The Pandora Directive

Chapter Twelve

The waterfront area had once been a teeming centre of commerce. Now it’s building sat decrepit and forgotten, like dust-covered blocks in an attic. I’d heard that most of the properties had been bought up by underworld types, who used them to store things like hot merchandise, drug shipments, and the occasional dismembered body. Some of the buildings could still pass inspection with a small donation and were rented out as practice space for aspiring rock bands and experimental dance companies.

The massive structure at 54 Front Street had no pulse. It look like it had died about the same time as black-and-white movies (may they rest in peace). From the front, no lights were visible inside. After scaling an eight-foot chain-link fence, I walked around the left side of the building. I glanced up at the windows pockmarking the wall and saw no sign of activity, no indication that anyone was home. From the rear, I caught sight of a faint, thin, halogen glow seeping out around a window on the sixth floor.

There were three doors at ground level: one in the front, one in the back, one on the west side. Of course, they all felt solidly dead bolted. I returned to the rear of the building and fired up a Lucky Strike. Smoking is good for a lot of things, one of which is helping me to think. It’s also great after sex, baths, and meals and goes with just about anything except milk.

I looked up at the sixth storey window, then scanned my way down the building, looking for any possible way I could climb up. When I was nine, I’d had an authentic Spiderman uniform. Whenever I wore it, I could scale anything. A twinge of nostalgia ran through me. Of course, even if I could find the uniform, it probably wouldn’t fit. No, I’d become a mere mortal and would have to resort to mere mortal methods.

A rusted metal ladder was bolted to the brick face of the building on the far left side and ran all way up to the roof. Apparently, the bottom section had rusted and fallen off or been broken off, leaving a jagged end about 15 feet above the ground. If I could only reach the latter, I could easily climb to the sixth floor. I searched the area around the back of the building. Plenty of junk scattered around, but nothing useful. Then I was struck by a possibility: it might be a tricky fit, but I could probably land my speeder close enough to use it to stand on.

Five minutes later, I was standing atop my speeder, pulling my ever-increasing body weight up onto the first rungs of the latter with my ever-decreasing muscular capacity. Despite some unpleasant burning sensations and several mysterious popping noises, I finally got my feet on to the bottom rung. I rested a few moments, then began the ascent of Mount Malloy. As I reached the fourth story, the kid in me was saying to look down. The adult, of course, was saying not to. I listened to my inner child and felt the world begin to spin wildly off its axis. It took several minutes before I was ready to climb again.

When I got to the sixth storey, I realised that the window I was trying to reach was much farther away from the ladder than it had appeared when I was safely on the ground. It was at least eight feet away, with no apparent way to bridge the gap. If it had been possible to get a cigarette, light it, and smoke it without using my hands, I would have done it. As it was, both hands were locked in rigor mortis on the ladder, and I was hoping desperately that I’d live to smoke again.

It didn’t take me long to realise that I wasn’t going to get to the window from where I was clinging to the ladder. I began to climb again. Despite sweating palms and slight dizziness, I reached the roof quickly. Thirty feet away I saw a roof-access door. I hurried over, but it was locked. A search of the rooftop turned up no trap doors or other means of entrance. I walked toward the retainer wall at the edge of the roof, directly two floors above the sixth-storey window. As I approached, I stumbled over something in the dark. It turned out to be a coil of steel cable.

An idea came into my head that was simultaneously ingenious and ridiculous. I looked around and spotted a metal vent pipe protruding from a rooftop surface. Kneeling down and examining it, I determined that it was sturdy enough. I unrolled the steel cable and fed it down over the side until the end of the cable reached the bottom of the six-storey window. Making note of the length, I pulled the cable up, then attached the other end to the vent. I wrapped the cable around my hands several times. With a deep breath, I took several steps toward the edge of the roof and hurtled over the side.

I fell for what seemed an eternity, then jerked violently as the slack in the cable was taken up. My eyes, which had closed involuntarily, opened to see the window rushing straight at me. I shut my eyes again and felt a strange sensation of bursting through solid matter. With a loud crash, the window shattered into a thousand pieces. Still not opening my eyes, I let go of the cable and dropped. My feet hit the floor, and my knees buckled.

I looked up and saw a man across the room. He was half turned toward me and appeared to be in shock. I stood up slowly and made a quick check to verify that everything was still intact. Brushing glass shards from my overcoat, I walked toward him.

“Thomas Malloy, I presume.”

The old man seemed paralysed. I looked him over. He obviously resembled his image in the photograph Fitzpatrick had given me, but in person he had the look of a biblical prophet. He seemed ancient, though his gnarly, hoary look was probably as much a result of cigarettes and booze as the labours of a long and fruitful life. He still didn’t answer, so I decided to break the ice. “You know, Dr Malloy, you’re a hard man to track down. I’m pretty good at what I do, but you sure gave me a run for my money.”

“You’re NSA, aren’t you? You’re here to kill me.”

I gave Malloy my warmest smile. “No. I’m just a simple PI. A friend of yours, Gordon Fitzpatrick, hired me to find you.”

