Extinction Machine

Chapter Forty-five

The Black Hawk came in along the curve of a sheer bluff that rose above the headland of Chesapeake Bay. Elk Neck State Park was sprawled across twenty-one hundred acres of dense forests, hills, marshland, and sandy beaches. I’d hiked every one of the trails, roasted marshmallows and hotdogs over campfires, sung bad songs very loudly with other boys, done my first wilderness training and orienteering, and experienced some of my happiest moments here. I look back at the last summer we’d camped here as the last clean breath before my life became polluted by the urban trauma that scarred me and transformed me into the killer I’ve become. That summer was before Helen and I had been attacked by a group of teenage boys. Before they’d stomped me half to death and then assaulted her. It was the last time I was unmarred by life. The last time I was innocent.

Here in this forest.

I could feel my mouth wanting to smile at those memories, but that’s always tough for me, because I have to view them through the lens of what happened so soon after.

And yet …

We’d played here. Helen and me, when her family came camping with mine. My brother and me, the two of us hunting for Apaches and dinosaurs and savage tribesmen on those forgotten trails. Maybe one day, maybe when the war let me stop long enough to catch my breath, I’d come back here and find one of those old trails and walk it. With Ghost beside me and ghosts around me. Would I be able to hear the echo of old laughter here? Does the world ever grant a killer that much mercy?

It was a bad day to ask those kinds of questions.

The shadow of the Black Hawk flickered across a flat green lawn and flitted up the white tower of the Turkey Point Lighthouse. From a distance the lighthouse looked blunt and squat, but it was deceptive. A hundred feet high and as white as a gull’s breast.

I was surprised to see that there was a house adjoining the tower. Our scoutmaster had told us that the lightkeeper’s house had been torn down in 1972, years before I was born. But now there was a two-story Victorian cottage that had an improbable number of porches and cupolas and little towers sticking out in all directions. In contrast to the stark simplicity of the lighthouse, the cottage was on the charming side of untidy. Japanese black pines stood guard beside an inviting walkway, and an herb garden was embowered by beach plum, bayberry, and hydrangeas.

The pilot, Hector, set us down on the far side of the two-acre lawn.

“You want backup, Cap?” he asked. We’d left Baltimore with a crew of three: Hector at the stick; a former field agent with an artificial leg called Slick riding shotgun; and a red-haired woman nicknamed — creatively — Red along as crew chief. They were support staff, but they were also combat vets; each partially disabled but still tough as nails.

“Stay on station,” I told Hector. “I don’t know if this is a hello-goodbye waste of time or if we’re going to need to get this Flynn woman back to the shop. Cut the rotors but stay ready.”

“You got it.”

Red rolled back the door and once I hopped out she handed me a ruggedized laptop bag. A MindReader substation. She gave Ghost a wink as we got out. She said, “Don’t go chasing no ’possums.”

Ghost gave her a snooty look and followed me through the fading rotor wash. The turbines whined down to a whisper and then fell silent as I approached the garden path.

The day was cool and clean. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and despite the time of year the air was alive with the last of the season’s hummingbirds. They whipped and whizzed around us, dancing with swallowtail butterflies, and Ghost jumped and barked like a puppy. The scent of roses was infused by the rich salty air, and as the breeze shifted I could smell rosemary and sweet grass. As I approached the cottage I marveled at the variety of flowers, some of which were way out of season. Pansies, impatiens, and dianthus thrived alongside tulips, crocuses, and a dozen kinds of roses. And there was a row of hollyhocks with their paper-thin blooms fluttering in shades of pale pink, lemon yellow, and deep magenta, some of them towering nearly ten feet high.

I stopped and looked around, and despite everything — my errand, the video, the crisis — I smiled.

Then the door opened and Junie Flynn stepped into my life.

I know how that sounds. Absurd, dramatic, corny. But there are moments in life — precious and rare — when no matter what else is hanging fire or clawing at your attention, you have to simply pause and focus all your attention. You do so because something of great importance is happening and you are suddenly aware of it. Maybe not in a conscious away, but deep down, on the level where your instincts trump your thoughts. The voice of your essential self whispers to you: Behold. And you stop because you must. You know that to fumble the moment through inattention or to pollute it through triviality is to lose something of great value. Even if you cannot then — or ever — ascribe precise parameters to that value. You are acutely aware, though, that if you blunder through the moment without giving it its proper due you are one very dull fellow. This, you are sure, is an event in life so rare and significant that it can only be described as having a flavor of importance.

That is what I felt when the lighthouse door opened and Junie Flynn stepped from soft interior shadows into the golden sunlight of early afternoon. She wore a loose peasant skirt with a complex Mexican print, a white long-sleeved sweater unbuttoned over a coral t-shirt with a deep V, and no shoes. Her wavy blond hair was tied back in a loose ponytail. She wore no makeup, but there were silver rings on most of her fingers, a jangly ankle bracelet on her left leg, and at least a dozen bracelets on each wrist — layers of silver, white gold, red gold, and copper. An emerald pendant hung from a gold chain around her neck, half lost in the shadows between her sun-freckled breasts.

She walked up to me, smiling and asked, “Are you here to kill me?”

Chapter Forty-six

The golf cart’s top speed was twelve miles an hour, and Mr. Bones tried to will it to go faster. The labyrinthine underground structure of basements, subbasements, laboratories, warehouses, firing chambers, and other rooms was more than triple that of the massive castle above. They had to endure two freight elevators and more than a mile of tunnels in order to get to Howard’s design lab. It was a ponderous distance at the best of times, and now it was excruciating.

“Why don’t you move the fucking lab closer to the elevators?” Bones growled.

“Why don’t you stop whining and steer? Nearly clipped my elbow back there.”

The sniping war continued all the way to the big security door. Then they piled out and went through the steps necessary to open the airlock door. It required two palm prints simultaneously applied. There was a secondary entry method for those times when Mr. Bones was not at the estate, but that had a number of extra steps and many safeguards in case Howard was being made to access the lab under duress.

The airlock hissed open, belching refrigerated air at them. Despite the nervous hostility during the trip, they weren’t mad at each other. They were terrified. The disaster at Dugway was dreadful.

Beyond the airlock was a large laboratory with state-of-the-art computer systems lining three of the walls. The fourth wall was completely covered by a line of heavy gray drapes.

Once inside they hurried to the central Ghost Box station, which was a massive affair with over twenty networked screens built in a semicircle around a console with two wheeled leather chairs. Mr. Bones held the chair for Howard and paused to feel the old man’s pulse and press a palm against his forehead. Howard was flushed, but the blood pressure medicine seemed to be keeping him stable. His pulse was elevated, but not dangerously so.

Howard waved him away with mock irritation.

They logged onto Ghost Box and immediately called Yuina Hoshino. A hologram of her appeared above them, almost life-size but just her head and shoulders. She wore her glasses and peered owlishly at them.

“Howard? What is it? I’m in the middle of—”

“I tried to call you, damn it.”

“I turned my phone off,” she said. “We’re working on the slave circuit and—”

“To hell with the slave circuit. Never turn your goddamn phone off,” snarled Howard. His voice carried such savage emotion that Yuina straightened and removed her glasses. “Look at this.”

Howard replayed the last few seconds of footage from Dugway.

Her face was a total blank. No expression, no emotion.

“Again,” she said. “Play it again.”

They played it twice more and then a third time in slow motion. Mr. Bones opened some video-editing software, froze the best image and blew it up, but as good as the senator’s lapel cam had been it was still not sophisticated enough. As the picture expanded it began to blur and then to fragment into blocks as the computer isolated individual pixels and assigned them colors. Annoyed, Mr. Bones reduced the magnification until they had the largest clear picture.

“They’re back,” said Howard. “Holy mother of God, Yuina, they’re back and—”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Yuina slowly. She put her glasses back on and bent over her keyboard for a few seconds. Then a second image appeared in an inset box. The craft in this picture was a triangle of unreflective black metal with one bright light near each of its three points and a larger light in the exact center. The sides were dark, alternating black and smoke gray. The top and bottom of the machine were slightly larger than the center section, creating an eavelike overhang all the way around. In the second picture, the craft stood on three metal legs made from steel struts. The vehicle was apparently in a cave with rough walls but on the closest wall there appeared to be some kind of rough structure. When Yuina increased the size of the inset box it became more evident that the structure on the wall was the reconstructed skeleton of a dinosaur.

The craft in the inset and the craft at Dugway were a perfect match.

“Wait, wait,” said Shelton. “What are you saying here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” answered Yuina. “The ship in the cave is the one found at the Dadiwan dig in the excavation site in Zhangshaodian Village, in Tianshui City. The one they found in 2013.”

“Bullshit … that ship was trashed,” Howard fired back. “Tull got in there. He took photos of everything.”

Yuani gave him a pitying look. “Haven’t you ever put used parts from one car into another? Or am I the only tomboy in this group?”

“Son a bitch,” breathed Mr. Bones. “The fucking Chinese did repair it.”

“Are you sure they’re the same?” demanded Howard. “Look, the lights aren’t exactly—”

“If there are differences it’s because the Chinese rebuilt or remodeled the craft,” said Yuina.

“This craft just shot down the Locust bomber they’re testing out at Dugway,” said Howard. “That’s an act of war, Yuina. You actually think the Chinese are looking to declare open war on the U.S.?”

Her face was impassive. “I’m not so sure I’d call this war, Howard.”

“Then what?”

“A war is two-sided. The DoD has been hoping to use the Locust to put us way ahead in the international arms race. Much like we’re hoping to do with Specter 101. But if that vehicle is Chinese, then they’ve just told us in no uncertain terms that the arms race is over.” She leaned toward the screen, dark eyes intense. “And they just won.”

Chapter Forty-seven

Junie Flynn’s words seemed to hang burning in the air.

“Kill you?” There may have been a crooked smile on my mouth, but I wasn’t sure. “That’s a pretty strange way of answering your door.”

Ghost whined faintly.

Junie Flynn shielded her eyes with her hand and squinted up at me. “You landed on my lawn in an unmarked black helicopter. What else would I think?”

My crooked smile twitched. “Actually, I can make a pretty good list of reasons why someone would land on a lighthouse lawn. That list includes free rides for lucky kids and extremely aggressive Jehovah’s Witnesses. Killing people, however, would be moderately low on the list.”

“Only ‘moderately low’?” she asked, smiling.

“I could be Santa Claus gone high-tech.”

“It’s October.”

“The Great Pumpkin, then?”

“In a black helicopter.”

“It’s not entirely black. Look, we have snazzy red sports trim. It’s just an ordinary everyday heli—”

“‘Ordinary’? Why would an ordinary helicopter have — and this is just a guess off the top of my head — a pair of GAU-19/A Gatling guns, seventy millimeter Hydra rockets, probably a round dozen AGM-114 Hellfire laser-guided missiles, and thirty millimeter M230 gun pods?”

“Geese are a hazard to air traffic,” I said. “We’re being proactive.”

Junie Flynn laughed.

I laughed with her. Ghost wagged his tail.

Not sure in what proportions our laughter was constructed of false and honest humor. In the background, the Black Hawk crouched on her lawn like a giant insect from a Godzilla flick. She glanced down at Ghost, who, despite extensive and costly training, was wagging his tail like a puppy. She held out her hand to him.

“Don’t,” I warned quickly. “He’s a trained combat dog.”

My trained combat dog licked her fingers and then flopped on the ground to show his belly, tongue lolling and tail thumping. Junie squatted down and began rubbing his tummy while Ghost’s eyes rolled up and one leg started kicking.

“Who’s a good little combat dog? Who’s a good little combat dog?” cooed Junie Flynn in a singsong voice.

“Um … he’s not usually like that with people.”

“Dogs understand me.”

Ghost was apparently understanding that her clever fingers on his fur was the equivalent of a crack pipe.

“Why did you think I was here to kill you?” I asked.

Junie stood up and shrugged.

“That’s it?” I said. “Shouldn’t there be a whole ’nother part to this conversation?”

“You haven’t read a single one of my books, have you?”

I said, “Um…”

“If you had, you’d know that I am not a cheerleader for any part of the government that employs bullies and thugs. And you’d know that I’ve had my share of bullying and thuggish behavior.”

“I’m not here to bully you, and I am seldom thuggish to total strangers.”

“Just close friends, then?”

“Cute, but no. Look, Ms. Flynn, I’ll admit that I haven’t read your books, watched your videos, or listened to your podcast. In fact, until this morning I’d never even heard of you.”

“Oh?” Her blues eyes flashed with challenge. “Do you know anything about me?”

“Just basic stuff. You were an orphan who was adopted at age five by Jericho and Amanda Flynn. Your foster dad was a physicist, your mom was a developmental psychologist. They were killed in a car accident when you were in your senior year of college. They had no other children, no family except for you, so you inherited. You finished college, but you switched your major from art history to political science. After college you went to grad school at the University of Pennsylvania, but dropped out a year later after you were injured in a car bombing while on vacation in Egypt. After you returned to the States, you began to write articles about conspiracy theories, UFOs, alien abductions, shadow governments, and the Majestic Black Book. You’ve published twenty-three books, four of which were New York Times bestsellers and two of which were USA Today bestsellers. You are on the UFO and conspiracy theory lecture circuit, which means that you travel at least half the year. You are the go-to expert for several topics related to UFOs, though the real basis of your celebrity is the Black Book. You wrote the first books on it — which, I admit, I haven’t read — and you’ve filed over one hundred requests via the Freedom of Information Act in an attempt to have the contents of the book released.” I paused. “Did I leave anything out?”

Her face remained bland through my recitation, with only a momentary tightening of her mouth when I mentioned the death of her parents and her own injuries in Egypt. “You didn’t mention my arrest record.”

“Eleven arrests in seven years, all related to organized protests to humanitarian issues. You’ve been on talk shows with Martin Sheen, Don Cheadle, and George Clooney following various arrests.”

“What does that tell you?”

“That you’re a social activist and I probably agree with some of your politics.”

“Says the man with the gun, the helicopter, and the combat dog.”

“Being a patriot isn’t the same thing as being a radical. Right or left.”

She digested that. “You left out that I’m a freak. That shows up in a lot of field reports. I’ve seen some of them, so I know.”

“‘Freak’? I wouldn’t use that word.”

“What word would you use?”

“Gifted?” I suggested. “Maybe uniquely gifted. In middle school you demonstrated qualities consistent with eidetic memory — photographic memory — but later that diagnosis was modified to include hyperthymesia, which I believe is what they call a superior autobiographic memory. In short, you don’t forget anything.”

“Can’t forget,” she corrected. “And … it’s not very much fun.”

“I’ll bet. There are whole years of my life I’d like to forget.”

“Me, too.”

We looked at each other for a moment, letting all of that sink in.

“What do they call you?” she asked, shifting topics abruptly enough to strip the gears.

I offered my hand. “Captain Joseph Ledger.”

She didn’t immediately take my hand. “Captain of…?”

“You won’t have heard the name of the organization I’m actually with. We don’t have badges.”

“Let me guess. It’s one of those ‘we’re so secret that if you told me the name you’d have to kill me’ things?”

I laughed. “That’s almost exactly what I said to my boss the first time I met him.”

“He didn’t kill you.”

“Not so far. Guy’s twitchy, though, so we’ll see what my retirement plan looks like.”

“A gold watch and two in the back of the head?”

I liked this Junie Flynn. She was a civilian and I could have stood there and sold her some kind of bullshit, but with some people deception is like lying in church.

“The name isn’t really important,” I said. “You wouldn’t have heard of it and to tell you I’d probably have to make you sign a mountain of nondisclosure papers. Do you really want to do that?”

“No.”

“Then let’s leave it at this: I’m not with the IRS, so that means I’m not pure evil. I am definitely not here to kill you. And I consider myself to be one of the good guys.”

“The American flag and mom’s apple pie?” she asked skeptically.

“My mom’s dead. She died of cancer. And … I don’t really know why I told you that.”

“People talk to me,” she said.

“I guess they do.” I offered my hand again. “The name’s Joe.”

Junie considered that, her smile wavering only a little. Then she took my proffered hand.

“Junie,” she said. Her hand was slender but strong, with long fingers and interesting calluses. Yard work, maybe. No shooter’s calluses, though.

She looked into my eyes and something happened. There was a very sudden and very weird bit of chemistry between us that created a connection I didn’t really understand. In one split second it felt as if a door opened in my mind and Junie Flynn stepped through. Just like that she seemed to know who and what I was. I’d known other people who had a similar gift. Some of them were screeners who worked for the CIA and FBI. They didn’t need a polygraph machine because for whatever reason they were wired differently than the rest of us. Maybe they could smell subtle changes in body chemistry, maybe they could feel the vibrations of other human hearts. I didn’t know how it worked, but they were human lie detectors. And then there were some who had an even deeper level, a second and separate gift. They could look into your eyes and see who you were, your real self, down deep behind the artifice and affectation. Junie was that kind of person. I didn’t know it until we touched hands and looked into each other’s eyes. It was all so immediate, so fast. And it was like having an X-ray focused on my soul.

There are so many things about me that I don’t show people. I am not, by any clinical definition, entirely sane. I am functionally warped as a result of the brutal attack on my girlfriend and me when we were fourteen. We both lost ourselves that day. Neither of us ever really came back. After I healed from the physical trauma I found every way possible to make myself tough. Martial arts, boxing, weights, endless reading about psychology, warfare, the physics and physiology of the destruction of the human body. As the corny saying goes, I became a weapon. My mind, though, was not something that could be sweated back to fitness in the gym any more than it was something the docs could stitch back together. My personality had become splintered and over the years a number of unique personality fragments emerged, some quite self-destructive. Others were shockingly violent. Through endless hours working with Rudy Sanchez — a doctor who became my best friend — I learned to exert control over them. I edited out most of the bad ones, but three aspects still remain. One is the Modern Man — the Civilized Man — and he’s the one who still carries the last cracked pieces of my idealism and innocence. In recent years he has taken a serious beating.

Then there’s the Cop, and he’s the closest thing I have to a central personality. The Cop is frequently in charge. He drives the bus most of the time and that’s a good thing because he’s smart, calm, passive, sensitive, and intuitive. He’d rather solve a problem than pull a trigger.

But the third part of me is the Warrior. Or, as he prefers to be called, the Killer. That part of me was born on that terrible day. With each stomping foot, with each punch and bash and crack he fought his way into the world. He is the skull-cracker, the neck-breaker, the eye-gouger. He is not evil, but he is not nice. The Warrior paints himself with camouflage greasepaint and crouches in the tall grass waiting for the bad guys to come by, and then he hunts them with a cruel and savage delight.

Helen became lost in that carnival funhouse of the damaged mind, where all images of her destruction and violation were reflected in twisted and deformed mirrors. And in that darkness she became so utterly without hope that she needed to find a permanent way out.

Which she did.

I found her — too late. The Warrior in me rose up and screamed so loud that it broke the fragile shell of mercy that hung around his neck. There is no mercy left in him now.

As Junie Flynn looked into my eyes I tried not to let her see any of this, but I knew that she did. Somehow, impossibly, she did.

All in one tiny moment.

I saw it register in her eyes. They widened a bit, and her face went death pale. I expected her to yank her hand back. To at least turn away in disgust. Instead she reached up with her other hand and touched my cheek. Despite the fact that we were strangers it was an oddly personal gesture, intimate and familiar, as if she and I shared some history beyond a few seconds of banter and verbal sparring.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I closed my eyes.

Her fingertips lingered for a moment and the connection was gone. When I opened my eyes, she had indeed stepped back. But it was not a retreat from me. Instead she’d stepped back into a neutral space, which was the only way we could both move forward from this moment.

“So why are you here, Joe?” she asked in a tone that held no trace of what had just happened.

It took me a second to find my footing, and my voice. “I … need your help to find a copy of the Majestic Black Book.”

Her eyes flicked to the parked helicopter and back. “I don’t have it.”

“I know.”

“Then—”

“I need to get a copy of it. Any copy. Today.”

Her eyes were thoughtful, her mouth formed into a half smile, and I waited her out.

She said, “Then I’d better make some tea.”

With that Junie Flynn turned and went back inside, leaving the door open for me to follow. I glanced down at Ghost. He gave me a “hey, you’re the super secret agent guy; I’m just a dog” look.

We followed her inside.

Chapter Forty-eight

The inside of the cottage was a wonderful mess. It was clean but a long way from neat, and the way in which the living room was arranged seemed to suggest that there were at least two distinct sides to Junie Flynn. One half of the room was given over to big squashy armchairs, comfortably lumpy couches, brightly colored throw rugs, endless decorative pillows, tables piled high with art and craft magazines, a half-finished macramé bedspread, and hardwood stacked haphazardly by a massive stone fireplace still cluttered with cold ashes. Christmas lights framed the windows and ran along the edges of the walls even though this was still October. Or perhaps they were last year’s lights never taken down. The floors were polished wood covered by overlapping rugs with Navajo and Turkish weaves. A guitar stood against the hearth and various handmade instruments — a buffalo horn, a tube zither, reed pipes, tongue drums, and several brightly colored BaTonga Budima Drums. In one small glass-fronted cabinet were dozens of packs of tarot cards, some new and some very old. The decks were interspersed with crystals and semiprecious stones. Deep purple amethyst, yellow citrine, dark blue lapis lazuli that was flecked with red, golden tiger eye, watermelon tourmaline, and sky-blue turquoise. These were quality pieces and even though they were indoors they seemed to radiate light that was as rich as the bright sunshine outside.

If that was all that I saw of this woman’s home I would not have been surprised. It was in keeping with her garden, her manner of dress, and her apparent lifestyle. A dull and unimaginative person might dismiss her as one of those soft, fringe people, a latter-day hippie, a child of the New Age.

The other half of the room showed a different aspect of Junie Flynn; a separation so dramatic that it suggested a true dichotomy, or perhaps a mind in schism. Still too early to tell. There was a functional desk on which was a high-end ruggedized laptop, laser printer, scanner, podcasting equipment that included a good camera on a tripod and a quality microphone. There were six steel file cabinets in a neat row, and a side table on which was a wire sorting rack filled with neatly arranged papers. The chair tucked into the desk was a leather business model similar to the kind I had in my own office. Everything was neat and precise and functional.

Standing between the two halves of the room, almost as a deliberate bridge between them or a doorway from one to the other, was a tall bookshelf crammed with books on every subject: physics, astronomy, linguistics, symbology, politics, genetics, molecular biology, engineering, religion, and medicine. The walls directly adjacent to the bookcase were covered, floor to ceiling, with framed pictures of Egyptian cartouches, a semaphore signaler, an obviously blind woman touching the face of a child, Maori body art, strange animals carved as geoglyphs into the hardpan of a Peruvian desert, and even crop circles.

There were two things that made me go “hmmmm.” Standing neatly side by side near the front door was a bulging suitcase; and leaning against the wall just inside the doorway was a good old-fashioned Louisville slugger.

I nodded to the suitcase. “Planning on going somewhere?”

“I was going to drive up to Philly, my friend just had a baby.” She was a pretty good liar, but not a great one.

“Glad I caught you,” I said. “And the baseball bat?”

She shrugged. “I live alone.”

“You didn’t bring it with you when you went outside to meet me. A guy you thought was here to kill you.”

“I didn’t really think you were here for that,” she said with a laugh.

“Oh? What tipped you off? My boyish good looks? Crinkly blue-eyed smile?”

She plucked at the sleeve of my Orioles shirt. “The kind of killers the government sends dress better.”

“Hey, I’ll have you know this is a genuine 1983 World Series away-game shirt.”

“Okay.”

“Tippy Martinez wore this shirt when he got the save against the Phillies in game four!”

“Tippy who?”

“My dad gave me this shirt when I turned eighteen.”

“Your face is turning red.”

“Baseball,” I said, the way most people say “religion.”

“Baseball seems like a lot of time with men standing around spitting tobacco and scratching their crotches. I like football. Things happen in football.”

Before I could construct a properly devastating reply, Junie waved me toward the couch. “Sit.”

“I’d like to set up a video conference call,” I said, hefting the case I’d brought. “Okay with you?”

“Sure. You can set up on the coffee table. Just push the magazines and stuff onto the floor.” She vanished into the kitchen.

I set the case down but instead of opening it I stepped to the far side of the living room and pulled out my cell to call Church. When he answered I said, “Where do we stand?”

“Nothing new,” he said. “Have you made contact with the Flynn woman?”

“With her now. She’s a bit paranoid, thought I was here to kill her.”

“That’s interesting,” said Church. “Try not to do that.”

“Very funny. I’ll patch you in as soon I’ve prepped her.”

I disconnected, sat down and opened the MindReader substation. It had a powerful satellite uplink, a 128-bit cyclic encryption system, and a battery good for forty-eight hours.

Junie came in carrying a tray of cups and fixings, which she set down on the edge of the coffee table. I covertly watched her eyes take in the sophisticated machine. Her appraisal was cool and I saw the tiniest lift of one appreciative eyebrow.

“My tax dollars at work?”

“Nope,” I said. “This system is privately owned and its use is loaned at no charge to Uncle Sam under very restricted circumstances.”

Junie poured tea from a Japanese pot decorated with cherry blossoms, selected a fat slice of lemon and squeezed the juice through the steam. I accepted the cup, sniffed, took an experimental sip. The tea was far richer than I expected, and it swirled with several flavors that I could almost but not quite identify.

“Delicious,” I said, setting the cup aside.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“Ghost.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “That figures.”

“Pardon?”

“He can see spirits. This place is haunted.”

“Okay,” I said, mostly because how else do you reply to a comment like that? It didn’t help that Ghost sat beside the couch staring at the empty air across the room. He turned his head slowly as if watching someone idly strolling from the window to the front door. I wanted to tell him to knock it the hell off. “I thought this house was brand new. The old one burned down, right?”

“This house is a hundred and sixteen years old. It was dismantled and brought here from Cape May, New Jersey.”

“That sounds expensive. Why bother?”

She looked puzzled. “Why not?”

“Good point.”

“So, why are you looking for the Majestic Black Book?”

“That’s—”

“Classified?” Her smile was very charming and a few degrees below freezing. “Have a safe flight back, Joe. I can put your tea in a travel mug.”

“Hey, it’s not a joke. This is an actual matter of grave national importance. No bullshit.”

She snorted.

“You don’t believe me?” I asked.

“You’re with the government,” she said, as if that said it all.

“Wow, cynical.”

“I tried naive faith in all people but that became a drag.”

“You’re paranoid, too.”

“I prefer the term ‘realist,’” she said. “Surely you’re not going to tell me that the government has never spied on its citizens, denied them their rights, violated their constitutional and civil rights … et cetera. You’re not going to go there, are you, Joe?”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

Ghost was watching this exchange like a spectator at a Wimbledon match.

