Origin (31 page)

He opened the small hatch and slipped through more easily this time. He stopped at the top of the wheel strut to help Lynn through. Once out, she turned and closed the hatch. Still hidden within the wheel housing, they were out of sight of anyone on the runway, and also gone without a trace from the cargo area in case anyone should check it now the plane had landed.

Adams’ mind calculated what to do next. The night crew would be deplaning any minute, and then the airport’s service crew would be at the plane, refuelling it and preparing it for flying again. Timing would be everything.

He slowly turned himself upside down, his legs clenched around the landing strut to support his weight, keeping his hands by his side, so that only the top of his head would be visible if anyone was watching as he lowered himself to see what was going on around the aeroplane.

A set of stairs had already been brought to one side of the aircraft, nearest to the large white terminal building. On the far side of the terminal was a huge parking lot; and beyond that, the super-hotels and casinos of the Strip, the colossal black glass pyramid of the Luxor just opposite.

He heard an electric engine from the other side, and turned to see a service wagon coming across the runway towards them. Adams didn’t move a muscle, realizing that with the light as it was, only movement would give away his position, unless someone came right up to the wheel housing and looked straight at him.

He continued to watch as the first sets of feet started to descend the steps, and then as a service crew got out of the wagon, extended a ladder from the top of the vehicle, and entered the plane through the rear service hatch.

Realizing that everyone’s attention would now be on their own particular job, he spun his body back round, nodded to Lynn, and descended the strut, sliding straight down on to the tyre. Looking up to check that Lynn was with him, he then dropped from the top of the tyre to the runway tarmac.

Lynn joined him moments later, and he grabbed her hand and ran with her to the far side of the service wagon, using it to block the view of anyone in the Janet Terminal. They edged round the vehicle to the far side until they were at the rear.

Adams took another visual sweep of the area, gesturing with his head towards the parking lot just thirty metres away across the runway. Lynn looked across and nodded.

Adams turned to her and mouthed silently, ‘Three . . . two . . . one . . . go!’

Together they sprinted as fast as they could across the dark paving, running in the direction of the thick shadow of the plane’s fuselage cast by the powerful terminal floodlights. They covered the distance in five seconds, arriving at the fence line breathless, adrenalin coursing through their systems. Adams was sure they had remained undetected but every second that passed made them more of a target.

‘Up and over,’ he said to Lynn, and she turned to the fence, bending one leg and placing her foot into Adams’ cupped palms, which he then pushed upwards, boosting her up to the top of the fence. She grabbed at the top, pulled her body across and over, and dropped gracefully to the other side.

Adams backed up a couple of feet and then launched himself at the fence, swinging up and over in one smooth motion. He landed in a crouch and turned back to look through the fence, to see if their escape had been seen by anyone. But nobody had turned towards them. The Area 51 workers were making their way into the terminal building like sheep into a pen, the service crew continued to buzz around the plane doing the jobs they were paid to do. The busy main terminal buildings were far over to the south-east; the north-west corner was deathly quiet by comparison, almost like a private airfield all on its own.

It was clear that their presence had not been noticed, and so Adams and Lynn backed away from the fence, straightened up and turned to face the parking lot, just another couple returning to their car. And then, arm in arm, they headed towards the unmanned exit.

Ten minutes later, they had crossed Haven Street and Giles Street, made their way through the parking lot of Motel 8 Las Vegas until they had emerged on to South Las Vegas Boulevard, the fabled ‘Strip’. They crossed the wide, busy thoroughfare, and headed north until they reached the Luxor’s gigantic pyramid, the world-famous hotel and casino that Adams had spotted from the wheel strut of the Boeing.

Anywhere else on earth, a couple entering a casino just after seven in the morning might have caused a few raised eyebrows; in Vegas, however, such a sight was as natural as night following day. It was a true twenty-four-hour culture here, and some of the regulars literally spent every hour of every day of their stay behind the slot machines or at the roulette tables, betting their life savings on a roll of the dice.

