Of course, Forrestal wasn’t a fool. He knew that Hoover would have eventually found out; the damn man had ears everywhere. And there were a couple of pertinent bits of information that Forrestal still kept to himself. He knew in his bones that Variants were a threat, but he preferred them in the right hands—his hands. Hoover would have to hit the jackpot to find a Variant before MAJESTIC-12 did.
But in case those Variants did wander off the reservation, Forrestal figured it was better to have men like McCarthy and Hoover—men who weren’t afraid to act—in his corner.
Overall, despite the initial surprise and with lingering reservations about Hoover, Forrestal decided he was fine with how the evening had gone. He grabbed another Scotch and headed outside for some air, not noticing the pair of eyes that had been on him the entire evening.
January 25, 1949
Julia Meyer had never seen a place so desolate in her entire life.
Her plane—a creaky, god-awful cargo hauler—had landed on a huge, dried-out lake bed, white as salt and stretching for miles in all directions until it bumped up against sandy desert mountains. There were buildings—short and squat except for the couple they used to store airplanes—and a few scattered encampments away from the main base that she had seen from the air.
Her handler—not quite a captor, certainly not a friend, and she was still unsure if he’d ever be her boss—had called the place Area 51 and said that its very existence was one of the United States’s foremost secrets. And even though she’d only known Danny Wallace for a short period of time, she’d quickly come to understand he wasn’t a man to exaggerate.
So, it made sense that Area 51 was where they trained Variants to become full-blown spies.
Julia knew her worth in this, of course. A spy who could walk through walls was valuable. There were others with different Enhancements—another unusual term Danny used to describe these strange powers. There was a woman who could look into the past through physical touch. A man with extraordinary powers to both heal and harm. And of course, she had already found herself at the mercy of the woman who could play with emotions like a puppeteer controlled a marionette. Julia swore that if she ever saw Maggie again, she would avoid her at all costs.
“Let’s go,” Danny said, grabbing his duffel bag and nodding toward hers. Julia gathered her things and followed the navy man—now dressed in a khaki uniform—off the plane and into a waiting jeep.
“Any final questions?” he asked as the driver put the vehicle into gear and headed for one of the buildings.
“No,” she replied, repeating the verbal agreement they’d already made several times over. “You will take me to your scientists for analysis of my ability for a few days, then I will go to one of the training places here to work on the things that will make me a spy. And when you feel you can trust me, you will take this thing off my leg.”
This thing was the damned electronic device that the Maggie woman had used on her in Vienna. It blocked her ability completely. Danny had decided to handcuff it to her ankle after she tried to make a break for it at the Keflavik air field in Iceland on their way back.
Julia was still skeptical of the entire affair, but she’d run out of alternative options for the time being. She would play along for now. Besides, the training he promised her could make any future endeavors even more lucrative.
“You behave yourself, you get the jewelry off,” Danny said. She hated how he thought he was being clever, calling her shackle jewelry. “Now we’ll have a bit of paperwork first, and—driver, what the hell is going on over there? Three o’clock.”
Julia looked to where Danny was pointing, in the distance off to the right, where a number of heavy trucks were driving off down a road that led into the mountains. It was a very large caravan and seemed to include heavy equipment as well as numerous people. Even from far off, Julia could see a few of the people were wearing white lab coats.
“No idea, sir,” the young driver shouted over the airflow around the jeep. “Bunch of trucks from the carpool got requisitioned, is all I know.”
Danny looked around him until his eyes fixed on the largest building on base. It looked very important, with its own security fence. Julia noticed that the cargo doors to the building were opened.
“Shit! Follow those trucks, sergeant!” Danny ordered. Immediately, the jeep swerved and headed for the line of vehicles. “We get any visitors while I was gone?”
“I drove General Montague in just yesterday, sir,” the driver replied.
Danny sat back in his seat with a worried grimace on his face—an uncharacteristic look for a man Julia had heretofore only seen as being quietly competent. “What is it?” she asked.
“Don’t know yet, and you’re probably not cleared for it,” he replied.
* * *
Danny stewed for the entire hour it took the convoy to head over the mountains. They were heading toward one of the nuclear test sites; that, combined with Major General Bob Montague’s arrival, was cause for worry.
Danny was nominal commander of Area 51’s Variant research and training program, but that was due more to necessity rather than the appropriate rank—there were only so many people cleared for TOP SECRET-MAJIK stuff, after all. Montague was one of them, but he already had a full-time job commanding the air base in Albuquerque. Mostly, the general left Danny to his own devices, but every now and then, he’d get to asking unusually pointed questions about individual Variants or other related topics, leading Danny to believe the general was likely being fed intel by someone on base or elsewhere inside MAJESTIC-12.
Of course, Danny could’ve simply been paranoid, and he accepted that as part of the job description. But there were days …
The convoy rolled to a stop on a hillside overlooking another valley. About two miles down, he could just make out a number of technicians standing around an impossibly bright light.
