‘This is a house of the Gods!’ he screamed and took aim.
Robbie, weak from smoke inhalation, hauled the heavy shotgun up single–handedly once more to point at Messian as he heard the girl’s voice in his hear.
‘Don’t shoot! Get away from the exit!’
Robbie ducked to one side and crashed through an open doorway as he twisted aside and Messian’s shotgun blasted its rounds past them both as they fell. The door to the outside rattled as the shot hammered into it and punched a few holes through the wood that cast beams of white light into the smoky air.
Robbie slammed down onto his back and saw Messian rush toward them as he aimed the shotgun, and then suddenly a dozen pistol rounds smashed through the ranch door from outside and punctured Messian with enough force to lift the old man off his feet and hurl him onto his back. The shotgun clattered down alongside him, and as Robbie stared in amazement so the ranch door crashed open and four heavily armed troopers dashed in, fire crews following them and running straight past where Robbie and the girl were sprawled on the floor.
‘It’s safe now,’ the girl whispered into his ear, her arms still wrapped tightly about his neck.
Robbie staggered upright and out of the doorway into the brilliant sunlight with the girl still clinging to him, squinting and staggering until he collapsed onto his knees and sucked in a deep lungful of the blessedly clean air. He instantly collapsed in a deep coughing fit as he felt the girl being lifted from his arms. Robbie let himself be helped up by two firemen and a paramedic who had rushed to their aid, and he dimly became aware of a helicopter thundering overhead and the dozens of law enforcement vehicles swarming into the ranch compound as fire teams sprayed hoses of white foam into the building’s blackened hulk.
‘You okay, pal?’
A paramedic was fussing over him, but apart from his coughing Robbie was beginning to recover. He nodded as he was patted down for injuries, and as he stood there in the bright sunshine so one of the fire crews hurried up to him.
‘Hey, how the hell did you get out of there? My men can’t get close to that building without risking their necks?’
Robbie gestured to the girl, who was now being laid on a gurney with an oxygen mask over her face as the medics prepared to get her to a hospital.
‘She showed me the way out,’ Robbie replied, coughing again, ‘and saved my life twice on the way. She’s sharp as a button, make sure she’s well looked after.’
The fireman looked back at the girl and then at Robbie. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The girl,’ Robbie frowned. ‘I didn’t find my way out of there, she did. She told me to follow a star on the wall, to duck when the wall came down, told me about the shooter in there and when you guys came blasting in. She saw it all.’
The fireman stared at Robbie for a few moments more and then clapped his shoulder. ‘I think you just got real lucky and the smoke’s got to you pal, that girl can’t see a damned thing.’
Robbie frowned in confusion and then looked at the girl’s face for the first time in broad daylight, and he felt the hairs rise up on his forearms and the back of his neck as though insects were crawling on his skin. She was looking right back at him but her eyes were as white as clouds, the girl completely blind.
‘She owes you her life pal,’ the fireman said, ‘know when to take credit.’
Robbie barely heard the fireman as he watched the girl being lifted into the ambulance, and never once did she take her sightless eyes off his.
***
IV
Defense Intelligence Agency,
Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling,
Washington DC
Ethan Warner walked into the south entrance of one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world, and although he had been here many times before he felt oddly out of place. Beside him his partner Nicola Lopez looked as though she felt the same, as though they were returning to a house that they had lived in many years before.
Lieutenant General J. F. Nellis, the Director of the DIA, appeared in the building’s lobby and strode toward them across the large emblem emblazoned across the floor tiles. Ethan and Lopez moved through two security posts, Ethan getting a brief glimpse of himself and his partner in the monitors nearby; Lopez, diminutive and dark skinned, a Latino with a bad attitude that would put any soldier he had ever met to shame, while he was six–one tall with somewhat unkempt light brown hair and a jaw that was perhaps a little too wide to be considered handsome.
‘Ethan, Nicola,’ Nellis greeted them with a brief handshake.
‘Where’s the fire?’ Lopez asked.