As they entered the one hundred and twenty thousand-foot casino floor, they were amazed by the hustle and bustle around them, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people swarming from gaming tables to slot machines and back again. It was chaos, pure and simple.

Adams turned to Lynn and smiled. ‘It’s perfect.’

John Ayita was a man with a number of concerns, none of them minor.

Ten of his Shadow Wolves were dead, including his team in San Francisco and the Najana brothers. In fact, as far as he was aware, there was now only him and Stephenfield left.

He hadn’t heard from Adams since he and Lynn had gone to pick up the test results from DNA Analytics. He could only assume that the Bilderberg Group had somehow found and captured them, and forced them to talk. What else could have happened?

And yet he couldn’t believe Matt would have talked, not the great ‘Free Bear’. Maybe Lynn then? Or maybe they’d just used drugs on them; Ayita knew it was impossible to resist certain types of truth serum. Either way, his men had been wiped out by Jacobs’ Alpha Brigade, and he was on the run for his life.

He had had to abandon his warehouse headquarters and go deep into hiding, and he knew that Stephenfield would be doing the same.

He was in a bar in downtown Salt Lake City, downing a beer and considering his next move, when his cellphone rang. It was a clean phone, as he had rid himself of his other units for fear that he could be tracked, but he had rerouted those numbers to his new phone.

After a moment’s consideration, he pressed the answer button, although he didn’t say anything.

‘John?’ He heard Matt Adams’ voice coming through the line, speaking in the Lakota language, but he still did not answer. He was glad Adams was still alive at least, but didn’t know whether he could trust him. Maybe he was making the call under duress. Or maybe his voice had been sampled and was now being simulated by a computer. He had no idea.

‘Look,’ the voice continued in Lakota, ‘I can’t talk over an open line, we need to meet.’ Ayita considered the use of the tribal language. If Adams was being forced to make the call, why use the language? It made more sense that he was aware that calls could be monitored and was using Lakota as it was so hard to translate.

‘When and where?’ Ayita asked finally.

By the afternoon, Ayita was in a motel room with Adams and Lynn, just off Highway 80 outside Carson City. Stephenfield was with them too, Adams having also managed to make contact with the only other surviving Shadow Wolf.

Security arrangements had been made carefully, none of the parties entirely trusting the other, but eventually the meeting had been made, and each person explained their part in what had happened.

Adams was distraught over the loss of his friends, but as he explained what had happened to Lynn and himself, what they had found out, and what was about to happen, such a private tragedy began to pale in comparison.

‘So we need to get to Geneva as quickly as possible,’ Adams finished. ‘The stakes really don’t get any higher than this.’

Ayita bowed his head as he considered the matter. Adams was right, of course. Their own lives were as nothing compared to the fate of the whole of humanity; there was no use in hiding now. He turned to Stephenfield. ‘Can you still get passports?’ he asked.

Stephenfield considered the matter before nodding his head. ‘Given the alternative of not getting to Geneva, you bet I can.’

Three hours later, Stephenfield returned to the motel room. It never ceased to amaze him what could be accomplished if you had enough cash, and he hadn’t been shy with his money. If they couldn’t get to Geneva to stop Jacobs, what would be the use of money anyway?

He reached into his bag and pulled out not only passports, but also driving licences and social security cards, as well as a variety of cloned credit cards. He put them all on the table between them, and Adams was surprised when he noticed that there were four passports.

Stephenfield smiled at him. ‘You didn’t think you and Lynn would be going alone, did you?’ he asked.

‘Look,’ Adams argued, ‘I don’t want you risking your lives as well, it—’

‘You need us,’ Ayita said, steel in his voice. ‘And what do we have to stay here for anyway? If what you say is true, if you fail then we’ll all be dead anyway.’

Adams realized he was right. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’d better book some tickets out of here then. What are our new names?’

‘I’ll give you the lowdown on the way,’ Stephenfield said. ‘Flights are already booked, we leave from Reno-Tahoe International in two hours.’

