Origin

1

DNA Analytics was located in downtown Phoenix, one of thousands of such laboratories scattered across the United States. The principal work carried out by such facilities is paternity testing, although many work in cooperation with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to analyse DNA evidence for criminal cases.

Lynn chose this particular site expressly because it carried out no governmental or law enforcement work at all, and was thus a little more off-radar than many other such establishments. In addition, it had a sister facility in Los Angeles that could deal with analysis of the fragments of cloth that Lynn had collected from the burial site. This would enable them to deal with everything in just one visit, thus minimizing their exposure.

As they entered the foyer, they were surprised by just how busy it was, from young mothers with screaming babies to ageing college professors and white-coated laboratory technicians, the place was a hive of bustling activity.

Adams had shaved his head and started to grow a beard, while Lynn had dyed her hair blonde, changed her style of make-up and clothes considerably, and put in blue contact lenses. They had also both used powder to try and lighten their skin tone, and both now wore glasses to adjust the contours of their faces. Even so, they still avoided looking towards the security cameras pointing from the ceiling down into the busy foyer. They were officially dead, of course — Lynn twice now — but if the past few days had taught them anything, it was that it was impossible to be too careful.

Lynn approached the desk, backpack in hand. After a brief discussion with the receptionist, during which Lynn asked for a full DNA test for three of the samples she had brought with her, they were told that due to a backlog, results wouldn’t be ready for at least a month. The handing over of five hundred dollars in cash — courtesy of Fabricio Baranelli — immediately moved that up to just over a week.

Lynn turned to Adams. ‘A week,’ she said, deflated even though she had been expecting as much. ‘Can we wait that long?’

‘Well, without access to government labs, I don’t see what choice we have. I mean, the only way we’d even have access to better facilities was if we used your position, but that would mean using your name, and we definitely can’t afford to do that.’

Lynn nodded, then turned back towards the receptionist. ‘OK,’ she agreed, and then gave her a cellphone number from a newly acquired, pay-as-you-go, untraceable handset. ‘Call me on this as soon as you have anything. And there’ll be an extra five hundred for you if you get those results to us in under a week.’

Walking out of the centre, Lynn turned to Adams once more. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘now what?’

‘We’ve done the science bit,’ Adams said, ‘now we need to do the real work. Let’s go and meet my friends.’

Baranelli had been as good as his word. The day after their meeting, Lynn and Adams had been back in the United States.

The professor had been chartering an aeroplane for his aerial research on a long-term basis, and had simply filed a flight plan up to Mexico, citing connected research as his reason. The little bird had needed to be refuelled once in Columbia, and had then made it to Mexico, where nobody at the small airfield expressed any interest in the two passengers that deplaned and went on their way.

The pain from their hastily extracted teeth — covered by adrenalin for so long — was now becoming unbearable, and so Adams used his old contacts to make a late-night visit to a friendly dentist in a small town nearby.

An Oglala Lakota like Adams, the dentist took cash and asked no questions. He did, however, tell Adams that it was a good job that they had come; if they had left it much longer, there would have been the possibility of infection, which might have led to blood poisoning.

The old man had patched them up quickly — albeit not exactly painlessly, and then advised them to get some rest. Adams and Lynn had just smiled, sharing the same thought — the chance would be a fine thing.

The town was close to the border, and after their brief but necessary detour, Adams had led Lynn back along the same unmanned trails he had used to enter Mexico several days before.

As they had made their way across Arizona towards Phoenix, hitchhiking in a battered pick-up, Adams had used their new cellphone to call one of his Shadow Wolves colleagues, careful to use codes he had not used in years, aware that plain speech might well be picked up by electronic surveillance. But his friend had understood, and a meeting had been arranged for the following morning.

The Tohono O’odham Sweat Lodge was located in a part of the reservation completely out of bounds to those not associated with, or invited by, the tribe.

The sweat lodge is an ancient American Indian custom, a traditional tribal ceremony that is still carried out by many tribes across the country. It is similar to a sauna in that there is heat and moisture — people sit around a firepit filled with stones, upon which they pour water, while ensconced in a heavy, blanket-covered tent — but the sweat lodge is a more spiritual affair, the heat being used to create the atmosphere of being in the womb of the ‘great earth mother’. It is intended to help purify not only the body but also the mind, emotions, and spirit.

Adams and Lynn arrived at the lodge in the early morning. Adams greeted his old colleagues with warm embraces, and was introduced to the newer members of the team. Lynn was also introduced, and she understood what an honour it was for her to be there — outsiders were seldom welcome.

Adams was pleased to see his old friends but he was disturbed not to see Mark ‘Spirit From Above’ Takanawee at the meeting. The fact that this was the man who had provided him with his passport and some cash for his trip to South America — as well as the troubled looks on the faces of the other men — did not bode well.

But his questions would have to wait, for tradition demanded that first they had to ritually cleanse themselves, and then light the fire for the ceremony, and only then could the talk begin.

2

Adams looked over at Lynn. It wasn’t the first time she had been in a sweat lodge — he had taken her to the Lakota lodge back at his home reservation when they had been married — but he saw that the extreme heat was taking its toll on her, sweat running profusely down her face and neck. As per custom, she was fully clothed. Adams wondered if she was going to pass out. It had been a long time, after all.

But she continued to hang in there, even joining in with the ritual songs and chants, in time to the steady, rhythmic beat of the drums. To Adams, she had never looked more beautiful.

‘Matt,’ said John ‘First to Dance’ Ayita, a Cherokee tribesman who was the unit leader, having moved up to the position after Adams had left, ‘it is time to talk.’

And with that, the feeling within the tent immediately changed.

Adams nodded his head. ‘What happened to Mark?’

Ayita looked pained, looking up to the roof of the tent, and the sky beyond. ‘He was taken from us, not so very long ago. He is with the spirits now.’

‘How?’ Adams asked, fearing he already knew the answer.

‘Heart attack.’

Adams knew the coincidence was too great. There was no way it would have been a real heart attack, and a wave of grief swept over him. It was his fault entirely. The enemy would have finally caught his image at the airport entering Chile, found out the passport he was travelling under, and then tracked down Mark Takanawee. And then they would have tortured him for information, finally staging a heart attack.

‘Did you get a chance to look at the body?’

Ayita’s face was grave. ‘Bodaway managed to check the body out at the morgue before he was buried.’

Bodaway ‘Fire-Maker’ Arawan was the Shadow Wolves’ chief medic, a legend among the tribes for his fusion of traditional medicine with the latest cutting-edge medical practices.

‘I think it was an electron trigger,’ Arawan said, voice subdued. ‘Such a device is rumoured to be undergoing military trials but is not yet commercially available. A burst of static transmits from the device straight to the heart, where it interferes with the normal, regular electrical signal, producing the signs and symptoms of a myocardial infarction. I would have missed it entirely had I not been looking for something out of the ordinary. But he had two tiny burns underneath the hair on his chest, which indicate the use of some sort of electronic device.

‘This also corroborates my other findings, which included several bruises and contusions on the body, symptomatic of being manhandled and bound with restraints of some type. And then there are the needle marks on the inside of his right elbow, and the unusual blood samples.’

‘Unusual how?’ Adams asked, the guilt eating at him painfully.

‘I found traces of short-acting barbiturates, most notably thiopental, an active ingredient of the so-called truth serum, sodium pentothal. It indicates that he was kidnapped and interrogated, before being killed with an electronic device, unknown outside military circles.’

‘So he was executed?’ Adams asked.

‘Without a shadow of a doubt,’ Arawan confirmed.

John Ayita looked at Adams with steely eyes. ‘And I think it’s about time you told us why.’

Adams did not check with Lynn before he started the tale; he knew she would understand. Another man had laid down his life due to Lynn’s discovery, and they owed it to his friends to tell them the truth.

Adams started at the beginning, with Lynn’s mission to Antarctica, and described their ordeal in its entirety. It did not disturb Adams that the men he was sharing this information with worked for the same US government that was potentially behind the situation; tribal ties would always outweigh loyalty to the government.

When he reached the end of his tale, Ayita shook his big head slowly in disbelief. ‘Incredible,’ he said at last. ‘Simply incredible. So Mark is dead now because of this discovery?’

Adams nodded his head in shame. ‘Yes. He is dead because I asked for his help.’

‘And now you come to us, to ask for our help?’

Adams paused. The thought that he might now be endangering his other friends had never occurred to him, and he felt the hard, hot flush of guilt wash through him once again. What had he done?

‘Please forgive me,’ he stammered. ‘I—’

Ayita held up his hand. ‘Do not worry, brother,’ he said. ‘Mark Takanawee was taken from us by a powerful enemy, and we will not rest until we have our revenge.’

Adams’ heart glowed, hope rising within him. ‘But can you all spare the time?’ he asked.

Ayita nodded. ‘I am afraid so,’ he said. ‘Since we examined Mark’s body, the Department of Homeland Security has announced the dissolving of the Shadow Wolves unit. We are to return to our tribes, and disband. They have not even offered us alternative employment. The Wolves are no more.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ Adams exclaimed.

‘I am afraid not,’ Ayita said. ‘It would be difficult to kill us all, especially while we’re working for the government, so they did the next best thing, disbanding the group and sending us all back to our own tribes, scattered around the country. It wouldn’t surprise me if some more of us meet unexpected “accidents” over the coming months.’

‘But who are these people, that they can shut down a group like the Shadow Wolves? It’s part of the damned Department of Homeland Security!’ Lynn spoke for the first time and everyone in the tent looked at her.

Ayita turned to a man on the far side of the firepit, looking through the hazy, hot mist. ‘Samuel?’ he urged.

Samuel ‘Two Horses’ Stephenfield was the unit’s intelligence officer. ‘We have started an initial investigation already, of course,’ he began, and he could see the looks of sudden interest from both Adams and Lynn. ‘Have you ever heard of the Bilderberg Group?’

Lynn answered first, trying hard to ignore the suffocating heat and humidity of the firepit. ‘Isn’t that just a bunch of politicians and media figures who meet up once a year to exchange ideas and phone numbers? A bit like an informal networking group for global bigwigs?’ She wiped the sweat from her brow, which reappeared instants later. ‘I think even Sam Atkinson went to one of their meetings a few years ago, and—’

She stopped dead as the ramification hit her. Atkinson was the head of NASA, and he was the first person she had told about the discovered body.

‘Maybe you should tell us what you know,’ Adams said to Stephenfield.

The intelligence officer nodded his head. ‘Lynn is right to a certain extent,’ he began. ‘The first meeting of the group took place in May nineteen fifty-four, at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland — hence the group’s name. It was supposedly held due to problems with cooperation between Europe and the US when it came to some of the really important issues. It was felt that a new type of meeting was necessary, something a little more off the record, without the worry of journalists or political aides reporting or commenting on what was said, especially with the looming threat of the Soviet Union.

‘With the end of the Cold War, the meetings continued apace. Even without the threat of communism, western leaders still had important issues to worry about — trade, employment, monetary policy, ecological problems, investment, terrorism and international security, to name but a few.

‘There are usually about a hundred and twenty participants, and the list changes every year. The majority are from Europe, with the rest from the US, although other nations from around the world are being increasingly represented. The list is made up of about one-third from government and politics, and two-thirds from finance, industry, labour, education and communications.

‘No resolutions are prepared at such meetings, there are no votes taken, and no policy statements are issued. They are simply “talking shops” where the world’s great and good can get together out of the glare of the media spotlight.’

‘And how do they link in with what’s going on here?’ Adams asked.

‘The connection arose when we started to look into who had been putting pressure on Homeland Security to close us down. After some searching, we found that it was coming directly from the White House, specifically from the office of the President’s special aide, Tony Kern. We quickly found out that Kern is a member of the Bilderberg Group.’

‘A member?’ Lynn asked. ‘I thought you just said that it’s an informal network, and that a new group of people attend each year?’

Stephenfield nodded his head. ‘That’s true, yes. But there is also a steering committee of twelve semi-permanent members, of which Kern is one.’

‘But being part of a steering committee for an international group is hardly an unusual thing for a White House aide, surely?’ Lynn countered.

‘Normally you would be right, of course,’ Stephenfield conceded. ‘But the Bilderberg Group is by no means normal. It is the subject of much international scepticism, and conspiracy theories abound regarding what these global leaders get up to at their secret meetings. Some people feel that they are deciding international policy in a very undemocratic way, unelected people discussing matters of global importance without any reporting mechanism or oversight. Some believe they are attempting to gradually impose a new world order, with big business interests behind it all.’

‘But I still don’t see how it ties in with the body, or the people who have been killed,’ Lynn persisted.

‘Perhaps it doesn’t,’ Stephenfield admitted. ‘But Kern’s membership of the group is the only anomaly we have found so far, and therefore worthy of investigation. Even more so now, as Samuel Atkinson’s attendance at a Bilderberg meeting as head of NASA gives us a clear link. Your NASA group finds a body, you report it to Atkinson — who is linked to the group — and soon the body has gone missing and all your colleagues are dead. Matt goes to help you, asking an old friend for help — and then his friend is killed, and a police unit that has been operational since the nineteen seventies is suddenly shut down for no reason — again by somebody connected to the Bilderberg Group.’

‘OK,’ Adams said, nodding his head, ‘so we have a possible connection. What else do we know about them?’

‘We’ve simply not had the time to run a complete check on the group,’ Stephenfield admitted, ‘but what we have found out is interesting, to say the least.’

‘What have you found?’ Adams asked.

‘From our initial investigations, using various government resources, which thankfully we still have unofficial access to, it seems that, far from being purely a talking shop, the annual meetings are used as a recruiting ground of sorts.’

‘Recruiting for what?’ Lynn asked.

‘Ah,’ Stephenfield replied. ‘Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand dollar question, isn’t it? Reports from certain attendees who have spoken about the event indicate that at some stage of the weekend conference, each delegate has to have an informal “chat” with the steering committee. This chat is held in a private room, something of an interview, it would seem. But nothing is ever mentioned about what it is they might be recruiting for. But it seems that over the years, an unusually high proportion of guests at the meetings end up having unfortunate “accidents” — car crashes, heart attacks, slipping in the shower and breaking their necks, you name it.’

‘So what do you think is going on?’ Lynn asked.

‘I suppose one possible explanation,’ Adams ventured, ‘would be that occasionally one of them turns the offer down. And, now that they know what it is, the group silences them in order to ensure their true purpose never becomes public knowledge.’

Ayita nodded his head slowly. ‘Our thoughts exactly, Matt,’ he said. ‘So the question still remains, what are they recruiting for? Something they are willing to kill for, certainly. And so I can’t help but feel that it ties into your own problems somehow.’

‘But how?’ Adams asked, confused.

‘We are still investigating, but our powers are now — thanks to Kern — necessarily limited.’

Adams and Lynn looked at each other, thinking hard. Was there anything? Anything at all that they might have missed?

‘The helicopter,’ Lynn said suddenly, looking up. ‘I tried to find out information on the flights myself, but I couldn’t get access to any of it. In Antarctica, there were two military helicopters, Chinooks I think. They had serial numbers on their tail rotor assemblies.’ She thought for a moment, and then recited the numbers, glad that her scientific mind and memory of detail were still working.

Stephenfield nodded his head. ‘They may have been false IDs, but given that they expected everyone on board your chopper to die, it’s possible they may have been genuine. We’ll look into it.’

Adams looked at Stephenfield, then at all of his comrades both new and old, until his eyes came to rest on John Ayita. ‘Thank you,’ he said with deep sincerity.

Ayita waved his hand. ‘It is our duty to avenge the death of brother Takanawee,’ he said gravely. ‘And if it involves a forty-thousand-year-old body and the world’s most powerful secret cabal, then that is an adventure none of us would turn down.’

3

Santa Rosa is a tiny township in Pima, Arizona. Less than four hundred and fifty people live there, in an area of just under six square miles, with over fifty per cent of its population existing below the poverty line. It is situated squarely in Tohono O’odham territory, and was therefore safe — outsiders were unwelcome, and very easy to spot.

The tiny flat-board house Adams and Lynn were using was one of the only unoccupied units in the township, and Ayita had organized for them to stay there for the time being. They were given a pick-up truck in case they needed to get to Phoenix to collect the lab results or if they needed to leave in a hurry for any reason, and were told that Stephenfield would visit them in twenty-four hours with news of their investigation. As telephones and other forms of electronic communication could no longer be trusted, it was decided that face-to-face meetings were the only answer.

As Adams looked out of the dirty living-room window from behind the dusty shutters, he felt the memories returning. He had spent many days in Santa Rosa — known as Kaij Mek to the O’odham — over the years he had worked for the Shadow Wolves, running down leads, talking to the town’s inhabitants, and cutting for sign down by the area’s major highway, Indian Route 29.

It was close by, just off Indian Route 15, that he had discovered the truck all those years before. And the bodies.

He turned away quickly and headed for the kitchen, and saw Lynn lying on the sofa, asleep. She had been complaining of sickness, and Adams had laid her on the couch, where she had passed out instantly.

Even asleep, he admired her beauty, the taut yet soft line of her cheek, the arched eyebrows, the way her hair fell across her forehead, arms wrapped across her body and knees up to her chest.

He crossed the room, took his jacket from an easy chair opposite and placed it over her. He bent closer, kissing her gently on the cheek.

He wondered how she felt about him. He knew that their physical reunion in Peru was probably the result of deep emotional needs requiring some sort of powerful physical release after their escape across Chile and the subsequent helicopter crash. But for him it had been more than that, something he had wanted to happen on an even more fundamental level, and he hoped that Lynn felt the same way.

They hadn’t really had a chance to talk properly since then, everything had been happening so fast, but as he looked down at her, his heart skipping the proverbial beat and his stomach swimming, he knew one thing. He loved her.

He lay down next to her, cradling her in his arms, nestling his head against hers. He closed his eyes, drinking in the scent of her hair, contented for the first time in many years.

And then, mercifully, he drifted off into a deep sleep; for the first time in a long time, a real sleep.

Twelve hours later, Adams sensed the man about to knock on the door. He was already standing next to it. The sound of footsteps coming up the path had woken him from his sleep, and he had leapt from the couch, revitalized and filled with new life from his extended, much-needed rest.

By the tempo of the gait, he surmised it was Stephenfield — although it seemed the intelligence chief had altered the length of his stride, perhaps to test his awareness.

‘Come on in, Sam,’ he said, opening the door just before the knock came.

Stephenfield looked up and smiled. ‘You didn’t fall for it then?’

‘You nearly had me,’ Adams joked as he let his old friend in, ‘but I guess you’ll just have to try harder next time.’

‘Well, you always were the best,’ Stephenfield admitted as he entered the living room. He spotted Lynn sitting on the couch, rested now after her long sleep, and nodded his head in greeting. ‘Hi, Lynn,’ he said amiably.

‘Hi, Sam,’ Lynn said in return. ‘I’m not sure what we have in the kitchen, but can I get you something?’

Stephenfield shook his head. ‘No thanks,’ he replied. ‘You’re probably going to want to hear this right away. We’ve got some news.’

Adams went to sit down on the couch next to Lynn, and they interlinked hands without even thinking. Stephenfield took his seat in the armchair opposite.

‘Right, first things first,’ he began. ‘We checked with DNA Analytics, and they haven’t got any results yet.’

Adams nodded his head. ‘Yeah, it’ll be at least another day or two, we figure. Hopefully the money will speed things up a bit, though.’

‘And the helicopter?’ Lynn asked anxiously.

‘Well, it looks like we were right about the Bilderberg Group. We used the numbers you gave us and traced the helicopters through several cut-offs and back channels to the person who chartered them.’ Stephenfield noted the look of anticipation on the faces of both Lynn and Adams. ‘Wesley Jones,’ he told them, and saw their looks turn to confusion, realizing that they would never have heard of the man. And why should they? ‘Fifty-six years old, ex-Defence Intelligence Agency, rank of colonel. Now the private aide to Stephen Jacobs.’

Adams and Lynn had been given dossiers on what Stephenfield had already found out about the Bilderberg Group and knew instantly who Stephen Jacobs was.

‘The chairman of the group?’ Adams asked for confirmation.

‘One and the same. So let me spell it out,’ Stephenfield carried on. ‘The aide of the chairman of the Bilderberg Group is the person who chartered the helicopters that took the team of engineers to the Antarctic, and that left with the body. We now have a clear, definite link between the group and what’s been happening to you both.’

‘OK,’ Adams said in a measured tone. ‘What else do we know?’

‘John wants to talk to you about that himself,’ Stephenfield said in answer, standing up from his chair. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

Hi Kdan Business Park is part of the San Xavier Development Authority, located in Tucson, just off the Nogales Highway. Situated within Tohono O’odham territory, it was regarded as something of a safe haven for John Ayita, who rented one of the small industrial units on a long-term lease.

The situation with Matt Adams and his ex-wife disturbed him greatly. Not only was one of their old comrades dead, but their entire unit had been shut down by an enemy that seemed enormously powerful. And what about the body that Lynn and her team — also all dead — had found in the Antarctic? What was the story behind that? What Ayita had learnt recently certainly hinted that it might be very special indeed, which was why it was attracting such very special attention. But it was where the remaining helicopter, the one that had carried the body, had ultimately landed that worried Ayita particularly. It meant the powers ranged against them, and which they would be forced to confront, were greater than they had at first thought.

They were going to have to enter the belly of the beast, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Adams still had the fight for it.

4

The sun was starting to set, a huge red fireball slowly descending behind the Tucson Mountains far to the west, when Stephenfield’s battered Ford sedan rolled into the industrial estate.

A large door was open in the side of Ayita’s unit, and Stephenfield drove slowly through, parking his car within the building itself, safe from prying eyes. He got out of the car, followed closely by Adams and Lynn.

The inside of the building appeared to be a small warehouse, and even contained stock of some kind, although Adams had no idea what it would be. Crates on pallets ran all round the walls of the available space, and an open stairway led to a second-level catwalk and a glass-fronted office that looked out on to the rest of the warehouse. As Adams looked up, he saw Ayita in the big window, gesturing for them to come up.

‘OK,’ Ayita said when they were all sitting on folding metal chairs in his Spartan office. ‘Sam will have already told you the connection to Jacobs, yes?’ He watched for confirmation before continuing, prowling the office like a big cat. ‘Right, so now I’ll tell you where the helicopter with the body landed. We tracked the route to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. Specifically, to the Janet Terminal.’

