‘It’s a computer,’ Hellerman nodded, ‘and Die Glocke was a monitor of sorts, pre–programmed to descend at a given moment in time. Something made it come down, and whatever that something was is what Majestic Twelve was formed to figure out, before they became corrupted by power and money.’
‘Jarvis wanted to know the answer to all of that just as much as we do. Let’s figure out where he’s gone and then we’ll find out why. Are you in, Hellerman?’
Hellerman glanced at the phone on his desk. Video games, video schmames.
‘Where do you want me to start?’
***
XLIV
Tortola, British Virgin Islands,
Caribbean
The white sands of the private beach stretched for what seemed like endless miles in both directions alongside a glassy, gin clear sea beneath a flawless blue sky. Palms lined the secluded cove, their broad leaves rustling in the warm breeze as Jarvis strolled near the water’s edge.
For the first time in as long as he could remember he was not wearing a dark blue suit. Instead, beige slacks and a white shirt were all that he needed, along with the sunglasses that shielded his eyes from the brilliant beach before him.
They would come for him, he knew. Sooner or later, the DIA would set their agents in pursuit of him and he would once again have to look over his shoulder. The joy of his position now was that he had done no wrong. With the media focused entirely on The Panama Papers and the scandal causing such uproar in the press, Jarvis had been able to slip silently away and at this time was merely missing in action. Nellis, and Hellerman no doubt, would guess at what had happened but it would take them an age to figure out how he had achieved it: long enough that he would be forever beyond their reach.
He was tired, although the warmth of the beach and the freedom of his flight from the DIA had invigorated his soul. His advancing years had precluded him from ever seeing Majestic Twelve suffer the fate that they truly deserved, the years spent rotting in some cell somewhere, and so he had decided that this last act, this late in his life, would be committed to give him some sense of satisfaction, to know that he had completed what he had set out to do. However, he would never have expected to be doing what he was now doing. The irony of his path was not lost upon him.
At his insistence, the meeting was to take place on a tourist beach at a popular holiday island. Some had been appalled at his choice of location, but Jarvis had always been a firm fan of hiding in plain sight. The DIA and others would be searching for them in exclusive villas or private islands, in the most expensive and salubrious locations on earth, not in bars popular with retirees and vacationing families. Only moderate disguises were required, simple means to conceal one’s true identity and avoid easy recognition, especially when most of them were entirely anonymous beyond their offices anyway.
Jarvis reached the small veranda of a bar nestled amid the swaying palms. This early in the morning it was mostly empty, a few vacationers and honeymoon couples sprawling in bliss beneath the sun as he walked onto the veranda and sat down at a table occupied by a small group of men and women.
All of them looked unremarkable, except perhaps for the physical size of the dark skinned man who looked at Jarvis.
‘You’re alive then,’ Jarvis remarked as he sipped from the coffee awaiting him.
Aaron Mitchell raised an eyebrow. Beneath his loose shirt Jarvis could see fresh wounds concealed by medical tape and what was probably carefully applied make up, but Mitchell seemed otherwise intact.
‘No thanks to you,’ he growled.
‘Ethan and Nicola?’ Jarvis asked, genuine concern in his voice.
Mitchell leaned forward on the table between them. ‘They got out just in front of me. They made it.’
Jarvis sighed and sank back into his chair as the coffee and warm sunshine suddenly seemed to take effect on him and the last tight knots of anxiety unwound somewhere deep inside his belly.
‘So, we’re all good then,’ he smiled finally.
On the opposite side of the table, Rhys Garrett raised a glass of what looked like sparkling champagne in Jarvis’s direction.
‘Three billion down, but still standing.’
‘Don’t knock it,’ Jarvis replied, ‘you can’t spend money when you’re dead. How did the leak go?’
‘I take it you’ve seen the news?’ Garrett replied. ‘I managed to warn most of my clients before the leak was made, and it’ll probably sink Mossack Fonseca in the long run, but it covers the presence of Majestic Twelve’s missing money for now.’
The Panama legal firm Mossack Fonseca had been the source of a massive data leak of clients who were subject to international sanctions. Dozens of individuals and companies under sanctions by the US Treasury had been exposed, with Mossack Fonseca registering companies as offshore entities operated under its own name to conceal the identities of the real owners. Although some clients were registered before international sanctions were imposed, Mossack Fonseca had continued to act as a proxy after they were blacklisted. No less than eleven million documents held by the Panama–based law firm were discreetly passed to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and media organisations in over seventy countries to show how the firm had helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade taxes.