Nellis smiled but did not reply, indicating that they should follow him. Ethan complied in silence, aware that discussing such delicate matters here in the lobby was not something that a four–star general would be willing to do. Nellis led them to an elevator and they travelled in silence up to the fifth floor before walking to the Director’s office. They sat down inside as he closed the door behind them.
‘I’ve got some work for you,’ Nellis said as he sat down behind his broad desk of polished mahogany, ‘and a few updates.’
Lopez frowned. ‘We haven’t worked for the DIA since Majestic Twelve was liquidated six months ago. Why drag us out of Chicago now?’
Ethan had begun working for the Defense Intelligence Agency some six years previously, when his former colleague in the United States Marines, Doug Jarvis, had recruited him to go in search of something that he would never have believed possible: the seven–thousand–year old remains of a humanoid creature found in the depths of Israel’s Negev Desert. Since then, with Nicola Lopez at his side, they had conducted ten major investigations for the agency involving phenomena that all other agencies had rejected as superstition.
‘We’re listening,’ Ethan intervened, to a dirty look from Lopez.
Although Lopez was dismissive of the DIA since their last investigation had come to an abrupt and violent close over six months before, Ethan was more than happy to listen to what the director had to say. Majestic Twelve, a shadowy and corrupt cabal that had operated within the United States Government for over sixty years had met its demise in South America at their hands. Despite defections from within the DIA in the wake of the victory Ethan and Nicola had considered their task complete and had returned to Chicago, where they had continued their work as bail–bondsmen in relative peace ever since.
General Nellis pulled out a file and opened it before them on the desk.
‘Majestic Twelve is no more,’ he said, ‘long live Majestic Twelve.’
Ethan looked down at a series of photographs taken from automated feature–recognition cameras in airports and hotels, and he instantly recognized the faces upon the first of the images.
‘That’s Jarvis,’ Lopez uttered in shock, ‘and Aaron Mitchell. But they’re together!’
Ethan leaned back in his seat and dragged one hand down his face. Their boss, Jarvis, had been one of the major DIA defections after MJ–12 were taken down, and had somehow managed to spirit away with him the vast majority of the cabal’s thirty–billion–dollar wealth. Now it appeared that he had enlisted the assistance of MJ–12’s most feared former assassin, Aaron Mitchell, a towering African American.
‘Jarvis and Mitchell are confirmed as working together, but who are these other people?’ Nellis asked Ethan, looking at the other images.
‘This is Lillian Cruz,’ Ethan replied as he pointed to a picture of a woman wearing dark glasses moving through an airport in Sao Paulo. ‘Lillian had business with Majestic Twelve some years ago after a series of events in New Mexico, with which I’m sure you’re familiar?’
Nellis recalled the investigation clearly.
‘Lillian Cruz was born in Montrose, Colorado, in the year 1824. She was the last survivor of eight soldiers of the Union army who took sanctuary in a place called Misery Hole in New Mexico in 1862, just after the Battle of Glorietta Pass.’
Lopez leaned back in her seat.
‘So you think Lillian’s gone over to the other side? I don’t believe that for a moment; she was iron–willed and hated MJ–12 for the way they hunted her and her friends down.’
‘While searching for a cure for human mortality?’ Nellis surmised.
‘She was persecuted by Majestic Twelve,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘She, her husband and some soldiers had hidden from enemy forces in New Mexico and drank water from a subterranean cave that slowed the ageing process via a bacteria present in the water known as Bacillus permians. MJ–12 killed the other members of the group a few years back, her husband included, but she survived long enough to cut a deal with MJ–12. They got the elixir of life, she got her freedom from persecution.’
‘What about this one?’ Nellis asked, pointing to a woman in another image. ‘She looks far too young to be a member of such a cabal?’
‘Amber Ryan,’ Lopez identified her. ‘Her uncle was a man named Stanley Meyer. He invented a fusion device that could have powered the world for free, but was killed by Majestic Twelve before he could give away for nothing the fusion cage he built, an act that he considered essential to mankind’s future, because it would have cost MJ–12 profits from fossil fuel interests.’