‘The Janet Terminal?’ Adams asked, the ramifications hitting him like a sledgehammer.

Ayita merely nodded his head.

‘OK,’ Lynn said, knowing she was missing something, ‘would someone like to tell me what is so special about the Janet Terminal?’

‘Do you want to tell her, Matt?’ Ayita asked.

Adams nodded his head slowly, turning to Lynn. ‘When I used to work down here, sometimes we’d go as far as Nevada. We got talking to the local tribes around the area, they pretty much know exactly what goes on. The Janet Terminal at McCarran has always had a lot of rumours about it, but the guys we knew filled us in. We checked it out and it was all true.’

‘What was true?’ Lynn asked.

Adams and Ayita exchanged looks. ‘The so-called “Janet flights” out of McCarran generally go to one place, and one place only,’ Adams said at length. ‘The US Air Force installation at Groom Lake. Better known to the world at large as Area 51.’

‘Area 51?’ Lynn asked incredulously. ‘Are you sure?’

Adams nodded his head, noting that he didn’t have to explain to Lynn what Area 51 was.

The base derives its name from being classified on maps of the 1950s and 1960s as ‘area 51’ of the Nevada Test and Training Range, a truly colossal military site of nearly four thousand seven hundred square miles — bigger than some countries.

Its very existence was denied for decades by the US government, which maintained that there was no such facility, but in actual fact, knowledge of the base’s existence — if not exactly what currently goes on there — is widespread.

The base is a top-secret military test and development facility, currently operated by Detachment 3 of the US Air Force Flight Test Centre, but founded in 1955 by Lockheed and the CIA in order to test their newly developed U2 spyplane. The base has been continually expanding ever since, and has been responsible for many other ‘black’ projects, including the A-12 ‘Blackbird’, the F-117 ‘Stealth Fighter’, and the B-2 ‘Stealth Bomber’. It has also played a key part in developing the latest battlefield advancements, such as unmanned reconnaissance and combat aircraft.

More notoriously, Area 51 is better known as being the repository for supposed alien UFO technology, which many people believe is hidden out at the Groom Lake facility. They say it is being reverse engineered, the only way to explain the US’ continued position at the forefront of military technology.

One of the primary beliefs of such conspiracy theorists is that the Air Force and CIA took possession of a UFO that was supposed to have crash-landed at Roswell in New Mexico back in 1947. They believe that it was then stored, along with its alien pilots, at Edwards Air Force Base while Area 51 was built, and was then shipped to the new facility for analysis. Many people argue that the entire purpose of the base is the analysis, reverse engineering, and use of alien technology.

With no proof, however, rumours about the base remained just that — rumours. And while Adams and Lynn both knew that this was the case, the coincidence just seemed too great, and their shared look said they were both thinking along the same lines.

‘So,’ Lynn said for both of them, ‘the body we found is now at the one place in the world that is rumoured to be using, or have access to, alien technology?’

Stephenfield nodded his head. ‘It makes you think, doesn’t it?’

Adams looked at him. ‘Can we get on to the base?’

‘We’ve considered the options but it doesn’t look viable. We could try and get on board one of the Janet flights and get delivered to the base directly, but the chance of being found is too great, especially when it comes to leaving the aircraft once it lands.

‘The only other way would be to access the base on foot. It is not secure in the conventional manner — it is too big to fence off entirely. But there are armed patrols, called “cammo dudes” due to their camouflage uniforms. They are actually part of a private security firm, and are authorized to use deadly force on anyone crazy enough to trespass. The whole area is littered with body-heat sensors too, so it would be very hard to move through undetected.

‘And even if one of us managed to penetrate the security and get on to the base, we have no idea of the internal layout of the place. Some internet sites have put up satellite photos of the overall layout, and others have taken photographs with telephoto lenses from the nearby mountains, but what is inside is simply not known. I mean, there’s a reason it’s the world’s most secretive military installation. So all we have to go on are rumours. One such rumour is that there are up to ten levels to the base below ground. If there is even just the possibility that this is true, where would we start? Finding anything in such a huge place would be next to impossible. Another rumour is that there are seven hangars, with concealed doors hidden in the side of a mountain at Papoose Lake ten miles to the south of Area 51. So the chances of finding out anything of use — if we even managed to get in there in the first place — would be next to zero, and the chances of being caught, arrested, and probably killed would be exceedingly high.’

Adams nodded his head in agreement.

‘What else do we have?’ Lynn asked.

‘Stephen Jacobs,’ Adams answered, reading Ayita’s thoughts. ‘You’ve looked into him?’

Ayita nodded his head. ‘We have. Sam?’

‘He lives in a colonial mansion near Washington,’ Stephenfield explained. ‘Right on the Potomac, next door to Mason Neck State Park near Colchester, about twenty miles south-west of the city proper. You’ve read his dossier?’

Adams and Lynn both nodded their heads. In the limited time Stephenfield and his contacts had had available, he had not only written a briefing paper on the Bilderberg Group itself but had also collated biographical details on the organization’s steering committee.

‘So you’ll know he was a DC bigwig, and obviously still holds a lot of sway in town. Can’t really find out too much about him before the age of thirty, but since then he seems to have literally skyrocketed through the ranks of both military and civilian intelligence. He likes to be where the action is, so even though he’s retired, he’s kept close to the capital. Makes sense. As head of the Bilderberg Group, he’ll want to be dialled in to everything.’

‘And we know something about this house?’ Adams asked.

Stephenfield smiled. ‘Almost everything. We’ve got the original building plans from the civic authorities, as well as internal schematics which include various security updates, and we’ve checked with the security firms that installed them and got further details. The place isn’t military, and so we also have the latest satellite images of the place, in high definition.’

Stephenfield took out a sheaf of papers, blueprints, maps and glossy photographs, and spread them out on an old, battered card table placed in the middle of the office.

He pointed to one of the satellite photographs first, which showed Jacobs’ house and grounds. ‘You see the house here,’ he said, gesturing at the huge, double-winged mansion. ‘It’s close to the edge of a cliff that descends two hundred feet to the Potomac River, set back on a lawn of about one hundred feet in length. At the other side of the house, the driveway runs almost a mile from the access road gates to the front door. And these woods that the road cuts through and that spread out for about a mile on either side? They’re all his, giving him about two square miles of land, or about twelve hundred acres.’

‘That’s a hell of a lot so close to the capital,’ Lynn observed.

‘You’ve seen what he’s worth,’ Adams commented. ‘What was it, two billion dollars? He can afford it.’

Stephenfield nodded. ‘Yes, and that’s a conservative estimate.’

Adams looked up at Stephenfield and Ayita. ‘So what’s the plan?’

Ayita spoke plainly. ‘Our resources are limited, obviously. There are the twelve of us,’ he said, referring to the unit of ex-Shadow Wolves, ‘and we are also using other colleagues from the tribes. Some of our people are tracking Tony Kern already, and we’ve put two men in position near to Jacobs’ house. They are members of the Mattaponi tribe in Virginia, brothers of Great Spirit.’

Thomas ‘Great Spirit’ Najana was relatively new to the team, but Adams trusted Ayita’s judgement, and he had no trouble with outsourcing to the man’s family — blood ties were the strongest kind of reassurance.

‘We are also sending others to run surveillance on the other American on the committee, Harold Weissmuller,’ Ayita continued. ‘He is up in San Francisco, but we should have him by dawn.’

Weissmuller was another billionaire, a businessman who had made his fortune from oil but who had then branched out into any and every field he could, from arms sales to media ownership.

‘And the others?’ Adams asked.

‘The other members are beyond our reach for the time being,’ Stephenfield admitted. ‘They are from all over the world, and hard for us to gain access to. We’re trying to arrange some sort of remote electronic surveillance, though. Pretty soon, we should have a good idea of what they’re up to.’

Adams looked directly at Ayita. ‘I want to meet up with Thomas in DC.’

Lynn looked across at Adams, then back to Ayita. ‘Me too,’ she said, aware that her ex-husband would be less than happy at the suggestion.

‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ Adams interjected immediately. ‘You’re not used to surveillance operations, and someone really needs to stay here and wait for those lab results, and—’

Lynn held up a hand to silence him. ‘Stephen Jacobs sent the men who killed eight of my friends,’ she said. ‘I want to be there.’

Adams was about to protest further when Ayita raised his own hand. ‘Thomas is waiting for you already,’ he said, turning to Lynn and smiling. ‘Both of you.’

Adams looked up and rolled his eyes, pointedly ignoring Lynn’s own triumphant smile.

5

The large mahogany desk was swamped with papers, and Stephen Jacobs sat behind it with a large glass of cognac. There were twenty-three names on his list, and he had to decide on one of them soon.

Normally such selections were made at the annual Bilderberg Group meetings, and indeed up until last night they had their full complement of one hundred individuals, as agreed all those years ago. But last night one of the ‘Bilderberg Hundred’ had been hit by a car and killed instantly, which left a small gap that had to be filled.

He hoped when the offer was made, it would be accepted. Nine times out of ten they were; the people approached were carefully vetted, and their acceptance was virtually guaranteed. The promise of near immortality and undreamt-of power was the sort of thing that was not in the nature of such people to refuse.

But over the years, there had been some who had refused, who had demonstrated what could only be termed horror at the group’s real plans, as if the sacrifice of human life was something abhorrent. In the main it was, of course; but for something so incredible, such sacrifice was nothing.

But the fact remained that there were the odd refuseniks, people who subsequently had to be dealt with by Eldridge and his Alpha Brigade. It was not that Jacobs regretted the killing of such people; rather, it was that if a selected candidate subsequently refused, they would have to waste time selecting another in their place. And with the device just about ready, time was something that they were quickly running out of.

Jacobs supposed it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they didn’t get one hundred people; after all, it would hardly affect him. But it was in his nature to deal and bargain and negotiate, and when he had been in the early stages of his negotiations with the group — who referred to themselves as the Anunnaki — he had been offered the survival of just the steering committee.

Jacobs put down the dossier he was reading and chuckled to himself. The first offer had been basic survival, and for just twelve people. By the time Jacobs had finished, he had negotiated for one hundred people and the conferring of equal status and powers as the Anunnaki themselves.

He wanted the extra people not only to make a point to the Anunnaki that they couldn’t dictate terms to him, but also because the more like-minded people he had behind him, the more secure was his own position. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his partners — although it was true that he didn’t do so entirely — it was just that his long decades of practical experience had taught him that the more people you had in your corner, the better. If the Anunnaki were to try something, he would rather have ninety-nine capable people with him than eleven.

The whole thing was a gamble, of course; the Anunnaki might well renege on their deal, and he and his people might well end up dead, along with the rest of the world’s population. But if he hadn’t said yes all those years ago, somebody else would have, and he would have eventually been killed anyway. At least this way, at the forefront of the mission, there was the very real possibility of the big reward, and rewards truly came no greater than what had been finally negotiated.

Jacobs took a sip of his cognac and picked the dossier back up from the desk, when the voice came into his head, crystal clear as always.

He looked across the room to the metal box by the door, one of the machines built out at Area 51 according to the specifications of the Anunnaki.

‘How are preparations?’ he heard the voice say in his head, and he wondered at this ‘voice’ as he always did. It was not a voice in the normal sense of accent, tone and inflection; instead the words appeared directly in his brain, fully formed, almost like thoughts of his own.

‘Good,’ he said out loud. ‘The device is almost complete.’

‘When can we expect it to be operational?’

‘One week from now,’ Jacobs said with confidence. ‘And then we will meet properly for the first time.’

The journey to DC took less time than expected. Adams had figured they would have to use roads rather than fly, due to the need to avoid airport or any other kind of security. This would have taken about two days, though, and he was relieved to find that Ayita had his own helicopter, kept round the back of the warehouse. Lynn, however, was less sanguine about boarding another helicopter. Adams had seen the fear in her eyes, but her resolve soon overcome her wariness — the time they would save would be well worth going up in the air again. At least this chopper wouldn’t be stolen, or flown by remote control.

Ayita flew the helicopter himself, stopping for fuel only once at a friendly airstrip in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He finally landed just outside Fredericksville, well short of DC airspace. There, a nondescript Toyota sedan was waiting for them, and Adams and Lynn transferred quickly to the car, while Ayita refuelled once more and made his preparations to return to their home base, to monitor everyone’s activities from a central point.

An hour later, the pair had arrived at Potomac Plaza Shopping Centre in Woodbridge, where one of Najana’s three brothers met them. They left the sedan in the parking lot, and joined Ben Najana in his large SUV.

After introductions, Adams got straight to the point before the 4x4 had even pulled on to the main road.

‘So what have you found out so far?’ he asked.

‘Security’s good, man,’ Ben said seriously. ‘Better than the schematics we had. We’ve had a quick recon but didn’t want to go in too far. The woods connect up to Mason Neck State Park and look to have some sort of body-heat sensors strung out between the trees. Cliff access looks impossible due to the breakers below — you couldn’t even get close to the cliff base even if it wasn’t under surveillance, which it is. The driveway is patrolled by guards and dogs, as is the lawn which backs up on to the cliffs.’

‘Anything else?’ Adams asked.

‘The security guards are good. We estimate about a dozen of them, plus a couple of personal bodyguards. All good, professional people, the kind you’re not gonna find sleeping on the job.’

‘The dogs,’ Adams asked next, ‘what kind are they?’

‘Doberman Pinschers, well-trained. There are four canine teams, one security guard with two dogs in each. They run alternate routes, swapping teams for both the driveway and the lawns.’

‘OK. Where are you based now?’

‘Camping up in the park. We’ve tried to approach the fence to his property a couple of times during the night, but it’s a bitch to get over.’

Adams nodded his head. ‘OK, let’s get to the camp and we’ll see if we can come up with a plan.’

6

By nightfall, the plan had been drawn up and rehearsed, and everyone was ready.

Lynn looked at Adams, her eyes displaying all sorts of emotions — fear, concern, belief, love — and Adams willed her to trust him. He would be going in by himself; he knew it would be safer that way. The truth was, he was the best there was at this sort of thing. It had been true before he had ever joined the Shadow Wolves, and it was true again now, his powers fully returned to him at last.

There was no need for words, just the exchanged looks of two people who had been through so much together, and realized that they still wanted to go through more. A tear rolled down Lynn’s cheek, and then Adams turned on his heel and was gone, through the treeline and into the thick woods of Mason Neck Park.

The fence to Jacobs’ property was an eight-foot stone wall topped by blades and razor wire, with CCTV cameras placed along its length every twenty feet. As Adams looked at it, he considered that perhaps the cliffs wouldn’t have been such a bad choice.

It was a cloudy night, and at first the wood had been pitch black. Adams could have used night-vision goggles — Ayita could certainly have found some for him — but he had never liked them, as they cut off peripheral vision and made you vulnerable from the flanks. He preferred to rely on the abilities that nature had given him, and had spent the first half-hour in the woods squatting on the cold ground, letting his eyes adjust to the dark.

The simple fact was that there was really no such thing as pitch black, that was just how things appeared before you let the eyes adjust. Even with clouds covering any available natural light source such as the moon and the stars, manmade sources of light were ever present, especially so close to a major city like Washington DC. Even though he was in a state park, surrounded by huge trees in an area many people would feel was in the middle of nowhere, the truth was that the nation’s capital was only twenty miles away, and Mason Creek itself was separated from several major towns by only a relatively small body of water. The result was that, if you let the eyes adjust for long enough, there was enough light to see clearly with no technological apparatus whatsoever. You just had to be patient, a quality Adams had in abundance.

He also knew how to see things in the dark, looking at just the right angle to whatever object he needed to see, never directly at it, to maximize the effect of the available light on his retina. It was one of the skills he had learnt long ago on the plains of the Badlands.

The coating he had applied to his entire body was another. Some of the night creatures out in the Badlands, including the deadly prairie rattlesnake, relied on a type of heat-sensing vision, and he and his friends had regularly coated their bodies with cold mud when on night hunts, in order to avoid unfortunate accidents with such predators. He had done the same to himself now, every inch of his body covered with cold mud drawn up from the thick pools back at the campsite. It wouldn’t necessarily fool the body-heat sensors that were supposed to be located all about the property, but it was a good back-up to his main plan, and with security like this, every little helped.

His eyes now fully adjusted to the conditions, he studied the wall, the barbed wire, the cameras, and the trees that surrounded them. It was as Najana had described: the trees from the park ran right up to the wall, while the treeline on the private side had been cut back ten feet for security reasons. He was pretty sure Jacobs would have wanted the park’s side cut back too, but Adams was pleased to see that the man’s influence didn’t seem to extend to cutting down acres of woodland in a state park. Adams supposed the public outcry would have outweighed the beneficial effects to security. Jacobs’ primary safety mechanism was probably that nobody knew where he was, and a public scene would destroy that in an instant.

The people responsible for security at Jacobs’ estate would have been concerned about people simply crossing over from tree to tree, circumventing the wall by going over the top of it, which is why they had cut the trees back on their side. It wasn’t going to stop Adams, though, and he examined the trees closely, walking down the line of the wall — careful to remain out of camera shot — until he came to what he thought was ideal. A big oak, whose huge, thick branches came to within ten inches of the property, four feet above the wall.

Wasting no time, Adams clambered up it, scaling the thick trunk in seconds and hauling himself along the chosen branch until he was hanging within inches of the wall. Legs clamped tightly round the branch, lying flat on top, he looked out across the barbed wire for his first real glimpse of the estate beyond.

As he suspected, both CCTV and body-heat sensors were scattered along the open space between the wall and the treeline, ready to catch anyone foolish enough to jump from the state park side. But the sensors were designed to catch someone landing on the ground, and that wasn’t Adams’ intention at all.

The ten feet between the trees was too far to jump — at least in a straight line. But from a height, jumping down, Adams knew he would be able to cover more than ten feet.

And so he reversed back to the big trunk and kept on climbing — twenty feet, thirty feet, until he was forty feet above the ground, the branches thinner now, his position precarious as he manoeuvred out towards the end of his chosen platform.

He looked down to the trees on the other side, so far away it seemed, although they were as tall as the ones on his side. He studied the trees opposite, looking for a landing site. He knew the tree he wanted, now it was just a question of where on that tree.

The location selected, he crouched down on his branch, coiling his body like a spring, and then he released himself, launching out across the void like a jungle cat.

His extended body sailed high over the wire-topped wall, and he could feel himself plummeting to the ground with alarming speed. But the tree was also coming nearer — nearer, nearer…

Adams dropped thirty feet for the ten that he made across the clearing, and then he was at the tree on the far side, hands grasping wildly, seizing hold of branches, twigs, anything that he could, his leg catching on a thick branch, his fall broken. Then he was swinging, hands clasping other branches, until he had a secure hold, swaying upside down between two branches, still ten feet above the ground but now ten feet inside Jacobs’ property.

As he lay there swinging, looking back across the monitored clearing, he allowed himself a brief smile. He had made it.

If he had been running on a track, it would have taken just a couple of minutes or so to cover the half-mile between the wall and Jacobs’ house. The method of locomotion Adams had chosen, however, was going to take a lot longer.

Using the same rationale as that of entering the estate — the cameras and body-heat monitors were used at ground level, as that was where security would expect a threat to be moving — Adams decided the best way to get to the house undetected would be to use the trees. And so — slowly, carefully, often painfully — Adams used his superior climbing skills to stay up in the trees, working his way towards the house high up in the branches of the trees.

He was careful to keep his breathing, his heart rate and his physical movements as slow and deliberate as possible, not wanting to disturb the animals that used the trees as their home, knowing that a flock of birds escaping the treetops en masse at this time of night would be as good as a high-decible alarm call to the guards. And so what should have taken two or three minutes stretched to over three hours as he negotiated each and every tree branch by branch, sometimes able to step easily to the next tree along, other times having to jump, while on other occasions having to work his way around small clearings, which added even more time to his journey.

Twice, dog patrols passed through the woods, although never directly below him; Adams heard them a long way out, assessed their likely route, and laid up high in the treetops until they passed. The covering of mud of his body also reduced his natural scents, giving nothing to alert the dogs’ acute senses.

It was a long and drawn-out process, but by the time Adams approached the edge of the treeline on the house side — the lights of the east wing shining brightly through the branches — he was sure that he had got there completely undetected.

He had considered getting the Najana brothers to create some sort of distraction, to take the security force’s attention away to another part of the estate, but had eventually decided against it. Better that the security forces were not alerted at all, he had figured.

He had taken even more time to manoeuvre his way through the last few trees, knowing that the lights of the estate might now serve to illuminate him. He had a natural instinct, honed by years of practice, that enabled him to keep to the darkest areas, understanding how the trees would appear to anyone looking directly at them. He had now succeeded in attaining an excellent observation point, hidden in the treetops in direct line of sight of the east wing of the mansion house.

The brothers had offered him a collapsible, micro parabolic mic, with which he could have listened in to voices within the house from his current position. But he had been worried about the electrical charge given off by the device, keenly aware of the security group’s counter-electronic surveillance capabilities. He had therefore decided to go in ‘naked’, without any electrical or technological equipment. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust it, or thought that such equipment was useless; on the contrary, during his time in the Shadow Wolves he had used many such devices, and had at times found them invaluable. In this particular situation, however, he decided that relying on his natural resources was going to be the best option. Which meant he was going to have to get closer.

He had memorized the layout of the house — the living areas, the kitchens, dining room, study and library, the bathrooms and the bedrooms — and knew that he was looking directly at the first-floor guest bedroom, with the kitchen on the floor below. Jacobs’ own bedroom was on the rear side of the east wing, facing the lawn and the bay. His private study was also to the rear, with French doors leading to the lawn’s terrace. The rear façade of the house was illuminated by garden lights aimed directly at the white stucco exterior. Conversely, the eastern edge of the building that Adams was looking at was dark, unlit and shaded by the trees.

The question was, how to cross the forty feet of trimmed, open lawn between the treeline and the eastern edge of the house? There would doubtless be motion sensors in addition to body-heat detectors, not to mention the guards and their dogs. But again, it would seem that all such sensors were directed at ground level.

Still cloaked in the dark, Adams started to unravel the long, thin rope that was coiled round his body.

‘Do you think he’s there yet?’ Lynn asked Thomas with more anxiety than she wanted to display.

