by Steve Alten
“Sir, I believe that was SAIC.”
Jordan Denny reached across his desk for his phone, hitting the intercom. “Angela, get me Barry Zuckerman over at SAIC.”
“Yes, sir.”
He scanned down to the next name on the list. “What about ‘Cosmic Ops?’ ”
“That was Lockheed. You’ll want to speak to Edward Canup, Jr.; he’s stationed out at Edwards Air Force Base.”
The intercom beeped. “Sir, I have Barry Zuckerman on line one.”
“Thank you, Angela.” He pressed the blinking key. “Barry, Jordan Denny. I’m with Under Secretary Adam Shariak and you’re on speaker.”
“Gentlemen. To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“Project Royal Ops—read me in on it, please.”
A moment of silence … followed by: “I’m sorry, Jordan. I can’t do that.”
Jordan Denny snatched up the receiver. “Barry, in case you forgot, I’m the goddam Secretary of Defense. Now read me in on Project Royal Ops.”
Adam watched as his boss’s face flushed red.
“What do you mean I don’t have a need to know? If I’m asking you about … hello? Hello?”
Adam winced as the Secretary slammed the receiver on the hook.
“Can you believe the son of a bitch hung up on me?” He pressed the intercom button again. “Angela, get me Edward … sorry?”
“Canup.”
“Canup. Edward Canup. He’s at Lockheed?”
Adam nodded.
“He’s at Lockheed, Angela. Thank you.”
The Defense Secretary closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. “Meditation … my wife swears by it. Ever give it a try?”
“This weekend as a matter of fact.”
“Did it calm you down?”
The intercom beeped, cutting off Adam’s reply. “Sir, I have Edward Canup on line two.”
“Mr. Canup, this is Jordan T. Denny, the Secretary of Defense. I want you to read me in on Project Cosmic Ops.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary. I’m not familiar with Cosmic Ops.”
“In that case, Mr. Canup, say hello to Adam Shariak. Before he was sworn in as my Comptroller, Mr. Shariak was Project Manager at Kemp Aerospace, a company you subcontracted and paid $1.2 billion to complete work on this unfamiliar Cosmic Ops.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Secretary, Adam Shariak never had the clearance to discuss Cosmic Ops, and you do not have a need to know. Have a blessed day.”
Jordan Denny’s eyes widened in disbelief as he was hung up on yet again.
The intercom buzzed through. “Mr. Secretary, you have an important call on the Blue Line.”
The Secretary of Defense picked up the receiver. “Denny here … Yes sir. Stand by, General.” Looking up, he signaled to Adam to wait outside the office.
The Under Secretary exited to the waiting room, feeling like a scolded child.
Angela Hatzileris stared at him from behind her desk. “I’ve served three administrations, and in all that time, I’ve never heard a general sound so upset. What is going on?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a UFO landed on the White House lawn.”
The administrative assistant chuckled, then covered her mouth as the door opened and Jordan Denny waved Adam back inside.
The Secretary of Defense looked pale. “Apparently, we poked the bear. In no uncertain terms, I’ve been told to cease these inquiries.”
“Told by who?”
“Doesn’t matter. Mr. Shariak, at this particular time, I am satisfied that the proper due diligence regarding the existence and nature of these projects was carried out or they would not have been funded. Therefore, in response to your report—”
“UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“Excuse me?”
“You wanted to know the nature of the USAPs. They involve the reverse-engineering of advanced technologies taken from interstellar craft that have been shot down over the last seventy years.”
“Christ … are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Let me do my job and I’ll expose this thing.”
“Your job? What the hell do you think the president is going to say if I tell him my new Under Secretary wants to investigate a bunch of black budget projects dealing with aliens? Where do you think this investigation of yours is going to lead? How will you prove your case? Anyone you or your Senator brother subpoena from the defense sector is going to hide under the shield of ‘exclusivity and trade secrets,’ and no one in Congress will dare challenge that. This whole thing is a cluster-fuck and I want no part in it.”