Adams smiled. ‘Excellent,’ he said, happy to be leaving immediately. ‘We’ll get to Geneva, and then we’re going to make those bastards wish that “contact” had never been made.’

F
OR THE FIRST
time in as long as he could remember, Jacobs was excited.

He had lived as Jacobs for several decades now, and no longer thought of himself as Charles Whitworth. But Whitworth he had been, firstborn son of Benjamin and Mary Whitworth, and he had cut his teeth at the back end of the First World War. He had done and seen it all. But this would outdo everything.

He couldn’t wait to meet the Anunnaki, and he had none of the doubts that Adams and Edwards had tried to instil in him. They would keep their end of the bargain; of course they would, he was already an immortal. But the real reason that Jacobs trusted them – at least for now, anyway – was that the Anunnaki needed him and his chosen colleagues.

For all their hi-tech advancement, the fact remained that the Anunnaki had not lived on a real planet for several thousand years; their minds were strong but their bodies were weak, and they needed assistance if they were to truly enslave the rest of humanity. The deadly virus would only do so much; the survivors would need hunting down, which was why the entire Alpha Brigade were also to be spared. The Bilderbergers’ mission was to use their various talents to lure out the other survivors, so that the Alpha Brigade could capture them. This physical task was something that the Anunnaki could simply no longer manage. They had the technology to build all sorts of robotic or cybernetic answers, of course; but they didn’t have the space – which was why they were coming back to earth in the first place.

And so Jacobs was more than happy to trust the Anunnaki upon their return. He had no doubt they would look for a way to get rid of him and his allies at the first available opportunity, but he planned to make himself indispensable to them in the short time he had, which he was more than confident he could do. He also harboured another, altogether more ambitious plan but was wary of thinking about it too much due to the Anunnaki’s telepathic abilities. Over the years he had developed a technique for getting around this to some extent. He had learnt that the thoughts or words had to be fully formed before the Anunnaki could interpret them, and therefore when he was thinking about anything he didn’t want them to know about, he never let anything become fully realized in his mind. It was almost like trying to see something in the dark; you didn’t look at it directly but glanced to the side so that peripheral vision picked it up instead.

And so it was that Jacobs’ ultimate plan lay just out of reach of the Anunnaki, and although he had no guarantees that it would work, it was certainly something that was worth pursuing when the time was right.

For now, though, he was just enjoying the anticipation, as he was whisked through the dark, snow-filled streets of Geneva. He and his colleagues – they were the Hundred once more, after his invitation to Saul Rubino, a billionaire diamond merchant, had been accepted – had arrived at the airport late the previous evening and had decided to spend the night at the Palais Grande, overlooking the wonderful lake that had made the city so famous.

Wesley Jones had stayed behind to manage affairs back in Washington, aiming to stall the investigation into the crash site near Jacobs’ house, but he was due to get to Geneva in time for the arrival of the Anunnaki. Jacobs had come to rely on Jones over the years and found himself hoping that he would make it.

The rest of the Bilderberg Hundred were now in convoy, travelling out of the city and taking the autoroute through the glorious foothills of the far mountains, heading for the Large Hadron Collider facility of CERN, the organization he himself had helped to establish for the express purpose of bringing the Anunnaki back to earth.

Philippe Messier had come to join them for dinner at the hotel the night before and, over lobster and Dom Perignon, he had informed the assembled group that the device would be operational by the following afternoon. There had been cheers and celebration, and Messier had been toasted time and again, until he could barely stand.

As the first rays of dawn started to appear over the mountains, Jacobs rested back in the deep leather seat of the huge Rolls-Royce limousine, and took a sip of early morning cognac.

His telephone rang as he put the glass to his lips, and he quickly retrieved it from his pocket. He saw who it was and answered the call immediately, the blood draining from his face.

It wasn’t a call Colonel Caines had wanted to make but better it came from him directly than that Jacobs heard it from another source, which would surely happen before the morning was out.

‘Mr Jacobs,’ he started uneasily. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’