“Us?” Mitch said.
The chief stood and stubbed out the cigar. “It has been decided that you will not be confined for the time you are here. Again, not my choice. However, if you venture out of your assigned quarters, it is to be in the company of either Miss Breland, who will continue to act as your host, or another member of staff. If these conditions are violated, I will see to it that you lose that privilege.”
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Mitch said. “But I don’t even know where here is. If it’s not too much to ask, I think I’m at least entitled to know that much.”
The chief turned to the wall behind his desk and pushed a button below a large watercolor painting depicting an enormous herd of buffalo racing across the great American plains. The picture began to rise inside the frame.
As Mitch approached the opening window, the confusion he had felt, the anger, all the questions, evaporated as his mouth fell open and his eyes grew wide.
“Welcome to Aurora,” the chief said.
Chapter 49
Merritt Island, Florida
Saturday 22 July 2006
0600 EDT
The plane landed at seven. Francis sat behind the wheel of the Cobalt and watched the sleek aircraft glide to a halt outside the hangar doors. When the airlock opened a man in jeans and a white cowboy hat stepped out. He said something to the waiting crewman, who nodded and left. Francis met him halfway and held out the envelope. “Bob sends his regards.”
George took the envelope and tucked it under one arm, then removed the stub of a cigar from his breast pocket and lit it.
“Tell him it’s been a pleasure,” George said. “I mean that.”
“How did you get on with the cargo?” Francis asked.
“Like a house on fire. Real sweet kids, those two. I don’t even want to know what they’ve gotten themselves mixed up in.”
“I take it you don’t follow the news.”
“Only Bloomberg. And the FT, if I’m desperate.”
“You might not be able to avoid this one,” Francis said. “It’s going to make headlines.”
George went back to the plane and emerged a minute later with two people Francis hardly recognized. Jesse looked pale and unsteady on his feet. There was a cannula in his left hand and he was holding an empty IV bag. Amanda looked much better, despite her attire and tangled hair. She smiled when she saw him and gave him a little wave. It filled him with an enormous sense of guilt. They came down the steps together, Jesse leaning on Amanda for support. When they reached the tarmac she surprised Francis by giving him a hug.
“I’m glad to see you, too,” Francis said.
Jesse moved the IV bag to his right hand and held out his left.
“I think we owe you a thank you,” he said.
Francis took his hand and squeezed it gently, shaking his head. “I’m the one who should be thanking you.”
“I guess we did all right,” Jesse said.
“I don’t know what you did,” Francis said. “But whatever it was, it was a hell of a lot more than all right. When you’re up to it, I’d like to hear everything.”
George came back down the steps holding their backpack and handed it to Francis, who slung it over his shoulder.
“Don’t mean to be rude,” George said. “But I need to refuel and be on my way.”
Amanda turned around and gave him a hug. “You’re an all right kind of guy, George.”
They said their goodbyes; George walked back up the steps and vanished behind the closing door. A moment later the plane taxied away. Francis offered to help Jesse to the car, but he insisted on walking by himself. A smile crept onto Francis’s face as he led them across the floor of the hangar. The boy was no longer a boy, and his pride had taken a compensatory leap.
They headed back along State Road 528. Jesse sat up front. Another point to be proven, Francis thought. When they passed the tollbooth Jesse said, “I don’t think the man who came after us was human.”
Francis looked at him with raised eyebrows, “What makes you say that?”
Jesse recounted the entire event. Francis looked at him a couple of times with something that was maybe astonishment and maybe even a little trepidation. When Jesse was finished Francis shook his head in wonder.
“And to think I told you not to touch the grenades,” he said.
“I always thought of fear as something that paralyzes you,” Jesse said. “But I felt the opposite. It was like my mind focused more sharply than ever and then I wasn’t scared at all, just angry.”
Francis knew exactly what he meant. One of the first things Reginald had taught him was that fear couldn’t be eliminated, but it could be conquered and used. It had taken him over a year of training under some of the most grueling conditions imaginable to fully understand what that had actually meant. It made what Jesse had described all the more incredible.
They had sent one man to find them, and that man would have been expecting Francis, not the boy. He would also have been the best they had. The speed with which he’d discovered their whereabouts left no doubt of that in Francis’s mind. Luck and surprise had played their part, but such things always did. Francis would have died many times over by now if he hadn’t had plenty of both over the years. But while he, Francis, would have been able to make the best use of every advantage, Jesse had been acting on pure instinct in a state of near terror. He was both in awe of Jesse and a little ashamed for thinking of him in terms of his own experiences. The last thing he wanted was for Jesse to emulate him and become someone who could never quite give up the idea of killing a man as an entirely bad one. That road ended in a slow death of the conscience.
They arrived at the house to find Mike standing in the doorway smoking a cigarette. When the car was in the garage Francis led them into the living room and Mike came back inside. Francis introduced everyone and a rather awkward moment passed in which no one knew quite what to say.
Mike broke the silence. “Francis, I need to talk to you.”
“Francis?” Jesse and Amanda said in perfect unison.