‘Well, he’s possibly at the treeline by now, looking out over the house, probably trying to assess whether he can make it all the way with that rope of his,’ Thomas responded. When he saw that this did not immediately reassure her, he added, ‘But he must be doing OK, we’ve not heard any alarms, and there’s not been any shouting or barking, so I think he must be doing all right.’

‘From what I’ve heard about him, there shouldn’t be a problem anyway,’ Jacob Najana, the youngest of the brothers, interjected. ‘I mean, he’s a legend, right? He—’ Jacob was interrupted by a bleep from the secure digital satellite radio resting between them.

‘Guys,’ they heard Ben’s voice come through loud and clear, ‘there’s a problem.’ Ben Najana was stationed up on Cemetery Road, observing the main access route to the house. ‘Eight big SUVs just passed the main gates and are turning down the driveway. They’ll be at the house in two minutes.’

Lynn went white. Matt didn’t even have a radio. There was no way to warn him.

7

Adams heard them before they had even entered the estate, picked out the rough, V8 burble of large vehicles — eight or nine of them — travelling in convoy on the main access road to the north of his position. He heard the deceleration, the sound of tyres turning, and knew they were on the driveway, heading towards the house.

He considered his options as he hung suspended thirty feet above the side lawn from his black nylon rope. He had had to throw the rope to the far rooftop, hoping that his aim was sound. He had watched with trepidation as it had gone sailing through the night, the weighted end aimed at one of the roof’s railed edges, all too aware that if it failed to hit the right spot, it would tumble uselessly to the lawn below, its forty-foot length impossible to haul back up before it hit the ground and activated every sensor and detector in the area.

But it had flown true, and anchored on the correct point, and after breathing a sigh of relief, Adams had started climbing, upside down and hand over hand, legs secured over the rope for stability.

Now he was halfway across, with around eight vehicles carrying maybe five people in each — forty extra, unknown people — about to arrive. Should he go back, or press on? The decision had to be made instantly, as within two minutes the headlights of the oncoming vehicles would hit the house and illuminate him like the proverbial sitting duck.

Never one for retreat, there was hardly a decision to be made, and he continued doggedly on his way, one fist pumping steadily over the other.

Jacobs looked up from his paperwork as Wesley Jones entered his study.

‘We’ve got a problem, sir,’ he announced with military understatement.

Jacobs stared at Jones through his half-moon reading lenses. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘Secret Service has just entered the estate,’ Jones said uncertainly.

‘What?’ Jacobs nearly spilt his brandy over his papers. ‘What the hell for? Where’s Tony?’

‘Tony is still at the White House, I just called him. He doesn’t know anything about it.’

Jacobs’ mind was racing. What was going on? Why had the Secret Service decided to visit him, so close to the end?

‘Who are they?’ Jacobs asked agian. ‘How many?’

‘Gate security reports eight cars, four men in each. And one of them is Lowell himself.’

Jacobs groaned inwardly. Harvey Lowell was the Director of the Secret Service. He had been a guest at a Bilderberg meeting just last year and, unknown to him, had been under consideration to become one of the chosen. He hadn’t made the grade in the end, though, and the offer had never been made. His psychological profile, as well as his answers during their private, informal interview, indicated that he would have moral issues with the sacrifices that were going to be made.

But did he suspect something? Had he figured out what was going on? And why had he arrived with so many agents? Why the show of force?

Jacobs slowly took the glasses off the end of his nose and rested them on his desk, pushed his chair back and stood up.

‘Well,’ he said resignedly, ‘I suppose I’d better go and meet him, hadn’t I?’

Adams heard the vehicles getting closer and closer, could almost feel the heat of the incoming headlight beams, so heightened were his senses.

Finally, he reached the house, fingertips touching the railings, his thin-soled climbing boots resting carefully on top of the exterior brickwork of the window frame below. He would have rolled directly on to the roof, but the information gathered by Stephenson suggested that it would have its own infrared sensors strung out along the top. He therefore clung to the side of the building, melting into the dark as he disconnected the rope from the railing. He would have loved to have used the rope to get back to the treeline, but knew that a forty-foot rope spanning the space between the woods and the house would not go unnoticed for long. And so he took the weighted end and hurled it as hard as he could back at the trees he had come from, watching as it once again sailed through the air, mercifully coming to rest hidden in the uppermost branches, even as the bright headlights arrived at the turning circle at the front of the house.

He quickly pulled himself further back into the wall, flattening himself as much as he could, becoming immobile, aware that any movement now could give him away. And then the lights were brighter as the vehicles moved round the turning circle, and for a few brief seconds Adams was sure he would be spotted, certain that his dark, mud-covered silhouette would be all too visible against the white stucco of the mansion’s wall.

And then, mercifully, there was dark again as the vehicles — large, black SUVs with government plates, Adams noticed — completed their turns and came to rest at the front entrance.

Adams started to edge his way down the building.

‘Lowell, to what do we owe the honour?’ Jacobs asked charmingly as he opened the large front door of his home.

Before him stood Harvey Lowell, tall, angular and thin, with a receding hairline and a look of fierce intelligence. He was flanked by six men, all dressed in identical dark suits.

‘We need to talk,’ Lowell said evenly.

‘Well, why don’t you come in then?’ Jacobs said graciously, although he was feeling nothing of the sort. ‘Where are the rest of your agents?’ he asked, gesturing at the eight SUVs parked outside.

‘Securing the estate,’ Lowell answered simply, the implication clear: the visit was not friendly.

Jacobs smiled stiffly. ‘I am sure there is no need for that,’ he said. ‘But you better come in anyway.’

In the study, Lowell sat down and gestured at the papers still scattered across Jacobs’ desk. ‘Doing a little research?’ he asked, eyebrows raised.

‘You know how it is,’ Jacobs said non-committally.

Lowell grunted in reply.

‘A drink?’ Jacobs offered next, trying to keep the conversation genial.

Lowell shook his head. ‘No thank you. This is hardly what you would call a social visit.’

Jacobs’ eyes narrowed, and for an instant Lowell was rocked by the intensity of the man’s gaze.

‘Well, in that case,’ Jacobs said with a hint of underlying menace, ‘you’d better tell me what the hell it is you want.’

Adams entered the house through the guest-room window. As he had suspected, the house wasn’t continuously alarmed; people going in and out of rooms would make such a procedure unnecessarily troublesome. And so the security measures were focused largely upon detecting threats before they ever got to the house, and less so on the entry and exit points of the house itself, especially on the upper floors.

The house dated from 1815, and although some major modifications had been made in order to improve security, it was still an old house and was relatively easy to break into if you knew how. After all, with twelve armed security guards on-site, who in their right mind was ever going to break into the house in the first place?

Adams recognized the infrared strip light running across the inside of the window frame. After disabling the lock, a simple hand-held mirror slipped between the light beam as he made his entry was sufficient to stop the alarm going off.

Once inside, he went immediately to the far wall and pulled open a cupboard. He found himself staring down the laundry chute, still in operation and exactly where Adams had expected to find it.

Perfect, Adams thought, even as he started to climb inside.

As he neared the bottom of the chute, he slowed his descent until he was moving in complete silence, ears straining for any sound. Confident that the basement laundry room was empty, Adams allowed himself to drop out of the chute and into the huge laundry bin at the bottom. He peered out over the top to confirm the absence of security guards. He didn’t know what was going on upstairs but the presence of government officials meant that there were now yet more people in the house to find him, and he would have to be even more careful.

From his position in the bin, Adams confirmed the location of the CCTV cameras and planned his route to avoid them. Then he was on the move once again, moving swiftly across the room to a door on the far side. He pulled it open the instant he was there, slipped quickly through it, and closed it again behind him no more than three seconds after leaving the protection of the laundry bin.

The new room was not a room at all really but a large cupboard, filled with shelves containing various cleaning chemicals, spare sheets and other bedlinen. And according to the building’s blueprints, the cupboard was located directly underneath the ground-floor study of Stephen Jacobs.

8

‘I want to talk about the deaths of Ryan Yordale, Frank Croaker, Yves Desault, Vitor Dzerzewski, Patek Guillaume, Stephanie Ortmeyer, Gustav Schliesser, Helen Holmes, Anthony DeSilva, Jacek Ostrawski and Nicolas St Vincent,’ Lowell said, his tone grave.

Jacobs sighed inwardly. So Lowell really did have something after all; it just wasn’t the most important thing he could have found, and Jacobs actually found himself relaxing slightly.

‘What do you mean?’ he said at length.

‘What do I mean?’ Lowell said, stifling a laugh. ‘I mean these eleven deaths — mysterious deaths — all occurred to people who had recently attended a Bilderberg Group meeting.’

‘And?’ Jacobs asked, sure that Lowell must have more to go on than that.

‘And, they are deaths that have all occurred on your watch as chairman of the group.’

It was Jacobs’ turn to laugh. ‘Eleven people die after meetings at which I presided? Harvey, I have been chairman of the group for twelve years, and with an average attendance of one hundred and twenty, that is — what? — between fourteen and fifteen hundred people. Eleven people is—’

‘Zero point seven six per cent,’ Lowell interrupted. ‘Or a death rate of seven point six per thousand, but as they all died within twenty-two days of the meetings, this equates to a death rate of one hundred and twenty-six point one per thousand per year, which is twelve times higher than the national average. How do you explain that?’

‘I’m not sure I have to, do I?’ Jacobs asked mildly.

Lowell’s nostrils flared. ‘Do you know the death rate for people attending Bilderberg meetings before you took over? It was lower than the national average, which is what you would expect given the wealth of the attendees and their easier access to advanced medical facilities. So what we have is a twentyfold increase in the death rate of attendees since you took over, a rate that has been pretty much steady for the twelve years you have been in charge.’

‘I’m still waiting for the part where you tell me what you’re doing here,’ Jacobs said offhandedly.

Lowell slammed his fist down on the table. ‘Dammit, you know exactly what I’m talking about! You’re running the Bilderberg Group like a recruitment centre, we all know that. Those little private meetings, we all know you’re interviewing for something. And maybe some people you choose, when they realize what it is you’re offering, they just hold their hands up and say, “Hell, no!” And then what do you do?’ Lowell slammed his fist down on the table again. ‘Kill them!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that!’

Jacobs was silent for a time, then started chuckling to himself. ‘I’m still waiting for the evidence you possess, besides some dubious statistical anomalies. Croaker died of a heart attack, Schliesser was hit by a car, Ostrawski had a brain aneurism, the list goes on, all certified by doctors, nothing untoward ever suggested or implied. Suspicious? I’ll give you that. Solid, as in court-of-law solid?’ He smiled again. ‘I don’t think so.’

Lowell sat back in his chair and smiled his own wide, wicked smile. ‘Stephen, I think you have me all wrong,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to arrest you.’

Jacobs’ eyes narrowed, suspecting what the man really wanted. ‘What do you want, Harvey?’ he asked quietly.

‘I want in,’ Lowell said with confidence. ‘Whatever your little scheme is, I want a part of it. And if you don’t let me in, I’ll do my best to bring it all crashing down around you.’

What the hell? In the cupboard below the study, Adams had positioned himself on the uppermost shelf, his ear to the ceiling, senses strained to the maximum as the conversation filtered down through the old house’s woodwork.

The Director of the Secret Service, Harvey Lowell, was asking to be brought into Jacobs’ inner circle, become part of the project.

Was he serious? Adams couldn’t believe it. Was there nothing people like this would stop at when it came to increasing their power, wealth and status? Adams sighed; of course there wasn’t, he knew that about as well as he knew anything.

He listened harder; if Lowell was asking to be let in, and Jacobs capitulated, then he might just be able to learn what the hell this thing was all about.

‘What makes you think I’m going to tell you anything?’ Jacobs said, as he sipped thoughtfully at his brandy glass. ‘Maybe you’re just fishing, hoping I’m going to incriminate myself.’

‘Maybe I am,’ Lowell said evenly. ‘But then it would just be my word against yours, wouldn’t it? You can have me swept for a wire if you want.’

Jacobs looked at his glass for several moments, then pressed the intercom on his desk.

‘Yes, sir?’ Jones’ voice came through, loud and clear.

‘Wesley, get Eldridge in here,’ Jacobs ordered.

Then both men rested back in their seats, looking at one another, each one trying to assess the other, weigh up their character, their willpower, their internal resources.

The spell was broken moments later by a knock on the door. ‘Come in,’ Jacobs said, and he looked over Lowell’s shoulder as Flynn Eldridge entered the room.

‘Check Mr Lowell for a wire, would you, please?’ Jacobs asked him.

Eldridge nodded his head, and asked Lowell to rise from his chair. He then passed an electronic sensor over the man’s body, before giving him a thorough physical check.

Halfway through the check, Jacobs managed to catch Eldridge’s eye while Lowell’s back was turned. He blinked twice, clearly, and then gave a coded signal with the fingers of one hand.

Eldridge recognized the order immediately, and blinked his own eyes once in confirmation.

He finished the search, thanked Lowell and turned back to Jacobs. ‘He’s clean,’ he said, before being dismissed by Jacobs.

Once the door had closed behind Eldridge with an audible click, Lowell turned to Jacobs, all business. ‘Satisfied?’ he asked.

Jacobs shrugged his shoulders. ‘I suppose so. What now?’

‘Now,’ Lowell said happily, ‘tell me everything.’

‘The Secret Service?’ Lynn asked, wondering what it could possibly mean.

‘John’s confirmed the license plates,’ replied Thomas. ‘Looks like the director himself has gone to pay Jacobs a visit. Our guys watching Kern have also said that his phone has been going crazy for the past half-hour, so we can probably assume it’s an unannounced visit, and Jacobs or his staff have been trying to contact Kern to find out what the hell is going on. And according to our guys, Kern is flapping himself, knows nothing about it.’

‘Do you think the Secret Service have been working the same angles as us? Do you think they’ve found out what’s been going on?’

‘Who knows?’ Thomas replied. ‘But if that’s the case, maybe they’ll do our job for us.’

9

Jacobs finished one glass of brandy, poured himself another and drank half of it before he leant back in his chair and smiled at Lowell.

‘You want to know what’s going on?’ he asked.

Lowell leant forward, his glare intense. ‘I demand to know.’

Jacobs sighed resignedly, nodded his head, and motioned to the metal cube in the corner of the room. ‘We used to have to contact them through all manner of complex apparatus. Our questions took weeks to get to them, and their answers the same to return. And now we can communicate just by using that box there.’

‘“They”?’ Lowell asked, a look of scepticism writ plain across his aquiline features. ‘And just who in the hell are “they”?’

Jacobs smiled charmingly. ‘You’ve heard of Roswell, of course.’

‘Roswell?’ Lowell asked, unbelieving. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘July the eighth, nineteen forty-seven,’ Jacobs began, almost as if Lowell wasn’t there. ‘Roswell, New Mexico. Walter Haut, the Public Information Officer for Roswell Army Air Field, made a press release announcing that the 509th Bomb Group had recovered a crashed “flying disc” from a nearby ranch. It was later claimed that the debris recovered from the crash site was in fact from a highly classified project known as “Mogul”, a high-altitude surveillance balloon that was designed to spy on Soviet nuclear weapons tests. But the original story was in fact true. The wreckage was indeed from a flying disc, of unknown origin. Unfortunately the pilots died in the crash, but we have established contact since, aided by the technology we recovered.’

Lowell looked stunned, still not sure whether to believe a single word of what he was hearing. ‘But contact with who?’ he persisted.

Jacobs gestured at the box behind Lowell. ‘Why don’t you ask them yourself?’

Beneath the office, Adams tried to ignore the other sounds he was picking up from around the house, important though they were, and did his best to concentrate on the sounds above.

It looked as if Jacobs was about to open communications with whoever he was working with — or maybe even working for — and Adams hoped to finally learn what was going on. He pressed his ear to the thin fibreboard ceiling panel, and strained to his utmost.

‘Who… who are you?’ Adams heard Harvey Lowell, the Director of the US Secret Service, say uncertainly.

Adams waited for the answer but was rewarded with silence. He was concentrating so hard on listening he could even pick up what he took to be the men’s breathing — Jacobs’ deep and rhythmic, Lowell’s excited and nervous. But still no answer.

‘What is this?’ Lowell said next, sounding shocked.

‘That’s the way the box works,’ Jacobs answered. ‘Just let it happen.’

The box? Adams wondered. What the hell is he talking about?

‘OK,’ Lowell said next, determination in his voice. ‘Can you tell me what is going on?’

Again Adams tried to listen to the answer but could hear nothing, just the breathing. And Lowell’s breathing was rapidly increasing. Adams wondered what it was he could be hearing.

‘It… It can’t be true!’ Lowell stammered.

‘Oh, but it is, my friend,’ Jacobs assured him. ‘And you’ve not even heard the best of it yet.’ His tone changed, as if he was now speaking to someone else. ‘Why don’t you tell him what is going to happen?’

Again there was silence, and again Adams wondered not just what the two men were hearing in the room above but how they were hearing it. What was the box they had? Surely it wasn’t as simple as some sort of telecommunications device — Lowell certainly wouldn’t have been impressed with anything so mundane. Was it some sort of alien technology? Jacobs’s talk of Roswell, and the recovered wreckage of a flying disc, would certainly hint at such a possibility, and at this point Adams was ready to believe anything.

‘You’re… You’re crazy!’ Lowell shouted, and the fear and horror in his voice were clear. ‘You can’t do this! You can’t!’

‘Harvey, this is why you weren’t selected at the last meeting. We decided you would never approve of the plan. You’re simply not strong enough.’

‘Strong?’ Lowell said, his voice regaining some of its earlier composure. ‘This isn’t strength, Stephen. It’s genocide.’

‘And that doesn’t take strength?’ Jacobs shot back. ‘Something like this takes more strength than you would believe possible.’

Genocide? Adams’ head was spinning.

‘It doesn’t matter any more anyway,’ Lowell said. ‘I’m gonna shut you down. I’m gonna shut it all down, and I don’t care who your friends are or where they come from. I’m going straight to the president, your secret little project in Europe is not going to be operational next week, and those friends of yours are never going to set foot here. And you and all your Bilderberg cronies are going to jail for a very long time.’

There was a pause, and then Adams heard Jacobs chuckle.

‘Oh, you think this is funny?’ Lowell asked. ‘My men are all over this place, and you’re all under arrest as of right now.’

Jacobs chuckled again, and Lowell changed his tone, sounding as if he was now talking into a microphone. ‘Jenkins, start rounding them up,’ he said with renewed vigour. ‘We’re shutting this place down.’ There was a pause. ‘Jenkins?’ he asked again, anxiously.

Still Jacobs was chuckling, and the noises Adams had tried to drown out from the other areas of the house all started to drop into place.

‘Fredriks?’ Lowell asked next. ‘Fielding?’ His voice snapped back to Jacobs. ‘Damn you, what’s happened to them?’

‘They’re dead, Harvey. Their fate was sealed the moment you brought them here. You had a chance, though. If you’d accepted the vision, you could have joined us. You could have been one of us.’

‘Hey,’ Lowell said in a placatory tone, ‘let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Stephen. We can negotiate, right? I mean, that was then, and this is now, right? It’s not too late. I can still join you. You know I can be useful. You know that, right?’

‘No, Harvey, I don’t. But why don’t I ask my friend?’ he said reasonably. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, and Adams could envision him directing his question to the mysterious box.

‘Well,’ Jacobs said moments later, ‘that seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?’

‘No!’ Lowell yelled, and Adams heard him pushing his chair backwards, moving quickly, fearfully. ‘No!’

And then Adams heard the loud, concussive blasts of three 9mm rounds fired from a semi-automatic handgun, and the heavy thud as Lowell’s dead body hit the floor above him.

10

Jacobs stared down at the dead body of Lowell, lying bleeding on his study floor. It had been unfortunate but necessary.

‘Why did you contact us?’ The voice entered Jacobs’ mind almost painfully. ‘You could have dealt with this yourself. It was unnecessary to give him details.’

‘On the contrary. We felt we could use him on our team before. He was a good man, we just felt he wouldn’t go along with it. But then he came here, demanding to be a part of it. It was worth finding out.’ Especially as I still need to find one more person anyway, Jacobs didn’t say.

‘Just so long as it does not interfere with our schedule.’

‘It will not,’ Jacobs promised. He had already decided what to do with the bodies of Lowell and his men. ‘We will meet in person within the week, I promise you.’

‘What the hell’s going on over there?’ Lynn asked, startled by the muted gunfire coming from the other side of the woods.

Thomas got straight on the secure radio to Benjamin on the main road. ‘Ben, what can you see?’

‘Not sure yet,’ Benjamin’s voice came back, crystal clear. ‘But I’m pretty sure that was nine-millimetre fire, and the Secret Service carry forty cal.’

‘You think Jacobs’ men have opened fire on the agents?’ Lynn asked incredulously.

‘It’s possible,’ Thomas replied. ‘I don’t know what the hell is going on but I’d be ready to believe anything right now.’

Adams gently lowered himself from the top shelf, silently touching down on the floor.

He had outstayed his welcome and was going to have to leave. If he read the situation correctly, Lowell’s Secret Service agents were all dead. It would be standard procedure for Jacobs’ security team to now comb the building to make sure it was secure.

But what had he learnt? Adams began to think, but a rattle at the outside laundry door made him go instantly alert.

Damn! He chastized himself; there would be plenty of time for reflection if and when he managed to escape from this place. For now, he had to concentrate his resources on survival.

Reacting on instinct, he hauled himself back up to the topmost shelves again, lying flat just below the high ceiling. It was cramped and dark in the store cupboard, but if anyone looked directly up, they wouldn’t fail to see him.

Adams concentrated on his breathing, consciously slowing it, putting himself into a state of reduced metabolism, less likely to make any unnecessary movement that would alert anyone who came into the cupboard. At the same time, he removed the blackened knife from the sheath on his belt, holding the wicked blade flat against his forearm.

Outside, he could hear two men looking around, checking around the laundry room. He heard the laundry chute he had slid down earlier being opened, the men obviously looking up into it. He heard it swinging shut, and then the next thing he knew, the cupboard door was flung wide open and a burly, short-haired security operative armed with a short-barrelled submachine gun entered the small space.

Adams watched from above in a state of heightened anticipation as the man looked through the lower shelves, knowing that if the operative looked upwards, he would have no choice but to dive straight on to him and kill him with the knife.