Measuring only six feet across, that light was somehow an impossibility of physics, a pure white nothingness that could be moved by magnetic fields but was otherwise immune to any attempts to alter it. Danny had discovered it in 1945, in the ruins of Hiroshima, and since transporting it to the United States, they’d been able to determine that the pulses of radio waves and radiation it threw off regularly were ultimately connected to and very likely the actual source of the Variants’ powers.
How and why this was happening, nobody knew. The best physicists in the world were stumped. Einstein had once told an Area 51 researcher that such a thing was unequivocally impossible. And yet there it was.
Now Danny just had to figure out what the hell it was doing off base and on a nuclear testing range.
He jumped out of the jeep and turned to his driver. “Take Miss Meyer back to base. Put her in containment holding until I get back. That shackle on her ankle does not come off under any circumstances whatsoever. Understood?”
Danny didn’t wait for the reply. Instead, he marched off toward the rest of the caravan of vehicles, looking for anybody who could explain what was happening. Thankfully, he found a friend before anyone else.
“Commander!”
Dr. Detlev Bronk, one of the world’s foremost—actually, he was the only one—biophysicists came rushing up to greet Danny. Bronk was a reedy man with slicked-back gray hair, with a propensity for wearing both Hawaiian shirts and, usually, an amused look on his face.
“What’s going on, Det?” Danny demanded as he continued to stride forward to where he assumed the brass would be.
“Schreiber managed to talk Montague into another test of the vortex,” Bronk said, falling in beside Danny. “You’re not going to like it.”
“They already nuked the vortex at sea last year. How badly am I not going to like it?”
“I lodged a formal protest with the President as soon as I found out. But they kept me in the dark so long, I doubt it’ll get there in time,” Bronk said, handing Danny a pair of binoculars. “Take a look.”
Danny stopped to put the binocul
ars to his eyes. He surveyed the vortex—a team of engineers were dismantling the frame of the magnetic field generator they’d used to transport it there. Others were inspecting what Danny presumed to be a nuclear weapon atop a three-story wooden derrick.
And there was a man in all black talking to a man who was seated in—and tied to—a chair.
“What the hell?” Danny muttered. “Is this what I think it is?” He looked over at Bronk, who responded only with a grave look on his face.
He didn’t wait for a response. Danny took off at a sprint, his glasses nearly falling off his face. He stopped only as he approached Montague, who was talking to a thin, severe-looking man in a white lab coat. It was all he could do to adhere to military protocol and salute first.
“Commander Wallace, reporting for duty,” he snapped. “May I ask what’s going on, sir?”
Montague fixed him with a grandfatherly smile, though one tinged with the knowledge of what was coming next. “Commander, good to see you back. I trust the Meyer extraction went well.”
“Yes, sir. Miss Meyer is heading to base as we speak, sir. Now if I may, as to my original question?”
Montague sighed. “Commander, Dr. Schreiber here sent me his research request in your absence. I understand the reasoning why you denied his request before—and to his credit, he included that in his request to me. We subsequently arrived at an alternate solution, so I approved it.”
Danny’s eyes grew wide. “A solution, sir?”
Montague turned and nodded toward the valley below. “That man is a convicted murderer. He’s due to be hanged in two weeks. We’ve offered him a quicker, easier sentence as well as compensation for his ailing mother. And now maybe his death will do even more good, beyond serving justice.”
Danny opened his mouth to argue, but Montague held up his hand. “Decision’s been made, Commander.” And with that, Montague walked off, leaving Danny with Dr. Kurt Schreiber, one of MAJESTIC-12’s top scientists.
Before that, Schreiber had been one of Adolf Hitler’s top scientists.
“You really, really just want to kill someone, don’t you,” Danny hissed.
Schreiber merely smiled. “The only difference between what happened at Hiroshima and our nuclear test last year was the fact that, in Japan, people died. If the vortex exhibits any changes during this test, then my theory will be proven correct. If not, then a man already sentenced to die will have at least helped us learn more.”
“And I’ll ask this yet again, Doctor—how the hell do you even quantify the effect of a person’s death? There’s nothing scientific about this theory!”
“On the contrary, Commander, it is quite scientific. In physics, we believe that there is no lost energy in the universe. Energy simply changes form into something else. So, what happens to the energy that animates a man in life? The energy that animates his mind? His soul? We do not know, but we know that the energy does not simply dissolve. It goes somewhere. And so, now we will see if this particular energy has an effect on our vortex.”
Danny opened his mouth to argue further, but thought better of it. “Go over my head again, Doctor, and I’ll see that you spend time in the brig for insubordination.”
He walked back to where Bronk had settled in next to a series of dials and readouts. “Well?” Bronk asked.
“Pointless,” Danny said. “They already decided. It’s happening.”
Bronk grimaced. “It’s immoral. Though I suppose they feel they’re clever by using a convict like this.”
Danny looked down at the instruments, primed to record the passing of a human being not by eulogy but by radiation and radio pulses. “Too clever.”
“You don’t have to be here for this,” Bronk said. “Schreiber’s men can handle it. Montague has the military side of things under control.”
