The Nemesis Origin

VI

‘I want to speak to you plainly and in complete security. You are under no obligations and your presence here remains covert. No non-disclosure protocols are in operation, as I have asked you here on trust and reputation alone.’

Lieutenant General J. F. Nellis was a former United States Air Force officer who had recently been appointed DNI by the current president. Just one year into the role and he had already aged visibly, swamped by the sheer volume of information he was required to process as a matter of daily routine.

‘That’s the first time anybody has said that in an agency capacity. What gives?’

Former Defense Intelligence Agency operative Douglas Ian Jarvis sat opposite the DNI and tried not to look nervous. Almost as old as the director himself, Jarvis had spent some twenty years working for the DIA and been involved in some of the highest-level classified operations ever conducted by elements of the US Covert Operations Service. Most of them he would never be able to talk about with another human being, even those with whom he had served. Jarvis knew the rules and had obeyed them with patriotic fervour, more or less, his entire career. Which was why he was now feeling uncomfortable.

There had been no warning of the meeting. He had been woken at five in the morning by a polite knock at his bedroom door. Not the front door of his house — his bedroom door. Two agents, both armed, had disabled his alarm and accessed his house before waking him at gunpoint to inform him that he should not panic, that he was required for a meeting that must be conducted without observation of any kind.

Jarvis, unsurprisingly, had believed himself the victim of a terrorist abduction and had almost shot the two agents with the pistol he held under his pillow, but one of them had uttered two words that had both shocked him and belayed his trigger finger.

Majestic Twelve.

‘You served the DIA for two decades, the last five years of which you operated a covert unit tasked with high-level, low-footprint investigations into unusual phenomena. By your own design the outfit was conceived to be completely deniable and capable of infiltrating government agency programs under the umbrella of its official investigative charter.’

Jarvis blinked. ‘We stole data, exposed corruption and investigated paranormal events.’

General Nellis smiled at Jarvis, took the hint. They could talk as he had requested and dispose of the formalities.

‘At what level was your non-disclosure agreement ordered?’

‘Cosmic,’ Jarvis replied, ‘Level Five. Orders came from the Pentagon, which department I do not know. All five of the investigations we conducted were sealed terminal, never to be released for public consumption.’

Nellis nodded as he looked down at folder before him. ‘Tell me, how did you come into all of this?’

‘Short story?’

‘As concise as you can be.’

Jarvis began to feel a little more at ease, but he still picked his words with care as he spoke. He didn’t know the DNI well enough to be sure of whether this was going to end with him being hung out to dry for revealing state secrets.

‘The program I led was not designed by me but was inherited. It had its origins in something known as Project Blue Book, a series of systematic studies of the UFO phenomena conducted by the Air Force. It started with Project Sign, then Project Grudge, before becoming Blue Book. Designed to determine if UFOs represented a threat to national security and to analyse data gathered from sightings, it was scrapped in 1970.’

‘And then resurrected later?’

‘The CIA had numerous projects running through the seventies and eighties, like Project Stargate which investigated psychic phenomena and remote viewing, and units like MK-ULTRA which studied everything from hallucinatory drug-induced assassins to microwave mind-control and use of animals as weapons of war. All of these programs were eventually shut down, but a few years back I was approached by the DIA to start up a small unit that unified the disparate threads of previous CIA-led programs and create a more covert study of such phenomena. Essentially, we were willing to investigate events that other agencies rejected as fantasy.’

Nellis leafed through a few pages of the folder. ‘What was the catalyst for this sudden volte-face of the DIA?’

‘An event that occurred in Israel,’ Jarvis said, and then let his voice trail off.

Nellis looked at Jarvis for a moment. ‘You can speak freely here, Doug.’

‘No, sir, I cannot,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Lives have been taken as a result of the Pentagon’s determination to preserve security over that operation.’

Nellis held Jarvis’s gaze for a long moment. ‘I can tell you, Mr Jarvis, that you never received orders from the Pentagon regarding these issues and operations.’

Jarvis stared long and hard at the DNI before he replied. ‘Say that again?’

‘You never received orders from the Pentagon regarding these issues and operations,’ Nellis repeated. ‘Your non-disclosure agreements, although legally and technically valid in a public setting, hold no weight in this office.’

‘Who gave the orders?’ Jarvis asked, stunned.

‘I’ll get to that,’ Nellis replied. ‘Israel?’

Jarvis sighed. He was an old man now, and he realized that it wasn’t like the Pentagon or anybody else could steal his young life away from him. If he was ever going to be able to come clean about the operations he had conducted, now was the time and Nellis was the man.

‘I take it you are aware of the alleged events that took place in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947?’

‘The supposed crashed flying-saucer,’ Nellis nodded.