Ethan spotted another familiar face among the photos.
‘Doctor Lucy Morgan,’ he said, ‘Jarvis’s granddaughter and the woman who got me into this in the first place. She discovered the remains of some kind of humanoid species in the deserts of Israel a few years back.’
Nellis nodded, well aware of the origins of ARIES, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Research and Intelligence Engineering Section, which Jarvis had headed up before he had decided to cut his ties to the US Government.
Created to support to the work of other agencies such as the NSA, CIA and DARPA, ARIES was tasked with emulating the technology of other nations that had been uncovered by covert overseas operations, for the purpose of finding effective defenses against those technologies. In a world where digital and cyber–warfare was more widespread now than ever, where foreign hackers were capable of accessing everything from the computers of major film studios to even the Pentagon and other defense installations, the need for absolute security had never been more paramount.
Ethan knew that with Jarvis and his companions somewhere on the outside and with a great deal of knowledge of the inner workings on ARIES, Nellis would be keen to reign in their erstwhile former boss and prevent history from repeating itself.
‘What do you think he’s up to?’ Lopez asked as she looked at the images. ‘It’s no secret that Jarvis and I didn’t get along so well, but he’s no bad guy.’
‘He’s not immune from the rule of law either,’ Nellis pointed out. ‘He walked off with billions of dollars of assets that should have been seized by the US Treasury, so as you can imagine there are some seriously annoyed shouting heads roaming around the Capitol at the moment.’
‘Let ‘em shout,’ Ethan said. ‘We shut down MJ–12. They should be putting medals around our necks, not burying what happened to save their own careers.’
‘I agree,’ Nellis said, ‘but we have another problem.’
‘We do?’ Lopez challenged. ‘Ethan and I signed out after MJ–12 got themselves toasted in South America, remember?’
‘Yes, but nobody knows Jarvis better than the two of you.’
‘He worked for you for almost eight years,’ Ethan pointed out.
‘And disappeared when he was damned good and ready,’ Nellis shot back, ‘but not before ensuring that both you and Nicola were safe. Whatever the DIA may think of Jarvis it’s clear that he cares enough about you both, and that’s his weakness if we’re to bring him down.’
‘You’re actually going after him, after everything that he’s done for his country?’ Ethan challenged the director.
‘Everything Doug Jarvis did for his country was in the name of fighting corruption,’ Nellis snapped. ‘Deciding to up and off with a few billion dollars didn’t exactly endear him to the White House despite his prior record. However, as I said that’s not our only problem right now.’
‘Our?’ Lopez echoed, never missing an opportunity to express her displeasure.
‘What’s happened?’ Ethan asked.
The Director produced another file, this one containing no images at all but filled instead with data that looked as though it may have come from the National Security Agency, the ultra–clandestine cryptographic and cyber–crime unit based not too far away in Maryland, Virginia.
‘Over the past two years, the NSA has been intercepting communications chatter among Russian political and military channels. Russia has been flexing her muscles a little too prominently for our comfort lately, especially in Crimea and the Ukraine, and it’s been deemed highly important to monitor what they’re up to both in the Kremlin and in the field.’
Ethan, like most people across the globe, had witnessed the Russian annexation of the Crimea and its barely–covert involvement in the civil war raging across Ukraine’s eastern borders. That its belligerent president was becoming bolder by the month, and that there seemed little the west could do about it without provoking a full–scale third world war, was clear to anybody with the most basic grasp of world politics.
‘The Russians are keen to expand their influence and take back what they see as their fair share in world events and markets stolen from them post–Glasnost,’ Nellis explained. ‘Nobody’s is quite sure what the Kremlin’s true intentions are in the long term, but that there seems to have been a backsliding toward pre–Glasnost politics and subterfuge is clear enough to us. The Cold War is returning and with the consent of the Russian people, too. Like most countries Russia’s population is gradually ageing, and the old guard there have developed a hankering for what they see as the “good old days” of the Politboro.’
