Extinction Machine

Chapter Ninety-two

House of Jack Ledger

Near Robinwood, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 7:41 p.m.

The October sun was a memory and darkness rose up, immense and absolute. The lingering summer heat vanished, leaving a cold mist that filled the hollows and valleys of northern Maryland.

We downloaded the case files to the laptop and began going through them. Junie sat at the other end of the table, between Top and Lydia, but she kept darting covert glances my way. I only caught them with my peripheral vision and by the time I looked up each time, she’d already looked away or bent over the material again. I wasn’t sure what kind of message she was trying to send me.

One of the first things I found were Rudy Sanchez’s notes from a series of phone calls he’d made to friends of Mr. Church—and friends of their friends. A lot of it confirmed things that Junie had already told me. T-craft. Alien-human hybrids. The Majestic Project. M3. And a long list of suspected members of that mysterious group. I took special note of the names that kept coming up most often. Then I looked at the reports on the cyber-attacks.

“Time to put all of our cards on the table and play twenty questions so we can all see what we know,” I said. “Let’s start with this: Do we believe this or not? Are we, a group of rational adults and trained special operators, going to sit here and say yes, we believe in aliens, and crashed UFOs, and all of it? Show of hands.”

I waited. Junie chewed her lip.

The first hand that went up was the one I thought would be last.

Top.

Everyone looked at him, startled. Top was a hard sell on a lot of edgy issues, and a lot of the times his doubt proved to be a steadying and sobering reality check.

Top said, “I’m not saying I buy all of it. Lot of it seems like science-fiction bullshit to me, but … there’s a sense to it. These cocksuckers are throwing a lot of assets at us to keep us out of this, and all of that started as soon as we started looking for the Black Book. If the book is some made-up shit, then why bring down all this heat?”

It was a soldier’s response, an operator’s response.

Pete Dobbs nodded. “I’ve pretty much been on board since I heard about the president. I know some guys in the Secret Service and they keep their shit tight. And we all talked about it some,” he said, indicating the rest of Echo. “We came up with four or five good ways to snatch the president, but none of them would leave zero traces.”

“Plus there’s that crop circle thing,” said Ivan, nodding. “That’s some freaky shit right there. No way you’re going to tell me that a couple of jerkoffs with flat boards and string faked that thing on the White House lawn right when the Secret Service was crashing the building. So … count me in.”

The next hand to go up was Sam Imura’s. “Not a big believer in anything up there or out there,” he said. “But … somebody’s building flying saucers.” He cut a look at Junie. “Sorry, T-craft. If it’s us, then we’ve suddenly gotten a lot smarter. Those things are way past anything we have that I’ve ever seen, and one of the upsides to working for Mr. Church is you get to see next year’s stuff this year. I don’t know what year that stuff belongs to.”

He’d used Mr. Church’s name so casually, and it chilled the air in the kitchen.

“The big man always loved having the best toys,” said Bunny softly. “Damn, I still can’t believe—”

Lydia suddenly turned in her seat and punched him in the chest.

“Hey!” she snapped. “We’re on a mission clock, pendejo. Go to the funeral later.”

He blinked at her in surprise, then his eyes hardened and he nodded. “Yeah, shit, sorry.”

“Where do you stand, Staff Sergeant?” I asked.

“I’m with the team on this, boss,” said Bunny. “If this is aliens and stuff, then it’s aliens and stuff.”

Everyone else agreed.

“Does any of this answer the question of who took the president? Is that M3? Is it the Chinese or the Russians? Or is it the aliens?”

Top, Junie, and I all said it at the same time: “Aliens.”

“Okay,” said Pete, “but why?”

“I think that’s pretty obvious,” said Top.

Junie and I nodded.

The others looked perplexed.

“If these aliens are here,” Top said, “then you got to ask yourself why they didn’t scavenge their own stuff. If these D-type components are so damned valuable and dangerous, then it seems foolish to let ’em lie around where we can pick ’em up. Maybe that’s the point. Not to belittle the human race, but there’s also the possibility that we’re part of a controlled experiment. Give the monkeys a bunch of Legos and see what happens. Maybe for most of the last sixty years we’ve been shoving those Legos up our asses, but now we’re building a set of stairs that we can use to climb out of our cage. We might have crossed that line from ‘oh, isn’t it cute that the humans are flying those quaint little airplanes’ to ‘holy f*ck, they’re actually building T-craft.’”

“Or maybe they left that stuff there as an alarm,” said Junie. “As long as we play with the toys then they know we’re no threat. But now we’re figured out how their science works. Maybe that’s what triggered the response.”

I nodded again. “Might even be as simple as the aliens not knowing who was doing this research. They’re high tech, but that doesn’t mean they can see through walls. On a planet this big—and with the kind of communication gaps there have to be between them and us—maybe they needed us to step out of the shadows and announce ourselves.”

“Like flying a T-craft?” asked Bunny.

“Like flying one—and doing shit like trying to provoke a war in the Taiwan Strait and shooting down stealth aircraft. That looks the same from every angle: Someone has built a T-craft and is trying to use it to start a war. That might be the kind of alarm that might make them take steps. Like nabbing the president, like threatening big-ticket destruction. And maybe worse.” I looked around. “I think maybe the aliens have decided that they want their toys back.”