The file had come to his desk at the same time as McCain had approached him regarding the event in Scotland, and its secrecy level meant that nobody could be contacted regarding its contents. Although there was no direct way for Mackenzie to back-track the files and locate Jarvis or whomever had actually sent him the project, there might be clues within the paperwork that would reveal the most likely source. It clearly had not been from the White House or any other official body, so that ruled out normal channels of communication with the Pentagon. There was nothing in the way that the report had been worded that struck him as out of place or indicative of a certain post or command. That left only one thing, the name; Douglas Jarvis.

  The former DIA agent and Marine officer had been part of ARIES, a secretive DIA sponsored team tasked with what amounted to paranormal investigations. That in turn had led him on to Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez. They appeared to be patriots through and through and were even now risking their necks to protect Kyle Trent, so the threat was not coming from them. When he had suggested to McCain that the CIA might be behind the hit, McCain had been shocked and had said that it was “much worse than that” but had not then explained what he had meant.

  Mackenzie rubbed his forehead between the fingers of his right hand. Warner and Lopez. Their records indicated that they were routinely attacked by elements of various foreign powers, most often the Russians. Mackenzie thought for a moment, about everything that he had seen, and then suddenly it hit him as hard as the sniper’s bullet had hit the kid, Greg, out there in the lonely deserts.

  He saw the sniper’s shot hitting the kid’s head, and suddenly he understood what McCain had meant.

  ‘It’s much worse than that.’

  Mackenzie bolted up out of his seat, grabbed his jacket and rushed for the door. The Dugway troops hadn’t opened fire on anyone. That meant there was another player in the game, and suddenly the attempted hit on himself and his family made sense. He knew that he had to get the word out before this whole thing blew up in their faces and Ethan and Nicola found themselves face to face with…

  Mackenzie opened the apartment door in time to see four men rush in. There was no time to fight, no time even to react. They ploughed into him and he crashed down onto his back on the threadbare rug in his room, the four men plunging down on top of him. Gloved hands silenced any cry he might have made and he felt a sharp pain in his neck as something icy cold was injected into his body.

  Mackenzie cried out, but no sound came forth as his limbs became numb and his vision faded to blackness.

  ***

  XXXII

  Quinn Canyon Range,

  Adaven, Nevada

  The map barely marked the route as Ethan drove down a dusty trail that led off the state highway and into the barren hills of Quinn Canyon Range, the sun just rising over the desert wilderness. They had passed a couple of ranch stations on the way a few miles back, but that was the last they had seen of civilisation as they drove across the blistering desert toward the canyon wash.

  The trail followed the winding canyon as they entered into its depths, the sand-coloured hills either side of them peppered with thorn scrub and devoid of anything approaching human habitation. They drove for a mile, and then another, Ethan cautious of their remote location.

  ‘We’ll have to turn back soon,’ he said. ‘Without spare water, we’re in real danger out here. If the car quits it’ll be a self-rescue job because nobody knows where we are.’

  Lopez nodded, more than aware of their vulnerability out here. Kyle Trent seemed oblivious, shaking his head as he read from his laptop.

  ‘The amount of work this guy did is incredible,’ he enthused. ‘I mean, some of his theories are right out there but he backs them up with hard evidence and examples. If even half of what this guy thinks is right, we’re looking at the whole UFO phenomenon the wrong way around.’

  Ethan was about to ask what Kyle meant when he spotted something in the brush ahead. Angular, awkward looking, it was as out of place in nature as anything he’d seen and the sign that they were encountering man-made objects.

  ‘There’s something out here,’ he said as he slowed the car.

  Ethan rounded the corner and saw the hood of an abandoned vehicle, its bodywork rusted to an orange-brown. It looked like something he had seen on black and white television shows, a 1930s vintage vehicle that had been out here in the deserts for close to a century.

  ‘We won’t be getting that running again if this car quits,’ Lopez observed, and then she sighed. ‘Nobody’s been out here for decades, we’re wasting our time.’