“No, I need to be here now. See it through. And if Schreiber is right, I have to figure out how to stop him from executing more people with nukes.”
* * *
An hour later, with the observers ten miles away and well upwind, Danny watched as Schreiber pressed a big red button. Of course it had to be a big red button. It probably gave the Nazi a little thrill to press it, the bastard.
Fifteen seconds later, the sky was lit up by blinding nuclear fire. A man’s life ended with the ultimate finality—there would be nothing left of him at all, or the chair he sat in, or the ropes that bound him. Nothing except a slightly darker patch of earth already blackened by unnatural heat.
Schreiber didn’t even act like he noticed. He was too busy watching his instruments, dials and needles and ticker tapes of data that only a handful of people in the entire world knew how to read.
“Well?” Montague snapped, Danny right at his side.
The Nazi turned and smiled—a smile that sent a chill right up Danny’s spine. “There is something here, yes, that we have not seen before,” Schreiber said. “A little variance in the radiation patterns that we were not expecting. It is—wait.”
The dials and ticker tapes suddenly went nuts.
“What is it?” Danny demanded, all pretense of military decorum gone.
“The vortex, it is issuing another pulse. A strong one!” Schreiber exulted. “It has responded!”
“Responded?” Montague asked. “What horseshit is this?”
Schreiber made a visible effort to compose himself. “It would seem, gentlemen, that the energy expended by this man’s death—which had a measurable impact on the vortex—may have prompted the vortex itself to respond with one of the energy bursts that created Variants in the first place.”
Danny frowned. “Or maybe it’s just coincidence. We’ve studied this thing for three years now. Still can’t predict when or why it does that. It just does.”
“It would be an incredible coincidence, Commander, as you no doubt know,” Schreiber responded, giving the Navy man a hard-eyed look.
The two stared each other down a moment longer until Montague interrupted. “We have a bearing and altitude of that pulse, Doctor?”
Schreiber finally turned and looked over his readouts, making calculations on a small notepad he kept in his pocket at all times. “Southeast, General. Fairly high altitude. Hard to say without more data.”
Montague turned to Danny. “Get your team ready just in case.”
“Yes, sir,” Danny replied. “And if I may, I strongly suggest that no further experiments with human life be taken until all of the data is thoroughly analyzed. Maybe it’s coincidence, maybe it’s not. But I don’t think we should gamble on it.”
The general nodded. “Agreed. Doctor, this should keep you busy awhile. And I’m sure Commander Wallace here will keep you honest.”
“I’m sure he will, General,” Schreiber said, still smiling.
Danny glared at Schreiber, then fixed Montague with an equally withering look. “Permission to begin work on my report on today’s events. Sir.”
Montague smirked slightly before turning away from Danny. “Granted. Dismissed,” he said breezily before turning his back to talk to Schreiber once more.
Danny stormed off, red-faced with anger. He would make damned sure that everyone in Washington who was cleared for MAJESTIC-12 knew of such a callous disregard for life.
February 3, 1949
Unlike in most other meeting spaces, the man in charge in the White House Cabinet Room never sat at the head of the long, angular table that dominated the room. The President always sat in the very middle, with his back to the windows overlooking the grounds. It made sense, of course, in that nearly everybody in the room had clear sightlines to the President, and the latter could see whoever was talking.
But for Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, there was something amiss about the setup. It had pestered and annoyed him for months—ever since he’d taken over the job, really—until one day it finally hit him.
The pecking order was all botched up.
At normal tables, you’d have t
he President at the head, followed by his closest aides on either side, continuing on all the way down to the other end, where you might find some junior deputy cabinet secretary hiding behind a notepad. But in the Cabinet Room, that sense of order and power was lost.
Did the man directly across the table from the President—in this case, that goddamn blowhard Jim Forrestal—carry the same weight as Hillenkoetter himself, directly to the President’s left? Or were both trumped by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who sat at Truman’s right hand? And Forrestal himself was flanked by Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg on his left, and Army Secretary Gordon Gray on the right. So, where did they stand?
Hillenkoetter hated Washington for so many reasons, but this particular mind game was high up on his list.
“All right, then,” Truman said, nodding at Hillenkoetter’s deputy, who had just wrapped up the latest intelligence briefing. “Hilly, how are we doing with the Soviet nuclear program? I know Uncle Joe wants an A-bomb, and I want us to be ready when he gets there.”
Hillenkoetter cleared his throat. This was a question he was getting tired of repeatedly answering. But this was the President of the United States. “We’re still working on it, Mr. President. We’re monitoring all their top scientists, as well as the ones they nabbed from the Germans. They seem to have set up shop out in the Kazakh Soviet, near the Chinese and Mongolian borders. No-man’s-land, really. Tough to infiltrate. All we can do is send the planes overhead as often as we can get ’em fueled.”
“Mr. President,” Forrestal interrupted. “We know they’re there; we know what they’re doing. We’ve done enough sitting around and keeping watch. We should be taking action.”
Hillenkoetter shook his head and looked over at Truman, who had a long-suffering smile on his face.
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