Extinction Machine jl-5

by Jonathan Maberry

  I grinned. “Right around the time everyone else did. My boss, Bug, Rudy, even that jackass Dr. Hu. I think Ghost knows, too. It’s not like you built a mind-boggling web of deception around that part of it.”

  “Oh,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was relieved or deflated.

  “But…,” I said, “I’m sorry, Junie. For your dad, and your mom.”

  She sighed and nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Right now, though,” I said, “I need you to tell me how he got involved with M3, what he knew, why they decided to kill him, and why on earth you painted a bull’s-eye on yourself by broadcasting that you’re going to share their secrets with the world.” I paused and gave her my most charming smile. “Really … start anywhere.”

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Hadley and Meyers Real Estate

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 11:27 a.m.

  “How’s this actually work?” asked Aldo.

  “I thought you took the tour … Didn’t Dr. Hoshino go over it all?”

  “Yeah, she went over a lot of bullshit science. The woman is a supergeek. Doesn’t know how to talk to real folks. She couldn’t explain the concept of chewing gum to a kid without making it sound like Star Wars.”

  “It’s simple,” said Tull. On the table were ten tiny components laid out on a long piece of red velvet, each piece separated by a block of rubber. “These are miniatures of the D-type components used in the Device. The stabilizer, the red generator, the green generator, the clock, the interface, the mother board, the master circuit, the slave circuit, the iridium heart, and the central switch. When President Truman authorized Majestic Twelve and Majestic Three, the initial goal was to rebuild the alien craft from Roswell. That was an immediate failure because the ship was too badly damaged. So, M3 began researching other crashes around the world, and when it began clear early on that there have been many crashes, Truman directed M3 to obtain as many D-type components as possible in order to cobble together one complete craft. All devices have these ten. The miniatures were made to run simulations, but they’re actually too dangerous for that. We blew up a couple of labs before we figured that out.”

  Tull took two of the components. “Take any two of the — like this slave circuit and this green generator and put them in close proximity and look what happens.”

  He set the two pieces down within five inches of each other. Immediately they began trembling and suddenly they flew together. At first they merely collided, but as Aldo watched the components continued to tremble and turn until they finally reached the point where a tab on the green generator slid into a slot on the slave circuit. There was a flash of white light and when Aldo blinked his eyes clear the pieces lay immobile but completely connected. Tull handed it to him.

  “They look like they’re welded together. I can’t even find a seam. Jeez-us.”

  “It’s called charismatic magnetism. The pieces know they’re supposed to be together and given the chance they’ll always connect. Rubber blocks work pretty well, but for today we’re going to coat one piece in ionized gel. The charge in the gel will be fed by the motors in the pigeon drones. Once in place, we shut off the motors and the gel gradually loses its charge, eventually allowing the last component to be pulled into place.”

  “That’s some scary shit,” said Aldo.

  “You should see your face,” laughed Tull. “It’s not magic, man, it’s just science.”

  Aldo grunted. “What was that flash? Nearly blinded me.”

  “Ah, well … that’s the reason they stopped building the little ones, and it’s the reason they’ve had so much trouble with the big ones. When the components connect they emit a strong burst of energy. No one quite knows why. Almost every previous attempt to construct a complete Device — or a synthetic Truman Engine — has resulted in such a massive energy discharge that it’s been like dropping a nuke.”

  “Yeah, I heard some bullshit rumors about that. Did we cause Mount St. Helens to blow?”

  “Sure, they had a geothermal research lab that was part of a clean power project. The governors of M3 at the time thought that the big turbines and batteries they’d built to store all that geothermal energy would be enough to contain the discharge.”

  “That didn’t work out so great, huh?”

  “Not the first big mistake, not the last.”

  “You’re telling me that every single one of these engines is a potential disaster waiting to happen.”

  “Right,” said Tull.

  “So…,” Aldo said slowly, “why the fuck are we trying to build ten of them right here?”

  Tull grinned. “When you were a kid, didn’t you ever tie a firecracker to a cat’s tail?”

  “No, when I was a kid I was sane.”

  “Well, the man who taught me about the Device used to blow up cats.” He paused and picked up another component. “I even tried it. So much fun.”

  Chapter Seventy

  Over Maryland airspace

  Sunday, October 20, 11:31 a.m.

  There was a soft tone in Top’s ear and he tapped his earbud.

  “Go for Sergeant Rock,” he said, using his combat call sign.

  “It’s Bug. I just intercepted a call from the Coast Guard. They got an emergency call from someone claiming to be Captain Ledger. Sounds legit.”

  “Tell me.”

  Bug replayed the message.

  “Who’s rolling on this?” demanded Top.

  “Coast Guard has a boat inbound and a helo in the air. The helo reports smoke rising from the direction of the Turkey Point Lighthouse. They’re eighteen minutes out. The Deacon wants to know your ETA.”

  “Instruments say we’re about to hit the outer edge of the jam zone,” said Top.

  The pilot tapped Top’s shoulder and pointed toward the northeast. A column of gray smoke curled up above the trees at the edge of the bay. Bunny leaned between Top and the pilot.