  Ethan shook his head. ‘No, we’re not.’

  ‘There’s nobody here!’ Lopez said as she pointed at the canyon around them.

  ‘No,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but there was.’

  He pointed over the hood of the car, and for a moment Lopez didn’t get it. But then she realised what he was looking at.

  ‘I’ll be damned.’

  The winds of the open desert constantly shifted, hiding trails and patterns in the sands, but here in the canyon Ethan could see the trail left by a vehicle, and that trail could not have been more than a day or two old to still be here.

  ‘Someone’s here,’ he said. ‘Let’s just hope it’s this Ben Freeman and he’s…’

  A gunshot shattered the silence outside and Ethan slammed on the brakes as a puff of dust burst on the trail a couple of yards ahead of the car. Ethan jammed the car in reverse and was about to hightail it backwards down the track when Kyle Trent leaped out of the vehicle and waved his hands in the air.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’

  Ethan was about to yell at Kyle to get back into the car when he heard another gunshot and a spurt of dust whipped up near where Kyle stood. The sound of the shot echoed down the canyon, that of a double-barrelled shotgun. Ethan could not see the shooter but he knew for sure that no trained military soldier would use a shotgun in terrain like this, the weapon far too inaccurate to confirm a kill unless you were within fifty yards or so.

  ‘They’ve fired warning shots only,’ Lopez observed.

  ‘On target,’ Ethan nodded as he slipped the car into neutral.

  Kyle Trent was standing in front of the car with his hands still in the air as he called out.

  ‘Ben? Ben Freeman, is that you?’

  His voice echoed down the canyon as Ethan turned off the engine. There was no point in running now, and neither he nor Lopez were armed. They waited in silence for what felt like an age, nothing but the hot desert wind moaning through the valley around them, and then a voice called back.

  ‘Who’s askin’?’

  Ethan glanced in the direction of the voice. He could see nothing but scrub and rock on the hillsides, the canyon playing tricks and carrying sound this way and that.

  ‘Kyle Trent! I’m a… a computer hacker. I managed to make a program that predicts where UFOs will appear. I need your help with something.’

  Smart kid, Ethan thought. Kyle had left out anything about the government shooting his friend and pursuing them across the country. Despite his earlier misgivings, he was starting to like Trent. He got out of the car and moved to stand alongside Trent.

  ‘Who’s the bodyguard?’ the voice yelled from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  ‘Ethan,’ Kyle replied, ‘he’s helping me with his partner.

  As if on cue, Lopez got out of the car. She moved to stand on the other side of Kyle. Ethan wasn’t sure if it was the wind or not, but as Lopez appeared he could have sworn he heard the man say “hot damn” and cough. Lopez certainly looked the part as her long black hair snaked like a banner on the breeze and the low sunlight illuminated her face.

  ‘Who’s the broad?’

  Ethan smiled as he wondered how hard Lopez would hit the mystery man for that.

  ‘Nicola Lopez,’ she shouted back, ‘and you call me that again, I’ll take that shotgun and shove it up your ar…’

  ‘I’m a comin’,’ the man yelled, and stepped out almost right in front of them as though he had appeared in a puff of smoke.

  To Ethan’s surprise, the side of the hills and gulleys just ahead and to their left was in fact a simple canvass hide, painted the exact same colour as the hill behind it and carefully disguised with scrub bushes. The narrow approach road meant that their perspective on the hide was limited to a narrow angle, and so they could not see that it was not a part of the natural hillside until the man stepped out from behind it into view and broke the illusion.

  The man was in his sixties, Ethan reckoned, with a grizzly grey beard and half-moon spectacles. He held the shotgun at port arms, neither threatening them nor accepting them as friends either. Kyle took the initiative.

  ‘We’ve got some footage here that I think you’d like to see, but some of the data we’ve gathered is too complex for us to understand. We need your help to figure it out.’

  Again, Kyle played the old man like a fiddle, teasing him in with precisely what they figured he’d like to hear. Ben Freeman peered at them suspiciously.