‘Nobody knows what happened that day, but what we can be sure of is that something happened and that it was highly important to the government of the time. The stories of the wreckage actually being a weather balloon aren’t bought by anybody: it was a cover-up all right and within months of the event programs like Project Sign started up to investigate UFOs. The government spent millions trying to understand what happened, but its people just didn’t have the skills to properly investigate such unusual events. After Project Blue Book was closed, the agencies involved adopted a wait and watch policy. They figured that if it happened once, then maybe something similar might happen again.’

Nellis blinked in surprise as he continued to study the file. ‘Are we the only ones involved in this?’

‘Not at all,’ Jarvis replied. ‘NASA recently heavily redacted a press-release that had been leaked to the media. Within it, from a NASA published study entitled Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communications, a paragraph was revealed that suggested they’re preparing for contact from extra-terrestrial species. If what you’re looking at there is the files the DIA publicly maintain on such events, it’s on page eighteen.’

Nellis flipped to the relevant page and read aloud from it. ‘These scholars are grappling with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity if an information-rich signal emanating from another world is detected. By drawing on issues at the core of contemporary archaeology and anthropology, we can be much better prepared for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come.’ Nellis looked up at Jarvis. ‘Is this serious? You think that they’re expecting an invasion?’

‘Not exactly,’ Jarvis smiled. ‘NASA was likely using previous human invasions of other countries in history to compare to the arrival of an alien species here on Earth, but you can guess how the public reacted to such an official paper. After what happened in 1977 with the WOW Signal, I suspect the Pentagon wasn’t too happy with NASA’s more recent leak.’

‘That what signal?’ Nellis asked.

‘The Wow Signal was picked up by the Big Ear Radio telescope of Ohio State University on August 15, 1977 as part of the SETI Project, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. It bore all the hallmarks of an intelligent, non-terrestrial and non-solar system origin and lasted seventy two seconds. Other, more recent signals have been detected from earth-like systems but are suppressed by the media.’

‘It was an alien broadcast?’ Nellis asked.

‘By all the standards applied to such signals, yes,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘It was intelligent, technological and came from a star system other than our own.’

‘It’s been government policy for some time to suppress anything that might be considered controversial that NASA or other space agencies might discover.’

‘Such as France,’ Jarvis agreed, ‘who have a full time department called Geipan dedicated to the study of UFO sightings. The British recently operated a similar department but shut it down, or at least the public face of it. After what happened in Israel, the powers that be in Washington want all allied countries to cease further investigations into UFO activity to avoid generating unwanted public interest.’

Nellis reached the relevant page on Israel in the file before him. ‘This material is heavily redacted, I can’t figure out what it actually refers to.’

Jarvis took a deep breath, and let it all out.

‘In the Negev Desert of Israel, a palaeontologist by the name of Dr Lucy Morgan excavated a seven thousand year old tomb, and inside it she found the skeletal remains of a bipedal, non-human figure.’

The room filled with a deep silence as Nellis absorbed the information. ‘Go on.’

‘Morgan vanished, along with the remains and with a delicate political summit underway between Israel and Palestine, official US interference was impossible. Instead, I was tasked with organising a rescue and retrieval mission: liberate Lucy Morgan and tie her into a strict Non-Disclosure Agreement, and ensure that the remains she discovered were secured by the agency and spirited away.’

Nellis nodded, reading from the file and no-doubt filling in the redacted gaps as he went.

‘The mission was a success and led to your further operations.’

‘Four more,’ Jarvis said, ‘in New Mexico, Florida, Idaho and New York and involving various rogue agency-operations that were brought to a close. All were successful, but the unit was wound-down after the final operation in New York City.’

‘What happened?’

‘A rogue CIA unit governed by MK-ULTRA, a supposedly defunct Agency program, hunted down my two lead operatives and forced them into hiding for over six months. After the situation was resolved, the two in question walked away from the DIA and vowed that they would never work for the government again. I haven’t seen either of them since.’

Jarvis saw Nellis wince as he listened, and then he closed the file and looked at Jarvis.

‘A situation has developed and I need your help.’

‘I’ve been out of this game for almost two years,’ Jarvis replied. ‘My contacts have moved on, as has the technology. I don’t know that I would be of any use in…’

Nellis raised his hand to forestall Jarvis, a smile touching his craggy features as he searched for the right words before he spoke.

‘My role here is that of a cipher,’ he said. ‘I have the role of Director of National Intelligence, but that role has been engineered to deny me access to the Black Budget, to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Department, to various sub-agencies operating across the globe and to any high-level clearances afforded the directors of those agencies. In short Mr Jarvis, I’m sitting here as an administrator and nothing more and I don’t damned well like it.’