  “Jesus, is that the lighthouse?”

  “Wait,” said Bug, “what did he—”

  And they crossed into the jam zone. The pilot tried everything he could to reestablish contact.

  “Sorry, Top,” he said, “but nobody’s talking to nobody in here.”

  Top felt his stomach turn from cold slush to hard ice. He pulled out the plastic-covered map and tapped a spot half a kilometer from the lighthouse. “Put us down right here, then go to this spot. Drop us, then haul ass outside the jam zone and call for serious backup. Next time I look up all I want to see is gunships. Copy?”

  “Hooah,” said the pilot. “What about Captain Ledger?”

  He tapped a second point three klicks inland. “Sweep by this LZ every half hour. We’ll find the captain and come to you.”

  Then Top turned in his seat and yelled in his leather-throated sergeant’s voice.

  “Echo Team — saddle up! Time to bring the pain.”

  Chapter Seventy-one

  The Warehouse

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 11:32 a.m.

  Rudy’s next call was to Bill Birnes, publisher of UFO Magazine and, like Rudy’s fiancée Circe, a New York Times bestselling author. Although Rudy had seen Birnes several times on UFO specials and shows, it took Rudy a moment to realize that this was the same William J. Birnes who had written several landmark books on a completely different subject — serial killers. One of those books, The Riverman, coauthored by detective Dr. Robert Keppel, described how serial killer Ted Bundy helped police track Green River Killer Gary Ridgway. Rudy had read that book twice while working as a police psychologist prior to his being hired by Church for the DMS.

  He used his laptop to run through Birnes’ other publishing credits and noted that he’d coauthored books with George Noory as well. That was good. The conversation with Noory had yielded a great deal of information. About M3, about the Black Book, and about the Closers — those fearsome Men in Black. Everything, along with Rudy’s notes and observations, had alread
y been passed along to Mr. Church, Aunt Sallie, and Bug, and so the great investigative machine that was the DMS was already turning.

  Rudy dialed the number and got Birnes on the line.

  “How’s the Deacon doing these days?” asked Birnes after the introductions. “Still tilting at windmills?”

  “Every day.”

  “I’d expected nothing less. Tell me what you need and I’ll tell you if I can help.”

  “I don’t know what Mr. Church knows,” confessed Rudy, “and he’s not available right now. I am attempting to gather as much information as possible to assist one of our field agents. One area in particular seems to make no sense to me.”

  “Which is?”

  “Funding. If a group like M3 exists, and they have been working for half a century to reverse-engineer technology from crashed alien craft, surely that would have to be an enormously expensive undertaking.”

  “Very.”

  “So — where is that money coming from? I know the popular belief is that it’s all buried beneath levels of secrecy as part of Depart of Defense funding, but—”

  “Some of it is, sure,” said Birnes, “but not the bulk of it. And, you have to understand that we’re not really talking about work being undertaken by hidden divisions within our own government. That would be a logistical nightmare. It’s hard to hide something that big — and that interesting — inside a red-tape bureaucracy. No, a lot of this kind of R and D was transferred out of the government and into the hands of private contractors.”

  “Defense contractors?”

  “Mostly.”

  “But that would still necessitate a lot of monies going to those companies as government fees.”

  “Sure, but not for what we’re talking about. We’re talking about companies that have massive projects under way that are totally legitimate. We contract out everything of military importance to whoever can design and build it according to the right timetables and price tags. Alien tech notwithstanding, we still need jet fighters and satellites and submarines, and that sort of thing. However, private corporations, even defense contractors, have other sources of funding, and this is where this all starts to get dirty.”

  “And that’s probably the part I need to hear.”

  “I’ll give you the short course in illegal black budget cash flow,” said Birnes. “Each year the Department of Defense lists several coded entries that have nondescript names, like ‘special evaluation research program,’ that don’t clearly relate to anything that sounds like any known new weapons system currently in development. These entries are simply covers for black budget items, and this provides a hefty slush pile for all sorts of things including covert operations, intelligence activities, and classified weapons research to be conducted without congressional oversight on the grounds that such oversight would compromise the secrecy essential for black ops. And to a degree that’s true. However, some watchdog groups have tracked some accounting anomalies in the DoD budget that suggest that as much as a trillion U.S. dollars is annually being siphoned by the CIA into the DoD for secret distribution to unknown projects.”

  Rudy whistled.

  “It gets better,” said Birnes, warming to his topic. “Congress is always looking for a way to chop the DoD budget and to put a tighter leash on black operations of all kinds, especially anything connected to the CIA. At the same time, there are things the DoD and other groups want to work on that they know for a fact would never get official sanction or funding and, if it was discovered that they were being secretly funded, they would get the ax and some heads would roll. So, that’s part of why we’ve seen the movement of critical and you could say ‘radical’ R and D away from the DoD and into private labs. Now, those labs still need to be funded and this kind of research is enormously expensive. We’re talking amounts bigger than the national debts of some of our allies.”

  “Why so much?”

