‘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.’