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.