Extinction Machine

Chapter Ninety-seven

House of Jack Ledger

Near Robinwood, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 8:51 p.m.

Bunch of people, mostly killers, sitting in a room.

Looking at the pretty lady, the civilian.

Who just said that she might be related to the man who killed the entire staff at the Warehouse.

Who said that she might be part alien.

All of us, sitting there with that painted on the air in front of us.

“That’s it,” Bunny said. “I quit. I’m going home.”

Mr. Church nodded to Junie. “I know.”

You could actually hear the sound of every head in the room whipping around from staring at Junie to gaping at Church.

“What?” I croaked. “You knew?”

Church nodded. Pain flickered on his stern face. “I read through all of Dr. Sanchez’s interview notes on the way here. Several of the experts mentioned the alien-human hybrid initiative, indicating that without an acceptable biological interface these T-craft cannot fly. A certain percentage of alien DNA is necessary, and so to ensure the success of their vehicle-design program, Majestic Three would have had to be ready with pilots who had that DNA signature. Hybrids.” Junie nodded, and he continued. “Among those persons who claim to be hybrids or who are suspected of being such, there is a high percentage of savantism. In some cases it is prodigious savantism, with deep memory and awareness of multiple areas. Math and numbers are common, but there are other areas as well. Many of these people have exceptional hand-eye coordination. And there is the issue if having both eidetic memory and hyperthymesia. The instances of that are so rare in the general population that to find it in any contained population suggestions a connection. I know for a fact that Erasmus Tull has those qualities. It’s part of what made him such an exceptional operator. Show him a building blueprint or let him read a mission case file and he has it all stored. Expose him to a language, a combination, a cypher, and it’s stored in his head.”

“Just like the Majestic Black Book,” I said.

“Yes,” said Junie.

“Holy mother of shit,” said Lydia.

“Wait, wait,” said Pete, “can we go back to the part where you two are related?”

“It’s an ugly thing,” said Junie. She took a tissue out of her sweater pocket and wiped her nose. “You’ve heard about all of those alien abductions? You know, people taken out of their beds and subjected to all sorts of tests? Well, as far as I know most or all of that is faked. It’s M3 using hallucinogenic compounds and some mind-control tech they developed. They implant a false memory using drug-enforced hypnosis.”

“That sounds military,” said Ivan. “I mean … I know guys in psi-ops who do that sort of thing.”

“Yes,” said Church.

“After the people are abducted,” continued Junie, “they are used as part of a breeding program. Early on they tried to get the abductees to mate. They even used date-rape drugs like Rohypnol, gamma-hydroxybutyrate, Ketamine, and even Ambien—because it had both sedative and amnesiac properties. But there were too many behavior problems associated with forced sex, and because it required the time and expense of monitoring the pregnancy after the abductees were returned. And, of course, kidnapping the child if he or she demonstrates useful qualities. There are some real horror stories associated with that, and the program began tripping over itself. So they changed tack and decided to harvest eggs and sperm instead. That way they can cut the parents totally out of the picture and raise the babies under controlled conditions.”

“Like the facility in Nevada?” asked Mr. Church.

“Yes. That was my home as a baby. There were nearly a hundred of us. We weren’t clones or anything like that. Each of us came from a human egg and sperm via in vitro fertilization. I was in the eighth batch of viable fetuses. Group Eight.” She paused and a shadow passed across her face. “There were problems with the previous batches. The first few were awful. I saw photographs. Birth defects of the most horrible kinds. That’s when they were trying to determine how much alien DNA to introduce, and at which point of fetal development.”

“Christ,” whispered Top. He was the only member of Echo Team with kids. His eyes were filled with sickness and anger. “What happened to those kids? The ones with the birth defects?”

Junie shook her head. “They were considered failed experiments. The same with the next batches. It wasn’t until the batch before mine, Group Seven, that they began getting an acceptable yield. There were still some problems, but they … allowed most of them to grow up.”

“Erasmus Tull was in Group Seven?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Did he have any ‘problems’?”

She nodded. “Behavior problems. He was brilliant and he had all the qualities they needed for the pilot program—enhanced coordination, perfect memory, total calm in high-pressure situations. But—he was hard to control at first. He was very violent, but in a strange way. He never picked a fight, but if someone else started one, his reactions were way over the top. Once a little boy shoved him in the playroom. Erasmus got up, walked over to the toy box, picked up a heavy net bag of building blocks, walked back over to the other boy and started beating him with it. By the time the staff heard the screams and came in, the other boy was dead and Erasmus was completely covered in blood.” She paused. “Erasmus was four years old.”

My mouth went dry.

“They put him through a battery of psychological tests, and he passed every one. After a while they determined that it was an aberration, a one-time event. Until it happened again. Seven months later two boys tried to beat Erasmus up because they were afraid of him. They caught him in the boys’ bathroom.”

“What happened?” asked Birddog, whose face had gone as pale as everyone else’s.

“He killed them both.”

“So,” said Bunny, working it through, “are you saying that he was born without a conscience? Or he is too alien to understand right and wrong?”

“I really don’t know. I’m not sure if the people at M3 know either. However, they must have learned something from all the tests they did on him, because he wasn’t terminated for having birth defects. Erasmus and a few others who were a lot like him were removed from the program shortly after the incident in the bathroom. Actually a lot of us were taken out of the program and assigned to families.”