The moment was lost on Mike, but Francis held up his hands. “You got me.”
“I think I like Eddie or Maurice better,” Amanda said.
Mike was visibly impatient.
“Whatever it is, Mike, just go ahead and say it,” Francis said. “We’re all in this together.”
“Reginald’s been making a few calls. He’s – I don’t know – he’s a little freaked out.”
“Who’s Reginald?” Amanda asked.
“A friend of mine,” Francis said. “This is his house. He’s been having a look at the stuff on the hard drive while we were gone.”
Reginald appeared in the entrance to the hallway. “And here we are. Safe at last”
Another awkward silence fell over the room.
“Yep, here we are,” Amanda said.
Again, it was Francis who stepped in. “This would probably be a great time to head up to SeaWorld and spend a few days getting to know each other. Because that’s obviously out of the question, I suggest we all listen to what Reginald has to say. It’s the reason we’re here, after all.”
Reginald picked up his pipe.
“Take a seat,” he said, pointing at the couch.
They all sat down, Jesse next to Amanda on one side, and Francis and Mike on the other. When they all looked comfortable and suitably impatient, Reginald lit his pipe and sat down in the rocking chair. For a long moment he just sat there chewing the stub of the pipe and looking grim. When he looked at them all again he seemed unsure of how to proceed. “Okay. Feel free to pitch in at any time if you have questions. You all know about the hard drive and where it came from, so we’ll ignore that for the moment. It contains mainly pictures and technical diagrams. Most of it appears to be random. A few satellites, a dock crane, and so on. There are also a few pictures of a Victor-class nuclear powered Russian submarine. Nothing you can’t find on the Web, in other words. The schematic draw
ings are a little more specific. One of them is actually a highly detailed plan for the retrofitting of a Victor with a loading hatch. Don’t ask me what that means, because I haven’t got a clue. There is, however, a common denominator and that’s Skyline Defense.”
“What’s that?” Jesse asked.
Reginald looked at Francis, who said, “Just run us through it briefly.”
“All right. Skyline is an American company based in New York, although in reality it belongs to a Zurich-based foundation with very deep pockets. They design, consult on, and provide engineering support in all fields of space-related technology. They work with NASA, The European Space Agency, The Russian Federal Space Agency and even the Chinese. During my time at the Pentagon there were even rumors that Skyline was lobbying to resurrect the Strategic Defense Initiative.”
Amanda raised her hand like a pupil in a classroom and Jesse said, “It’s a program Reagan began that was supposed to create a space-based defense shield against Russian nukes. Total waste of money.”
Amanda smiled and squeezed his left hand, mouthing the words “thank you.”
Reginald nodded. “That’s right. Anyway, Skyline is a relatively minor player in the space game. I’m still waiting for a couple of people to get back to me, but what I’ve found out so far suggests they’re more diverse than most people know. It has forty-three subsidiaries. A few of them are openly acknowledged, but the rest are hard to find. And if I found forty-three, you can bet there are more. Most of them are related to the company’s primary activities, but a few aren’t. They own a Finnish maritime salvage and refit company based in Kotka on the Baltic Sea, which makes you wonder about the Victor drawings. They also own a Russian munitions manufacturer, a private university outside Sao Paolo in Brazil, and a small but highly successful company called Albion in California that manufactures water desalination systems. All four of these companies appear in the technical drawings on the drive.”
Reginald sat back and re-lit his pipe.
“That’s it?” Jesse asked.
“What about the encrypted files?” Francis said.
Reginald raised a finger. “I’m getting to that. I just wanted to get the things that make at least some shred of sense out of the way first.”
Mike and Reginald shared a knowing look, while Francis, Jesse and Amanda just sat there looking perplexed.
“What are you talking about?” Jesse said.
“Come with me,” Reginald said and stood up.
They followed him down the hall and into a spacious office lined on three sides with floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves. Only one shelf in the entire room had any space left for more books. Against the remaining wall, below a large window looking out over a thick wood of slash pines, was an old writing desk with an enormous LCD computer monitor in the middle. Reginald sat down at the desk and they all gathered around.
“Ready for the weird part?” Reginald said.
No one answered.
“Okay, here we go. The hard drive Francis…”
Reginald hesitated and looked at Francis.
“Stole,” Amanda said. “The hard drive Francis stole. I think we can dispense with the politeness under the circumstances, don’t you guys? Or are we going to stand here and have a circle-jerk?”
She looked around, and smiled when she caught Francis’s eye. There was no sarcasm or malevolence in it, just determination.
“Fine, I stole it,” Francis said.
“Okay,” Reginald continued. “So the hard drive Francis stole is old. It only has a capacity of just over three hundred megabytes, which by today’s standards is nothing. The images and drawing files use just under half of it. The rest is taken up by four raw image files, each over thirty-five megabytes in size. The files are encrypted, which is why you couldn’t open them. But the technology used to do it is even older than the drive, so breaking it was easy. I would have said they were digitally created because what they show can’t be taken seriously, but they appear to be video stills. That doesn’t mean they are real, but it does make you wonder. And the timing is a little too perfect to be a coincidence.”
