The Black Knight

L

Ethan Warner sat quietly on a seat opposite the DIA’s Patriot’s Wall, a series of hexagonal gold plaques set alongside each other in a shape reminiscent of the continental United States and flanked by the flags of both the agency and the United States of America. The wall honored DIA personnel who had lost their lives while working for the agency around the globe. Ethan knew that the wall was not exhaustive due to exclusion of agents with links to classified missions — nobody knew how many personnel the agency had lost in classified circumstances over the decades.

A new plaque now shone on the wall, emblazoned with Hannah Ford’s name. Ethan stared at it in silence for a long time, and knew that if either he or Lopez had lost their lives in the battle against the enemies of their country their names would not be honored upon the wall. Unlike the CIA, contractors were not included on the DIA’s wall due to the often highly sensitive nature of their work.

He was still sitting there when Doug Jarvis strolled in and took a seat alongside Ethan, the pair of them staring at the same wall.

‘What intel did we get on Majestic Twelve?’ he asked.

Jarvis looked at him for a moment. ‘Let’s forget about them for a moment. How are you doing?’

Ethan sighed and looked into his lap for a moment before he replied.

‘It doesn’t really matter how I’m doing, does it,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘We have a job to do and it costs lives every day. All that matters right now is finishing the job.’

‘You need to take some time,’ Jarvis began, ‘or this whole thing will…’

‘It won’t be for nothing,’ Ethen growled back. ‘Hannah gave her life for this, for what we do, for this cause that we’ve been recruited for. You and I both know that the only reason her name is up on that wall is because she worked for the FBI and had enough history there to warrant it. As it is, the cause of her death has been put down to terrorism.’

‘It was the only way to get her on the wall,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Had we not opted for that, her sacrifice would have gone entirely unnoticed.’

‘Which brings me back to my original question.’

‘Nicola and Michael succeeded in identifying the members of Majestic Twelve in New York City,’ Jarvis informed him. ‘While you were returning from Antarctica our team was able to put names to those faces. We know who Majestic Twelve are, Ethan, every last one of them and we already have one of them in custody, a man named Victor Wilms.’

‘The man behind the missile attack,’ Ethan said. ‘What about Mitchell?’

‘He gave us Wilms, but is now in the wind. I can only assume that he intends to flee and live out his days on some obscure beach far from civilization, or that he intends to continue exacting his revenge on Majestic Twelve.’

Ethan shook his head. ‘He won’t last long on his own. A man like Mitchell always has a game plan of some kind, an escape option.’

‘Perhaps,’ Jarvis conceded, ‘but he’s getting too old for field work. If he’s planning something it’ll be big, something sufficient to allow him to live his life in peace.’

‘The eradication of his enemies,’ Ethan agreed, ‘which now represent Majestic Twelve. He’ll hunt them down as we do, but he won’t stop at arresting them.’

‘No, he’ll kill them one by one,’ Jarvis replied.

‘I’m not going to let Hannah have died just so Mitchell can go on his revenge spree,’ Ethan said, his voice hard and cold. ‘That asshole spent enough time working for the bad guys and knowing it to have expended any sympathy I might have had for him. You should never have worked with him, Doug.’

‘I had no choice, and the intel’ he gave us resulted in us apprehending one of MJ-12’s most senior members and identifying the rest. Not only that, the images we obtained show them in the company of Gordon LeMay, who is now dead. They were the last people to see him alive and we have evidence of their complicity in his death: his autopsy revealed the use of a drug called pancuronium bromide, slipped into champagne which the members of MJ-12 handed to him. We even have LeMay’s collapse on record and MJ-12 standing around laughing at him on the floor.’

‘Nothing less than he deserved,’ Ethan observed.

‘I’m not going to disagree with you on that score, but we have them on the run. Hannah and Mitchell’s work gave us a major breakthrough Ethan, the first step on the road to crushing MJ-12.’

‘What about the blast at the glacier, and the remains of the base?’

