Origin (18 page)

By the tempo of the gait, he surmised it was Stephenfield – although it seemed the intelligence chief had altered the length of his stride, perhaps to test his awareness.

‘Come on in, Sam,’ he said, opening the door just before the knock came.

Stephenfield looked up and smiled. ‘You didn’t fall for it then?’

‘You nearly had me,’ Adams joked as he let his old friend in, ‘but I guess you’ll just have to try harder next time.’

‘Well, you always were the best,’ Stephenfield admitted as he entered the living room. He spotted Lynn sitting on the couch, rested now after her long sleep, and nodded his head in greeting. ‘Hi, Lynn,’ he said amiably.

‘Hi, Sam,’ Lynn said in return. ‘I’m not sure what we have in the kitchen, but can I get you something?’

Stephenfield shook his head. ‘No thanks,’ he replied. ‘You’re probably going to want to hear this right away. We’ve got some news.’

Adams went to sit down on the couch next to Lynn, and they interlinked hands without even thinking. Stephenfield took his seat in the armchair opposite.

‘Right, first things first,’ he began. ‘We checked with DNA Analytics, and they haven’t got any results yet.’

Adams nodded his head. ‘Yeah, it’ll be at least another day or two, we figure. Hopefully the money will speed things up a bit, though.’

‘And the helicopter?’ Lynn asked anxiously.

‘Well, it looks like we were right about the Bilderberg Group. We used the numbers you gave us and traced the helicopters through several cut-offs and back channels to the person who chartered them.’ Stephenfield noted the look of anticipation on the faces of both Lynn and Adams. ‘Wesley Jones,’ he told them, and saw their looks turn to confusion, realizing that they would never have heard of the man. And why should they? ‘Fifty-six years old, ex-Defence Intelligence Agency, rank of colonel. Now the private aide to Stephen Jacobs.’

Adams and Lynn had been given dossiers on what Stephenfield had already found out about the Bilderberg Group and knew instantly who Stephen Jacobs was.

‘The chairman of the group?’ Adams asked for confirmation.

‘One and the same. So let me spell it out,’ Stephenfield carried on. ‘The aide of the chairman of the Bilderberg Group is the person who chartered the helicopters that took the team of engineers to the Antarctic, and that left with the body. We now have a clear, definite link between the group and what’s been happening to you both.’

‘OK,’ Adams said in a measured tone. ‘What else do we know?’

‘John wants to talk to you about that himself,’ Stephenfield said in answer, standing up from his chair. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

Hi Kdan Business Park is part of the San Xavier Development Authority, located in Tucson, just off the Nogales Highway. Situated within Tohono O’odham territory, it was regarded as something of a safe haven for John Ayita, who rented one of the small industrial units on a long-term lease.

The situation with Matt Adams and his ex-wife disturbed him greatly. Not only was one of their old comrades dead, but their entire unit had been shut down by an enemy that seemed enormously powerful. And what about the body that Lynn and her team – also all dead – had found in the Antarctic? What was the story behind that? What Ayita had learnt recently certainly hinted that it might be very special indeed, which was why it was attracting such very special attention. But it was where the remaining helicopter, the one that had carried the body, had ultimately landed that worried Ayita particularly. It meant the powers ranged against them, and which they would be forced to confront, were greater than they had at first thought.

They were going to have to enter the belly of the beast, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Adams still had the fight for it.

T
HE SUN WAS
starting to set, a huge red fireball slowly descending behind the Tucson Mountains far to the west, when Stephenfield’s battered Ford sedan rolled into the industrial estate.

A large door was open in the side of Ayita’s unit, and Stephenfield drove slowly through, parking his car within the building itself, safe from prying eyes. He got out of the car, followed closely by Adams and Lynn.

The inside of the building appeared to be a small warehouse, and even contained stock of some kind, although Adams had no idea what it would be. Crates on pallets ran all round the walls of the available space, and an open stairway led to a second-level catwalk and a glass-fronted office that looked out on to the rest of the warehouse. As Adams looked up, he saw Ayita in the big window, gesturing for them to come up.

