Disclosing the Secret

by Vincent Amato

  SSG-10’s eyes shot back to SSG-01. “They have lied to us more than once. How are we to calm the population when they…”

  The sound of Sabre being briskly escorted into the situation room took the meeting by surprise, cutting SSG-10 off mid-sentence. Flanked by four heavily armed Black Seals, Sabre stood at attention, helmet in hand, as if waiting for permission to speak.

  Thirty-three’s eyes lit up in surprise then concern. “Mr. Sabre, this is highly unusual. I take it that your unexpected need to join us is a prelude to some pressing developments.”

  The room fell silent, all eyes were on Sabre.

  “Sir, an exotic specimen from the ’47 Corona crash site is out in the open. Marcel is receiving assistance from Reilly.” Sabre’s tone was robotic.

  A wave of hushed murmurs and wide-eyed exchanges went around the room at the mention of Dr. Charles Reilly. A calm hand being raised by Thirty-three silenced the table.

  “When did this occur?” Thirty-three’s eyes were calculating.

  “Within the last six hours, sir.”

  Seated to the right of Thirty-three, SSG-2’s face was grim. “Then it is already too late to send an extraction team. Reilly would already have it back underground, and with his involvement, no doubt having it scrutinized by outsiders.”

  SSG-4 shook his head. “This is a catastrophic breach! Should it be leaked into the public arena…”

  “Agreed!” SSG-10 cut in. “This needs to be contained! If that irrefutable sample of non-terrestrial material, or its analysis, is allowed to be circulated out in the open, it would unravel everything. The greater good must be considered. All knowing parties need to be sanitized; the blow back would be incalculable. This rising threat of premature disclose could be devastating. It must be eliminated. It will bring forward the Reveal Event 15 years ahead of schedule. It cannot be permitted to pass.”

  All around the table agreed.

  “Then it is unanimous.” SSG-2 leveled a fiery stare at Sabre. “Sanitize the situation, Mr. Sabre. Execute extreme prejudice as necessary and return that specimen back to the classified arena.”

  Sabre looked to Thirty-three. “Sir?”

  Thirty-three paused as if afraid he’d say something he might regret. “It would appear you have your orders.”

  CHAPTER 46

  The NRO’s research and data harvesting building cut a distinctive profile against the darkened horizon of scattered industrial buildings in Dr. Vladik Primakov’s rear view mirror. Towering over its neighboring installations, and although now miles away, its blazing office lights outshone the lowest scattered stars against the ink black sky.

  Primakov was excited. He fumbled for his phone inside his briefcase while simultaneously trying to keep his speeding car inside its lane. With eyes darting between the dark road ahead and the keypad, he selected a menu item to place a secure call and dialed.

  “Vladik?” The voice on the line was Dr. Charles Reilly’s.

  “It’s miraculous, Charles!” A chill raked Primakov’s flesh.

  “Is everything okay? What’s happened?”

  Vladik spoke in rapid bursts. “It’s the metallurgical tests on the specimen. Iron, cobalt, nickel, with large traces of iridium and meteoric iron. Charles, iridium of this nature is normally only found in meteorites!”

  Unsurprised, Charles sat up in his bed as he listened.

  “The Broad Spectrum Elemental Analysis showed there are extremely rare elements in this thing; they’re extremely exotic and there’s so many of them. Thirty-six different elements in all, two of which we haven’t seen before! This is a complex, highly advanced, manufactured alloy built for strength.”

  Charles nodded, a knowing smirk crossing his face.

  “The surface coating is very peculiar,” Vladik continued. “It appears to be sensitive to voltage; it emits electromagnetic radiation when charged. The iron ore we mine does not possess these properties. Under its surface we found layers of carbon nanotubes unlike anything we’ve seen, and Charles, nature doesn’t grow nanotubes!”

  Primakov was talking faster now. “It’s incredible to witness; the atoms appear to have been somehow coded to self-organize. In over 40 years of working as a physicist I’ve never seen anything like it. If you fracture this thing it self-heals – it reassembles at the atomic level! We’re talking about an intelligent material with the ability to repair itself. This is centuries, possibly millennia, beyond any manufacturing processes we have!”