‘The impact event has been put down to a meteorite strike, with NASA providing data and material borrowed from other genuine Antarctic impacts to support the assertion,’ Jarvis explained. ‘With the glacier weakened it will be many months before scientists can again visit the area. We have teams already monitoring the site, which is filling up once again with ice and snow as it refreezes. Our best estimates suggest that within three months there will be no remaining evidence of the impact.’

‘And global nuclear detection satellites?’

‘All detected the impact, as did seismic survey instruments around the globe, but all nations with sufficient resources to observe the event have taken NASA’s story as gospel and there appears to have been no international enquiries about what happened. On the same vein, we have enough evidence to charge Victor Wilms with the attempted murder of United States service personnel at the site, along with the illegal missile test event known as the Vela Incident. He’ll be tried behind closed doors and likely incarcerated in a maximum security facility — I felt that the one in Florence would be a nice touch to finish his story.’

‘He’ll get out,’ Ethan said. ‘These people have too much power, too much money.’

‘Not this time,’ Jarvis countered. ‘Wilms’ targets were military, which makes him an enemy combatant and effectively a terrorist. His lackeys in MJ-12 won’t be able to help or reach him, and we’ll be using Wilms as an example and a message to others among the cabal: we’re coming for them and there’ll be no escaping true justice this time.’

Ethan sighed again as he stared at the plaque on the wall.

‘What about Amy?’

Jarvis shifted in his seat.

‘She is in confinement in a laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base and under the strictest security, but she’s doing fine and Doctor Chandler is with her. The Seehund submarine you used maintained a perfect seal and Chandler got her out, with Polar Star picking them up off shore. The DIA has the disc in its possession and we’re working on deciphering it now.’

‘How long will that take?’ Ethan asked.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Jarvis replied, and then stood up. ‘You did good work down there, Ethan. There’s a light at the end of this tunnel now and it’s all down to Hannah.’

Ethan nodded, and Jarvis walked away. He had barely gone when from the other side of the room somebody else approached, and Ethan looked across to see Nicola Lopez striding toward him.

Ethan stood up and practically fell into her arms, the two of them leaning into each other and saying nothing for a long time. Eventually, Lopez looked up at him and one hand touched his cheek.

‘You okay, hero?’

Ethan could not prevent the awkward smile that slapped itself across his face as he tried to keep his grief inside. His jaw ached and he nodded.

‘Just another day, right?’

Lopez nodded as she released Ethan and looked at the plaque on the wall. ‘Would’ve been me if I hadn’t been in a coma.’

‘Napping on the job again,’ Ethan replied.

‘You wanna be the next plaque on that wall, asshole?’

Lopez’s eyes were hot with contempt but he could see the twinkle in them. Her skin was filled once again with color and though he could see that she had lost weight, she was rapidly making her comeback.

‘Does this mean we’re partnered up again?’ he asked wearily.

‘You work for me, remember?’

‘That was before we threw our lot in with the DIA again,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘We’re on an equal playing field now.’

‘You mean level playing field.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘That’s what I just said.’

‘Jeez, I need another break from you already.’

Lopez smiled brightly, grabbed his hand and gently led him away from the memorial wall.

‘We’ve got work to do,’ she said. ‘We’ve got MJ-12 on the run, and now’s the time to strike. They know we’ve identified them, so they’re going to do everything they can to erase their histories before we can charge them with anything.’

‘And how do you propose we stop them?’ Ethan asked.

‘They’re Nazis, right? We’ll hit them where it hurts them the most,’ Lopez replied with a cruel smile, ‘their history and their pockets.’

The deepest, most secretive subterranean section of the Defense Intelligence Agency was its Research and Test facility, concealed not just from the public but from most of the agency’s many thousands of employees. Most were informed that it contained the agency’s archives, the record of countless covert missions, which was true enough in and of itself.

But Jarvis knew that it did not reveal the whole story.

