intense. “Maybe he was really smart or maybe really paranoid, or both, but he knew that there would come a point in time when America would need another dramatic edge. Something on the scale of nuclear weapons, but something that would give an edge once other countries acquired nukes and caught up to us. Welcome to now.”

“That doesn’t answer why your father left, Junie,” I said. “And it doesn’t explain how you know so much about your dad’s classified work.”

“The deeper he got the more he understood about the nature of the Project. It became clear that M3 was operating totally without congressional oversight. They were so deep into the black budget, and covered by so many levels of subterfuge that none of the last six presidents even knew the Project existed. The whole thing was being run as if M3 and the Project were actually separate from America. It made Dad wonder where the funding for something this big was coming from. How could you hide tens of billions from congressional accountants year after year? Dad decided to find out, so over a period of a few years he ingratiated himself more and more with the governors of M3 while at the same time using that increased access to take covert looks into their computers. It was painstaking work, but he figured it out. Dad always figured things out. He found out where the money was coming from.”

I thought I knew, but I let her tell it.

“Drugs,” she said triumphantly. “It was all drug money. The same way the CIA has been getting most of its funding since the fifties. Air America, the Iran-Contra thing, today in Afghanistan. Our own government agencies have been deeply involved in drug trafficking on a massive scale. This isn’t even a secret anymore. Our so-called War on Terror is funded by drug money and most of the time we’re in bed with the very people we claim we’re taking down.”

“I know,” I said. “The DMS has had some dealings with a few of those groups, and we’ve put some of them out of business. I wish I could say that we made more than a casual dent, but…”

“Do you know where your funding comes from?” she demanded.

“No,” I said. “But I’ll say this—even though I don’t believe for a millisecond that Mr. Church is paying our light bill with drug money—if I found out he was, I’d put a bullet in him.”

She pushed me over so that my face was in the light. Junie studied my eyes for a long time, then she nodded to herself.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Now, about the funding … Did your dad find this out for sure or was this guesswork?”

“He had proof. That was part of what he wanted to bring to Congress. Real proof.”

“And that’s why they killed him,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Shit.”

“But…,” she said.

“What?”

“I hacked my dad’s computer.”

“You did what? Why?”

“Because I thought he was a bad man,” she said glumly. “I thought he was a government flunky working on something very bad. In a way I was right, but I misunderstood my father. He was a lot more complex a person than that, and less politically astute. When I saw him start getting more and more depressed I figured it was guilt for the bad things he was doing for the government. I hacked his computer so I could confront him with the proof.” She stopped and shook her head. “I read everything I could find. Hundreds of pages of materials, and records, and evidence.”

“Jesus.”

“Then I confronted Dad, but not with accusations. I begged him to go to the world media with the story. Not just one newspaper or station, but all of them. A blast of truth. But he said that doing something like that could damage the government and even then he didn’t believe that the entire government was corrupt. He was determined to make Congress react and then act.”

“He took all his notes with him? His computer records, the copies of the Black Book pages, all of it?”

“No,” she said. “He took one complete set. The rest was on his computer at home and on several portable hard drives he kept in a wall safe.”

“Thank god! We can—”

“The house was burgled the night he was killed,” she said. “They took everything. They tore the safe out of the wall, tore his desk to pieces, and even took my mom’s laptop and mine. They ripped open all the walls, tore up floorboards, pulled down the ceilings. The police said that it was the most thorough search they’d ever seen. When I tried to explain why this was done, they gave me very tolerant smiles. I saw them laughing about it outside. I was a grief-stricken conspiracy theory goofball. They said that the house was probably targeted after my parents’ names were announced on the news. They said it happens all the time.”

“It does.”

She punched me again.

“But hold on, hold on,” I said. “If all of your father’s records were destroyed, then how were you planning on revealing all the secrets of the Black Book? Did you somehow make a copy?”

“You forgot,” she said.

“I what?”

“You forgot. That always amazes me,” she said. “I see it all the time, hear about it, read about it, but it still amazes me.”

“What does?” I asked, totally lost.

“That someone can actually forget something. I never could.”

And it hit me with a very nice one-two punch. I said, “Jesus, I even said it when I was showing off and reading out your bio. Eidetic memory—photographic memory, and that thing where you can remember every day of your life.”

“Every day, every hour, every minute,” she said. “Hyperthymesia.”

“And you saw your father’s notes.”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“You remember all of it…”

“Every single word. Every formula. Every measurement and description.” She smiled. It was a strange, intense, almost otherworldly smile that put goose bumps all along my arms and down my spine. “Joe … for all intents and purposes I am the Black Book.”