by S. A. Beck
She stuck the thumb drive into a laptop the Atlantis Allegiance had given her and found her CPS files. Scrolling down to the one with the oldest date, she opened it.
Abandoned Infant Report
Place of Discovery: Loretta Goldberg Clinic, San Francisco
Estimated Age: Three months
Sex: F
Race/Ethnicity: Mixed, undetermined
General Health: Excellent, well fed
Diseases/Infections: None
* * *
There they were—her vital statistics, her introduction to the world. The next document in the files, she knew, would show that the police had taken a print of her feet and checked it with all the state hospitals, only to find no match. Her mother had given birth either at home or out of the state. A later FBI report found no match nationally to the prints of any missing babies.
Jaxon’s eyes strayed back to the second-to-last line. “Excellent, well fed.”
She had forgotten about that. Maybe she had been too aloof to notice before what it really meant. It said so little and said so much. Her parents had cared for her. What had Isadore told her? A lot of her kind ended up criminals or suicide cases? Not her parents. They had loved her. They had taken proper care of her.
So why give her up? Had they been hunted like she was being hunted?
Jaxon felt relief and panic at the same time. Discovering that she hadn’t been rejected by her parents felt like two giant boulders, sadness and cynicism, had fallen off her shoulders. Maybe she had been taking the wrong attitude all her life. Why hadn’t she thought of this before?
Because you assumed you weren’t special before. Now, you know you are.
But the fact that they’d loved her meant they hadn’t wanted to give her up. They had been forced to for some reason. If those military agents wanted her as a weapon, they’d want all of her people as weapons. All the Atlanteans were being hunted.
And how long had this been going on?
She couldn’t sit there in the hotel room anymore, waiting for someone to escort her through the streets. The answers she wanted were out there somewhere, and she should be the one finding them, not her new friends.
Jaxon got up and took some money and a card with the hotel address printed in English, French, and Arabic. She hurriedly wrote a note to Vivian on the back of her boarding pass and left it on her pillow. Jaxon hoped Vivian could read it. Her spelling always got worse when she felt nervous.
Locking the door behind her, she walked quickly downstairs, past the front desk as Mohammad merely nodded, and out into the streets of Morocco.
Chapter 11
July 28, 2016, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
10:15 PM
* * *
General Meade sat late at his office. He didn’t feel safe at home. There in the middle of a military base, at least he wouldn’t be shot at. Or would he?
The assassination attempt had left him seriously rattled, the worst of it being that he had no idea who had tried to kill him. He didn’t dare send out feelers through his usual channels. Oscar’s killing had shaken up the entire Pentagon. When a top-ranking intelligence analyst got gunned down in a parking lot in broad daylight, even the president heard about it. Asking too many questions might lead to people asking him questions, and he couldn’t have that.
No one had come to talk to him about it. Apparently, he had gotten away clean. The only people who witnessed the shooting were he and the assassins.
And of course, the assassins knew he had been there.
General Meade felt like a sitting duck. The shooters had obviously known who he was, for they had been tracking Oscar. That meant they knew where he worked and probably where he lived. He had only been home once to pack a few things and move into a motel. He had to find one that would take cash—credit cards could easily be traced—so he’d ended up in a trashy motel in a bad part of town, the kind of motel where no one asks for ID when you check in and everybody minds their own business. He hoped nobody he knew spotted him there. Think of the scandal!
General Meade realized once again that his decision to never get married had been a good one. He had decided long before to devote his life to his career. Marrying someone and then running off to war zones for months or years at a time wouldn’t have been fair. He’d seen plenty of military marriages break up over that. However, the war zone had come right to America, and he was taking fire in local parking garages.
There had been one woman who almost made him change his mind, though…
Meade shook his head to clear away his thoughts of a better past and the better future it had promised. He had to focus. After making sure the door to his office was locked, he retrieved the special plastic envelope in which he’d stored the photos Oscar had given him.
He’d spent hours laboriously cleaning the blood off them while trying to keep the paper as dry as possible. Even after all that work, he still didn’t manage to get all the stains off. A lab tech with the proper equipment could have done a much better job in a tenth of the time, but he hadn’t been able to risk showing the photos to anyone. Someone was willing to kill for them, someone within the military.
He spread the photographs out on the table and focused a bright lamp on them. As far as he could see, they weren’t much different than any of the hundreds of other photos he had seen. Shiny metallic discs, larger black triangles, and huge cigar-shaped objects hovered above the clouds, some even higher in the upper stratosphere on the border of outer space. The images had been taken by spy planes and powerful ground-based telescopes.
General Meade took out a magnifying glass and studied them. What should he look for? Oscar had said something about their being fooled. Fooled about what? Could these not be extraterrestrial at all? Could the Russians or the Chinese have made them? Or some unknown, secret power?