The old man relaxed a bit, but was still on guard. “So what are you going to do now?”

I considered for a moment. “Well, first I’ll have a smoke.”

I pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Malloy. He took it slowly and sniffed it, then turned and packed it on a countertop. He was obviously no stranger to unfiltered smokes. I pulled out a matchbook and held a lit match up in front of him. He lit the Lucky Strike and inhaled deeply, eyes closed and a faint trembling in his hand. After several seconds, he exhaled and opened his eyes. It looked like he’d caught a buzz.

“This is my first cigarette in four months.” his eyes were bright. He took another drag, savouring it. “My daughter made me quit. I think she was just trying to make my last few years as miserable as possible.”

Malloy sat down and motioned me towards a nearby chair. We sat and smoked without talking for several minutes. Malloy took a final drag and dropped the cigarette to the floor, crushing it under the tip of his shoe. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“My pleasure.”

He ran a hand through his unruly thatch of white hair. “So Fitz put you on my trail. Did he tell you why he wanted to find me?”

I shook my head. “He didn’t give me any details… he just said that he thought you might be in danger.”

Malloy chuckled, then coughed several times. “You don’t know much about me, do you Mr — “

“Murphy. Tex Murphy. I found out a little. I know you recently married a young woman named Emily Sue Patterson. I know that you used to work at Berkeley with Sandra Collins, and that you once worked as a research scientist with Fitzpatrick.”

“Is that it?”

“Pretty much.”

Malloy nodded and scratched his white-stubbled chin. “My life’s been in danger for some time now. You probably know I’m wanted by the N S A. Well, a few other little groups would like to get their paws on me as well, some in the government, some in other governments, some in private organisations. Hell, sometimes it feels like I’m running from everyone but the Girl Scouts.”

He coughed violently into a closed fist. He didn’t look very healthy. I didn’t ask if he was all right.

“I knew about the NSA. I had a little run in with them a couple of days ago. They mentioned your name, but I played dumb. It’s something I’m really good at. But I’m pretty sure they believed me.”

The old man glanced up at me sharply. “You didn’t let them follow you here, did you?”

I thought back to what I’d done over the past six or seven hours. I was fairly certain that I hadn’t been trailed. I shook my head. The old man didn’t seem one hundred percent convinced. “If they followed you here, our acquaintance is going to be a short one. Better give me another one of those cigarettes.”

I pulled out the pack. There was only one smoke left. I handed it over and lit it for Malloy. He leaned back in his chair and inhaled, French-style. “Do you want to hear a story?”

“Sure.” I tried to be casual, but I had a feeling that this guy had a lot to say. I wanted to know everything.

“You positive? What I’m gonna tell you could put you in the same danger I’m in.”

“Just knowing you has been dangerous enough. Besides, danger’s like Jell-O — there’s always room for a little more.”

Malloy grinned, coughed three or four times, then wiped his eyes on his shirt sleeve. “You ever heard of Project Blue Book?”

It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Wasn’t it some kind of scandal in the testing department at the Naval Academy?”

The old man shook his head, smiling, then coughed again. “No. It was a government-appointed study started in 1952 to determine whether or not aliens had ever made contact with Earth.”

I remembered now. I’d always been somewhat interested in the idea of aliens but had never really gotten into the whole UFO scene.

“It was the first time the government publicly addressed the possible existence of UFOs. Of course, the findings were negative, and all reported sightings were determined to be fraudulent or misinterpreted. Most UFOlogists consider Project Blue Book to be the first step in a massive government cover-up.”

Malloy coughed again and turned to the desk behind him. He grabbed a can of Crown Cola and took a drink. The desk was littered with books and papers, some of which were covered with symbols like those I’d seen back at the boarding house.

“Anyway, the government made an official announcement that Project Blue Book had been closed.”

He paused poignantly.

“It wasn’t. The truth is, the military had found something at Roswell — I’m assuming you’ve heard about Roswell — and it wasn’t a @#%$ weather balloon. It was a spacecraft, and it sure wasn’t Soviet. The Roswell incident was the greatest disinformation campaign of all time. Sure, there were allegations and investigations, books written and witnesses interviewed, but not a shred of tangible evidence was ever released to the public.”

I’d heard this kind of talk before, mostly from UFO crackpots. I believed Malloy more than I would believe most people on this topic, but he hadn’t told me anything that wasn’t already in print.

“So what does this have to do with Project Blue Book?”

Malloy grinned. “Project Blue Book turned into Project Blueprint. I seriously doubt you’ve heard of it, seeing as how you’re still alive. The military made it their top priority and never allowed a leak.”

“What is Project Blueprint?”

“The wreckage in Roswell was taken to a nearby underground base. A handful of top researchers with the highest security clearance were essentially given lifetime assignments to the Roswell complex. The spacecraft was not large, but was chock full of goodies to analyse. Of course, their first thought was of finding weapons, or technology to help build a better bomb. Remember, we were still in the middle of the Cold War and looking for any advantage possible.”

