Voyager

by Carl Rackman

  “Is that where the Diane Breecker side of you comes from?” Brad asked but immediately regretted it. It was too confrontational.

  Alex picked up on it regardless. “You know it, Barnes. I have a ruthless streak. I still get off on the power I have compared to normal people. I could probably break most existing Olympic track records. I’m faster, stronger, and have quicker reactions, better eyesight and hearing than most people walking the Earth. I learn new skills in a fraction of the time it takes an average person. Also, one of the unexpected benefits of my gene therapy is that I regenerate almost miraculously; I should live for about a hundred and fifty years.”

  Brad was briefly taken aback by the effortless brag and was ready to dismiss it as trolling. But he’d seen her incredible escape from the cartel with his own eyes. It was chilling to hear, but it gave him a slight thrill at the same time.

  “So you’re what? Supergirl?”

  She laughed ironically. “I wish!” She continued to open up. “I’m not invincible. I’m still scared of getting hurt. I’m pretty tough but as you saw, not unbreakable.” She breathed deeply and interlocked her fingers in his as their eyes met.

  A reckless desire for her began to surface in Brad. He tried to keep it down. She was still a very dangerous agent as far as he knew, and he was unsure if she wasn’t just playing him.

  As if she read his mind, she gave him a coy smile. “Go find the nurse will you, Barnes? Get her to bring my stuff. I need to make a call.”

  Brad felt a wave of genuine compassion for her. “I’m sorry, it doesn’t work like that, Alex. Right now, you only get to talk to me.”

  Her hand moved up to his wrist and caressed it lightly. “That’s not so bad. Brad, you’re a good man. Best I’ve ever met. Brave, thoughtful, resourceful. You carried pain, but you remained a decent person.”

  “Uh, that’s very kind of you,” he said, practically giddy from the accolades.

  She moved her hand up his arm. He felt self-conscious at her touch. He was still quite wasted after his month-long coma despite efforts from the physical therapists.

  “And just so you know – the OIG report against you was just smoke. They were going to hang you out to dry, Barnes. The report I passed you was real. I played the dumb blonde just to see what you’d do, and you surprised me. You didn’t bite. Not even when I went after your dead fiancée. That was pretty cool of you.”

  She began to draw him closer, parting her lips as her eyes glittered in the soft light.

  Brad’s blood pounded in his ears. He was overwhelmingly aware of Alex’s presence as she rose to meet him; a powerful thrill rang through his body as their lips met. His fears evaporated at the first touch of her skin as he slid his hands under her thin hospital gown. There was one hiccup, a jarring, self-conscious mistake when he strained her injured shoulder causing her to gasp in pain, but the moment was soon forgotten as Brad felt himself enveloped by her, losing himself again in the stupor of this reckless attraction. He threw off his caution in a single, careless dive into the unknown as the Eden of his comatose dreams became a dangerous and delicious reality.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Brad balanced on the edge of the narrow bed next to Alex, her good arm and one leg draped across him, holding him from falling off the edge. His heart still hammered from the incredible release he felt, while his wasted body protested from every joint. His head pounded from the exertion - the nervous tension had eased but the increase in blood pressure caused his broken head to throb.

  Alex had brought him pain, but her intimacy was beginning to heal him again. Although she was still bandaged, she seemed to be impervious to the pain from her own injury.

  It hadn’t been an entirely pleasurable experience. Her physical strength had been unexpected and quite unnerving for Brad during their short and intense coupling. Brad was half-expecting her to break his arms and bolt for the door, but his suspicions were overwhelmed by his pent-up desire. It had been years since he had loved anyone; Alex had woken something desperate and deep inside him. He tried to rationalise again, but the physical drain on his recovering body had rendered him almost helpless. If she decided to leave, he was as physically and emotionally defenceless as a puppy.

  She turned onto her back in a languid move, grimacing slightly as she shifted her injured shoulder.

