Origin (25 page)

‘If we’re going to die anyway, why not tell us what it’s all about?’ Adams said. If he was going to die, he wanted to know why, at least.

Jacobs looked at Eldridge, who shook his head, and then looked back at Adams and Lynn. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any harm in you knowing now, is there?’

Ignoring Eldridge’s disapproving look, he pulled up a plastic-topped stool and sat down, smiling at Lynn and Adams, clearly pleased with himself and what he had accomplished. If he couldn’t gloat at least a little, what was the point of it all?

‘Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?’ he said with a smile.

F
OR JACOBS, IT
was nice to be finally telling the tale in its entirety, or at least the part he had direct, first-hand knowledge of.

He had spent most of his life under a double persona, one side existing only in his mind, dealing with intimate knowledge of things most people could never even dream of. It had altered his personality somewhat, until he sometimes wondered who he really was. And now his life was set to change again, and he once more wondered about his place in all of it.

‘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.’

Jacobs watched the shock in the eyes of his captives, revelling in it. ‘My real name is Charles Whitworth, and I was born in Dallas, Texas, on October the third, eighteen ninety-eight. I am one hundred and fourteen years old.’

He smiled widely as he stood up from his stool, his previous bent-over posture, typical of a man in his seventies, straightening up into the rigid upright military posture of a much younger man. He removed dentures, showing a set of perfect teeth, and took the half-moon glasses from his face to display his crystal-clear blue eyes. He pulled a nap of wrinkled skin at his neck, and it stretched and broke in his hand, evidently some form of professional make-up.

‘I have had the body of a thirty-year-old since nineteen sixty-nine, when I finalized the deal to bring them here,’ he told them. ‘“Whitworth” died, and I created Stephen Jacobs as his successor, and I have lived as Jacobs ever since, having to use prosthetics and make-up when in public, in order to age according to my new birth year of nineteen forty. I wanted proof, and they gave it to me. Genetic manipulation you simply wouldn’t understand.

‘Look at me,’ Jacobs demanded, the spark of the zealot in his eyes. ‘
I
am the proof of their promise to us. I am already an immortal!’ He glared at them with his piercing blue eyes. ‘And the earth is doomed.’

Lynn recovered from the shock of Jacobs’ statement first, the scientist in her overcoming the emotional response.

‘You still haven’t answered the question I really want to know the answer to,’ she said, holding his gaze. ‘How does the body we found in Antarctica tie into all of this? Was he part of the same group that want to come here now? And if so, what were they doing here forty thousand years ago?’

Even if she was about to die, Lynn
needed
to know the answer. Not only had the discovered body started her whole involvement in this, but her colleagues had all been killed because of it. She owed it to them, if nothing else.

‘The body?’ Jacobs said thoughtfully, before checking his watch. ‘I think I’ve been more than open with you already, Dr Edwards. It is now time we left. So I guess you’ll just have to go to your grave still not knowing.’

He turned to Eldridge and nodded towards the door, and the big man marched up and opened it, Jacobs following. As he reached the door, he turned back to Lynn and Adams.

‘You should be grateful really,’ he said to them. ‘Whatever is going to happen to you here is almost certainly better than what will happen to most of earth’s population in the weeks and months to come. The virus that will be introduced here is not very forgiving. Nasty, even. It eats away at your flesh from the inside. Truly, you should be glad you’re going to die well before then.’

‘Bastard,’ Adams muttered through clenched teeth.

‘Maybe,’ Jacobs admitted. ‘Farewell.’ And with that, he turned on his heel and marched with Eldridge out of the steel door, which swung shut electronically behind them.

Three other men entered the room moments later. They seemed to be scientists of one sort or another, all middle-aged, serious-looking men dressed in white lab coats.

One of them, a small, avuncular man with a balding head and thick-rimmed spectacles, approached the two captives, appraising them. ‘My name is Dr Steinberg,’ he said in a friendly tone. ‘I will be overseeing your treatment. My aim is to minimize your pain if at all possible. If you cooperate, I think you’ll find our procedures mildly uncomfortable, nothing more.’

‘And if we don’t?’ Lynn asked.

‘Let’s just say that it is better if you cooperate, and leave it at that for now,’ he said diplomatically. ‘But first, we’re going to run some basic tests, to assess your physical and psychological states, so we can calibrate our equipment correctly.’

‘You mean, so you can push us as far as you can without killing us?’ Adams asked.

Steinberg smiled at him. ‘Yes, Mr Adams, that is exactly the reason, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to the two other doctors, who began to wheel over large trolleys with a variety of medical instruments resting on top. ‘So let’s begin, shall we?’

T
HE PHYSICAL TESTS
involved a thorough bodily examination, with the doctors’ gloved hands exploring every part of them, in addition to skin, blood, hair and urine samples, and even a muscle biopsy. The straps around their bodies had been removed but their wrists and ankles were secured to the chairs throughout.

They were put through basic psychological tests, standardized questions that both had seen before; as such, they gave answers they knew would skew the results. The doctors just smiled and nodded their heads, and then pulled out a portable MRI scanner and examined their brains directly.

After what seemed like hours, the doctors finally left the room to analyse the results, leaving Adams and Lynn on their own.

Lynn turned to Adams urgently. ‘We’ve got to find a way out of here,’ she whispered to him. ‘We can’t let them get that wormhole machine working.’

Adams blinked his eyes at her, gesturing with his head in the direction of a large mirror on the opposite wall. The message was clear; he was positive they were still being observed.

He had already decided that they would try and escape. They were going to be killed anyway – along with about six billion others if that damned machine at CERN became operational – so what did they have to lose? The only question in Adams’ mind was how the hell they were going to do it. They were strapped down on chairs in a metal room hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the world’s most secure military base. Was escape even a distant possibility?