In a far flung corner of the archives, in an area purposefully allowed to gather dust, was a door emblazoned with an aged warning sign of high voltages within. The door had a single visible lock, to which only a handful of the agency’s personnel held a key. The key would not work on its own, however, for most of the locks inside the door were on the far side and controlled from a secure location in the Director’s office. One could only access the door with their key if the other locks had been accessed by the director himself.

Jarvis slid his key into the lock, turned it, and waited.

Moments later he heard mechanical and electrical locks open and the door hissed open before him. He walked into a narrow tunnel filled with old fuse boxes, cables and pipes, and strode down it until he reached another door. Above this one, a dusty looking camera flashed a red light, and as the door behind Jarvis closed again so the one in front of him opened.

The laboratory within was large, manned by a dozen or so people had picked from the agency’s thousands of staff. One of them was Hellerman, who hurried up to Jarvis’s side and started speaking as though he had never done so before.

‘Oh my God, sir, thank you so much for letting me know about this place. I can’t believe all of the incredibly cool things you’ve got hidden away down here and I really wanted to say that I…’

‘Where is it, Hellerman?’

Hellerman controlled himself and pointed down the laboratory. ‘It’s just over here.’

Jarvis followed him to a workstation where a Perspex box contained a perfect chrome sphere of material that looked to him like a ball of mercury, the liquid flowing around itself as though it represented the weather patterns on a tiny planet. Beneath it was the gold disc, broken now into two pieces.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘The disc was merely the container,’ Hellerman enthused, ‘and the Black Knight a drone of sorts, perhaps one of thousands distributed across the galaxy by an advanced species. We deciphered the symbols upon it using Amy’s work from Antarctica and it opened to reveal this.’

Hellerman pointed excitedly at the sphere.

‘And this is what, exactly?’ Jarvis asked.

‘Hell, I don’t know!’ Hellerman almost shouted, his face beaming with delight, ‘that’s the exciting thing!’

‘An educated guess?’ Jarvis pushed.

Hellerman glanced at the sphere. ‘It’s a computer drive,’ he replied. ‘It’s a liquid metal, variable state memory system so advanced that I nearly pee my pants even thinking about it. It’s using the quantum state of the metal in order to maintain immense volumes of information, comparable to the entire memory capacity of every single computer on Earth ten-fold.’

Jarvis peered at the sphere and saw his own distorted reflection in it.

‘Can you access it?’

Hellerman’s delighted expression faltered slightly as he too looked at the sphere. ‘No. In fact we don’t even know where to start, except to be certain that we can’t take a keyboard and a USB and just plug it in.’ Jarvis peered at Hellerman, who shrugged. ‘Sorry, I just get real excited by things like this. Whatever it’s for, Majestic Twelve knew about it and wanted it real bad.’

Jarvis nodded and stood up from it.

‘Keep this to yourselves,’ he ordered. ‘Do everything that you can to understand what it is and how it works. If we can access it, our country will have a sufficient technological advantage over the rest of the world that will never be surpassed.’

‘You got it,’ Hellerman said as his head bobbed up and down like a deranged parrot.

Jarvis walked away from the laboratory and out of the subterranean section of the building. He used the elevator to return to the ground level of the agency, and then left work for the day. He did not use his cell phone until he had driven ten miles away from the agency, and then it was a burner cell that would not be traced. He dialed a number from memory and waited, the line picking up on the second ring.

‘Yes?’

‘We’ve got it and we’ll figure out how to use it sooner or later.’

A long silence on the line before the reply.

‘We’re taking an awfully big risk here, Jarvis. Keeping me out of ADX Florence and off the law enforcement radar will only last so long.’

‘It only has to last so long,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I want this all to come to an end, but I sure as hell don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. We’re each other’s insurance policy, Aaron: let’s make sure all our cover is perfect before we both disappear.’

Jarvis shut off the line as he drove, opened his side window and tossed the phone over the side of the bridge and down into the Potomac. As he closed the window he reflected on how little time he had left to complete his mission, just like Mitchell.