  “Okay, Brad, quid pro quo. You have to let me go now.” She laughed when she saw his alarmed expression. “Just kidding. How’s your head?”

  “Sore. It’s always sore.”

  “I’m glad you seem to have kept all your faculties. I guess you needed a workout,” she smirked.

  Brad was cheeky in return. “I can’t believe I scored with Supergirl. Wait till the guys hear about this.”

  “Nice try, Barnes. Supergirl probably felt she owed you. Call it charity. Or pity.” She laughed at his crestfallen face.

  “Thanks. I feel so…used.” Brad kissed her, uninhibited at last. “Ferguson’s going to kill me,” he whispered.

  “No, he’s going to love you. You’ve got a great interrogation technique, Agent Barnes.” She slid her leg off him and sat up, hugging the bedsheet with her good arm. “What do you want to know?”

  “Seriously?”

  Alex shrugged. “The medical officer comes in at eight. He’ll probably be expecting you to have done more than play patty cake with the scary lady.”

  Brad bolted up from the bed in alarm, which provoked another bout of laughter from Alex, and a dizzying headache in his pounding brain.

  He tottered slightly as he pulled on his clothes. “Okay, Alex. Tell me about Voyager. Who’s behind it?”

  She pouted. “I thought you’d want to know more about me.”

  “Hey, Alex. It’s just business,” he said with a smirk of his own.

  She frowned and threw the pillow at him without even wincing. “Okay, smartass. The Triumvirate set up the Visitors plan back in 2013.”

  Brad stopped her. “Wait, who? The Triumvirate?”

  Alex stared. “Really? I have to go back to Conspiracy 101?”

  Brad nodded. “I guess. This is all news to me.”

  “The Triumvirate is my employer, Barnes. They probably own half the world’s wealth between them. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But they do control banks, corporations, stock markets and media. They gather data from across the world on every human being who has internet access. They use it to manipulate, control and direct the opinion of vast swathes of our democracies across the world.”

  Brad would have laughed if he’d heard it from anyone else, but her face was completely earnest.

  “It’s all about control. They operate a wider council of maybe twenty other guys. All men. All white. They’re the elites everyone thinks are running the world – only these guys actually do it. They’ve effectively appointed every leader of every major economy in the world for the last forty years. The ones they can’t buy, they burn. And don’t pretend you haven’t seen that happen in your lifetime.”

  Brad listened. He would think about it later; for now he owed her his full attention.

  She continued her story. “I don’t know everything, but I know what the Visitors project is all about. They want to fracture the United States. They want to encourage the break-up of the Union in order to raise up a new Russian-European superstate.”

  Brad remained silent.

  Alex gave him a look to make sure he wasn’t zoning out. “For decades, the Triumvirate have known the threat of something is as powerful as the actual thing itself. Nuclear war, global warming, communism, terrorism – the list is long, and all have been used to control populations right up to the present. They know it’s easy to set nations against each other. But it’s much harder to create something that threatens the whole of humanity. Global warming was a common enemy but it’s too nebulous. It has no face. There’s too much science. It’s elitist and people resent it rather than fear it. It’s not threatening enough to really change anything.

  “For mank
ind to have a common enemy that people can fear and hate, you have to give it a face. A sinister force or unspecified threat doesn’t work because people don’t know what it looks like. That’s why the Triumvirate have been trying to plant seeds of alien invasion in popular culture since the Forties.”

  Brad had to agree. “The X-Files?”

  Alex laughed. “And so much more! The old Saturday night movies of the Fifties, Close Encounters, Independence Day…It goes on and on, Barnes. But it only works if there’s proof. And the Triumvirate know that proof is something the nations of the world can’t afford to provide.”

  “Why not?”

  “If our planet was threatened by an alien species, what would happen? Do you think anyone on earth would give a crap about their jobs, or consumerism, or whether their government was communist or capitalist or Muslim or Christian? Do you think they’d worry anymore about immigration or terrorism or oil or TV shows? The economic base of our civilisation would collapse. That’s why it’s so easy to make people believe that the government would cover up anything that pointed to the existence of intelligent, extraterrestrial life.