‘OK,’ Ayita said when they were all sitting on folding metal chairs in his Spartan office. ‘Sam will have already told you the connection to Jacobs, yes?’ He watched for confirmation before continuing, prowling the office like a big cat. ‘Right, so now I’ll tell you where the helicopter with the body landed. We tracked the route to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. Specifically, to the Janet Terminal.’

‘The Janet Terminal?’ Adams asked, the ramifications hitting him like a sledgehammer.

Ayita merely nodded his head.

‘OK,’ Lynn said, knowing she was missing something, ‘would someone like to tell me what is so special about the Janet Terminal?’

‘Do you want to tell her, Matt?’ Ayita asked.

Adams nodded his head slowly, turning to Lynn. ‘When I used to work down here, sometimes we’d go as far as Nevada. We got talking to the local tribes around the area, they pretty much know exactly what goes on. The Janet Terminal at McCarran has always had a lot of rumours about it, but the guys we knew filled us in. We checked it out and it was all true.’

‘
What
was true?’ Lynn asked.

Adams and Ayita exchanged looks. ‘The so-called “Janet flights” out of McCarran generally go to one place, and one place only,’ Adams said at length. ‘The US Air Force installation at Groom Lake. Better known to the world at large as Area 51.’

‘Area 51?’ Lynn asked incredulously. ‘Are you sure?’

Adams nodded his head, noting that he didn’t have to explain to Lynn what Area 51 was.

The base derives its name from being classified on maps of the 1950s and 1960s as ‘area 51’ of the Nevada Test and Training Range, a truly colossal military site of nearly four thousand seven hundred square miles – bigger than some countries.

Its very existence was denied for decades by the US government, which maintained that there was no such facility, but in actual fact, knowledge of the base’s existence – if not exactly what currently goes on there – is widespread.

The base is a top-secret military test and development facility, currently operated by Detachment 3 of the US Air Force Flight Test Centre, but founded in 1955 by Lockheed and the CIA in order to test their newly developed U2 spyplane. The base has been continually expanding ever since, and has been responsible for many other ‘black’ projects, including the A-12 ‘Blackbird’, the F-117 ‘Stealth Fighter’, and the B-2 ‘Stealth Bomber’. It has also played a key part in developing the latest battlefield advancements, such as unmanned reconnaissance and combat aircraft.

More notoriously, Area 51 is better known as being the repository for supposed alien UFO technology, which many people believe is hidden out at the Groom Lake facility. They say it is being reverse engineered, the only way to explain the US’ continued position at the forefront of military technology.

One of the primary beliefs of such conspiracy theorists is that the Air Force and CIA took possession of a UFO that was supposed to have crash-landed at Roswell in New Mexico back in 1947. They believe that it was then stored, along with its alien pilots, at Edwards Air Force Base while Area 51 was built, and was then shipped to the new facility for analysis. Many people argue that the entire purpose of the base is the analysis, reverse engineering, and use of alien technology.

With no proof, however, rumours about the base remained just that – rumours. And while Adams and Lynn both knew that this was the case, the coincidence just seemed too great, and their shared look said they were both thinking along the same lines.

‘So,’ Lynn said for both of them, ‘the body we found is now at the one place in the world that is rumoured to be using, or have access to, alien technology?’

Stephenfield nodded his head. ‘It makes you think, doesn’t it?’

Adams looked at him. ‘Can we get on to the base?’

‘We’ve considered the options but it doesn’t look viable. We could try and get on board one of the Janet flights and get delivered to the base directly, but the chance of being found is too great, especially when it comes to leaving the aircraft once it lands.

‘The only other way would be to access the base on foot. It is not secure in the conventional manner – it is too big to fence off entirely. But there are armed patrols, called “cammo dudes” due to their camouflage uniforms. They are actually part of a private security firm, and are authorized to use deadly force on anyone crazy enough to trespass. The whole area is littered with body-heat sensors too, so it would be very hard to move through undetected.

