The Black Knight (3 page)

‘You didn’t have to get your weapon out for me, Warner.’

Ethan turned away from former FBI Agent Hannah Ford and tossed his pistol onto the bed.

‘False alarm,’ he replied. ‘I thought something exciting was about to happen. Don’t you know how to knock?’

‘We’ve been knocking for five minutes,’ Ford replied as her two armed escorts moved to guard the apartment’s door as Ethan dressed. ‘You sleep soundly, which is something I wouldn’t have expected.’

‘I’ve learned not to give a damn any more,’ Ethan retaliated. ‘Where’s the fire?’

Hannah leaned on the doorframe and watched as Ethan pulled on a pair of jeans.

‘Doug Jarvis has called us in. I don’t know why, but they’re in one hell of a hurry so let’s get moving.’

Ethan scowled as he glanced at a digital clock beside his bed.
5.26am.

‘Jesus, can’t they have a crisis at a normal time for a change?’

Hannah didn’t reply as Ethan padded into the bathroom and stood in front of a sink, yanking the faucet to let warm water fill it. A mirror reflected his wide jaw, gray eyes and scruffy light brown hair as he splashed the water across his face and tried to shake off the lethargy slowing his movements.

In recent years Ethan and his partner Nicola Lopez had been fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough depending on how he looked at it, to have been contracted by the Defense Intelligence Agency to investigate cases the rest of the intelligence community had rejected as unworkable. The connection to a high level agency like the DIA had come from a former colleague of Ethan’s named Douglas Jarvis. The old man had once been captain of a United States Marines Rifle Platoon and Ethan’s senior officer during his time with the Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their friendship, cemented during Operation Iraqi Freedom and later, when Ethan had resigned his commission and been embedded with Jarvis’s men as a journalist, had continued into their unusual and discreet accord with the DIA where Jarvis continued to serve his country.

Throughout this time he had performed his duties for the DIA alongside Nicola Lopez, as a part of their shared business
Lopez & Warner Inc
. The memory of Lopez slowed his movements further still and he stared in silence at his reflection in the mirror as he thought of her.

‘How’re you holding up?’

Hannah Ford’s voice reached him from the distance. Ford had been an FBI Agent assigned to track both himself and Lopez in an attempt to arrest them for crimes they had not committed. It had taken a recent national incident for the FBI to realize the deception and cancel the operation, after which Hannah Ford had transferred to the DIA and joined the team. Her voice pulled him back into the present, and he sighed and dried his face.

‘I’m fine.’

Nicola Lopez had been seriously wounded several months before during a gunfight with terrorists determined to assassinate either the President of the United States or the President of the People’s Republic of China, during a major ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. Both he and Lopez had been instrumental in preventing that tragedy, but success had come at a great price, with Lopez still on a life-support machine in a DC hospital. Ethan had moved from Chicago to be closer to both Lopez and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

‘I checked in on her the other day,’ Hannah said. ‘She’s still stable, still fighting.’

Ethan did not reply. It wasn’t often that he had heard anybody refer to Lopez as stable – being a fighter ran strong in her Latino blood. They had shared several investigations for the DIA over the years, often facing death and coming out the other side by the skin of their teeth, each always covering the others’ back. His world felt empty now without her constant bitching to color it.

Ethan pulled on his shirt, which helped to cover some of the scars his frame had garnered over the years, and then he pushed past Hannah and fitted his shoulder holster, slipping the Beretta into it before pulling on a leather jacket.

‘Let’s go see what the fuss is about,’ he said, not wanting to discuss Lopez any further.

Outside the apartment two smart SUVs were pulled into the sidewalk, the sun rising in slivers of molten metal between gray clouds as Ethan climbed aboard one of the vehicles. Hannah Ford followed him and moments later the two SUVs were cruising south toward the Capitol, the driver eager to beat the early morning rush into the city center.

‘Where’s Vaughn?’ Ethan asked.