‘Majestic Twelve’s assets will now be frozen to the tune of three billion dollars,’ Garret said, ‘and in fact they probably already have been. The rest…’
Garret shrugged and smiled as Jarvis sipped from his coffee as he turned to look at the other people around the table, and smiled at a young blonde woman whom he recognized instantly.
‘Lucy, glad you could make it.’
‘Grandpa,’ Doctor Lucy Morgan replied with a slightly nervous smile. ‘Why’d you bring me all the way down here from Chicago? I was working on a project for the museum. What do The Panama Papers have to do with you? And what’s Majestic Twelve?’
‘It’s a long story, Lucy, but you know that Ethan Warner worked for me and has helped you too on occasion with sensitive investigations into your work.’
‘He saved my life,’ Lucy acknowledged, ‘more than once. Is he involved in this?’
‘He still works for the DIA,’ Jarvis explained, ‘but I don’t. Majestic Twelve was a cabal that had infiltrated governments and corporations around the world and was manipulating politics and world markets for their own benefit. They maintained the boom–bust cycle of international banking, making appalling profits each time as ordinary people suffered. The Panama Papers are the result of their exposure and destruction.’
‘What does that have to do with me being here?’ Lucy asked.
‘All will be revealed,’ Jarvis replied, and then looked across the table. ‘Rhys, would you do me the honor of introducing our guests?’
Garret gestured to a woman sitting alongside Jarvis, who might have been forty years old but glowed with health and vitality.
‘This is Lillian Cruz,’ he said. ‘Lillian had business with Majestic Twelve some years ago after a series of events in New Mexico, with which I’m sure you are familiar?’
‘I am,’ Jarvis replied, ‘but others here are not. Lillian, if you could explain why you’re here?’
Lillian spoke clearly and with extraordinary confidence.
‘My name is Lillian Cruz and I was born in Montrose, Colorado, in the year 1824. I am the last survivor of eight soldiers of the Union army who took sanctuary in a place called Misery Hole in New Mexico in 1862, just after the Battle of Glorietta Pass.’
A silence enveloped the table, and Lucy Morgan stared blankly at Cruz. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘It’s true,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Lillian?’
‘I was hunted by Majestic Twelve,’ Lillian went on, ‘in particular by a man named Jeb Oppenheimer, who was intent on discovering the secret to immortality. I and my husband, along with a small troop of former soldiers, had hidden
from enemy soldiers in a cave in New Mexico and drank water from a subterranean cave that slowed the ageing process via a bacteria present in the water known as Bacillus permians. Oppenheimer killed the other members of the group, my husband included, but I survived long enough to cut a deal with MJ–12 after Oppenheimer died. They got the elixir of life, I got my freedom from persecution. The deal was struck with a man named Gregory Hampton III, whom I now understand to be deceased, along with the rest of MJ–12.’
‘He is,’ Jarvis confirmed, and then looked at another young woman at the table, with long dark hair and intelligent eyes. ‘And you, my dear?’
‘My name is Amber Ryan, and my uncle was a man named Stanley Meyer. He invented a fusion device that could have powered the world for free, but was killed by Majestic Twelve before he could give the fusion cage he built away for nothing because it would have cost them profits from oil interests.’
Amber’s introduction was almost spat across the table, enough so that nobody present could deny the contempt in which she held men of power. Jarvis looked across at Mitchell, and the big man hesitated in silence for a moment before his deep and melodious voice rumbled across the table.
‘My name is Aaron Mitchell, and I am a Vietnam veteran and long service assassin for Majestic Twelve.’
Amber Ryan’s eyes flew wide and she sucked in a deep breath as she stared in horror at Mitchell, who directed his dark gaze in her direction.
‘I did not kill Stanley Meyer but I am directly responsible for his death.’
From nowhere Mitchell produced a pistol that he placed on the table and slid across to Amber Ryan. Jarvis almost backed up out of his seat as Garrett leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the weapon.
‘This isn’t why we’re here,’ he warned Mitchell.
Amber stared at the pistol and then at Mitchell. ‘My uncle died because he wanted to do the right thing,’ she snarled.
Mitchell said nothing, simply sat in silence and watched Amber. Jarvis took a breath as he watched the young woman who had lost so much.
‘That’s right,’ Jarvis said. ‘He did the right thing.’
Amber shot Jarvis a glance, and in a moment they shared an understanding. Amber Ryan was too sharp to miss Jarvis’s point as she turned back to Mitchell. ‘Why are you here?’
‘To put right what was done wrong,’ Mitchell replied. ‘You can either help me, pick up that gun and kill me or walk away from this table and never come back.’