  Reilly felt himself being swept up in the physicist’s infectious enthusiasm and realized he was also smiling as he listened.

  Vladik’s excitement was building. “And get this…this is the real debunker killer: the isotope ratio is off the scale. Its isotope shift is 20 percent; the material has a week’s decay with a half-life of about a billion years. They are so far outside the standard percentages that there is no way they could have been formed in our solar system, or even the supernova that created all the heavier elements in our local star cluster. That means that this material came from an area of the galaxy which is in advance of ours by 90 million years or so. Charles, you can’t fake this; these isotope shifts are unusual to the extreme. And with atoms that self-organize…how the hell do they do that? When was the last time you broke something and watched it reassemble? It just doesn’t happen. How did you get this out in the open?”

  Reilly couldn’t help but flash a wide smile at his friend’s excitement.

  “Charles, the metallurgical testing determined that some of the metals in the specimen not only contain non-terrestrial isotopic ratios but contain atoms that do not exist in the periodic table. I don’t believe any human made this sample. Simply put, whatever you gave me did not come from this earth.”

  Primakov’s tone intensified. “This sample generated the most significant and most compelling actual data we have ever seen in support of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The impact of this is mind-stretching.”

  Reilly was still smiling, but spoke with a resolute tone: “Then I don’t have to impress upon you the paramount importance of keeping the metallurgical test results away from prying eyes.”

  “We’ll do this just like the old days!” Vladik Primakov’s voice still reverberated with excitement. “Only one control copy of the lab report, no electronic copies with no chance of electronically snatching through firewalls.”

  Charles nodded as he listened.

  “And if I had to make an educated guess on where this thing came from, and based on the isotopic decay, I’d have to say it came from a place in our galaxy at least 40 light years in the direction of…”

  With a sickening crash, the phone connection was severed from Vladik’s end.

  CHAPTER 47

  An unexpected movement had caught Dr. Vladik Primakov’s eye on his left side.

  The colossal impact from the ramming truck completely caved in the driver’s side of Vladik’s car. The energy from the side impact twisted and contorted the car’s chassis, wrapping it around the front of the speeding Kenworth truck.

  Now airborne, the mangled car spun in the air, its remaining windscreens and side mirrors exploding as it hit the road to continue rolling end over end ahead of the truck.

  The rear wheels of the Kenworth skidded and skipped, its brakes screeched in protest as the driver attempted to slow the 18 tonne beast trailing inches away from the rolling car. The two vehicles continued along the road, the truck’s wheels smoking under braking behind the car, which rolled on its side for another 100 feet.

  With a final spin, the car slammed to a halt on its roof in the headlights of the huge Kenworth, which screeched to a standstill 15 feet away.

  *

  “Vladik?” Charles’s face was contorted in anguish. “Vladik!”

  Slowly he lowered his phone, mute with terror. Reilly was frozen in disbelief.

  His lips spasmed in a hopeless attempt to speak. His voice was barely a whisper as a soul-chilling realization washed over him: “They
have already begun.”

  *

  A hulking black-clad figure emerged from the cabin of the truck. Heavily armed, he approached the mangled wreck in the headlights.

  Peering through what was left of the driver’s side door, Alpha inspected the disfigured body that was still strapped to the seat. The face had caved in to the blood-soaked cranium, jellified brain gray matter seeped through cracks in the physicist’s skull.

  Alpha thumbed his comm unit, its microphone strapped to his voice box. “The target has been disposed.”

  CHAPTER 48

  “You’ll have to move fast,” Charles said ominously to Jake.

  Natasha and Mark stood with Jake as Charles explained that they now had definitive, unprecedented proof that the crash debris which had been in Jake’s family was manufactured somewhere other than on earth. The form of this evidence was by way of independent and verifiable expert analysis by a non-government physicist, a leader in his field who could not be refuted.