Michael Vaughn was Hannah Ford’s former partner at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, both of them having resigned their roles there to become agents within the Defense Intelligence Agency after the attempted attacks on the life of the President. A stocky, thick-necked and capable agent, Vaughn had followed Hannah willingly into the DIA.

‘He’s already at Bolling,’ Hannah replied. ‘Jarvis sent me to get you.’

‘Why didn’t he just use the damned phone?’

‘Because you keep turning it off, Einstein,’ Hannah pointed out. ‘You haven’t been on top form lately, Warner, so I guess he thinks you need me to pick you up and return you to your former joyful self.’

‘He shouldn’t have delegated that task.’

‘I shouldn’t have accepted it but I’m all heart, y’know?’

Ethan glanced out of the windows as he watched the city awakening around them, lights glowing in houses and twinkling across the Potomac. The SUV was closing in on Joint Bolling-Anacostia Airbase, located on the eastern shore of the river close to where it merged with the Georgetown Channel. The base was the location of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Headquarters and clad in secrecy.

‘You got any idea at all what this is about?’ Ethan asked, more to change the subject than anything else.

‘Like I said, Jarvis didn’t reveal much but I do know that this isn’t just a DIA gig. Vaughn told me they’ve got a team of boffins from NASA assembling at the DIA Headquarters Building, and all of them are in a state of excitement about something.’

‘Hellerman there?’

Hellerman was Jarvis’s assistant, a scientist and verifiable genius who liaised with the agency on technical matters. A firm admirer of Lopez, he too had suffered since she had been shot months before.

The SUV pulled into the base, security checks delaying their passage as the vehicle and its occupants were thoroughly searched before they were allowed into the DIA’s complex. The SUV pulled up close to the south entrance and allowed Ethan and Hannah to disembark. The dawn sky above was brightening quickly as two armed escorts approached them and hustled them inside.

The DIA’s south wing entrance, in front of which was a fountain before broad lawns, made up only a tiny part of the agency’s sprawling complex. Huge, silvery buildings with mirrored black windows contained some of the most sensitive intelligence gathering equipment in the world, including vast 24/7
Watch Centers
manned by specialists monitoring events across the entire globe.

In all Ethan and Nicola had conducted eight investigations for the Defense Intelligence Agency since Ethan had been plucked from Cook County Jail by Jarvis and given a new life working for one of the most clandestine units ever created by the intelligence community.

Hannah took the lead as they moved through the intense security measures, including full-body X-Rays and pat down searches. They finally passed through the last of the checks in time for Jarvis to meet them in the main foyer of the building, the polished tile floor emblazoned with a large DIA emblem in the manner of all the senior intelligence agencies. For a change, Jarvis’s characteristic easy smile and casual demeanor was absent, replaced by genuine concern and urgency.

‘Ethan, how are you doing?’

Ethan shook the old man’s hand. ‘I’m fine. What’s the story?’

‘Come with me,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’ll show you.’

Ethan followed them, aware of the large number of civilian staff walking through the building. Uniquely to a highly secretive intelligence agency, two thirds of the DIA’s seventeen thousand employees were civilian, which allowed selected freelance operatives like Warner and Lopez to act in concert with official employees like Jarvis. Represented in some one hundred forty countries and with its own Clandestine Service, to which Warner and Lopez were now attached, the agency’s only weakness was a lack of influence in law enforcement, forcing them in past cases to work alongside, or against, local police and federal law agencies around the country.

Jarvis led them to an elevator shaft, which in turn carried them deep into the building’s subterranean sections far from the prying eyes of even the most sophisticated surveillance cameras and electromagnetic scanners.

‘A NASA Watch Station at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, detected an unknown signal this morning coming from Earth orbit,’ Jarvis announced as they travelled down in the elevator. ‘It’s got the Joint Chiefs of Staff running about like headless chickens, and for now the President is out of the loop until we can provide a decent explanation for what the signal is and what is means.’

Hannah Ford frowned. ‘What kind of signal?’