A silence enveloped the table as Amber Ryan looked from the pistol and back to Mitchell, bit her lip, her hands twitching as she fought with the demons that must be screaming through her mind, willing her to pick up the gun and kill the assassin who had caused so much pain to so many.
Amber flinched as though she were about to pick up the gun, and then she hissed her response.
‘It’s not what Stanley would have done,’ she muttered as she pushed the weapon back toward Mitchell.
Another man who sat alongside Rhys Garrett, a bespectacled and bearded scientist by the name of Martin Beauchamp, spoke softly to Amber.
‘I’m glad you think so. This is not a gathering built around vengeance, but one conceived by hope. We have all lost a great deal, but have far more to gain by working together now.’
Jarvis breathed a sigh of relief as he saw Garrett stand up and lift his champagne glass again.
‘My name is Rhys Garrett, and my father was a scientist named Aubrey Channing who was murdered by Jeb Oppenheimer, the same man who hunted Lillian Cruz and former member of Majestic Twelve. It has been my life’s work to hunt MJ–12 down and destroy them, which I have now done with Doug Jarvis’s help and that of the Defense Intelligence Agency, although they don’t know it.’ He smiled. ‘A scourge of humanity has been slain, and a new future awaits us all.’
Lucy Morgan, who had watched the exchange in amazement, shook her head in wonder.
‘Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on here?’
‘You have all been chosen because you have all suffered, in one way or another, at the hands of the cabal known as Majestic Twelve,’ Garrett said. ‘That cabal is no more, but I can tell you that their entire assets…’ Garrett looked pointedly at Jarvis. ‘… minus three billion dollars, now sit in off shore accounts in my name, and all of yours.’
Lucy Morgan’s eyes widened. ‘Say what now?’
‘Six account names, spread evenly with a hundred twelve accounts to each name,’ Garrett said, ‘totalling one point four trillion dollars in cash, assets and shares.’
Even Jarvis had not expected such a sum, and he forced himself not to cough on his coffee as Cruz, cool as ever, shrugged.
‘What makes you think we’d want any of their blood money?’
‘Speak for yourself honey,’ Amber Ryan replied, ‘but I could do a lot of good with that money, just like my uncle would have done.’
‘That’s the idea,’ Jarvis said with an easy smile. ‘There’s a lot to be done and unless any of you have any objections, we’d like all of you to be working together to ensure that the future of our planet is not controlled by corporations.’
‘You want us to be the next Majestic Twelve?’ Lucy Morgan uttered in disbelief.
‘Not the next Majestic Twelve,’ Jarvis countered, ‘more like the Reluctant Six. MJ–12’s legacy is a lot of suffering across the globe. We can change that. It all depends on how much involvement you want? None of us would blame any of you for choosing to walk away from the table.’
Cruz frowned. ‘And how would we be going about this new crusade of yours?’
Jarvis and Garret exchanged a glance, and Garrett willingly gestured for Jarvis to continue. ‘This is your area of expertise, Doug.’
Jarvis set his coffee cup down before he spoke.
‘Our politicians do not really control our countries,’ he began. ‘Big corporations do, and most are as corrupt as they come. Our leaders routinely sell arms to countries that defy international human rights laws if the money’s right, allow millions to die in squalor while pharmaceutical companies profit from new medicines that those countries cannot afford. We cannot operate within those confines and thus beyond them we will be opposed, persecuted and even hunted down as criminals, often by our own countrymen. The only thing we have on our side is the financial power bequeathed us by Majestic Twelve and safely harboured by Rhys Garrett, and the corruption of the people we’ll be hunting: they’ll do anything to avoid exposure and loss of wealth or power, and I intend to grab every last one of them by the balls and squeeze real hard. Politics likes the status quo, of an elite controlling what happens and hoping the people won’t notice, and we’re going to blow that out of the water. The Panama Papers is just the first step.’
Jarvis stood up and looked at them all as the warm breeze gusted across the beach.
‘We have a lot to do and it starts here. There are those who believe that our race faces extinction in the next few decades, an event that Majestic Twelve were keen to expedite. We’re now here to do everything we can to prevent it. Who’s in?’
***
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dean Crawford is the author of twenty novels, including the internationally published series of thrillers featuring Ethan Warner, a former United States Marine now employed by a government agency tasked with investigating unusual scientific phenomena. The novels have been Sunday Times paperback best-sellers and have gained the interest of major Hollywood production studios. He is also the enthusiastic author of many independently published Science Fiction novels.
Table of Contents
THE EXTINCTION CODE
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XXXIV
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XXXVI
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XXXVIII
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The Extinction Code Page 30
