“And just how did he find out?” It was the same man who asked the first question. “Are you still spying on your friends?”
Sudden knew it was a loaded question. The Jonathan Pollard case was still a sore spot in American-Israeli relations. Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst working for the U.S. Government, had been sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for passing secrets to Israel. He was the only American citizen convicted of passing secrets to an ally sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.
Tal Ben-David’s smile became icy. He stared at the man.
“The answer to your second question is, of course, yes. Just as you spy on us, and read our emails and monitor our phone conversations. But we found out about the Hadron incident by accident. Accidental, but frustrating, of course, for any intelligence service. It seems that there is an informal back-channel network of scientists who believe in extraterrestrials and that sort of thing. They keep themselves abreast of any new developments they come across in the course of their work. Some of these scientists work for various intelligence services, including those that we consider unfriendly. They shouldn’t be in contact, of course, but I suppose they do little harm, and in this case, their network was crucial. Someone in your organization presumably told our analyst about the Hadron Collider incident and he remembered the Zyster file. He came to me, and I to you.”
Cole Sudden nudged Nigel Buss.
“What the hell are they talking about? What does the Hadron Collider have to do with any of this?”
Penelope Parsons again took over as Ben-David sat down.
“I see a lot of confused looks out there. Everything you need to know is contained in these briefing packages.” She passed a hand over the pile. “We will pass them out in a few minutes. They are not to leave this room, and you are not to take any notes, of any kind. Most of us here are representatives of the nation’s three major intelligence agencies, C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. We all know how to keep secrets. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t capable of absorbing and remembering what you read and see. Some of you are privy to parts of the story, but when we leave all of you will know everything we have. Some of the material, such as that relating to the Collider, is in the public domain. You can probably Google everything you want to know about that sort of thing, so we provided only the bare bones to provide some context. C.I.A. briefing books are too damn long anyway.”
“Hear, hear,” someone muttered, to a few laughs.
“Our bosses have already been briefed by the President,” she continued, “and it will be up to you to keep them up to speed. And, naturally, we all have to use assets available to us in our agencies. Some of them are already in this room. Israel, of course, is in the loop.” She nodded at the Mossad chief. “But I think it is in all of our best interests to limit the dissemination of what we know. But just to close the circle, so to speak, we are almost certain that the alien presence discovered by the Nazis in 1945 and later in the U.S. is ongoing. We don’t know if they’ve been here all along, or just show up intermittently. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have proof that one, and probably, two aliens, has been active recently. One we captured. We have to find the other.”
“Wait a goddamn minute, Penny. We have one of them? Are you serious? These aliens actually exist!”
It was Lawrence Christopher, the President’s National Security Adviser.
“Yes, Larry,” she said. “They exist. Or don’t you believe what your boss tells you?” It was widely known that Parsons and Christopher detested each other. “Unfortunately the one we recently had in our custody expired under advanced interrogation techniques.”
“You tortured him, it, whatever the fuck you call it, to death?”
Parsons sighed.
“We’re not sure he, and for the purposes of clarity let’s use ‘he’, died as the result of the interrogation, or just died. I think I’ll let Mr. Yunner give you the details, which are in the briefing papers.”
Yunner stood up.
“The guy we worked on looked like a normal human male. To tell you the truth, when we were told he wasn’t, we thought our bosses had gone nuts.”
“Hold it, Yunner,” Sudden said with barely concealed distaste. He hadn’t gotten over the revelation that the man was one of the ones who waterboarded him. “I presume someone noticed that he had no sex organs.”
Parsons stepped in.
“Actually, he did have them. Apparently he was the newest, improved version, anatomically correct. At least on the outside. When he was autopsied, we discovered the internal anomalies described by the Nazi doctor and in the later Area 51 incident.”
“The sexual organs weren’t prosthetics?”
Now she seemed embarrassed.
“I’ve been told everything was in working order. He could possibly perform as a normal human male, although he would be unable to reproduce.”
“Why is that?” Sudden asked.
Parsons cleared her throat.
“He was somewhat different on the inside. He could presumably have an orgasm and a normal ejaculation. But the semen would be sterile.”
“Well, whoever put him together may have had delusions of grandeur,” Yunner said. “The bastard was hung like a racehorse.” There was nervous laughter around the table. “He was even circumcised. But whether he did screw, I don’t know. I do know he could feel pain down there, since we hooked his dick and his balls up to a field telephone, as a last resort when nothing else worked. Son of a bitch howled like a bastard.”
Yunner couldn’t help but notice the looks he was getting.
“Hey, before anyone here gets high and mighty, let me remind you that we were told to spare no effort in finding out who this guy was. It’s not like he was human, or anything.”
“But you didn’t know that,” Sudden said bitterly. “You said so yourself. And he was a sentient being. Why didn’t you try drugs before you lit him up like a Christmas tree?”
“We did, first thing. We’re not animals, you know. No effect. Must have a different physiology, or something.”