“Like Jericho and Amanda Flynn?” suggested Church.

“Yes.”

“Did they know where you came from?”

Junie gave me a brief guilty look. “Yes.”

“So, all that stuff you told me about your father was bullshit? Winning those science fairs, getting hired by DARPA … that was all crap?”

“No,” she said quickly and reached out to touch my arm. “Most of it’s the absolute truth, but…”

I pulled my arm away. “How about the whole truth? How about you stop f*cking with my head?”

She nodded as tears rolled down her face. “What I said about my father was true. He didn’t know about any of this until long after he was working inside the Project. Even then he still thought he was working on a DARPA-sanctioned project. It’s where he met my mother. She was a developmental psychologist and … she was a key member of M3’s breeding program. She helped tie my father to the program. Did she ever really love him? I don’t know. Maybe, toward the end. I don’t know. But she grew me in a lab, Joe. All the adoption papers were handled by her. My father was in love and he was work-obsessed, so he believed everything his wife told him.” She paused and dabbed at the tears on her cheeks. “He was a good man, Joe. I think maybe he had some issues of his own. Asperger’s, perhaps. He was always focused on work and never really that connected to other people. He didn’t know where I came from or what I was. He tried to be a good father to me, but when it was clear that I didn’t want to follow his career path, we drifted. That’s when I started acting out. I tried to tell him about the ‘orphanage,’ but he wouldn’t listen. He thought they were silly stories. Until I told him about a kid I knew named Erasmus Tull.”

“Why did that change things?” I asked.

“Because Dad knew Erasmus Tull,” she said. “By the time I was in college, Erasmus was around the lab all the time. He’d become part of the team that was searching for new components, and he was apparently very successful at it. He kept getting promotions even though he was so young. Hearing about Erasmus—someone I could not possibly know—seemed to do something to Dad. That’s when he began making copies of everything related to the Project.”

“Including the Black Book,” said Church quietly.

“Yes. Dad had been such a company man that they never thought he’d betray them. But loyalty has to cut both ways, and when he realized that the Project was built on lies, he turned against them. Dad was a patriot, Joe. When they found out that he’d copied the Black Book, they had him killed.”

“But your mother was killed in the same rigged accident,” I said. “Why? Whose side was she on?”

“My mother was still very much with the company … and there’s a pretty good chance she’s the one who turned Dad in.”

“So why’d they kill her?” asked Lydia.

Junie gave her a long, hard look. “You should ask Erasmus Tull that question. Maybe it was easier to manage the hit that way. Or maybe he was running out of time.”

“I have one last question,” said Church. “When you began your podcast and published your books on M3 and the Black Book, those people had to suspect that your father told you crucial secrets. Why didn’t they come after you?”

“They did, once. A car bombing in Egypt that was blamed on terrorists. And a close call with what the police called a ‘failed abduction-rape.’ It failed because half the football team came stumbling out of a bar just as two men in black clothes tried to pull me into a van.”

“No,” said Sam, “those were close calls, but someone like this guy Tull could have taken you out with a bullet or one of those microwave pistols. And you’ve been living all alone at that lighthouse for how long? Not to offend you, miss, but you should be dead a hundred times over.”

“Which means they don’t want you dead,” said Top. “Now why would that be?”

“I think it’s obvious,” I said. “For whatever reason, the governors of M3 want the world to know about the Majestic Black Book. Maybe they’re planning a big event, a reveal, and this is part of a plan to pave the way.”

“That sounds thin,” said Pete.

“It’s not,” countered Church. “Our government does that all the time. We leaked information on the stealth program before we rolled the first ships out. It cut down on wild speculation from eyewitnesses who thought they were seeing UFOs. This is a standard policy, like a valve that lets off steam. It makes the reveal less of a staggering drama.”

“Iran did that with their nuclear program,” I said, and he nodded. “Which means that Junie’s podcasts and books could be part of a limited and very selective disclosure process.”

“I think you’re right,” she confessed. “Besides, before last night they probably thought I only knew bits and pieces of the book. After all … I sat on the information for years. I was afraid to do anything with it. My life hasn’t exactly taught me to trust anyone. Family, governments … you wonder why I write about conspiracies? My whole life has been in the heart of one of the biggest conspiracies of the last century, and that’s not a theory.”

“And last night you told the whole damn world that you had the Black Book and were going to share it with everyone,” said Bunny. “No offense, but … why not just paint a bull’s-eye on yourself? You had to know they’d move heaven and earth to pop a cap in you.”

She shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”

“Why not?”

She was a long time answering. Ghost caught something, some emotion, and he whimpered and leaned against her. Junie bent and wrapped her arms around him, burying her cheek against the soft white fur on the top of his head.

“Gene therapy is still largely experimental. There are always unexpected side effects,” she said, her eyes distant and her voice very soft. Then, she took a long, ragged breath, reached up, entwined her fingers in her wild blond hair … and pulled it off. Beneath the wig she was totally bald, her smooth skull unmarked except for the small blue tattoos the radiology techs put there to mark the spot where the tumor is. Then she looked up, looked at each of us.

“They don’t need to kill me,” she said. “They already have.”