“No problem. When I announce that I just discovered the DoD has been secretly funding $80 billion to $100 billion or more worth of unacknowledged and unapproved special access projects every year—secret projects that neither the president nor Congress have any inkling of, I’ll be sure to mention that you wanted no part in the investigation.”
Adam headed for the door.
“Wait just a minute, goddam it! You want to investigate the matter—fine. But for now it stays an internal investigation inside your office. Funds are missing; we want them found and accounted for—period. I don’t want to hear anything about aliens or UFOs or freakin’ Bigfoot, am I clear?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.” Adam exited the Defense Secretary’s office, his mind racing.
Jordan Denny remained seated behind his desk, gazing at the framed photos of his wife, three children, and two grandchildren arranged on the far corner of his desk.
Screw it. You tried to warn him … he didn’t listen. Just keep him isolated so there’s no blowback.
22
Subterranean Complex—Midwest USA
Monday Evening
IT WAS 5:41 P.M. WHEN JESSICA MARULLI summoned Elevator-7 to her location on Level-3, the uppermost floor in the subterranean habitat. After an intense first day, all she could think about was dinner, a hot bath, and bed.
Don’t forget you scheduled a call with Adam …
Today had been the first time she had thought about her fiancé since she had boarded the Boeing 767 back in Baltimore.
Barely a week … was that even possible? Her schedule had been so non-stop and utterly disorienting, it seemed like she hadn’t seen Adam in a month.
Today was the first time she had really missed him.
* * *
Her early morning lecture had been followed by a “meet and greet” with her staff in Lab-3C, the work place assigned to Project Zeus. Waiting for her outside the only entrance into the facility was a blue-eyed, brown-haired woman in a white lab coat.
Dr. Sarah Mayhew-Reece appeared to be in her early forties, though Jessica knew from reading her assistant’s personnel file that she was fifty-eight and had earned her doctorate from M.I.T. while her new boss was still in diapers. At five-foot-one, the petite southerner seemed more of a doting mother than a rocket scientist, but by mid-morning Jess found herself more than a little intimidated by the sharp-witted, always probing ‘thinkaholic’ her colleagues teasingly referred to as “Ladybug.”
“Dr. Marulli, so good to finally meet you. As you can see from my identification, I’m Sarah Mayhew-Reece, Zeus’s assistant director. Ya’ll can call me Sarah or Dr. May if you’d like … my last name gets a bit tedious. You’ll find the staff prefers Ladybug—that’s sort of a pet name my husband, Alton, blessed me with. Unfortunately, a co-worker heard him call me Ladybug on a personal Skype message two years ago; since then it’s followed me around like an unwanted shadow.”
“Sarah it is. Call me Jessica.”
“You know, I think it best we keep it as Dr. Marulli. I find informality and beauty with one as young as ya’ll to be a recipe for insubordination.” She whispered, “Some of these men haven’t been with a woman of the flesh for quite some time.”
“Oh-kay … Did you happen to catch my lecture this morning?”
“I did, and I made some notes. We can go over them after you meet our tech team.” Sarah swiped her id
entification card and pressed her brow against the rubber mold of the retinal scan, causing the bolt of the pneumatic steel door to open with a hiss of air.
Jessica followed her into an anteroom, a warning sign posted above a second pneumatic door.
Bio-Hazard Level 2 Containment
Nothing is permitted to leave the lab
without proper documents.
Sarah pressed a button and the interior door opened, the air pressure blasting them in the face before easing.
A howling wind accompanied the two women as they made their way single-file through a tight empty corridor. Up ahead was a golden-yellow glow coming from the end of the passage which was sealed behind a Plexiglas barrier.
Sarah waved her right hand at the motion detector, causing it to part.
“Welcome to the Hive.”
Lab-3C was contained inside a four-story-high dome; its curved interior walls composed of three-foot-in-diameter honeycomb-shaped panels which radiated a faint golden light. Jessica recognized the material—an advanced polymer designed to block out electromagnetic waves.
More of an assembly area than a lab, the facility spanned the length of two football fields, the open space divided into twenty work stations. Each location encircled an 8,000 pound Zeus satellite, the monoliths lined up like giant dominoes.