Sudden couldn’t restrain himself.
“Am I the only one here who thinks perhaps we should have treated this alleged alien with more respect.” Nigel Buss kicked him under the table. But he was undeterred. “Why handle him like a terrorist?”
“That’s a damn good question, Penny,” Christopher said. “One I’m sure the President will be asking me.”
“We were caught between a rock and a hard place,” Parsons replied. “When we apprehended the subject, whose name was Charles Baker, by the way, he denied everything. Tried to laugh his way out of it. Said we were crazy. Asked for a lawyer. Threatened to go to the press. Can you imagine how that would have played out? We would have been laughing stocks. And it’s not like we could have admitted how we found him. It would have blown the nation’s most-secret intelligence operation and told our adversaries here on earth what our technological capabilities were.”
“You’re worried about the Chinese and Russians when you found aliens in our midst? You can’t be serious.”
“No, Larry, you’re the one who isn’t serious.” Parsons was angry. “Your boss would have been the first to ream our asses if we blew the cover off our cyber-warfare capabilities. His priorities may change after you brief him, but I don’t want any goddamn Monday-morning quarterbacking from you.”
“OK. You’ve made your point. How did you locate this Baker character?”
“As you know, the N.S.A. monitors every communication in this country. Phones, emails, Internet, etc.”
“That’s strictly regulated for privacy reasons,” Christopher said.
“Either you still believe in Santa Claus, Larry,” Parsons chided, “or you are saying that for the hidden microphones. Save your breath. We aren’t recording this meeting. Anyway, when the alien was discovered in the 1960s it turned out that he had a communication device of some sort. Our technicians were able to get it working for a short while befor
e it went dead. The signals it sent out were just gibberish to them, but they were able to save the frequencies and other technical aspects of the transmission. That wasn’t very helpful until someone got the bright idea a few years ago to add the information to the N.S.A. search screens. You know, the ones that go through billions of bits of chatter looking for indications of terrorist or enemy activity. The idea was that if there were any aliens still around, and they used the same type of communication, it would stand out like a sore thumb. And it did. A month ago, Baker sent a message to someone in Switzerland.”
She paused.
“And in case you are wondering, he used a regular cell phone to send the message. The device from the 1960s is now just a hunk of metal. The scientists are still trying to figure out how it worked. Anyway, the whiz kids at N.S.A. caught the outgoing transmission, which they couldn’t understand. But even though Baker was using a burner cell phone, they got a lock on its location, his farm in Commerce, Georgia. Baker is, or was, a scientist working at the National Linear Accelerator Laboratory at the University of Georgia in nearby Athens. He also taught at the University. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to get an exact lock on where the transmission in Switzerland went. Apparently to another burner phone. But they were eventually able to narrow it down to a ten-mile-square area on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.”
Parsons voice turned ominous.
“And as some of you already know, and as the rest will find out in the briefing papers, that’s where the Hadron Collider is located. It’s the largest particle accelerator on earth. We assume Baker was contacting someone at that facility.”
***
The meeting broke up a few minutes later, and people started drifting away. Tal Ben-David and Penelope Parsons walked over to the BURY team.
“Please don’t be a stranger, Rebecca,” the old man said. “I have a great-granddaughter who is teaching me how to Skype.”
“I will try, Uncle. Please take care of yourself.”
“And you be careful, Becca.” They embraced. “Very careful.”
The Mossad chief walked away.
“Let’s go to my office,” Parsons said.
On the way to the elevators, Sudden spotted Brin Yunner entering a men’s room.
“I have to make a pit stop,” Sudden said. “I’ll be right along.”
Parsons, Buss and Soul kept going and Sudden entered the men’s room, easing the door open and closing it quietly.
Yunner was standing at a urinal. There was no one else in the room. Sudden quickly walked up behind the C.I.A. agent, who had just unzipped his fly, let out a contented sigh and began whistling “The Marine Corps Hymn”. The kick from behind between his legs doubled him up and his head hit the metal piping above the urinal as he grunted in agony.
As Yunner sagged to his knees, Sudden grabbed him by his shirt collar and the seat of his pants and twirled him around. He dragged the moaning man, whose hands were at his groin, and shoved him through the half-open door of a stall. Then he grabbed Yunner by the hair and rammed his face into the toilet water.
“Semper Fi, asshole,” Sudden said, holding the struggling man’s head under until he saw some bubbles.
He pulled Yunner’s head out. Gasping for breath and sputtering, the man started to scream. Sudden dunked him again. And again. And again. Finally, he just let Yunner slip to the side of the toilet, whimpering.
Sudden stopped at a mirror on the way out of the men’s room and straightened his tie and cuffs. Then, smiling contentedly, he headed to Penelope Parson’s office.
Whistling “The Marine Corps Hymn”.
CHAPTER 10 - ASSIGNMENT
An hour later, Buss, Soul and Sudden were still sitting in Parson’s office. They were all drinking coffee. It was burning a hole in Sudden’s stomach. All he’d had to eat since the night before were the peanuts on the plane down. The Bloody Mary, he decided, had been a mistake. He was starving.