“Seems to me the military hasn’t changed a whole lot.”

Malloy smiled grimly and nodded.

“You got that right. Anyway, Project Blueprint was the operation concerned with gleaning new information and/or technology from the wreckage. The research continued well into the 1980s. Small advances were made, but it took time for our analysing technology to catch up the alien data. Eventually we got there.”

“You said ‘We”’

Malloy leaned back and took another sip of cola.

“So I did. I joined Project Blueprint in 1984. As a promising graduate student in linguistics and symbology, I was recruited by the military and given the assignment at age 21. In retrospect, that particular year was an interesting time to join, seeing how Big Brother was firmly in place, and the Peacekeeper was the most powerful weapon on the planet. It now strikes me as being very Orwellian. Anyway, I went to work at the Roswell complex. My job was to carry on the work of deciphering hieroglyphics. Very little — or I should say, no — progress had been made over the previous thirty-two years. In the years since the Roswell incident, the military had found no other spacecraft, though plenty of sightings were reported.”

The old man was besieged by coughing spasms, which took him a minute to recover from.

“Excuse my hacking. It’s become a problem lately.”

I waited, impatient to hear the rest of the story. Eventually, Malloy caught his breath and went on. “I’d been working in Project Blueprint for about fourteen years when word came through the complex that there’d been a breakthrough. I never got all the details, but apparently someone had discovered that one of the alien instruments would generate minute quantities of antimatter. Of course, this was technology we were capable of — in theory — in 1998, but the operation was impractical, not to mention potentially devastating. The alien technology worked much more efficiently.

“Naturally, the military was ecstatic about the breakthrough and set about using the antimatter generator to build a new and improved bomb. If you will remember, the Desert Standoff was in effect by then, and we were looking for a technology edge on the Middle East Bloc. Well, the military had what they needed and started the war. Unfortunately, as you know, things went wrong.”

“That’s the understatement of the century.”

“Yeah, well, the military didn’t think it had time to do any testing. Instead, they started a political incident and let it boil until they could plead probable cause. Then they flew a squadron out and dropped a few bombs. I don’t know all the details, but apparently the bombs hit someplace they weren’t supposed to and started a chain reaction. It ended up being like Chernobyl back in the early ‘80s, only on a scale a hundred times bigger. As the war raged on, radiation clouds drifted across every continent, seeding the atmosphere to the point of saturation. The military had screwed up big, and even they realised it. They stopped producing the bombs and destroyed the generator, but it was too late. The war ended, but irreparable damage had been done.”

Malloy paused for a moment, pondering the sad, stupid, tragic story.

After a short time, the old man leaned forward and spoke, his voice low. “During all this, as I said, I’d been working on the hieroglyphics found in the Roswell spacecraft. We had quite a bit of raw material to work with, but of course, we had no key. The collective set of symbols was an interstellar Rosetta Stone, a cryptic code just waiting to be broken. I spent the first sixteen years obsessed with the hieroglyphics. At least a dozen times, I felt like I was on the verge of discovery when, suddenly, everything would fall apart.

“After the war ended, Project Blueprint was disbanded. The military was embarrassed and decided to terminate the whole operation. I ended up being reassigned to China, where I translated Chinese documentation. Fortunately, I had managed to smuggle out all my notes, records, and physical reproductions from Roswell. In China, I secretly continued my research, always certain that I would eventually make sense of the cryptic symbols… and I did.”

If Malloy was telling the truth, if he wasn’t just a crackpot driven mad by a lifelong obsession, I could become one of the first people to hear the words of an alien race. According to some people’s beliefs, I could essentially be hearing the word of God. I waited breathlessly.

The words never came. With a terrific crash, the door on the far side of the room was kicked open. A masked figure, dressed completely in Black, burst through the doorway. Cradled in his arms was an assault rifle. Almost majestically, Malloy stood up and turned toward the figure. Through the open door, I could hear the sound of pounding footsteps. There were a lot more of them coming. Malloy turned back toward me and motioned toward another door.

“Get out of here! Save yourself!

I hesitated instinctively. I couldn’t just leave Malloy. The gunman was levelling his rifle at the old man — he was as good as dead. As I bolted from my seat, I caught sight of Malloy rushing in the direction of the masked figure and heard the rifle go off. Malloy screamed as I tore open the door and plunged into the darkness. As I ran like a madman down a dark corridor, bullets sprayed the door I had just passed through. A dimly glowing Exit sign appeared, and I hit the door at full speed. Rounds of ammunition came flying down the passageway, sinking into the walls around me. I was through the door and into a cement stairwell. I leaped down the stairs, oblivious to any pain or lack of oxygen. Above me, I could hear footsteps in pursuit, and they sounded faster than mine.

Finally I reached ground level and burst through the door. I was on the side of the building. I ran to my left, around the corner to my waiting speeder. No one was waiting for me; whoever they were, they must have never considered that I would make it back this far. I jumped into the speeder and lifted off. Several bullets struck the back of my speeder, but too late. The sound of rounds being fired died out slowly as I sped off into the early red sky.