But the man just moved two tubs of bleach to one side in a half-hearted gesture and then muttered to himself, turned on his heel, and left, closing the cupboard door behind him.

Adams waited a few moments more until the men had left the larger laundry room, and then exhaled slowly.

He was about to slide back down to the ground when voices from above caught his attention.

‘What are we going to do with the bodies?’ Adams heard, recognizing the voice as that of Eldridge, the security guard who had searched Lowell earlier.

‘Round them up, put them in their own cars, and drive them out to Pahosa Point,’ Jacobs said in reply. ‘I’ve just spoken to GT, he’s going to meet you up there with an oil tanker. Rig up a crash, make sure all vehicles are involved and incinerated by the tanker exploding. It’ll look like they died on their way here.’

‘Sir,’ Adams heard Eldridge say in protest, ‘those bodies are full of bullet holes. One body alone has over thirty rounds in it. It won’t look like an accident for long.’

‘We don’t need it to look like one for long,’ Jacobs replied. ‘Just for a few days, and we can use our resources to slow down any investigation. After that, it won’t make any difference at all.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Adams heard Eldridge reply, but he didn’t even consider why it wouldn’t matter in a few days’ time that an entire cohort of Secret Service agents had just been massacred; instead he latched on to something else Jacobs had just said.

The cars. They were going to move the cars.

And in an instant, Adams realized he had a way out.

‘OK, drag them inside,’ Eldridge ordered the guards, pointing towards the government SUVs. The men nodded grimly and started to load the bodies into the large 4x4s.

The bodies of the Secret Service agents had already been recovered and arranged in front of the entranceway, a thick trail of blood and entrails leading from the house.

The agents had gone around the house, rounding up the guards by relying on their presidential authority. They had forced the guards to drop their weapons but had failed to cuff them or check them for back-up pieces, which they all carried.

When Eldridge had sent the message to retaliate, the men had simply drawn their weapons and shot the agents dead. So confident were the Secret Service men in their inviolable authority, they had been caught completely off guard, and only one agent had managed to get off a shot of his own.

Killing over thirty members of the elite presidential bodyguard would have unnerved most men, but Eldridge remained unmoved, as did the security guards; after all, they knew that the world’s ultimate power was not possessed by any government.

Being one of the hundred ‘chosen’, Eldridge himself knew even more. He knew exactly why the deaths of all these men mattered not one bit.

They would all have been dead in the near future anyway.

Adams manoeuvred himself through the house as quickly as he could, aware that even though Jacobs’ men were otherwise occupied, he could still be discovered at any time. He saw bodies being dragged through the house, blood still pumping across the tiled floors from the bullet holes that riddled them, but managed to remain undetected. And then he was at the window of the dark kitchen, staring out at the well-lit courtyard outside. The eight SUVs were parked up in a semicircular arc around the turning circle directly outside the front entrance, the bodies lined up in front of them.

Despite himself, Adams was impressed; the Secret Service agents had outnumbered Jacobs’ own men by more than two to one, which meant that they would have had to shoot at least two men each before the agents could react. And although perhaps overly confident, Secret Service agents were no slouches, they were well-trained professionals.

Jacobs’ men struggled to load the heavy, blood-soaked bodies into the row of cars, under the watchful eye of a large, intense man that Adams assumed had to be Eldridge. He guessed Jacobs would still be ensconced in his study, probably with Jones, trying to achieve some sort of damage control. A professional cleaning team would need to be on-site as soon as possible, for a start. All traces of the Secret Service having been here would have to be eradicated.

Adams checked the layout of the vehicles, and knew he had to make his choice quickly; although loading the bodies was a slow process, it wouldn’t last forever. There was a long shadow stretching from a bush just outside the utility room all the way to the SUV on the far left side. It was possible that he would be able to slip out of the window unseen and crawl to the car within the shadow.

Adams was just about to move when he sensed them behind him. Perhaps it was the smell, perhaps the breathing, or perhaps even the feral energy, he didn’t know which he picked up first; but he knew that two of the Doberman Pinschers had just entered the kitchen.

With all of the guards involved in the clean-up operation, they must have just let the dogs off the leash within the house. He wondered where the other two were, and hoped they were still outside.

He turned slowly, carefully, until he saw them, staring at him in anticipation, tails still, ears pricked, alert and ready to act. The teeth were not even bared in warning, and Adams knew that these dogs did not want to scare him but were primed to kill if necessary.

Adams stood his ground, eyes not meeting the dogs’ directly but instead lowered slightly, non-confrontational. Without moving his body at all, he started to emit a low, almost inaudible hum. The dog on the left tilted his head, curious about the sound, and the dog on the right retreated a half-step.

Adams read the signal and advanced a half-step of his own, raising the pitch of his voice, looking up further, and raising his right palm slowly up in front of him.

Both dogs looked as if they were trying to resist some unseen force, but then both capitulated at the same time, sitting down like show dogs, tails starting to move, mouths now open and tongues out as they assessed their new master.

Adams smiled as he looked at his new friends, quickly calculating how they could help him.

11

Eldridge’s head snapped round at the sound of panting and scurrying feet, and was amazed to see the two guard dogs that had been let into the house come bounding out down the stone steps and go sprinting off into the darkness of the trees that bordered the long driveway. The guards also noticed, pulling their heads out of the cars to watch the two animals race into the woods.

‘Thompson, Greer, Jenkins, Marquez,’ Eldridge ordered just moments later, ‘get after them, see what they’re after.’

He watched as the men drew their weapons and raced off after the dogs into the treeline. The Dobermans were well-trained guard dogs, they wouldn’t have gone tearing off through the estate just for the fun of it; there must be something out there.

‘Ellison, Carter,’ Eldridge said after further reflection. ‘You too.’

The two other guards gave chase to the dogs.

Eldridge turned back to the remainder, who stood looking after their comrades. ‘Back to work!’ he ordered gruffly. They still had a schedule to keep to, and the oil tanker would be at Pahosa Point in fifteen minutes.

Adams was well-secured under the chassis of the big SUV when the now breathless guards returned to their vehicles. He had used the distraction of the dogs to come out of the utility room window and follow the shadow to the car. He could have tried to use the guards’ preoccupation with loading the bodies to make his escape back into the treeline, but without the security of height, he was worried that the estate’s sensors would pick him up. He wanted to leave the estate with no trace of his ever having been there, so he had decided that he would ride out with the guards themselves, hiding underneath one of the vehicles, knowing that they would have no reason to check there.

‘And?’ he heard Eldridge shout.

‘Nothing, sir,’ one of the men replied. ‘They’ve just gone crazy, barking at the moon. Ain’t nothing out there ’cept us and the dogs.’

There was a pause, and Adams could imagine Eldridge mulling things over. ‘Probably just freaked out by the shooting,’ he said finally. ‘Happens sometimes, even to trained animals. OK, let’s move out.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Adams heard the men reply, watching the booted feet marching to the other SUVs in the line and climbing aboard.

Soon, the engines started, and then the government vehicles were moving, crunching the driveway gravel as they turned towards the driveway.

Towards freedom.

‘The cars are coming back up the driveway,’ Lynn and the two Najana brothers heard Benjamin announce over the radio.

‘Can you see who’s in the cars?’ Thomas asked immediately.

‘Negative,’ his younger brother announced. ‘Headlights are on full and side glass is smoked.’

There was a pause, and then Benjamin’s description continued. ‘They’re now at the main gate, about to turn… They’re going right, must be headed for Pahosa Point.’ Silence followed for several moments more. ‘They’ve gone past, headed up the main road, all eight cars. Still couldn’t see who was inside. I—’

Thomas’ hand gripped the radio tight as the connection went dead. ‘Ben?’ Thomas whispered urgently down the broken line. ‘Ben?’ he asked again helplessly, before putting the radio down, his eyes meeting Lynn’s and Jacob’s.

Lynn reached out and put a hand on the arm of each brother. ‘I’ll stay here,’ she told them. ‘You go.’

‘Son of a bitch!’ Benjamin laughed, punching Adams in the arm.

Adams had dropped from the bottom of the SUV as soon as it had proceeded on to the main road, rolling unseen towards the grass verge on the opposite side to the estate. He had then worked his way in the dark through to Benjamin’s observation point, creeping up behind him and putting a hand over his mouth.

Benjamin had immediately tensed, releasing the radio, turning round ready to strike, when he saw Adams standing there smiling at him. Benjamin was himself a highly regarded tracker and guide, and thought of himself as untouchable when it came to operating in the field, but Adams was truly something else.

‘I better call my brothers back before they come down all guns blazing!’ he said only half jokingly.

Adams nodded his head, looking forward to relaxing in the plush seats of Thomas Najana’s vehicle.

Even more than that, he was looking forward to seeing Lynn.

12

It wasn’t until they were all safely inside the rented warehouse in Tucson that Adams gave his full debrief of events.

Back at base camp, Lynn had embraced him with tears in her eyes, and Adams had held her tight, until their shared warmth had started to melt the mud that still covered his body. They kissed as they broke apart, and soon the whole party were packing up and moving towards their car.

There was a further change of vehicles, this time in Dale City, before Ayita picked them up in his helicopter at a friend’s private airfield near Manassas. During this time, the group had mainly slept, and so by the time they arrived back in Tucson, Adams’ adventures had been barely touched upon. But now, with everyone well rested, he gave a detailed, blow-by-blow account of what had happened.

‘So we were right about Jacobs using the Bilderberg Group as a recruitment centre,’ Stephenfield said.

‘It certainly seems so,’ Adams agreed. ‘But we still don’t know what for, exactly.’

‘But we can certainly hazard a guess, from what you’ve told us,’ Stephenfield replied.

Lynn nodded her head, the scientist in her processing the information quickly. ‘It would appear,’ she began, ‘that there was some sort of alien contact back in the late nineteen forties, which enabled communications to be opened up between us. It is also clear that Jacobs and at least some element of the Bilderberg Group are creating a device that will enable this group to come to earth, presumably en masse. The talk of genocide is disturbing to say the least, and an agreement has probably been reached whereby Jacobs and his cohorts will be spared for assisting them. And perhaps this is what Jacobs is recruiting for — the group of people who will be allowed to survive. This could explain why some people felt it was morally abhorrent and refused to be any part of it, and why these same people then met a mysterious end soon after, before they could tell anyone else.’

Ayita nodded his head. ‘It would certainly make some sort of sick sense,’ he agreed.

‘I’m worried about the timetable,’ Stephenfield said. ‘You say Lowell mentioned Jacobs’ “secret little project in Europe” becoming operational next week, which presumably somehow ties in with how this unknown group are coming to earth. We also have to factor in how the Director of the Secret Service and thirty-one other agents have been slaughtered by Jacobs’ men, and he didn’t seem fazed in the slightest.’

‘The crash with the oil tanker was reported as an accident, and the fireball that resulted probably won’t give much in the way of evidence,’ Ayita responded, having been monitoring the events from Tucson.

‘But there will be evidence, undoubtedly; it will just take time to uncover. And Jacobs’ attitude indicates his belief that such an investigation will be of no consequence by then. Which means, by extension, that the full force of the president and the United States government will not worry him at all in about a week’s time.’

Ayita nodded his head, considering the matter. ‘Yes, it does look like we’re running out of time,’ he agreed. ‘It looks like next week is crunch time.’

‘But what I still don’t get,’ Adams interjected, ‘is where the body Lynn’s team discovered comes into all of this. I mean, it seems alien contact wasn’t made until nineteen forty-seven and yet the body she found — and which Jacobs and the Bilderberg Group are prepared to kill for, and which might even be of alien origin itself — is forty thousand years old. So what’s the connection?’

Lynn stared ahead, deep in thought. ‘I just don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘It still doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Well, I might just have some good news for you,’ Ayita said, smiling for the first time since the debriefing began. ‘DNA Analytics will have your results ready to pick up this afternoon.’ He watched Adams’ and Lynn’s eyes go wide with excited anticipation. ‘They said to be there after three.’

DNA Analytics was its usual bustling self when Adams and Lynn entered through the electronic double doors.

Even though they were both believed dead, they still wore dark glasses, their hair was dyed and they wore bulky clothes to disguise their physical profiles. At this late stage, there was no use in taking chances.

Adams hung back to keep an eye on things as Lynn walked up to the reception desk.

The blonde receptionist, who sported the name tag ‘Angela’, gave her a warm, if not exactly genuine, smile. ‘Good afternoon, welcome to DNA Analytics Phoenix, how can we help you today?’

‘I’ve come to pick up some test results,’ Lynn said. ‘Name of Gower, Lucy Gower.’

Angela turned to her computer, her long, false nails clacking away at the keyboard. ‘Ah, yes, here you are,’ she said. ‘Dr Connor will take you through the results. You can find him in Room Sixteen, second floor,’ she continued, pointing down a long corridor to the east of the main reception. ‘Down the corridor, take a left and there are the elevators. When you get out, turn right and it’s the second room on the left. OK?’

Lynn wondered just how large this place was, and how many people got lost here. ‘Thanks,’ she said simply, and turned round, nodding to Adams to follow her.

Five minutes later, they were outside the office of Dr Connor.

The second floor was in sharp contrast to the first. Whereas the entire first floor seemed to be a frenzied melee of people all rushing about, the second floor was almost deserted.

Adams’ survival instinct was instantly aroused by the change of pace, wondering why they should have had to go to such a different area to collect their results. If going to see the doctor was standard procedure, then surely this corridor should also be swarming with people?

He felt for the Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol cinched into his waistband, feeling its reassuring weight resting there. He looked up and down the corridor, and saw two men rounding the corner at the end, deep in discussion. There were three closed-circuit television cameras, but none of them seemed to be interested in either him or Lynn.

He heard the elevator bing as it brought others to the second floor, and Adams let his hand rest over the butt of his pistol as he waited for the doors to open.

They opened, and another couple came out into the corridor. Adams watched them as they turned left, checked the name panel on a door further down the corridor, and then knocked. A smart young doctor opened the door and welcomed them in.

‘Are you finished?’ Lynn asked, frowning at him. ‘I think it’s all above board.’

Adams smiled sheepishly. ‘I’m finished,’ he said, and reached forward to knock on the door.

It opened moments later, an older yet equally smart doctor standing there with a friendly smile. ‘You must be Ms Gower,’ he said, extending his hand.

Lynn shook it. ‘A pleasure, Dr Connor,’ she said in return. ‘This is my friend, James Davies.’

‘Mr Davies,’ the doctor said, shaking Adams’ hand. ‘Please, come in.’

He led them into a small but plush office, expensively furnished and clinically clean. He showed them to two leather armchairs on the other side of his designer glass desk, and then took his own seat, looking down at the papers gathered in front of him.

He looked up suddenly through his half-moon glasses. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve not offered you a drink,’ he said apologetically. ‘Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee?’

‘No thank you,’ Lynn said for both of them. ‘We’re anxious to get the results of the tests.’

Connor smiled at them. ‘Of course.’ He tapped the papers on his desk. ‘The results. Most interesting. Most interesting.’

Lynn and Adams looked at Connor expectantly.

‘Ms Gower, Mr Davies,’ Connor began, staring once again through his spectacles, ‘I am the senior consultant here in Phoenix. Upon initial examination, your samples were referred to me for validation. Do you mind if I ask you where they came from?’

‘We can’t answer that, I’m afraid, Dr Connor.’

He nodded, and looked back down to the test results. ‘OK,’ he began. ‘Here we go.’

13

Tony Kern left the president’s office and immediately dialled Jacobs’ number.

When Jacobs answered after the first ring, Kern got straight into it. ‘He’s going crazy,’ he said. ‘Literally crazy. The oil tanker? He doesn’t believe a bit of it. He’s already ordered a full investigation and it’s going to be getting priority over literally everything else.’

‘But did he know anything about Lowell’s visit beforehand? Did he know Lowell was coming to see me?’

Kern shook his head as he walked towards the Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House, even though he knew Jacobs couldn’t see him. ‘Didn’t know a thing about it, which is why he’s even more pissed. I mean, the Director of the Secret Service and a whole platoon of agents, all out on some unregistered operation? He wants to pull out all the stops until he knows exactly what’s been going on.’

‘So at the minute he doesn’t know anything,’ Jacobs said. ‘How about anyone else at Secret Service?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Kern answered. ‘The people with him were all loyal to the director, known to him personally. Some of them were even off-duty. So it looks like some sort of private affair, which concerns the president greatly.’

‘And my involvement?’ Jacobs asked.

‘Well, the crash obviously occurred close to your home so it’s assumed that they were on their way to see you, but there’s no actual evidence for that. But I’d expect a full cohort of investigators arriving on your doorstep any minute now. Is Eldridge there?’

‘He’s taking care of a little business somewhere else right now,’ Jacobs answered.

‘Probably a good thing, he doesn’t have a good reputation around here. Has the house been cleaned?’

‘The whole estate,’ Jacobs confirmed. ‘I flew out a team from Nevada, they’re used to doing deep cleans. The place is spotless, like they were never here.’

‘Good,’ Kern said, smiling at a pair of advisers as he passed them in the narrow basement corridor. He held the cellphone closer, whispering now. ‘I know we’re close, but we still can’t afford to take any chances. Do we have a day yet?’

‘Not yet. Philippe thinks it will be ready to go by the middle of the week.’

‘OK,’ Kern said, still whispering as he waited outside the closed door of the Situation Room. ‘I’ll try and slow things down as much as I can from here. Another week shouldn’t be a problem.’

‘Make sure it isn’t,’ Jacobs answered.

‘First, let’s start with the scrap of material that you asked us to pass along to our sister laboratory in Pasadena,’ Dr Connor began. ‘Although the exact nature of the material couldn’t be determined, it is thought that it is some sort of silk derivative, much like the silk of a spider’s web in terms of its strength-to-weight ratio. It exhibited remarkable thermal properties too, although the piece was too small to test as thoroughly as my colleagues would have liked.’

‘Had they seen anything like it before?’ Adams asked.

‘No,’ Connor answered immediately. ‘Never. They thought it might be related to some sort of advanced military technology — we know they are looking into using synthetic materials to mimic things like spider’s webs — but then they performed other tests and were forced to reconsider.’

‘Radiocarbon dating?’ Lynn asked.

Connor nodded his head. ‘Exactly.’

‘And?’ Adams prompted.

Connor cleared his throat. ‘The consensus — after three separate tests were made — is a date of 40,500BC. In other words, the bit of cloth you gave us is over forty-two thousand years old.’

Lynn and Adams exchanged looks. So Devane’s off-the-hoof estimation of age from the ice layers had been pretty much dead on, and Adams’ own theory that the most likely explanation was an incorrect initial dating could now be put to bed. The body, and the artefacts the scientist had found with it, were indeed truly ancient.

‘And the DNA testing?’ Lynn asked nervously.

‘Well,’ Connor began, obviously disconcerted by the radiocarbon findings, ‘we carried out the usual diagnostic tests, including variable number tandem repeats, particularly short tandem repeats, and then used both polymerase chain reaction analysis and amplified fragment length polymorphism analysis.’

Lynn nodded her head, while Adams just stared blankly ahead. The methods didn’t matter to him so much as the results.

‘The subject was male, approximately forty years of age, with blond hair and blue eyes. No indication of internal pathologies, seems to have been robust and healthy.’

Lynn looked at Connor, her gaze boring into him. ‘Let’s cut to the chase, doctor,’ she said. ‘Was the subject human?’

The nervous anticipation of Lynn and Adams, as they sat poised on the front edges of their seats, waiting for Connor to give his answer, was suddenly interrupted by the sound of a door crashing open behind them.

‘Don’t answer that, doctor!’

Everyone turned in their seats to see a large, fierce man in the doorway, flanked by three armed men on each side, who quickly fanned out through the office. Adams recognized him instantly as Eldridge, the chief of security from Jacobs’ house back in DC. In his hand he held a silenced pistol, aimed directly at Connor’s head.

Adams and Lynn had no time to react before each of them had three silenced submachine guns trained on them.

‘You!’ Lynn exclaimed as she stared at Eldridge, recognizing him as Major Daley from the Antarctic. ‘You bastard, I’ll—’

Before she could finish her sentence, there was a low bark and the back of Connor’s head suddenly exploded across the rear wall of the office, the subsonic bullet from Eldridge’s handgun leaving only a small entry wound in the man’s forehead. For several moments the doctor’s body held upright as if suspended like a puppet, his unbelieving eyes still covered by his half-moon glasses, and then he bent straight over from the waist, his bloody head crashing into the glass tabletop.

Lynn’s eyes went wide with shock and disbelief, but Adams came to his senses. Using the sound of the doctor’s head smashing on to the table as a distraction, he reacted forward to create space, going for his concealed handgun. But Eldridge’s men were too switched on, and the nearest one quickly smashed the butt of his weapon into the base of Adams’ skull.

He literally saw stars, his head swimming with pain from the heavy blow as he collapsed to the carpeted floor, feeling rather than seeing as another man reached forward and removed the gun from his waistband. He groaned, struggling to stay conscious.

Lynn reacted herself, moving off her chair to help Adams, but she was forced back, one man slapping her across the face with a sharp crack.

Adams returned to reality instantly, shooting up from the floor to defend Lynn, only to be forced back down, face pushed into the carpet as his hands were pulled violently up and behind his back, and secured with plasticuffs.

He turned his head to the side, his cheek scraping along the carpet, to see Lynn also being cuffed and hauled up off her chair.

Both Adams and Lynn were pulled to their feet and pushed up against the desk, gun barrels up and raised straight into their faces.

‘Dr Edwards,’ Eldridge said ingratiatingly. ‘Still alive.’ He clapped his hands mockingly. ‘I commend you, I really do. You’re quite exceptional.’

‘Screw you, you murderous bastard!’ she yelled back in response, only to be met with a cruel smile.

Eldridge turned to Adams next. ‘And you must be Matthew “Free Bear” Adams. Quite an exceptional man yourself, giving us the runaround the way you have.’ He suddenly took two paces towards Adams and violently pistol-whipped him across the face.

Adams’ legs gave out and he collapsed to the floor. Eldridge looked down at him with an emotionless expression. ‘That’s for my men.’ He looked over at Lynn. ‘I’m not the only murdering bastard in the room, Dr Edwards. You’d do well to remember that.’

‘That was self-defence!’ Lynn exclaimed indignantly.

Eldridge only scoffed, as Adams climbed back to his feet, a colourful bruise already starting to appear on his dark skin.