Every fourth work station was separated from the next by an eight-foot-high, twenty-foot-long divider. From her vantage, Jessica could not see what these barriers were concealing.
Sarah frowned. “Look at them. They’re like twenty lost children, waiting for their mama to send them off into space. C’mon, I’ll introduce you to their keepers.”
Jessica followed her assistant to the partition situated between work stations four and five. On the other side of the divider was a combination supply depot and break area. Hanging from numbered hooks were tool belts, uniforms and an assortment of bulky orange vests that resembled life-jackets. There was a kitchenette, and a lounge area which consisted of several sofas and recliners, and eight nap pods—all but two of them vacant. Four port-o-potties were paired off by gender, the combination toilet and enema designed to evacuate and “refresh” the bowels.
Project Zeus’s station leaders were dressed in white jumpsuits, the extra padding around their knees and elbows stained dark from wear.
Lois “Lolly” Stern was the first to make an impression on Jessica. Strapped in one of the orange vests, the teal-eyed, forty-eight-year-old engineer was floating upside-down three feet off the ground, her long brown hair hanging below her face like a mop.
Jessica stared at the device strapped across her chest. “An anti-gravitics device? That’s impressive. How high—”
“—three hundred meters; excuse me, Dr. Marulli.” Sarah rushed over to the inverted woman whose face was flushed purple, the veins in her forehead popping out like tree roots. “Lolly, roll into a horizontal position at once before you pop an artery!”
“Dr. May? Did I fall asleep again?”
Sarah grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her into an upright position. Then she turned a harsh parental gaze upon the two men watching the spectacle from their leather recliners. “Mr. Mull … Mr. Mahurin, I thought I asked the two of you to keep an eye on her.”
Chris Mull was in his late forties, his brown hair worn long and tied in a tight ponytail despite a receding forehead. The upper torso of his orange jumpsuit was tied by the sleeves around his waist, exposing his gray Dallas Cowboy’s tee-shirt. “We were watching her, Ladybug. And in the course of watching her, we decided to kill time by wagering on when she’d pass out. I said nine minutes; Lukas went with fourteen.”
“And if she dies from an aneurism?”
“Then all bets are off.”
“No worries, Ladybug. Lolly has good veins.” Lukas Mahurin held a carrot in his mouth like a cigar, his attention focused on the guinea pig feeding from the other end. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Nibbles?”
“Ugh … do you see what I have to put up with, Dr. Marulli? Lolly, we agreed to a maximum of five minutes per session. Ignore my rules again and I’ll ban you from all gravitronic devices.”
“No you won’t.”
Jessica turned to the voice of dissension.
Jeffrey Emmette was in the kitchenette, working on his own assembly line, this one consisting of six deli subs. “Lolly has a herniated disc and frequent inversion is the only thing that takes the pressure off the nerves in her lumbar spine. Cut her off and we’ll have to listen to her whine all day.”
The self-appointed “Sandwich King” ran his eyes over Jessica. “What’re you having, boss lady? I’ve got Italian, turkey-off-the-bone, and two pounds of fresh roast beef that’s nice and bloody. We have another six hours before it starts to go bad.”
“Thank you … maybe later. It’s only nine-twenty in the morning.”
“Around here we eat when we can; you never know when Ladybug is going to call for an all-nighter.” Using a large carving knife, Jeffrey sliced a turkey sub in half, slid it onto a paper plate, then walked over to one of the sealed sleep pods and banged on top of the oval device with the palm of his free hand. “Wake-up, R.B. Eats!”
The pod opened, revealing Rachel Barry, a long-necked, frizzy-haired Caucasian woman in her late thirties. “Did you put mayo on it?”
“Did you ask for mayo?”
“In fact I specifically said no mayo.”
“Then there’s no mayo on it.”
Rachel accepted the sandwich and took a bite. “Asshole.”
Jeffrey Emmette grinned. “Turkey’s a little dry. With dry turkey you gotta add mayo. Ain’t that right, new boss lady? So what’s your poison?”
“Italian with oil and vinegar; hold the mayo and onions.”