“I’m still not sure what we are doing here, Penny,” Buss said. “This would seem to be a job for your foreign intelligence boys. We are just humble assassins. What’s up?”
“You’ve never been humble, Nigel. It’s one of your charms. But to answer your question, your unit, small as it is, is just what I need. As I said, the fewer people who know about this the better. You’re based in Philadelphia, for God’s sake. Even if you leaked something no one would believe it.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I’m being facetious. Truth is, your team is about the best the C.I.A. has. I’m not talking out of school here, but you and I know that the paramilitary guys have just about taken over the agency, fighting all their little wars, growing their cute beards. Good people, some of them, but cowboys. We need someone who can think outside the box, and that’s you and yours. This is so far outside the box it is ridiculous.” Parsons smiled at Sudden. “And Cole, here, brings something else to the table.”
“I was wondering when you’d get around to me,” Sudden said.
There was a sharp knock on the door.
“Come in.”
A man stuck his head in.
“The Director would like to see you, Penny. Right away.”
“Tell him I’ll come right up.”
The man shut the door. Parsons winked.
“When I’m ready.” She turned back to the others. “I want someone to infiltrate the Hadron facility in Switzerland, someone with a cover story that’s iron-clad. Someone who will be able to talk to everyone without raising suspicions. Whoever that message went to might be wondering what happened to his pal. I don’t want him taking off.”
“Yeah,” Sudden said. “Who would blame him? Why risk getting his privates hooked up to a field telephone.” He got up and walked over to the small table where the coffee pot was. He poured himself a cup and looked at the others. They all shook their heads and he sat down. “I presume you want me to go to Hadron as Cole Swift, world-renowned thriller writer.”
“Now who is being facetious? But yes, that cover will give you access to everyone.”
“I only have the vaguest idea of what the Hadron Collider is, or does. Something about smashing atoms together to find the building block of the universe, the so-called ‘God particle’.”
“Don’t worry. It’s probably like Wall Street. My guess is that half the people at CERN don’t know what they are talking about. No one will think twice about you asking questions, no matter how asinine. Make yourself annoying. Nigel tells me you have a knack for that.”
Sudden looked at Buss.
“You think I’m annoying? Wait until you see my expense reports.”
They all laughed.
“Didn’t I read,” Buss said, “that there was some concern that they might create a black hole and destroy the solar system when they revved up their whoosiwhatsis?”
“I told you it was like Wall Street,” Parsons said. “I think they said it was, like, a million to one that would happen.”
“So, they rolled the dice,” Sudden said. “Maybe someone should have told them that a million to one is roughly the odds of picking the final four in the NCAA tournament, and someone does it every year. I think we’re killing the wrong people.”
“Well, we’re still here, so I guess they were right. Now, how long will it take you to set it up?”
Sudden thought about it.
“Well, as you uncharitably pointed out, ‘Cole Swift’ isn’t exactly a household name. I’ll need a hook. Who operates the facility?”
“The European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is made up of twenty European countries and Israel.” She looked at Rebecca Soul. “That’s another reason Ben-David asked for you, Rebecca. He will provide your cover. You are going there as an Israeli journalist. And as for ‘Cole Swift’, the President has already called the head of the European Commission and asked him to smooth the way with the Hadron people. The President laid it on thick. Said you’re his favorite author and you asked him for a favor. The CERN
people are always looking for funding and the President may have hinted at a quid pro quo.”
“What’s CERN?”
“That’s what they call the European Organization for Nuclear Research. I have no idea why.”
“CERN’s original French name was Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research,” Rebecca Soul said, with the air of authority for which she was famous in BURY. “It dates to when the organization was established in 1952. They kept the acronym for the laboratory after the council became the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire a couple of years later. CERN just sounds better than OERN.”
“Well, thank you, Rebecca. I’m sure you will do well on the quiz. Anyway, these covers will allow you and Cole to interact publicly without creating suspicion. It would be natural for a journalist and a novelist to socialize and compare notes, I would think.”
“JFK made Ian Fleming famous when he said he liked the James Bond novels,” Sudden said. “Any chance the President could mention his enthusiasm for my books to the media? My publisher would love it.”
“As far as I know, the President doesn’t even know who the hell ‘Cole Swift’ is,” Parsons said. “I think he likes Westerns. Just try to find who we are looking for. We’ll worry about your book sales later.” She paused. “If there is a later.”
The three of them were quiet for a moment. Then Buss said, “What do you want them to do if they find this guy?”
“Yes,” Rebecca Soul said. “It’s not as if he will be a font of information. They don’t talk, apparently, and drugs don’t work.”
“It’s still being debated. But I suspect you may just have to kill him. They don’t want any more messages sent out.”
TWO SUDDEN!: A Pair of Cole Sudden C.I.A. Thrillers Page 21