‘Your mistake was sending the cloth sample,’ Eldridge told them. ‘If you’d just stuck to the DNA, we may never have noticed. But when we intercept emails and telephone calls about a forty-thousand-year-old piece of cloth, and discover the interest and involvement of a DNA agency, then it sets our little alarm bells ringing. You’ll be pleased to hear that Dr Connor’s colleagues have already been taken care of,’ Eldridge continued. ‘You see what you’ve achieved with your little games? Six other people have now been killed; maybe more if our investigations show that they told anyone else.’

‘You son of a bitch,’ Lynn whispered with true, unbridled hatred at Eldridge, but she was sensible enough not to try and physically engage the seven armed men lined up in front of her. ‘Why don’t you just kill us and get it over with?’ she asked bitterly.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun,’ Eldridge said, a genuine smile spreading across his face. ‘We’ve got some real treats in store for you.’

He gestured to his men, and Lynn watched as one of them moved towards her, another towards Adams. Lynn opened her mouth to protest, then saw the tasers in their hands. She jerked back, trying to get out of the way, but it was too late.

She felt the sudden, fierce burst of electricity enter her body, and then everything went black.

14

Adams awoke from his deep slumber, a sharp pain shooting through his head which seemed to lance his brain.

For the first few moments, he had no recollection of anything, but then things started to filter back to him; the double pistol whipping explained the pain in his head at least.

But where was he now? And where was Lynn?

He immediately noticed that wherever he was, it was dark, almost completely so. Maybe a closed room, somewhere inside, where no light seemed to be getting through. But it was too dark, and he realized he was wearing a thick blindfold. And then he realized he was restrained too, his head, torso, hands and legs secured to a high-backed rigid chair.

He opened his mouth to speak, to try and find out if Lynn was with him in this unknown place, but he had been gagged, and his mouth moved uselessly around a heavy braided cloth, unable to make any sound other than a simple, quiet grunt.

But then he heard a similar grunt from nearby — just six feet away, maybe a little more — and he knew that Lynn was near him. She was still alive.

He tried to move his body to get closer to her, but the chair seemed fixed to the floor, and whatever had been used to bind him was too tight to break. He might try and loosen the bonds later, maybe move his mouth around the gag and push it out, try and shrug off the blindfold. But for now, he relaxed and used his other senses to get a fix on where they were. Once he became less concerned with his restraints, he immediately picked up a low, throbbing hum that seemed to come from beneath him, or maybe to the sides; in fact, it seemed to envelop him, from all angles, as if it were being channelled down the room they were in. And then he felt a subtle vibration through his body that indicated they were moving.

Adams realized in an instant that they were in an aeroplane, in a pressurized cabin. Where the hell could they be taking them? And why?

Presumably the ‘why’ was to interrogate them, in order to find out exactly what had happened over the past few days, and who else they might have told. Adams baulked as he thought of Baranelli, realizing they had put him in danger.

Despite his toughness, his training, his warrior spirit, Adams was under no illusion that he would be able to resist the interrogation. It wasn’t that he was scared of torture, as physical pain was something he was well used to; he was scared of what he might do if forced to witness Lynn’s torture. And if his interrogators were to use the latest drugs instead of more brutal methods, then the matter of his power to resist would be moot anyway, as these new synthetic truth serums were virtually guaranteed to work.

But the where still puzzled him. He knew from Stephenfield’s research that as well as Jacobs’ main residence at Mason Neck, he also had homes in New York and San Francisco, and Adams wondered if they were heading for one of these. The Bilderberg Group’s unofficial headquarters was at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, from where the annual meetings were organized, and Adams knew that Jacobs also spent quite a bit of time there, as well as maintaining an apartment in the city.

As he went through the various locations, he felt that none of them was right. He didn’t know why but he just couldn’t see why they would be shipped to any of those places.

But there was somewhere else with which Jacobs and the Bilderberg Group had a clear connection, a place with the technological know-how to get them to talk, and where their disappearance would never be reported.

Adams knew in his gut that they were headed for Area 51.

15

An interminable time later, Adams felt a dipping sensation in his stomach and intestine as the airplane’s altitude started to drop, and he knew they were finally coming in to land.

By now, he just wanted to get it over with. He was sick of being cooped up on the plane, unable to move, see or talk; he wanted to get to wherever it was they were going so he could see if they had any chance of getting out of there. With no information except for the fact that they were on an aeroplane, his options had so far been limited. He knew they could only increase upon landing.

He felt the altitude dropping quickly now, and then he heard a faint electronic grinding noise, somewhere far away, and realized it was the landing gear opening up ready for touchdown.

Three more minutes later, the aircraft was taxiing, and then it came to a complete stop.

The sound of opening doors greeted him just moments after the aircraft braked to a standstill, along with the heavy pitter-patter of several pairs of booted feet. Adams could hear the breathing, and estimated half a dozen people had boarded the plane.

There were no orders given, no words spoken, but whoever had just boarded set to work immediately, and Adams could sense the people around him, could hear as they unlocked various catches, felt his chair loosened from its moorings, and he realized that he was in a wheelchair that had been fixed in place to the aircraft floor.

He was tilted backwards, upended but still strapped securely to his chair, and then he was being wheeled down the length of the fuselage. The chair hit a bump, was pushed forcibly over it, and then he was rolled slowly downwards.

From the length of the fuselage to the exit, and the fact that he was being pushed down a ramp at the rear end of the plane, Adams quickly grasped that he and Lynn had been flown here in a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft. A primarily military aeroplane, it lent credence to Adams’ earlier guesswork as to their destination.

Still no words had been exchanged between the people who had boarded the plane, but Adams identified a slight grunt as that of Lynn, and he could hear her chair being moved too, rolled down the ramp behind him.

From the body odour, gait, and breathing pattern, Adams could tell his chair was being pushed by a man, although he didn’t know about Lynn’s. The people pushing them seemed to take a long, winding, circuitous route to their destination, and Adams could only assume it was part of the same disorientating process as the gags and blindfolds, designed to make them panic, and weaken their resolve. He nevertheless tried to memorize the route — if they managed to escape, he might try and reverse it in order to find their way back. Although what good that would do him, he didn’t yet know. But the concentration necessary was good for avoiding the disorientation and feeling of helplessness that might otherwise ensue.

First of all, they were wheeled along an even, smooth stretch of tarmac, which Adams assumed had to be the runway. He could hear other vehicles as well: two more planes taxiing in different directions, one of which had a strange, almost electronic vacuum-like engine noise that he had never heard before; a small utility vehicle, 4x4, probably some sort of military jeep; a larger truck, further away in the distance; and then another truck, passing by just a few feet away, the deep rumble of its diesel engines covering up all other noise as it thundered past.

Then suddenly they were inside, and Adams struggled to hear anything except the dull, monotonous roll of the chair wheels, and the sharp crack of the booted feet of their escorts, echoing off what he took to be a concrete floor, and down a long, empty corridor.

And then they turned right, and were immediately assailed by a bombardment of savage noise, like that of an industrial complex at full production — electric saws eating their way through sheet metal, acetylene torches doing welding work, the grinding of heavy machinery, and voices, all with the same scientific, professional tones.

Four more turns later, they stopped dead, waited for twenty seconds, and then moved forwards again, just six feet. Adams heard some doors close behind them, and sensed they were in a very confined space. He guessed it must be an elevator, and this was confirmed just seconds later as he felt the drop in his stomach and intestines once more, but much more intensely than on the aeroplane. This elevator was terribly fast, and Adams feared that he would be sick, the gag making him choke on his own vomit.

But he kept it down, and then marvelled at how long the fast descent was taking — five seconds, ten, fifteen, twenty — and he could only wonder how far down in the bowels of the earth they now were. He knew it took forty-five seconds to get from the lobby of the Empire State Building to the eightieth floor, and almost choked again as he realized the extent of the base’s secret facilities.

Before he could consider it further, they were being rolled out again, down another long, empty, concrete corridor, until he heard the opening of a metal door. They were wheeled through into a room, and the sound of the wheels indicated the floor was metal too.

Then he felt the hands on the back of his wheelchair relax, and pull away; he heard the boots retreat, back out into the concrete corridor outside.

And then the door closed, trapping him and Lynn in the mysterious metal room, hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth.

Adams could sense Lynn was in the room with him, and took comfort from the fact that she was still near, although he was at the same time terrified for her safety. But at least he knew where she was; he could only imagine how he would feel if she had been wheeled off to some other part of the complex.

They were left alone for a long time, and Adams put it down to an attempt to wear them down, to make them lose all sense of time and place. His mental tracking of their route, and his current counting of the seconds of their wait helped him retain his faculties, however, and he could only hope that Lynn was doing the same thing.

His tracking of the time took him to just under fifteen thousand seconds, or just over four hours, before the door opened again.

He heard two sets of feet enter the room, one booted, one in leather-soled shoes. The lights were turned on, and Adams could feel the intense glare even through his blindfold. He knew what was coming next.

Seconds later, a strong hand ripped the blindfold from his eyes, and Adams knew the plan was to momentarily blind them, to weaken them further. But Adams had screwed his eyes tight shut the moment he had felt the hand reach forwards for the blindfold, and although the glare of the halogen spotlights in the ceiling above them threatened to burn through his eyelids, at least the shock to his retinas was somewhat subdued.

He gradually opened his eyes, and was greeted by the unwelcome sight of Flynn Eldridge grinning at him sadistically. ‘I trust you had a good journey,’ Eldridge dead-panned.

Adams ignored him, instead looking over to Lynn, glad to see she had also shut her eyes when her blindfold had been removed. As she opened them, he gave a reassuring smile, trying to offer her comfort and hope with his eyes.

Turning back to Eldridge, Adams could see, over the man’s muscular shoulder, a debonair, suited man of advancing years whom he immediately recognized as Stephen Jacobs. Adams was impressed. So the big man himself had come down for the interrogation.

Adams watched as Jacobs approached them, appraising them as a biologist might examine a newly discovered life form. ‘So here we are, my friends,’ he said finally, his tone deep and smooth. ‘You and I all know that you are not going to leave this facility alive. You are going to die, make no mistake about that.’ He smiled. ‘How you die, though, that might make a big difference to you.’

Jacobs gestured at Eldridge, who moved forward and removed first Adams’ gag, and then Lynn’s. No sooner was Lynn’s off than she spat at the man, straight in his face, a look of pure hatred on her own.

‘Oh, come now, Dr Edwards,’ Jacobs said to Lynn as Eldridge wiped the saliva off his cheek, ‘it isn’t his fault. Not really. He was, after all, merely following orders.’

‘Your orders?’ Lynn shot back resentfully.

‘As it happens, yes,’ Jacobs replied, his confidence unshakeable. ‘And now I have ordered our experts to interrogate you using any and every available means at their disposal, until we find out exactly what you know and who else you have told.’

‘We’ve already found Baranelli,’ Eldridge told them with a hint of pleasure. ‘It didn’t take much for him to squeal like a piggy. Luckily, he hadn’t had time to tell anyone else. He is dead now, of course.’

Both Lynn and Adams tried to launch forward out of their chairs, to get to Eldridge; both would have dearly loved to choke him to death with their bare hands. But their bonds were too tight, and the violent movements barely caused the chairs to rock slightly.

‘It probably doesn’t matter any more anyway,’ Jacobs said, ignoring the attempted attack by the two captives. ‘Things have progressed too far to worry about what might happen if the word gets out now. But it just doesn’t do to leave things hanging, so to speak. You are both loose ends, and have to be tied up. There is too much riding on this to let any mistakes occur now.’

‘If we’re going to die anyway, why not tell us what it’s all about?’ Adams said. If he was going to die, he wanted to know why, at least.

Jacobs looked at Eldridge, who shook his head, and then looked back at Adams and Lynn. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any harm in you knowing now, is there?’

Ignoring Eldridge’s disapproving look, he pulled up a plastic-topped stool and sat down, smiling at Lynn and Adams, clearly pleased with himself and what he had accomplished. If he couldn’t gloat at least a little, what was the point of it all?

‘Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?’ he said with a smile.

16

For Jacobs, it was nice to be finally telling the tale in its entirety, or at least the part he had direct, first-hand knowledge of.

He had spent most of his life under a double persona, one side existing only in his mind, dealing with intimate knowledge of things most people could never even dream of. It had altered his personality somewhat, until he sometimes wondered who he really was. And now his life was set to change again, and he once more wondered about his place in all of it.

‘The crash at Roswell occurred on July the eighth, nineteen forty-seven. After the initial press release, the whole incident was subsequently denied, of course. And then the National Security Act was signed, and the Central Intelligence Agency came into being in September of the same year. Coincidence?’ He smiled at his two captives. ‘Of course not. The Act was signed by President Franklyn D. Roosevelt when he was presented with the evidence of the Roswell crash.’

Jacobs saw the look of interest on the faces of Lynn and Adams, who seemed to have momentarily forgotten about their upcoming demise. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘we found a great deal of such evidence at the crash site. There was the wreckage of a spacecraft, scattered across three square miles of New Mexico desert. We boxed it up and shipped it in secret to Roswell Army Air Field for initial assessment, and from there it was later moved on to Muroc Army Air Field, now known as Edwards Air Force Base.’ He paused, and held the gaze of the man and woman seated opposite him. ‘We also found a body.’

‘What?’ Lynn asked, despite herself.

‘Yes, we recovered a body from the scene. In good condition actually, although unfortunately dead. But it proved that there was something else out there. But what we all had to ask now was, were they friendly? What were their capabilities? And so the CIA was set up to protect the nation against all foreign threats, specifically those that were exceptionally foreign, even extraterrestrial.

‘At Muroc, we started to reverse engineer the technology we had found, and performed an autopsy on the body. What we found was interesting, to say the least. We were able to open communication with them, which was difficult at first given our level of sophistication back then.

‘It was clear that the aim of these people was to come to earth in order to take over. They had been forced into space by a planet-destroying cataclysm, and they’ve been up there ever since, looking for a suitable place to inhabit. They were quite open about it, and wanted our help.’

‘And you agreed?’ Lynn asked incredulously.

‘They knew how to ask,’ Jacobs answered with a smile. ‘They seemed to have an uncanny understanding of human nature. They appealed to our greed and vanity, plain and simple. They told us that if we cooperated, we would be rewarded with equal status in the new world they would create, and immortality.’

‘And you believed them?’ Adams asked sceptically.

‘We had certain guarantees and proofs,’ Jacobs answered. ‘But that is getting away from the story. We negotiated that one hundred people would be allowed to survive, and we set up the Bilderberg Group as a way of recruiting the best that the world had to offer. Our first meeting was in May nineteen fifty-four, and it was decided at the meeting to ratify the treaty that led to the formation of CERN, on the twenty-ninth of September that same year. CERN — or the European Organization for Nuclear Research — was established to develop the technology required for bringing our visitors to earth.’

‘But the spacecraft had already been here,’ Lynn interjected. ‘So why did they need your help?’

Jacobs nodded. ‘You’re right, of course. They did have the ability to cross vast distances but only in very small, one-man craft, and it involved putting the pilot into a state of suspended animation, which was often dangerous — as seen by the crash at Roswell itself, which we believe was due to the pilot not waking up from his deep sleep. They wanted something more — their entire population to be transported here en masse, along with all of their vehicles and hardware, ready for invasion.’

Jacobs ignored the look of horror on the faces of Adams and Lynn. ‘It was decided to have the location for this research based in Europe rather than the United States, in order to cover up the connection between our work there, and our reverse engineering of the technology from the crash site, which was by then being held here, at Area 51.

‘Not long after we opened communication channels, it was deemed that Muroc was too public, and so the CIA sponsored the building of a new base out at Groom Lake, in the Nevada desert, a place where we were virtually guaranteed anonymity. The projects everyone knows were developed here — the U2 spy plane, the stealth bomber and stealth fighter, and all the new unmanned aerial drones — are all the result of what we discovered from that spacecraft.

‘Our work at CERN is a stage further removed from that. While at Area 51 we develop technology that has ensured the West’s consistent superiority over our enemies, at CERN we are concerned purely with the building of a wormhole device — the machine by which our visitors will arrive here.’

‘A wormhole device?’ Lynn asked, disbelieving. ‘I didn’t think such a thing was possible.’

‘It’s not, at least not with the technology that you believe currently exists. But we are working with a people who are thousands of years more advanced than us, and their science might as well be magic to us philistines. Even with their help, we’ve been struggling to get the machine working properly. Of course, ours is only one of a pair — the other is on their mother craft, millions of light years away across the galaxy. Think of it as a send/receive coupling. Their machine will bend space-time, causing it to curve; our own machine, the “receiver”, will make sure that their point and our point meet, enabling them to cross over. Without both machines being perfectly aligned, they might end up anywhere in the universe.’

‘And the machine is ready?’ Adams asked, remembering Jacobs’ conversation back at his manor house at Mason Neck.

Jacobs gave a broad smile. ‘Ready within the next few days, yes. We are almost there.’

‘And what will happen when they arrive?’ Lynn asked.

‘A global pandemic will break out, biological warfare on a colossal scale. It will decimate the world’s population by an estimated ninety-eight per cent. The rest will be hunted down and enslaved for our own benefit, leaving most of the earth’s vast Lebensraum purely for the visitors. And one hundred survivors, of course.’

‘What makes you think they’re going to let you live?’ Adams asked bitterly.

‘We have already received the formulas for both the bioweapons and the antidotes,’ Jacobs answered. ‘And the reward is worth the risk.’

‘You scum,’ Lynn spat vehemently. ‘You’re willing to kill six billion people for your reward? I hope you burn in hell!’

Jacobs smiled knowingly. ‘Unlikely,’ he answered. ‘Immortality, remember?’

Adams scoffed at the idea. ‘You’re living in a dream world if you think they’re ever going to live up to their side of the bargain.’

The confidence radiating from Jacobs’ features gave Lynn pause. She thought back over the man’s story, and something suddenly occurred to her. ‘Why do you keep saying “we” when you talk about Roswell?’ she asked. ‘That was nineteen forty-seven. You must have been only a boy.’

Jacobs shook his head gently. ‘Ahh, you’ve finally realized,’ he said. ‘No, I wasn’t a boy. I was part of the Central Intelligence Group at the time, the immediate forerunner to the CIA. They sent me to investigate the incident at Roswell, and it was I who recommended the forming of the CIA in order to protect us from the perceived alien threat. As such, I was put in charge of this particular division — the so-called “ET Unit” — immediately upon the agency’s creation. I was the first to speak with them once contact had been made, and it was I who suggested and engineered the formation of the Bilderberg Group and of CERN. I had fought during the war as a major with the OSS, and I was forty-nine years old when the spacecraft crash-landed in the desert.’

Jacobs watched the shock in the eyes of his captives, revelling in it. ‘My real name is Charles Whitworth, and I was born in Dallas, Texas, on October the third, eighteen ninety-eight. I am one hundred and fourteen years old.’

He smiled widely as he stood up from his stool, his previous bent-over posture, typical of a man in his seventies, straightening up into the rigid upright military posture of a much younger man. He removed dentures, showing a set of perfect teeth, and took the half-moon glasses from his face to display his crystal-clear blue eyes. He pulled a nap of wrinkled skin at his neck, and it stretched and broke in his hand, evidently some form of professional make-up.

‘I have had the body of a thirty-year-old since nineteen sixty-nine, when I finalized the deal to bring them here,’ he told them. ‘“Whitworth” died, and I created Stephen Jacobs as his successor, and I have lived as Jacobs ever since, having to use prosthetics and make-up when in public, in order to age according to my new birth year of nineteen forty. I wanted proof, and they gave it to me. Genetic manipulation you simply wouldn’t understand.

‘Look at me,’ Jacobs demanded, the spark of the zealot in his eyes. ‘I am the proof of their promise to us. I am already an immortal!’ He glared at them with his piercing blue eyes. ‘And the earth is doomed.’

Lynn recovered from the shock of Jacobs’ statement first, the scientist in her overcoming the emotional response.

‘You still haven’t answered the question I really want to know the answer to,’ she said, holding his gaze. ‘How does the body we found in Antarctica tie into all of this? Was he part of the same group that want to come here now? And if so, what were they doing here forty thousand years ago?’

Even if she was about to die, Lynn needed to know the answer. Not only had the discovered body started her whole involvement in this, but her colleagues had all been killed because of it. She owed it to them, if nothing else.

‘The body?’ Jacobs said thoughtfully, before checking his watch. ‘I think I’ve been more than open with you already, Dr Edwards. It is now time we left. So I guess you’ll just have to go to your grave still not knowing.’

He turned to Eldridge and nodded towards the door, and the big man marched up and opened it, Jacobs following. As he reached the door, he turned back to Lynn and Adams.

‘You should be grateful really,’ he said to them. ‘Whatever is going to happen to you here is almost certainly better than what will happen to most of earth’s population in the weeks and months to come. The virus that will be introduced here is not very forgiving. Nasty, even. It eats away at your flesh from the inside. Truly, you should be glad you’re going to die well before then.’

‘Bastard,’ Adams muttered through clenched teeth.

‘Maybe,’ Jacobs admitted. ‘Farewell.’ And with that, he turned on his heel and marched with Eldridge out of the steel door, which swung shut electronically behind them.

Three other men entered the room moments later. They seemed to be scientists of one sort or another, all middle-aged, serious-looking men dressed in white lab coats.

One of them, a small, avuncular man with a balding head and thick-rimmed spectacles, approached the two captives, appraising them. ‘My name is Dr Steinberg,’ he said in a friendly tone. ‘I will be overseeing your treatment. My aim is to minimize your pain if at all possible. If you cooperate, I think you’ll find our procedures mildly uncomfortable, nothing more.’

‘And if we don’t?’ Lynn asked.

‘Let’s just say that it is better if you cooperate, and leave it at that for now,’ he said diplomatically. ‘But first, we’re going to run some basic tests, to assess your physical and psychological states, so we can calibrate our equipment correctly.’

‘You mean, so you can push us as far as you can without killing us?’ Adams asked.

Steinberg smiled at him. ‘Yes, Mr Adams, that is exactly the reason, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to the two other doctors, who began to wheel over large trolleys with a variety of medical instruments resting on top. ‘So let’s begin, shall we?’

