by Tom DeLonge
Alan closed his eyes. There were no windows, nothing to look at but the men sitting opposite him, and he had long since mastered the ability to sleep through the most turbulent of flights, but his mind was racing. He hadn’t signed the letter of resignation, but even that token gesture of defiance was little more than a delaying tactic, while he waited to see what he was really being offered. Hatcher had told him nothing, beyond dangling a few vague and slightly mystical phrases, smiling cryptically and—more to the point—silently, when Alan pressed him for details. He would be fully briefed when he committed to the program. Not before.
It wasn’t like he had a lot of options.
But a dawn flight out of Afghanistan felt strange, like he was sneaking out. It didn’t sit right with him, and a part of Alan felt that Hatcher was playing games with him, with his hints about strange aircraft.
“Sign this,” he had said, “and I’ll show you.”
Alan shifted in his seat, trying to hold onto his outrage and his skepticism, but part of him was curious, and nervous, the way a child feels, cautiously cranking the handle of a jack-in-the-box.
Around him, sleepy Marines nodded along to the tinny music that leaked out of their headphones and ear buds. Some played video games on their phones or tablets. Others thumbed through magazines. Two had thrown up, and several others were looking green, but there was still an overall sense of relief. They were going home. Alan didn’t know where he was going.
If they were heading to Cherry Point, or even to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they would fly through DC. When they touched down not in Greece but in Kuwait, he and Hatcher were the only passengers to disembark. There, they were met by a bald man in a suit, who shook Hatcher’s hand and introduced himself to Alan as Agent Harvey Kenyon. His handshake was firm and dry, his manner brisk as he directed them to a solitary Gulfstream jet parked in a hardened shell just off the tarmac. “You can get aboard. We’re just waiting for one more.”
Alan took his seat. After the C-130, this was luxury itself, the Gulfstream’s sleek and polished interior more posh and expensive than anything Alan had flown lately. And for all its luxury, nothing like as fun.
“Where are we heading?” he asked as Hatcher settled into the seat across the aisle and took out an iPad.
“Did you sign that letter yet, Major?” he replied, not taking his eyes off the screen in front of him.
“Not yet,” said Alan.
“You’re going to want to do so,” said Hatcher. “Or we won’t be taking you any further.” His tone was abstracted, as if he were thinking of other things, but it had a finality to it that left Alan irritated. He turned away so that the CIA man—men, now that Kenyon was standing in the doorway—wouldn’t see the color rise in his face, and said nothing. Then, a final passenger boarded.
“Major,” said the asset known as Morat. “We seem to keep crossing paths, don’t we?”
He tossed a non-regulation duffel bag onto the seat behind Alan and dropped into the chair next to it.
“You’re heading to Langley too, huh?” asked Alan.
There was a momentary pause as Morat looked at Hatcher, who was studiously ignoring them both.
“Not unless they’re planning on giving me a parachute,” Morat said.
“We’re not going to Langley?” Alan asked.
“Until you sign that document in your pocket,” Hatcher said, still not looking up, “our destination is classified.”
Alan frowned. The aircraft was a Gulfstream G650 designed for both speed and extreme range. They could reach a lot of places without stopping to refuel.
Morat grinned and rolled his eyes.
“CIA, man,” he muttered to Alan. “We do like our little games.”
“What’s your position exactly?”
“Mr. Morat’s identity and occupation are likewise classified,” said Hatcher, deadpan.
And that, it seemed, was that. After years of being inside the loop, of being not just informed but consulted—his opinion solicited—Alan was now to be treated like a raw recruit, a know-nothing who couldn’t be trusted with the most basic piece of intel …
“Guess I’ll see you in the morning,” said Morat. “Whenever the hell that is.” Morat turned his shoulder in toward the window and pulled the blind down.
“Okay, Major,” said Hatcher. He was standing over him, a ballpoint pen in one hand. “We’re ready to close the door and get out of here. This is your last chance. Sign your letter to the Marine Corps, or this is as far as we go.”
For all the earlier back and forth Hatcher seemed quite serious. Alan plucked the letter from his pocket and considered it. He was a Marine. If he stopped being one, what would be left of him? Who would he be?
“Where are we going?” Alan asked, stalling.
“Okay,” Hatcher said with a shrug and a half smile. “We’re going to Groom Lake, Nevada. AKA Homey Airport, AKA Dreamland, AKA Paradise Ranch, AKA Watertown, AKA …”
“Area 51,” Alan completed for him, suddenly wide awake.
Hatcher gave him that fractional, knowing smile again.
“That’s an Air Force base,” said Alan.
“Parts of it,” said Hatcher. “I’m Operations Director for a separate portion. Special aircraft development and testing. Wanna see what we’ve got?” he asked, his voice low, almost teasing. “Sign here.”
Alan blinked.
And signed.
ALAN WAS SHAKEN AWAKE BY HATCHER. THE FLIGHT HAD been uneventful and, for all his unease, exhaustion had gotten the better of him, two-thirds of the way into the flight. It was unlike him to sleep through a landing, but that was what seemed to have happened. He awoke groggy, his mouth dry, with an ache in the small of his back. Hatcher was the only person still aboard. The Gulfstream’s cabin door was closed and all the window shades were down.