Lopez raised an eyebrow. ‘They’re asking to queue for bread again, to re–open the Siberian prisons and for politicians to be beheaded if found at fault?’
‘Who knew?’ Nellis replied with a shrug. ‘For them Glasnost was a moment of weakness, of bowing down to the west and becoming the lap–dog of the United States. The Russian people want a strong leader, a hard man with little compromise, which explains the popularity of their current President.’
‘How does all of that affect us?’ Ethan asked.
Nellis showed them the folder.
‘The Russians, believe it or not, have opened up a unit that is based directly on ARIES.’
‘No way,’ Lopez smiled brightly. ‘You think that there’s a Warzinski and Lopchek working out of Moscow?’
‘I doubt that,’ Ethan replied as he stifled a smile. ‘The Russians don’t have anybody as good looking as us.’
‘They also don’t have anybody as humane,’ Nellis said. ‘The Russians are calling their unit Mat’ Zemlya, or Mother Earth, which isn’t as new age as it sounds. They’ve been overheard talking about the operation you two conducted in Peru a few years back concerning the Russian, Yuri Volkov.’
‘He was searching for ancient alien corpses in Machu Picchu,’ Lopez said. ‘The only corpse he found was his own when we left him up there in the mountains.’
‘It seems that the Russian’s interest in all things paranormal has recently gone through the ceiling, and that bothers us here at the DIA.’
‘Because they’ll find out what we’ve been up to here?’ Ethan asked.
‘No,’ Nellis replied, ‘because that’s what got the Nazis started in World War Two. Hitler’s obsession with the occult led them to conduct gruesome experiments on human beings that I can barely allow myself to read about. Let’s just say that putting monkey heads on human bodies and conducting invasive surgery without anaesthetic only scratches the surface of what those insane lunatics got up to.’
Lopez shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘You think that the Soviets are looking to catch up some ground they lost after Glasnost, right?’
Nellis nodded, impressed at Lopez’s insight. ‘Russi
a lost pretty much everything after Glasnost as its economy collapsed and its military crumbled, the old Soviet Union fragmenting as the states broke away in favor of independence. The old guard’s growing influence in Moscow seeks an empire back in power, and for that to happen quickly enough they somehow have to bridge the gap of the last thirty or so years.’
‘So they turn to paranormal means,’ Ethan figured. ‘Trouble is, apart from a pandemic or an open war which they would probably lose, there’s only the nuclear option left and we all know that ends with no winners. Even their current president wouldn’t be so insane as to hit the big red button and give us all a thousand–degree heat wave, right?’
‘You’d hope not,’ Nellis replied. ‘However, he might be able to get the edge if he knew what we were about to do next.’
Lopez frowned. ‘How would he know that? Since we ended Joaquin Abell’s campaign in Florida all those years ago nobody can see into the future.’
‘That, I’m afraid, is where the Russians would tell you you’re wrong.’
***
V
‘Say what now?’
Nicola Lopez was watching the General with a keen interest as Nellis gestured to the files before him.
‘As you both no doubt already know, one of Russia’s most recent forays beyond its borders includes a presence in Syria in support of government troops loyal to Syria’s president. The Russians claim that they’re fighting terrorism alongside the Syrian Army, when in fact most people know damned well that they’re propping up the Syrian government, who are staunch Russian allies and opponents of western interests in the region.’
‘The Syrian president is a psychopathic terrorist,’ Ethan said. ‘How Russia thinks that it can support such a dictator who is accused of war crimes is beyond me.’
‘It’s beyond any of us,’ Lopez agreed, ‘but what does Syria have to do with us?’
‘The country is irrelevant to ARIES,’ Nellis said, ‘but what is being done inside that country is of great interest. Put simply, the Russians appear to have been conducting clandestine experiments within Syria at the time the civil war started, and it was only when those experiments were threatened with exposure by the advancing Free Syria army that they intervened and turned the course of the war.’
The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6) Page 3