  “Because a lot of these research projects chew up money and then hit a developmental dead end. Which means there are no items to sell to Uncle Sam and no items that can be repurposed and sold to the global nonmilitary technologies markets.”

  “So where does this funding come from?”

  “Drugs.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Sure,” said Birnes. “Look, to understand it you have to realize that this has been going on for a long time and that the money doesn’t go to fund a single project or even a related group of projects. A lot of it goes to funding any kind of operation that is so secret it needs to stay totally off congressional or public radar. That means there are a lot of dirty deals being made. During Vietnam — even before Mr. and Mrs. America knew we had an interest over there, the CIA was taking control of the flow of drugs as a way of funding our developing involvement. That includes everything from bribe money to providing weapons for locals who we’d turned into allies, to all sorts of things. That process didn’t start there and it sure as hell didn’t end there. CIA and other agencies have been managing the world narcotics market for decades because that is an inexhaustible and unregulated source of income.”

  “You’re killing me with this,” said Rudy.

  Birnes laughed. “You asked. But I’m not taking wild shots at America. This isn’t national policy, this is backdoor stuff and when the right people in Congress find out about it they shut it down.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it goes away, though.”

  “Of course not,” said Birnes. “Too much is at stake.”

  “National security?” Rudy said, pitching it as a sour joke.

  “Actually, yes, to a degree. Some of it does serve the common good. But no government has ever been entirely honest, and there are all kinds of groups, big and small, that have their own agendas, and they know that they can’t go to Congress to get funding. The fact that drug money can be used to fund these projects is too tempting to ignore. Even for those persons who abhor the damage drugs do, they often look at the risk-reward ratio. Many of them are absolutely convinced we’re involved in a very serious arms race, and if we lose that race we’ll lose more than economic superiority.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that whoever cracks the alien technology in a practical way that allows mass production of a new generation of weapons of war will end the arms race right there and then.”

  “How? By shaking the biggest stick?”

  “No,” said Birnes, “through conquest. We could easily see a new age of empire that would reshape every map on Earth.”

  “With alien technology?”

  “With alien technology,” said Birnes.

  Chapter Seventy-two

  Elk Neck State Park

  Cecil County, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 11:34 a.m.

  We heard sounds and moved to a new hiding spot. The sounds were probably deer sneaking away from hunters, but we weren’t taking chances. I found a ravine that angled down into a little natural tunnel worn by rain runoff. It was ten feet long, with easy egress from either end. We could see and hear anyone coming, but in the dense shadows we were invisible.

  So, we hunkered down to wait. I knew that help had to be on its way. Maybe the Coast Guard, definitely my guys from the DMS. All we had to do was not be seen and not get our brains scrambled by those freaky microwave pistols.

  As the minutes dragged by, I used the time to gather as much intel as I could. They say that knowledge is power, and that’s true enough, but knowledge is often a shield as well.

  “Okay,” I said, “now tell me how your father got access to the Black Book.”

  Junie tucked her legs under her and smoothed her skirt. In the shadows she was a specter, her pale skin painted a misty blue, her eyes dark and bottomless.

  “My father was a brilliant physicist and engineer,” she said. “He’d filed half a dozen patents during his first eighteen months at MIT. He won prizes in so many different areas of science. The Rolls-Royce Science Prize, the UNESCO Science Prize, the Bunsen Prize, the Ste
n von Friesen’s prize, he even spent two years as part of a team in Austria and won the Erich Schmid Prize. He was so smart that he was unhappy with it. He hated it. He was depressed a lot of the time because everything he tried was too easy. There are people like that, you know, genius freaks who almost fit in with the rest of the world, but can’t really. Maybe there was some Asperger’s there. Maybe some autism, but it was never diagnosed. If he’d come along a half generation later they might have caught it.” She shook her head. “The thing is, genius of that level gets noticed. He partnered with another young scientist for one of the DARPA challenges. The participants were given three pieces of a machine but no other information. No idea what kind of machine the parts belonged to or even if they belonged to the same machine. The challenge was to develop a way for those parts to work in harmony. Most of the entrants were part of the robotics crowd, and Dad was always into task-oriented robotics. Well, no surprise, but he won the challenge and was awarded a huge research grant and DARPA hired him for their robotics lab.”

  “So he worked for the military?”

  She frowned. “Not exactly. His paychecks came from DARPA, but he never worked in their lab in Arlington. Instead he was brought into a separate lab nearby. The thing is, none of the DARPA people he’d met at the challenge were there except one of the judges, and that person was Howard Shelton of Shelton Aeronautics. He’s a major defense contractor. His family’s always done contract work for the government. Jets now, planes of every kind going back to World War I, and before that they made cannons and special guns.”

  “Shelton … he’s on your list of possible M3 members.”

  “He’s pretty high on my list, I suppose. He was the one who recruited Dad for the special DARPA group. I’m not sure if that means he’s in M3 or is one of the people profiting from their research. A lot of people are, there’s a trickle down among the superwealthy industrialists, especially those tied to the Department of Defense.”