‘And even if one of us managed to penetrate the security and get on to the base, we have no idea of the internal layout of the place. Some internet sites have put up satellite photos of the overall layout, and others have taken photographs with telephoto lenses from the nearby mountains, but what is
inside
is simply not known. I mean, there’s a reason it’s the world’s most secretive military installation. So all we have to go on are rumours. One such rumour is that there are up to ten levels to the base
below
ground. If there is even just the possibility that this is true, where would we start? Finding anything in such a huge place would be next to impossible. Another rumour is that there are seven hangars, with concealed doors hidden in the side of a mountain at Papoose Lake ten miles to the south of Area 51. So the chances of finding out anything of use – if we even managed to get in there in the first place – would be next to zero, and the chances of being caught, arrested, and probably killed would be exceedingly high.’

Adams nodded his head in agreement.

‘What else do we have?’ Lynn asked.

‘Stephen Jacobs,’ Adams answered, reading Ayita’s thoughts. ‘You’ve looked into him?’

Ayita nodded his head. ‘We have. Sam?’

‘He lives in a colonial mansion near Washington,’ Stephenfield explained. ‘Right on the Potomac, next door to Mason Neck State Park near Colchester, about twenty miles south-west of the city proper. You’ve read his dossier?’

Adams and Lynn both nodded their heads. In the limited time Stephenfield and his contacts had had available, he had not only written a briefing paper on the Bilderberg Group itself but had also collated biographical details on the organization’s steering committee.

‘So you’ll know he was a DC bigwig, and obviously still holds a lot of sway in town. Can’t really find out too much about him before the age of thirty, but since then he seems to have literally skyrocketed through the ranks of both military and civilian intelligence. He likes to be where the action is, so even though he’s retired, he’s kept close to the capital. Makes sense. As head of the Bilderberg Group, he’ll want to be dialled in to everything.’

‘And we know something about this house?’ Adams asked.

Stephenfield smiled. ‘Almost everything. We’ve got the original building plans from the civic authorities, as well as internal schematics which include various security updates, and we’ve checked with the security firms that installed them and got further details. The place isn’t military, and so we also have the latest satellite images of the place, in high definition.’

Stephenfield took out a sheaf of papers, blueprints, maps and glossy photographs, and spread them out on an old, battered card table placed in the middle of the office.

He pointed to one of the satellite photographs first, which showed Jacobs’ house and grounds. ‘You see the house here,’ he said, gesturing at the huge, double-winged mansion. ‘It’s close to the edge of a cliff that descends two hundred feet to the Potomac River, set back on a lawn of about one hundred feet in length. At the other side of the house, the driveway runs almost a mile from the access road gates to the front door. And these woods that the road cuts through and that spread out for about a mile on either side? They’re all his, giving him about two square miles of land, or about twelve hundred acres.’

‘That’s a hell of a lot so close to the capital,’ Lynn observed.

‘You’ve seen what he’s worth,’ Adams commented. ‘What was it, two billion dollars? He can afford it.’

Stephenfield nodded. ‘Yes, and that’s a conservative estimate.’

Adams looked up at Stephenfield and Ayita. ‘So what’s the plan?’

Ayita spoke plainly. ‘Our resources are limited, obviously. There are the twelve of us,’ he said, referring to the unit of ex-Shadow Wolves, ‘and we are also using other colleagues from the tribes. Some of our people are tracking Tony Kern already, and we’ve put two men in position near to Jacobs’ house. They are members of the Mattaponi tribe in Virginia, brothers of Great Spirit.’

Thomas ‘Great Spirit’ Najana was relatively new to the team, but Adams trusted Ayita’s judgement, and he had no trouble with outsourcing to the man’s family – blood ties were the strongest kind of reassurance.

‘We are also sending others to run surveillance on the other American on the committee, Harold Weissmuller,’ Ayita continued. ‘He is up in San Francisco, but we should have him by dawn.’

Weissmuller was another billionaire, a businessman who had made his fortune from oil but who had then branched out into any and every field he could, from arms sales to media ownership.

‘And the others?’ Adams asked.

‘The other members are beyond our reach for the time being,’ Stephenfield admitted. ‘They are from all over the world, and hard for us to gain access to. We’re trying to arrange some sort of remote electronic surveillance, though. Pretty soon, we should have a good idea of what they’re up to.’

Adams looked directly at Ayita. ‘I want to meet up with Thomas in DC.’