17

The physical tests involved a thorough bodily examination, with the doctors’ gloved hands exploring every part of them, in addition to skin, blood, hair and urine samples, and even a muscle biopsy. The straps around their bodies had been removed but their wrists and ankles were secured to the chairs throughout.

They were put through basic psychological tests, standardized questions that both had seen before; as such, they gave answers they knew would skew the results. The doctors just smiled and nodded their heads, and then pulled out a portable MRI scanner and examined their brains directly.

After what seemed like hours, the doctors finally left the room to analyse the results, leaving Adams and Lynn on their own.

Lynn turned to Adams urgently. ‘We’ve got to find a way out of here,’ she whispered to him. ‘We can’t let them get that wormhole machine working.’

Adams blinked his eyes at her, gesturing with his head in the direction of a large mirror on the opposite wall. The message was clear; he was positive they were still being observed.

He had already decided that they would try and escape. They were going to be killed anyway — along with about six billion others if that damned machine at CERN became operational — so what did they have to lose? The only question in Adams’ mind was how the hell they were going to do it. They were strapped down on chairs in a metal room hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the world’s most secure military base. Was escape even a distant possibility?

He looked at Lynn with a reassuring nod of his head, steely determination in his eyes. The stakes were simply too great not to try. And if he believed anything in life, it was that where there was a will, there was a way.

In the observation room, the three scientists sat at their computer monitors, analysing the test results.

Steinberg looked through the two-way glass at the captives, who were looking into one another’s eyes, remarkably unafraid and seemingly filled with an unquenchable fire that threats of death and torture would not easily extinguish.

‘Tough sons of bitches,’ he murmured, mostly to himself. As Chief of Section 8, Area 51’s medical interrogation division, Steinberg had seen dozens of people pass through here over the years — and knew that hundreds more had preceded them, before his own time — but never had he witnessed the relaxed confidence of the two people sitting in the room now.

‘Interesting,’ one of his men said quietly, breaking Steinberg’s reverie.

He turned away from the window and looked at the man. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Very interesting,’ the man said again, as he looked closely at a very specific set of results displayed across the computer screen in front of him.

Four more hours passed before the scientists re-entered the room, flanked by two security guards, two hospital gurneys between them.

‘Hello again,’ Steinberg said, still friendly. ‘I’m sorry for keeping you, but we had to make sure we checked all of the results.’

‘I bet you did,’ Lynn muttered. ‘Can’t have us dying too soon, can you?’

Steinberg chuckled. ‘How forthright you are,’ he said almost admiringly. ‘And you are right, of course.’

He gestured to the security guards, and they went to the side of the captives, one guard with one gurney to each. The doctors removed hypodermic needles, and started to fill them from two separate vials.

‘We need to move you now,’ he said apologetically. ‘You will both receive individual treatment, in individual rooms. I am afraid you will never see each other again.’

He watched Lynn and Adams stare at each other, desperation creeping unbidden across their faces for the first time.

His features softened. ‘Did you know of your condition, Dr Edwards?’ he asked.

Lynn frowned. ‘What condition?’ she asked uneasily.

Steinberg looked at her with pity. ‘I’m sorry you have to hear this from me, and in this place of all places, but… you are pregnant, Dr Edwards.’

18

The shock was writ large across Lynn’s face. She looked at Adams, who looked just as shocked. ‘Wh-what?’ she stammered, even as the doctors moved towards them, liquid dripping from the ends of their needles.

‘You are pregnant,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Eight days.’

Lynn didn’t have to do the calculation; she knew it must have been when they had made love in the desert after their escape from Chile.

‘I am afraid that we cannot alter the eventual outcome of our procedures,’ Steinberg said apologetically. ‘But we will try and make the process as comfortable as possible. And for what it is worth, I am sorry.’

Lynn just looked ahead blankly, her brain frozen. She was pregnant. She was going to be a mother. And Matt was the father, which was exactly what he had wanted all those years ago, the big issue that had eventually led to them splitting up.

And now here they were, reunited and with a child at last, with only the promise of death to look forward to.

Adams stared at Lynn, not believing what he had just heard, still trying to process it. Lynn was pregnant?

And to be told that she was still to be interrogated and killed, along with his unborn child?

He knew the doctors were going to inject them with some sort of anaesthetic so they could be transferred peacefully and without struggle to the gurneys positioned adjacent to them. They would then be wheeled off to other rooms, where the ‘fun’ would really start.

The leather straps that secured his arms and legs to the chair were tight; he had already tried to struggle free of them on the aeroplane on the flight over. But he knew this in his conscious mind only, and as he watched the doctor approach Lynn and their unborn baby, hypodermic needle reaching for her bare arm as the guard moved into position next to her, this conscious part of his mind collapsed entirely, leaving only his raw, animal self, a visceral beast that operated on pure, unbridled instinct.

He roared, his body convulsing against the straps, muscles bulging as they contracted against the straining leather, his back arching off the chair. His eyes were popping out of his head, a feral look on his face, and it appeared that his entire body was going to break in half.

‘Secure him!’ Steinberg yelled to the guard next to him, who had been surprised into inaction by Adams’ sudden, violent convulsion. ‘Get that needle into him!’ he shouted at the doctor, even as Adams’ body contracted again, and again, and again, the straps straining more and more each time.

The other guard ran across to him from Lynn’s side, and both men tried to force Adams back into his chair, pushing his arms down as his body continued its violent, unpredictable convulsions.

The doctor tried to aim his syringe at the right point, but Adams’ thrashing body meant that he couldn’t see his target well enough to get a clear shot. One of the guards reached for the taser on his belt, pulling it clear of its holster and pressing it towards Adams.

But then Adams convulsed again, even stronger this time, and screamed at the top of his lungs — a piercing, animalistic howl that penetrated deep into the people around him, causing them to recoil for just a split second.

In that brief fraction of time, the leather strap that had been securing his right wrist finally gave way. In the next instant, Adams’ free hand snaked out and gripped the wrist of the guard holding the taser, violently jerking it towards the doctor.

The contacts jammed into the doctor’s body, sending 50,000 volts of electricity into the man, shutting down his system completely. He dropped to the ground, the hypodermic needle spilling across the metallic floor.

In the same movement, Adams continued to twist the guard’s arm, even as his entire body continued to convulse in violent anger. And then the second strap gave way and his left hand was free, grasping the second guard’s belt and pulling him close, straight on to the taser.

The guard fell to the floor unconscious, and Adams — straps still securing his ankles — rose slightly out of the chair, catching the guard in front of him with a punch to the jaw. Disorientated, the guard was powerless to stop Adams bending his arm back on itself, the taser electrocuting its owner.

With three men unconscious on the floor, Adams immediately switched to the other two — the man with the hypodermic still dangerously close to Lynn, and Steinberg who seemed to be stuck to the spot, mouth open in disbelief.

Then the man with the needle leaped towards Lynn, and Adams threw the taser straight at him. Not waiting to see if it struck the target, he bent down, quickly unfastening the straps round his legs. As he did so, he heard the impact of the small metal unit and a grunt from the doctor.

He looked up, and launched himself at the man with the needle, who was heading back to Lynn after the momentary distraction of the thrown taser. Adams crashed into him, driving him forcefully backwards into the wall, knocking the breath from him. He collapsed to the floor, and Adams sent a knee straight into his face, slamming his head back violently into the metal wall.

Adams turned and saw Steinberg still staring, still not reacting. And then, as Steinberg saw the murderous intent in Adams’ eyes, he finally moved, reaching for the wall-mounted electronic intercom.

Adams snatched the taser from the floor and raced towards him, punching it hard into Steinberg’s neck just as his hand touched the button. His body went stiff, and he collapsed to the floor.

Adams kicked him violently in the gut — once, twice, three times, violence emanating from his body. He picked his foot up high, ready to deliver the coup de grâce.

‘No!’ Lynn shouted, and the spell was broken. Adams put down his foot and looked round.

‘We’re going to need him if we’re ever going to get out of this place alive,’ she said.

It took less than five minutes to fully secure the two guards and scientists, who were starting to come round. Adams bound their hands and feet and gagged them, before hitting them with another 50,000 volts for good measure. He had no desire to kill them but he didn’t want to take any chances, and he figured that the longer he could keep them unconscious, the better.

With Lynn, he placed Dr Steinberg in one of the wheelchairs, securing him just as they had been only minutes before. They pocketed the Sig Sauer pistols carried by the guards, along with their radios, and moved towards the laboratory door.

Adams had noticed that, other than the two-way mirror, there were no cameras in the room. Presumably, given the location, it was thought unnecessary to monitor things too closely down here; security would normally take care of itself. But he was also very conscious that there would now be two missing guards.

‘Where’s the guard post?’ he asked Steinberg, who looked up at him through drowsy eyes.

‘One floor up,’ the doctor murmured, still struggling to recover fully.

‘How many?’

‘On that floor?’ Steinberg asked. ‘About thirty, but they cover three floors.’ As a professional interrogator, he realized that resistance was futile, and he might just as well tell the truth right from the start. They would probably kill him anyway, but he would at least spare himself a lot of pain.

Adams tried some quick mental arithmetic, but failed. ‘How many on the base in total?’

‘Close to three hundred.’

Adams and Lynn exchanged looks, then Adams turned back to Steinberg. ‘When are these two,’ he gestured to the unconscious guards, ‘expected back?’

‘They were to be attached for the duration of the interrogation, to be relieved at the end of their normal shifts, replaced by two more men.’

Adams examined Steinberg’s face for any sign of dishonesty, but found none. ‘How long to the end of their shift?’

‘They’ve just started, so about eight hours, give or take.’

Lynn leant down to the man who had been about to oversee their torture and death. ‘Is there a way out of here?’ she asked. ‘Can you get us out?’

‘And just why would I do that?’ Steinberg scoffed.

Adams looked at Lynn, and then back to Steinberg. ‘What exactly do you know about Jacobs’ plans?’

It took no more than a few minutes to outline what Jacobs had told them, and the effect on Steinberg was electric.

‘The bastard!’ he muttered. ‘How can he hope to get away with it?’

‘He already is getting away with it,’ Adams reminded him. ‘He’ll be halfway to Geneva by now.’ In a way, Adams was surprised by Steinberg’s reaction. After all, the man had made a living out of torturing innocent people. But global genocide was a different thing altogether, especially if you just found out that you were going to be one of the unfortunate victims.

Steinberg just sat there, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I knew about the alien research of course but I had no idea we had opened up any sort of contact with them. I just can’t believe it, I—’

‘Doctor,’ Adams interjected forcefully, trying to get Steinberg’s attention back on track. ‘We need to get out of here, and to CERN. Can you help us?’

Eventually, Steinberg looked up and met Adams’ gaze. ‘There might be a way,’ he said earnestly.

Ten minutes later, Steinberg was out of the wheelchair, and they were walking with the doctor down another concrete corridor, the sound of their footsteps echoing in the concrete space.

‘Why is it so deserted down here?’ Lynn asked.

‘This floor is classified A1 Ultra,’ Steinberg told her. ‘Not that many people are authorized to be here, and a lot of those who are have recently been shipped off somewhere — I guess to CERN, from what you’ve just told me. There’s only a skeleton staff remaining here now.’

‘What goes on down here?’ Adams asked next.

‘What you would probably classify as “alien” research,’ Steinberg admitted. ‘It is here that we develop related projects directly connected with the technology discovered at the Roswell crash site. This entire floor is unknown to the majority of the people working here at Area 51. I don’t know many details myself, I just run the interrogations. We have our base here because this is the most secure level. The elevators normally stop on the floor above unless you have a special access key.’

Lynn nodded, and they walked on in silence for a few more moments, following Steinberg’s directions. He had a final destination in mind but was withholding it for fear of being executed if he revealed it too early, as his captors would then have no further need of him.

‘Careful here,’ Steinberg told them as they turned into another long, concrete corridor. ‘There’s a laboratory down here. Should be empty now but you never know.’

They were silent until they reached the laboratory door, but Lynn’s curiosity was piqued. ‘What do they do in there?’

Steinberg smiled at her. ‘That is where they keep the bodies,’ he whispered.

‘The bodies?’ Lynn asked for both of them. ‘Which bodies?’

‘The original pilot of the craft that crashed in nineteen forty-seven,’ he told them proudly. ‘Perfectly preserved, despite full autopsies having taken place several times over the years.’

‘And who else?’ Adams asked.

‘Oh, various other bodies of questionable origin that have been found over the years.’

‘Like the one my team found in Antarctica?’ Lynn asked, and Steinberg nodded his head. ‘You mean there have been others?’

Steinberg smiled. ‘Of course there have,’ he said as if to a small child. ‘Would you like to see?’

Adams knew it was not a wise move. Things were happening too quickly in Geneva, the machine at CERN too near becoming operational to waste time on what amounted to no more than scientific curiosity. And yet he knew that to Lynn it was more than that — the body her team had discovered in the ice had led to their execution, and she felt it was her duty to them to follow the discovery to the end of the line. She owed them that much.

And Adams himself had to admit that he was more than a little interested to take a look in the room himself. And anything that they learnt there could be useful when it came time to confront Jacobs and his men in Geneva.

But it was a risk. Who knew if it even contained what Steinberg said it did? Maybe the doctor had tricked them and led them straight to the main guard post. Adams couldn’t be sure if Steinberg had really believed the story about Jacobs, or if he had just pretended in order to lead them into a trap.

But Adams had examined Steinberg’s physical signs as he spoke — his pallor, his heart rate, his respiration, his perspiration — and, save for the expected display of nervousness that would naturally come from being escorted at gunpoint, it seemed that he was telling the truth, as far as Adams could tell. He had confidence in his ability to read such things, and so finally agreed for the small party to enter the room.

‘Now I don’t know if there will be anybody inside,’ Steinberg told them honestly. ‘So we need to be careful.’

Adams nodded, withdrawing his pistol as he moved into position to the side of the door. Steinberg leant forward, pressing his palm against a security panel, which then flashed on to his retina. The door unlocked, and swung open.

Adams nodded to Lynn, who entered the room one step behind Steinberg.

‘Andrew!’ Adams heard Steinberg say in a friendly tone. ‘I thought you’d have gone with the rest of them.’

‘Willie!’ Adams heard an older man exclaim. ‘What are you doing over here?’

In a flash, Adams rounded the door frame and entered the room, gun levelled at the scientist before him, no more than twenty paces away.

The look on the man’s face indicated that he wasn’t going to shout or move, as he was more or less rooted to the spot in shock.

Adams ran towards him, forced him to the floor and cuffed him with plasticuffs he had taken from the guards back in the interrogation area. At the same time, he scanned the rest of the room for more people but found none. What he did see was more than interesting, though, and as he hauled Andrew back to his feet, he continued his inspection of the laboratory.

But it was more of a morgue than a laboratory, he soon saw. The room was a large metallic cylinder, with dozens of mortuary drawers cut into the walls. At the head of the room, in pride of place, was a tank filled with fluid, a body suspended within.

Adams and Lynn both saw it at the same time and their jaws dropped.

Steinberg saw their expressions and smiled. ‘Mr Adams, Dr Edwards,’ he said formally, ‘please let me introduce you to Exhibit 1A, the pilot of the Roswell spacecraft.’

Lynn walked with Steinberg towards the tank, while Adams pushed the other man — whose name tag read ‘Professor A. Travers’ — alongside them.

They stopped at the perspex unit, eyes wide. Lynn was surprised to see that the body bore no resemblance at all to the one they had found in the ice, save for having the normal complement of arms and legs.

The 40,000-year-old body in the Antarctic could have been buried there only last week, such was its similarity to modern-day humans, but the dead body she was looking at now literally screamed ‘alien’.

The body was small, its limbs short and slim, its stomach slightly distended so that it looked not unlike a child suffering from famine. But the skull was large, much larger than a modern human’s, and the eyes were also oversized, set into deep pits below the enlarged cranium. The face itself was small like the body, the mouth even smaller, almost as though evolution was in the process of eradicating it altogether. But the circumference of the brain case must have been twice that of a man’s, indicating great intelligence.

Adams was struck by how similar the body appeared to popular images of such creatures — large head and eyes, small child-like body. The skin had a strange, grey pallor, as if the species had not seen the sun in millennia, which perhaps explained why ‘eye witness’ evidence had resulted in such beings being labelled ‘Greys’ by the UFO press.

‘Which planet does it come from?’ Lynn asked with unbridled excitement, turning first to Steinberg, and then to Travers. ‘Is it from the same place as the body we found?’

Steinberg and Travers exchanged looks, and then Travers turned to Lynn, nodding his head. ‘Of course it is,’ he said, slightly confused.

‘Why “of course”?’ she asked immediately.

‘Because both this body and the body you discovered in the Antarctic are from the same species — Homo sapiens.’

He saw the look of utter shock on her face, and decided to confirm his statement.

‘They are both human.’

19

‘Human?’ Adams asked, breaking the silence that had hung in the air for several seconds. ‘How in the hell is that thing human?’

‘Oh, it’s human all right,’ Travers said. ‘It’s just undergone a very specific form of evolution for the past fourteen thousand years or so.’

Adams knew they were pressed for time but he felt the need to know more, and knew Lynn would too.

‘I think you’d better explain that,’ he said.

Travers thought for a second or two, then looked at the pistol in Adams’ hand still aimed at him, and nodded curtly. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

They followed the professor to one of the mortuary drawers, which he pulled open. Lynn gasped as she saw the body on the metal slab, the one Tommy Devane had stumbled upon in Antarctica.

‘I’ll try and make this as simple as I can,’ Travers said. He pointed at the body. ‘This body that you found was part of the group of Homo sapiens that inhabited the earth from as early as two hundred thousand years ago, a highly advanced people who were expert in science and mathematics.’

‘Two hundred thousand years ago?’ Lynn asked. ‘Highly advanced?’

Travers nodded his head again. ‘Yes, and don’t ask me how they evolved, as they don’t even know themselves. One moment the earth had other Homo species, including ergastor, heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, habilis, neanderthalensis, among others, and the next, we had Homo sapiens sapiens, fully formed not only physically but also mentally. We’ve known for some time that anatomically modern humans existed as long ago as two hundred thousand years. But we had no idea that mentally advanced human beings inhabited the earth so long ago. There seems to have been an entire era of high human advancement, stretching far into pre-history.’

‘So if we accept this,’ Lynn said, ‘then what happened to this ancient civilization?’

‘Destroyed,’ Travers said simply. ‘Or at least, almost destroyed. People, buildings, vehicles, entire cities, lost forever.’

‘But how?’ Adams asked.

Travers held up a hand. ‘Before we get into that, we need to look at how human society was before the destruction. This will help you understand what happened.’

Both Adams and Lynn, along with a seemingly fascinated Steinberg, looked at him expectantly, urging him to continue.

‘As technology moved on and humans became more and more advanced, the world was much the same as it is today — various nation states looking after their own citizens while vying for power with each other. War followed war, followed war, until democracy started to spread, and federal blocks of like-minded nations joined forces. After several false starts — remember that this process took thousands of years — a true world government emerged, bringing peace to the earth.

‘But what occurred then was that society started to split down the middle, the rich became richer and the poor became poorer, until there were essentially two tiers. The “upper” tier, if you will, were known as the “Anunnaki”, which translates as “those who from heaven came to earth”, while the lower, much larger tier, was known as the “Arkashians”, or the “Others”, and they essentially became slaves to the Anunnaki. The Arkashians spread to the far corners of the world, living mostly unsophisticated lives, while the Anunnaki created one supreme city-state, located off the coast of what is now the Atlantic Ocean.’

‘Atlantis?’ Adams asked with disbelief.

‘Yes, Mr Adams,’ Travers confirmed. ‘There was indeed such a place, and it was the single, most highly advanced centre of civilization ever seen on the planet, before or since.’

‘So if these events were recounted for future generations, then presumably there were survivors of whatever disaster befell them?’ Lynn asked.

Travers grunted. ‘There are always survivors,’ he said. ‘And in this case, there were two sets, which brings us nicely on to the next part of our story. Fourteen thousand years ago, the world saw the flood that has found its way into tales of every single civilization and religion ever since. But it really happened, and wiped out an estimated ninety-five per cent of the world’s life forms current at that time.’

Lynn gasped. ‘A meteor?’ She knew NASA had looked into various ways such a flood could occur and she had read the research. One of the most likely explanations was that if a large meteor hit the earth in an oceanic area, the impact would create a mega-tsunami that would completely change the face of the planet.

Travers shook his head. ‘No, although the effect was much the same. At the time, there was a huge rocky island, just off the African coast — a little like the Canaries, only much larger. It had a cliff on one side, five hundred metres high, essentially a waterside mountain, that eventually just collapsed. Possibly seismic activity was the cause, but a huge chunk of this cliff just basically sloughed off and crashed into the sea. We’re talking about millions of tons of rock slipping straight down towards the ocean floor, the resulting force of which created a tidal wave two miles high that sped across the Atlantic and completely destroyed the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States of America.’

‘And Atlantis,’ Adams added.

‘In a way,’ Travers offered non-commitally. ‘But it didn’t end there, as the incredible force of the impact threw up billions of tons of debris into the atmosphere, which then inflamed and landed all over the planet, causing vast devastation by forest fires, which in turn caused carbon dioxide gases to clog up the atmosphere, until there was a nuclear winter that helped stamp out much of what life remained.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Lynn asked.

‘I’m the foremost expert on the Anunnaki,’ Travers answered. ‘I’ve been working with them for years, I’m an expert on their history.’

‘Working with them?’ Steinberg asked suspiciously.

Travers smiled. ‘I’m in communication with them,’ he answered. ‘There is a device I use, one that enables me to link telepathically to the Anunnaki, and I’ve been piecing together their entire history — as it’s related by them, at any rate.’

Adams nodded his head, not surprised that there was more than one communications box. He was sure it would be a device identical to the one that Jacobs must have been using back at his house in Mason Neck.

A sudden thought entered his head. ‘Where is it?’ he asked. ‘The box?’ If it was in the room, could the Anunnaki be reading their thoughts right now?

‘Relax,’ Travers said calmly. ‘It’s in another room entirely. We have a research library dedicated to learning and preserving their history and culture, and it’s based there. We use it regularly, and they are only too happy to provide answers to our questions. A remarkable people, really,’ he said with considerable respect.

‘Going back to the flood,’ Lynn said to Travers, directing the conversation back to the matter at hand. ‘Who survived?’

