“I am going to share some information with you,” began Church, “that is of a highly confidential nature.”
She nodded. Church has never asked people to sign nondisclosure agreements. If he doesn’t trust someone he doesn’t tell them anything. And Junie was family.
“There are a number of things we want to share with you, and some of them may be unpleasant,” said Church. “I don’t think you’d thank us for sugar-coating it, so let’s start with the one that most affects you. We believe the Majestic program may still be active.”
Her face went dead pale beneath her spray of sun freckles, and she put a hand to her throat. “No… oh, God, are you sure?”
“Sure enough.”
We took turns laying it out for her. I started with the Closers who attacked Top and Bunny at Dr. San Pedro’s office. Church told her about the extreme cult of secrecy built around Gateway and how it was hidden in almost the same way as Majestic Three. We told her one of the things Aunt Sallie had learned last night, that the late Oscar Bell had worked on projects for Howard Shelton. Those ties, plus the exotic nature of the Gateway project.
As we laid it out, Junie’s shock was replaced by a critical intensity. Her body became less rigid but her eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s. She is not an ordinary person by any stretch. She has very high intelligence and an eidetic memory — she cannot forget anything she’s learned. Makes it really fucking hard to have an argument with her. Trust me on this.
During our info dump, Harcourt Bolton came in, exchanged silent greetings with Junie, and sat to Church’s right. Bastion jumped into the man’s lap and began cleaning himself. Pretty sure that did not endear either him or Bolton to Ghost, who gave them both the evil eye.
For Bolton’s benefit, Church even filled in some of Junie’s background, after first assuring her that Mr. Super Spy was there on the orders of the president and that all information shared in that room was confidential. I could tell Junie didn’t like it, and there was a damn good reason.
I’d met Junie when the DMS was looking for the Majestic Black Book. At first I thought she was nothing more than a smart and pretty lady who was half airy-fairy hippie and half conspiracy theory podcaster. Even split of both. She’d talked about the Black Book and Majestic Three on her podcast, so I went to see how she knew about them and to see how much of it was, in fact, conspiracy theory bullshit. Turns out… not much at all. Majestic Three had been building advanced weapons of war, including a new generation of ultrasophisticated stealth aircraft, using technologies recovered from crashed vehicles. They had also recovered some biological materials from those wrecks. Nothing alive, but they managed to sequence the DNA. Let’s just say that the DNA was exotic. M3 ultimately discovered that in order to use the technology of these vehicles they had to include an element of that DNA into the mix. That was a big problem for a long time, but they solved it by genetically grafting the alien DNA to human embryos, creating true hybrids. They raised thousands of them in groups called hives. Most of the hybrids died off. A flaw in the DNA made them exceptionally prone to diseases, particularly brain and bone cancer.
When I met Junie she was battling brain cancer.
Yeah. Run with that and you’ll get into the right end zone. Not a comfortable place to be. Does that mean she has antennae or any of that stuff? No. Her DNA is more than 85 percent human. But along with the cancer — which she’s beaten twice now — she got an exceptionally high IQ, perfect recall, and higher than normal aptitude in science, mathematics, engineering, and other related sciences. She had been in one of the last batches of hive kids, and in order to breed more socially adept children, M3 seeded many of those kids into foster homes. Most of the foster parents were employees of M3 or in some way associated with it. Howard was the mastermind behind this whole thing. He’s dead and, hopefully, burning somewhere. Sick bastard.
“And that brings us to the God Machine,” said Church. At that point he turned it over to Bolton, who told Junie what he’d told me. I have to admit, she took it better than I had and she asked smarter questions.
She glanced around at each of us. “You realize that this is not a new theory, right?”
“Please explain,” said Church and Bolton at the same time.
“The God Machine, it’s been around for a long time,” said Junie. “I mean, a device that can open a doorway between our world and another, that’s not a new concept. It’s a scientific twist on the conjuring circle. And, please bear in mind, I said ‘circle.’ It’s always been a circular doorway. Nearly every culture has some version of it. Nikola Tesla was working on something like this, maybe exactly this. There’s a story that’s been floating around the conspiracy theory world for over a century about Tesla building an interdimensional doorway at his laboratory at Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York. According to the story, he was approached by a very rich old man who paid him to build a machine called an Orpheus Gate. The description matches the God Machine, even down to the gemstones, which, according to the story, were somehow used to regulate the power. Tesla told a colleague sometime later that he built two of them. The first one vanished as soon as it was turned on, and it blew out all of the power in the entire region.”
“Well, well,” said Bolton.
“Orpheus Gate,” murmured Church, nodding. “I’ve heard of that, but I did not make the connection. I should have. Apparently we’ve all been off our game.”
Bolton nodded. “Agreed. None of us are at our best right now.”
Junie picked up her story. “When the Orpheus Gate was activated there was some kind of intense energetic discharge — something he called a ‘God Wave.’ It knocked Tesla out and he was sick for weeks afterward. He had a high fever and hallucinated badly.”
“If there’s any more precise description of his symptoms,” I said, “I’d like to share it with Dr. Hu. Maybe match it against the symptoms of what Top, Bunny, and I had. After all, we got sick after an energetic discharge from the Gateway machine.”
Church nodded and asked Junie to continue.
“The whole experience shook Tesla’s confidence,” she said, cutting me a quick look, “and it changed him. That was when he started shifting his focus from sustainable energy and communication systems to weapons of war. Death rays and that sort of thing. Some historians say that he went mad, and maybe we know why.”
“‘Mad’ is a relative term,” observed Bolton.
“There’s more,” said Junie. “In 1918 a constable in a small fishing town in Spain reported that a strange machine appeared in a farmer’s barn. Actually he said that it looked like it exploded through the side of the barn. He found a naked old man near the machine who claimed that he was a traveler who was trying to find his way home. The constable got sick shortly after that, and so did everyone in the town. That’s where the first cases of the Spanish flu were reported.”
Well, yeah, that hit us all like a cruise missile. Junie looked around at our stricken faces.
“What?” she asked.
“Ms. Flynn,” said Church, “did anyone tell you what kind of virus Captain Ledger and his men were affected by?”
“No. Just that it was a rare mutation of the flu.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The Spanish flu.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Church immediately called Dr. Hu and Bug and brought them up to speed, and ordered them to run down this information. Almost immediately Bug came back with hits. Even for MindReader, a Net search required the right keywords. The hits he got were not on the “God Machine” but on the “Orpheus Gate.”