Extinction Machine (40 page)

“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

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.”

“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

Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 11:46 a.m.

“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.”