‘The Anunnaki, of course,’ Travers informed her. ‘They were aware of the possibility of the mountain caving into the sea long before it happened, but despite their technical expertise they could find no way of averting the catastrophe. Instead, they put their resources into developing their city-state of Atlantis into a spacecraft.’

‘They what?’ Adams asked, surprised. ‘They made a city into a spaceship?’

‘They were already very advanced in terms of space travel,’ Travers explained. ‘They had explored every planet in the solar system, and were in the middle of developing technologies that would allow intergalactic travel. And think about Plato’s description of the city of Atlantis — the central island surrounded by concentric rings, joined by bridges. It’s a spacecraft, plain and simple. The central island was the actual craft, and the rings — spinning once the craft was airborne — helped to create artificial gravity for their long voyage. And then the whole thing simply lifted up and blasted away into space.’

Lynn considered the matter. ‘At least that explains why Atlantis was never found,’ she said. ‘Because it’s no longer on earth at all.’

Travers smiled. ‘Exactly right,’ he confirmed. ‘The Anunnaki escaped the devastating flood by venturing up into space in Atlantis itself.’

Adams looked at a digital clock embedded into the laboratory wall and turned to the others. ‘Talking about making an escape, I think it’s time we started moving.’

Steinberg looked up at the clock and nodded his head in agreement. ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’ He turned to Travers and gave him a brief rundown of what was going on, and Jacobs’ plan for the earth’s population. ‘I’m taking them down to the Roosevelt Exit,’ he explained. ‘You should come with us.’

Travers stared at the tank containing the Anunnaki’s body for several long moments before turning back. ‘Yes. Of course I’ll come. There are still some things I need to explain.’

Steinberg smiled and turned to Adams and Lynn. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go. We’re still about a mile away from the exit.’

Moments later they were once more walking the deserted corridors of Level 36, footsteps again echoing off the concrete as they passed cavernous storerooms and hi-tech laboratories.

‘So what happened after the flood?’ Adams asked, still curious about the story Travers had so far told them.

‘Well, most of the Arkashians were wiped out,’ Travers continued, seemingly glad to be back in the role of educator; Adams supposed it kept his mind off their precarious situation. ‘But small pockets survived around the world, and we are their direct descendants. The most successful survivors were those that converged in a narrow area of the Middle East, the conditions there allowing them to develop into the agrarian cultures of Sumer, Babylon and Egypt.’

‘But what happened to all the evidence that must have remained from the earlier civilization?’ Lynn asked.

‘Most of it is underwater,’ Travers answered, ‘as you would expect after such a flood. But most of the high technology was centred on Atlantis, which was no longer on the planet. The Anunnaki’s previous technology across the globe had already been destroyed by the Arkashians long ago. Some artefacts are still discovered here and there, along with bodies like the one you found, but almost all of them end up here.’ He gestured back the way they had come. ‘That room back there alone contains several hundred examples of bodies of these ancient humans, including several well-preserved specimens like the one you found. There are other storerooms down here containing thousands of other examples of their ancient technology.’

‘And what happened to the people who made these discoveries?’ Lynn asked bitterly.

‘Most were debriefed here, before memory erasure or death,’ Steinberg admitted. ‘Others, who for whatever reasons we couldn’t get here, either met with unfortunate “accidents” or were just subjected to ridicule in the press, their “evidence” being systematically discredited and then openly mocked. That’s why you sometimes see such discoveries in the popular media, and why they are always denied by the scientific establishment.’

Lynn snorted. ‘You guys really do control everything, don’t you?’

‘We certainly try to,’ Travers said.

‘So what happened to the Anunnaki?’ Adams asked.

‘Well, they spent the next few thousand years travelling through space — much of it in suspended animation due to the vast distances involved — trying to find a new planet to colonize. Eventually, they discovered that there were no other truly habitable planets within the reach of their starship and so they decided to make the spacecraft itself their permanent home. As such, without the physical pressures of a planet-based existence, the evolution that you saw in the Roswell pilot occurred. They had no use for powerful bodies or limb strength and so on, which is why their physical shape shrank to that of a modern child’s. But their brains — and their intelligence — continued to grow, leading to the abnormally large craniums you see. Their other physical senses — touch, sight, smell and hearing — also became greatly diminished over time, and once they developed telepathic communication abilities, their mouths started to become smaller and more useless with each generation.’

‘That’s great,’ Adams said. ‘So if they’re so perfect in their own little spaceship world, why do they want to come back and take over?’

‘Simple mathematics,’ Travers explained. ‘At the moment, they are all but immortal. Due to advances in medicine, they really have no upper age limit, as their cells are kept from dying artificially. But they understand that to keep evolving, they need to keep on reproducing — but where do they have room for the new people? Not on their little spaceship. They want to keep evolving, and to do so they need more space, it’s as simple as that.’

‘But why now?’ Lynn asked. ‘Why did they return now?’

‘World War Two,’ Travers said. ‘The atomic bomb. Even in the depths of space, their sensors picked up the detonations, and it was clear that they were manmade. This told them that not only was planet earth still habitable, but we had the technology to make their return here a real possibility, although we would of course need their guidance to create the means.’

‘I’m surprised they didn’t leave sensors here in the first place, some way of monitoring what happened after the tidal wave hit,’ Lynn said.

‘They did. They left a “stay back” team, orbiting the earth in a smaller craft, to report back on what happened.’

‘Really? And what happened to them?’ Lynn asked.

‘You’ve read the Bible?’ Travers asked with a smile. ‘It’s all in there.’

20

‘What do you mean?’ Adams asked as they rounded yet another corner in the underground labyrinth.

‘Pretty much everything in the Torah, the original books of law from the earliest Bible, relates to the crew of the ship that stayed behind,’ Travers explained. ‘And because the Bible was built on earlier myths and tales, you can also read the history of this people in the writings of the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians. And because the same stories were told again by the Indians, Greeks, Romans and even the Vikings, you can read them all again in their own various religions and mythologies.’

‘It sounds like what Baranelli was telling us,’ Adams said to Lynn.

Lynn nodded. ‘Yes, we studied comparative religion at Harvard,’ she said. ‘And it’s true that there are some remarkable similarities in otherwise disparate religions all over the world. The Great Flood, for example.’

‘Exactly,’ Travers agreed. ‘And it is clear that almost all faiths describe “gods” or “angels” descending from the heavens, often in rather complex machines.’

‘And you’re saying that these “gods” were in fact men left behind after the flood, who were now based in an orbiting spacecraft?’

‘Yes. They monitored from a distance, unsure whether the Arkashians would survive, or whether the atmosphere of the earth was too compromised. And so they observed as generations came and went, until communities became established in the “cradle of civilization” as we know it, and started to farm the land.’

‘Did they send their reports back to the mother ship? To Atlantis?’ Adams asked.

‘That was the aim, but it soon transpired that their communications were for some reason not making it back to their comrades who were now in deep space, and so these people were there on their own.’

‘What became of them?’ Adams asked.

‘Aware that they had lost all contact with the rest of the Anunnaki population, and now sure that the earth was truly safe to re-inhabit, they started to visit us. They came down in small spacecraft, and were instantly perceived as gods by the ancient Sumerians. Indeed, the name “Anunnaki” for these gods is clearly preserved in Sumerian literature.

‘Of course, having been alone for so many generations, the visitors revelled in the glory and attention that they received here. In order to further their status, they began to teach those early civilizations the rudiments of reading, writing, and mathematics — not at an advanced level, but enough to whet the appetite, so to speak, in order to ensure the people’s continued worship, which they now craved.

‘Despite their advancement, they were still human, and were subject to the same human emotions as us. They therefore ended up interbreeding with us — which proves that these visitors were human, as members of different species can’t interbreed successfully — and were finally subsumed into our own populations, although with their offspring they created “royal” dynasties that lasted for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The royal line of David, for instance, can be traced back to these early visitors.

‘Their relationships were like some sort of modern-day soap opera, as you can see from the tales of the Greek gods, most of which are based on much earlier stories, originally true for the most part. Some of the stories really do have to be read to be believed. And then there are all the reports of advanced technology and weaponry. Zeus’ lightning bolt? A laser weapon brought down from the spacecraft.

‘Similar stories are found elsewhere. The spacecraft themselves are to be found described in the Indian Vedas as “vimyana”, and they came from a “star” in the sky that could be readily identified. It was of course the orbiting space station, which could indeed be seen by the naked eye in much the same way as our own international space station can.

‘In the Bible, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was based on an actual event that occurred long before the book was written, when an entire city was razed by a nuclear weapon. And there’s a lot more, throughout religious literature.’ Travers cleared his throat. ‘“When mankind had spread all over the world and girls were being born, some of the heavenly beings saw that these girls looked beautiful, so they took the ones they liked… In those days, and even later, the Nephilim were upon the earth, who were descendants of human women and the heavenly beings. They were the great heroes and famous men of long ago.” Sound like a virtual history of extraterrestrial visitation and interbreeding? It is. Genesis, chapter six, verses one through four.’

‘You’re joking,’ Adams said.

‘He’s not,’ Lynn broke in, her mind racing. ‘The Nephilim were sometimes referred to as “the giants” in other translations, but the exact meaning was never known.’ She turned to Travers. ‘So you’re saying that the Nephilim were the surviving Anunnaki?’

‘Absolutely. “Nephilim” is, in fact, a direct transliteration of “Anunnaki” into ancient Hebrew from their own language. It’s all there,’ he continued, ‘written plainly in black and white, in front of all of us. The entire history of our world. Everyone’s read it but nobody truly understands it. Some believe that the gods described are actually supernatural beings, while others believe that they are the result of drug-induced hallucinations or visions, or are merely symbolic. Nobody really takes the stories as the literal truth. The closest are those who tout the ancient astronaut theory, who say that these ancient gods were in fact aliens.

‘But the truth is even more amazing. These ancient gods, the whole basis of all religions and all faiths, were men and women. We were, and still are, worshipping humans.’

21

‘We’re here,’ Steinberg said as they rounded another corner, suddenly confronted by what looked like an elevator door. ‘This is the Roosevelt Exit,’ he explained, ‘built some time after the original construction, on presidential orders. Roosevelt — who visited us here from time to time — was a claustrophobic, and something of a paranoiac. He hated the idea of one single elevator being the sole means of escape should anything happen down here, and so ordered a secret tunnel to be built.’ Steinberg leant forward and pressed a button to the side of the elevator door. It opened smoothly, showing a standard elevator interior. ‘It was disguised as a normal lift, which has always been out of order, eventually being decommissioned as unsafe. But,’ he continued, tapping a code into the control panel on the inside wall, ‘it was never intended as an elevator at all. At least not in the normal sense.’

As he finished speaking, the rear wall of the elevator slid to one side, showing an inordinately long tunnel stretching at a slight incline as far into the distance as they could see.

Adams peered into it. ‘If we’re thirty-six storeys below ground,’ he said, ‘then at that angle, the tunnel would have to stretch—’

‘Five miles,’ Steinberg finished for him. ‘It comes out just near the “Extraterrestrial Highway”, Route 375, that runs up to the base perimeter. The tunnel exit is just outside the fence line. It’s still on US Air Force property — the whole area for hundreds of klicks around is Air Force property — but it might just be far enough for you to make it out of here.’

Adams gestured to a metal cart on the right of the tunnel, resting on what looked like a rail track. ‘What’s that?’

Steinberg smiled. ‘I would ignore that if I were you. It was intended for a quick escape but it’s sat there unattended for the last forty-plus years, and even if it did work, the G-forces probably wouldn’t do you any good at all.’

Adams nodded. ‘Let’s go then,’ he said, stepping into the tunnel, Lynn next to him.

He turned back round when he realized the two scientists were not following them.

And then Lynn gave a startled yell and Adams’ eyes went wide as they saw Professor Travers standing there with a pistol aimed directly at Steinberg’s head.

22

‘Did you really think I was just going to let you walk out of here?’ Travers asked. ‘Did you think I was unaware of the plans?’ He laughed at them. ‘I was a guest at the Bilderberg Group meeting of two thousand and two, picked for the Hundred immediately.’ He gestured back down the corridor. ‘You hear that sound?’

Adams could hear it, and cursed himself for not picking up on it sooner. It was the sound of boots, lots of them, running towards them. He had allowed Travers to distract him with his stories. From the sound of the echoes, Adams estimated they would be upon them within the next sixty seconds.

‘Twenty members of security,’ Travers said, a wicked smile painted across his features. ‘And they are not known for their tolerance of escapees.’

Adams saw the look of indignant rage on the face of Steinberg long before Travers did, and was gripping Lynn’s hand and moving for the tunnel even as Steinberg let out an angry yell and launched himself at his colleague.

Steinberg clasped both hands round Travers’ pistol and yanked the arm upwards. A loud blast rang out, and a single supersonic round ricocheted down the corridor as both men struggled for control of the weapon.

Adams could hear the footsteps just about to turn the final corner, and pushed Lynn into the metal cart, looking in vain for the controls.

Steinberg saw what they were trying to do and yelled to them, ‘The left-hand side! The red button!’

Adams turned and saw the armed guards storming into the corridor, submachine guns raised at shoulder level.

He flinched as they pulled their triggers, heard Lynn cry an exultant, ‘Yes!’ saw Steinberg ripped to bloody pieces by hundreds of nine-millimetre hollow-point rounds, and then felt his own body surge back into the metal cart with tremendous force as it tore free from its moorings and accelerated at terrifying speed up the tunnel, leaving Travers and the twenty guards as tiny, insignificant specks in the far, far distance.

Steinberg hadn’t been joking about the G-forces, Lynn realized.

At first, the shock of the cart’s speed made her brain all but malfunction, the incredible force pinning her against the back of the cart, her face rippling under the intense pressure. But her faculties started to return, and she estimated the G-force to be in the range of 4 or 5.

During her time with NASA, she had experienced forces of up to 12 G in inverted dives when she had been invited to observe pilot training, but that had been wearing a special G-suit which mitigated much of the shock. And although 4 to 5 G was about the same as a high-G rollercoaster ride, those figures only applied to short spells on the fastest parts of the ride. Here, there were no protective suits, and the acceleration was constant, for a prolonged period of time.

She soon started to feel the effects. The first thing she noticed, after only thirty seconds of hard acceleration, was a progressive blurring and greying of her vision, the long tunnel ahead of her losing all colour and clarity. She closed her eyes to try and gather herself, but soon started to feel nauseated.

Opening her eyes once more, she experienced an intense tunnel vision. The fact that she was in a tunnel anyway didn’t help, but her range of vision was becoming progressively — and rapidly — diminished. She had no idea how fast they were going but she knew that the tunnel was five miles long. Even at two hundred miles per hour, the journey would take longer than one and a half minutes, and she was unsure how much time had already elapsed. How much longer could she hold out? She felt her vision start to fail completely, blackout coming on fast now, and knew that unconsciousness would follow soon after, with death being a significant possibility.

Blackness started to creep into the corners of her vision, and she knew all would soon be lost, but then she felt the cart slowing; it was gradual but she could sense the deceleration, and as the cart slowed, her senses started to come back to her. First the blackness ebbed away, then the tunnel widened out ahead of her, and then finally colours returned and her perception cleared totally as the cart continued to slow until it came to a complete stop.

Her hand went to the side of the cart for support as she was hit by another wave of nausea, her head swimming, but then she felt a hand on her arm, and turned to see Adams looking at her through bleary eyes.

‘Come on,’ he said weakly, pulling her by the arm. ‘Let’s go.’

Colonel Briscoe Caines stood at the main bank of monitors in the Main Security Building, a large brick structure located next to the new base headquarters, in the dead centre of the plethora of other buildings that littered Area 51.

Caines was in overall command of physical security at the base, a task he carried out with ruthless dedication. He had been a major in the US Special Forces before transferring to the Defence Intelligence Agency, where he had risen to the rank of full colonel before moving to Area 51.

Although his appointment had been made by the US military, in cooperation with the CIA, he had really been co-opted by his old friend Stephen Jacobs and was under no illusions about who really led security at the base: Commander Eldridge and the men of Alpha Brigade. Eldridge and his cronies had, however, recently decamped to Geneva, leaving Caines alone to clean up this mess.

He had been woken up when the emergency call had come through ten minutes before, the watch officer in something of a blind panic. He swung his feet out of the bed in his private room in the dormitories to the rear of the MSB and started to get dressed even as he listened to the report.

An emergency distress signal had been sent to the guard room on Level 34 from Laboratory 8 two levels below, from Professor Travers. It seemed that the two captives who had recently been brought to the base had overpowered the two guards assigned to them, along with two of the interrogators, and had managed to convince Dr Steinberg to try and get them out. Caines had scoffed when he heard that — what possible chance did they have?

But then it became apparent that they were headed to the Roosevelt Exit, and all of a sudden the possiblity became somewhat more real. Ordering a section of men to hunt the escapees down through the vast corridors of Level 36, and all other base security personnel to be on immediate standby, he left the officers’ dormitory at a full run, getting to the MSB in record time.

By the time he got there, however, things had gone even more wrong. Although Steinberg had been killed, Adams and Edwards had made it into the escape tunnel and had vanished towards the exit in the magneto-electric cart.

‘Converge on Groom Lake Road!’ he yelled into his radio mouthpiece, panic creeping now into his own voice. ‘All units!’

23

Adams hoisted Lynn out of the cart and pointed upwards. The rail track stopped several feet from the end of the tunnel, which turned sharply upwards into a short vertical shaft. A ladder was bolted to the wall, which snaked its way up through the dark cylinder to what looked like some sort of submarine hatch.

Adams started climbing the ladder and Lynn followed him immediately, turning to look back down the long tunnel for only a second to make sure that they were still alone.

Her head had recovered from the shock of the cart’s acceleration, and the nausea had now left her completely, although her stomach still felt more than a little nervous, given that they still had to make good their escape from the most secure military base in the world; and not only was there a team of trained killers hot on their heels behind them, they had no idea whatsoever what would be on the other side of the hatch above them. Still, she stayed close behind Adams, watching as he reached the top and entwined his feet in the rungs so that he could brace himself to open the metal hatch.

He tried to twist the circular spin lock but it was too tight.

He looked down at her. ‘Damn thing’s rusted shut,’ he said sourly. ‘Probably hasn’t been opened in the last fifty years.’

Despite the seeming pointlessness of it, he turned back and twisted again, until he was red in the face and the skin on his hands started to blister. But still it wouldn’t move, the inoperable hatch teasing them cruelly with the possibility of escape just beyond.

Caines checked the monitors. Although the corridors of Level 36 were conspicuously absent of security cameras, being almost completely off the grid, the team headed up by Captain Aldo Barnes was feeding images back to him from their own helmet-mounted imagers.

He was happy to see that Barnes had had the foresight to bring some L-84 ‘Ramcarts’ down from the upper guardroom. The vehicle was basically a modified golf buggy, and although not anywhere near as fast as the device that had whisked the escapees away at such high speed, it was considerably faster than making the pursuit down the tunnels on foot.

Caines watched as half of the men managed to squeeze into the two small vehicles and then took off up the tunnel at a rapid thirty miles an hour, while the rest of the men started to jog along behind them. Then he turned away to check on the progress of his other units, who were headed for the tunnel’s surface exit.

Barnes took point in the lead buggy, the noise of the diesel engines deafening in the confines of the narrow tunnel, a savage grin on his face as he checked the magazine on his Steyr AUG assault rifle. The couple just a few miles up ahead had left two of his men unconscious on the floor back in the interrogation rooms, a professional insult to Barnes, and one that would soon be avenged.

Adams heard the noise of the engines first, even with his ears pulsing with blood from the pressure inside his head as he continued to struggle against the spinlock.

The damn guards must have brought some sort of vehicles into the tunnel and would be upon them a lot sooner than Adams had hoped. A team of armed men on foot would probably have taken close to an hour to reach them. But in motorized transport? It depended on the exact speed, of course, but it would certainly be a lot less than an hour, that was for sure. It could even be as little as a few minutes.

Adams looked down at Lynn, saw that she, too, had heard the roar of engines; could see the look of worry in her eyes, not only for themselves but also for the unborn child she now knew was growing in her belly.

Adams turned back to the cursed, rusted hatch and attacked it with renewed ferocity. The damn thing was going to open one way or another; he could not let it be otherwise.

Moments later, he felt Lynn move up beside him, feet entwined with his, her back braced against the tunnel wall opposite.

She smiled reassuringly at him, reaching up to take hold of the opposite side of the lock. She looked at him, more than simple love transmitted by her gaze; it was understanding, belief, mutual recognition of their deepest feelings for one another.

‘Let’s do it together, OK?’ she said to him, and Adams knew that she wasn’t just talking about opening the hatch.

He returned her look with one of his own, one that he hoped transmitted just as much to her, and nodded his head.

‘On the count of three, we both twist together,’ he said, as the noise of the diesel engines grew louder and louder.

‘One,’ he said, as they both tightened their hands around the stainless steel hatch seal. ‘Two,’ he continued, taking a deep breath. ‘Three!’ he shouted, and they both hauled on the ring as hard as they could, muscles contracting with such force that the veins started to pulse blue in their foreheads, threatening to burst from their skin.

At first there was nothing, not even a hint of movement, but as both of them continued to exert an almost inhuman level of force, there came the very first slip of metal on metal, a grinding sound and slight judder that they both felt through their hands.

Adams looked at Lynn, unable to talk with the effort; but his eyes said it all. We’re almost there! Harder!

24

The Ramcart buggies built up to their maximum speed of fifty miles per hour just one mile into the long tunnel, and Barnes calculated that they would reach the end within seven minutes of setting off from the disguised elevator entrance.

He checked his watch as six minutes came around, gesturing for his men to get ready. They would make the assault as soon as they arrived, hit the two escapees hard and fast.

And then he saw the end of the tunnel coming up, the cart abandoned. The man and woman were not readily apparent, which meant that they were probably stuck up the access tunnel, struggling to open the metal hatch.

Barnes smiled to himself; the hatch was as good as welded shut from years of neglect. It was on the ‘to do’ list but always seemed to be one of the things that never got done.

The buggies cruised to a stop and Barnes and his men spilled out into the tunnel, guns raised, sprinting towards the vertical shaft. It was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Two of his men got there before him, assault rifles pointing vertically up the short exit tunnel. Barnes was momentarily confused when no shots were fired, but then he was there, looking up towards the hatch himself, and understood in an instant.

