The Sphinx

CHAPTER 5

Duncan handed out sheets of paper, one each to Turcotte, Yakov, Major Quinn, and Larry Kincaid. “This was the last article Kelly posted before she went underneath Rano Rau Volcano on Easter Island and became entrapped by the guardian computer. I want you to read it and compare it to the one that was just transmitted.”

The five were seated inside the conference room just off the Cube… the complex deep under Hangar One from which Majestic-12 had ruled Area 51 for decades. There was the quiet hum of machinery in the room, along with the slight hiss of filtered air being pushed down by large fans in the hangar above.

Major Quinn had been the operations officer at Area 51 for many years, but he had survived the purge of MJ-12 personnel because he had not been on the inner circle taken over by the guardian, and when Duncan had finally shut Majestic down, he had assisted her. He was the one man in the room who knew all the inner workings of the Area 51 facility and the Cube, the nickname for C3, (Command and Control Central).

Just outside the conference room was the main operations center, housing the Cube center. It measured eighty by a hundred feet and could be reached only from the massive bouncer hangar cut into the side of Groom Mountain via a large freight elevator. The entire complex was self-enclosed and rested on massive springs designed to allow it to survive a direct nuclear strike on the mountain above. Like the old NORAD headquarter in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, the Cube had been built during the Cold War, the costs hidden in the sixty-billion-dollar-a-year black budget.

At the height of Majestic-12’s operations, the bouncers were being test-flown, and part of the security force… which Duncan had had Turcotte infiltrate… codenamed Nightscape, had kidnapped subjects to be sent to the sister biotech facility outside of Dulce, New Mexico.

The Dulce facility was now crushed rubble, blasted by foo fighters, and Nightscape disbanded. Major Quinn had a different job now, aiding Duncan in her attempt to find out the truth about the aliens and their influence on mankind, which even Majestic-12 had been relatively clueless about.

Quinn was of medium height and build. He had thinning blond hair and wore tortoiseshell glasses with oversized lenses to accommodate the split glass he needed for both distance and close-up viewing.

The other person waiting in the room, Larry Kincaid, had worked for JPL… Jet Propulsion Laboratory… and NASA for over three decades. He was an outsider to Area 51 and had been as shocked as the rest of the world to learn what had been hidden there for decades. He was short and overweight, and his face bore the stress of his having sat through numerous space launches. He was the one who had spotted the Airlia base at Cydonia on Mars, right next to the enigma known as the Mars Face. Kincaid looked more dour than ever, with the recent word of the loss of Atlantis.

They all quickly scanned the clipping of Kelly Reynolds’s article:

“Most of this is already out of date,” Turcotte noted.

“We damn well know where the message was sent,” Larry Kincaid confirmed. “And we know where Aspasia was, and we know he’s dead now, thanks to Mike.” He inclined his head toward Turcotte.

“Are we sure they’re all dead up there?” Turcotte asked. “After what happened here and at the Kennedy Space Center?”

“We think the talon is operating on an automatic program,” Kincaid said. “It’s shown no indication of being able to maneuver. It’s drifting in orbit.”

“An automatic program that sucked in Warfighter and used it to destroy the hangar that just happened to be holding the two bodies here?” Turcotte’s tone indicated his disbelief. “And took out Atlantis as it was prepping to go up?”

Kincaid shrugged. “I’m just telling you our best guess,”

“Back to this.” Duncan tapped the news release.

“We know Aspasia was the rebel, the bad guy, not the Kortad,” Major Quinn said. “And that the Kortad were some sort of Airlia police, led by Artad.”

“Are we certain of those so-called facts?” Yakov asked “We have only your dead Professor Nabinger’s word on that… what he learned from a Kortad guardian (…) Qian-Ling in China. Aspasia’s guardian under Easter Island told him the opposite thing, and did you not believe that first? It is to be expected that each side’s computers would make them out to be the… How would you say? Men, or in this case, aliens in white hats?”

Turcotte was tired, more mentally than physically. First stopping the flight of the mothership by Majestic-12, then intercepting Aspasia’s fleet from Mars, then stopping the new Black Plague… he saw no end in sight to this war with a foe that had yet to make themselves apparent. The fact that The Mission had escaped from Devil’s Island and was now somewhere in the world, preparing the next phase of battle, was something he had thought about ever since coming back to Area 51.

“Something bothers me.…” Quinn hesitated, as if uncertain whether to air his thoughts in front of the group.

“Go ahead,” Duncan prompted.

Quinn tapped the article. “One thing that has been lost in recent events is the factor that started all this… the danger of activating the mothership’s interstellar drive.”

Turcotte stirred. “I destroyed the power source for the drive… the ruby sphere we found in the Great Rift Valley. So that’s not a problem.”