“You must have grown up in the northeast … praise God. Not like the assistant boss lady, who kills every sandwich I make her with yellow mustard.”
Ignoring him, Sarah scanned the break area, doing a mental head count. Grimacing, she approached a man soldering scraps of copper at a work table, his Marist College sweatshirt stained in grease. “Ian, where’s Peter and Andrew?”
Ian Concannon never looked up from the ET figurine he was piecing together. “Pete’s trying to fix the leaking A/C duct. I lost track of Andrew. Maybe it’s tea time?”
“Grabowski’s on the shitter,” Lukas said, the guinea pig now feeding off carrot shards covering his groin. “Or should I say, the ‘port-o-loo.’ ”
Lois Stern stretched her back, her complexion having returned to normal. “Did you know in Russia they call it a unitas … as in, ‘You Need Ass.’ True story.”
A tall athletic man with a slight paunch emerged from the men’s port-o-potty, slamming the plastic door shut. “That’s not a story, Lolly, it’s more of an anecdote. A story is what our dear Ladybug will be spinning when I ask her—again—why maintenance still hasn’t drained the sludge out of the men’s shitter. What’s the point of ‘refreshing one’s colon’ if one has to smell it afterward? It’s been two bloody weeks.”
“I was told—again—that all maintenance services will revert to their normal schedules in the fall. Until then, and I quote, ‘your ten zoo keepers can make do,’ no pun intended.”
Andrew Grabowski snorted a reply. “Next turd I vacuum out of my intestines will be in the woman’s shitter; see how you like it then.”
“Enough. This is Dr. Marulli—”
“The new head zookeeper, we know, Ladybug.” Ian looked up from soldering. “Hey, boss lady, how long have you been a member of the Flat Earth Society?”
“I’m sorry?”
Jeffrey Emmette handed her a paper plate holding the two halves of an Italian sub. “What my esteemed colleague is referring to is this morning’s speech. It was a bit … antiquated.”
“It was bullshit.”
Jessica looked up as a powerfully-built man with piercing hazel eyes and a neatly trimmed mustache floated down from the ceiling, a heavy tool belt hanging below his anti-g
ravitics vest.
“Peter Niedzinski, this is our new—”
“Ops Director, I know. Will you be offing yourself like your predecessor?”
Jessica felt the blood rush from her face. “Scott Hopper committed suicide?”
“Suicide’s the ‘official’ report,” Chris Mull said, hopping off the recliner. “Everyone who saw the body knows he was TWEP-ed.”
“What’s TWEP-ed again?” Lolly asked as she moved into a downward-facing-dog yoga pose.
“Terminated With Extreme Prejudice,” Chris Mull answered. “You can bet the farm it was the bikers.”
“You’re wrong,” Peter said. “Scott was poisoned. Poison is CIA.”
“Yeah, well I spoke to his wife. After they poisoned him they yanked out one of his back molars. The dental calling card is strictly Devil’s Disiples.”
“Stop you guys; you’re freaking Dr. Marulli out.” Rachel wiped mayo from the corner of her mouth. “Besides, it could have been an overdose. I mean—you know, Scott. He had issues.”
“What sort of issues?” Jessica asked.
“He had a conscience,” Chris Mull replied. “Morality and MAJI go together like mayo on an Italian sub.”
Sarah shook her head. “This is entirely improper. The walls have ears—”
“Not today they don’t,” Peter winked. “The Hive’s security system is wired into the EMP shield. By removing one of the panels to access the A/C duct, I may have accidentally severed the circuit. Until I replace the panel we can speak freely.”
“Then I’ll start,” said Ian, holding up his copper extraterrestrial. “Interstellars, new Boss Lady. Are you for ’em or against them?”
“Extraterrestrials? I can’t really say. I mean … I know they’re out there; I’ve just never crossed paths with one.”
“But you helped create a satellite array designed to fry them as they cross into our dimension. Surely you must have something against them?”
“Sorry … Ian, is it? Ian, I think you have the wrong impression about Zeus. It wasn’t designed to be a weapons platform; it simply tracks physical objects moving out of the higher dimensions—”
