Trifariam, The Lost Codex (2012) (50 page)

“But what did the screen do exactly?”

“It is a prototype. It is able to interpret your thoughts and show them in writing. It was sometimes even able to display clear images as long as your brain remembered them in detail.”

James thought about the advantages this research held for all those people with disabilities; it would give them a real feeling of independence. However, he didn’t believe that that was the goal of the experiment. As always, military reasons came first.

“Holy shit! All the experiments which are being carried out at these facilities are truly spectacular.” Charly’s face shone with pride. James knew it was time to broach the subject. “Not to mention all those secret and questionable investigations which you were involved in.”

The smile on Charly’s face evaporated and he became defensive. He knew what he meant by those words. “The research you saw this morning is secret. We had no choice but to reveal them so that you could deactivate the
Trifariam
, but you can be sure that you would never have known about them otherwise. However, it is fair to say that within these facilities hundreds of much more complex experiments are taking place. Ones that, of course, you will never know about.”

What could be more important than the use of magnetic fields, invisibility, teleportation, levitation…?
he wondered, intrigued. “Obviously the area has a famed reputation for paranormal phenomena.” James insisted on making the professor uncomfortable, but he kept quiet. “It all started with the Roswell case, when - ”

“Don’t tell me you’re another of those fanatics who believe in UFOs?”

James bowed his head. Ever since he was a boy, he had only believed in what he could see, but in spite of never having seen a UFO, they had always captured his imagination.

“Well, I don’t believe in UFOs… completely. Human beings are arrogant by nature and it is overwhelming arrogance to believe that in such an enormous universe, there is no other intelligent life form apart from us. I’ve never had experience of a sighting, so I can’t believe in what I haven’t seen. However, the Roswell case has always fascinated me.” After a long silence in which he chose his words carefully, he asked the question again. “What actually happened?”

“Have you seen the report?”

His voice became tense, he didn’t seem to be pleased to talk about the subject.

“Yes, of course.” James knew all too well the difference between what is in a report and what could have actually happened. “Many people claim to have seen the remains of a kind of flying saucer, they even say that they saw bodies scattered on the ground.”

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “Ever since I’ve been in charge of Area 51, I’ve heard thousands of different stories about what happened that day. The vast majority of them suggest that an unidentified craft crashed in Roswell in 1947, throwing outside several extraterrestrial bodies. They also add that it was us who took possession of those bodies to examine them and even film a video of the supposed autopsy, which would later be proven to be false and to have been created by a famous filmmaker. By and large, the theories have been made up by UFOlogists who are desperate to prove that beings from other planets exist and, as they haven’t found irrefutable evidence, they insist on reverting back to this subject.”

James had heard that part of the story. The most passionate UFOlogists go as far as to claim that the United States was in possession of extraterrestrial technology and they were thinking of using it to their own advantage; they would never make it known publicly for fear of causing an outbreak of mass panic when people found out that there was other intelligent life out there apart from human beings.

“And… what actually happened?” he insisted.

“At that time, we were working on Project Mogul. It involved using top secret observation balloons to find out about the nuclear activity of the Soviet Union. The site of impact coincides with Flight No. 4 from that project, with which we lost communication on the 5 June of that same year. The remains found consisted of tinfoil and adhesive and insulating tape… What kind of spacecraft could be made of those materials? Even the description of the object found matches that given by its designer and creator, Mr. Charles B. Moore. Due to the amount of ungoverned UFOlogists, we wasted part of our time studying the weather on the day Flight No. 4 was launched as well as its possible path, where it could have exploded and how the remains could have been scattered. It all fits together perfectly like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”

“And what about that recent report involving Japanese prisoners of war?”

Charly sighed. He knew the story only too well. “Are you talking about the use of Japanese prisoners as guinea pigs?”