“Maybe I’m going about this the wrong way,” I conceded. “How’s this — I’d like to hire you as a paid consultant.”

“A consultant on the Black Book.”

“Sure,” I said. “On the book and where I can find a copy.”

“Paid?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

I shrugged. “What’s your standard fee?”

“You couldn’t afford it,” Junie said with a sour laugh.

“I have pretty deep pockets.”

“You still couldn’t afford it.”

I sipped my tea. “Try me. What’s your price?”

“The truth,” said Junie Flynn.

“Ah … now that is expensive.”

“And nonnegotiable.”

“Even though this is a matter of—”

“Grave national importance,” she finished. “Yes, you said that. But how can I believe there’s any crisis at all unless you tell me the truth?”

I sat back and crossed my legs. “How would you know that I am telling the truth?”

“I’d know.”

“I’m a very good liar,” I said. “It’s a professional requirement. You know, working for the Man, and all.”

“I’d know,” she insisted. She didn’t lay into it, she wasn’t selling it. She was telling me.

“What? Can you read minds?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking. It’s more empathy than telepathy. I don’t know what people are thinking, but I can tell if they’re being honest or not.”

“That’s a useful skill.”

“Yes,” she said. “Though often disappointing and disheartening.”

“I’ll bet.”

We sipped our tea.

“Even if I can meet your price,” I said, “it doesn’t mean that I can tell you everything.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” said Junie, “but I don’t want to be lied to.”

“Guess I can promise that much. If there’s something I can’t say, I won’t.” I set my cup down. “So … what is it you want to know?”

She blew out her cheeks. “Lots of things. Everything. I guess the first thing, though, is why there’s such a rush to get the Black Book? Why right now? It’s been around for years.”

A dozen lies and two dozen variations on the truth occurred to me, but what I said was, “Someone has cooked up a pretty damn good way to extort the United States. A lot of people could die and the country would never recover. Never. Because of certain circumstances related to this matter, we believe that this is a credible threat.”

“How does the Black Book play into that?”

“Apparently, that’s the price to keep America safe. We obtain the book for them and they don’t make good on their threat.”

“I thought America didn’t negotiate with terrorists.”

“That’s really more of a guideline than a rule,” I confessed. “It’s all a matter of what kind of leverage they have. Threatening to blow up a school bus or release anthrax into a Grand Central Station is one thing. Bad as those events would be, the disaster would be, to a degree, containable.”

“What about all those lives?”

“We’re at war, Junie,” I said, and it hurt my mouth to say those words. “And for all practical purposes the nature of war has changed. It isn’t a matter of who can put the biggest army in the field. The Taliban taught us that, just as they taught the Russians before us. War is about threat, leverage, bribery, duplicity, subterfuge, and political gain.”

“Wow,” she said softly, “you’re really not lying to me.”

“No.”

“It takes a lot to tell the truth.”

“I get my strength through purity.”

“Just like Lancelot.” She cocked her head to one side. “Didn’t he steal the girl and betray his best friend, though?”

“Best not to look too closely at heroes,” I suggested. “They often have feet of clay.”

“Very sad, but also very true.” She pursed her lips. “What kind of threat are we talking about? And using what leverage? A terrorist bomb? Anthrax?”

There was no way I was allowed to answer that question. I could get fired. I could get locked up. But … sometimes, with some people, you simply have to take a chance.

“They’ve threatened to cause a mega-tsunami in the Canary Islands that would totally destroy the coastlines of Africa, Great Britain, and the eastern United States.”

“Cumbre Vieja,” she said automatically.

I leaned forward and very quietly asked, “Now, how the hell do you know that?”

Interlude Four

Erasmus Tull knocked on the door of room 67, waited for ten seconds. Knocked again.

When there was no answer, he leaned close to the door, listening for sounds from inside the room. There was a faint mutter of voices on a television turned low. Nothing else.

Tull knocked one more time.

Nothing.

The hallway was empty. Most of the tourists were baking by the pool or crammed into faux pirate ships on the way out to prime snorkeling spots. Late morning was the deadest time in a resort hotel, especially on floors reserved for time-share swaps. The cleaning staff only came here by appointment and the mass exodus that required extensive cleaning wouldn’t happen until Friday afternoon.

Nevertheless Tull waited for a full minute to make sure the hall would remain empty before he dug a small device from his pocket. It was about the size of an old Zippo lighter but had no visible moving parts. At a glance — and even on close inspection — it looked like a piece of metal. Aluminum or magnesium. Something pale and light.

Tull moved close to the electronic door lock, using his body to shield it from view as he pressed the blunt edge of the metal right below the keycard slot. There was no sound at all from the device he held, but the light on the card reader shifted from red to green and there was a faint click.

Easy as pie, he thought as he gently body-blocked the door open, careful not to touch the handle or wood with his hands. The door swung inward and Tull stepped quickly and cautiously into the room.

“Mr. London?” he called.

The man he was there to meet, Thomas London, was a broker of some note on the international technologies scene. London was in his late sixties and had navigated the treacherous waters of the black market ocean since his boyhood apprenticeship with father, brothers, and uncles. If something with wires, gears, circuits, or hard drives was needed and there were no conventional means of obtaining said item, the London Brothers could get it for you. Quickly, cleanly, discreetly, and at a good price.

Tull’s employers, the three governors of M3, had authorized Tull to reach out to the Londons in order to obtain an exceedingly rare and extremely valuable piece of debris. Thomas and Tull met four separate times to haggle over price for the item, the purchase being complicated by the presence of other bidders who were — as London put it — very aggressive and passionate.

Competition creates a seller’s market, and the price skyrocketed from its initial $1.2 million to its current $4.5 million.

Even at that amount, Tull thought it was a bargain. After all, this was not a top-quality facsimile — which abounded on the market — or one of the damaged items that circulate and circulate, waiting for the unwary enthusiast to snap them up. No, this piece was very nearly perfect. A few minor dents and some scorching. Operationally sound, though, and that was all that mattered.

Or, rather, as far as M3 and Tull knew at the time, that was all that mattered.

They would later learn hard lessons about the dangers of using D-type components with any surface damage.

Tull stepped aside to let the door swing closed behind him.

He immediately dropped the metal device into a pocket and darted his hand under his jacket to pull his gun.

Thomas London lay sprawled on the floor. Most of him. Some of him was on the bed, and some was spilled out onto the balcony. The walls and carpet and drapes were painted with blood. Tull stared at the carnage, his mouth suddenly going paste-dry. London was not merely dead — he had been destroyed. Torn apart.

Blood dripped from the lampshade and a pool of it spread out beneath each ragged piece.

Realization shot through Tull’s shocked brain in a microsecond.

Blood dripped. It still pooled. In a dismembered corpse. That could only happen if the slaughter had taken place seconds ago.

Tull threw himself to one side, turning in midair, bringing his gun up toward the corner as the closet door swung open. He did not see the killer; all he saw was the snout of a weird-looking pistol.

Both guns fired at the same time.

Tull felt a blast of superheated air scorch past him as if some monstrous fire demon had exhaled at him. The lamp on the bedside table exploded into a thousand fragments and the tabletop split down the middle.

But there was no second shot from that strange gun.

The gunman sagged slowly down to his knees, canting forward in slow motion as he toppled bonelessly out of the closet, the gun clattering from his hand. A red hole glistened in center of the man’s chest and a bloody bubble expanded from the hole and then popped as the man fell forward onto his face.

Tull lay on the carpet, gun held in both hands, staring at the dead man.

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped, and abruptly drank in a huge lungful of air.

He scrambled to his feet, aware that his shoulder and thigh were smeared with blood. Not his own, but still hot.

He hurried over to check that there no other surprises. The bathroom was clear. So was the balcony. He was alone in the room with two dead men.

Thomas London was barely recognizable. There were enough parts to add up to a human being, but the damage was so severe that the police would need to use DNA or dental records.

The other man was another matter. Tull rolled him over. The killer was Asian; though Tull didn’t think he looked Chinese. Possibly Korean. Slim, wearing the uniform of a hotel maintenance man, but when Tull checked his pockets he found a wallet belonging to another man, a local, who did indeed work at the hotel. That man was also dead somewhere, Tull thought. The only thing in the killer’s clothes that did not appear to belong to the genuine maintenance man was a thick bundle jammed down into the left front trouser pocket. It was the size of a large bar of chocolate.

Tull hastily opened it and when he saw what it was, he let out a huge lungful of air.

“Thank God,” he murmured.

The stabilizer.

One of the rarest D-type components of the Device, the one most often damaged during a crash or misfire.

Howard Shelton would be so happy.

Though admittedly less so for the loss of an important contact like Thomas London.

Tull rewrapped the component and slipped it into an inner pocket of his jacket. Then he bent and retrieved the odd-looking pistol. It was far lighter than he expected, and badly designed. Square and clunky. Instead of a barrel opening there were four prongs at the business end. Tull glanced down at London and over at the destroyed lamp, and he remembered the blast of heat.

He took a cell phone from his pocket and hit a speed dial.

When it was answered, Tull said, “This is a secure line.”

“Very well,” said Howard. “How did it go?”

Tull told him.

“That’s unfortunate,” said Howard. “And the component?”

“Secured.”

“Thank God.” The governor put so much emphasis on the last word that it came out like a prayer from a devout supplicant. Tull thought that was as accurate a picture of this man as any he’d had. To Howard, the Device was God, and the arduous process of obtaining D-type components were quests to obtain relics. What did that make him, he wondered — Percival?

“We’re getting so close,” breathed Howard. “We’re going to do this and we’re going to change the world.”

“Save it, you mean,” corrected Tull.

“Of course. Save it. That’s what I meant.”

Chapter Forty-nine

Howard Shelton paced back and forth while Mr. Bones watched. The big plasma screen was blank now. Yuina Hoshino had gone back to work, leaving them with her observations and their shared fears.

“She can’t be right,” said Howard for maybe the tenth time.

Mr. Bones did not comment. They’d already wrangled through this. If Yuina was right, then sixty years of the Majestic Project was an exercise in futility, and M3’s belief that they were well ahead of the competition was so much vain fluff.

That was a problem, though not at all in the way Yuina thought it was. To her the Project was everything. Her entire adult life had been building toward this.

“How come she didn’t look more upset?” asked Mr. Bones. “She seemed to take it pretty well.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” countered Howard. “I know her and I could see it in her eyes. Two seconds after she got off the phone with us I guarantee you she was curled into a fetal position, screaming her lungs out. If this is all what it looks like, then we have to be really careful with her.” He paused and made a mouth while he considered that. Then he snatched up a phone and made a call to one of his people at her lab, advising them to keep a close eye on Dr. Hoshino. “And I mean close. She just got a pretty hard knock and we have to make sure she doesn’t do something unfortunate.”

He ended the call and flung himself into his chair.

“What does this do to us?” asked Mr. Bones. “After that … they’re definitely never going to let the air show go on.”

Howard chewed a crumb of skin off of his thumb.

“I want like hell to believe it’s those fucking Chinese,” he muttered. “I have half a mind to call that prick Admiral Xiè and shove this in his face.”

“He’ll deny it,” said Mr. Bones. “He’s a backstabbing shit and he’ll deny it was them.”

“Son of a bitch takes our money and then does this.”

“If it’s him,” said Bones. “If it’s the Chinese.”

“It has to be.”

“This and the president?”

“Has to be,” insisted Howard.

They sat in silence, thinking about it. Howard could almost hear his plans crashing to ruin around him.

“If it is,” said Howard slowly, “then they have to know where we stand with the Project. I can build a case for that, Bonesy, I can make sense of that. If they had a spy inside our Project, then they’d know what we have planned for the air show.”

“Had planned,” Bones corrected sourly.

“Had planned, whatever. If they know that, then this was an attempt to trump us. To make the statement that we’d better not get any fancy ideas because they’re already up and running and ready to kick us in the nuts.”

“Okay … so what?”

Howard got up and walked over to the wall of curtains. He touched a button and the curtains parted and slid away to reveal huge glass windows beyond which was an enormous limestone cavern. Far below, standing on three steel struts, connected to computer systems by a hundred pendulous cables, was a massive triangular craft. Dozens of technicians swarmed like ants around the thing. Dangling above the center of the machine was an engine made from gleaming metal, supported by chains, swaying slightly. Dozens of similar engines, each in various stages of completion, stood on metal trestle tables that lined one wall. Howard leaned on the windowsill and put his forehead against the cold glass. After a moment, Mr. Bones got up and came to stand next to him.

“You know, Bonesy,” said Howard Shelton very softly, “we might be going about this the wrong way. I think we are trying to win a battle instead of going straight for it and winning the whole damn war.”

Chapter Fifty

“How do I know about Cumbre Vieja?” she asked, puzzled. “With you coming to me, I thought that meant someone in the government watched my shows, listened to my podcasts, or maybe read my books.”

“Others in our group have. I haven’t. Tell me something that’s going to lower my blood pressure and my sudden urge to reach for a pair of handcuffs.”

“Joe — it’s in all my stuff. I did an entire podcast about this stuff.”

“About what stuff? Stop talking around it.”

“I’m not,” she snapped, but then paused to take a calming breath. “Okay, so you came here to interview me but you haven’t done your homework. Typical government.”

“Can we save the target shooting for later?”

“Sure. I did an entire book about the dangers of WMDs based on retroengineered technologies.”

“Retroengineered from flying saucers.”

“Alien craft,” she corrected. “Most of them aren’t round. Only the small scout craft.”

“Really?”

“Most of the ships have been triangular. T-craft, they’re called. And there are some fully automated craft that are round — they look like glowing balls. It’s probably the basis for the myth of the will-o’-the-wisp.”

“Not swamp gas?”

“Swamp gas doesn’t change direction at right angles, accelerate and decelerate over specific locations, and—”

“Okay, got it. We’re off topic already.”

She nodded. “That might happen because everything you want to know has context and you clearly don’t know the context.”

“True, so you can be my study buddy, but let’s try to stay as close to a straight line as possible. We were talking about alien WMDs.”

“No, we were talking about weapons of mass destruction made by humans based on alien technology. That’s not at all the same thing. I’m talking about weapons that have been openly discussed in the media and scientific journals but which never seemed to go past the stages of basic research or early experimentation. Particle-beam weapons, cold-light phasers, satellite-killer superlasers, things like that.”

“The government is researching all kinds of stuff—” I began, but she cut me off.

“Of course they are, and some of it is the natural outgrowth of our own very human desire to kill each other.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way…”

“No? Remind me again which nations were formed without conquest and bloodshed?”

“Touché,” I said weakly.

“There are a lot of universities, private labs, and corporations doing advanced work funded by government dollars. Who has first dibs on any useful developments? The Department of Defense.”

“I know this, Junie, but nothing so far suggests that a race of evil alien space monkeys is behind it.”

“Joe,” she said with eroding patience, “please try to let this sink in — this is not aliens. This is us using their technology.”

“How? By discovering how to use their — what do I call them? Ray guns? Space bombs? I’m not trying to be a smartass here, Junie, but I don’t know the vocabulary for this conversation. Help me out. Pretend I arrived on the short helicopter.”

She laughed. “Okay, and I’m sorry if I get a little, um, passionate about this.”

“No, I get that. We’re cool.”

Junie nodded, collected herself for a moment, then launched in. “Let me begin by saying that I am a believer in aliens, alien visitation, and alien technology. I am not, however, the kind of person who believes everything. There are a lot of things attached to the world of ‘UFOlogy’ that I don’t believe in. Some of it are things that just don’t hit me, but I can’t prove or disprove — I’m just not sold on it yet. And, yes, the ‘yet’ was intentional.”

“I want to believe,” I said, quoting X-Files.

“Some of this stuff I don’t believe because I know it to be a lie.”

“Who’s putting those lies out there?”

“A lot of them are from people who want to belong to any group that will have them and they use false stories to latch on to the UFO community. It’s a very accepting community, even when it comes to outlandish stories. After all, no one has yet been able to provide the world with absolutely irrefutable proof of alien life and visitation. At least … no one has been able to survive an attempt to do so.”

“Yeah, we’re going to have to come back to that point,” I said.

She nodded, and continued. “I’ve been exposed to this world since I was little, I grew up with it. But my parents — well, adoptive parents — were both scientists. Especially my father. He was skeptical of everything that couldn’t be measured. He engendered within me a similar skepticism. I don’t take things at face value. Sure, I’ll discuss them on my podcasts and in my books, but I really don’t believe everything. However, just as science is unwilling to accept what can’t be measured, it cannot by its own structure discount anything that cannot yet be measured.”

“Meaning?”

“We know that there are billions upon billions of stars in this galaxy. We know for a fact that there are worlds orbiting many of those suns. We cannot state with any degree of scientific certainty that those worlds can or cannot support some form of life. We cannot state with any degree of scientific certainty that advanced life has not developed on any of those worlds. Or that these potential life forms have or have not developed technology allowing them to travel through the vast distances of space. Along the same lines, we cannot prove or disprove time travel or interdimensional travel. As our own science moves forward, we gradually — and reluctantly — reevaluate the limits of what we are able to believe because we can now prove it and what we are willing to believe because it now fits within the revised guidelines for possibility. In recent decades, with the marked decrease of the prejudice against quantum physics, we’re seeing proof that our universe is much larger and more complex than we ever thought.”

I nodded. “So far I’m absolutely sold on the statistical possibility of life in the galaxy. Drake’s theory, right? Which was recently updated.”

“Wow, look at you for knowing that.”

I spread my hands. “What can I say?” What I didn’t say was that Bug told me this a couple of hours ago.

“So, science can’t take a serious stand against the possible existence of alien life or discount the possibility that we’ve been visited by aliens. That’s point one. Point two is that there have been sightings and purported visitations throughout recorded history, and in virtually all world cultures. With me so far?”

“Yup.”

“Point three, there are instances of radical leaps forward in human development, particularly in certain fields of science that are not yet explainable.”

“The building of the pyramids,” I ventured.

“Are you trying to be the teacher’s pet?”

I said nothing. Was that a flirtatious twinkle in her eye when she said that?

“Point four. It is reasonable to postulate that nothing lasts forever, or to put it another way, everything breaks down. From plant life ending its life cycle to suns burning out. Manufactured items that are heavily used tend to ultimately break down because of that hard use. Point five is that vehicles built to cross the gulfs of space qualify as items being heavily used. We can expect that the demands of such travel might wear them out.”

“You’re building a case for crashes,” I said.

“Exactly. If you look at the great exploration fleets of human history, you see that a percentage of all long-range fleets fail. That’s true from the Phoenicians to Columbus to the NASA shuttle program. Friction, vibration, material fatigue, temperature changes, intended and unintended impacts, and other phenomena will degrade the internal and external integrity of any craft.”

“Still with you,” I said. “But if these craft crashed on earth and we’ve salvaged the wreckage, why don’t we have a fleet of saucers … er, triangle ship thingies?”

“Ah, that’s the right question and you get your first gold star.”

I tried not to preen.

Junie said, “Let’s look at it from the perspective of the target culture. If a wrecked Phoenician ship washed up on the shores of the Hudson River a couple of thousand years ago, how long would it take the Iroquois Indians to repair it and sail it?”

“Ah,” I said. “But we’re more educated than the Indians.”

“We’re more technologically advanced. The Iroquois were very smart — for their time and their place in their own history. Don’t forget that the United States Constitution was based in part on the Iroquois system of government. However, they lived in a resource-rich environment that did not require the development of certain technologies.”

“They didn’t even have the wheel.”

“They didn’t need the wheel,” she amended. “Now, spin that around, crash a World War II German Messerschmitt in Galileo’s backyard. Or Newton’s. These were clearly very smart men. Could they have repaired and flown that plane? What about a Los Angeles — class nuclear sub found damaged and drifting off the coast of Japan in, say, 1938. Or even Russia in 1944. They even had a fledging nuclear program by then. Could they have repaired it? Refloated it? Driven it?”

I sighed. “We can’t fix the crashed UFOs because we’re not smart enough.”

“Oooh, and he loses his hard-won gold star.”

“Wait — how?” I demanded.

“It isn’t about being smart, Joe. Look how smart Ben Franklin was. And Da Vinci. Yet they would be flummoxed by any fifth-grader’s entry in a school science fair.”

“Not if it was explained to them,” I said. “They could grasp the concept.”

“If someone was there to explain the concept. And if they spoke the same language and used the idiomatic references particular to that era and location. What if that fifth-grader was from one of the regions of China where only five hundred people speak their dialect? The cultural differences would significantly decrease the likelihood of a meaningful exchange. Now step back and expand that communication gap. A theoretical physicist, born and raised in an affluent family in New England working at the Large Hadron Collider to a member from a Amazonian tribe whose people have never before held a conversation with an outsider. That tribesman may be the leader of his people, a shaman whose understanding of healing might be the result of ten thousand years of word-of-mouth training, and it might involve plants and compounds found nowhere else on earth. Tell me, Joe, where is the basis for understanding? How long before that tribesman can calibrate that collider?”

“You think the gap is that wide?”

She laughed. “I think the gap is about a million miles wider, and this is not a two-way conversation. The aliens are not guiding us through this step by step.”

“Surely we’re starting from a more viable point than a guy whose culture hasn’t invented any machines. If a Roman chariot-maker found a bicycle wheel he might eventually make a breakthrough in his understanding of materials, design, and other areas. That’s basic human reasoning. What if he found an antigrav hoverboard, like the ones in Back to the Future? There’s no design corollary in his experience, none in any culture he would have exposure to even though Rome was the center of the civilized world. The item would sit there, maybe for centuries or even thousands of years before someone figured out how it works.

“Is that what’s happening now?”

“To a degree” she said. “We’ve recovered so much from the crashed vehicles, and some of it we’ve been able to figure out. Basic things like chairs, control panels, stabilizers. Mostly stuff that’s pure mechanics. However the deep science has been a lot more elusive because it doesn’t fit any of the design philosophies we understand. Even when we reassemble some of the parts, we can only guess what the result is or does.”

She bent forward and rested her elbows on her knees.

“Joe … tell me the truth,” she said. “Is all of this just nonsense to you, or do you believe?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I started the day with a hangover and a belief that we were alone in the universe. Since then a lot of very bad things have happened and most of them seem to be tied to a book I never heard of that’s supposed to be filled with information about alien spacecraft. Maybe I’m inching my way toward believing, but right now I think I’m too scared and too confused to know what to believe.”

Her eyes searched mine. “You’re telling the truth.”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

We sat there, looking into each other’s eyes for almost a minute. The room grew quiet around us. Ghost looked from me to her to me, as if he was watching a Ping-Pong match, or following a conversation, but we weren’t saying anything.

Before I could open a new doorway into the conversation, my cell rang again. Church.

I excused myself and stepped outside to stand among the flowers while I took the call.

“Tell me this isn’t more bad news,” I said.

Church said, “How often do I call you because I enjoy small talk?”

I sighed. “Okay … hit me.”

“We received another video. Like the first it came from an untraceable source. And, like the first one, it shows the president,” he said.

“What’s the message this time?”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll send the video. In the meantime, what is the sit-rep there?”

“Miss Flynn is being cooperative. We can do the conference call as soon as you’re ready.”

“Watch the video first.”

Church disconnected but my screen display told me I’d received a video. I plugged in an earphone so I could watch it silently.

It opened on a tight shot of the president’s face, then pulled back to show him sitting on a nondescript chair against a blank wall. There was a small table placed between them on which was a small black box. The president said, “You must find the Majestic Black Book.”

The image abruptly changed and the screen was filled with an image that was frighteningly familiar. A circle divided into concentric rings and sections. The diagram of pi. It was the same image that had been stamped onto the White House lawn, but it was not a picture of the lawn. This was a precisely drawn image, possibly a computer graphic.

“You must find the Majestic Black Book.”

Blank faces, toneless voices. Then the president half turned and pressed a button on the top of the black box. Red numbers appeared on the face of the box. The display read 4320:00. Then the numbers changed.

4319:59

4319:58

A countdown. Seventy-two hours. Four thousand and twenty minutes, ticking away with silent, inevitable precision.

Simple.

Eloquent.

Terrifying.

“Holy shit,” I said. Around me there were beautiful wildflowers and a sky bright with clean sunshine. The Chesapeake was blue perfection and the air was as clean as any I’d ever breathed.

But there was nothing right about any of it.

4319:51

Then a series of numbers ran across the bottom of the screen. I recognized the pattern. A radio frequency restricted for military use. The one we use for the most severe catastrophic events.

It was a very clear message. Get the book, broadcast the fact on that frequency … and keep a billion people from dying.

Clear. Simple.

Good Christ.

I hurried back inside.

Chapter Fifty-one

The Seventh American Fleet was spread out across the dark waters of the Taiwan Strait. Thirty-eight of its sixty ships were moving into position, carrying with them more than half of the fleet’s sixty thousand men and three hundred and fifty aircraft. Even without the rest of the fleet, this was a show of sea power that could conquer most nations on Earth. Some of the ships possessed the potential for more destructive power than all the bombs used in World War II, and that did not include the missiles with nuclear warheads.

Miles away, China sprawled, vast and powerful, secure in its personal power. Or, so it wanted the world to believe. Most of the civilian world believed that the Chinese military machine was only a half step behind America’s, but that was a by-product of China’s disinformation and misinformation campaigns. Whereas they could put a far larger army on the ground than anything America could hope to match, every military strategist in the world knew that such a ground battle would never be fought. Not directly. Not without intermediaries like the Koreans, the Vietnamese …

The real fight, if it ever came to it, would be with sea and air power.

The Seventh Fleet did not have an equal in China.

Not yet.

China had two aircraft carriers to America’s eleven. Twenty-one destroyers to America’s fifty. A defense budget of sixty billion compared with the U.S. commitment of over five hundred billion. The only area where they were nearly on a par was in the number of submarines. China claimed sixty-eight and America admitted to seventy-five.

This is what the generals and the admirals knew. This is what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew every bit as well as the chief of PLA General Staff.

Knowing this, seeing the demonstration of potentially overwhelming force riding the waves within fist strike of mainland China, it would be stupidity or madness or naïveté to put fighters in the air.

Philosophers have long suggested that all men are fools. Not all the time, but often enough. Else why would wars ever start?

The Shenyang J-15 is a carrier-based jet fighter aircraft based on the Russian-designed Sukhoi Su-33. Twenty of them crouched on the deck of the ROCS Hu Yaobang, the second of Chinese domestically built aircraft carriers. The jets were all primed, the pilots on deck, the flight and deck crews ready.

No one is certain — or will admit — who gave approval for Pilot Deng to climb into the cockpit of his J-15, belt in, fire up the engines, and launch his craft. No one on the deck crew tried to stop the action. It was as if they were all complicit, although in interviews following the incident, each man claimed to have received orders. They could not, however, remember who gave those orders, and there was no entry in any log that authorized the launch.