In a half daze, born of exhaustion and the enormity of his resignation from the Marine Corps, Alan followed Hatcher down the steps to the airfield. The runway was lined with blast-hardened hangars and concrete buildings, the base nondescript except for the eerie quiet and the parked buses with the blacked-out windows. A Humvee barreled towards them from the direction of the air traffic control tower, throwing up a rooster tail of sand and dust. A soldier in the gun port, half suspended in his five-point harness, manned a massive 50 cal machine gun. Alan gave Hatcher a look.
“Easy, Major,” he said. “Just routine.”
“I’m still a Major?”
“Would you rather be called Agent?”
Alan thought quickly and shook his head.
“Then Major it is,” said Hatcher.
The Humvee pulled up some twenty yards short and the driver got out, careful to keep out of the .50 cal’s field of fire. Hatcher held up his badge in one hand and the iPad in the other.
The soldier checked the ID and took the tablet back to the Humvee, where he made a phone call while he checked the mobile data terminal mounted on the vehicle’s passenger side. Alan waited, conscious of the vast and silent blue of the Nevada desert sky above him, and of the eyes of the man watching him down the barrel of the machine gun. Overhead, a hawk called, high and shrill. The soldier returned Hatcher’s things to him.
“That seems to be in order, sir,” he said. “Sorry for making you wait. We have inbound in three minutes. Anyone below level seven must avert.”
“I’m granting the Major here clearance level seven on a temporary basis,” Hatcher said.
The soldier hesitated.
“Temporary, sir?” he said. “For how long?”
“Five minutes ought to do it,” Hatcher said.
“Understood, sir,” said the soldier.
Not by me, thought Alan. What was the point of being granted five minutes of high security clearance?
“This way, please, gentlemen,” said the soldier, motioning them into the Humvee.
Hatcher sat up front, Alan in the back. He nodded an uncertain greeting to the machine gunner, but the other ma
n did not respond. They dove towards the control tower, and then the air was torn apart by the shriek of a pulsing high-pitched siren. Red lights flashed in sync with the noise. In the distance, two uniformed men lay face down on the ground, hands around their heads.
“What the hell …?” Alan began, but he words died on his lips. All over the base, men were doing the same, either dashing into buildings or lying down in the dust and sand, arms over their heads. They weren’t taking cover. They were effectively blindfolding themselves. It was so strange, so mesmerizing, that for a moment Alan did not see the ship.
It came out of nowhere, soundless, slipping through the air so easily that it was as if it had always been there, and he’d just noticed it. But that couldn’t be.
Nothing about the ship could be.
Except, of course, that he had seen it—or something like it—only a few nights before.
16
JENNIFER
London
THE BUSINESS SUIT FELT RIDICULOUS. THE PENCIL SKIRT hugged her thighs so closely that she had to take tiny steps, though in her absurd high heels, it was no great loss, given that she could barely walk.
“No wonder women don’t get anywhere in business,” she muttered to her refection. “It takes them twice as long to go anywhere.”
“I think you look most professional,” said Deacon, sweeping an invisible fleck of lint from her shoulders with a brush apparently designed for the purpose. He considered the elegant French twist which had taken her a maddening half hour, and adjusted a fly away strand of hair.
“I think I look like an imposter,” said Jennifer, “and so will everyone else.”
It had been three days since the reading of the will. Jennifer had stalled as best she could, asking Deacon to deflect all phone calls and requests for informal meetings on the grounds of bereavement, but she was only postponing the inevitable. When she was told of the scheduled meeting of the Maynard Consortium’s executive board, she knew she would have to go.
“Wouldn’t Miss rather begin with one of the less … er … formidable bodies?” Deacon suggested. “A museum board or charitable trust, for instance? Dip your toes in, as it were. The men in the Maynard group are … powerful.”
“I’m powerful,” she said, not really believing it. “My father’s will made me so.”
“But you are also new to the world of finance,” Deacon said gently. “These men take no quarter. I recommend you get your feet wet in rather less dangerous waters.”
“Maybe I’ll just cannonball into the pool and see how they handle it,” she said.
“At the risk of belaboring the metaphor,” Deacon replied, “I think it’s less of a pool and more of a piranha tank.”
“Then I’ll be the shark,” she said, determined to stay upbeat.
Deacon frowned. “Do sharks eat piranhas?” he mused. “I believe piranhas are fresh water fish …”
“Let’s leave the marine biology lessons for another day, shall we Deacon?”
“As you wish, Miss,” said the older man, with his patented gesture of acknowledgment—a fraction more than a nod, a fraction less than a bow, head tilted slightly, eyes almost closed for a moment. “Then I will find you the Consortium’s latest reports. If, after perusing them, you want to delay the meeting …”
“I won’t.”
“As you say, Miss.”
She’d sounded so confident, so sure of herself and her capacity to blend in. All that changed once she began to pore over the Consortium’s various printouts and quarterly reports. Bafflingly, her father’s computer files seemed to contain nothing on the Maynard group, despite it being his primary financial concern, so she had little that was personal to guide her through the publicity hype and acronym-cluttered business-speak.