  ‘Government send you?’ he half-asked, half-stated, then pointed at Ethan. ‘You look like you’ve been in the military.’

  ‘Marines, twenty years ago,’ Ethan admitted, sensing an opportunity. ‘We’re not working for anyone, but we are interested in what you’d have to say about what we’ve got here. I’ve never seen images like it.’

  ‘That so?’ Ben chirped. ‘That’d be just the thing to get me all excited and drop m’guard, don’t you agree?’

  Ethan smiled ruefully. The old man wasn’t going to be swayed so easily, but it was Lopez who replied.

  ‘Yeah, you got us. We’re working for the CIA. We’re a covert hunter team sent here to erase you from existence. We were offered a platoon of troops, an attack helicopter and explosives but nah, we just wandered out into the desert in a Lincoln, unarmed and with a geeky teenager in tow, ‘cause we figured that would buckle you at the knees.’

  The old man cackled a laugh that sounded like crows feasting on a carcass. The laugh instantly degenerated into a membrane-tearing cough that made Ethan’s eyes water just to hear it. Ben Freeman doubled over and Ethan hurried to his side as the shotgun fell from his grip. He caught the weapon, and Ben looked up at him with eyes both streaming with mirth and also filled with sudden fear and uncertainty.

  Ethan turned the shotgun around, set the safety catch to on, and then held it out for the old man.

  ‘We’re not here to harm you, and we really do need your help.’

  Ben Freeman got his lungs under control as Lopez and Kyle joined them. The relief in the old man’s eyes was plain to see as he realised that they were kindred spirits and not the government assassins he so plainly feared had found him.

  ‘You’d better come this way,’ he said, his voice rough.

  ***

  XXXIII

  Ethan could see that all that remained of Adaven was a few weathered shacks and what looking like abandoned mining equipment that lay scattered and rusting amid the thorn scrub. He followed Ben to what looked like just another abandoned homestead nestled against the hills, but as they got closer it became clear that the homestead was in fact in perfect working order, the battered walls merely a shell tacked on to give it a weathered appearance.

  The canyon walls rose up either side of them to great heights, effectively concealing the homestead even from air traffic passing overhead.

  Ben led the way inside. The living room before Ethan was little more than an immense library with some scattered chairs and a sofa. The whole place was scented with the odours of old paper, leather and books. Shelves lined every wall, filled with reference books on physics, astronomy, electromagnetism, chemistry and biology. Kyle wandered into this plethora of material, both wide eyed and confused.

  ‘Do you have a computer?’ he asked Ben.

  ‘Pah!’ the old man scoffed. ‘I do have one but it isn’t connected to the Internet, damnable thing.’

  ‘You don’t have an internet connection?’ Kyle asked, stunned.

  Ethan was mildly surprised but the old man looked at Kyle as though he were an imbecile. ‘For every bit of valuable information on the Internet, there is a thousand times more garbage! The Internet is a trash can for the bile of humanity’s wretched bowels, the repository of all the inane gossip and drivel that was once confined to conversations and could be denounced face to face. Instead, we have a digital crucible where anyone can say anything, where falsehoods and outright lies have become the currency of mankind.’

  ‘Not on Facebook then?’ Lopez murmured.

  Ben didn’t dignify her flippancy with a reply as he spread his arms to encompass the room around them. ‘Once, the printed word was the currency of knowledge, and if one wrote drivel you could be assured that others would present them with that drivel and demand evidence, to prove that what they had written was real. Books required bibliographies, so others could also check the reference and validate or reject the author’s claims. This, my friends, is knowledge.’

  Lopez scanned the shelves. ‘I’d have a tough time squeezing that lot into my back pocket, where my phone lives. I like to travel light. Kyle, show the professor here what you’ve got.’

  ‘I don’t want to see it,’ Ben snapped.

  ‘What?’ Ethan uttered. ‘You’ve got to see the pictures, they’re electrifying.’

