Extinction Machine jl-5

by Jonathan Maberry

  “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.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Then I confronted Dad, but not with accusations. I begged him to go to the world media with the story. Not just one newspaper or station, but all of them. A blast of truth. But he said that doing something like that could damage the government and even then he didn’t believe that the entire government was corrupt. He was determined to make Congress react and then act.”

  “He took all his notes with him? His computer records, the copies of the Bl
ack Book pages, all of it?”

  “No,” she said. “He took one complete set. The rest was on his computer at home and on several portable hard drives he kept in a wall safe.”

  “Thank god! We can—”

  “The house was burgled the night he was killed,” she said. “They took everything. They tore the safe out of the wall, tore his desk to pieces, and even took my mom’s laptop and mine. They ripped open all the walls, tore up floorboards, pulled down the ceilings. The police said that it was the most thorough search they’d ever seen. When I tried to explain why this was done, they gave me very tolerant smiles. I saw them laughing about it outside. I was a grief-stricken conspiracy theory goofball. They said that the house was probably targeted after my parents’ names were announced on the news. They said it happens all the time.”

  “It does.”

  She punched me again.

  “But hold on, hold on,” I said. “If all of your father’s records were destroyed, then how were you planning on revealing all the secrets of the Black Book? Did you somehow make a copy?”

  “You forgot,” she said.

  “I what?”

  “You forgot. That always amazes me,” she said. “I see it all the time, hear about it, read about it, but it still amazes me.”

  “What does?” I asked, totally lost.

  “That someone can actually forget something. I never could.”

  And it hit me with a very nice one-two punch. I said, “Jesus, I even said it when I was showing off and reading out your bio. Eidetic memory — photographic memory, and that thing where you can remember every day of your life.”

  “Every day, every hour, every minute,” she said. “Hyperthymesia.”

  “And you saw your father’s notes.”

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “You remember all of it…”

  “Every single word. Every formula. Every measurement and description.” She smiled. It was a strange, intense, almost otherworldly smile that put goose bumps all along my arms and down my spine. “Joe … for all intents and purposes I am the Black Book.”

  Chapter Seventy-six

  Hadley and Meyers Real Estate

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 11:59 a.m.

  Aldo and Tull watched the ten white dots move across the tracking screen. One by one the dots stopped moving. Telemetric feeds provided exact locations via a satellite uplink.

  “Perfect,” said Aldo. “Every single one of them. Nice!”

  “Very nice,” agreed Tull.

  Chapter Seventy-seven

  Elk Neck State Park

  Cecil County, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 12:01 p.m.

  There were a million questions I wanted to ask Junie, but suddenly Ghost came racing down into the tunnel, gave me a sharp whuff, then turned around and stared back along the path he’d come. We froze and listened, and after five long seconds we heard it. Men’s voices. Terse and harsh.

  “God,” whispered Junie, “they found us!”

  I shook my head. “No, if they did they’d either be yelling or making no sound at all. I think they’re following that trail.” I nodded to the one we’d been paralleling. “Maybe there’s another team coming up from the far side and it’s our bad luck we’re in the middle.”

  “What do we do?”

  I held a finger to my lips and she nodded and fell silent. I left Ghost with her as I climbed out of the tunnel and up onto higher ground, ready to ambush them if they found our hidey-hole.

  Five minutes passed and the voices faded.

  Then we heard new voices coming from a different direction.

  We waited them out, too.

  Minutes crawled by.

  The voices finally went away.

  After they were gone, I drifted back down to Junie.

  “Are they going to find us?” she asked. She leaned very close to whisper in my ear, and despite the blood and ash on our clothes I was very deeply aware of the sweet faintness of her perfume and the heat from her soft cheek.

  You’re a frickin’ idiot, growled the Cop inside my head. Keep your head in the game.

  I cut a sideways look at Junie’s beautiful face, and I told my inner Cop to go piss up a rope.

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to go find them.”

  Her hand darted out and closed around my wrist. “You can’t! They’ll kill you.”

  “I need to go take a look,” I said. “We need to know if we can wait here or if we’re in the center of a net.”