He squinted at the photos one by one, taking in every detail. He wasn’t an expert as Oscar had been, but he’d stared at enough intelligence photos to have a pretty good eye. The problem was that he didn’t know what he was looking for. All the alien craft looked just the same as the others that had been tracked for the past several years, and the data printed on the edge of the photos showing coordinates, altitude, and speed were within the same general parameters.
He sifted through the photos one by one, then looked through them again.
Then one caught his eye. It showed a shiny metallic disc flying above some cirrus clouds, the wispy clouds that only form above eighteen thousand feet. Usually, the UFOs flew so high that no clouds would be in the picture at all. That made the photo unusual but not highly so. Other UFOs had been spotted at low altitudes, always the same flying-disc type. The cigar-shaped UFOs were considerably bigger and always stayed either in the upper stratosphere or in outer space. Scout vehicles and mother ships? Perhaps.
General Meade stared at the photo, trying to figure out what had caught his eye, what exactly was nagging him in the back of his mind.
His eyes drifted to the clouds. Something about them…
He hurried over to his computer and punched in his password to bring up the top-secret database of UFO images. Using the search engine, he narrowed down the thousands of pictures to only those with cirrus clouds in them, bringing the total down to a couple hundred. Then he went through them one by one.
He needed more than an hour to find it, but when he did, it was so obvious he nearly fell out of his chair.
The photo Oscar had given him was dated just three weeks before, and the photo on his screen dated more than two years before.
But the clouds were identical.
General Meade stared at his screen then at the bloodstained photo and back at his screen.
He couldn’t deny it. The wisps of water vapor were the exact same shape. That didn’t happen in nature. Clouds were like snowflakes, all different.
That meant the images were faked.
The UFOs in the two pictures were obviously different, with different angles and vectors and l
ight conditions. The angle of light on the clouds was different too, as was the total brightness, but the shape was identical.
Whoever had faked the photos had gotten lazy and reused some cloud imagery, figuring no one would notice since the photos were from two years apart, and everyone would be focusing on the UFO anyway. The forger had assumed no one would catch it.
Oscar was smart enough to catch it.
Had been smart enough, Meade corrected himself.
General Meade looked at the other photos. Were these faked too? They must have been. Oscar would have checked, using the advanced analysis software in his lab, software Meade didn’t have access to. Once he had spotted the first fake image, he would have suspected all of them and checked each one. Oscar must have been analyzing them for weeks, maybe even months, until he had assembled the stack of twenty images to show General Meade incontrovertible proof that the entire UFO hunt was a sham.
The general leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes and letting his breath out slowly. His world had just come apart. For years, he’d been following the UFO phenomenon, searching through everything the government had in its files. There had been so many false leads, so many silly eyewitnesses who’d seen Venus and thought it was an alien spacecraft. Even some of the government reports turned out to be meteors or experimental aircraft. But there had always been a hard core of cases, perhaps one percent, that couldn’t be dismissed. And then the UFOs started flying through the upper atmosphere in what was obviously a search pattern, and the government had finally taken the threat seriously and begun monitoring them.
So was it all a fake? Did none of those craft exist? Were even those credible cases somehow falsified?
Who would want to fool the Pentagon? The images came from military installations, so it wasn’t an enemy power unless they had managed to get a whole team of secret agents into a top-secret project. That seemed unlikely. The United States had certainly never managed to get access like that to an enemy power.
That left the United States government itself. One part of the government, perhaps a faction within the Pentagon, wanted the rest of the government to think an alien invasion was imminent.
General Meade rested his elbows on his desk and ran his hands through his hair, letting out a deep sigh. All he had worked for, all he had conspired to do, had been useless. He had enslaved Orion, a fellow human being, because he thought he needed to do so to defend the Earth. Damn it, he had even spoken with General Corbin about overthrowing the government in a military coup!
His ancestor, the famous General Meade of the Union army, the victor of Gettysburg, must have been spinning in his grave. Meade had fought the Confederacy to free the slaves and protect the Union, and there he was, 150 years later, enslaving Atlanteans and planning on overthrowing democracy, all because some trickster with a computer had made him believe in aliens!
He slammed a fist on his desk. They would pay—he’d make sure of that. All his efforts hadn’t been for nothing. Sure, they had fooled him, but by fooling him they had spurred him to start the Poseidon Project and train Orion. Plus, he had the Grants and other agents at his disposal. Whoever was behind this had made a powerful enemy. He’d make them pay for their treason.
But who could it be? And why were they doing this? What did they have to gain?
His mind settled on General Corbin. He had been the commanding officer who had cleared the Roswell report for release into the top-secret Pentagon server. The military’s initial report had long since been available, but there had been a second, more detailed report made a week after the 1947 crash, which had only just recently been uploaded onto the server. For those with eyes to see, that second report had been a bombshell.
There had been strange writing on the UFO that had crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, back in 1947, writing no one at the time could decipher. Only his lead scientist in the Poseidon Project, Dr. Jones, was able to figure out what it meant—it was part of the genetic sequence for the Atlantis set of genes.