  ‘They’re worthless,’ Ben insisted. ‘I could sit and watch Independence Day and be told that it looked amazing, but I’d still know that it was produced with digital animation. It’s just pictures.’

  Kyle’s wonder morphed into anger. ‘My friend died to get these pictures here.’

  Old Ben froze in motion and peered at them. Kyle’s careful screening of the truth was shattered in an instant.

  ‘What have you brought to my home?’ the old man growled.

  Ethan stepped in, not wanting to lose Ben’s assistance.

  ‘The photographs and video Kyle took were shot at a place called Dugway Proving Ground. Someone opened fire when they detected his presence, and one of his friends was shot and killed. They’re hunting for Kyle right now, because of what he’s come here to show you. That’s about how real they consider it to be.’

  Ben Freeman thought for a moment, and then he sat down on an old sofa and sighed wearily.

  ‘I’ve managed to stay happily hidden out here for more than twenty years, and you bring the military to my doorstep?’

  ‘You’re not hidden,’ Lopez replied. ‘You need supplies, medicine, food. You’re known to be in Rachel from time to time. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find you Ben, we managed it in a couple hours. The military likely knew you were here all along.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ben agreed, ‘and they left me alone here. Now what’s going to happen?’

  ‘Look at what we’ve brought here,’ Ethan urged him. ‘Help us in any way that you can, and then we’ll leave and dummy trail the military right past Rachel and right past you. They won’t know we were ever here.’

  ‘It’s still just pictures,’ Ben resisted.

  ‘It’s not,’ Kyle replied. ‘It’s the data they’re after.’

  ‘What data?’

  Kyle perched on the edge of a chair and started talking. Ethan and Lopez waited in silence as Kyle laid it all out for the old man; the data gathering and the PredPol predictive policing program that he had hacked and appropriated for himself; the development of the Hydra and the data crunching that he had performed; and the big data from MUFON and other sources that had allowed him to begin predicting when and where UFOs might appear. Ben Freeman listened in silence as Kyle went on.

  ‘The Hydra predicted a UFO appearance in Scotland, United Kingdom, and another in Utah at the Dugway facility a few days later. It was that information that allowed me to be present at the scene and film UFOs. We got images in optical, ultra-violet and infra-red light, like nothing anyone’s ever seen. The government troops want the images but it’s really the data they’re after.’

  Kyle did not mention the fact that he had been provoking the government into declassifying its UFO files, demanding full disclosure “or else” he’d go public with the images. Ben Freeman peered at Kyle for a long time before he finally spoke.

  ‘You can predict when UFOs will appear?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Kyle nodded, ‘with about seventy-five to eighty per cent accuracy.’

  Ben did not move for a long moment. When he did, it seemed to Ethan that he was doing so with guarded interest. He got up and walked to a shelf, unerringly selecting a folder tucked between ranks of books. He dusted it off and walked back to his seat, flopping down into it as he opened the folder.

  ‘In almost forty years of investigations, I have found precisely five cases of what can definitely be termed alien spacecraft being encountered by human beings on this planet.’

  Ethan moved closer to the old man without realising it, his eyes fixed on the folder in his lap.

  ‘Seriously?’ Lopez replied. ‘Just five?’

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t mean there aren’t more of them out there,’ Ben said. ‘It just means that with the data we have, five is the number of cases that are without doubt extra terrestrial in origin. They are the cases which I have studied the most, and they are the ones that have revealed the most intriguing and solid information I have on what these things are and what they’re doing here.’

  Kyle moved closer to Ben too, his laptop open.

  ‘We need to share our information,’ he said. ‘If we can figure out what’s been going on all these years, we might have the key to advancing humanity, not to mention getting a bunch of bad-ass dudes off my back.’

  Ben Freeman briefly removed his spectacles and sighed as he replied.

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’

  ‘Why not?’ Lopez challenged, as eager as Ethan to hear what was in the file. ‘People have a right to know about these things. There’s a seven-year old girl who’s battling depression and seizures because of encounters with these things and you won’t tell us what the hell’s going on?’

 

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