  Junie touched my arm. “You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

  Her question caught me as I was rising, and for a moment I settled back down into a crouch. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be very careful.”

  That coaxed a smile from her. Small, but damn if it didn’t light up the day.

  But I lingered a moment longer. “Junie … when we get out of this, when we get back to the world … you understand that my people are going to need to know everything you know about the book. You get that, right?”

  She nodded.

  “This isn’t about you getting revenge for what they did to your parents. And it’s not about sharing alien technology with the whole world. All personal considerations are back burner.”

  “But—”

  I took her by the shoulders and shifted around so that we were face to face. “Junie, this is about saving a big chunk of the world. The southern coast of Africa, all of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a sizable chunk of Western Europe, and the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. Do the math, honey, because that racks up to about a billion people who are going to drown under the worst tsunami in recorded history if we don’t stop it.”

  “How can we stop it?” she demanded. “What if whoever took the president wants the Black Book destroyed? Will you shoot me? Or will you let Mr. Church do it? He seems cold enough.”

  “You tell me what I should do,” I growled. “You saw the videos, you know the score. What should I do?”

  “I think we should try and get the actual damn Black Book. There’s only one copy. Maybe that’s what they want you to get. They don’t even know about me.”

  “Who are ‘they,’ Junie? Who do you think took the president?”

  She took a moment before she said, “Them.”

  “Say it.”

  “The aliens, okay. I think the aliens took the president and they want the Black Book.”

  “How does that make sense? If they can abduct the president, how come they don’t just take the Black Book?”

  “Maybe they don’t know where it is.”

  “How can they not? They’re aliens.”

  “Does that automatically make them psychic? Who knows what the problem is? Maybe it’s taken them a long time to figure out how to communicate with us. Maybe there aren’t that many of them. Maybe they simply don’t know who has the Black Book.”

  “Then why go to these lengths to get it?”

  “I don’t know. Something pushed them,” she said with heat. “They’ve been silent all this time, but something changed. But they clearly don’t know everything. I mean … their ships crashed. A lot of them. That has to say something about them as fallible beings. Maybe they only just learned about the Black Book and realized what kind of threat it poses. I don’t know, Joe. I’m just guessing, too. All I know is that there are at least two copies of the Black Book. M3 has one and I’m the other. You have to decide which one you want to give to the aliens.”

  I sat back on my heels. “Your aliens are playing some serious hardball. They’re willing to kill a billion people to get that book.”

  “No,” she said. “We don’t know what they’re doing. The fact that you can make a comment like that shows how much you don’t know about them.”

  “Junie, I don’t know anything about them. Even if I am starting to edge toward accepting that this is real, I don’t know one single thing about whoever buil
t the crafts that M3 is studying. What are they like? Did they come here to conquer us? Are they studying us to determine our weaknesses? Is this some kind of alien seedpod invasion?”

  “What they look like isn’t important, Joe. You’re like everyone else, you keep trying to ascribe human emotions to them. You think that if a race is powerful then they could only get that way through military force.”

  “You saw the video…”

  “Okay, we both saw the video. Do you understand what it means? I mean, really understand it? How do we know it doesn’t have multiple meanings? How do we know that it’s even a threat? It could be a warning.”

  “Pretty harsh for a warning.”

  “That’s because you think like a soldier and you think they think that way, too. They haven’t attacked us after all these years, what makes you believe that they’re even capable of violence? Maybe they’re warning us of what could happen if somebody else builds a working Device. China, Russia … They could be trying to help us. No, we just can’t assume they’re violent. Not everyone is.”

  I shook my head. “Show me a culture that isn’t violent. Even the Swiss used to be warriors. Ditto the Tibetans. There were armed soldiers in the service of the Dalai Lama. Soldiers and armed police guard the Pope. History and every holy book you can find is filled with stories of war and conquest. It’s a side effect of being a predator species. We may aspire to civilized and harmonious behavior, Junie, but it’s not natural to us.”

  “I’m not saying it’s not natural to them either.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that they are alien, so we shouldn’t make assumptions. We have to stop trying to understand them based on what we know of ourselves. That’s polluted thinking.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, and rubbed my eyes. “I should have stayed in bed today. I was nursing a well-earned hangover and…”