And yet Deng’s J-15 leaped into the air and drove toward the Seventh Fleet.

Within minutes a swarm of Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets had been scrambled and they screamed out to meet the J-15.

Although these two jet types had never before been pitted against one another in real combat, analysts theorized that the J-15 had superior aerodynamic capabilities to all other known fighter aircraft with the possible exception of the F-22. It had 10 percent greater thrust to weight ration and a 25 percent lower wing loading than the Super Hornets. In a one-to-one contest, it should have been a turkey shoot for the Chinese fighter.

But there was only one of them in the air, and five of the Hornets.

The J-15 picked the fight, everyone was clear on that. It flew straight at the Hornets, playing a crazy game of chicken, thrusters punching it to Mach 1 for no sane reason. The Hornets spread apart to let the fighter pass, but then they rolled and turned and followed because the Chinese pilot was still moving forward toward the fleet. Toward the lead carrier.

The game of chicken became a chase.

Politicians will argue for years over who fired the first shot. It is not even clear what Pilot Deng’s intentions were. To buzz the tower on the carrier? To make a statement? To provoke a first shot?

Or to attack the carrier with missiles and a death run.

All calls went unanswered. Calls to the plane, calls to the Chinese carrier.

The gap between the J-15 and the fleet was decreasing at incredible speed. There was a stopping point, a line of sanity, where everything could have been dialed down. But that point came and went with a scream of jet engines. And then there was a second stopping point when the pursuit craft locked on to their targets and went weapons hot.

Even then, the J-15 could have peeled up and away and everyone would be able to breathe.

But that stopping point melted away.

“This is Bloodhound Five,” said the lead Hornet pilot. “I have a sweet lock on the joker.”

There was only a moment of hesitation from the carrier. “Bloodhound Five, you are cleared to fire.”

“Bloodhound Five, fox three.”

A simple code for the firing of an AIM-120D AMRAAM missile.

The missile burst from under the Hornet’s wing and drove above the choppy sea toward its target.

It was exactly halfway there when the missile exploded.

The Hornet pilot said, “What—”

“We have a missile malfunction,” said the pilot. “Bloodhound Five, fox three.”

The second AMRAAM blew up so close to the Hornet that the shock buffeted the jet into a dangerous tilt. It took every ounce of the pilot’s skill to keep from stalling.

“Missile system failure,” he bellowed. “Disengaging.”

Ahead of him, the J-15 was still closing on the carrier with the rest of the Bloodhound team in close support. The Hornets had to cut wide and change angle to keep the ships out of the line of any misfire.

Bloodhound Two and Three fired missiles.

The missiles exploded almost immediately.

Shock waves swatted the jets away and they wobbled like wounded birds, trying to regain a measure of control.

Suddenly the J-15’s angle of approach made a radical change. The pilot peeled up and away and as soon as he had a clear line of escape he hit the afterburners and scorched his way out of there. In seconds he was a dot on the horizon, heading away from the fleet.

“What the hell was that all about?”

The radar man from the carrier cut in. “Bloodhound Squadron be advised, there is a second bogey coming low and fast out of the—”

But the pilot of Bloodhound Five saw it before the radar man could finish his sentence. It moved in an arrow-straight line, coming back along the path the J-15 had taken, but moving many times faster.

Many times.

“Holy moly look at that mother move.”

The T-craft closed the distance from the horizon to the fleet in seconds.

“He’s clocking Mach fifteen,” cried Bloodhound Three.

But he was wrong.

The T-craft cut through the center of the fleet at Mach 20, shooting between a destroyer and a cruiser, pulling behind it an air mass that rocked both ships. It bore down on the carrier too fast for any practical reaction. There was only time to cut in the collision sirens as the gray mass of it hurtled toward a certain impact.

And then it turned.

At Mach 20, it turned.

In its own length it went from a lateral glide path to a straight vertical rise. A ninety-degree turn. It rose one thousand feet into the air and turned again.

Another ninety-degree turn. As precise as if written onto the moment with a ruler.

As thousands of men watched — through binoculars, goggles, portholes, the windscreens of jets, and with naked eyes — the T-craft became a blurred dot and then vanished.

Over mainland China.

Bloodhound Five opened his mouth to make a report, but any words he might have said died on his tongue, replaced by a single word.

“God…”

Chapter Fifty-two

“What’s wrong?” Junie asked as I came back into the house. “God, you look like you just saw a ghost.”

“That would be a comforting break, actually.”

I sat down and poured myself some hot tea, stared into the cup, and didn’t drink any of it. Ghost, roused by what he thought was the mention of his name, whined to be petted. I ran my fingers through his fur and stared into the middle of the air, hoping that answers would appear out of nowhere.

They didn’t. What a surprise.

“Joe?” murmured Junie, concern in her voice.

I rubbed my eyes. “Things have gotten worse.”

“Can you tell me?”

“I think we’d better leave that to my boss. I’m going to video conference him in now, along with a couple of other people from my team.”

“Okay,” she said dubiously. She fluffed her hair, which did not make any appreciable change — it was just as wild and lovely — and smoothed her skirt.

I hit some keys on the MindReader keypad and suddenly we had a very weird little party. The large computer screen was broken into several smaller windows, each filled with a high-res 3-D image. Mr. Church, Bug, Dr. Hu, and Rudy Sanchez — who I was gratified to see was at the Warehouse and no longer on his toilet at home.

“Wow,” said Junie Flynn. “I feel like I’m on a game show.”

The big guy took the lead. “Ms. Flynn … my name is Mr. Church. Before I make introductions, I need to know if you are willing to cooperate with us in this matter.”

“I am,” she said, “but only as long as I feel that I’m doing the right thing. I’ll tell you straight up front that I don’t trust most government agencies and I have good reasons for that. If I think you’re manipulating me or trying to pull a fast one, then we’re done. You can arrest me or whatever.”

Mr. Church gave her a small, faint smile. “That is acceptable.”

But Junie wasn’t finished. “I negotiated a consultant’s fee with Joe. He’s agreed to pay me what I asked.”

Church nodded but did not ask what that price was. I saw Rudy’s eyebrow lift a little; he must have caught some nuance to her tone. I gave him a tiny nod. Hu seemed to have recovered from his earlier shock and now contrived to look bored. Bug was clearly in love.

“You gave us your conditions, Ms. Flynn,” said Church, “now here are mine. I expect that the content of this conversation is to be kept confidential. It is not to be talked about, written about, or otherwise shared except with my permission. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“The names of any organizations I choose to share with you, and the identities of the people involved in this matter fall under that agreement of secrecy.”

“Agreed,” said Junie. “Do you need me to sign anything?”

Church shook his head. “I’ve found that a signature on an agreement of secrecy is no guarantee of anything other than a basic ability to write one’s name. Either your word is good or it’s not. From what I have heard about you, I believe you to be a person of integrity.”

That put a smile on Junie’s face. Mine, too. Church was actually being mildly charming. The scoundrel.

“Are you going to tell me who you people are?’ asked Junie.

“You won’t have heard of us,” said Church. “I am the director of the Department of Military Sciences, the DMS. We are a small agency that operates under executive order. We are answerable to no other agency within the government. We are not answerable to Congress. Does that disturb you?”

“Yes.”

“It disturbs me, too,” said Church. “There should be no need for an agency like ours to exist. However the world is not a calm or safe place, and there are many people who would like to see it burn. Just as there are people who would like to see everyone in chains — real chains or those created by political, religious, ideological, informational, or theological manipulation. I am not one of those people. I employ people who share my view of fairness, freedom, and justice. Does this sound corny to you?”

“Actually,” she said, “it doesn’t.”

Church gave her a small nod and another small smile, and I had a totally irrational flash of jealousy. I felt as if all three of my inner personalities suddenly looked askance at me.

“Very well,” continued Church, “let me introduce the others who are working on this problem.” His introductions were brief and moderately nondescript. “Bug, head of computer division. Dr. William Hu, chief of science and research. Dr. Rudy Sanchez, a psychiatrist who consults on matters related to trauma.”

There was a very brief flurry of greetings. Hu as dismissive, Bug was obsequious, and Rudy was charming. No one was paving new ground.

“For the most part these men are participating as observers,” explained Church. “Captain Ledger and I will ask most of the questions, but having the others here trims down the time we’d waste sharing your remarks with them.”

Junie took a breath, gave me a brave smile, and nodded to the wall of faces.

Then Church hit her with the problem. He told her about the abduction. He showed her the videos — the original one and the second video I’d just watched. I studied Junie’s body as the information and images slammed into her. She straightened and stiffened and all the humor drained out of her face, leaving her drawn and deathly pale.

“Oh my God,” she breathed.

“Indeed,” said Church. “Now you know what we know, and you can see why Captain Ledger arrived unannounced and in such an unorthodox manner. He probably did not mention that he was also attacked this morning by four men who claimed to be government agents and who subsequently vanished without a trace. Someone else knows what’s going on and they’ve already made a move to obstruct our investigation. We have no clue who they are or what their motives might be.”

Junie glanced at me. “You didn’t tell me you were in a fight.”

“It wasn’t much of a fight,” I said.

From her expression I could tell that she didn’t believe me.

“You’re not hurt?”

“Didn’t even get my hair mussed.”

“If we can stay on point,” interrupted Church. In his own little screen, Hu was making a gagging sound. Rudy looked amused.

“Yes,” said Junie. “This is all … just so much so soon.”

“I wish we could offer time for you to get up to speed,” said Church, “but we don’t have that luxury. We need to know about the Majestic Black Book.”

“How much do you already know?”

“Some,” he admitted, “but why not give us your take on it.”

She nodded, thought about it, then dug in. “Joe admitted that he doesn’t know a lot about UFOs and the related conspiracies. What about the rest of you?”

“I know a lot,” said Bug, beaming.

“So do I,” said Hu sourly, “but I think this is all a waste of time.”

“I don’t know a tremendous amount,” said Rudy, “but I believe we’ve been visited. However, I never heard of the Black Book before today. Neither, I believe, has Dr. Hu or Joe. So, please don’t assume any useful knowledge on our part.”

Church said nothing and when it was clear he was not going to comment, Junie said, “Then let me start with some things everyone needs to know.” She took a breath. “It started with a group called Majestic 12—or MJ-12. That was a group of scientists, government officials, military officers formed by a secret executive order from President Harry S. Truman. The initial agenda for MJ-12 was to investigate the recovery of the UFO that crashed north of Roswell, New Mexico. The government denies that MJ-12 ever existed, however UFOlogists uncovered a collection of documents in 1984 that state that the group was formed based on a recommendation by Dr. Vannevar Bush and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. In 1985, another document mentioning MJ-12, dating to 1954, was found in a search at the National Archives. The FBI naturally attacked these documents as fabrications and continues to deny their authenticity.”

“But you don’t accept that denial?” asked Rudy.

“Hardly. Since the eighties, thousands of pages of other government documents mentioning MJ-12 have leaked out. The preponderance of evidence shows that there is an ongoing government cover-up of the existence of UFOs and the recovery of technologies from crash sites. According to these papers, the members of MJ-12 were Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who was the first director of the CIA; Dr. Vannevar Bush, who chaired the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was the predecessor of the National Defense Research Committee. Dr. Bush also set up and chaired the postwar Joint Research and Development Board (JRDB) and then the Research and Development Board (RDB) and was president of Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. Then there was James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy and the first secretary of Defense. When he died, he was replaced on MJ-12 by General Walter Bedell Smith, who was the second director of the CIA.”

“Wow,” I said.

She began ticking the others off on her fingers. “Next you have General Nathan Twining, who headed Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson AFB, and who was later the Air Force chief of staff from 1953 to 1957, and then the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff from ’fifty-seven to ’sixty-one. General Hoyt Vandenberg, who directed the Central Intelligence Group in ’forty-six and ’forty-seven and was Air Force chief of staff from ’forty-eight through 1953. General Robert M. Montague, a noted guided-missile expert and commander of the nuclear Armed Forces Special Weapons Center, Sandia Base. Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, an aeronautical engineer from MIT. Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, first director of Central Intelligence Group and first executive secretary of National Security Council. Gordon Gray: secretary of the Army and a top intelligence and national security expert as well as a CIA psychological strategy board. He was also the National Security advisor from 1958 through ’sixty-one. Harvard astronomer Dr. Donald Menzel, who was also a cryptologist during World War II and a security consultant to CIA and NSA. Dr. Detlev Bronk, a medical physicist and aviation physiologist who went on to chair the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, and become president of Johns Hopkins and Rockefeller universities. And last, but not least, Dr. Lloyd Berkner, a physicist, radio expert, and the executive secretary of Bush’s JRDB.”

“Again I say … wow.”

Dr. Hu looked like he’d rather be arranging his sock drawer than listening to any of this. He kept rolling his eyes like a thirteen-year-old girl.

Junie shook her head. “The point is that they were only the top level of administration. Advisors more than players. They never got their hands dirty beyond writing policy for the government on how it would handle UFOs and alien technology. These are the people who created the levels of misinformation and disinformation. They created Project Blue Book and commissioned the Condon Report, both of which were never intended for anything else except to present to the public a fabricated message that UFOs don’t exist. These men paved the way for generations of credible witnesses to be discredited, humiliated, maybe even killed. They are the ones who created the image of the aluminum-foil-hat-wearing delusionists who claim to have seen little green men. And yet all along they knew the truth. The MJ-12 documents include diagrams and records of tests on UFOs, memos on measures to prevent leakage of information, and descriptions of the president’s statements about UFO-related issues.”

“And they keep that truth from everyone?” suggested Rudy.

“Not from everyone,” said Junie. “There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who work for some aspect of the part of the defense industry that exists to exploit these alien technologies. Some people believe that a lot of the R and D is done by private companies in order to keep it outside of government oversight and to smooth the way for plausible deniability.”

“Absolutely,” agreed Bug. “I started a pattern search for people and businesses who fit this kind of profile. I’ve … um … been trolling your Web site for keywords to use as search arguments.”

“Fine by me,” said Junie.

I said, “And M3? Where does that come in?”

“They are the ones doing the actual work,” she said. “MJ-12 is the bureaucracy, but the Majestic Three are the true research and development people. They’re called ‘governors,’ and each one handles a specific area. Acquisitions, Research, and Development. The head of Acquisitions is generally the only nonscientist of the group, though occasionally the governor in charge of Development is more of an industrialist than an actual scientist. He or she hires scientists to develop the products that come out of the Research.”

“How do you know this?”

Junie paused and drummed her fingers on her knee for a long time before answering. “I … had a source.”

“A source?” asked Church. “What kind of source?”

“Someone who was on the inside,” she said evasively.

“‘Was’?” asked Hu, jumping on that.

“Was,” confirmed Junie, but she didn’t immediately explain. “My source was involved in the active R and D on recovered artifacts. That research required that he consult generations of notes that had been entered into the Black Book. Interesting to note that no one ever called it the Black Book, of course, and it was absolutely forbidden to mention words like ‘alien’ or ‘UFO’ at any of the labs or testing facilities. It all had to seem very normal, like they were reverse-engineering a captured MIG or some piece of Chinese spy technology.”

“Which it probably was,” muttered Hu, but everyone ignored him.

“All the research and development fell under one umbrella, though,” continued Junie. “They called it ‘the Project.’”

Church asked, “Your source was on the inside of this Project?”

“Very deep inside,” she said. “He was a senior researcher and designer. He led one of the most important teams, though like most of the senior scientists he consulted on several projects because so many research lines overlapped. They had a lot of these experimental lines going at once. Radical engine design, artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, organic computer memory, biological hybridization, even some work on psychic enhancement.”

“‘Psychic’?” echoed Hu, smiling. “Please.”

“Doctor,” said Church quietly. The smile vanished from Hu’s face.

“Yes, psychic,” said Junie with a bit of frost. “They wanted to develop pilots who were completely integrated with their craft, and who could think their commands instead of using control panels or joysticks. That was a big part of the Project. It was way more practical than the eye-head controlled operations we use now. It would have been the most important military development since the invention of the airplane. Maybe more so. It would be an incredible leap forward. A quantum jump forward in terms of the arms race.”

“How so?” I asked.

“The human mind is so much faster than a computer,” said Junie. “Not in data recall, of course, but in reaction time, decision-making, intuition, and creative reactions to critical encounters.”

“How much information did your source share with you?” asked Church.

“Yeah,” said Bug, “it sounds like a lot.”

Junie glanced at me and then down at her hands, which were folded nervously in her lap. “It was a lot.”

“Did he write any of it down?” asked Bug.

“He had notebooks,” she said, nodding almost absently. “Over a period of fourteen years he managed to copy every single entry in the Majestic Black Book.”

We all came to point like a pack of birddogs.

“Ms. Flynn,” said Church very quietly, “where are those notes?”

She raised her head and met his eyes. “Destroyed,” she said. “They’re all gone. My source was in a car accident and the notes were incinerated.”

The silence was crushing. I felt like I’d been hoisted up into the sunlight and then dropped right back down into the slime.

Rudy said something under his breath. Bug looked away; Hu gave a triumphant smile as if this was the kind of news he wanted. The man was deranged.

But Church continued to study Junie.

“What exactly happened to your source?” he asked. “How was it that all his research notes were with him when he had his accident? That seems strange to me.”

Junie nodded. “They found out that he was duplicating the Black Book. When he realized that they knew, he gathered together everything he had, notebooks, printouts, drawings, flash drives, all of it and took off. This was in Virginia, in a lab in Arlington. My … source … tried to make it all the way to D.C.”

“What did he hope to accomplish there?” I asked.

“Exposure,” she said. “There was an important bill being debated in the Senate. It was all over the news. That jobs bill a couple of years ago. My source wanted to get to the Capitol building and … I don’t know … crash the Senate.”

“The security would have stopped him.”

“He was terrified, he didn’t know where else to go. He thought that if he yelled out the right names right there, with all those congressmen and all that press, then maybe he could force his way into the public eye. He thought that creating a media sensation would keep him safe long enough to get the truth out there.”

“Guy sounds like a fucking idiot,” said Hu.

Junie gave him a withering look. “He was naive. About that kind of thing … he was very naive. That’s how they hooked him in the first place. They played on his idealism. They sold him on a story that he was working on a project that would help save America and maybe even prevent future wars. Considering what he was working on, that seemed reasonable. It still could be, or would be in there was a genuine public welfare in the minds of those bastards in M3.”

“How so?” asked Rudy. “What were they working on?”

“In simplest terms they were trying to re-create the engine of the crashed UFO. That engine is enormously powerful, capable of flying all those light-years across space. My source was told that if this power could be tapped and controlled, then it could be the basis for an entirely new kind of clean, renewable energy.”

“Oh, wow,” said Hu, “a cliché.”

“Doc,” I said, “if you make one more crack I’m going to beat the living shit out of you. Tell me if I’m joking.”

“That’s enough,” barked Church, though I don’t know if he was directing that at Hu, me, or both of the yapping dogs.

In the ensuing silence, Church focused all his considerable personality on Junie.

“Ms. Flynn,” he said, “we know that your source never made it to Congress. What happened to him?”

“They got him,” she said.

“Who got him?” asked Church. “Specifically who?”

“The Closers.”

“And they are?”

“Most people call them the Men in Black.”

Chapter Fifty-three

The black Yukon drove at a sedate speed past the long double chain-link fence that bordered the street side of Cobbler Records Storage. At the corner, they made a turn and drove away, tucked into traffic, hiding in plain sight.

“Okay,” said Aldo, “so that’s where it is. We could have seen it on the Ghost Box. There are pigeon drones all over the place.”

Tull shrugged. “It’s always better to put eyes on something. Hard to tell about architecture and building materials from a video feed, and the building plans are no longer on public record.”

“Church pulled them?”

“He made them disappear,” said Tull.

“Driving past the place is a piss-poor substitute for a blueprint.”

“Not always,” said Tull. “And not in this case.”

Chapter Fifty-four

Dr. Hu said, “So you’re telling us that Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones abducted the president of the United States.”

Junie gave him an arctic glare. The fact that she was taking a quick dislike to Hu made me like her even more.

“Yes, Doctor,” she said icily, “we’ve all seen the movies, ha-ha, but in the real world the Closers are anything but wise-cracking heroes protecting us from the scum of the universe.”

“Then who do you think they are?” asked Church.

“They claim to be government agents.”

And suddenly I thought about the four goons I met today. Four men in black suits claiming to be government agents. Church’s eyes flicked toward mine for a millisecond. He was right there with me.

“They show up after significant UFO sightings or crashes,” said Junie. “That’s been happening since Roswell. They harass and even sometimes threaten witnesses.”

“What kinds of threats?” asked Rudy.

“It varies,” she said, crossing her arms under her breasts. “Sometimes they threaten to arrest people on the grounds of national security. Sometimes they hint that ‘accidents’ might happen if the witness doesn’t stop talking. Sometimes their threats are very direct.”

Rudy frowned. “Threatening physical harm?”

“Threatening to kill witnesses. Or the families of witnesses.”

“Has anyone actually been harmed?” Rudy asked.

“There are several cases in there about people who have been brutally beaten. Some people have gone missing. And there have been a number of unexplained or unexpected deaths of witnesses. Car accidents, heart attacks, cancer, viruses, street muggings … all sorts of things.”

“Bug?” murmured Church.

“Already on it. Compiling a list now.”

“Have the Closers ever taken a run at you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I’ve never actually witnessed anything. Wish I could say otherwise. God, I’d give anything to know … to really and truly know.”

“I thought you were a believer.”

“The Pope believes in Jesus,” she said, “but I bet he’d like to actually meet him.”

Everyone smiled at that. Even Hu.

“True,” I admitted.

“Who do you think the Closers are, Ms. Flynn?” asked Church. “And what do you think they’re trying to accomplish?”

“I have theories, but that’s all they are. They claim to be from the Air Force, the CIA, or the FBI. Andrew Meyers, who used to be a major voice in UFO research, believed that these men are really members of the Air Force Special Activities Center, based in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and working under operational authority of Air Force Intelligence Command centered at Kelly Air Force Base in Texas.”

“Bug,” said Church.

“On it,” Bug replied.

“This guy, Meyers,” asked Rudy, “you said he used to be a major voice. Did he die?”

“No. He retired from UFO research. No one seems to know why.”

Before anyone could say anything, Bug said, “On it.”

“You said that this was Meyers’s theory. What’s yours?”

She said, “I think the Closers work for Majestic Three.”

“Which could connect what happened this morning in Baltimore to this case,” said Church.

Junie turned suddenly toward me. “The men who attacked you were Closers? How come you didn’t say that?”

“I didn’t know who they were,” I protested. “I still don’t. As much as it pains me to say it, Junie, there are a lot of people who would like to see me dead.”

Barely under his breath, Hu said, “And some of them work with you.”

“Ms. Flynn,” interrupted Rudy. “What exactly happened to your ‘source’?”

“He was in a car accident on the George Washington Parkway. His car was run off the road into an oncoming truck. He and his wife were both burned to death in the wreck.”

“Whoa,” I said, “there’s a pretty significant median between opposing lanes.”

“Not down by the foot of the Mount Vernon Trail, off the ramp from the Curtis Memorial Parkway,” said Junie, and it took me a moment to recall that part of the highway.

I nodded. “Okay, but that’s a dangerous road, though, accidents happen all the time.”

Junie gave another shrug.

“So,” said Rudy slowly, “it’s your belief that your source systematically made a copy of the Black Book, and when M3 found out about it they sent these Closers to arrange a fatal traffic accident.”

“Yes.”

Bug asked, “Do you have any idea who might have a copy of the Black Book? I mean … Do you know the names of the current members of M3?”

“Or any previous members?” I added.

Junie laughed. “I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to figure that out. I have a list of about a hundred possibles. A lot of those names are going to be on the list of industrialists profiting from radical technologies your Mr. Bug is compiling.”

“She called me Mr. Bug,” said Bug, apparently to himself.

“Do any names stand out for you?” asked Church, and I knew that this was the key question. Church asked it casually because we didn’t yet know how far we could trust Junie Flynn, or how deep her true knowledge ran. If she was, after all this, just a conspiracy theory nut, then any guess she made could be worthless. Or, if she was as well informed as she claimed, then she might have what we needed. Either way we didn’t want to spook her. This all had to be done right the first time.

Junie thought about it and then gave Church a careful nod. “There are seven living people that are on my ‘most likely’ list. They are Ernest Foster Gould of Gould Cybersystems; Charles Osgood Harrington III, Harrington Aeronautics, Harrington-Cheney Petrochemicals, Harrington and Mercer Fuel Oil Company; Rebecca Milhaus, president of Brantley-Milhaus-Cooper Aviation and wife of H. Carlton Milhaus, CEO of Milhaus and Berk Publishing; Howard Shelton, owner and CEO of Shelton Aeronautics; Reese Sunderland of Sunderland Biological and Sunderland Integrated Systems; Joan Bell-Pullman of MicroTek International; and David Robinette of Robinette Development Associates.”

My breath caught in my throat and I cut a sharp look at Church. All of those names were well known to us. Laboratories, computer systems, and factories of every single one of them had been targeted by the cyber-attacks. Church gave me a tiny shake of his head. For now he didn’t want that information shared with Junie Flynn.

I think she caught something though, because her eyes darted from me to Church; however, Church asked her, “Is it your belief that one or more of these people are members of M3?”

Junie shook her head. “No, I think that all the current members of M3 are probably on that list, and maybe one or two former members.”

“Please explain.”

“It’s circular logic,” she said. “In almost any industry, most companies develop products in a kind of dead heat. Company A might bring out a new widget that seems to be ahead of the market, but looking back you can see that it’s a natural step in the progression of research and development. Companies B and C tear that product apart to find what their own R and D missed, but they’re so close behind already that they can get a competing product out in the same calendar year. Look at the cell phone business and you see what I mean. The Samsung-Apple court case is a prime example.”

Church nodded.

“But every once in a while someone comes along with a product that is a radical jump,” continued Junie. “It’s so innovative that it’s freaky, and even if you take it apart and look at the science you can’t backtrack it to any kind of developmental process. It appears to be the result of an intuitive design leap.”

“Right,” I said. “So?”

“So, sometimes it’s only that. Someone has a dream about a new kind of widget and it’s nothing more than a true flash of intuition. However, the seven people on this list have done this time and again. They’re not doing it in ways that clearly build off each other’s research. The products are in totally different areas, as if they have agreed not to compete with one another. That’s not normal, and those design jumps definitely aren’t. An intuitive leap is really rare. It might make a fortune for a company, that’s happened plenty of times, but it’s usually going to be in a single area. Even if that kicks off a new avenue of design philosophy, it’s still a single line. The people on this list seem to be able to come up with patents for radical jumps in a lot of different areas of technology. Military and private sector stuff. Big jumps, where there’s no backtrack at all. Nothing.”

