‘This is kind of Ethan’s area of expertise,’ Lopez explained. ‘Have you contacted his family?’
Lucy nodded. ‘I spoke to his sister, Natalie, and she said that they speak to him regularly by phone but that they have no idea where he is.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’
‘Natalie promised that she would tell him that I was looking for him but she admitted that contact with Ethan is sporadic and it could be weeks or even months before he speaks to her again. I don’t know who else to turn to.’
For the first time Lopez recognised a hint of fear in Lucy’s tone and instinctively her disinterest vanished as she leaned forward in her seat.
‘How do you know that somebody has made a similar discovery as the one in Israel?’
‘A man came to see me this morning,’ Lucy explained. ‘He insisted I share with him everything I knew about what was discovered in Israel. When I explained that I knew nothing, he threatened me.’
‘Do you know his name or where he came from?’
‘His name was Vladimir Polkov, and I think he was Russian or at the very least eastern European.’
‘And do you know anything about what was discovered in Israel?’
Lucy nodded. ‘I know a great deal about it, because I’ve been studying it for the past five years.’ She reached into her bag and produced a clear plastic cylinder. Inside the cylinder was a bone that looked a little like a finger bone but was much, much longer. ‘I think they were looking for this.’
Lopez peered at the bone for a moment and saw the label stuck to the outside of the cylinder. Inscribed with the word Negev and a date from five years previously, she did not need to ask what the bone was.
‘Who else knows that you have that?’ Lopez asked.
‘Just Ethan, because it was he who gave me this bone. He liberated it from the remains that I excavated in Israel and handed it to me before my return to Chicago, and before he met you in Washington DC. Miss Lopez, I don’t know who is watching me but I think they know that I’m lying and I’m not sure what they’re going to do next. I really need to find Ethan Warner — will you help me?’
VI
‘I want to speak to you plainly and in complete security. You are under no obligations and your presence here remains covert. No non-disclosure protocols are in operation, as I have asked you here on trust and reputation alone.’
Lieutenant General J. F. Nellis was a former United States Air Force officer who had recently been appointed DNI by the current president. Just one year into the role and he had already aged visibly, swamped by the sheer volume of information he was required to process as a matter of daily routine.
‘That’s the first time anybody has said that in an agency capacity. What gives?’
Former Defense Intelligence Agency operative Douglas Ian Jarvis sat opposite the DNI and tried not to look nervous. Almost as old as the director himself, Jarvis had spent some twenty years working for the DIA and been involved in some of the highest-level classified operations ever conducted by elements of the US Covert Operations Service. Most of them he would never be able to talk about with another human being, even those with whom he had served. Jarvis knew the rules and had obeyed them with patriotic fervour, more or less, his entire career. Which was why he was now feeling uncomfortable.
There had been no warning of the meeting. He had been woken at five in the morning by a polite knock at his bedroom door. Not the front door of his house — his bedroom door. Two agents, both armed, had disabled his alarm and accessed his house before waking him at gunpoint to inform him that he should not panic, that he was required for a meeting that must be conducted without observation of any kind.
Jarvis, unsurprisingly, had believed himself the victim of a terrorist abduction and had almost shot the two agents with the pistol he held under his pillow, but one of them had uttered two words that had both shocked him and belayed his trigger finger.
Majestic Twelve.
‘You served the DIA for two decades, the last five years of which you operated a covert unit tasked with high-level, low-footprint investigations into unusual phenomena. By your own design the outfit was conceived to be completely deniable and capable of infiltrating government agency programs under the umbrella of its official investigative charter.’
Jarvis blinked. ‘We stole data, exposed corruption and investigated paranormal events.’
General Nellis smiled at Jarvis, took the hint. They could talk as he had requested and dispose of the formalities.
‘At what level was your non-disclosure agreement ordered?’
‘Cosmic,’ Jarvis replied, ‘Level Five. Orders came from the Pentagon, which department I do not know. All five of the investigations we conducted were sealed terminal, never to be released for public consumption.’
Nellis nodded as he looked down at folder before him. ‘Tell me, how did you come into all of this?’
‘Short story?’
‘As concise as you can be.’
Jarvis began to feel a little more at ease, but he still picked his words with care as he spoke. He didn’t know the DNI well enough to be sure of whether this was going to end with him being hung out to dry for revealing state secrets.
‘The program I led was not designed by me but was inherited. It had its origins in something known as Project Blue Book, a series of systematic studies of the UFO phenomena conducted by the Air Force. It started with Project Sign, then Project Grudge, before becoming Blue Book. Designed to determine if UFOs represented a threat to national security and to analyse data gathered from sightings, it was scrapped in 1970.’
‘And then resurrected later?’
‘The CIA had numerous projects running through the seventies and eighties, like Project Stargate which investigated psychic phenomena and remote viewing, and units like MK-ULTRA which studied everything from hallucinatory drug-induced assassins to microwave mind-control and use of animals as weapons of war. All of these programs were eventually shut down, but a few years back I was approached by the DIA to start up a small unit that unified the disparate threads of previous CIA-led programs and create a more covert study of such phenomena. Essentially, we were willing to investigate events that other agencies rejected as fantasy.’
Nellis leafed through a few pages of the folder. ‘What was the catalyst for this sudden volte-face of the DIA?’
‘An event that occurred in Israel,’ Jarvis said, and then let his voice trail off.
Nellis looked at Jarvis for a moment. ‘You can speak freely here, Doug.’
‘No, sir, I cannot,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Lives have been taken as a result of the Pentagon’s determination to preserve security over that operation.’
Nellis held Jarvis’s gaze for a long moment. ‘I can tell you, Mr Jarvis, that you never received orders from the Pentagon regarding these issues and operations.’
Jarvis stared long and hard at the DNI before he replied. ‘Say that again?’
‘You never received orders from the Pentagon regarding these issues and operations,’ Nellis repeated. ‘Your non-disclosure agreements, although legally and technically valid in a public setting, hold no weight in this office.’
‘Who gave the orders?’ Jarvis asked, stunned.
‘I’ll get to that,’ Nellis replied. ‘Israel?’
Jarvis sighed. He was an old man now, and he realized that it wasn’t like the Pentagon or anybody else could steal his young life away from him. If he was ever going to be able to come clean about the operations he had conducted, now was the time and Nellis was the man.