“Yes. After the declassification of various reports, it came to light that prisoners of war were used in rather unorthodox tests. It is currently believed that the government experimented with weather balloons to try and infiltrate enemy lines and launch atomic bombs from the stratosphere. The balloons were - ”

“Nonsense!” cried Charly in anger. He was starting to feel like he was being judged and it infuriated him. “That’s not the case but even if it was, you should be proud of the decisions made by your government. It has always tried to keep you safe from enemies.”

James ignored what he had to say and continued with his argument. “The balloons were carrying a series of baskets, specially designed for the project. Inside were Japanese prisoners of war, the smallest ones they could find.”

“Are you suggesting that we covered up the accident so that nobody would realize we were using prisoners of war in our experiments and we could therefore hide the technology we were creating?”

“Exactly!”

Charly looked at him in defiance. “And so what if we did? You think that other countries didn’t use North American lives in their own quest for world supremacy? We’re going back over fifty years here. There wasn’t the morality that exists today, the focus was on survival. Would it have been better to let other countries bombard us with their weapons, leaving millions of Americans to die? Anyway, you that you are mistaken. We didn’t use prisoners of war in our experiments.”

James’ doubts were more than reasonable. His gut feeling was that he was being fed lie after lie. “There’s something I don’t understand. What can you tell me about the bodies that were found?”

“Nothing, because there was none.”

“What?! Impossible! What about the witness statements? They firmly claim that there were bodies scattered on the ground.”

“First off, those versions of events are based solely on the statements made by several people over thirty years after the event, and in many cases they weren’t even eyewitnesses. An interesting fact is that a supply plane exploded near Roswell several years later, and the bodies of the crew were scattered on the ground. Obviously both stories became mixed up over the years in the minds of the witnesses and a fictitious story was produced from two real ones.”

James felt yet again that the Director was lying to him. He was hiding something much more important which he would never reveal to him in a million years.

The office doorbell suddenly rang. An officer was waiting on the other side of the door.

Charly walked over to his desk, opened the top drawer and pressed a red button. The door opened instantly.

“Good morning, sir. The aircraft is ready.”

“Thank you very much.” He turned and spoke to James much more calmly. “Are you sure you are able to travel?”

“Of course. I don’t know what they injected me with, but I feel like a new man.”

Charly smiled. “Please show Mr. Oldrich to the corresponding hangar and make sure he has everything he needs.” He turned back to James and gave him a wicked smile before addressing the officer. “Give him a couple of sick bags. He’s going to need them.”

“M
r. Secretary, have you seen the images?”

Margaret pressed the receiver hard against her ear to calm the tremors from which she had been suffering ever since she heard the news. An uncomfortable silence which went on for over thirty seconds made her wonder if the line had been cut off, or if Peter was speaking and she couldn’t hear him.

Margaret had held the position of Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Defense for several years. She was his right hand woman, his loyal ally. Despite being only forty years old, she had a more than solid reputation among the members of the Cabinet of the United States. Known to all as ‘Marge’, she always acted as intermediary between the Secretary and the whole department from her office located in the Pentagon.

“Sir, are you still there?” asked Marge.

Again, silence.

“Sir?”

She was about to hang up when a faltering voice choked with nerves spoke on the other end.

“Yes, Marge. I’ve just seen it on one of the monitors in the room. Who else knows about it?”

“Just you, me and the scientist you contacted. But obviously some of the most important agencies in the world will find out very soon. I’m almost certain that - ”

“Marge,” he interrupted. “I don’t know whether we have time to prepare ourselves. We have to speak to the President immediately.”

“I’ve already tried but he’s in a meeting.”

“Well get him out of there! We are on red alert!”

T
he noise that could be heard seemed to indicate that the landing gear was unfolding and that they would be touching down in a few minutes. The journey had been extremely quick and Richard had barely noticed the direction they had traveled since takeoff. William, who was currently sitting alongside him, had spent the whole journey with his ear glued to an intercom which allowed him to speak to the naval base where they were heading.

