‘Where the hell did that come from?!’
Alarms began droning across the prison as Ethan checked his pistol’s magazine.
‘At least a mile to the north east,’ he replied and looked up at the sky. ‘Sniper rifle, maximum range, perfect conditions, no wind and minimal thermal interference. A professional hit.’
‘Mitchell,’ Lopez growled.
‘It’s a fair bet,’ Ethan confirmed, ‘either that or MJ–12 contracted somebody else to silence Wilms.’
Ethan called across to a sergeant sheltering behind the thick wall of the nearest watch tower. ‘You guys got a helicopter here?’
The guard shook his head. ‘Marshall’s office, or the local airfield, but they won’t be up here at short notice!’
Ethan shoved his pistol back into its holster and dashed for the nearest of the prison trucks. Lopez rushed after him, and they climbed into the cab as Ethan started the engine and yelled out of the window.
‘Get the damned gate open or the shooter’ll be in the wind!’
Ethan crunched the truck into gear and drove it toward the main gates as a guard rushed into the control room and opened the gates. Motors whined as the gates slowly opened, and beyond them a second solid set also rumbled apart to let them through.
Ethan hit the gas and the truck lurched through the open gates and into the parking lot outside, accelerating toward the exit as Lopez leaned forward to peer out to the east at the distant hill.
‘Jesus, that’s a long way to shoot.’
Ethan nodded as he turned onto the highway, the truck’s wheels screeching on the asphalt. The chassis shuddered as the rubber bounced and then caught again, and he slammed the gas pedal down as he replied.
‘Bullet drop due to gravity must have been damned near four feet at that range, and there was no way the shooter could have tested the shot without alerting the prison. First time, at a mile: even with the perfect conditions it’s the shot of a lifetime.’
‘Especially for Wilms,’ Lopez uttered dryly. ‘He was about to give us another name. That’s why I keep telling you, we need these assholes alive. They know enough to give us info on bad guys for years.’
Ethan changed gear and gritted his teeth, but he said nothing. He wasn’t sorry to see Wilms fall dead right in front of him, had even felt a brief sense of elation. But he realized too that Lopez had been right all along, as usual: with Wilms dead there was nothing else he could do for them. All of his knowledge of Majestic Twelve and all that it had done had died with him, information that could have brought more of their kind to justice.
The line of hills drew closer, but even as they sped along Ethan knew that their chances of finding anybody up there were almost nil. The deserts beyond were vast and empty. If the shooter was a smart man, and Ethan had to figure that he was, he wouldn’t have a getaway vehicle. Instead, he would cross the deserts to another town and slip away into obscurity once more, the deserts themselves far too vast to search effectively. Even basic camouflage and concealment skills would be enough to evade detection, and the heat of the desert would remove any advantage in using infra–red cameras on helicopters until nightfall.
A narrow, dusty track led off the main road toward the hills, the truck bouncing and bumping around and leaving clouds of dust spiralling away across the hot wastelands. Ethan could hear above the engine noise the wailing of sirens as police pursuit vehicles alerted to the crisis raced to catch up with them.
‘Call the Sherriff’s office,’ Ethan said to Lopez. ‘Have them send the cars to surrounding towns, and circulate an image of Mitchell in case he shows up somewhere local.’
‘Might not be him,’ Lopez said, but pulled out her cell without question. ‘Besides, he’ll have thought of that.’
By the time they had driven to the edge of the hills and Ethan had been forced to abandon the truck, the shooter could have covered a fair distance out into the desert from wherever he had set up his laying–up position. Ethan scanned the hills, and spotted a likely location. He climbed up the hillside, leaving Lopez talking on her cell, powering his way up the steep slopes until he was a hundred feet or so above the plain.
He could see the prison clearly from up here, and down into the entrance compound and some small areas of the exercise yards. The watch towers were close enough to be able to make out the guards patrolling within them, watching over the prison and likely also watching him now climb the hill.
Ethan scouted around the hillside for a few minutes until he found what he was looking for.
Alongside a narrow track on the hill was a shallow depression, and around it had been placed a loose assembly of rocks that was a little too circular to be natural. Ethan climbed down into the depression, and underneath one of the rocks he saw a small slip of paper folded between them.
He knelt down and tugged the piece of paper out, unfolded it, and read the words printed there in a hurried script.
THIS IS THE BEST WAY. DON’T TRY TO STOP ME. A
Ethan folded the piece of paper once more and looked over his shoulder to where the crest of the hill vanished. He stood up and climbed to the top and looked out over the vast empty desert, the sun rising in a blaze of glory before him and the wastes devoid of life and movement.
Lopez climbed up to join him, and he handed her the slip of paper.
‘He’s on the warpath,’ she said softly, and let the piece of paper fall from her fingers. ‘That asshole’s gonna cost us dear if we don’t shut him down.’
Ethan nodded, but he knew that there was no real way they could catch up with Mitchell now.
‘C’mon, let’s get back to DC with what we’ve got.’
***
IX
Westin Excelsior,
Rome
‘In questo modo, signore.’