“Unless,” I said, feeding her the prompt she wanted.

“Unless he’s drawing on another source,” she confirmed.

“Like the Majestic Black Book?” said Church.

“Right. It’s more than just a catalog of parts. The Black Book has measurements, weights, schematics, information on material composition, stuff like that. It also has a complete list of the ACL.”

“Isn’t that a ligament in the knee?” I asked.

“Alien Code Language,” explained Bug. “Don’t you ever watch Nat Geo?”

“I watch the Dog Whisperer,” I added. Beside me, Ghost whuffed at the mention of that show. Cesar Millan was a god to him.

Junie smiled at me. “There are symbols on most of the T-craft and on all the parts recovered from crashes. They look like the pictograms you see on Egyptian tombs. A language based on images rather than letters or words.”

“All of that’s in the Black Book?” asked Rudy.

“Yes. That and a catalog of all the parts. Not just from Roswell, but from every crash. There have been a number of them. Kecksburg, Tunguska, Rendlesham, other places. Some estimates say that there have been as many as sixty crashes, some of them centuries ago, maybe longer than that.”

Bug said, “I heard there was a black market for stuff from crashes.”

Hu made a face of complete contempt.

“There is,” said Junie. “My source said that occasionally the governor of Acquisitions would bring in a brand-new piece, something obtained from unnamed sources. My source believed that M3 was purchasing or bartering these D-type components.”

“If this crap really existed,” said Hu belligerently, “why the hell would anyone ever part with any of it? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Two hammers,” said Junie.

“What?”

“If you have two hammers and no saw, wouldn’t you consider trading with someone else who had a saw?”

Hu glared at her, but he didn’t attack the logic. It was too sound. He sulked instead.

There was a brief pause as we all considered this.

Church said, “Could you put these seven names in order of most likely, by your estimation?”

“No. I keep rearranging that list, but I really don’t have it locked down other than I think they’re all involved in some way. Some of them are old enough to have been governors who have since stepped down.”

“David Robinette is pretty young,” said Hu. “I’ve seen him at trade shows. He’s not even thirty-five. And he’s no scientist.”

“He’s one of my votes of the current governor of Acquisitions.” She shrugged. “He’s a wildcard, but his family has long-standing ties to Defense Department contracts, and he goes missing for long periods of time. No one knows where.”

“You think he’s on buying trips?” I asked.

She nodded.

“One more thing,” said Church, and he hit the key to bring up the picture taken by the helicopter early this morning. “What can you tell me about this image?”

Junie didn’t even blink. “It’s a crop circle — though it looks like it’s on a lawn somewhere.”

“Do you recognize the pattern?”

“Of course. It’s the pi crop circle, like the one that appeared in a field in Wroughton, Wiltshire, England, in June 2008. But this isn’t that one. Where was this taken?”

“This appeared on the White House lawn at approximately the same time the president disappeared.”

Junie stared at him. She was surprised, but not totally shocked.

“There seem to be a lot of theories as to what crop circles are,” said Church, “including strong evidence that many of them are faked.”

“Sure. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley have made a bunch of the ones in England. There are companies that pay to have them made with their logos as advertising gimmicks. There have been over ten thousand of them since the early seventies. All over the world, too, and probably eighty or ninety percent of them are faked.”

“Not all?” asked Rudy.

“You tell me,” she challenged. “Did a couple of pranksters put that one on the White House lawn?”

No one answered that.

“What are they?” Rudy asked.

“No one knows for sure, but when you see something like this one, I think that the point is pretty clear.”

“Tell us,” encouraged Church.

“Communication,” said Junie. “Pi is a universal constant. Pi is math, and math is immutable. It will be the same here as it will be across the galaxy. Ten plus ten equals twenty no matter where you are. Same goes for, say, geometry? A circle is always a circle and its circumference is always calculated the same way no matter where you are. The same holds true for any other geometric figure like triangles, squares, or rectangles.” Her eyes shifted to Hu. “Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

Hu grunted something unintelligible.

Church nodded and gave Junie a pleasant smile. “Thank you. Bug, do you have enough to begin a comprehensive pattern search on the names Ms. Flynn provided?”

“More than enough.”

“I’ve run those kinds of searches,” said Junie. “Hundreds of them, with all kinds of software, but I hit too many walls, and there are simply so many variables.”

Bug laughed. So did I.

She looked from him to me. “What?”

“We have a pretty spiffy computer,” I said.

“I’ve used university networked supercomputers and—”

“And we have a pretty spiffy computer,” I repeated.

She stared at me, her eyes imploring me to explain but she didn’t ask. She understood that I couldn’t. After a few moments she nodded, then turned to Church.

“Mr. Church,” she said, “this — all of this — is really about stopping a disaster? About saving the country?”

“Our country, England, and a good part of Africa.”

“And you believe that if you get the Black Book you’ll really be able to do that?”

“It’s our hope and belief, yes.”

She sat there, chewing on her lip, fingers twisting nervously in her lap, clearing agonizing over a very difficult decision.

“Maybe…,” she began hesitantly, “Maybe there’s an easier way…”

Mr. Church opened his mouth to ask what she meant.

Suddenly the MindReader screen went blank and then dissolved into the static of white noise.

“Ah, crap,” I said, reaching for the controls.

“What’s wrong?” asked Junie.

“Looks like we lost the satellite connection. Damn it.” I tapped my earbud. “Bug, I need a new—”

There was static in my ear, too.

“Joe?” asked Junie, a note of doubt creeping into her voice.

I pulled my cell.

The display told me that there was no service.

Junie looked down at the screen and then up at me. “Joe, what’s going on?” Doubt was turning into the first faint traces of alarm.

Before I could say anything there was a knock on the door.

“Must be my guys,” I said, rising and crossing the living room to reach for the knob. “Radio must be out on the Black Hawk, too.”

But as I turned the knob I heard Ghost begin to growl. I told him to be quiet as I pulled the door open.

Two men stood there.

Big men. Strangers.

Both of them were dressed in black.

Both of them were pointing guns.

Chapter Fifty-five

Mr. Church sat in Joe Ledger’s leather chair and stared at the blank square of screen that moments before had held the image of Joe Ledger and Junie Flynn. Now all it showed was static.

“Bug?” he snapped.

“Working on it.”

“Work faster.”

Rudy Sanchez sat on the other side of Joe Ledger’s desk, fists balled in his lap.

Dr. Hu smiled down from the wall-mounted plasma screen. “Ledger probably spilled his coffee on the keyboard,” he suggested.

“Stop being a child,” said Rudy, and it shut Hu up as surely as a slap across the face.

In the lower corner of the big screen was the digital clock that Church had started after receiving the second video.

4316:12

4316:11

4316:10

“Bug,” he said again.

“This is weird, boss. We got a total communications dead zone that extends in a perfect circle around the lighthouse.”

Hu looked suddenly interested. “A jammer?”

“A mother of a jammer. It’s even killing the satellite uplink.”

Rudy frowned. “I thought Joe once told me that a jammer couldn’t do that.”

“It can’t,” said Hu. “C’mon, Bug, you’re reading it wrong.”

Bug flashed information onto the screens from half a dozen sources, including a Defense Department satellite and two general communications satellites. “Yeah? Then you show me how to read it right.”

Hu stared at the data. So did Church and Rudy.

Church snatched up his cell phone and hit a speed dial. “Gus. I want Echo Team wheels up for Turkey Point Lighthouse right now. Make it happen. Captain Ledger is in trouble.”

4315:55

4315:54

Chapter Fifty-six

“Oh God,” cried Junie.

“Get inside,” said the taller of the two men.

There was a black SUV parked on the lawn halfway between Junie’s front door and the helicopter. A third man stood by the car. There was no movement at all from the chopper, and that did not make me feel good. Hector and the others should have signaled me. They should be out in the field and up in the faces of these three goons.

They weren’t. The chopper sat there as silent and cold as a dead bug.

Junie touched my shoulder from behind and whispered, “Joe…”

Behind me, Ghost continue to utter a low growl of obvious intent.

One of the two men in the doorway shifted his pistol from my heart to Ghost’s head. The other one looked me in the eye. The gun he held was not an automatic. It was square and clunky, with four curved contacts at the business end. A microwave pulse pistol, an MPP. It was a scary-looking piece of hardware and it was pointed at my dog.

“You call the play,” said the man.

I half turned. “Ghost, ease down.”

Ghost stopped growling and sat. The man turned the MPP away from Ghost and pointed it at me, and the man who’d spoken gave me a nod, pleased that I’d made the sensible choice.

We’d see about that. “Ease down,” in the private and coded language I’d created when I trained Ghost, did not mean what these guys apparently thought it meant. Misunderstandings can be very useful.

“Get inside,” the man said again. He was the leader of this team. Unlike the clown act that had attacked me on the street in Baltimore, these guys were younger, tougher looking, and dressed in black battle-dress uniforms. No insignia of any kind. No rank. Everything was black, and their trousers were neatly bloused into black boots. They wore gun belts with extra magazines. They had white wires curling behind their ears and small wire mikes hovering at the corners of their mouths. The leader was a light-skinned black man, the guy behind him was white. They both wore identical mirrored sunglasses, right out of every cheap 1970s highway cop flick you ever saw. Neither of them was smiling. Mr. Black raised his barrel from my heart to my head, the four metal contacts were aimed right between my eyes.

Despite the exotic guns, the rational part of my mind wanted me to believe that these were a couple of working stiffs from the FBI or NSA and that we’d get this all sorted out as soon as we swapped IDs, and then we’d all laugh about it over tea.

The rational part of my mind was sometimes a fucking idiot.

The rest of me knew who and what these guys were, even if I hesitated using the word.

Closers.

Jesus.

I backed up with my arms wide to shield Junie but also guide her backward. Ghost rose and backed up, too, as the Closers herded us inside.

When we were all inside, Mr. Black looked past me. “Are you Miss June Cassandra Flynn?”

“I—” she began, but I cut in.

“Hey, let’s dial this down, fellows. I’m a federal agent. Please identify yourself and your reason for being here.” I pitched it in my best officer’s voice. Flat and authoritative.

Mr. Black and Mr. White turned their mirrored glasses toward me for a microsecond.

“Shut up,” said Mr. White.

“Look, chief, I think there’s been a big misunderstanding here,” I said, still keeping it in neutral. “If this is a jurisdictional thing, then we can get it straightened out. Who cut your orders for this pickup?”

“Raise your hands and do not interfere,” said Mr. Black.

“I can show you my identification,” I said. “NSA. We’re on the same—”

Mr. Black lashed out with the barrel of his pistol and slammed me across the face. A line of heat exploded along my cheek and the force spun me around and dropped me to one knee. Ghost barked and started to go for the man, but even with my eggs scrambled I knew that they’d kill my dog and then me. Which would leave Junie alone and probably the target of the next Shot. I lunged sideways and hooked my arm around Ghost’s throat.

“No!” I yelled, shouting it to anyone and everyone.

“Don’t shoot!” shrieked Junie. She darted forward, as if she wanted to put herself between the guns and us. Mr. White stepped toward her and jammed the hard metal points of his gun against her breastbone.

“Get the fuck back,” he said in a deadly voice.

Junie gasped and stepped back, bumping into me where I knelt. Ghost strained against my arm.

“No,” I begged in a fierce whisper. “Don’t.”

There was no shot. Not yet.

“Control that dog,” said Mr. White. “Do it now.”

“Ghost,” I pleaded. “Ease down, ease down.”

He trembled in my arms, but despite his primal need to defend the pack leader, he eased down. Just as he was taught. There was blood on his shoulder and I touched my face. My fingers came away slick and red. I didn’t think my cheek was broken, though. Small mercies. The gun may look plastic, but it hit like steel. I dearly wanted to take it away from him and shove it up his ass.

After a moment I climbed to my feet. Mr. Black’s gun followed me, always pointing at my heart. There was a small, cruel smile on his mouth. “Stand there and shut the fuck up. When we want you to speak we’ll ask you a question. If you open your mouth before then, I’ll put you down.”

I raised my hands, palm out, head high, and unthreatening. Whoever these guys were, they played in a whole different league from the clowns who braced me on the street in Baltimore. They had been Triple-A ball and these guys were major league all the way.

“What do you want?” demanded Junie.

Instead of answering, Mr. Black said, “Check her.”

I thought he was ordering a pat down, but Mr. White reached into a pocket and produced a cell phone, thumbed a few buttons and pulled up a photograph of a pretty, blond, smiling woman. He held it up to compare it with the pretty, blond, unsmiling woman standing with me.

“It’s her.”

“Good,” said Mr. Black. They turned toward us. Toward Junie.

That’s when I knew what was going to happen next.

I couldn’t see their eyes, but I can read body language. They teach us about that in Ranger school, in the cops, in the DMS, and in martial arts. No matter how cold a person is, no matter how detached they believe themselves to be, it is impossible to kill without some psychological and physiological reaction. Even machete-wielding Hutus, mob button men, and mercs who will spray a whole village with automatic weapons fire feel something. That reaction might manifest as a curl of a lip in real or pretended loathing for the victim. It might be a mad light in the eye as the inner voice whispers that to kill is to prove a sort of godhood. It might be a flinch at trigger pull as the mind tries to erect screens around the action in order to compartmentalize it from the more ordinary parts of life. Some have to scream or yell or laugh louder than the sound of another piece of their own soul cracking off as if ricochet bullets pinged and pocked it. Some go totally cold, their conscious submerging into a dark place so deep inside their fractured minds that there is no name for where it goes.

There are a hundred different reactions.

But everybody reacts.

There is always a sign that the mind has ordered the body to break that most ancient of taboos — the ending of a human life.

Practiced killers try to hide their own involuntary reactions.

Warriors look for that small sign, that inevitable tell, because it is both a warning and a doorway.

I saw Mr. Black’s mouth tighten. Ever so slightly, and as it happened the muscles in his arm steadied in anticipation of the force of the gunshot and the recoil of the weapon.

I moved first. My hands were already high, hands open and loose. With every scrap of speed I could muster I whipped my open left palm across the barrel of his gun, knocking it away. It is not a move you try if there are any other options. And you don’t wait to see if it worked or how he’s going to react. All you can do is commit. Totally and with as much savage aggression as you can manage.

I can manage quite a lot.

My right hand darted out, fingers straight and stiff and stabbed Mr. Black in the eyes.

Before he felt it, before he could scream, I went for Mr. White, but Ghost, who had been waiting for this kind of move, was already in motion. He is big but he is very fast. And he is every bit as savage, every bit as vicious, and maybe after all he’s been through, every bit as crazy as me. He came in low and went straight up, jaws wide to take the wrist of the gun hand.

There were two shots. Mr. Black and Mr. White each managed to get off a shot in the same split second. One shot each is all we allowed them.

No bullets. The guns made that weird, hollow tok sound, and suddenly there was a flash of intense heat that burned past my face. The wall behind me exploded in a cloud of superheated plaster and charred wood. The other missed the top of Junie’s head by a hand’s breadth and hit the MindReader substation. The computer blew up — a big, gaudy explosion that took the sofa and half the wall with it. All the pictures on the wall crashed to the floor.

My brain recorded all this, but I was in motion. It was all happening fast now.

Ghost took Mr. White’s wrist. There was a red moment of crunching and worrying and growling and screaming. He took the wrist and the hand with it.

I pivoted to Mr. Black. He had one hand clapped over his eyes and the other tried to bring the gun around. I grabbed the gun and gun hand and wrenched it all in a vicious circle. The trigger guard is curved metal, it’s sharp. At the right speed and with enough leverage it can become a blade. As I took the gun I saw the finger fall.

Junie screamed and kept on screaming. At the blood or at the ugliness or in terror.

Everyone was screaming. Mr. Black, Mr. White.

Me.

I buried the pistol under the soft palate of Mr. Black’s chin and pulled the trigger. If it was a regular pistol it would have blown the top of his head off.

This wasn’t an ordinary pistol.

There was that hollow tok sound and then Mr. Black’s head exploded.

Yeah.

Exploded.

All over me, the wall, the ceiling. A huge blurp of superhot blood and brain matter.

I am pretty damn sure I screamed. You want to blame me? You make someone’s head explode and see how calm you stay.

As the corpse fell away from me, I turned and saw that Mr. White, despite the loss of his hand and the agony he must feel, was trying to hammer at Ghost’s head with his remaining hand. Ghost evaded the blow and clamped his fangs around the man’s thigh. Mr. White’s screams rose to the ultrasonic, but then I shot him in the face.

Same effect.

A tok.

And his head exploded.

I didn’t scream that time. Junie was screaming loud enough for both of us. I gagged. Everything I’d eaten since the late nineties wanted to come up.

But there were shouts from outside.

Not one man’s voice.

Two of them. More.

I shoved Junie down and ran to the open door. Two of the Closers were running toward the house with their M-16s ready to fire. I took the MPP in both hands and fired two shots. They both flew apart.

But there were still shouts.

No, a single voice. Not in front.

There was the sound of breaking glass, and Junie screamed, “Joe! The kitchen door—”

A man shouted at Junie.

Ghost was already in motion. He was a red-streaked white blur, a torpedo in dog shape who blasted through the living room, into a short hallway and out of sight. The man’s yells changed. Became screams. Became wet.

Stopped.

I crouched, listening.

Nothing. No sound.

“Ghost!” I called. “Hunt!”

I heard his nails skitter on kitchen floor tiles and then he was gone.

“Oh my God,” cried Junie, her eyes filled with the horrors that lay around her. There was blood everywhere. On her skirt and coat, too. On her legs. All over me. “Joe! Oh my God … what did you…”

“Get down behind the couch,” I ordered.

Her mouth snapped shut and without a further word she scuttled behind the couch and dropped down out of sight.

I looked down at the gun I held. Mr. Black’s gun felt wrong in so many ways. It felt intensely freakish in my hand, so I tossed it down and drew my Beretta. I tapped my earbud for the team channel. “Hector! Hector! Give me a sit-rep. Red! Slick! Do you copy?”

There was no answer. The communications were still down.

“Joe,” cried Junie, peering out from behind the couch, “are you hurt?”

“No. Stay down.”

She disappeared again.

I edged outside, fanning the Beretta across the lawn. The only movement was the swaying of tall flowers. With the pistol leading the way, I ran toward the helicopter. It sat there, eerily still in the sunlight.

There was no doubt of what I’d find.

Of what I did find.

Hector, Red, and Slick.

What was left of them was sprawled behind the Black Hawk. That gun — that weird gun — had blown them apart. Three good people were now fried meat and drying blood. Not even recognizable as the people they’d been. Red lines of blood snaked through the grass. Exactly the same color as the red trim on the helo.

Eight dead. My three friends, and five of the Closers.

What the hell was happening?

As I ran back toward the house, Ghost came running around the corner of the building, stopped and stared at me, waiting for orders. “Watch. Call, call,” I ordered and he faded back, ducking into the shadows of the house. If anyone else showed up, Ghost would warn us with a couple of loud barks, and then he would go back to hunting.

My face hurt like hell from where Mr. Black had pistol-whipped me, and blood dripped onto my shirt. All the drinking I’d done last night, the violence twice today and the accompanying adrenaline dump, and the sheer exertion of terror was all taking its toll. Kicking my ass. I didn’t know how much I had left to spend on this game. It felt like I was down to my last couple of chips and I didn’t like the cards I was being dealt.

Exhausted, frightened, and sick at heart, I turned and ran back inside house.

Chapter Fifty-seven

First Sergeant Bradley Sims looked up from the flat tabletop tactical computer screen that showed a topographical map of Elk Neck State Park. The rest of Echo Team was clustered around in a semicircle, checking their gear, thumbing fresh rounds into spare magazines, laughing and joking. Swapping the kind of trash talk that was meaningless in itself but useful as a way of coaxing courage into the heart and adrenaline into the veins.

Five of them. Four men and a woman.

All combat vets, all first-team shooters. None of them virgins when it came to a firefight, even if they had not all taken fire together in the same battle. Bunny, the hulking kid to his right, had been with Top and Captain Ledger from the jump, the three of them signing onto the DMS on the same day — and that day had been a nonstop series of battles. In the two years since, the lineup of Echo Team had changed so many times. Lydia, the woman sitting beside Bunny, had been on the firing line for half that time, which made her the third in team seniority. The other three — Pete Dobbs from Kentucky, Sam Imura from California, and Ivan Yankovitch from the Motor City — were all new to Echo.

So many others had fallen. Every night of his life, before he went to sleep and in lieu of prayers, Top Sims murmured the names of every other member of the team who had stepped up to the line and then gone down in the heat of a fight. Some were still alive but because of injuries received on the job were no longer field certified. Big Bob Faraday, who had taken a chestful of bullets during the Jakoby affair, now ran mission support out of a substation in Virginia. DeeDee Whitman, who’d taken a facial laceration and permanent eye damage while aboard the Sea of Hope, was a talent scout for the DMS — cruising the top guns in JSOC for Echo and other teams. Gunnery Sergeant Brick Anderson, formerly of the Denver office, now ran the special weapons shop two blocks from the Warehouse.

And the others, the ones who had fallen and not been able to get back up. Top remembered every name, every rank, every MOS. He remembered why and where they’d fallen.

As the Black Hawk tore through the skies toward Turkey Point, he glanced at the five faces around him. So often in military PR they call all soldiers heroes, and to a degree there was a heroic sacrifice made when enlisting. But these five were actual heroes. Each of them had been in DMS actions — either with Echo or other teams — and had put their lives on the line to protect the country, and in some cases the whole goddamn world.

Top chewed on a wooden kitchen match, dancing the stick from one corner of his mouth to the other. He was at least ten years older than the oldest of them, and almost twenty years older than the youngest. He was older than Captain Ledger. There was no other active field agent in the whole DMS agent that had hit forty yet, and Top was a few years past that milestone. He could feel it, too. He wasn’t sure how many more of these missions he had left in his bones. What was the expression? It ain’t the years, it’s the mileage?

Bunny tapped his arm and offered him a bottle of vitamin-enriched water. The big young man leaned close.

“You okay, Top?”

“Thinking ’bout the cap’n,” said Top, pitching his voice low enough so that only Bunny heard him. “Wondering what he’s got himself into now.”

“You think he’s in trouble?”

“Day ends in a ‘y’ doesn’t it?”

Bunny sighed. “Did Dietrich tell you anything? Everyone’s on alert and now the captain goes off the grid. I only saw Mr. Church for a second this morning but he looked like he was ready to cut throats. We know what kind of shit is hitting the fan?”

Top shook his head. “Don’t know. Don’t want to find out.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell you what, Farmboy…”

“Yeah?”

“If someone’s finally put their mark on the cap … I am going to tear their world apart.”

“Hooah,” agreed Bunny.

That threat, Top knew, was not empty trash talk.

The Black Hawk flew north with all the speed and ferocity of a dragon.

Interlude Five

“Doctor, you must come quick! The diggers have found something!”

Dr. Wen Zhengming looked up from the small fossil he was cleaning and peered at a young graduate assistant who had burst into his office. The assistant’s face was flushed, his eyes wide, brow beaded with sweat.

“Is it more of the hadrosaur?” asked Dr. Wen hopefully. Three weeks ago they had found a thigh bone and part of a vertebra from a hadrosaurid that might be as big — or even bigger — than the great one found in the 1980s. Dr. Wen had been part of the team that had unearthed the earlier one, and so far it was the largest of its species unearthed anywhere. Back then he was a junior member of the team; if they made a significant discovery here, he would be the one to receive the accolades. That would mean greater support from the government and possibly a speaking tour of the United States.

The young man snatched his cap off his head and fidgeted with it. Whatever this was it had deeply affected him.

“Doctor,” he said in an almost strangled voice, “you had best come and see for yourself.”

Dr. Wen frowned and set down the brush with which he had been cleaning the fossil. “You’re not one of mine, are you?”

“I am with Professor Yao’s team,” said the young man.

“Ah,” said Wen. “Then I will come at once.”

Despite his name, Professor Yao was an American from the University of Pennsylvania, and he was not part of Wen’s team of paleontologists. Yao was an anthropologist and the senior member of a very important international team made up of experts in a number of fields ranging from ethnobotany to archaeologists. His team had come here to China primarily to study the excavation of a nearly pristine village of the Dadiwan, a Neolithic culture that once lived in Gansu and western Shaanxi. The original Dadiwan-type-site was excavated between 1975 and 1984. Although the Dadiwans lived between 5800 and 5500 B.C., their village stood on grounds that were rich in dinosaur bones dating back one hundred and seventy million years. Scientific teams came from all over the world to study everything from the world’s largest fossilized dinosaur footprint — which measured one and a half meters across — to Neolithic pottery kilns. The region was so rich in varied history that Professor Zhao Xijin, the chief paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology famously labeled it “the garbage dump of time.”

Three days ago Professor Yao made a very interesting and intensely curious discovery. While excavating the ruins of a Dadiwan roundhouse, Yao had removed an oddly placed floor stone and discovered that it partially covered the entrance to a tunnel. Neither Yao nor Dr. Wen quite understood what that tunnel had been used for or why it had been carved out of the calcium-rich sediment. After getting approval from Professor Zhao in Beijing, Yao’s team had begun to painstakingly excavate the tunnel, photographing, weighing, and cataloging every piece of rock they removed. As of last night, Yao reported that the tunnel angled downward at twenty-eight degrees but so far was only filled with rocks of no remarkable nature.

However, from the look on the face of this young man, it appeared that Yao had found something other than chunks of rock.

“Have they reached the end of the tunnel?” he asked.

The young man licked his lips and repeated what he had already said, “You had better come and see for yourself, Doctor.”

Dr. Wen sighed and stood up, his knees and lower back popping audibly. He pulled on a sweater, fitted a knit cap over his bald head, and followed the assistant out into the teeth of a raw northerly wind.

A large tent had been erected over the site of the roundhouse and from the way it glowed Wen could tell that every light was on. But as they approached he hesitated. Instead of the usual graduate student standing guard outside, the tent opening was guarded by two more of Yao’s assistants. A Norwegian boy who towered over everyone else in the camp, and a diminutive Senegalese woman. Wen could not remember either of their names; both were unpronounceable anyway.

The dark-skinned woman stepped forward to meet them, and she looked even more stressed than did the young assistant who fetched him. So did the Norwegian boy. Despite the cold, they were all sweating.

“Where is Professor Yao?” asked Wen, his pulse quickening as the first tickles of alarm shivered through him.

“Inside, Doctor,” said the Norwegian. “He is down in the pit.”

