Extinction Machine (27 page)

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

VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sunday, October 20, 10:15 a.m.

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

Turkey Point Lighthouse, Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 10:17 a.m.

“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.”