A concierge attached to the luxury Villa La Cupola Suite guided the eleven men through the silent corridors of the exclusive hotel situated in the Via Veneto district of the city. The suite occupied two entire floors of the hotel, making it the largest in Italy and ensuring absolute security and privacy for its occupants.
The concierge led the men to the room, opened the ornate doors and then stood to one side and allowed the men to file past him. As soon as they were inside he closed the doors behind them and left.
The suite had recently been refreshed with a seven million dollar makeover to ensure that any individual or group hiring the suite would be surrounded by the finest that Italy could offer. Furnished in the grand old style, with hand–frescoed cathedral–like domes and a grand piano in the main conference room, it was also peppered with tastefully incorporated high–tech gadgets controlling heating, lighting, drapes and other extraneous fittings, along with a private fitness room, dining room, sauna, steam bath and Jacuzzi.
Samuel Kruger had never before visited this particular hotel, the location of their meeting chosen by one of his personal assistants, but he approved of her selection as he turned to the ten men who had accompanied him.
‘Gentlemen, it is time to discuss our next move.’
Samuel Kruger was a tall, gaunt man who had just enjoyed his sixty fourth birthday surrounded by his family and close friends on an island in the Bahamas that he had hired for the occasion. Throughout his long years Samuel had known only the finest things in life, from his education at Eton College in London to his business life managing the sizeable property empire that his father had built in the wake of World War Two, when so much of Europe had needed re–building. Samuel had inherited the immense fortune and then gone on to swell it further with numerous wise investments and forays into global property development, especially those that allowed him to snap up land cheaply from native populations and then eject them in order to build multiplex hotels and resorts. His last major acquisition, the ravaged shores of Aceh, Thailand that had been shattered in the wake of the tsunami that had taken tens of thousands of lives, had been made possible by considerable bribes to government officials. With the land reclaimed f
rom the families who had owned it, he had built an immensely profitable new development.
Of the families who once lived there, he knew and cared little.
Unlike the smaller, publicity loving buffoons like Trump who paraded their wealth for all to see, Kruger and his companions remained in the shadows, their wealth and power unknown to all but a few politicians. That, in part, was why Kruger was now the de facto head of Majestic Twelve.
‘Our next move?’ uttered one of his companions, a man with a cane who looked old enough to be able to remember Gettysburg. ‘You make this sound like a position of choice Samuel, but we are being hunted, our position is precarious. It is likely that our enemy know our identities.’
Samuel nodded sombrely, keen to show that he understood the delicacy of their position. ‘The American Defense Intelligence Agency has made great strides in deconstructing our efforts and they have had some victories, but their power will always be limited by the office of their director, General Nellis.’
‘Who has the ear of the President,’ a man by the name of Felix pointed out, younger, more hawkish and energetic, the heir to an oil fortune whose mind was every bit as sharp as his father’s had been. ‘That’s significant in itself.’
‘Presidents come and go,’ Samuel replied without concern. ‘What one achieves, the next often undoes for nothing more than spite. The current president clearly shares few of our ideals, but he has little power over us. That, my friends, is why the administration is allowed to lead the country: it makes the people think that they can make a difference.’
The other men nodded in silent agreement.
‘We almost took too much from them last time,’ said another man, the owner of one of the world’s largest and yet least known banks. ‘The people suspect, Samuel.’
‘The people believe conspiracy theories,’ Samuel countered. ‘That’s why we promote them, one after the other: faked moon landings, UFO sightings, economic crashes, shadow governments…’ Kruger smiled. ‘When they can no longer tell what is true and what is not, the truth remains well hidden within the lies.’
‘It was too great a risk,’ said another, the owner of a major shipping company. ‘Look at the Arab Spring, at Syria, Egypt and others. Push the people too hard and they will rebel, violently if necessary.’
‘Indeed they will,’ Kruger agreed, ‘against their politicians. Not against us. Most of them barely know we exist, and those that suspect that we do don’t know who we are.’
Kruger sat down on an ornate chair and folded his hands beneath his chin. He was well aware of the old adage that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely: that was why Majestic Twelve was formed of twelve men and not one. The cabal’s origins in the wake and the rubble of World War Two had been born of more than just the spectacular discoveries made during the time of Einstein and Oppenheimer, for that conflict had resolved in the minds of men made powerful by the sale of weapons that humanity, even democratically governed humanity, simply was not capable of saving itself from tyranny when it appeared. Mankind had lost all sense of the common good, and thus was feeble in the face of violence and greed, traits that Kruger and others before him had encouraged.
A state of fear was that which best protected both leaders and the led. That had been the conclusion of the predecessors of Majestic Twelve, military industrial figures who pondered the bizarre way in which the Third Reich had risen to power and so completely brainwashed the population of Germany before setting Europe aflame for five long years. Hitler had used a skillful combination of patriotic rhetoric and fearmongering to galvanize the German people into rising against oppressors that in many ways did not exist; blaming the United Nations for the crippling economic reprisals directed against Germany for the First World War under the Kaiser, despite Germany having been the aggressor in that conflict also; blaming the Jews likewise for the ailing economy, targeting them as an enemy of the state while convincing the people that every other country in Europe would continue to oppress them, preventing Germany from ever holding a place on the world stage. In doing so, he took control of the entire country and won the allegiance of a people who had vowed to fight an enemy that technically did not exist.