For there was nothing there to shoot at; the shaft was empty, the steel hatch open to the night sky above.

Adams and Lynn had finally managed to turn the steel rim enough to break the rusty seal, the sound of tortured metal giving way to a freer, easier movement, until the hatch had opened fully.

Dirt and soil had collapsed on their heads as Adams pushed the hatch gingerly open, and he held it open a few inches as he and Lynn moved to the side and waited for the soil to work its way down to the tunnel floor.

Adams pushed again, and although he met with resistance, he continued the effort until it was halfway open. For reasons of safety, he hadn’t wanted to open it all the way anyway, as he didn’t want to attract too much attention if there were any guards in the vicinity. He presumed that the guards from Level 36 would have issued a general alert, and that they may therefore have already reached the tunnel exit, if they could find it.

Holding it open just enough for someone to crawl through, he gestured for Lynn to come across to him. She transferred to the ladder side, bracing herself as she took the weight of the hatch. Adams pulled out his handgun, kissed Lynn quickly on the lips, and edged his way slowly out into the moonlit night.

He kept his profile low to the ground, slipping out of the semi-open hatch slowly and silently. Once his upper torso was out, he stopped and monitored the immediate area, keeping his head still while his eyes roved.

There was no movement, of that he could be pretty sure. He was an expert in tracking animals at night and was used to searching for movement even on the darkest nights; but here there were no telltale signs whatsoever. But that wasn’t to say that there wasn’t anybody further out, monitoring them electronically, or behind the hatch cover where he couldn’t see.

And so he slowly extricated himself from the hatch completely, allowing his body to turn in order to check the rear area as well. He swept the entire horizon for three hundred and sixty degrees, until he was happy that nobody was there.

But, now clear of the engine noise in the tunnels below, he began to pick up the noise of other engines, on the land, converging on them, and he knew security must know where they were and already be on their way.

He pulled up on to his haunches, reached for the hatch and ripped it open completely, the earth that had been resting on top now flung to the side. He reached further in and grasped Lynn by her arms, pulling her up and out of the tunnel in one smooth motion until her feet hit solid ground next to him.

He gestured to the noise of engines to their right, and Lynn followed his gaze. There was a high chain-link fence just twenty feet from them, and they could see the brightly lit runways just beyond the fence line. The noise was coming from the runway, and they quickly realized that armoured vehicles were approaching at speed, using the runway as a fast road. To their left, a narrow empty road ran far into the distance. Other than that, the area resembled the barren scrub of the Chilean and Peruvian deserts from which they had so recently escaped.

‘They’re on their way,’ Adams said to her. ‘We need to leave. Now!’

25

Barnes emerged from the hatch as the headlights of four large off-road vehicles headed across the bumpy terrain towards him, body-mounted .50 calibre machine guns trained directly at him.

‘Stand down!’ he shouted into his tactical mic, tuned to the wavelength used by all the different elements of Area 51 security. He raised his arms as the lead vehicle’s searchlight hit him straight on, illuminating him perfectly.

The rest of his men poured up and out of the tunnel behind him as the four 4x4s steered to a stop around them.

‘They’re out here somewhere,’ Barnes announced, ‘and they’ve only got a few minutes’ head start.’

‘Do we have monitors out here?’ came a question from the interior of the second vehicle.

‘Affirmative,’ Colonel Caines announced from his station inside the MSB. ‘We have sensors all the way out to the main gate.’

Because it was so large, the actual perimeter of the Groom Lake base was not fenced in; rather, the sole approach road — Groom Lake Road, just fourteen miles from Highway 375, known affectionately by locals as the Extraterrestrial Highway — was marked with a variety of vivid signs warning people not to go any further. Anyone who did was instantly caught by the private security guards — the ‘camo dudes’ — who then handed them over to the County Sheriff’s Department. The land between the outer perimeter and the base itself was monitored by an array of heat sensors and motion cameras, as well as by the men who kept a visual lookout from the high hills that surrounded the approach road.

‘Barnes, you and your men will continue the search on foot,’ the colonel continued, ‘and I want the jeeps to extend the search area, right up to the main perimeter. We’ve got two hundred more men coming into the search zone within the next ten minutes, along with dogs and thermal imagers. Helicopters are being made ready and will be airborne soon, extending the zone further. Now let’s get going!’

‘Yes, sir!’ Barnes responded. ‘You heard the man!’ he said, turning to his team. ‘Let’s move out!’

Four long, terrible, migraine-inducing hours later, Colonel Briscoe Caines sat rooted to the monitors. The entire security apparatus of the world’s most secure military facility had been mobilized to find just two lightly armed escapees, in an open desert, without success. Three hundred men, two dozen off-road vehicles and fourteen helicopters had searched five hundred square miles of desert and had still found nothing.

So what in the hell was going on? Even though a lot of base staff had recently transferred to Europe on the orders of Stephen Jacobs, Caines was hardly without resources. But no trace was found anywhere, save for a pair of tracks that led from the tunnel exit across the desert sand on to Groom Lake Road.

Where could they have gone once on the road? There had been no sign of any vehicle. Perhaps someone had turned up in a car and whisked them away. Or maybe a couple of motorbikes had been left by the tunnel for them. But how on earth would that have been arranged? And the helicopters would certainly have found them anyway, if the sensors had not.

Caines was at a loss to explain it.

Lynn shifted her weight, struggling to get comfortable, but it was impossible.

After leaving the tunnel, Adams had dragged her to the left, out towards the paved road, where he had rolled himself along the tarmac, encouraging Lynn to do the same. ‘To confuse the dogs,’ he had told her, before taking her hand and pulling her back, retracing their steps to the tunnel exit. Adams had made sure they stepped into their previous footprints, covering up the fact that they had returned.

He had then gone to work, digging earth from next to the hatch until, with Lynn’s help, a small hollow had been cleared. Then he had pulled her down into the small pit and started to cover their bodies with the loose soil.

‘How are we going to breathe?’ she whispered breathlessly shortly before they were completely covered.

Adams pulled out his pistol, ejected the magazine and slipped it into his pocket before racking the slide to eject the round in the chamber. He gathered it up and put this in his pocket also, as Lynn started to do the same with her own gun.

Putting the butts of the guns in their mouths, they continued to cover themselves until they were completely buried, the barrels of their pistols sticking out of the dirt very slightly, allowing the cold night air to filter down to them.

And they had been like that ever since, lying immobile, hardly daring to breathe when the team had come up from the tunnel and the 4x4s had arrived on the scene, terrified that their pistol barrels would be found or their body heat would register on the guards’ hi-tech monitors.

But the barrels had been missed in the excitement — with two escapees on the loose, a mound of earth disturbed by the hatch being opened wasn’t of prime consideration; and their body heat wasn’t picked up by the sensors, thanks to the cold earth covering them.

They were still in place when the dogs had come and the sound of dozens — perhaps hundreds — of more feet had descended on the area; but again, the sounds came and went, and the mound of earth remained undisturbed.

But they had been in the same position now for far too long, and Lynn was starting to suffer from an intense claustrophobia that she had never before experienced. Even though there were only a few inches of topsoil separating her from the outside world, there might as well have been a thousand. She felt as if she had been truly buried alive, like one of those people who were declared dead a little too prematurely and then woke up buried in a coffin under tons of earth. Some of them had clawed their way out, Lynn knew, and now she felt that same desire, the intense need to just start digging.

She felt movement next to her, and realized Adams was doing exactly that; he was escaping from their earthy prison. Had it been too much for him?

Lynn started to dig her own way out instantly, and she was almost there when Adams reached in and helped pull her out, the heavy soil tumbling down her hair and off her skin as she removed the jaw-achingly wide gun butt from her mouth, eager to breathe in a full lungful of real air. As she took those first few precious, wonderful mouthfuls of clean air, Adams scanned the immediate area.

‘They’re not here, for now at least,’ he said with some satisfaction. ‘They’re probably scouring every inch of land around the base.’

‘So what do we do now?’ she asked him, her composure returning slowly.

‘Now we escape,’ he replied with confidence.

‘Which way?’

Adams smiled at her and pointed over her shoulder at the chain-link fence surrounding Area 51.

Lynn turned and looked, then groaned in disbelief. ‘Oh no,’ she said forlornly. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

26

The fence was not in fact the formidable obstacle it at first seemed. It was really a demarcation line more than anything, a way of letting base personnel know where they could and could not go. In terms of security, it was assumed that it was impossible to get past the body-heat and motion detectors placed all over the surrounding desert, and the roving patrols of guards.

Getting closer, though, Adams could see that although the fence wasn’t physically impressive — just one row of chain-link, ten feet high — its entire length was linked to both motion and body-heat sensors. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so easy.

Adams crouched in the shadows, his night vision picking out what looked like a gate some distance away, and after a moment’s observation, he could see that this was where the security vehicles must have passed through.

‘Come on,’ he whispered to Lynn, motioning towards the gate.

‘The main gate?’ she asked in disbelief.

‘It’s not the main gate,’ he whispered back, ‘it’s a minor side gate. And I think it’s still open.’

He took her by the hand, keeping low as they moved along the fence line towards the gate. Fifty metres out, they both crouched down again, straining to make out the details of the gate. Around them, far out in the desert, they heard the sound of off-road vehicles struggling over the rough terrain, helicopters circling the skies above, and voices shouting orders. Here, though, there seemed to be a complete absence of activity; Adams could only presume that the gate had been left temporarily open to aid the vehicles that would doubtlessly be streaming in and out all night.

Suddenly, engine noise from the rear caused him to grab Lynn by the arm and pull her down close to the sandy ground. Looking over their shoulders, they saw two 4x4s heading back to base. They watched closely as the off-roaders crashed along the bumpy terrain before passing through the gate, their headlights illuminating what Adams could now see was a small, deserted sentry box.

They continued to watch for several moments, until Adams turned to Lynn. ‘Other vehicles are at least a mile away,’ he said, able to pick up the sounds quite easily across the barren desert. He gestured for the gate. ‘It’s time to go.’

‘So where are we?’ Caines asked over the secure comms link, hoping for something — anything — that would help resolve this terrible situation.

‘Nothing so far,’ he heard Barnes report back immediately. ‘There’s nothing out here but the damn sand!’

Caines could hear the man’s frustration, and it was reflected in the answers that followed from the drivers of the 4x4 recon vehicles and the pilots of the helicopters. Nobody had found anything.

He turned back to the monitors, the bustling team that swarmed around the office all but invisible to him.

Where the hell were they?

At the same moment that Caines was asking himself that question, his prey were within less than a hundred metres of the Main Security Building, both parties unaware of the other’s presence.

Adams knew what the large brick building across the runway tarmac was, however, having been briefed on Area 51’s major structural layout by Stephenfield, and he knew to avoid it. It was to the south-west of a similar building, which he knew to be some sort of laboratory for something called Precision Measuring Equipment. To the north of that, and now directly opposite him, was the very large building that housed the base headquarters. But he still couldn’t tell where the underground building in which they had been held was. But, he supposed, he didn’t have to know; what he wanted was now within reach anyway.

Both Adams and Lynn were amazed by how big the base was, how sprawling, almost like a small township, albeit one that consumed the same amount of electricity as a large city. Dozens of buildings, from small barracks to large warehouses and vehicle hangars, were spread over a vast area, and then there were the seven brightly lit runways, each with their own command towers and support vehicles.

The inner base, however, seemed to be almost deserted, the search for them outside the base mercifully consuming almost all of the security force’s resources. They had crossed one runway after another, moving low across the terrain between them and fast across the smooth tarmac, always keeping to whatever shadows they could, until they reached the runway nearest the headquarters building.

As they crouched there, Adams pointed to the row of six Boeing 737 passenger jets, their fuselages painted white with a red stripe down each side. ‘The Janet planes,’ Adams whispered to Lynn, before pointing to one on the far side, which a crew was busy fuelling.

Adams looked up at the moon and stars in the sky. The base’s high-powered floodlights made them more difficult to read but not altogether impossible. ‘It’s just after five,’ he told Lynn, dawn still a long way off on the winter morning. ‘First flight out is at six o’clock, when the non-resident workers are flown back home after the nightshift.’

‘And what does that have to do with us?’ Lynn asked, although she suspected she already knew the answer.

‘We’re going to catch it with them,’ he whispered back.

The plane doors were closed and locked, Adams knew that even from their position across the runway, but they couldn’t afford to wait. Before long, the non-resident workers would be streaming out of headquarters and arriving in minibuses from other parts of the base, all ready for home, and the plane would be surrounded with people.

And so he and Lynn edged as close as they could, waited until all support personnel had left the area, and then ran across the tarmac to the landing gear at a near sprint, careful to keep low and within whatever shadow they could. Then Adams pushed Lynn up the massive tyre of the lead wheel, before pulling himself up behind her, continuing on up into the wheel housing, into the deep, dark bowels of the aircraft. They squeezed up past the tightly packed machinery, now out of sight of anyone outside, until they made it up to the top of the housing.

Clutching the top of the landing gear strut, Adams reached around in the dark until his hand found a lever. Pulling it, a small square access port opened into the aircraft proper, and he crawled through first, his body only just fitting. He thought at first that his shoulders wouldn’t fit but finally managed to collapse them sufficiently to edge through. He pulled Lynn in quickly after him, her lithe body proving a much easier fit.

Adams left the hatch open, the reflected light from the runway beneath providing their only source of illumination. His eyes adjusted quickly, and he saw that they were inside the cargo hold, which was half-filled with metallic containers.

The crates were secured to the floor, and Adams picked out one that nestled close up against the rear bulkhead. He closed the hatch, the darkness immediately enveloping them like a thick blanket, and took Lynn’s hand, leading her to his chosen hiding place behind the crate. They wouldn’t remain hidden if the cargo hold was checked but Adams figured that with attention focused out in the desert, the chances of a search weren’t likely.

Then they waited, and waited, for six o’clock, hoping against hope that the schedule would be adhered to.

At six o’clock the aircraft started taxiing, and within ten more minutes they felt the small Boeing accelerate off down the runway and lift into the air.

Relief flooded them both.

27

The flight from Groom Lake to Las Vegas was only a short haul.

Adams held Lynn as the aircraft touched down on what he knew would be the north-west runway of McCarran International Airport, adjacent to the Janet Terminal.

They stayed hidden behind the crate as the Boeing taxied along the runway, gradually slowing as it circled and then came to a halt at its final resting place.

‘Come on,’ Adams said, leaving the confines of their hiding place and heading straight for the wheel housing, Lynn right behind him.

He opened the small hatch and slipped through more easily this time. He stopped at the top of the wheel strut to help Lynn through. Once out, she turned and closed the hatch. Still hidden within the wheel housing, they were out of sight of anyone on the runway, and also gone without a trace from the cargo area in case anyone should check it now the plane had landed.

Adams’ mind calculated what to do next. The night crew would be deplaning any minute, and then the airport’s service crew would be at the plane, refuelling it and preparing it for flying again. Timing would be everything.

He slowly turned himself upside down, his legs clenched around the landing strut to support his weight, keeping his hands by his side, so that only the top of his head would be visible if anyone was watching as he lowered himself to see what was going on around the aeroplane.

A set of stairs had already been brought to one side of the aircraft, nearest to the large white terminal building. On the far side of the terminal was a huge parking lot; and beyond that, the super-hotels and casinos of the Strip, the colossal black glass pyramid of the Luxor just opposite.

He heard an electric engine from the other side, and turned to see a service wagon coming across the runway towards them. Adams didn’t move a muscle, realizing that with the light as it was, only movement would give away his position, unless someone came right up to the wheel housing and looked straight at him.

He continued to watch as the first sets of feet started to descend the steps, and then as a service crew got out of the wagon, extended a ladder from the top of the vehicle, and entered the plane through the rear service hatch.

Realizing that everyone’s attention would now be on their own particular job, he spun his body back round, nodded to Lynn, and descended the strut, sliding straight down on to the tyre. Looking up to check that Lynn was with him, he then dropped from the top of the tyre to the runway tarmac.

Lynn joined him moments later, and he grabbed her hand and ran with her to the far side of the service wagon, using it to block the view of anyone in the Janet Terminal. They edged round the vehicle to the far side until they were at the rear.

Adams took another visual sweep of the area, gesturing with his head towards the parking lot just thirty metres away across the runway. Lynn looked across and nodded.

Adams turned to her and mouthed silently, ‘Three… two… one… go!’

Together they sprinted as fast as they could across the dark paving, running in the direction of the thick shadow of the plane’s fuselage cast by the powerful terminal floodlights. They covered the distance in five seconds, arriving at the fence line breathless, adrenalin coursing through their systems. Adams was sure they had remained undetected but every second that passed made them more of a target.

‘Up and over,’ he said to Lynn, and she turned to the fence, bending one leg and placing her foot into Adams’ cupped palms, which he then pushed upwards, boosting her up to the top of the fence. She grabbed at the top, pulled her body across and over, and dropped gracefully to the other side.

Adams backed up a couple of feet and then launched himself at the fence, swinging up and over in one smooth motion. He landed in a crouch and turned back to look through the fence, to see if their escape had been seen by anyone. But nobody had turned towards them. The Area 51 workers were making their way into the terminal building like sheep into a pen, the service crew continued to buzz around the plane doing the jobs they were paid to do. The busy main terminal buildings were far over to the south-east; the north-west corner was deathly quiet by comparison, almost like a private airfield all on its own.

It was clear that their presence had not been noticed, and so Adams and Lynn backed away from the fence, straightened up and turned to face the parking lot, just another couple returning to their car. And then, arm in arm, they headed towards the unmanned exit.

Ten minutes later, they had crossed Haven Street and Giles Street, made their way through the parking lot of Motel 8 Las Vegas until they had emerged on to South Las Vegas Boulevard, the fabled ‘Strip’. They crossed the wide, busy thoroughfare, and headed north until they reached the Luxor’s gigantic pyramid, the world-famous hotel and casino that Adams had spotted from the wheel strut of the Boeing.

Anywhere else on earth, a couple entering a casino just after seven in the morning might have caused a few raised eyebrows; in Vegas, however, such a sight was as natural as night following day. It was a true twenty-four-hour culture here, and some of the regulars literally spent every hour of every day of their stay behind the slot machines or at the roulette tables, betting their life savings on a roll of the dice.

As they entered the one hundred and twenty thousand-foot casino floor, they were amazed by the hustle and bustle around them, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people swarming from gaming tables to slot machines and back again. It was chaos, pure and simple.

Adams turned to Lynn and smiled. ‘It’s perfect.’

John Ayita was a man with a number of concerns, none of them minor.

Ten of his Shadow Wolves were dead, including his team in San Francisco and the Najana brothers. In fact, as far as he was aware, there was now only him and Stephenfield left.

He hadn’t heard from Adams since he and Lynn had gone to pick up the test results from DNA Analytics. He could only assume that the Bilderberg Group had somehow found and captured them, and forced them to talk. What else could have happened?

And yet he couldn’t believe Matt would have talked, not the great ‘Free Bear’. Maybe Lynn then? Or maybe they’d just used drugs on them; Ayita knew it was impossible to resist certain types of truth serum. Either way, his men had been wiped out by Jacobs’ Alpha Brigade, and he was on the run for his life.

He had had to abandon his warehouse headquarters and go deep into hiding, and he knew that Stephenfield would be doing the same.

He was in a bar in downtown Salt Lake City, downing a beer and considering his next move, when his cellphone rang. It was a clean phone, as he had rid himself of his other units for fear that he could be tracked, but he had rerouted those numbers to his new phone.

After a moment’s consideration, he pressed the answer button, although he didn’t say anything.

‘John?’ He heard Matt Adams’ voice coming through the line, speaking in the Lakota language, but he still did not answer. He was glad Adams was still alive at least, but didn’t know whether he could trust him. Maybe he was making the call under duress. Or maybe his voice had been sampled and was now being simulated by a computer. He had no idea.

‘Look,’ the voice continued in Lakota, ‘I can’t talk over an open line, we need to meet.’ Ayita considered the use of the tribal language. If Adams was being forced to make the call, why use the language? It made more sense that he was aware that calls could be monitored and was using Lakota as it was so hard to translate.

‘When and where?’ Ayita asked finally.

By the afternoon, Ayita was in a motel room with Adams and Lynn, just off Highway 80 outside Carson City. Stephenfield was with them too, Adams having also managed to make contact with the only other surviving Shadow Wolf.

Security arrangements had been made carefully, none of the parties entirely trusting the other, but eventually the meeting had been made, and each person explained their part in what had happened.

Adams was distraught over the loss of his friends, but as he explained what had happened to Lynn and himself, what they had found out, and what was about to happen, such a private tragedy began to pale in comparison.

‘So we need to get to Geneva as quickly as possible,’ Adams finished. ‘The stakes really don’t get any higher than this.’

Ayita bowed his head as he considered the matter. Adams was right, of course. Their own lives were as nothing compared to the fate of the whole of humanity; there was no use in hiding now. He turned to Stephenfield. ‘Can you still get passports?’ he asked.

Stephenfield considered the matter before nodding his head. ‘Given the alternative of not getting to Geneva, you bet I can.’

Three hours later, Stephenfield returned to the motel room. It never ceased to amaze him what could be accomplished if you had enough cash, and he hadn’t been shy with his money. If they couldn’t get to Geneva to stop Jacobs, what would be the use of money anyway?

He reached into his bag and pulled out not only passports, but also driving licences and social security cards, as well as a variety of cloned credit cards. He put them all on the table between them, and Adams was surprised when he noticed that there were four passports.

Stephenfield smiled at him. ‘You didn’t think you and Lynn would be going alone, did you?’ he asked.

‘Look,’ Adams argued, ‘I don’t want you risking your lives as well, it—’

‘You need us,’ Ayita said, steel in his voice. ‘And what do we have to stay here for anyway? If what you say is true, if you fail then we’ll all be dead anyway.’

Adams realized he was right. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’d better book some tickets out of here then. What are our new names?’

‘I’ll give you the lowdown on the way,’ Stephenfield said. ‘Flights are already booked, we leave from Reno-Tahoe International in two hours.’

Adams smiled. ‘Excellent,’ he said, happy to be leaving immediately. ‘We’ll get to Geneva, and then we’re going to make those bastards wish that “contact” had never been made.’