‘You’ll need to hear that to believe it,’ Jarvis replied.

‘I never like it when you say things like that,’ Ethan said, recalling previous expeditions he and Lopez had conducted at the DIA’s behest. ‘It usually means something dangerous is gonna happen.’

The elevator doors opened and Jarvis led them out into a Watch Station used by the new department that Jarvis was heading up. Formerly employing only Ethan and Nicola Lopez, the events of recent investigations had brought the department to the attention of the current administration, with the result that staffing had increased. Ethan saw at least a dozen specialists working at computer stations before the large screens that dominated the walls, all showing news feeds from around the world.

‘So what’s so special about this signal?’ Ethan asked.

Jarvis grinned conspiratorially as he led them to a briefing room, outside which awaited Mickey Vaughn. The former FBI Agent shook Ethan’s hand and offered him a genuine smile.

‘Good to see you back.’

Vaughn ushered them into the briefing room, where sat Lieutenant General J. F. Nellis, the Director of National Intelligence. Nellis was a former United States Air Force officer who had recently been appointed DNI by the current president. Jarvis had been selected by Nellis to run a small investigative unit designed to root out corruption within the intelligence community while remaining beyond the prying eyes of senior figures on Capitol Hill. Jarvis had been chosen due to his prior success in operating a similar unit within the DIA that had conducted five investigations into what were rather discreetly termed as “anomalous phenomena,” which had attracted the attention of both the FBI and the CIA and eventually been shut down. 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 his entire career.

‘Please,’ Nellis gestured to seats around a long table with long, elegant hands. ‘Take a seat.’

Ethan sat down among several scientists, all of whom were whispering excitedly among themselves as Vaughn shut the briefing room door and all eyes turned to Nellis. The tall general, gray haired and imbued with an air of great authority, spoke softly but clearly.

‘My apologies for the speed with which you have been mobilized but there is little time and we need to act fast. At oh four hundred hours this morning, Eastern Seaboard Time, an anomalous signal was detected by NASA engineers at Cheyenne Mountain’s Surveillance Base in Colorado Springs. This signal has now been confirmed by signals officers at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and Signals Inteligence stations both at Joint Base Edwards and multiple listening posts across the globe. So far, we have been able to use our satellites to intercept these signals so that they cannot be detected by non-military or non-US assets on the ground.’

Ethan frowned.

‘How did you manage that so fast?’ he asked. ‘Surely people could have detected the signals themselves? It will be all over the Internet by now.’

General Nellis smiled.

‘That would be true had we not already known about the object making the transmissions. Fortunately, we have been aware of its presence for over a century.’

The scientists around Ethan gasped, their eyes wide as they stared at Nellis.

‘A century?’ Hannah Ford echoed. ‘But we haven’t had satellites in orbit for that long.’

‘Indeed,’ Nellis agreed. ‘That’s because the satellite does not belong to us, and we have been able to conceal its presence for decades because we already knew that it was there. The object was placed in orbit long before mankind first launched a satellite into space.’

Ethan’s curiosity got the better of him. ‘How long has it been there?’

General Nellis folded his hands before him.

‘The object’s rate of decay, when measured against its mass, provides scientists with the means to calculate how long the object has been in orbit around our planet by back-tracking its orbital path to the point where it was first captured by Earth’s gravity.’ Nellis breathed out softly as though unwilling to impart his next sentence. ‘They have calculated that the object, now code-named Black Knight, has been in orbit around the Earth for approximately thirteen thousand years.’

***

IV

A silence descended in the briefing room that lasted for several long seconds, as every man and woman present considered just what that meant.

‘Thirteen thousand years,’ Hannah echoed. ‘So it’s not man-made?’

‘Hardly,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘Thirteen thousand years ago, mankind had just worked out how to throw spears a long way and make knives out of something other than chipped flint. There’s no way Black Knight could have been produced by us.’

Mickey Vaughn, who had been leaning against a wall listening, spoke for the first time.

‘What’s it signalling, and to whom?’