In the aftermath of the conflict, Majestic Twelve formed and began planning to emulate the Third Reich’s methods, not with conflict but by guile: to sew fear into the hearts and minds of people, to convince them beyond all shadow of doubt that they needed governments to protect them, needed armies and navies and air forces to protect them, needed the skill and knowledge and prestige of well educated men to lead them to safety, needed water and electricity pumped to their homes, food in their supermarkets and fuel in their vehicles. Fears arose and were duly cultivated by Majestic Twelve to ensure the allegiance of the masses: the Cold War, The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the War on Terror, global warming: anything and everything that could be created to ensure that the people felt as though the enemy were already at the gates and only the might and expertize of the government could save them…
Kruger knew that he sat among the most powerful men on earth: powerful not because they were wealthy but because they knew precisely how the vulgar crowd, as Niccolo Machiavelli had once described them, were always “taken by appearances”. The growth of the Internet and the information age, far from hindering this process, had given it even greater reach as the truth was lost amid the inane ramblings of millions of citizens all clamoring for the truth even though they would not have recognized it had it rose up and slapped them across the face. Just as once had hundreds of Jews been subdued beneath the barrels of a handful of German Wehrmacht, simply because of the uniforms that they wore, when they could have risen and overpowered a few soldiers in moments; just as civilians even now suffered beneath dictatorships in so many countries, or cowered in apartments afraid to step out onto streets ruled by gangs, so the citizenry continued to fail to realize that it was their own inability to unite that kept them in chains. Hitler could never have reached power without the complicity of ordinary Germans; gangs of street thugs would be crushed in days by the might of the citizens living in houses across every city on earth; dictators would fall easily were the people, including the military, to form a true alliance of peace. Kruger knew that the Defense Intelligence Agency presented little threat to Majestic Twelve. He was more concerned with events like the Arab Spring where truly courageous, ordinary people had risen up and overthrown dictators like Muammar Gaddafi.
‘We must choose our twelfth member,’ Kruger said to his companions. ‘For too long we have been without a full compliment, and Victor Wilms is now either dead or in the hands of the Defense Intelligence Agency. If that is so, he may very well remain beyond our reach.’
‘And able to turn on us,’ said another of the men. ‘And of course, you have not yet even mentioned Aaron Mitchell.’
Kruger shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Mitchell, once their most talented assassin, had performed a remarkable volte face and become perhaps their most feared foe. His sudden reversal of allegiance was a prime example of one individual rising up against an oppressor, except that in this case Mitchell knew nothing of Majestic Twelve’s true intentions and thus was motivated purely by revenge, in itself a powerful threat.
‘Mitchell’s whereabouts are unknown, and as far as we are aware he has no knowledge of our identities.’
‘As far as we’re aware,’ a British man named Hampton echoed. He sat bolt upright in his seat, his hands resting on an ornate cane that he used more for show than anything else, the former Etonian as spritely as any man half his age and his clean jaw adorned with a broad, silvery moustache. ‘As far as we were aware it was impossible for a man to escape from a security max prison, but Mitchell achieved it. What else are we aware of that might also be incorrect, Samuel?’
‘A great many things,’ Kruger admitted, ‘but we are neither omnipresent nor omniscient. Mitchell has chosen his path and sooner or later it will bring him to us. When it does, we will
be prepared to eliminate the threat that he represents and continue with our work.’
‘And what about the Defense Intelligence Agency?’ asked another. ‘They have clearly made it their policy to hunt us down and to expose Majestic Twelve. Until now it has been a tolerable threat but we now face greater issues. What are we to do about Nellis’s team?’
Kruger examined his hands for a moment as he thought about the consequences of the DIA’s mission to expose the cabal. As his colleague had said, the DIA had been directly responsible for obstructing a number of MJ–12 campaigns, but at the same time they had failed also in many others, technology concealed from the American government that could otherwise have changed the face of humanity, at great financial cost to the cabal.
But now things had changed. An expedition to the Antarctic had resulted in the loss of a DIA agent’s life, and somehow that had created a personal vendetta of sorts. Kruger was well aware of the identities of the team’s members: Ethan Warner, Nicola Lopez, Douglas Jarvis and others, all apparently hell–bent on bringing the cabal down when they didn’t really have even the vaguest understanding of what Majestic Twelve represented, what its true mission was and had been for decades: some would say, centuries.
‘The DIA are operating with the consent of the current administration, although that in itself is of course a temporary measure for them and could change at the next election. However, I believe we share the view that leaving such measures to chance is never a wise course of action. The DIA’s mission to expose us has already cost the life of the Director of the FBI, and that in itself may seed caution in the minds of those who would stand against us.’
‘It also handed them Victor Wilms on a plate,’ said one of the men. ‘There are too many loose ends Samuel, too many problems to be resolved individually. We must strike boldly to prevent us losing control of the situation any further.’
The Extinction Code Page 6