The Norwegian stayed outside to guard the tent while the girl led the way. Wen was beginning to have a bad feeling about this. Had Yao’s diggers found something they weren’t supposed to? It wouldn’t be the first time, and such events were always calamitous. Just a few years ago another team of diggers had gotten into very bad trouble in Jilin when they unearthed a cache of bioweapons that had supposedly been destroyed thirty years ago following an international arms agreement. Changes within the government and the overall culture of secrecy had resulted in the cache being first mislabeled in the government computers and then lost altogether. The scientists who had found it were harshly rebuked and several of them vanished entirely.

Dr. Wen hoped that Yao was not next in line to disappear.

Or, himself.

The inside of the tent was large but cluttered, with rows of wood and metal shelves along one side, each of them crammed with tagged artifacts and plastic trays of materials to be analyzed and cataloged. At the far end, scaffolding had been erected over the entrance to the tunnel and a row of dented wheelbarrows groaned under the weight of rocks taken from this new find. Directly beside the tunnel mouth was a mound of dirt and chunky clay. A pair of shovels stood up from the side of the mound.

The mouth of the tunnel yawned round and black at Wen’s feet.

Professor Yao came hurrying over, and he was every bit as flushed and sweaty as the others. “Doctor Wen! Thank god,” he gasped. “Please, you must come see this.”

“What is it?” asked Wen. “What, have you found my hadrosaur?”

Yao gave him an enigmatic smile. “We found some bones,” the professor said evasively. “And something else. Something quite … extraordinary. Please, Doctor, come see for yourself.”

Yao led the doctor into the hole. A line of small yellow lightbulbs strung on a wire threw a pale glow along the slope. Wen grunted at how long the tunnel was. There were chalk marks to indicate distance and through the gloom Wen could see that the tunnel extended many meters into the earth.

“This is much longer than we thought,” he said. “How did you excavate this much of it so quickly?”

“This arm of the tunnel is ninety-two feet,” said Yao. “The obstruction did not extend all the way. As of last night we had cleared nineteen meters of the tunnel, and today we got through another five. Then the next two meters of the tunnel were filled with dirt packed on either side by red clay. There was nothing remarkable about the clay — no markings of any kind, so we photographed it and then broke through.” He nodded to the rest of the tunnel. “Beyond the dirt was empty tunnel. And then this…”

They emerged from the tunnel into a chamber whose floor was flat and smooth. Perfectly flat, perfectly smooth. Natural caves are never smooth and the Dadiwan were incapable of this kind of symmetrical stonework.

Wen was suddenly alarmed. This was exactly what he had feared.

“Professor,” he said carefully, “you realize that what you have found here is very likely a base, or a weapons storehouse. We are both going to be in a lot of trouble and—”

Yao was shaking his head. “You don’t understand, Doctor. Your government did not build this chamber. Nor did the Dadiwan.”

“How can you be so certain?”

Yao fished inside his trouser pockets and produced a heavy Maglite. He dialed the powerful beam up to its highest setting and then aimed it carefully at the closest wall.

Dr. Wen nearly screamed.

His heart leaped in his chest and he felt a spasm of pain shoot through him as he stared at the wall.

The wall was as flat as the floor, the ancient stone smooth as glass. But Wen saw none of that. Instead his eyes goggled open at what was in the wall. Extruding from the stone, like a display at a museum or a piece of decorative art, were the bones of a hadrosaur.

A complete skeleton. Articulated, assembled, perfect.

And impossible.

The bones were fused into the wall so precisely that the dinosaur seemed to rear up above them.

“I—” Wen began, but Yao turned slowly and shone his light along the wall. Beyond the hadrosaur was another skeleton, one that Wen recognized at once — the great predator Zhuchengtyrannus magnus, a cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex first discovered in the city of Zhucheng. Four meters tall and ferocious.

But beyond that … more skeletons.

So many more.

Each of them carefully reconstructed and fixed by some unknown means into the wall. This was not the result of lava capture or a mud slide — no, even through his deep shock Wen could clearly see that these skeletons had been placed here.

Preserved.

And it was absolutely impossible.

He snatched the flashlight out of Yao’s hand and used it and his own smaller light to sweep along the walls as he walked down the line of them. Then he was running.

Stopping. Gasping. Crying out.

Weeping.

There was a massive armored Huayangosaurus. A titanic Mamenchisaurus. A complete Shunosaurus, and an Omeisaurus with its improbably long neck and absurdly small body. And a perfect Tsintaosaurus that was at least a meter taller than any specimen Wen had ever seen.

There were many others. Too many to count.

Hundreds of them.

Species Wen had never seen before. Species he was positive were unknown to the fossil record. He stood there, trembling, tears running down his face.

Yao came hurrying up to him and gently took the Maglite from his hand.

“How…?” Wen asked. He gripped the professor’s arm with desperate force. “Who did this? How could they? I don’t understand. You must explain this to me…”

“Doctor,” Yao said in a haunted, hollow voice, “this is still not what I brought you here to see.”

It took Wen several seconds to process that statement. “W-what?”

“We don’t have much time. The news about this find is already out. One of the diggers working on my team is a spy. I didn’t know it at first, but I know it now. I caught him making a cell phone call to one of your government offices. Officials are probably already on their way.”

Wen’s heart nearly stopped in his chest.

“But I wanted you to see this before they arrive,” said Yao. “You deserve to see this.”

Yao raised the flashlight again. Not toward the wall this time, but into the center of the chamber. Dr. Wen’s eyes followed the beam.

“No,” he said.

Yao said nothing. He walked over and switched on the strings of lightbulbs that he and his assistants — his terrified assistants — had erected here in the darkness.

“No,” said Wen once more.

Yao nodded.

They stood looking at the thing that sat in the middle of the chamber.

A thing that was far more impossible than the perfectly round walls and museum of dinosaurs.

“No,” said Wen one more time. “Dear God … no.”

Ten hours later

Dr. Wen Zhengming lay dying.

All the heat was leaving his body, spreading out around him in a dark pool.

“I don’t … understand…,” he said, but his voice was a whisper, only the ghost of a sound, growing fainter even to his own ears.

He turned his head. It was so hard to do, requiring so much of what little strength he had left. But he had to do it. Not to look at the group of men who stood a few yards away. Not even to stare reproachfully at the government officer who had shot him.

No, Wen needed to see it again.

The thing that Professor Yao had brought him down here to see.

The impossible thing.

By turning his head, Wen saw the other shapes that lay sprawled on the ground. The young woman from Senegal. The Norwegian boy. The young assistant. Others. The whole international team. And all his own people. Sprawled in heaps. Dying or dead. Sacrificed on the altar of political and military gain.

Wen distantly wondered how the government would explain these deaths to the rest of the world. A plane crash over the ocean, perhaps. Something where the bodies could never be recovered.

His own death? That would be easier. He was old. He had a well-documented heart condition. Would they spin the story so that his heart attack was brought on by grief and shock over the deaths of so many of his colleagues?

He coughed wetly.

I have blood in my lungs, he thought. Would that make it easier to die? Would it make it hurt more or last longer?

He had never thought that he could be afraid of death. As an archaeologist, he worked among old bones every day, and each fragment was proof that nothing and no one lived forever. If they left him here, left him to turn to bones down here in this cave … Wen could bear that. Perhaps his ghost would spend a thousand years studying the gigantic skeletons that lined the walls. There were worse hells and no better heavens that he could imagine.

The group of men began walking and Wen watched them pace off the thing in the center of the cavern. The one who had shot him — Colonel Li — still held his pistol, though now the barrel pointed to the stone floor as he followed behind the group of scientists sent by the Fourth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security. Wen had been compelled to report what Yao had found. There was no way to avoid it.

Yao had begged Wen to be allowed to communicate the information to his own people back in the United States, but Wen had refused. They had to follow proper protocols.

Proper.

Now those protocols were playing out. Yao lay ten feet away with half his face shot away. Their colleagues were all dead. Each “properly” handled by the uniformed thugs who accompanied the science team here from the capital.

Wen tried to hear what these men — these killers — were saying, but he could only hear fragments. His ears rang constantly and everything was getting so dim, so far away, as if the entire cavern was receding from him.

“… there is no other opening…,” said one of the scientists.

“… since that is clearly impossible, we should search for an entrance cave…”

“… ground-penetrating radar…”

The voices faded and then came back as if the men were casually pacing the room while engaged in an idle conversation. So strange, thought Wen.

“… such a shame that it is so badly damaged…”

“… there are several components in perfect shape, Admiral Xiè…”

“… and a line on more. My sources inside the Majestic program assure me they can smuggle…”

“… with what we already have, Admiral Xiè, perhaps it will be enough to rebuild the Dragon Engine…”

The voices faded again. They were only fragments anyway. Some of them made sense, most were meaningless. Or, they were becoming meaningless as Wen became detached from the moment. Perhaps detached from himself.

A tear burned at the corner of his eye. As stunning as this discovery was, it was not his discovery. It did not matter to him as much as it mattered to the others. To Yao. To the government. To these men from the Fourth Bureau or the uniformed killers who traveled with them. They were all focused on the silvery wreckage in the center of the cavern. They barely even looked at the walls. At all the wonders there in the walls.

All those dinosaurs.

All that perfection. Not a bone out of place. Not a bone missing.

Hundreds of them. At least half of them unknown in the fossil record.

Would these government thugs even stop to consider them?

Or would they blast them apart in order to remove the wreckage from this chamber?

Wen closed his eyes for a moment, tasting the grief of that potential loss.

When he opened his eyes again he was much colder. The men were nowhere in sight. He had no idea how much time had passed. The chamber was silent. The others from Yao’s team and his own lay in utter stillness. How Wen — the oldest and frailest of them all — lingered while the others had died was a mystery. Wen doubted that he was in any way “luckier” than the dead. They were already beyond pain and fear, and he was not.

Wen lay with his face pointing toward the twisted metal.

“No,” he said in his ghost of a voice.

This is not what he wanted to see with his last moments of sight.

He wanted to see his precious dinosaurs.

One last time.

Wen summoned the last of his strength, took a final ragged breath, and tried to turn over. It was a simple act, if he could move far enough then gravity would do the rest, and he would see the bones in the walls.

He tried.

With everything he had left, he tried.

But his body would not move. He was too weak. There was simply not enough left in him to turn even the frail scarecrow of a body that he owned. Not even his head would move now.

Red poppies blossomed in his eyes and the breath burst from Wen in a final gasp of defeat.

He lay there and all that he could see was the impossible machine.

It was the last thing he saw as the darkness of the cavern swallowed him whole.

Chapter Fifty-eight

“Talk to me, Bug,” said Church in a voice that was getting harsher by the minute.

“I can’t break through the jammer, boss. Joe’s going to have to get to a landline or a computer with a cable. Whoever these bastards are, they’re killing the air.”

“Is Joe all right?” asked Rudy, but before Church could reply his phone rang.

Church frowned at the name on the screen display. He hit a button to mute Bug and held up a finger for Rudy to remain silent as he answered the call. “Yes, General,” he said. He listened for a moment. “Yes, you can send me a coded video. I’m in a secure location.”

Church hit a few keys on his laptop and watched a video file, but he did not turn the laptop so Rudy could see it. Church plugged earbuds into the speaker jack and listened in silence as he watched.

Rudy crossed his legs and sat back as he studied Church’s face. After two years he was still trying to catalog the man’s reactions. They were very subtle and generally too well hidden to read at all. Once in a while, though, that iron control slipped.

He watched it slip now, and he wondered which of the day’s crises was unfastening the bolts on that legendary calm.

“General…,” said Church after the video was done, “tell me everything you know about this.”

The conversation was mostly one-sided, with the general doing most of the talking. As Church had not put it on speaker there was little more than a few soft encouraging grunts to go on. That, and a gradual change in Church’s body language. The man slowly straightened as if his body was being pulled into a posture of terrible tension. The hand holding the phone was white-knuckle tight. The other hand lay on the desk and Mr. Church slowly opened it, pressing the palm and splayed fingers flat and pressing them against the polished wood.

“General,” said Church, “there is a high probability that this incident relates to what’s happening in Washington right now, and to other matters currently unfolding. You will need to speak with General Croft for further information. He will inform you of today’s … developments. Speak to no one else about this. Detain everyone who was there and confiscate all cell phones. No, I don’t care who they are. This matter supersedes all other concerns. Lock it down, General. Do it now.”

Church closed the phone and set it down on the desk. He removed his tinted glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“I’m almost afraid to ask what that was about,” said Rudy.

Before he answered, Church removed a pocket handkerchief and cleaned his glasses. He kept his eyes down, focused on the phone as he did so, and Rudy knew that Church was unwilling to let anyone see his eyes without the barrier of the tinted lenses.

He put the glasses on, took a long breath and breathed it out through his nostrils.

“That was Major General Armand Schmidt,” said Church. “He’s in charge of the stealth aircraft program out at Dugway along with his aide, Colonel Betty Snider.”

Rudy nodded. “I believe I met him at a State Department dinner. I took him to be a highly competent officer.”

“He is, and he’s not prone to hysteria. However, today they were doing a mock combat test of the Locust FB-119, advanced-design stealth fighter-bomber.”

He turned his laptop around, pulled the earbuds from the jack and replayed the video. When it was over, Rudy found that he could not speak. He tried, but he simply could not articulate his reaction to what he’d just seen.

“What do you think, Doctor?”

Rudy found his tongue. “Is this … is this … I mean, this can’t be real … Can it?”

Church did not bother to answer.

Of course it was real.

Rudy felt as if the floor was dropping away from under him. His hands were ice cold and his mouth was dry.

“What is happening?” he asked.

Church looked at him and said, plainly and frankly, “I don’t know.”

Chapter Fifty-nine

While Bug labored to solve the problem with the jammer, Dr. William Hu shifted his focus back to the project he’d been working on for the last few days.

The microwave pulse pistol.

The lab was filled was smoke, and he engaged the blowers while his assistants cleared away the debris and erected a fresh stack of bricks. Currently the microwave pulse pistol was clamped to a cart and placed twenty feet from the target. At five, ten, and fifteen feet the destructive power of the MPP was appalling.

And delicious.

This was fun, this was his idea of science. Not that UFO bullshit Joe Ledger and that daffy broad in Maryland were trying to get him to believe. You could measure this, you could prove this. Who cared if someone stomped out a crop circle on the White House lawn? Those things could be faked.

But this — the guns — this was real science.

Hu grinned as he paced off twenty-five feet, then locked the cart’s wheels. The assistants patted the target — a wall of red bricks, cinder blocks, and a couple of big river rocks brought in from outside the Hangar.

His assistant, Melanie, clipped leads to various places on the gun and watched the meter of a small device she held.

“This is crazy, Doctor,” she said. “The meter still reads 94.189 percent after nine test fires in five minutes.”

“I know,” said Hu, “I love it.”

They grinned at each other like a couple of kids.

Hu turned and pulled his protective goggles into place. “Clear the firing line!”

Everyone moved behind thick Lucite shields.

“Firing,” he yelled and pulled the trigger.

Tok!

The wall of debris exploded.

“Outstanding,” cried Hu. “Absolutely outstanding. Melanie, is there any power drain?”

Melanie ran the meter again and shook her head. “Ninety-three point seven seven six percent.”

They tried five more distances, and only when they neared forty feet did the destructive force of the MPP begin to diminish. By sixty feet it had little effect.

They kept testing the gun. Against blocks of ice and sheets of metal, firing through glass, firing at sides of beef to determine the effect on tissue. The gun had been delivered to Hu late on Thursday and now it was Sunday. It had been fired a total of 607 times. On arrival at Hu’s lab the gun had a charge of 99.00034 percent. After all those firings, after all that destruction, it had a charge of 90.0957 percent.

Hu removed the clamps and picked up the pistol.

It was ugly in design, but beautiful to his eyes.

And those numbers. The range, the effect, the incredible amount of power held in reserve.

“Who made this thing?” asked Melanie. It was probably the hundredth time she or someone at the Hangar had asked that question. “Who could have made it?”

Hu shook his head. Over the last couple of days he had spoken discretely to several who were on the cutting edge of microwave technology and they told him that they were decades away from a man-portable microwave gun like this pistol. The current estimate was that to fire a gun like this you’d need a battery the size of a Jeep Cherokee. And yet when they’d dismantled the gun, all they found in the battery compartment was a piece of drab metal approximately the size of an old metal cigarette lighter. The metal had no discernible features, and the gun fired no matter which end of the battery was inserted first. Ledger had found a second battery in the pocket of one of the men who’d ambushed him this morning.

Then Melanie stuck a pin in Hu’s enthusiasm. She got a call, listened, frowned, hung up, and said, “That was Mitchell in metallurgy. He finished his analysis of the scrapings he did on the other battery.”

“And?”

“And he’s never seen anything like it. He looked at it under the electron microscope and it appears to be an alloy composed of two metals. It’s approximately twenty percent iridium, but the other metal is unknown.”

“Meaning that he hasn’t identified it yet?”

“No,” she said, “meaning that it is a metal currently unknown to science.”

Chapter Sixty

“Junie,” I yelled, “do you have a landline?”

“No, only my cell,” she said, rising shakily up from behind the couch. “Wait — there’s one in the lighthouse. Emergency use only, it goes direct to the Coast Guard.”

Even before she finished saying it she was running toward the kitchen. I followed and tried to get ahead of her to body-block her view of whatever Ghost left of the Closers, but I was a step too late. She did not scream. Instead it was an intake of breath so deep and sharp that it was like a reverse scream, all of the terror driving back into her. Ghost acts like a puppy a lot of the time and he can be as playful as a house pet, but not when he’s working. He is by breeding and training a combat dog. A fighter and killer true to all of the lupine genes that fire in him every time the moment turns ugly. What he left was a man, but you had to look closely to tell. We didn’t look all that close.

I gave Junie a gentle push and she turned away, shaking her head in denial and disbelief. She looked up at me with her troubled blue eyes.

“Is this what you do?” she asked in a voice that was filled with pain.

I turned away, not willing — or perhaps able — to let her read that particular truth. It was a coin I did not want to spend, and it was a fee that would hurt her to accept.

Or so I thought.

Her fingers touched my cheek and she gently, firmly turned my head so that I faced her again. I looked into her eyes and searched for revulsion, for the judgment that was my due for being who and what I was. Inside my head the Killer tried to stare her down, but even he could not. Maybe I’m not sure who looked back at her. Cop, Killer, Civilized Man. Or someone else.

Pain flickered across Junie Flynn’s face. It darted like lightning through her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

Then it was she who turned away. Not because she was unable to hold that contact, but because she had seen what there was to see. She passed me and reached for the handle of a door set between two pantries, turned it, and went through it.

I took a ragged breath and followed.

Beyond the door was the huge, round base of the lighthouse and there was a wooden stairway winding its way around and up toward the light. The moment kept wanting to whisper symbolic meanings to me. I told it to shut the fuck up.

Junie was already running up the stairs, and I followed.

The stairs vanished through the floor of a wooden platform. Junie disappeared through that. As I came up through the floor, I saw that we were right at the top of the tower, with heavy windows in metal frames on all sides. The view was magnificent, with the October lushness of Elk Neck State Park behind us, the bluffs below, and the lovely bay spread out in front. In any other moment it would have been a breathtaking view. I was feeling less touristy than I might otherwise, however. Junie crossed to a serviceable-looking desk on which were various logbooks, charts, timetables, and a big, old-fashioned white phone.

She picked up the handset and listened. Her eyes lit and she smiled. “There’s a dial tone!”

Junie began punching numbers. I bent close and listened through five excruciating rings before a male voice answered, “Coast Guard, this is Petty Officer First Class Johnson Byrnes. Please identify and state the nature of your emergency.”

I snatched the phone from her hand. “Petty Officer Byrnes, this is Captain Joseph Ledger with the National Security Agency. I am calling from the Turkey Point Lighthouse in Elk Neck State Park, Maryland. We are under attack by multiple hostiles. This is a terrorist attack. This is a matter of national security. Put your commanding officer on the phone right now.”

Byrnes began to react as if my call were a joke, but his training overrode his natural skepticism. He said, “Sir, please hold the line.”

A moment later an older, gruffer voice came on the line, “This is Command Master Chief Petty Officer Robles. Please identify yourself.”

“Command Master Chief, this is Captain Joseph Ledger, currently attached to the National Security Agency and working under an executive order.” I gave him our location. “We are under attack by hostile forces of unknown type or number. We have three KIA and multiple hostiles down. All radio, sat-phone, and cell-phone communication are being jammed. I need you to send all available assistance. I need you to contact my superiors at the following number.” I gave them a special number that would ring on Church’s cell. “I have one female civilian with me and a white shepherd combat dog. We are in the lighthouse and if possible we will remain here until assistance arrives. We are armed.”

I waited for him to say something.

He didn’t.

He couldn’t. The line was dead.

I set the phone down.

Junie asked. “What’s wrong?”

“They cut the phones, too.”

She looked around as if expecting to see Closers leaping out of the shadows.

“Do you think he understood what you were saying?” she asked breathlessly. “Do you think they understood?”

I wanted to lie to her, to tell her that Robles heard and understood it all. But, she was Junie Flynn and you can’t lie to Junie Flynn.

“God…,” she whispered.

I took her by the shoulders and turned her around to face me. “Junie … can you think of any reason why these Closers would want to kill you?”

“W-what?”

“Downstairs … they weren’t after me. They had your picture, they were hunting for you. Why?”

She hesitated, clearly unwilling to tell me. Her pale face flushed red. Was it tension? Embarrassment? Shame?

“Joe,” she said tentatively, “I … may have done something really stupid.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“I think I may have gotten us killed.”

Chapter Sixty-one

Rudy Sanchez perched on the edge of the visitor chair, feeling immensely useless as Mr. Church and the rest of the DMS threw its resources against the current problem — including the loss of communication with Joe Ledger. Rudy’s stomach was turning slowly to a soup of hot acid.

Across the desk from him, Church was making a series of phone calls. To the acting president, to Linden Brierly, to Aunt Sallie, to two members of the Joint Chiefs, to four separate DMS station chiefs, to the Coast Guard and the Maryland State Police. At least half of his efforts were bent toward getting help out to Joe Ledger, but so far there was nothing Rudy could do to help. His advice was not even sought.

In a moment of dismal depression he mused that, as a trauma specialist, he might only be able to help Joe after this whole thing was over. Or, worse yet, to help those who cared about Joe if this situation continued to spin downward. He wished Circe was here. She was one of the world’s top analysts in matters of terrorism and, no matter whatever else this was, this matter was terrifying. Privately Rudy admitted that he simply would not mind having his hand held by the woman he loved.

Then the screen on the wall flashed and Bug reappeared. “Boss,” he said to Church, “we got a problem. Actually — maybe two problems.”

“Of course we do,” Rudy said to himself.

Church took a breath. “Tell me.”

“This is about our expert. It’s about Junie Flynn. I’ve been doing deep background on her, and you know she was adopted, right?”

“Yes.”

“No, she wasn’t.”

Church said nothing.

“I ran her adoption records and they’re passable fakes. They used that old trick of lifting a Social Security number from a real orphan who died a few days after being born. Junie was never in an orphanage. The paperwork was entered into the system by someone who’s pretty good at this stuff. Good enough that it took MindReader to figure it out.”

“Then who is she?” asked Rudy.

“Good question,” said Bug. “Here’s more. She was homeschooled until she went to college.”

“So…?”

“I went into the system to pull any records I could find on her. Medical, vaccination, anything.”

“And?” asked Church.

“There’s nothing.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rudy. “Have her records been removed?”

“No,” said Bug, “if they’d been expunged it would leave a trace in the system and MindReader’s programmed to look for that sort of thing. You can’t hide from MindReader…”

“But…”

“Unless you’re not in the system at all, and Junie Flynn is definitely not in the system. She’s never been in a hospital, at least not under that name or the name on the phony birth certificate. She’s never been to a dentist, she’s never been vaccinated, she’s never been to an ER. Never been to a shrink, as far as I can tell.”

“How thoroughly have you looked?” asked Church.

“I got a couple of guys on this and they’re going all the way down the rabbit hole, but Alice isn’t there.”

Church pursed his lips and said nothing.

Rudy asked, “But what does that mean? Is she … a spy? A mole, or something like that? Is she operating under a false identity?”

“We don’t know,” said Bug. “It’s not Witness Protection or anything like that, and I don’t make her for a deep-cover mole.”

“Doubtful,” agreed Church.

“As far as the system goes,” continued Bug, “prior to entering college she didn’t exist. Most of what we have is really recent stuff, what she put on her Web site and the content of her podcasts.”

“Put people on those podcasts,” said Church. “I want summaries of everything she’s said.”

Bug made a strange face. “Way ahead of you. I have a whole bunch of my guys on that. I started them on the podcasts as soon as Joe headed out to Turkey Point. Most of the stuff is general conspiracy theory material, and a lot of speculation on the Black Book, M3, all of that. But then Joe suggested we listen to last night’s podcast. If the thing with the president wasn’t already taking up so much manpower we’d have gotten to this sooner. But man-oh-man-oh-man.”

“What is it?” asked Rudy, gripping the arms of his chair.

“Last night Junie Flynn announced that she has obtained a complete copy of the Majestic Black Book and that tonight she plans on sending it to every newspaper and university in the world. And to every nonprofit organization, every grassroots organization…”

Rudy gasped. “She … she lied to us.”

Church sat back in his chair. “So it seems.”

“I’m embarrassed to say that,” Rudy said, “except for the obvious deception about her source, I believed that she was being straight with us. I caught none of the eye shifts, body language changes, or facial tics typical of someone who is lying. And considering the pressure of the situation, at least some of those elements should have been there.”

“What do you infer from that?” asked Church.

“That she is either a very practiced liar, or she is — for some reason — unaware that she is lying.”

“No other options occur to you, Doctor?”

“Not immediately.”

Rudy saw a twitch on Church’s mouth that might have been a smile. “Let me know if you have any additional insights to share.”

“If I may,” said Rudy, “Bug — could you go through those podcasts more carefully? If she’s made this bold a move then there may be some precipitating event. She may have hinted at it in some way that will give us a clue as to what she has planned.”

“‘Planned’?” asked Bug. “I told you, she’s going to release the Black Book.”

“There has to be more to it than that. She’s openly challenging M3. Surely she knew that they would respond. If they killed her parents, then she would have to be aware of the threat to herself. Until now she’s only talked about the Black Book. Now she not only claims to have it, but has threatened to release it in a way that will force M3 to move against her, to stop her.”

“I agree,” said Church.

“We need to figure out what game she’s playing.”

Chapter Sixty-two

I stared at her.

“What do you mean you got us killed? Junie … what did you do?”