Jarvis hesitated for a moment before he replied. ‘Majestic Twelve.’

Nellis nodded and his voice dropped an octave as though he were afraid that somebody might be listening, even in an office in one of the most secure buildings on the planet.

‘Is a rumoured cabal of former politicians, intelligence leaders and military-industrial CEOs responsible for running the show we call humanity from behind the scenes. When you believed that you were receiving orders from the Pentagon, you were in fact operating on behalf of Majestic Twelve.’

Jarvis rubbed his temples with one hand. ‘Why have you brought me here today?’

‘I want you to re-start your unit under my command and get to the bottom of what Majestic Twelve is attempting to achieve.’

‘I doubt that will be possible, sir,’ Jarvis replied. ‘As I mentioned, both of my lead agents were compromised and later refused to work for the DIA any longer. Neither of them have any desire to perform more operations for us, and I don’t even know where one of them is.’

Nellis nodded, clearly having memorised the names of the individuals concerned.

‘Nicola Lopez runs the bail bondsmen company Warner & Lopez Inc out of Chicago. Ethan Warner, former United States Marine, is off the grid and has not been seen for almost a year.’

Jarvis nodded. ‘You’re not going to get Lopez out of Chicago, and if Ethan’s decided to get off the radar then you won’t find him.’

‘I agree. We’ve already tried.’

‘Why now?’ Jarvis asked. ‘What’s this really all about?’

Nellis leaned back in his seat. ‘I received direct orders two months ago, allegedly from the Pentagon, to maintain a watch on Dr Lucy Morgan as a person of interest to United States security. It’s not every day I get direct orders regarding a single individual — that kind of attention is usually reserved for international terrorists and war criminals. Having personally researched her background, I could find absolutely no evidence of any sign of her being a threat to national security. I did some quiet digging, and none of my contacts at the Pentagon issued those orders.’

Jarvis raised an eyebrow. ‘What did you do, sir?’

‘I did as I was told,’ Nellis grinned, ‘and I waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, Lucy Morgan has been making some strange movements, working into the early hours in her apartment, buying chemicals and such like that are normally used for laboratory experiments. The CIA listed her as somebody perhaps intending to create bombs, but none of the chemicals she has bought can be used to create any explosive device that I know of and besides, she’s a model citizen and respected scientist.’

‘Not to mention a patriot,’ Jarvis added. ‘Lucy’s no terrorist.’

‘I had a few agents research her history, made connections with her presence in Israel some years ago, and with it numerous highly-redacted files. No clear trail, but enough to suspect that there was more to the ordered surveillance than met the eye. More digging linked Ethan Warner to Israel at the same time, and from there his link to you at the DIA.’

Jarvis masked his uncertainty with a smile. ‘Stirling work, sir.’

‘But I can do no more from here,’ Nellis replied, ‘and now Lucy Morgan has taken a vacation and vanished completely.’

Now, Jarvis leaned forward in his seat. ‘How long?’

‘Two days,’ Nellis replied, ‘right after she was observed speaking to one Nicola Lopez.’

Jarvis could not help the smile that creased from the corner of his lips as he pictured Lopez in his mind, her firecracker temper and sarcastic wit.

‘They’re up to something,’ Jarvis said finally. ‘Lopez might be helping her in some way.’

‘More than that,’ Nellis said. ‘Morgan was approached a Russian the day prior to her disappearance, a man by the name of Vladimir Polkov. He’s the son of Yuri Polkov, a famed fossil smuggler and all-round enemy of the state. We didn’t have the ability to obtain recordings, but if a fossil smuggler is interested in a fossil hunter’s work, and Lucy Morgan has been conducting private studies of some kind…’

‘… then she’s found something new,’ Jarvis completed the sentence. ‘And you think that Majestic Twelve might be watching her too.’

‘I need you to get onto this Doug, quietly,’ Nellis implored him. ‘Your former commanding officer, General Mitchell, recommended you in the highest terms to me as a reliable agent and patriot. Whatever’s going on with Morgan and Lopez, I need to find out, and if it leads me to identifying the members of Majestic Twelve then I can start doing my damned job properly and root out the corruption that has blighted the intelligence community for so long.’

Jarvis rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. ‘What resources will I have?’

‘Not much,’ Nellis admitted. ‘Two trusted agents as a security detail, what tech’ data I can send you directly, a jet and a budget of course. It goes without saying that this will be un-official operations, no paper trail, no direct contact after this meeting. You’ll be supplied with a satellite phone and all necessary visas if required. We need to move fast Doug. What do you say? Do you think you can track Lucy Morgan down?’

‘Definitely,’ Jarvis replied. ‘But Warner? I honestly don’t know.’