  “The Triumvirate developed a plan. They would create a means of proving an extraterrestrial threat. When the time came to reveal it, the US government would be totally undermined. The media could say, ‘See, the government knew all along! They covered it up! They are deceiving you, just like the moon landings!’”

  Brad nodded, setting off another tremor of aching in his head. It made sense. “So the Voyager photos were all part of this plan?”

  To his surprise, Alex shook her head. “No. Something went wrong. We were involved in setting up the first stage of the sting. We were working with a group of conspiracy whackos in New York. These guys were going to leak some video of an alien race they had discovered living on Earth. Some of our operatives were going to play the part of these aliens. We were going to stage some attacks in New York to make it look like the aliens were resisting exposure. The idea was to make it look like the aliens had always been colluding with the government to mask their existence. It was a slam-dunk conspiracy.”

  Brad made the connection. “Williamsburg? The group in Brooklyn?”

  Alex looked surprised. “Yeah. Did you know?”

  “We busted it. Two of their guys killed four of ours and got clean away. It’s one of the worst incidents in the history of the New York Field Office.”

  Alex looked grim. “Those two guys were our guys. Two operatives from Supra.”

  Brad was suddenly angry. His head throbbed in sympathy. “What the hell is this about?”

  “We got a change of orders. Somewhere the plan went wrong. I don’t know exactly how the Voyager photos fit in with the rest of the plan but we got recalled urgently to fix it. When the photos arrived, NASA were supposed to sit on them until the Triumvirate were ready to point the finger. But someone leaked it to the media as soon as the pictures were received. Perhaps it was one of the scientists, I don’t know. Then a copy of the photos turned up in England – the Triumvirate panicked.

  “Our team, Supra, were sent in to recover every single copy of the photos and silence anyone who knew anything about them. As you know, we succeeded, but it cost many lives. I’m sorry you got caught in the crossfire, Barnes.”

  Brad didn’t say anything. Carolyn Woolf’s brother still had the images; he’d provided them to the FBI. Perhaps Alex and Supra weren’t as unstoppable as they thought. Or perhaps the British MI5 had plugged their leak to the Triumvirate.

  He knitted his brows. There was still the nagging inconsistency he couldn’t resolve. “Alex, something’s been bugging me from the beginning. Surely the conspirators had the original copies of the pictures? If the whole conspiracy depended on NASA having copies, why did the Triumvirate destroy them?”

  She pulled a face at first, but then thought about it. “That’s actually a great question. I don’t know. Perhaps they wanted to maintain complete control over the information. Any leaks would minimise the impact. Besides, if they could manipulate releasing the information, the government would end up looking even worse. Even if the government doesn’t have the photos, they have no way of disproving it because the probe definitely sent them back. It would be a lose-lose for NASA – no pictures, but accused of being part of a conspiracy to deceive the public in any case.”

  Brad shrugged. “I guess. Or the conspirators never had the photos in the first place.”

  Alex’s amber eyes bore into Brad’s. “Are you serious?”

  “What if the pictures are real and the Triumvirate are just reacting? Using it as a better opportunity to strike a blow against America?”

  “Brad. That would mean… I don’t know what it means.”

  “It would mean that someone was messing with Voyager in outer space, and they sent us some selfies to warn us they were coming.”

  She sat on the bed, her brows furrowed in thought. “Well, that’s really bad news for everyone.”

  “Why? What else is there?” Brad still wasn’t sure, but he encouraged her to continue. She seemed eager to unburden herself of this inside information.

  “There’s another part of the plan, Brad. They’ve already done their job of manipulating the media to push the ‘Visitors’ story. But their endgame is how they’re going to destroy the last bit of credibility the federal government has. I mentioned JFK. Well, Supra has already been briefed for a mission to take place on Friday. Inauguration Day.”