She hugged her arms to her body, but a shiver swept through her, raising goose flesh on her skin. “Joe … when we were on with your boss, Mr. Church, and those other men … I was scared. I…” She shook her head like she was trying to shake off angry bees. “It’s so big! The president, the crop circle … this is the kind of stuff I podcast about and write about, but now it’s here, it’s right here, and I guess I kind of freaked. I flaked out on you. And the thing is … I still don’t know how much I can trust you.”

“Jesus Christ, Junie, I just saved your life from a hit team.”

“I know…”

“What more do you want?”

She stood several feet away from me, near the top of the stairs, tension rippling through her as if she was trying to decide whether to tell me or to make a break for it down those stairs. I tried to get inside her head and see it from her perspective, but maybe she’d lived in the world of conspiracy theories and paranoia too long. Maybe a lack of trust was the only thing she could rely on. And really, who was I to her? Sure, we shared a couple of freaky moments of subliminal communication, but who’s to say that wasn’t brain chemistry misfiring because of all the trauma? Hey, it’s not like I’m not crazy already, so I could have been reading a lot more into my first encounter with Junie than was ever there; and I didn’t have Rudy riding shotgun on my sanity right now.

“Joe … I’ll make a deal with you,” she said at last.

“Can’t wait to hear this, but sure, go ahead, let’s see what’s behind door number one.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. I’m like this when I’m serious.”

That probably wasn’t as comforting or amusing as intended. She filed it away.

“Here’s the deal … you get us out of here, you get us somewhere totally safe, and I will put the Majestic Black Book into your hands.”

I stared at her.

“What?”

“That’s the deal.”

“You have the book?” I growled. “After all this … you have the damn book?”

“Yes.” There was some hesitation in her voice, but she repeated her answer. “Yes. What’s it going to be, Joe? Do we have a deal?”

I towered over her, glowered at her. I wanted to yell at her, shake her.

What I did, though, was smile.

“Either you are one cool bitch,” I said, “or you’re every bit as crazy as I am.”

Her smile was of a lower wattage. “Do we have a deal?”

I stuck out my hand. “We have a deal.”

We shook on it.

Outside, Ghost suddenly started barking.

Then we heard the helicopters.

“The Coast Guard! Thank God,” she said as we raced to the windows.

There were two of them, coming in low and fast a hundred yards above the blue water. Coast Guard helicopters are red and white, easy to spot against the sky or sea.

These helos were as black as the bottomless well of despair that had opened in my heart.

There was a puff of smoke, small and pale in the distance. It was a slender thing and I knew it for what it was. I’ve seen so many of them, up close and mounted. I’ve seen what they can do. A hundred pounds of metal and wire and chemicals; sixty-four inches long. Sleek and silver in the sunlight, moving at Mach 1.3. Nine hundred and fifty miles per hour. Like an arrow shot by a god of war, the Hellfire missile flew toward us.

“Run!” I screamed as I hooked my arm around her and hurled her toward the stairs.

Above and around us the world seemed to disintegrate into a burning fireball of pure destructive force.

Hellfire without a doubt.

Chapter Sixty-three

“Give me something to do,” Rudy pleaded. “If I simply sit here and do nothing while all this is happening I’ll go insane.”

“As it happens, Doctor,” said Church, “there is something you can do.”

He handed Rudy a sheet of paper on which was a list of names accompanied by notations about each person’s credentials and contact information. Several of the names were highlighted in yellow.

“These are some experts who might be able to provide some useful information relative to this case.”

“I recognize some of these people. George Noory? He has a conspiracy theory radio show. And Bill Birnes, he publishes UFO Magazine. They’re both on TV a lot in all those UFO specials.”

“Yes. The others are experts as well. Some areas of expertise overlap. You can speak frankly to any of the people whose names are highlighted.”

“Why them?”

Church gave him the smallest of enigmatic smiles. “They are friends of mine in the industry.”

Chapter Sixty-four

We ran and hell followed after.

The whole lighthouse shuddered like a man does when he’s taken a bullet but hasn’t yet realized he’s dead. The walls cracked, crooked lines ran from top to bottom. The wooden stairs groaned as the bolts tore themselves free from the juddering structure.

“Run!” I screamed.

But she was running as fast as she could. As fast as it was possible to run down a set of stairs that was rippling like a serpent, twisting itself into an Escher-esque impossibility. The top of the lighthouse was a fireball. Flaming debris rained down on us. There was a great cry of tortured metal and I looked up to see the massive reflector come plunging through the burning deck to drop like a fiery comet to the concrete floor below. I dove for Junie and nearly crushed her against the wall as tons of metal and wood and flame smashed past us, the jagged steel beams of the reflector’s support reaching out to pluck at the handrail.

“God!” Junie shrieked.

The stairs were starting to collapse. I grabbed Junie’s hand and pulled her as I ran down. Shocked and terrified as she was, she ran with me. Civilian she might be, but she was not falling apart. Chunks of building stone tried to crush us. The stairs wanted to die beneath us. Heat bloomed up from the growing mound of debris that now filled the center of the lighthouse.

There was a huge crack and I felt the whole last section of stairs cant outward, reeling like a suicidal drunk toward the fire.

“Junie — jump!”

Her hand locked tight around mine and then we were in the air with nothing under us but hot air and a hard landing.

Ten feet doesn’t sound like a lot of distance to fall.

It is.

As we hit, I dropped into a crouch, taking as much of the impact as I could in my calves and thighs. I pulled Junie against my chest and twisted so that we hit the ground on my side and rolled over and over like a log, sloughing off the foot pounds of force. But I rolled a half turn too far. Into the edges of the burning rubble. Flames leaped onto my shirt and jeans.

With a howl of pain I thrust Junie away from me and I tried to roll fast enough to smother the flames. Then a shadow passed in front of me and Junie was there, on her feet already, tearing off her coat, swatting at me with it, killing the fires that wanted to consume me.

I scrambled to my feet, my clothes smoking but no longer burning.

“Thanks,” I said breathlessly, and she managed, despite everything, to give me a crooked grin on a soot-smudged and fear-flushed face.

One hell of a woman.

There was another cracking sound and we looked up in horror to see a massive fissure snapping its way down the wall.

“It’s all coming down,” she cried.

“We have to get out of here,” I snapped. “Right damn now.”

Junie tossed her smoking coat away as we headed for the back door to the house. The door was still ajar and I shouldered through it, drawing my gun, pointing the barrel everywhere I looked. There was no one in the kitchen except the dead man Ghost had killed, sprawled in a lake of blood.

I heard Junie make a soft sound, a grunt that was an inarticulate and visceral reaction to the presence of violent death.

“Don’t look at it,” I said, but it was too feeble and too late.

Junie edged around the blood as if it were a hole into which she could topple and fall. I jumped over the corpse and ran to the window. She crowded in beside me. Perhaps it was an accident or maybe she had that much presence of mind, but she pressed against my left hand rather than my gun hand.

Outside, the helicopters were still hovering above us, admiring the destruction they’d wrought. One was stationed high, missiles aimed for another blast. The other was lower, angled sideways with the bay door open and the ugly snout of a minigun pointed straight at the house.

But we were inside, in shadows, and they couldn’t see us.

“What are they doing?” asked Junie.

“Watching to see if anyone comes running outside.”

“What can we do?”

Without getting too close to the window glass, I angled my head to look up and down the yard. I spotted Ghost. He was alive, crouched under a pine tree forty feet from the house. He looked terrified.

Lot of that going around.

“Are we dead?” gasped Junie.

It was so strangely worded a question that I turned to her. Usually people ask Are we trapped? or Can we get out?

Are we dead?

That was a different kind of question and it opened within my mind a window of speculation about her. It also provoked a response from my inner committee. The Cop barked a sharp denial. Cold and certain. The Warrior rose up and thumped his chest to prove that he was the toughest ape in the tree. But the Modern Man, the quietest and least often heard from of my inner selves, spoke in the clearest voice.

“No, Junie,” he said, using my mouth, my voice, “we’re going to live.”

It was a clumsy line, awkwardly phrased, a bit of bad melodrama. And yet I knew that I meant it, and I knew that those words conveyed more than their surface meaning. I looked into Junie Flynn’s blue eyes and saw understanding and trust and — something else. It looked like sadness, but she gripped my wrist and gave me a firm nod.

“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

We backed away from the window and ran through the house to the front door. The dead men lay where I’d left them. Inside and out.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Right now they don’t know if we’re alive or dead. They’re going to shoot at anything that moves.”

“What do we do?”

“We give them something to shoot at.” I pointed to a stand of sassafras trees thirty yards to the right of the open door. “I’m going to draw their fire. You run for those trees like your ass is on fire.”

She frowned. “What about you?”

“I’ll be right behind you. Their focus is going to be the kitchen. As soon as you hear them open up, you move.” I touched her cheek. “No matter what happens, stay low and get lost in the woods. You know this forest, you live here. Find people. Find help.”

I fished a card out of my pocket. All it had on it was a phone number.

“As soon as you can, call this number. They’ll connect you with my boss, the man you spoke to earlier.”

She glanced at the card and handed it back.

“No, you’ll—”

Junie recited the number back perfectly and tapped her head. “Like an elephant, Joe, I never forget.”

I grinned at her. “Good brain you have there.”

“At times.”

As I made to move away, Junie suddenly grabbed my shirt and pulled me close for a very brief and totally unexpected kiss.

“For luck,” she said as she pushed me away.

I goggled at her. “Wow,” I said.

“Go!” she ordered.

I went.

The chopper with the minigun was slowly descending, clearly preparing to land on the lawn beside the flower garden. The kitchen was filling with smoke and I realized that pretty soon the entire place was going to be a bonfire. Junie was going to lose everything she owned. That gave me a flash of panic and I spun and ran back to the living room.

“Junie — the fire’s spreading.”

“No!”

“Your computer, the records about the Black Book. We need to get that stuff — we need to take that with us.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I have it all stored on my Web site in blind pages, and I’ve attached a lot of it to e-mails I sent myself. There’s some stored in cloud servers, too. The rest of it…” She went to touch her head, but her hand faltered. She took a breath and tapped her skull. “I’ve got the rest of it here. I don’t forget things.”

Smoke was coming up from between the floorboards now. Some of the debris must have punched through into the cellar and now the fire was burning up. We were out of time.

“We need that information,” I warned Junie.

“Then we have to get out of here. Get me to a good computer with a secure Wi-Fi and I’ll get you everything you need.”

I nodded and ran through the smoke into the kitchen. The chopper was ten feet above the grass.

Scary in one way, perfect in another.

With my Beretta in a two-handed grip, I leaned my thighs against the sink, aimed out the window and squeezed the trigger. The first shot hit the black metal beside the open door. The second shot hit the Closer who was crouched over the minigun. Not sure where I hit him, but it was solid enough to punch him back into the shadows of the helo. I paused to wait for the next man to swing into position to return fire. He did, leaping forward to grab the minigun, swinging the barrel around toward the house.

I took him in the face.

It was a long shot and I was aiming center mass, but it clipped him right above his snarling mouth. Lucky shot for me, damned unlucky for him.

Then the pilot turned the bird to bring his 30mm gunpods to bear.

“Kiss my ass,” I yelled, then spun and ran like a son of a bitch for the living room even as the first bullets began tearing the rear of the house into splinters, broken glass and flying debris.

Junie was right there and I did not even pause. I shoved her toward the door and I was pleased to see that she took the force of my push and used it to settle into a nice, fast, efficient sprint. For a tall woman she ran well.

The machine gun fire was continuous, the sound enormous; with that din we never heard the sounds of the other helo firing its rockets.

We were a dozen feet from the sassafras trees when the house exploded.

A huge, rolling, tumbling ball of superheated gases chased us across the lawn, caught us, plucked us off the grass, and hurled us screaming into the forest.

Chapter Sixty-five

Tull pulled to the curb outside of a real estate office that had a small parking lot. The windows were dark and the lot was empty. The lot was partly sheltered from the street by the exterior wall of a Dunkin’ Donuts, so Tull pulled into the Dunkin’ lot and killed the engine. Tull and Aldo got out, opened the back, stripped the cover off the false tire and removed several items from the safe. They packed everything into a pair of nylon gym bags, closed the car, and walked around to the back of the real estate office.

The place had an expensive security system. Aldo smirked at it. They were inside less than two minutes later.

The middle room had no windows, which allowed them to turn on lights without drawing attention. They cleared everything off a big worktable, and Aldo began emptying the bags while Tull set up the Ghost Box. Once it was booted, the system hacked the Wi-Fi, bypassing all security as easily as knife through wet tissue.

“Okay,” said Tull, “I’m recalling the pigeon drones. Open the window in the back room.”

“We’re going to be deaf for a while. Can we risk that?”

Tull shrugged. “Not going to matter much if we move fast.”

Chapter Sixty-six

Rudy Sanchez sat in his office at the Warehouse. The door was locked and the anti-intrusion devices activated, however he felt as if covert eyes were peering at him. He scolded himself for allowing the pervasive air of paranoia to set its hooks in him. Rudy prided himself on his detachment, but today he found that increasingly difficult to manage.

The list of names and contact numbers Mr. Church had given him was placed neatly in the center of his desk blotter. Rudy fitted a Bluetooth onto his ear and punched in the first of the numbers. The call was picked up after a few rings.

“Hello?”

“Is this George Noory?” asked Rudy.

“Sure. Who’s calling?”

Church had given Rudy a certain phrase to use when reaching out to the names he’d indicated were “friends in the industry.”

“A mutual friend told me to tell you that ‘Eden still burns.’”

There was a profound silence at the other end. George Noory was the popular host of the overnight radio show Coast to Coast AM, which was broadcast to well over five hundred radio stations as well as streamed over the Internet to more than ten million people a night. Rudy was a long-time listener and enjoyed the often lively discussions of everything from Bigfoot to flying saucers. More than once he caught elements related to DMS cases and he found it fascinating how public perception often spun stories into wild new forms. Looking back on those shows — and now knowing that Noory was a friend of Church’s — Rudy appreciated the subtle way in which the host dialed down needless panic and kept the discussions in the realm of intelligent speculation.

Noory said, “You’re a friend of the Deacon?”

“I am,” said Rudy. “Dr. Rudy Sanchez, I am—”

“The house psychiatrist at the DMS,” cut in Noory.

“You’ve heard of me?”

Instead of answering, Noory said, “What can I do for you?”

“The DMS is currently involved in a case that includes elements that are somewhat outside of our usual comfort zone.”

“With the things you fellows deal with I’m surprised anything’s outside of your comfort zone.”

“Unfortunately the Fates seem to take each new day as a challenge when it comes to the DMS.”

Noory laughed. “What are they throwing at you today?”

“We … have been tasked with obtaining the Majestic Black Book.”

“Wow,” said Noory.

“You’ve heard of it, I gather.”

“Of course. How can I help?”

“We need to put together a list of persons most likely to possess a copy.”

“Well, first understand that there aren’t ‘copies’ of the Black Book. There’s the original and that’s it.”

“Okay.”

“Are you familiar with MJ-12 and M3, or do we need to start at square one?”

“No, I’ve actually read a couple of Junie Flynn’s books.”

“Good. Are you talking to her, too?”

“We’re working on that but there have been some complications. Mr. Church said that you were also an expert on the book.”

“Kind of him, but I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve had Junie on the show a dozen times, but she’s the one who knows everything.”

“Miss Flynn was able to provide us with a list of possible current or former members of M3. If I share those names with you, might you be able to help us cull the list to the most likely? As Mr. Church is so fond of saying, time is not our friend.”

“I can’t make any promises, Doctor, but I can take a pretty solid swing at it. Is that the only thing Deacon wants from me?”

“Actually, I have a second request. This case involves groups of men Miss Flynn refers to as ‘Closers.’”

“Men in Black, sure.”

“I need everything you can tell me about them as well.”

Noory whistled. “Tall order. I hope you have a comfortable seat, Doctor, this might take a while.”

Chapter Sixty-seven

We slammed into the trees.

A month later and those trees would have been bare sticks and the crooked fingers of the countless branches would have plucked the skin from our bodies. But summer had lingered well into October and the trees were still thick with leaves. If those leaves were not as butter-soft now as they would have been in July, then at least there were a lot of them. Junie and I were curled into balls, arms wrapped around our heads, knees pulled to our chests like kids cannon-balling into a pool.

The blast punched us through the branches and gravity pulled us down to the thick grass. She hit first and then me, landing in a bad heels-first attempt at grace but powered by too much momentum. We tried to turn the landing into a clumsy run, but that was for shit. I lost sight of her as my body pitched forward and suddenly I was a big clunky wheel rolling over and over down a slope and I’m pretty sure I hit every goddamned moss-covered stone and fallen branch. Pain erupted all along my hide like a string of firecrackers. At the bottom of the slope I found a fragment of balance and ran halfway up the next hill to slough off the force. Everything hurt. My muscles hurt, my joints hurt, my teeth hurt, even my hair hurt. The world did a drunken Irish jig around me and my guts wanted to throw up everything I’d eaten since last March.

Instead, I whirled and looked for Junie. She was sprawled in a thick rhododendron. Her wild blond hair covered her face and one hand was flung out onto the grass. It was covered with dirt and ashes and blood.

She wasn’t moving.

“Junie!” I cried and then I was racing down the slope toward her, dropping to my knees, sliding the last yard, reaching for her.

Her fingers closed around my wrist.

“Joe…” Her voice was a faint echo of pain.

I tore leaves and branches out of the way. “Are you hurt?”

“I … don’t think so.”

There was a sound behind me and I whirled, one hand scrabbling for my pistol.

Which wasn’t there. I’d lost it in the trees.

Something moved quickly through the brush and then I saw a flash of white.

Junie looked past me. “Ghost!” she cried, and the fuzz monster came pelting down the slope. He was as much of a mess as we were. Sooty, singed, bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts, but for all that he was full of excitement to see me.

And he rushed right past me and began licking Junie’s face.

With dogs, it’s always an ego boost knowing that you’re the center of their universe.

“Hey,” I said, and Ghost gave me a quick token lick and half a wag.

He does more than that when he smells the neighbor dog’s ass.

Nice.

There was another sound from up the hill. Men shouting, and I realized with a start that the helicopters were no longer overhead. They must have touched down to deploy their crews of killers.

The Closers.

I pulled Junie down behind some wild shrubs.

“Persistent sons of bitches,” I said, then I gave her a shrewd look. “No offense, but this seems like a lot of firepower to kill one woman.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand it. I don’t know how to fight, they could have sent one man with a gun.”

“Why do they want to kill you at all?”

She didn’t answer.

“Junie … really, now’s not the time to be coy.”

“They’re coming!” she said urgently. Indeed they were, a line of men hurrying down into the woods.

We edged away and as soon as we could, we bent low and ran for our lives.

Chapter Sixty-eight

Ghost tore ahead of us, plunging through the brush, picking out a rough path for us, and we followed. Junie next, me behind her, watching her back. Studying this enigma of a woman.

Despite the shock and trauma of the last fifteen minutes, she ran well, moving with a flowing grace, her stamina impressive. I’m bigger, heavier, and I’ve had more wound-repair surgeries than most people have had hot dinners. On a short sprint I’m a pale Usain Bolt, but after about fifty yards my knee starts sending me hate mail. After half a mile at full speed I can feel each separate inch of scar tissue, each area of knitted bone, each screw and pin.

Junie Flynn ran like a deer. Ghost was right beside her.

“No,” I said in a grouchy wheeze, “I’m good, don’t stop for me.”

They didn’t hear me and weren’t meant to.

The land angled downward and wound through the woods. I looked over my shoulder and could no longer even see the column of smoke from the ruined lighthouse. The manicured lawn and beds of wildflowers were gone, replaced by a primal forest filled with deadfalls, gullies, hairy vines, twisted roots, and unexpected marshes. Once I heard a gunshot — the harsh boom of a shotgun — but it was ahead of us, far deeper into the woods. I almost stopped, but Junie flung two quick words over her shoulder.

“Deer hunters!”

Swell.

The lingering temperature kept fooling me about what time of year it was. It was fall, and fall meant hunting season was underway. Beginning in September, deer hunters begin walking these woods, armed with bows, shotguns, and even muzzle-loaders. And there are waterfowl blinds on the bay and along the Elk River. It would be so hilarious to have escaped helicopter-fired missiles and actual Men in Black with freaky weapons only to take a load of buckshot in the teeth. I’d die embarrassed.

As Junie jumped over a fallen log something fell from the loose pocket of her sweater. She felt it fall and turned, but I bent and picked it up.

It was one of the freaky-looking pistols. There was a single smudge of blood on the handle. Junie looked at it and then at me. She shrugged.

“I picked it up from the man in the kitchen.”

“Do you even know what it is?”

She nodded. “Microwave pulse pistol.”

“You say that like it’s something everyone knows about. I play with guns all the time and I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

Junie held her hand out for it, but I held on to it for a moment. “I need a gun.”

“You need to answer a bunch of questions before I put a weapon in your hand.”

We heard muffled shouts far behind us.

“Move!” I snapped, shoving the pistol into my waistband. Junie gave me a furious look, but she didn’t press the issue. Not then, anyway.

We cut across a well-worn hiking path that I knew as the Lighthouse Trail. Junie wanted to go that way, but I pulled her back into the brush.

“We’d make better time,” she insisted.

“And they’ll know that. This is where they’ll look for us.” I flipped open my rapid-response folding knife, went ten yards deeper into the brush, cut a leafy branch, and used it to wipe out our tracks on the road. Then I tossed some stones and loose gravel across the spot I’d cleared, and picked up some leaves and let them fall haphazardly over the stones. The old trick of brushing out your trail is useful for fooling the inept, but a trained tracker will see the distinctive erasure marks. The key is to then disguise the marks of the branch. Best way to do that is with casual debris. If I had time I’d have found some deer poop and dropped it there, too. The older and dryer, the better. But in a poopless scenario, stones and dry leaves would do it. You work with what you have.

We started running again and I took the branch with me, finally discarding it a quarter mile away.

“Junie,” I said, “we are going to have that talk.”

She looked at me, then turned away and pretended to concentrate on picking a path through the woods. If we were back in the world and if what happened this morning in D.C. hadn’t happened, then maybe I’d cut her some slack. She didn’t strike me as an agent of evil or a closet supervillain, but she was clearly hiding something. A little time alone in a holding cell or an interview room might give her a chance to sort through her options and make the right decision.

But we didn’t have that kind of time. We had no damn time at all. With the jammers on I couldn’t even check the countdown from the video, but I could feel the seconds burning, burning …

After ten more minutes I touched her shoulder to stop her, then sent Ghost out to scout. He’s trained to do that several ways. For this I wanted him to stay out there as long as he saw nothing. If there was anyone within five hundred yards of us, he would come back at a fast, silent run.

“Okay,” I said, “we’re good. Let’s talk.”

She kept moving.

I took a big step forward and wheeled around in front her, forcing her to a stumbling halt.

Junie exhaled a ball of tension and nearly collapsed. She put her face in her hands and sat that way on the weedy edge of a shallow ravine, feet propped on a rock, body hunched.

I let her have about two minutes of that.

“Junie,” I said, “we’re going to have to have a conversation, you know that, right?”

She said nothing.

“I’m not screwing around here. This is more than just your life.”

That did it. She raised her head and gave me a long, flat, uncompromising stare. “You think I don’t know that, Joe?”

“Frankly, sweetheart, I don’t know what you know. You’re hiding something from me and my patience for that kind of bullshit is wearing pretty thin.”

She whipped an arm out and stabbed a finger in the direction we’d come. “Those men are trying to do more than kill me,” she snapped. “They’re trying to kill the truth.”

“Oh, very nice. Can we use that as the tagline if someone makes a movie of your life?”

Junie glared at me. “I’m not being overly dramatic. The Closers want to shut me up because of something I said on my podcast last night.”

“Which was?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, then raised her face and looked up at the sky. “Last night I announced that I had a complete copy of the Majestic Black Book and that I was going to share it with the entire world.”

I stared at her for a long five seconds. “Well kiss my ass. Why in the world would you want to do something like that?”

She stared at me. “Do you even grasp what these people are trying to do?”

“According to you and my friend Bug, they’re reverse-engineering UFO parts and making a shitload of money. What else do I need to know?”

“How can you be so naive?”

“I’m not naive,” I said. “I lack information, and I feel like I’m being dicked around here. Instead of the dramatics, why not come straight out and tell me what’s going on?”

“Joe…” She winced as if saying anything were physically painful for her. “During the conference back there … I didn’t exactly tell you the truth.”

“Really? Well gosh, Junie, I’d have never figured that out.” I sighed. “If you’re thinking that now’s a good time to unburden your soul, then I’m all for it, ’cause we’re ass-deep in it right now. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been this confused in my entire life, and believe me that is saying a hell of a lot.”

She took a steadying breath. “Okay, I told you that I had a source who told me about the Black Book.”

“Right, and the Closers cooked him in a rigged car crash. What about him?”

“He was more than a casual contact, Joe.” Her eyes were bright with pain. “He was my father.”

And I said, “Yeah, no kidding.”

“Wait … you … know?” she gasped.

“I know.”

“When did you figure it out?”

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

“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

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

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 already 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

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 Sten 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.”

“What happened once your dad was in that group?”

“I don’t know everything,” she said. “I was little and even though he started telling me things later on, he never told me everything. He didn’t have time. From what I’ve pieced together, they kept Dad on some noncritical projects at first. Stuff that was challenging and interesting, but nothing that was tied to anything from the crashed vehicles. That came later, after they knew they could trust him.”

“Could they trust him?”

“For years, sure. He was very loyal to them at first. For most of the time, really,” she said. “Because Dad was very patriotic. He had his idealistic side, but he was always a bit more of a hawk than a dove. Dad’s grandfather died in World War II, at the Battle of the Bulge. His father was career military and had been wounded twice in Vietnam. Dad never served, but he had a lot of respect for those who did and he wanted to help create the kinds of technologies that would keep American soldiers safe. He worked on tactical armor and antiarmor programs, infrared sensing for space-based surveillance, high-energy laser technology for space-based missile defense, antisubmarine warfare, advanced aircraft, and defense applications of advanced computing, and he did some of the earliest work on predators and other drones. He created some of the parts for the MARCbot, the Multifunction Agile Remote Control Robot, used to disable IEDs. Stuff like that.”

“Good man,” I said. “I know people who didn’t die because those robots cleared IEDs off the road.”

“He was a good man,” she agreed. “A very good man. He wanted to do good things. They kept moving him from one project to another, and for a while he was frustrated by that because he never got to follow anything to completion. But then he realized that they were bringing him into projects that had stalled because the developers had hit a dead end or a limit in known science. Dad was the X factor that would take these projects in new directions or help them jump right over a design block. That was his gift. He was a developmental intuitive.”