The pilot, Michael Edwards, chief of one of the most famous squadrons in the United States, was in charge of carrying out the flight. The instructions were precise: take the Secretary of the Navy and his companion to a location which would be communicated to him when the plane was in the air. That was exactly how it was; five minutes into the flight, the Director informed him of the exact place to which he should go. He didn’t give a name, but a string of coordinates: 24 42’ 19”N 77 46’ 12’W.

The pilot acted on the orders without hesitation.

The airplane turned again in the air and Richard pressed himself up against the window to see get an aerial view of the place over which they were flying. As he had guessed, the view was beautiful.

Below was an island which was not very big and virtually unexplored, despite three inhabited areas being visible from the air. The earth seemed to want to give way to the sea and large avenues of water crisscrossed the land, dividing it up into hundreds of pieces. From the air, he could make out some nearby islands, which made him think that they were above one of the many archipelagos spread across the planet.

“Do you know where we are?” William had just put the phone down and collapsed, exhausted, onto one of the seats which were free.

“To be honest, that is what I was just wondering.”

William smiled. “We’re in the island of Andros.”

“What?! No way! The island of Andros is in Greece, we haven’t been able to travel so far in so little time.”

“No, I’m not talking about the Greek island, but the one which is in the Bahamas.”

“The Bahamas?”

“Yes, the island of Andros is the biggest island in the Bahamas and the fifth biggest in the Antilles. It is famous for its barrier reef, the third largest in the world of over one hundred and thirty miles. As you will have noticed, it is has a small population of fewer than seven thousand inhabitants. Look, that’s where we are going!”

Just then, the plane flew over a complex in a rectangular shape approximately 0.8 miles square before heading out three miles to sea. It looked nothing like the naval base Richard was expecting, but after what he had seen in Area 51 he thought it best not to get disappointed too soon. The American Government was an expert in brilliantly covering up all its secrets.

Its rectangular shape was perfectly delineated. The complex was full of hangars, buildings and various landing pads for helicopters. They even had a runway of approximately one mile on nearby land, where Richard assumed they would be touching down.

The airplane turned for one last time in the air and then gradually started its descent.

Richard seemed confused, they were too far from the runway to start such a maneuver. William’s face was as serious as usual and didn’t hint that anything was going wrong. Meanwhile, the water was getting nearer and nearer and Richard was starting to squirm in his seat. If they kept going down they would end up crashing into the sea.

William saw the nervous and anguished look on Richard’s face, so he leaned towards his shoulder and whispered into his ear. “You’ve never landed in the ocean, have you?”

Richard seemed confused and looked back at the window. Now the distance left was less than one hundred and sixty feet. “What do you mean?”

“You are in an amphibious airplane. It can take off and land both on land and in water.”

“How can that possibly work? When I got on the plane, I didn’t see any floats. It had normal landing gear.”

“There are several types of hydroplanes: those which have floats instead of wheels and those where the shell of the aircraft itself carries out that function. The latter are amphibious aircraft. The floatability is determined by the fuselage, which is in the form of a boat’s shell, and smaller floats below the wings which give it stability. It’s for that reason that the propellers are located on top of the wings, unlike with conventional airplanes where they are underneath them.”

At six hundred and fifty feet above sea level Richard was climbing the walls. William’s words hadn’t calmed him down at all. He remembered when he got on the plane having noticed those two details, but he thought it was some kind of innovative aircraft which had an alternative design to cut down on wind resistance.

One hundred and sixty feet. Richard clung on the seat and made sure for the fifth time that his seatbelt was fitted correctly. He saw how the water was getting nearer and nearer to the fuselage of the aircraft and it eventually touched it. With the impact, the plane plunged a few more inches into the water and Richard couldn’t stifle a scream of desperation when he saw how the water was getting dangerously close to window level. The aircraft then slowed down little by little, swaying from side to side like a boat rocking in harmony with the movement of the sea.