‘We can’t focus on that many people,’ Lopez agreed. ‘If we can’t find Abrahem we’re not going to be able to stop him.’
‘If he’s targeting the Trans Pacific ceremony purposefully,’ Ethan said, ‘that means he must have planned this attack for some months. He would have had to be sure that the Presidents of both the United States and China were going to be in the same place at the same time. That narrows our list of potential targets down.’
‘To a couple of thousand,’ Jarvis replied. ‘The President has been informed of the threat but is showing no signs of backing out of the ceremony, so you’ll have to brief the administration yourselves.’
‘What?’ Lopez uttered.
‘You’ll be taken directly to Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver your own briefing to POTUS.’
Ethan blinked in surprise as Lopez frowned.
‘What’s POTUS?’ she asked.
Jarvis glanced at her, somewhat bemused. ‘President Of The United States, genius. You’d best do your hair.’
XXIX
‘Will the Chiefs of Staff be present?’ Ethan asked as he climbed back into the limousine.
‘I doubt it.’
‘And the directors of the intelligence and security services?’
‘I certainly hope not.’
Ethan glanced at Lopez as the limousine climbed out of the underground lot and into the late afternoon sunshine. ‘That means LeMay won’t be there.’
Jarvis leaned in conspiratorially as he replied.
‘The President wants to be updated personally on our progress. He knows that what’s happened at Fort Benning will break out globally through the media within days, and he wants every last piece of information at his disposal when the storm hits. That means us debriefing him now before we do anything else. Believe it or not he asked for the both of you personally.’
Lopez raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. ‘Both of us?’
‘You’re a team,’ Jarvis replied. ‘And as it’s now Lopez & Warner Inc, it would have looked odd not to have you both there.’
Ethan glanced out of the tinted windows as the limousine passed through the last of the NSA checkpoints and began heading for the cluttered skyline of Washington DC. He had last met the current President several years before when he, along with Lopez, had prevented a crazed pastor by the name of Kelvin Patterson from infecting the then senator with an alien virus that the pastor had believed was in fact the blood of angels.
Despite the remarkable nature of their encounter they had won the eternal gratitude of the senator and now, it would seem, the President’s ear.
‘If we can let him know about Majestic Twelve, about what’s been happening, about LeMay’s involvement,’ Ethan began, ‘we could really start to root out the twelve men behind everything and…’
‘That’s not going to happen, Ethan,’ Jarvis cut him off. ‘You’ll put the President in a position where he’ll not be able to trust his most senior advisors. Short of replacing his entire administration there’s no way for us to let him know of what’s happening without fatally flawing his presidency, and you’re forgetting one important thing.’
‘What’s that?’ Lopez asked.
‘The President himself might be a member of MJ–12.’
Ethan stared at Jarvis for a long moment. ‘He wouldn’t have gone down that road — he was one of the staunchest senators when it came to government transparency and the reduction of corporate influence at the Capitol. It’s what got him into power.’
‘That’s the public face of politics,’ Jarvis replied as the limousine whispered along the asphalt. ‘What happens out of the eyes of the media, behind closed doors, is another matter entirely. Right now the only people we can trust besides DIA Director Nellis are the three of us and my assistant, Hellerman, as he’s too damned Uncle Sam to even think about taking MJ–12’s coin against our country.’
‘And yet we were working for them and didn’t even know it,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘They didn’t need brain implants to have us around their little fingers. A group so closely woven into the fabric of political life in Washington can’t be unraveled overnight even if the President is on our side, because we can never know exactly who to take this to.’
Jarvis offered them a tight smile.
‘That may not be true,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ Ethan asked, suddenly cautious.
Jarvis leaned back in his seat and watched the suburbs of the city passing by outside beyond the tinted windows as the limousine crossed the Anacostia River on the 11th Street Bridge.
‘I had an idea.’
‘I don’t like it when that happens,’ Lopez replied.
‘It sounds like government speak for “I’ve had a dangerous idea”,’ Ethan agreed. ‘We’re only in this to stop Abrahem Nassir, not run errands for the DIA and the Pentagon.’
‘I haven’t told them about this,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Not even Director Nellis.’
Ethan stared at Jarvis in amazement. The one person who had done more than any other to resurrect the covert unit that Ethan, Lopez and Jarvis represented was now being kept out of the loop for reasons that Ethan could not fathom.
‘What’s going on, Doug?’
Jarvis took a deep breath.
‘You said it yourselves, we can’t do anything because we can’t trust a soul on Capitol Hill or down in the Pentagon. So, the only way we can get that trust is to ensure without any shadow of a doubt that we recruit people who are utterly loyal to us.’
Lopez shrugged.
‘Back to square one then as we can’t do that. We don’t know how far MJ–12’s reach extends.’
Jarvis nodded. ‘Unless the people we recruit have no choice but to help us,’ he said.
‘That’s blackmail,’ Ethan said. ‘That would make us no better than the people we’re trying to bring down.’
‘I wouldn’t use blackmail,’ Jarvis replied.
Ethan’s mind went blank as he struggled to understand what Jarvis was suggesting, but beside him Lopez gasped.
‘You want to implant people,’ she said. ‘You want to control our own people and find out what’s going on using the same tech’ that Abrahem’s been using!’
Jarvis raised his hands.
‘It’s only an idea at this stage,’ he said. ‘But it represents a technological leap in our intelligence gathering capabilities and it cannot be cast aside simply because human rights lawyers are…’
‘It’s illegal,’ Lopez snapped.
‘The subjects would be carefully selected and would not be controlled, only monitored in the same way that the criminals under The Identity Mine program are observed.’
‘Until somebody blows it wide open,’ Ethan said. ‘Another Snowden for instance, then what would we do? Can you imagine the fallout from something like that? It would make PRISM and MYSTIC look tame in comparison.’
‘But the reach we will have in pinning down MJ–12 could be unparalleled!’ Jarvis insisted. ‘The ends justify the means in this case, as the individuals we implant will know nothing of the device in their brains, just like the criminals we’re already tracking. The intelligence we’ve uncovered using The Identity Mine has solved countless law enforcement cases. With this technology we could extend that reach into counter — terrorism and in the case of MJ–12, counter corruption at the highest levels.’
Ethan shook his head.
‘And those highest levels of corruption would have no problem with murdering anybody they suspected of informing against them,’ he pointed out. ‘You’d be putting innocent lives in harm’s way and they would know nothing about it. It’s like putting a child in a blindfold and letting them walk into a lion’s cage.’