“Timing?” Francis said.
“You’ll see what I mean in a moment.”
Reginald moved the mouse cursor over the first of four files in the folder open on the screen and double-clicked.
It was a picture of a planet, its surface a marbled texture of rust reds, browns and grays.
“This is –”
“Jupiter,” Jesse said. “It’s Jupiter.”
“That’s right,” Reginald said. “The most likely source of the image is Voyager II, the NASA space probe launched in 1977. It passed Jupiter in July 1979. Keep your eye on the top left hand corner.”
Reginald maximized the folder and opened the second image.
It was the same picture, only in this one there was a small speck in the corner.
“Look like anything?” Reginald said.
Everyone shook their heads.
Reginald opened the third picture.
Now the speck looked more like a black line. “See it now?”
Everyone nodded. Jesse stepped closer and squinted at the screen. “Are we supposed to believe that’s a – you know.”
“Go on,” Reginald said. “A what?”
“Okay, a spaceship. Are we supposed to believe that’s a spaceship?”
Reginald didn’t answer. He put his hand back on the mouse and zoomed in on the spot.
They stood looking at the screen for a long time, nobody saying a word. Mike and Reginald had already seen the picture, but they still looked just as dumbfounded as the others. A full minute went by before Jesse said, “Impossible. I mean, it’s clearly meant to be a spaceship, I can see that. But it can’t be real.”
“I said exactly the same thing when I saw it,” Mike said. “Then I remembered that several people had been killed by someone who wanted these pictures back. Can you explain that?”
“No, I can’t,” Jesse said. “I admit this whole thing is crazy. But I stopped believing in aliens when I was ten, and it’s going to take more than that picture to change my mind.”
“Mike?” Francis said.
Mike looked up from the screen and blinked like a man coming out of a trance. “What?”
“What’s your take on it?”
Mike put a hand over his mouth, exhaled through his nose and shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I was ready for a lot of things, but this – I don’t know. This is nuts.”
“Reginald?” Francis said. “You got anything to say? Know anyone down at Groom Lake who might be able to give us a hand here?”
Reginald laughed. “No, actually. I don’t.”
“Groom Lake is another name for Area Fifty-One,” Jesse said to Amanda.
She looked around at them. “Anyone care what I think?”
They all turned to her.
“I think that last week I was a junior at Penn State studying for a degree in sociology. I went home, went out for a drink, pulled over to help a woman who gave us a goddamned hard drive and a couple of hundred grand, got dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and whisked off to a cabin in Canada with fucking night vision cameras in the chimney. I was then shot at by a one-armed man, I hitchhiked to a town where the police chief handed us over to a cowboy with a jet airplane who flew us to Disney World. Right now, I’m prepared to believe Santa Claus was behind 9/11. And that thing, whatever it is, that’s just a given. That’s well within the norm at this point.”
Nobody said anything for a long time, then Francis, Mike and Reginald all laughed, took one look at her face and stopped.
“Seriously, guys,” she said. “We need to find someone who knows what they’re talking about and show them that disc. If they say it’s bullshit, fine, we’re back where we started. Which appears to be nowhere.”
Francis studied her with a clear sense of respect. “She’s right. And what I suggest we do before we discuss where to go from here is get so
me sleep. I don’t know about you guys, but I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
Reginald put Jesse and Amanda in the spare bedroom and Mike in his own. When Francis suggested they stay up and discuss strategy for a while, Reginald handed him a blanket and pointed at the living room. “Tired men don’t think straight. I’m sure we must have covered that at some point.”
Francis considered arguing the point, took one look at his former boss, and grabbed the blanket. “Four hours, no more. Make sure you wake me up.”
– – –
Everyone but Jesse was up by noon. They were sitting around the large table in Reginald’s garden eating a cold lunch of ham sandwiches and potato chips. Jesse was still asleep in the guest bedroom. Reginald had gone off to make another phone call.
“I can’t remember the last time I ate,” Francis said as he piled another handful of chips onto his plate.
“I can,” Mike said. “I had half a hot dog in Times Square that I was too nervous to eat.”
Amanda was picking at her food and looking vacantly out at the pines beyond the garden fence.
“You okay?” Mike asked her.
“I keep thinking about my parents,” she said. “They must be going out of their minds. I just wish there was some way I could let them know I’m okay.”
Francis and Mike looked down at their plates, knowing there wasn’t much they could say.
“I’d like to know where the hell we’re going,” Mike said.
Francis took another bite of his sandwich, chewed and said, “It’s best to let him work it all out first. Reginald is a maniac when it comes to planning, trust me. When he’s got it all figured out he’ll give us a full mission briefing.”
“I almost wish I’d brought my Marine fatigues,” Mike said.
“You think you’re kidding,” Francis said. “Wait and see. The man’s a detail Nazi.”
“I don’t see why we just don’t put all that shit up on the Internet and let the world have at it,” Amanda said. “Someone will figure it out faster than we can.”
Origin - Season One Page 26