That was enough to induce him to contact General Corbin. Soon, they were sharing information about aliens and Atlanteans. Not only that, they had agreed to do all they could to defend the Earth against the alien threat, up to and including overthrowing the democratically elected government in Washington in order to be able to mount a swift and decisive response again the invasion.
Had it all been a lie? Had Corbin falsified and planted that report, knowing that Meade would be so interested that he would get in touch? Had all this been to draw Meade and his Atlanteans into a plot to overthrow the government?
Perhaps Corbin wanted to be dictator. If he could fool the Pentagon into believing in an invasion from outer space, it would be easy to fool the general public. Half of them believed in UFOs already.
But when no invasion came, how would Corbin stay in power? Did he have some other trick up his sleeve? Or maybe Corbin was a dupe just like Meade had been. Should he contact him, try to draw him out? But if he had been behind Oscar’s killing, that would be like walking into the lion’s den.
Exhaustion tugged at him. He had been working hard all day, and this latest revelation was too much. His mind was a muddle and his thoughts unclear. He needed to go back to his motel and sleep on it. Maybe in the morning, things would be clearer.
Twenty minutes later, Meade pulled into the parking lot of his motel. It was just off the interstate, the kind of place truckers and traveling salesmen might stop after a long day on the road. The beds were creaky, the carpets all had cigarette burns, and the guy at the front desk looked like a drug addict. But it was a place no one would ever expect to find a general of the United States Armed Forces.
As he pulled into a parking space, he glanced around—nothing suspicious except for the drug dealer on the corner and the working girls hanging out next to the off-ramp.
It was a good thing there wasn’t a Mrs. Meade. No woman he’d ever marry would be caught dead in that dump, and if she caught him there, she’d think he was having an affair. From the sound of it, the people in the room next to his certainly had been.
General Meade cut the engine and got out of his car, keeping his hand close to the pistol hidden beneath his civilian clothing. Gripping his key, he hurried to the door of his hotel room, which looked directly out on the parking lot. He scanned the area for potential trouble but didn’t see anything beyond the usual. On his first night, he’d brushed off the drug dealer and the working girls, and they were leaving him alone. Briefly, he wondered what they thought of him. Why would anyone stay in this place, they must have wondered, if he didn’t want their services?
As he came up to his room, he brushed his hand along the space where the door met the doorjamb. He had shut one of his own hairs between them, right next to the lock, a simple trick to catch the unwary prowler. Chances were, they wouldn’t see the hair, and when they opened the door, it would fall to the ground. Its absence would signal that someone had entered his place without his permission.
The hair was absent.
Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, General Meade eased his 9mm automatic out of his shoulder holster and flicked off the safety. Edging away from the door so that if someone shot through it they wouldn’t hit him, he inserted the key into the cheap lock. Any halfway decent burglar could’ve picked that lock in ten seconds.
He unlocked the door and pushed it open, tensing himself for the gunshot he felt was sure to come. When it didn’t, he crouched and popped his head around the corner and quickly ducked back. No shots, and he hadn’t seen a thing in the dim interior of his room. He stood up so as not to appear in the same spot a second time and popped his head around the corner again, leading with his gun.
No one.
General Meade reached around the corner and flicked on the light. The cheap room stood out starkly under the glare of the bare bulb—lumpy bed, battered side table, TV with adult channels, faded carpet, and the open door to the bathroom.
The only parts of the room he
couldn’t see were the floor on the far side of the bed, under the bed, and part of the bathroom.
Where would an intruder hide? Most likely the bathroom.
General Meade dove into the room and landed on the bed, rolling across it to the other side, where he was relieved to find no one hiding. As he landed on the floor, feeling brief satisfaction at the noise—revenge for the sleep deprivation his amorous neighbors had given him—he glanced under the bed. There were all sorts of horrors under that bed, but no hidden assassin. He felt oddly glad as he wouldn’t have shoved his worst enemy under there.
That left the bathroom. General Meade trained his pistol on the doorway. He had expected someone to come leaping out, perhaps his friend with the Uzi from the parking lot.
He crept towards the half-open bathroom door. He could see only about half the room, including the chipped sink, part of the floor, and the mirror reflecting the entrance and parking lot. Nothing seemed out of place.
Wait, what was that on the floor? A bit of dirt, and not just the usual grime in that filthy place, but an actual little ball of soil that had obviously fallen off of someone’s shoe. It hadn’t been from him because he always tried to keep the place as clean as possible. Someone else had left it there.
Someone who’d hidden right behind that door.
General Meade rose, keeping his pistol trained on the doorway. He edged forward, trying not to make a sound.
Movement in the mirror made him spin around. A man was standing at the entrance to his motel room, an Uzi in one hand.
Meade put a bullet through his head.
As the assassin flew backward and flopped on the pavement, Meade spun again and ducked just as a shotgun blast tore through the room and ripped apart the wall behind him. Miraculously, he was unhurt and shot the second assassin, who had leapt out of the bathroom, right in the gut. The man crumpled onto the bathroom floor.