  They met just before dawn, gathering under a bridge away from the telescopic lenses of spy satellites. The scientist had arrived in a borrowed DHL van, the others in Mark’s car.

  “So all we have to do is break into the NRO building, a secure government facility, grab the report and run!” Jake looked skeptical.

  Dr. Reilly’s reply had the soft, controlled patience of a school teacher. “Jake, I’ll give you what you need to get in and out.”

  Mark was unconvinced. “Sure, sounds easy!”

  Natasha was looking increasingly uncomfortable.

  Reilly was silent for several seconds as he locked eyes with Jake, Natasha and Mark. “Your friend is right, I can get you in and out. But it will be up to you to deal with whatever surprises get thrown your way.”

  “And by surprises you mean big guys in black helicopters,” Mark interjected.

  Natasha’s eyes widened, she could bear it no longer. “Jake, you didn’t say anything about a SWAT team or a chopper chasing you last time! And now this!”

  “You should have seen the firepower they brought with them,” Mark added.

  Jake shot a silencing look at Mark, shaking his head.

  Completely wrong thing to say, Mark!

  A terrifying thought gripped Natasha. “Why did those officers need machine guns?”

  “They weren’t officers, hun,” Jake said, feeling himself being dragged into an argument.

  A trace of fear laced Natasha’s voice. “Then who were they?”

  Jake had been wondering the same thing. A heavy silence descended around them as all eyes were on Reilly.

  “Who’s the guy in the suit?” Jake finally asked.

  Charles took a deep breath. “Natasha is right to be scared. They are already tracking us. It’s only a question of time before they…”

  Jake’s tone intensified as he interrupted mid-sentence: “Who’s the guy in the suit, the one that smokes?”

  The scientist considered the question a long moment then turned to stand next to the van, leaning on it for support before continuing.

  “For the sake of argument,” Charles said hesitating, “let’s just say for a moment that there exists a classified group whose sole purpose is to study and handle off-world technology. Let’s also, for a moment, assume that the crash your grandfather was called out to investigate was retrieved and delivered to this special study group. They would then have in their position highly exotic off-world tech. Now let’s also say this group has access to enormous amounts of black budget funding, granting them the means to employ genius scientists to study and understand the off-world tech under absolute secrecy deep within the classified world. They’d have no outside influences, so they could take all the time they needed to understand the non-terrestrial technology enough to gain a working knowledge of its science and principles.”

  Jake remained silent, wondering where the scientist was headed now.

  Charles shifted before continuing, as if feeling some internal pain. “It would then be safe to assume that after the scientists spend years studying this stuff, they make one or two scientific breakthroughs in their understanding, some of which leads to profitable licensing of patents: lasers, integrated circuits, night vision, nano-carbon fibers or even fiber optics. So, now their research has yielded world-first leading-edge technologies, which also double as income-producing investment opportunities. Do you think this would give the group more or less incentive to reveal their secret?”

  Jake cocked his head. “Less, obviously.”

  “Let’s go one step further,” Charles continued. “Let’s pretend they then make breakthroughs that are even more significant, like anti-gravity, zero-point energy, field propulsion or a new source of energy that was clean and freely available. It would be at that point that their superiors decide it would be best that they not share these discoveries with the mass population.”

  “But why not?” Mark protested. “They would make millions.”

  “It’s not about what they would make,” Charles corrected, “it’s about what they would destroy. Yes, they would make millions, but in doing so they would break down the world’s largest industry worth multi-trillions; the petroleum industry. So now let’s say they continue studying these new sciences in secret. They would then be ahead of everyone else in the outside world and be in a position to break away from our society to advance on their own. Fast forward three or four decades later, this small group, broken away from the mainstream, would end up being a very different society from the rest of the world. Not only would they have very advanced technology and substantial resources, but their world view and geopolitical beliefs would significantly differ from the rest of us. Their technologies may even allow them to interact with the off-world entities before the rest of us; maybe even have the means to travel off-world to have encounters that would revolutionize their own world view, making them far removed from the rest of civilization by orders of magnitudes.”