I could see the shape of it. A scientist like that would be a shot of adrenaline to any project. DARPA, like most other R and D groups, has more failed projects than successful ones. That’s the nature of speculative science. Sometimes you don’t know until you try, and you can blow through a lot of cash and a lot of research time on projects that sound good until they hit an immovable snag. A man who can come in and think through or over or around the problem would be worth his weight in gold. Actually, considering the price tag on some of these things, he’d be worth a hell of a lot more than that.

Junie explained how her father was coaxed inch by inch away from DARPA and into the more covert world of M3. They played on his patriotism — and perhaps his naïveté—so that he believed he was part of a think tank that was the last bastion between a safe America and the collapse of democracy in the face of enemies both foreign and domestic. It was a very good sales pitch, and it bought her father’s total loyalty.

“Finally,” she said, “they brought him a piece of equipment that he could not identify. They said that it was a component to a large device, but that’s all they’d tell him about it. They called it a ‘D-type component.’ They said it was another test, like the DARPA challenge. They wanted him to figure out what it was and what it did. They let him work on the problem part of every day for months. Then he figured out what it did. It was a switch. That was all, just a switch, but clearly no one had ever figured that out before because it didn’t look like a switch. It didn’t resemble something whose design intention was to function as a switch. When Dad figured out what it was, everyone got very excited. They threw a party for Dad, they gave him a huge raise and better benefits. He became like a rock star at the lab.”

“This D-type component,” I said, “what was it?”

She cocked her head. “It’s what you think it was.”

“From an alien ship?”

She nodded. “The next day, when Dad came into work, the head of the lab brought him into his office and made him sign a whole stack of papers. Nondisclosure agreements and other documents, including one that essentially said that he waived his constitutional rights while working on what they called ‘the Project.’”

“Yeah, I’ve seen crap like that,” I said. “Some of the DoD bases require that for people working on the stealth aircraft program. Not a fan of that. Mind you, I’m okay with punishing someone for revealing secrets, but I’ve never been a fan of anything that actually strips away your legal rights. That’s a slippery slope.”

“Dad signed it, though. At the time he was happy to do it. And … once all the papers were sealed, that’s when they showed him the Majestic Black Book.”

“Ah,” I said. “We get to the point before I die of old age.”

She punched me lightly on the arm. “If I don’t tell this in order then some parts of it won’t make sense.”

I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender.

“The Black Book has a list of all of the parts recovered from crashes. The most important part of that inventory is the list and exact descriptions of the ten D-type components that make up the Device. That’s with a capital ‘D.’ Those ten D-type components are 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.”

“If there were so many crashes, that should have been easy.”

“No, Joe,” said Junie, “it’s very complicated and for a couple of very good reasons. First, the Device is the engine of the craft, and most of the crashes were the result of some kind of engine failure. We don’t know why, but in a number of cases the engines blew up. The ten D-type components that form the Device are held together with what my father called ‘charismatic magnetism.’”

“What the hell’s that?”

“It’s part of the science my father was studying. When certain D-type components are brought into close proximity, they would begin to pull on each other in way that simulated magnetism. Align the parts in approximately the right way and that pull allows them to self-assemble.”

“Um … okay.”

“However, when a Device fails or a crash occurs, the components reverse their polarity and fly apart. If the crashing ship hits sand, foliage, or soft dirt, the flying pieces might be recovered intact. But if they hit something harder, then most or all the components could be damaged.”

“I think I see part of the problem. M3 has been trying to build a flying saucer with potentially faulty parts.”

“That, and they don’t have all the D-type components. Ever since Roswell, M3 has been able to recover six complete and undamaged components from various crashes, but they never had the other four — the stabilizer, the interface, the slave circuit, and the green generator. Other countries have been working on this, too. There are groups like M3 in Great Britain, Israel, Germany, Brazil, North Korea, China, and Russia. Most of these projects are far behind M3’s Project. Brazil only has one part, a green generator. Israel and North Korea each have three parts, the Brits have five. Same with China and Russia. At least, that was the last count my source heard, and that was a couple of years ago.”

I knew that I had to have a long talk with Church. How the hell could something this big be going on without the DMS being aware of it? Either Church and MindReader were a lot less efficient than I believed, or there was something hinky going on. Neither option made me want to sing Disney songs.

“In 1952, when it became clear that they might not be able to assemble a Device made from original D-type components, President Truman allotted a huge amount of money for M3 to begin a research program to synthesize the missing parts. The intention was to combine these parts with the genuine D-type components to create a complete and working Device. M3 refers to this hybrid machine as a Truman Engine.”

“How close are they to pulling this off?”

“I don’t know. Close, I think. One of the last things my dad told me was that there have been some recent breakthroughs, but that was a few years ago, before he was killed.”

“But they must have had some success. I know for a fact that we have some radical engine designs in the works for the next generation of fighters and—”

“You’re thinking about it the wrong way, Joe. You’re thinking that this is about building a fast jet or stealthier jet, but the Device is more than just an engine. A lot more. From experiments they’ve tried where things have gone disastrously wrong, they know that there is an almost unlimited potential for power in those D-type components. You think they don’t know that fossil fuel is going to run out? Coal and natural gas aren’t the long-term answer. Nuclear has a million problems. And the technology for solar and wind power is not really as close as politicians make it. We’re hurtling toward a power crisis unlike anything we’ve ever faced. Unless we want to see ourselves plunged into a new and very literal Dark Age, we have to find a new and inexhaustible source of clean power. And, Joe — this is about power. The first nation to control that kind of power will become the greatest superpower the world has ever seen.” She touched her fingers to my chest. “Because unlimited energy like this can also be used for weapons. And nobody — no nation or group of nations — will be able to defend themselves against that kind of power. Whoever can solve the riddle of the Device will be able to conquer the whole world — and nothing and no one can stop them.”

Chapter Seventy-three

Rudy Sanchez made a total of twenty calls to Mr. Church’s friends, and another thirty calls to people recommended to him by the first tier of contacts.

He spoke with experts on alien craft. “You’re more likely to see something big and triangular than the classic saucer,” Peter Robbins, author of a landmark book on the UFO crash at Rendlesham in the UK told him. “As far as who or what they are … I have no idea beyond a general belief that they are not from here. They are from somewhere very far away. That in itself is cause for grave concern.”

Experts on alien abduction. “I was abducted last year in Phoenix,” said Jeff Straus, a friend of a friend of a friend of Church’s and the national technical director for the Mutual UFO Network. “They did the whole thing on me. Blood and urine samples, DNA, all sorts of meters and scopes. And an anal probe. I don’t know why aliens have this thing about anal probes. What’s up my ass that could help them understand the human race? That’s just uncalled for.”

Experts on alien-human hybrids. “The thing about alien craft,” said Bud Sorkin, a physicist from Caltech, “is that the pilot is part of the engine. There is a definite biomechanical interface and without the pilot to control all of the engine functions the engine runs wild and blows up. That’s why both the aliens and our own people are interested in creating hybrids. Not only will they be able to interface with the ships, but by doing so they’ll be able to form some measure of meaningful communication between aliens and humans.”

“Has there actually been any progress in terms of creating an alien-human hybrid?”

Sorkin chuckled. “Dr. Sanchez … they’re all around us. You’ve probably met one. I know I have. The thing is … not all of the hybrids know that they’re hybrids.”

Another expert on that subject was Abigail DuFraine, a clinical psychologist who Rudy had met at conferences. A brilliant, if eccentric woman, who had twice been short-listed for a Nobel Prize. Her book Of Two Worlds: The Question of Alien-Human Hybrids was a bestseller and had been the basis of a History Channel special.

“While writing my second book,” she said, “the one on alien abductions, I began to encounter a large number of people who claim to have had DNA, eggs, or sperm taken from them. And once, in 2005, I was introduced to a young man of about twenty-four who claimed to be a product of a government sponsored program tasked with creating hybrids. I was only able to interview the young man, sadly. I would very much have liked to do a full medical workup on him, particularly a DNA sequence. However, during our interview, he demonstrated a remarkable number of unusual qualities. In a leap to judgment you might think was indicative of savantism. He demonstrated prodigious capacities and abilities far in excess of those considered normal. He had an eidetic recall of any number sequence he had encountered, and when tested was able to calculate mathematical problems to six decimal points. However, with savants there is usually a prodigious memory of a special type that is very deep, but exceedingly narrow. Not so with him. He could recall every zip code, sports statistic, text and page numbers of every book he’d read, and so on. Understand, Dr. Sanchez, that it is exceedingly rare for a prodigious savant to have so many areas of interest and memory. From our conversation I counted twenty-six areas, and I don’t think I scratched the surface.”

“What happened to the young man?” asked Rudy.

DuFraine gave him a sad sigh. “I arranged to have him visit my office so I could do a more thorough interview. I said that I wanted to take some blood samples as well. However, on the way to that appointment he was killed in a traffic accident. What a sad loss to science.”

Rudy murmured agreement, but he made a notation to have Gus Dietrich pull the records on that accident.

He asked DuFraine a follow-up question, “Did this young man claim that these abilities came about as a result of his being a hybrid?”

“Yes, but that’s an odd thing. He said that these were not qualities he — and others like him — got from the aliens. He said that exposure to alien DNA unlocked these qualities in ordinary human DNA.”

Rudy’s next call was to a theoretical physicist, Dr. Kim Sung, who was a leading proponent of the theory that aliens were not from other worlds but from other times in our own future, or were visitors from neighboring dimensions. He leaned heavily on the interdimensional theory, which was the subject of the book he was currently writing.

“Why is that more likely than them being aliens?” asked Rudy.

Sung laughed. “We know that there are many dimensions. Superstring theory, M-theory, and Bosonic string theory respectively posit that physical space has either ten, eleven, or twenty-four spatial dimensions. However, we can only perceive three spatial dimensions and, so far, we haven’t come up with any experimental or observational evidence to confirm the existence of these extra dimensions. One very hip theory is that space acts as if it were curled up in the extra dimensions on a subatomic scale, possibly at the quark-string level of scale or below. You following any of this or did I lose you around one of the turns?”

“I understood two or three of the smaller words.”

Sung laughed again. He had a broad Southern California accent and a deep-chested laugh. “Okay, we think that there are a lot of dimensions and they’re all pretty much right here. We just can’t perceive them. Then again, without the right equipment we couldn’t detect radio waves or see ultraviolet light. It takes the right meter. Anyway, it’s conceivable that we could pass from our current dimension to another or maybe many others. Now, let’s jump to pop culture. An abiding theory is that there are an infinite number of universes, each separated from the other by a veil as thin as tissue paper. All it takes is the right kind of device or energy to open a pathway. Whereas that might take a lot of energy, think of how much more energy — not to mention time — that it would take to traverse trillions of miles of interstellar space. Light-years. That’s years of travel at the speed of light, which we can’t even approach, let alone maintain. Weighed against that, opening a doorway to the dimension next door sounds like a piece of cake.”

And Rudy spoke to many experts on shadow governments, political theorists, conspiracy theorists, and general UFO experts.

He asked every single expert if they had ever heard of Majestic Three and/or the Majestic Black Book.

Every one of them had.

Then Rudy asked them a crucial question.

“If you had to pick the top five people most likely to be a current or former member of M3, what would those names be?”

Almost everyone had an opinion on that.

It became clear to Rudy that the entire UFO community had given this a lot of thought, and although there was a strong likelihood that some names were being repeated because it was common knowledge that they were famously suspected of involvement, a few names began rising to the top.

Chapter Seventy-four

Aldo always stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth when he was doing delicate work. It was something Tull found oddly endearing. He’d seen kids do that on TV, and sometimes when he looked into windows in the dark of night. That’s how Tull learned a lot about families. Watching them through windows. He’d done it for as long as he could remember. Once he saw an old man doing the tongue thing while he rewired a toaster.

“Last one,” said Aldo, his tongue back in his mouth, small beads of nervous sweat on his forehead. He set the modified pigeon drone very carefully on the desk and pushed his wheeled chair away.

“You’re sure they can take the weight?” asked Tull.

Aldo shrugged. “I stripped out everything but the motor and the GPS. As long as we don’t want them to fly high or for long, they should be okay. We got to be careful not to let ’em fly into a telephone pole or something. The central switch is only held by a little bit of that ionized gel stuff. Hit it too hard and … well, that would suck very, very large moose dick.”

“Noted,” said Tull.

They each took one pigeon and carried it to the rear window, then went back for the others. There were ten of them in all and they made slow, careful trips, staying well clear of each other or obstructions. With each trip, Tull noticed that Aldo was sweating more heavily. He found that strange. He’d seen Aldo in firefights looking cool as a cucumber. Why should this make him more frightened? People were funny.

When the pigeons were all in the back room, Tull fetched the Ghost Box and set it on a stack of boxed SOLD signs. He squatted down and as Aldo read the serial number stamped on the first drone’s leg, Tull typed it into the computer. Then Aldo leaned out the window with the pigeon cradled gently in his cupped palms, then he gave it a little toss, like a Disney princess setting a songbird free. Tull kept that observation to himself.

One by one Aldo released the pigeons and Tull watched them appear on the tracking screen.

“And that’s all of them,” said Aldo with obvious relief. He squatted next to Tull and they watched the white dots on the screen flying at rooftop height through the streets of Baltimore.

Chapter Seventy-five

“You know, Junie, 1947 was a long damn time ago. What’s taking this project so long? If there are supergeniuses like your father involved, what’s taking so long?”

“Think about what they’re trying to do,” she said. “The science is so completely different than ours, the whole design philosophy follows a way of thinking that simply does not harmonize with human thought. Even their methods of communicating are so … well, so alien that it doesn’t in any way mesh with ours. Think of it in terms of the way we study languages in animals like dolphins and whales. We can record their language and we think we can understand some of the gist of it, but that’s not the same as being able to actually communicate with them. Not in any meaningful way. The differences are too great, there’s no commonality. We don’t have a Star Trek universal translator, and I don’t think the aliens do, either. I think … I think that’s one of the problems. I think that’s one of the reasons there hasn’t been any true or meaningful communication between them and us. We don’t have a shared language.”

“What about the crop circle? The pi thing. I thought math is the universal language.”

“It is and it isn’t,” said Junie. “Sure, we can both look at a simple equation — two plus two equals four — and that will be a universal constant, but what does it tell you about them? Or us? How does math explain Van Gogh or Lady Gaga or hot chocolate? How does it explain how the love you have for your country is different but equally as important as the love you have for your family or a puppy? How does math give insight into why you like one TV show over another? Or why you think baseball is a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon when I’d rather shop on Saturday and watch football on Sunday. Math is a common ground, but it isn’t a language.”

“Let’s go back a bit,” I said. “You said that at first your dad was dedicated to the Project. What changed? Why’d he lose faith in the space race?”

She gave me a sharp look.

“This isn’t a space race,” she said. “It never was. Even the space race of the 1960s was never about simply going to the moon. God, do people still really think that? This is an arms race, Joe. That’s what it was then and that’s what it is now. It’s about having the most powerful weapons, because weapons equal power on the global scale. Before World War II, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, do you think we were viewed as a superpower? No, we were one of many powerful nations. Those bombs changed the game. Everyone knows that. Now we’re in an age where the technology race is getting too close to call. China is becoming the world’s leading economy and it’s almost reached the point where it is the most powerful nation. Do you think our government — your government — will sit by and let that happen if there’s any way to give us back our edge?”

Her eyes were fierce even in the darkness.

“Truman foresaw this time,” she continued, her words whispered but her tone intense. “Maybe he was really smart or maybe really paranoid, or both, but he knew that there would come a point in time when America would need another dramatic edge. Something on the scale of nuclear weapons, but something that would give an edge once other countries acquired nukes and caught up to us. Welcome to now.”

“That doesn’t answer why your father left, Junie,” I said. “And it doesn’t explain how you know so much about your dad’s classified work.”

“The deeper he got the more he understood about the nature of the Project. It became clear that M3 was operating totally without congressional oversight. They were so deep into the black budget, and covered by so many levels of subterfuge that none of the last six presidents even knew the Project existed. The whole thing was being run as if M3 and the Project were actually separate from America. It made Dad wonder where the funding for something this big was coming from. How could you hide tens of billions from congressional accountants year after year? Dad decided to find out, so over a period of a few years he ingratiated himself more and more with the governors of M3 while at the same time using that increased access to take covert looks into their computers. It was painstaking work, but he figured it out. Dad always figured things out. He found out where the money was coming from.”

I thought I knew, but I let her tell it.

“Drugs,” she said triumphantly. “It was all drug money. The same way the CIA has been getting most of its funding since the fifties. Air America, the Iran-Contra thing, today in Afghanistan. Our own government agencies have been deeply involved in drug trafficking on a massive scale. This isn’t even a secret anymore. Our so-called War on Terror is funded by drug money and most of the time we’re in bed with the very people we claim we’re taking down.”

“I know,” I said. “The DMS has had some dealings with a few of those groups, and we’ve put some of them out of business. I wish I could say that we made more than a casual dent, but…”

“Do you know where your funding comes from?” she demanded.

“No,” I said. “But I’ll say this — even though I don’t believe for a millisecond that Mr. Church is paying our light bill with drug money — if I found out he was, I’d put a bullet in him.”

She pushed me over so that my face was in the light. Junie studied my eyes for a long time, then she nodded to herself.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Now, about the funding … Did your dad find this out for sure or was this guesswork?”

“He had proof. That was part of what he wanted to bring to Congress. Real proof.”

“And that’s why they killed him,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Shit.”

“But…,” she said.

“What?”

“I hacked my dad’s computer.”

“You did what? Why?”

“Because I thought he was a bad man,” she said glumly. “I thought he was a government flunky working on something very bad. In a way I was right, but I misunderstood my father. He was a lot more complex a person than that, and less politically astute. When I saw him start getting more and more depressed I figured it was guilt for the bad things he was doing for the government. I hacked his computer so I could confront him with the proof.” She stopped and shook her head. “I read everything I could find. Hundreds of pages of materials, and records, and evidence.”

“Jesus.”

“Then I confronted Dad, but not with accusations. I begged him to go to the world media with the story. Not just one newspaper or station, but all of them. A blast of truth. But he said that doing something like that could damage the government and even then he didn’t believe that the entire government was corrupt. He was determined to make Congress react and then act.”

“He took all his notes with him? His computer records, the copies of the Black Book pages, all of it?”

“No,” she said. “He took one complete set. The rest was on his computer at home and on several portable hard drives he kept in a wall safe.”

“Thank god! We can—”

“The house was burgled the night he was killed,” she said. “They took everything. They tore the safe out of the wall, tore his desk to pieces, and even took my mom’s laptop and mine. They ripped open all the walls, tore up floorboards, pulled down the ceilings. The police said that it was the most thorough search they’d ever seen. When I tried to explain why this was done, they gave me very tolerant smiles. I saw them laughing about it outside. I was a grief-stricken conspiracy theory goofball. They said that the house was probably targeted after my parents’ names were announced on the news. They said it happens all the time.”

“It does.”

She punched me again.

“But hold on, hold on,” I said. “If all of your father’s records were destroyed, then how were you planning on revealing all the secrets of the Black Book? Did you somehow make a copy?”

“You forgot,” she said.

“I what?”

“You forgot. That always amazes me,” she said. “I see it all the time, hear about it, read about it, but it still amazes me.”

“What does?” I asked, totally lost.

“That someone can actually forget something. I never could.”

And it hit me with a very nice one-two punch. I said, “Jesus, I even said it when I was showing off and reading out your bio. Eidetic memory — photographic memory, and that thing where you can remember every day of your life.”

“Every day, every hour, every minute,” she said. “Hyperthymesia.”

“And you saw your father’s notes.”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“You remember all of it…”

“Every single word. Every formula. Every measurement and description.” She smiled. It was a strange, intense, almost otherworldly smile that put goose bumps all along my arms and down my spine. “Joe … for all intents and purposes I am the Black Book.”

Chapter Seventy-six

Aldo and Tull watched the ten white dots move across the tracking screen. One by one the dots stopped moving. Telemetric feeds provided exact locations via a satellite uplink.

“Perfect,” said Aldo. “Every single one of them. Nice!”

“Very nice,” agreed Tull.

Chapter Seventy-seven

There were a million questions I wanted to ask Junie, but suddenly Ghost came racing down into the tunnel, gave me a sharp whuff, then turned around and stared back along the path he’d come. We froze and listened, and after five long seconds we heard it. Men’s voices. Terse and harsh.

“God,” whispered Junie, “they found us!”

I shook my head. “No, if they did they’d either be yelling or making no sound at all. I think they’re following that trail.” I nodded to the one we’d been paralleling. “Maybe there’s another team coming up from the far side and it’s our bad luck we’re in the middle.”

“What do we do?”

I held a finger to my lips and she nodded and fell silent. I left Ghost with her as I climbed out of the tunnel and up onto higher ground, ready to ambush them if they found our hidey-hole.

Five minutes passed and the voices faded.

Then we heard new voices coming from a different direction.

We waited them out, too.

Minutes crawled by.

The voices finally went away.

After they were gone, I drifted back down to Junie.

“Are they going to find us?” she asked. She leaned very close to whisper in my ear, and despite the blood and ash on our clothes I was very deeply aware of the sweet faintness of her perfume and the heat from her soft cheek.

You’re a frickin’ idiot, growled the Cop inside my head. Keep your head in the game.

I cut a sideways look at Junie’s beautiful face, and I told my inner Cop to go piss up a rope.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to go find them.”

Her hand darted out and closed around my wrist. “You can’t! They’ll kill you.”

“I need to go take a look,” I said. “We need to know if we can wait here or if we’re in the center of a net.”

Junie touched my arm. “You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

Her question caught me as I was rising, and for a moment I settled back down into a crouch. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be very careful.”

That coaxed a smile from her. Small, but damn if it didn’t light up the day.

But I lingered a moment longer. “Junie … when we get out of this, when we get back to the world … you understand that my people are going to need to know everything you know about the book. You get that, right?”

She nodded.

“This isn’t about you getting revenge for what they did to your parents. And it’s not about sharing alien technology with the whole world. All personal considerations are back burner.”

“But—”

I took her by the shoulders and shifted around so that we were face to face. “Junie, this is about saving a big chunk of the world. The southern coast of Africa, all of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a sizable chunk of Western Europe, and the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. Do the math, honey, because that racks up to about a billion people who are going to drown under the worst tsunami in recorded history if we don’t stop it.”

“How can we stop it?” she demanded. “What if whoever took the president wants the Black Book destroyed? Will you shoot me? Or will you let Mr. Church do it? He seems cold enough.”

“You tell me what I should do,” I growled. “You saw the videos, you know the score. What should I do?”

“I think we should try and get the actual damn Black Book. There’s only one copy. Maybe that’s what they want you to get. They don’t even know about me.”

“Who are ‘they,’ Junie? Who do you think took the president?”

She took a moment before she said, “Them.”

“Say it.”

“The aliens, okay. I think the aliens took the president and they want the Black Book.”

“How does that make sense? If they can abduct the president, how come they don’t just take the Black Book?”

“Maybe they don’t know where it is.”

“How can they not? They’re aliens.”

“Does that automatically make them psychic? Who knows what the problem is? Maybe it’s taken them a long time to figure out how to communicate with us. Maybe there aren’t that many of them. Maybe they simply don’t know who has the Black Book.”

“Then why go to these lengths to get it?”

“I don’t know. Something pushed them,” she said with heat. “They’ve been silent all this time, but something changed. But they clearly don’t know everything. I mean … their ships crashed. A lot of them. That has to say something about them as fallible beings. Maybe they only just learned about the Black Book and realized what kind of threat it poses. I don’t know, Joe. I’m just guessing, too. All I know is that there are at least two copies of the Black Book. M3 has one and I’m the other. You have to decide which one you want to give to the aliens.”

I sat back on my heels. “Your aliens are playing some serious hardball. They’re willing to kill a billion people to get that book.”

“No,” she said. “We don’t know what they’re doing. The fact that you can make a comment like that shows how much you don’t know about them.”

“Junie, I don’t know anything about them. Even if I am starting to edge toward accepting that this is real, I don’t know one single thing about whoever built the crafts that M3 is studying. What are they like? Did they come here to conquer us? Are they studying us to determine our weaknesses? Is this some kind of alien seedpod invasion?”

“What they look like isn’t important, Joe. You’re like everyone else, you keep trying to ascribe human emotions to them. You think that if a race is powerful then they could only get that way through military force.”

“You saw the video…”

“Okay, we both saw the video. Do you understand what it means? I mean, really understand it? How do we know it doesn’t have multiple meanings? How do we know that it’s even a threat? It could be a warning.”

“Pretty harsh for a warning.”

“That’s because you think like a soldier and you think they think that way, too. They haven’t attacked us after all these years, what makes you believe that they’re even capable of violence? Maybe they’re warning us of what could happen if somebody else builds a working Device. China, Russia … They could be trying to help us. No, we just can’t assume they’re violent. Not everyone is.”

I shook my head. “Show me a culture that isn’t violent. Even the Swiss used to be warriors. Ditto the Tibetans. There were armed soldiers in the service of the Dalai Lama. Soldiers and armed police guard the Pope. History and every holy book you can find is filled with stories of war and conquest. It’s a side effect of being a predator species. We may aspire to civilized and harmonious behavior, Junie, but it’s not natural to us.”

“I’m not saying it’s not natural to them either.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that they are alien, so we shouldn’t make assumptions. We have to stop trying to understand them based on what we know of ourselves. That’s polluted thinking.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, and rubbed my eyes. “I should have stayed in bed today. I was nursing a well-earned hangover and…”

My words trailed away as my mind conjured a picture of Violin. I glanced away from Junie, not wanting her to read anything in my eyes.

“Time’s flying away from us,” I said. “No more talk. Get down and hide. I’ll leave Ghost with you. If there’s something he can’t handle he’ll make some noise and I’ll come running.”

“Where are you going?”

“It’s hunting season, right?” I asked, and left it there. “Now come on, hide.”

She did as directed, vanishing completely in the dense undergrowth. All Ghost had to do was lay down and he became invisible in the tall grass. I moved off, veering away from our back trail and then heading upwind of the sounds.

I tried my earbud again, but got only dead air. Bug and Church had to know I was off the grid by now, even if the Coast Guard call didn’t go anywhere; but what was the best-case scenario for a rescue? Half an hour? An hour?

That was not encouraging. I didn’t know how many of the Closers were out in these woods. They had helicopters, too. Maybe thermal imaging.

I regretted not grabbing one of the long guns, but when the lighthouse blew up my mind was more focused on not burning to death than on arming for a prolonged war. Now I wondered if I should have circled around and made a smarter choice. I had my Beretta and a couple of full magazines, and I had my rapid-release folding knife, a lifetime’s study of jujutsu, and a lot of years camping in these woods. How did that stack up against the Closers? We’d have to see.

