“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 a
llotted 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
The Warehouse
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 11:44 a.m.
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.”
<
br /> 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
Hadley and Meyers Real Estate
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 11:45 a.m.
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.”