  “When you say the off-world entities, you mean,” Mark hesitated, “aliens?”

  “That term is implicit in evoking ridicule. Let’s just refer to them as ‘off-world visitors’ or ‘the others’. The intelligence community use words like ‘unconventional aircraft’, ‘unknown aircraft’ or ‘extraterrestrial vehicles’ also called ‘ETVs’ and are very careful not to use the term ‘UFO’ or ‘alien.’”

  Jake was getting back to the point. “What you’re saying is there exists a group that has broken away from mainstream civilization, independent from government. How is this connected to the guy in the suit?”

  An uneasiness crossed Reilly’s face. “And they would possess substantial financial power at the level of being able to influence governments, even dictate terms to governments if they deemed it necessary. They would also have their own ultra-elite security force at their disposal. The guy in the suit, as you described him, commands this group’s ultra-elite security personnel, his name is Mr. Sabre.”

  This revelation made Mark gasp; Natasha looked as if she was going to be sick. Jake’s eyes narrowed; he didn’t know whether or not to take the scientist seriously.

  This can’t be real, Jake thought.

  Although he couldn’t believe his ears, he sensed in Charles’s eyes that the scientist was telling the truth.

  “We don’t stand a chance,” Jake said, his voice barely a whisper.

  Charles thought of his friend Dr. Vladik Primakov and felt nausea creeping to the surface. He pushed the thought from his mind. “If there were ever a man who personified a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Sabre would be the one…he’s a titanium fist in a velvet glove. There are some very powerful interests that don’t want the truth to come out. Sabre commands the security force tasked with keeping the world’s most dangerous secret.”

  “You know him?” Jake struggled.

  “I know of him… I was one of them… I had the privilege of being able to study their science, learn from the others’ technology. Sabre was one of those who were given the priv
ilege of keeping the secret from falling into our enemies’ hands. Well, that’s what we believed…what I once believed,” Reilly said, his voice trailing off.

  “We’re going to die! All of us!” Mark’s voice was heavy with fear.

  A gentle smile crossed Charles’s face. “Yes, it is dangerous. They are very, very powerful people. But they are just that, people. They do possess an Achilles heel. The one thing they fear the most is the same thing that will guarantee our safety, and that is to get this out in the open. If we can get that report, that one body of evidence that is indisputable, the mass media will be unleashed on this story like it has never been unleashed before.”

  Reilly paused to punctuate his point. “And the safety, my friends, is in the masses. The perfect irony is that once it’s out, if they move to eliminate any of us, it’ll only serve to prove the very thing they are trying to suppress.”

  Jake, Natasha, and Mark all exchanged startled looks.

  The scientist waited a moment for them all to arrive at the same realization. “When my father was born there were no such things as flying machines. Before he died man had gone to the moon and back. In your generation there will be changes just as profound, which this group has been trying to hold back. What if I told you that the former head of Lockheed Martin, Ben Rich, once said that we now have the technology to take ET home? That was back in 1993; just imagine what we can do now.”

  Mark shot Jake a curious look, hoping the scientist would elaborate.

  “The truth embargo is now in its seventh decade,” Charles explained. “This isn’t the first time our civilization has enforced a worldwide truth embargo, we’ve been doing it since the fourth century. That’s what much of the Crusades were about – gathering and destroying information when the Vatican tried to bury the truth about Christ’s bloodline.”

  He paused. “But we’ll save that story for another day. The basic objective remains consistent…to restrict information from the many in order to empower the few.”

  Charles met eyes with each of his young companions as he spoke. “If we can retrieve the report and get it out in the open it’ll set off a shockwave in physics and force a disclosure event. And when disclosure happens, it will be a ‘where were you when it happened?’ moment. There will be a new dividing line in history. AD will come to be globally accepted as the reference After Disclosure. The sum total of all modern science will be rendered obsolete; it will bring an end to the age of silicon and change human civilization.”