  Brad stared. “You’re going to assassinate him? The President of the United States!”

  She heaved another sigh. “If they’re still planning to assassinate the new President, it suggests to me that their big moment is coming up. The people believe the new guy’s a maverick, the anti-establishment champion. They believe they’ve finally elected someone who’ll put one over the Illuminati in Washington, or whatever. Can you imagine what it’ll look like when he gets his head blown off on live TV one minute after being sworn in?”

  “There’ll be riots.”

  “No, Brad. There’ll be mass civil unrest, possibly followed by civil war. It’ll take months, even years, to sort out, and will probably end with some kind of secessionist movement among the conservative states. I told you they were planning to take down the United States. If they’re expecting actual alien visitors – well, it kind of makes more sense. With the US out of the picture, world power shifts to the east. We know what happens when an advanced civilisation meets an inferior, fragmented one.”

  Brad’s headache was getting intense. “Conquest.” He wasn’t sure if he could write any of this down. Ferguson would send him straight back to hospital, probably the kind with padded walls. He puffed out his cheeks. “That’s – quite the story.”

  Alex laughed again. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told. Good to get it off my chest, but I guess it sounds pretty weird to an outsider.”

  “But assassinating the President? At the Inauguration? You’re serious?”

  “I can help you take them down, Barnes.” Her face was serious again.

  “I don’t think Ferguson will go for it. I’m not sure myself.”

  “You seemed pretty sure of me half an hour ago.”

  Brad couldn’t help the flush through his cheeks. “Touché.”

  “Yeah, well, since you’re the only one I can talk to, can we wipe the slate clean? Start over? What do you say, partner?” She was smiling, her face radiant even in the flat light from the bed lamp. She had a truly astounding versatility. She hadn’t mentioned it, but he assumed she was an outstanding actress as well.

  Brad was still wary. She had been physically welcoming, disarmingly candid and seemed to truly believe everything she’d told him. Yet he’d seen her cold and calculating side up close. Too close. But she had already captivated him.

  He leaned in to her again and felt the electricity spark between them from the static build-up on the ship.

  “Partners… I like the sound of that.” Their lips touche
d again.

  Just then, there was a soft knock on the door. The nurse stuck her head around as she opened it. Her eyebrows rose at the sight of Alex sitting upright and Brad sitting innocently but stiffly on the adjacent seat.

  “Uh, ma’am, the doctor is here.”

  Alex nodded, and the nurse swung open the door to admit the medical officer.

  Brad was surprised to see he was a junior-grade lieutenant in his mid-twenties.

  “How’s my favourite patient? You seem to be making astonishing progress, I hear.”

  Brad moved defensively to the head of the hospital bed. He felt sure that someone knew what had happened between them, but neither the doctor nor the nurse betrayed anything.

  When the medical officer politely asked Alex’s permission to examine her it was posed in a way that suggested she wasn’t expected to refuse. She unselfconsciously removed her gown and allowed the medical officer’s fingers to gently probe the affected area. She didn’t react at all until he pressed firmly on the bone eliciting a wince at the corner of her mouth.

  “I’ll be damned,” said the officer quietly. He spoke some medical jargon to the nurse who made a few notes on the clipboard beside the bed.

  “Ma’am, you’ve been in our facility for fourteen hours. When you came in, you had an aggravated total fracture of the right clavicle with associated internal bleeding and severe swelling. Do you mind telling me how you’ve managed to fix the bone and reduce the inflammation in that time? Because I’m stumped.”

  “I respond well to treatment. I’ve always been a good patient.” The words dripped like honey. She was playing her girl-next-door part; the doctor was impressed.

  “Well, I’m going to discharge you from the sickbay as soon as the Officer of the Deck okays it. In the meantime, you can get dressed. I’d advise keeping the dressings and support bandages on for at least the next twenty-four hours. We should be back in Loma at zero one hundred hours Monday morning, about forty hours from now. I hope you brought a book.”