“And the mothership was damaged badly when Aspasia’s fleet was destroyed,” Duncan added. She pointed to the ceiling. “And it’s also in orbit abandoned, so we got it out of everyone’s reach.”

“What actually concerns me,” Quinn said, “is if the Kortad were actually one side of the Airlia in the civil war they fought, who is the interstellar threat that the guardians referred to? That’s the one thing both guardians… Aspasia’s and Artad’s… agreed on, as far as Nabinger could determine: that if the mothership’s drive was activated, there was an enemy out there”… Quinn pointed up… “who would track back along the drive and destroy our planet.”

Larry Kincaid shrugged once more. “We now know for certain there’s at least one other life-form out there among the stars, so it’s not a stretch to accept there are others.”

“Are they still out there is what concerns me,” Quinn said.

“Aspasia and Artad went at it over ten thousand years ago,” Turcotte said. “Who knows what’s out there now.”

Yakov suddenly stirred. “There is an ancient Chinese saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Maybe this enemy of the Airlia could be an ally in our fight?”

Everyone turned as Lisa Duncan tapped the top of the conference table. “We have to concern ourselves with more immediate problems here. On Earth. We can’t count on anyone bailing us out.” Duncan pulled out another sheaf of papers, giving a copy to each man. “Here’s the update, supposedly, from Kelly. It was burst-transmitted on the Navy FLTSCOM network off Easter Island, into the Internet, with e-mail addresses to every media outlet. It will be hitting the papers tomorrow and is already on radio and TV and posted on the Internet.”

“We can’t stop it?” Turcotte asked.

“Freedom of the press,” Duncan said. “It’s an American right.”

Yakov’s snort of disgust indicated what he thought of that.

“We couldn’t stop it,” Quinn said, “unless we shut down every Internet provider and put an absolute blackout on all media. I can assure you that Majestic-12 looked into the possibilities of doing just that and determined it would be impossible from a technological standpoint, never mind a legal or moral one.”

Turcotte quickly read the short article:

“Jesus, talk about spin control,” Major Quinn said. “According to this, we started the Black Death!”

“Kelly didn’t write this,” Duncan said. “I don’t think Kelly exists anymore. That’s why I had you read the earlier article. These words are from the guardian under Easter Island.”

“I’m not concerned about that or the spin control,” Turcotte said. “I’m worried why the Easter Island guardian sees a need to have Kelly send this.”

“Why are you so sure the Easter Island guardian is the evil one?” Yakov asked in a rather mild tone.

“Because of what Nabinger uncovered under Qian-Ling,” Turcotte answered. “Which could have been as much of a lie as what he uncovered under Easter Island,” Yakov noted once more.

Turcotte held up the article. “So we should believe this? We knew that The Mission was behind the Black Death. You talked to General Hemstadt on Devil’s Island.”

“I think… ” Duncan was interrupted by the buzz of her SATPhone. She pulled it out and turned it on. “Duncan here.” She listened for a second, her face tightening, then pulled it away from her ear. “Can we put this on the speaker in here?” she asked Quinn.

He nodded, pulling a wire out of a drawer and running it to her phone, plugging it into the bottom. While he was doing that, Turcotte mouthed the words Who is it?

“The Ones Who Wait.” Duncan held her hand over the phone. “Lexina, their leader.”

“You’re set,” Quinn told her as the speaker in the middle of the table came alive with a crackle of static.

“We’re listening,” Duncan said.

The voice that echoed out in response was low-pitched, somewhere between male and female. “We have been patient, but time is running out. We want the key.”

“The key to the lower level of Qian-Ling?” Duncan asked.

“Don’t play games with me,” Lexina said. “I have shown you just a small sample of what I can do by destroying the place you held my comrades’ bodies and your last manned space vehicle. I now control the talon, and I will do much worse if you do not turn the key over to us.”

“You killed a lot of people,” Duncan said.

“And I will kill many, many more if you do not get me the key.”

“Did you destroy the Columbia as it approached the talon?” Duncan asked.

“No. That was the talon’s automatic defense system reacting to anything that came close. But I control it now. I control your satellite through the talon. I warned you,” Lexina said. “You ignored the warning. Do not ignore this one. Give us the key.”

“Why should… ” Duncan began, but she was interrupted.

“Give us the key or we will destroy your country completely.”

Kincaid stirred. “Warfighter couldn’t even come close to doing that.”

“Give us the key or we will destroy your country completely,” Lexina repeated. “You have forty-nine hours. If you do not give me the key by then, North America will be destroyed.”

“You’re bluffing.” Duncan glanced at Turcotte as she said it.

“Is the Russian there?” Lexina asked. “The man from Section Four?”

“I’m here,” Yakov growled.

“Tell them about Strategicheskii Zvyezda,” Lexina said. “Deliver the key to me in forty-nine hours, or two hundred and sixty million die and your country will be an uninhabitable wasteland for centuries.”