Deacon brought her tea in a china cup and politely said nothing as she plowed through a hefty dictionary for phrases like “iterative empowerment,” “backward compatibility,” and “angel investors.” Jennifer sipped absently—recognized the delicate aroma of Earl Grey—and looked up.
“What in God’s name does it mean if a company has,” she checked the brochure, “‘a little known equity tail to its bond managing body’?”
“Perhaps we should start at the beginning,” said Deacon.
A day later, she was still learning. Jennifer had been up half the night, getting Deacon’s crash course in global finance, though as was always the case with complex information, the result had been to teach her how little she understood about the world. She had gone to bed with a raging headache and the nagging certainty that she would make a fool of herself at the board meeting, business suit or no business suit.
She had managed to squeeze in a morning run along the hedgerowed lanes of her childhood, but it hadn’t been nearly enough to burn off all her pent-up agitation. Now she forced herself to sit still in the car, feeling the time tick by as they idled in the gridlock of central London.
“This is why we should have used the helicopter,” Deacon remarked.
“Because the day wasn’t sufficiently traumatic?” Jennifer shot back. She was starting to feel nauseated.
“You are so like your father,” he remarked. It wasn’t a compliment, and she gave him a sharp look, though she didn’t have the energy to argue the point, ludicrous though it was. They passed the pale, restrained decorum of the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street and were soon in sight of Pater Noster Square and the London Stock Exchange. Jennifer spent her time checking off the headquarters of companies that, in recent years, she had come to think of as the enemy: Lloyds, Old Mutual, Prudential, Ernst and Young, Standard Charter … This was her father’s world, the world of suits and limousines, though whether she was entering as a spy, full of hostile intent, or a defector, she really wasn’t sure.
Something else was on her mind as well. In her largely futile attempt to prepare for the day’s meeting, Jennifer had scoured her father’s files for details of his work with the Maynard group and had come up empty, and while she first thought this merely annoying, she soon realized that it was rather more than that.
It was strange. It made no sense. The Maynard Consortium had been a huge part of her father’s life. Why would there be no trace of it after his death? A solution seemed to present itself when Deacon pointed out that all the Maynard data was on a separate laptop he kept in his study when he wasn’t traveling.
But when she looked for the laptop, it wasn’t there.
Jennifer stopped fiddling with her French twist, flexed her fingers until the knuckles cracked and stared out of the rain-misted car windows at the orderly façades of the city offices. Maybe the laptop had just been misplaced. Maybe it would turn up when she and the lawyers catalogued her father’s things.
Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it was gone, spirited away by whomever had stood there in his study the day her father—inexplicably, impossibly—threw himself off the balcony. The police investigation had been perfunctory at best and that, it now occurred to her, was worrying. Her father had been a powerful man who dealt with vast amounts of money. The possibility that someone who ran in the same circles might have been able to influence the inquiry into his death was all too plausible. Who that might have been and why he had killed her father—if that was what had happened—she had no idea, but a thought was forming in one of the dark corners of her mind, something strange and shapeless and terrible to look at, something, she felt sure, that involved the Maynard Consortium.
Deacon checked his watch as they boarded the sleek steel elevator and gave her a look.
“Might I offer a piece of advice, Miss Jennifer?” he asked.
In other circumstances, the question might have irritated her, but she was rattled by how clearly out of her depth she was, and nodded.
“Be polite,” said Deacon. “Accept their condolences gratefully. Then just listen. Most of what they discuss will be baffling, and all of it will be tedious, so just keep calm and we’ll review after we’ve determined how long you are to stay
involved in these meetings. Don’t talk. You will only antagonize them and reveal how little you know. That will make it easier for them to outmaneuver you. Best to keep them guessing, as it were.”
Shut up, in other words.
She nodded again, nausea swelling within her as the elevator slowed into position on the twenty-third floor, and the doors opened. Deacon gave her a quick look and, as if seeing something in her eyes he didn’t like, added, “Really, Miss Jennifer. This is not the time for you to take on the dominant social order, or ask pointed questions about your father’s death. Just sit still and listen.”
She held his eyes for a moment with a touch of resentment, but she knew he was right. It was going to take all her strength, just to sit through the next couple of hours without being banned from the building.
“And stop touching your hair,” he added, smiling. “It looks fine.”
A secretary looked up from his desk, his bright, professional smile faltering when he saw Jennifer, then checked Deacon. Something wordless passed between the two men and the secretary rose, the professional smile back in place.
“Miss Quinn,” he said, standing up but seeming unsure if he should reach out to shake her hand. “Welcome. Please follow me.”
She murmured a thank you, but the words stuck in her throat and she didn’t think he heard her. She turned to Deacon, who gave her an encouraging smile. They followed the secretary, who stopped at a heavy door of lacquered wood and knocked deferentially, head cocked to catch the voices within. She didn’t hear whatever made him turn the handle and push the door open, but that was partly the blood rushing in her ears as she tried to shut down the panic that was rising inside her.