Best-case scenario was that the Coast Guard took our call seriously and a fleet of choppers and half a dozen Zodiacs crammed with sailors were about to bring down six kinds of hell on these Closers. Sure, I told myself, and the charge would led by the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

Inside my head a debate was raging. The Modern Man aspect of my personality was yelling at me to Run, run, run.

The Cop wanted answers and he was losing patience. When he did that he tended to act more like the Warrior. And that part of me, the Killer, wanted to turn this reconnaissance run into a hunt. He was telling me that if you run then you’re prey. That’s weak, that’s vulnerable, and it would probably get Junie killed as well as me.

Hunt the hunters, whispered that merciless voice.

I slowed from a light run to a crouching walk and then to stillness. Shallowing my breathing. Listening to the woods.

At least one of the helicopters was up there, but it was far away. North and west of where I crouched. Searching down near the main part of the campground, blocking the most natural exit from the park.

When you hunt like this you learn to tune things out. It’s not that you don’t hear them, but once a sound is cataloged you allow it to fade into the background so that other sounds can present themselves for identification. The same goes with movement. The forest is a living thing, it’s always moving, it’s always making sound, even in the very depths of winter. Here, in this freakish holdover of a summer that did not want to relinquish its grasp on these Maryland woods, there were a thousand sounds. Birds and animals moving through the leaves, the creak of trees in the breeze, the exhalation of the forest as its breath passed between and through the millions of intertwined branches.

There were no more voices.

I waited, letting the Closers hunt Junie so I could hunt them.

The Closers.

Over the last hour that name had already been burned into my private lexicon. I thought of them as “Closers,” but on another level I had a different word for them.

Prey.

I heard a man’s voice, speaking low and quiet. Just two words.

“This way.”

Inside my head, the Warrior grinned.

Yes, he whispered, come this way.

Chapter Seventy-eight

Yuina Hoshino called a few minutes after noon.

Howard and Mr. Bones sat down at the Ghost Box console to take the call and immediately they could tell that the nervous little scientist had been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and there was some white paste at the corners of her mouth.

“I can’t stand it!” she wailed. Almost wailed; her voice broke in the middle. “General Croft called our business office five minutes ago. He’s canceling the air show. Not just for now, but maybe or as long as six months. Between the cyber-attacks and now what happened at Dugway — he said that in the face of a concerted terrorist attack on the industrial-military complex we must exercise prudence and bullshit like that. He kept going on and on about how we had to protect what we have and consider our options.”

“Yuina—” began Howard, but she wasn’t listening.

“I tried to tell him that we had some solutions, that Shelton Aeronautics was ready to respond to these threats, but he didn’t hear me. It was like he was locked into a speech and he couldn’t shake loose. I think he’s really rattled. I think he’s scared because of what happened at Dugway. He’s freaked out and now they’ve canceled the air show. How are we going to get them to listen? It’s all ruined! All this work, it’s over, it’s ruined. The Chinese have—”

“Shut up!” bellowed Howard in a bull voice that struck the weeping scientist into a shocked and sniffling silence. Howard jabbed a finger at her hologram as if it could feel his emphatic pokes. “Listen to me, you silly bitch. We are not beaten and this is definitely not over. Pull yourself together. You’re a governor of Majestic Three for Christ’s sake. Act like it for a change. So the Chinese outplayed us on this round. We are far from done, honey.”

“But … I don’t understand … we are done. They clearly built a working Device and we’re years away from that! Our top-of-the-line is Specter 101, and that can’t do what that ship did at Dugway…”

Howard smiled at her. “It doesn’t have to.”

She frowned, forgetting her tears for a moment. “What?”

“Trust me,” he said.

Chapter Seventy-nine

I waited behind a tree.

Okay, I lurked behind a tree.

The forest quieted itself out of my consciousness; I focused less on what sounds should be there and more on which sounds shouldn’t.

They were pretty stealthy, I’ll give them that, but inside my head the Warrior grinned. This is the kind of thing he lives for. It’s why he exists at all. Which meant that to some degree I lived for this, too.

The hunt.

The ache to confront and engage and overcome. The desire to prove through the ugly and uncivilized filter of violence that I belonged here, that I deserved to live and to continue. And to an equal degree that they no longer owned the right to survive because they were lesser predators.

This is not the territory of logic, and it’s miles and years away from any justification in civilized behavior. This is the lizard brain whispering survival secrets to the most primitive centers of the primate mind. Because they hunted me, because Junie was in my protection, these woods had become mine. The boundaries were marked with blood rather than piss, and the killer within me would defend my territory in any way necessary.

Painted by dappled leaf shadows, I waited. My rapid-release folding knife was open, the blade down at my side where the steel wouldn’t catch stray sunlight.

They came in single file and I let them pass.

Three tall men in black BDUs, black boots, black weapons and gear. Pale faces, clean shaven, with buzz-cut hair, square jaws. Powerful men who carried no body fat at all, and who walked with cat grace, eyes tracking left and right, seeing the forest but not seeing me. They were armed. Pistols in belt holsters, knives. Two of them carried M4s, the leader had a combat shotgun with pistol grips on the handle and pump.

These, I knew, were different from the other men. Vastly different from the four men in cars I’d met this morning — God, was it only this morning? — and tougher even than the men who had invaded Junie’s cottage. These were prime soldiers. They were the elite. These were the kind of soldiers you could drop into a war zone or a hot LZ or a jungle at night and expect them to get the job done and come back alive. That they were all killers I had no doubt. This wasn’t work for missionaries. These were the true Closers, the men sent to shut Junie down and erase any threat she might ever pose. If they had their way, Junie Flynn would disappear off the face of the earth. Her house and all of its contents would be reduced to smoking rubble.

They did not know that I was here.

All they could know is that the ground team had met armed resistance. They knew that someone in the house had fired on them, hitting two, probably killing at least one.

That was not enough knowledge. I knew more about them than they knew about me.

If they knew that I was out here — not me specifically but someone like me — they would be doing this a different way.

That was a mistake. And at this level of the game the rules only allow for one mistake.

As the third man passed I stepped out from my hiding spot and moved behind him very quickly. The technique was one that these men probably knew. The surprise wasn’t in the selection of skill but in its application. In the timing.

Three limbs moved at once. My left hand whipped around and clamped over his nose and mouth, pinching everything closed, shutting off breath and sound. At the same time my right foot chopped out, knee and toes pointing outward at an angle as I stepped on the back of his knee. Bending the leg, toppling the weight backward into the inexorable pull of gravity, aided by the pull of the hand clamped over his mouth. My right hand was already in play, already darting forward and around, pressing the wickedly sharp edge of the blade deep into the skin under his left ear. As he fell, I pulled his chin to the left and cut his throat from ear to ear.

All of it in less than a second.

We all know this one fact, that we are only ever one step ahead of the darkness. It can reach out to tap us on the shoulder at any time.

The man died in an instant.

If he had been a sentry the death would have been solitary and unheard. But he was with others and I wanted his death to be heard. Not loud. Just a whisper from the darkness behind.

The second man whirled at the sound and I jerked back on the dead man’s head at the moment of my cut so that the hydrostatic pressure of heart hosed outward in a red geyser. The second man took it in the face.

I was already moving, body-checking the dead man into the second Closer. Blind, encumbered by dead weight falling against him, he had no chance, no time, no distance to use his M4. I thrust the knife into his throat, drilling it, giving the blade a half turn as it entered and a half turn to clear the path for a fast withdraw.

Two seconds, two dead men.

The man with the shotgun was the one who had the only real chance.

If he’d jumped forward before he turned, he might have been able to use that chance. That might have given him the time to bring the shotgun barrel to bear, to at least clip me with a blast before I took him. If the darkness was riding copilot for him, he might have been able to blast me back into the shadows.

He did not jump forward.

He merely whirled in place instead.

I leaped over two dead men, my left hand slapping the shotgun barrel down, my right going for the long reach to slash. Biceps, face, chest, wrist. The shotgun fell, I tackled him and bore him to the ground, straddling him, pinning his bleeding arms, pressing my forearm across his throat, stopping the red tip of the knife a millimeter from his eye.

“Shhhh,” I said.

Chapter Eighty

Gus Dietrich banged open the door to Joe Ledger’s office without knocking. Church and Rudy Sanchez looked up sharply at him.

“Got to get you out of here, boss,” said Gus breathlessly, “and I mean right now. We have every kind of federal agent at the gate right now waving warrants from the attorney general. Can’t stop ’em.”

“Warrants for what?” demanded Rudy.

“Joe. They have an arrest warrant for him and a search and seizure for his office. Don’t know what’s up their ass, but they want Joe in the worst way and that warrant is legit.”

“This is absurd,” said Rudy.

“How much time?” asked Church.

“I can stall them for a couple of minutes. I have your helo smoking on the roof.”

Without a word Church closed his laptop and began packing it away. Ledger’s laptop was locked in the top drawer of the file cabinet. Church touched a panel on the wall and the file cabinet sank into the floor with a soft hiss of hydraulics. A second file cabinet came down from the ceiling to replace it.

Rudy cocked an eyebrow. “That’s very clever.”

“Borrowed from a James Bond novel,” admitted Church, “but it was a smart idea.”

They exited the office and Church handed his laptop to Gus. “Put this in the vault. Cut all lines to MindReader and put the mainframe autodelete on standby. Make sure the staff cooperates in every way possible within the guidelines of their training. Then meet me at the Shop. Transfer all current case notes and records there. That’ll be our new war room.”

Gus nodded. The Shop was a secondary support location a few blocks away. It was run by Big Bob Faraday, a former Echo Team agent who had been permanently injured on a mission. It was also the home of Mike Harnick’s vehicle design department, logistical support, and a few other essential departments.

“What about the warrant?” asked Gus.

“Let them execute it. They are welcome to search Captain Ledger’s office.”

Rudy said, “What should I do?”

Church smiled. “Come with me, Doctor. No reason for you to be involved in this mess.”

“What about Joe? We can’t just leave him to the wolves…”

“Captain Ledger is a resourceful man, Doctor. I rather think it is the wolves who are in danger.”

Chapter Eighty-one

Erasmus Tull stepped out of the office and stood in the quiet of the empty parking lot behind the real estate office. From there he could see the distant corner of the Warehouse several blocks away.

He punched in a phone number that he had not called in a very long time.

It rang so many times that Tull didn’t think the other party was going to answer.

Then a voice said, “Hello, Erasmus.”

Tull said, “Hello, Deacon.”

Chapter Eighty-two

Mr. Church held up a hand for silence. “I must admit that I’m surprised to hear from you again.”

“I know. This is kind of a whim,” said Tull. “Are you sorry to hear that I’m alive?”

“You’ve managed to stay off the radar quite well,” said Mr. Church.

“You taught me a lot about caution.”

“Apparently.”

“I know you looked for me. Hunted me.”

“What other option did you leave, Erasmus? You left quite a mess behind you.”

Tull sighed. “Story of my life.”

“And of mine,” agreed Mr. Church. “Some people are born in the storm lands.”

“Yes.”

“What can I do for you, Erasmus?” asked Church. “Do you want to come in? You know that I can guarantee your safety.”

“Until you put a bullet in me.”

“It doesn’t have to play out that way. You can buy a lot of goodwill by unburdening your soul.”

“And if I don’t have a soul?”

“I don’t have time for poetry, Erasmus. Or philosophical debates. I have a lot going on at the moment.”

“I know.”

Church paused. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you’re calling me?”

“In part.” Tull paused. “You know, Deacon, you’re not as smart as you think you are. You always pretend to know what’s going on, but you don’t know. You think you know what’s going on right now, today — but you don’t.”

“I make no claims to understanding the current situation, Erasmus. I’ll admit to being totally at sea. Does that make you feel better?”

“Actually, it does. I’ve never heard you admit to being clueless. That’s worth a lot.”

“Care to tell me what is going on? You seem to have all the answers today.”

“You have no idea how true that is. I not only know the answers, I am the answer.”

There was an almost pleading note to that statement. Church filed it away.

“The world you know is about to change, Deacon. After tomorrow it’s never going to be the same again.”

“You’re involved in what’s happening today?” asked Church.

“Oh yes.”

“Are you looking to make a deal?”

“No,” said Tull, and Church thought he heard a note of regret in the man’s voice. “I wanted to clear the air about something, Deacon. Remember the conversation we had after the thing in Turkey? After I killed that entire Syrian strike team? You asked me if I needed to step down for a while, you asked if this was getting to be too much for me.”

“I remember.”

“Do you remember what I said to you?” asked Tull.

“Yes,” said Church. “You said that killing didn’t hurt you. I tried to explain that it hurts everyone and that we have to address that. But you said that you weren’t like everyone else.”

“Yes.”

“You said that you were a monster and monsters loved to destroy.”

“Yes.” There was fierce emotion in the man’s voice now.

“I tell you now what I told you then, Erasmus,” said Church, “no matter how far you’ve walked under the shadow of darkness you can always turn and go back.”

“It’s funny that you, of all people, should preach about redemption, Deacon. I may be a monster, but you’ve spilled an ocean of blood. What does that make you?”

Church looked out the window of the helicopter as it lifted from the roof of the Warehouse. “We both know exactly what I am,” he said.

“And we both know exactly what I am,” said Tull.

“Erasmus—”

“Goodbye, Deacon. If there is a God, maybe I’ll see you on the other side.”

There was a sudden white light so brilliant that everything was instantly washed to a blank canvas of nothingness.

The ten pigeon drones exploded at the same moment. Ten tiny versions of the Truman Engine detonating on different parts of the building. The shock wave blew outward at the speed of sound, blowing out windows ten blocks away. The fireball threw cars and boats a hundred yards into the bay. And the entire Warehouse leaped up into the air atop a fireball of superheated gases that drove upward like the fist of Satan, vaporizing thousands of tons of brick and steel, melting vehicles into pools of slag and splattering them for blocks.

The last thing Mr. Church saw before the blast buffeted his helicopter out of control was the tiny figure of Gus Dietrich on the roof near the helicopter, one hand lifted in a lighthearted salute. Then Gus, and the building, and everyone inside of it were gone.

Gone.

“Dios mío!” cried Rudy Sanchez, seemingly from far away.

Then the helicopter was tilting sideways, spilling the lifting air, sliding into the claws of gravity, and a fireball and the brown water both rushed toward it.

Chapter Eighty-three

The shock wave picked Tull up and flung him against the side of the real estate office. The trees in the parking lot bent over as if weeping, the windows imploded. Hundreds of car alarms began screaming.

Tull collapsed to the ground, dazed, flash-burned, blood pouring from his nose and ears.

And all the time he never stopped laughing.

Chapter Eighty-four

Even with all of the pain he had to be feeling, the Closer had enough control to understand. He was not being murdered in this moment. His ticket to a longer life was silence.

He clamped his teeth and lips shut to hold back the screams.

I bent close, my lips near his ear. The position, the closeness was an awful parody of intimacy.

“Who sent you?” I whispered.

His mouth remained shut.

I touched the point of the knife to the soft flesh below his eye. “Is it worth dying for?”

Nothing. But he tried to scare me to death with his he-man steely stare.

With the knife in place, I used my free hand to tear open his shirt. He wore the same kind of body armor I’d see on the Closers down in Wolf Trap. I tore open the Velcro straps and pulled it down. No dog tags underneath. In fact he had no ID anywhere.

I bent close and spoke very quietly to him. “Who are you working for? What’s your agency? What unit are you with?”

He said nothing.

“Who’s your commanding officer?”

Nothing.

“Listen to me, asshole, you’re hurt but you’re not over the line. We can change that real fast.”

Nothing. His eyes were bright with pain but he kept that glare going.

I am not a big fan of torture. Kind of don’t ever want to do it, but there are moments when your options are limited. Top calls them “L.A. nuke moments.” The logic goes this way: If you know for certain that there is a nuclear device about to detonate in L.A., killing millions of people, and you have in custody a terrorist who knows where that bomb is, which is the better moral choice — to stick by your guns and say “No, America does not believe in torture” or to ruin one guy’s day and save millions? It’s not a good choice, bad choice thing because they’re both bad choices. In that situation, you have to make the right choice, the smart choice, even if it’s one you may have trouble living with later.

Add to that the fact that the Warrior was running the show right now.

The man talked.

Not much, but enough.

He confirmed that they were here to collect Junie Flynn. Alive, if possible, but dead was within the mission parameters. He confirmed that I was to be terminated with extreme prejudice. When I asked him why, he said something really funky.

“They told us about you,” he said. “They told us that you’re trying to tear the whole thing down.”

“What thing?”

“Everything. The country, the Project. You’re out of control, Ledger, and they will stop you.”

“Wait — suddenly I’m the bad guy? You dickheads attacked us. You blew up a freaking lighthouse with missiles. How did I get to be the bad guy?”

He sneered at me. “We did what we had to do to protect the United States. Maybe we don’t wear the uniform anymore, but every goddamn one of us would die for this country.” Then he gave me a pitying, disgusted look. “They said you used to be a good guy, Ledger. What happened to you? How much did you sell your country for?”

I wanted to drop a flag on the play and sit down to reread the rulebook. He was making my speech. Okay, maybe it was a badly worded and needlessly clichéd version of my speech, but even so.

“They must have sold you a pretty amazing line of shit,” I told him. “You actually think I’m the bad guy?”

“We know you are, asshole. You and that crazy UFO broad want to see this country burn. You want to see Chinese troops marching up Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“Dude,” I said, “you lost me a couple of turns back. What the fuck are you talking about?”

And that’s when the silly son of a bitch made his move.

With slashed arms and a killer crouched over him and no genuine options, he went for it. He tried to buck me off while simultaneously twisting his hips and turning his face away.

I killed him for trying it.

It didn’t take much. He made his move, and I made mine.

Damn it.

I crouched over him, watching this man die. I don’t know if I have ever been more conflicted about killing an enemy combatant before. Inside my head the Modern Man was appalled at what I’d done. The Cop detested me for losing control of the moment and thereby silencing my only information source. The Warrior …

Oh, man, the Warrior was howling with red delight. He saw that blood pouring into the dirt and he wanted to roll in it like a dog. Like a werewolf.

This was a very bad place to be, a very dark place. My feet were at the edge of the abyss, and down there things howled up at me in a voice that was far too familiar, far too personal.

I staggered back in both mind and body, and I turned away.

The knife was in my hand. It was red with blood, but strangely there was not even a drop of it on my flesh. As if I had used an innocent hand to pick up a guilty weapon.

What a dreadful illusion that was. And I marveled at how many lies are sewn into the fabric of our awareness.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing who it was meant for. The dead men, the people in my life who might suddenly be in danger because of me, Junie? Or was it meant for myself? If you are a sane and moral person, then with every act of violence there is less of you. I know this to be true. I’ve been aware each time the scalpel of experience pares away a chunk of me. Rudy Sanchez is fond of the expression, “Violence always leaves a mark.”

As a therapist and an empathetic man I know he understands that, but Rudy’s experience is largely that of an observer. The violence he’s seen has been from a distance. Not always, but mostly. When you are ankle deep in blood, however, the truth of that saying is both more profound and horribly understated.

These thoughts shambled through my brain as I quickly searched the pockets of the other dead men. I did not expect to find ID, of course. Instead I found other MPP pistols, knives, hand grenades, and a few small electronic gadgets I did not recognize. I crammed my pockets with the stuff, as much as I could carry. In the front pants pocket of the last man I’d killed I found a compact satellite phone that was no larger than a cell.

I flipped it open. Instead of offering me an open line, it immediately went to autoconnect. It was set to call only one line. Only two seconds passed before a voice said, “Condor One to Six, copy.”

I took a gamble.

“Copy, Condor One, go for Six.”

“Give me a location and a sit-rep?”

As I spoke I crunched a few dry leaves in my palm. Sounds like crappy reception. Great for disguising your voice. I also dropped parts of words to make it sound like the signal was fluctuating. My buddies and I used to do this at fast-food drive-throughs, too.

“—three klicks no — west of — lighthouse and—”

“We’re getting some heavy interference, Six. Adjust your squelch.”

I crumpled more leaves. “Negative, — ondor, — phone took — hit—”

“Give me a target status.”

“Have engaged — and terminated — hostile.”

“Six, I’m reading that you have engaged and terminated one hostile? Confirm.”

“—onfirm — d.”

There was a pause, then, “Initial or secondary target?”

Junie had to be the initial target. They could only have found out about me within the last few hours.

“Secondary — arget has — neutralized.”

“Do you have eyes on initial target?”

I made the fake static worse, but paused long enough to say, “—southeast—”

Then I switched off the phone. With any luck they’d shift their search.

But off in the distance, I heard a dog bark. Ghost.

And more helicopters coming.

To kill Junie and to kill me. And they thought I was the bad guy.

“Christ,” I breathed.

And ran.

Chapter Eighty-five

“Are you sure he’s dead?” asked Howard.

“Turn on the news and you tell me,” said Tull. He was shouting, still partially deafened from the blast.

“Where are you?”

“Aldo and I are driving, getting away from the blast zone.”

Howard closed his eyes for a moment, trying to imagine that blast. The TV would only show the aftereffects and he wished he could have actually seen it. Heard it. Been pushed around by it. His loins twitched at the thought of a blast like that. The blast, and all that it accomplished.

“Field Team Nine is still hunting Ledger and the Flynn woman,” said Tull. “Last report said that they’ve taken some heavy losses but they haven’t yet confirmed a kill.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Howard. “There’s enough firepower at Turkey Point to do the job. In the meantime, get out of Baltimore and come here.”

“There?”

“Yes, I think you deserve to be with Mr. Bones and me when we make our big announcement.”

“When?”

“Come now. We’ll make the call first thing in the morning.”

Howard disconnected the call.

“That was Tull?”

“Yes. Deacon is dead.”

Mr. Bones smiled. “You’re joking.”

“Let’s turn on the news and find out.”

They did and the big plasma screen on the wall showed them an aerial view of a blast crater gouged out of the warehouse district in Baltimore. A cargo ship lay on its side in the brown water and other warehouses were blazing. Firefighters aimed dozens of streams of high-pressure water at the buildings, trying to save some. Others, more fully involved, were left to burn. Of the DMS Warehouse, nothing at all remained. Not a stick, not an unbroken stone.

The banner beneath the image read, in huge red letters, TERROR STRIKES BALTIMORE.

“How appropriate,” said Howard. “Not terrorism. Terror.”

But Mr. Bones did not answer. He stared slack jawed at the devastation.

“Oh my God…,” he breathed.

“Tull used ten of the miniature Truman Engines.”

“All of that?” breathed Mr. Bones aghast. “Just ten of the little ones?”

“Yes,” said Howard, “and I can’t imagine anything more wonderful or more perfectly timed.”

“But … but … the air show has been canceled. How does this…?”

Howard dug a cell phone out of his pocket and tossed it to Mr. Bones.

“I think it’s time we made some phone calls.”

Chapter Eighty-six

The sky got very loud. Craning my head to look up as I ran, I could see both of the unmarked black helicopters up there. But the noise was bigger than that. There were other engine sounds, rotors with a different signature coming hard from the south.

I broke from cover into a clearing that circled a small pond. There was a mound of sandstone rising on one side of the pond and I scrambled up to get the best possible view. The two black helicopters were moving slowly, rising from a low-level search and moving through a climbing turn to face south. It took ten seconds before I could see the other chopper. What I wanted to see — needed to see — was a different kind of black helo. Also black, but with a higher gloss to the paint and the distinctive weapons array that marked it as a DMS bird. I wanted to see thin red lines around the doors and down the tail.

What I saw instead were two helicopters, neither of them Black Hawks, neither of them black. The first was a hulking HH-60J Jayhawk and its companion was a much smaller AgustaWestland AW109. Both were painted with the bright white and blood red of the Coast Guard. Both, I knew, would be armed. M240D belt-fed, gas-operated medium machine guns firing 7.62mm NATO ammunition.

Under any other circumstance, two Coast Guard choppers would be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to anything troubling the shores of Maryland.

This was a different kind of day.

So far, it wasn’t a good day for the good guys.

The Black Hawks could have fought it out with their own machine guns, and they certainly had the edge. Kind of hard to pit the M240D against a minigun. The Guardsmen could spit out nine hundred rounds per minute. The minigun uses the same caliber of ammunition, but it blasts it out at a staggering six thousand rounds per minute.

But the Closers weren’t interested in a gunfight, not even with bigger guns.

There was a big, clunky gun mounted on the underbelly of the chopper. The distance was too great for me to make out details, but I knew that it would have four curved prongs instead of an open barrel. There was too much noise for me to hear the tok sound, but I saw a brief shimmer in the air as a focused beam of microwaves shot from the Closer’s bird and hit the first of the Coast Guard helicopters.

At first I thought that the shot had missed. Then suddenly the lead helo blew apart in a massive ball of intense red flame. It could not have been a full second later that the second helo exploded. It was so fast. So ugly. So thorough. Starbursts of flaming debris flew outward like the petals of some grotesque flower.

I screamed at the sky as the burning wreckage fell in strangely slow motion onto the rifling green treetops below.

I raised the stolen MPP in a foolish, wasteful, suicidal, and pointless attempt to strike back. My finger pulled the trigger. Tok! Tok!

And then something happened …

Something that seemed completely impossible.

As I fired at the closest Black Hawk — it exploded!

I gaped. It was impossible. At that distance, with the small gun I held — it was impossible. It was so freakishly absurd they wouldn’t have put it in a movie. Only as an afterimage did I see the arrow-straight trail of silver-black smoke.

I whirled to follow the back trail of the smoke to its source.

And there it was.

A gleaming black UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, the body detailed with lines of red the exact same color of blood. Men crowded the open bay door, hunched over the machine gun. I knew those faces. Even from here, I knew them.

I spoke one name.

“Top…”

You could almost see the other black helicopter freeze in midair in a WTF moment. Then the closer helo spun toward the DMS bird. Both helicopters were evenly matched for this kind of fight. However, there was a moment that echoed the confrontation between the black helos and the Coast Guard — a moment when this could have turned into a shooting match with machine guns.

But I knew Top. He had to have seen the two Coast Guard birds die. All those brave men, incinerated in an instant. Top’s son had been killed in Iraq in the first days of the war. His daughter had lost both legs when her Bradley rolled over an IED. “Fair” was never really part of the kind of war we were fighting. M3 and their killers had opened up on us with no declaration of war, no agreement of rules, no promise of quarter. They’d come like butchers onto the field. The death toll for today was already too high. Hector and the others aboard my chopper, the two Coast Guard crews.

Fair?

Fuck fair.

The DMS Black Hawk blew those sons of bitches out of the sky.

That’s fair.