The Roswell Conspiracy Page 14

  “What was in the crate?” Grant asked.

  Kessler glared at Morgan for a moment, then said, “Fine, you win.” He turned to Grant. “She’s talking about the Killswitch weapon systems. They were stolen from right under Agent Bell’s nose.”

  For the first time, Morgan’s stoic demeanor dissolved. “What do you mean ‘they’?”

  “I didn’t tell you before because it wasn’t relevant. As we do with all our testing programs, we built in redundancy in case we had a malfunction. When the terrorists took the crate, they didn’t steal just one Killswitch. They stole two.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  While Fay rested in the SUV after talking with the police for over an hour, Jess stood outside with the Alice Springs detectives and finished detailing the events leading up to the discovery of the bodies in the warehouse. When she’d presented her credentials as a New Zealand police consultant, they’d been forthcoming in what they’d learned so far about the case and the contents of the road train.

  It wasn’t until after the police arrived that Fay had received the email from Tyler saying he and Grant were inside the road train. As they were conveying the message to the officers, a massive explosion from the truck bomb detonated south of town. Jess and Fay were in shock at losing them until the police received word that Tyler and Grant had gotten out safely, saving the lives of the professor and his student as well.

  As to the bodies inside the warehouse, those five had been traveling under Russian passports and had arrived only this morning. It would take a while to verify the identities, and federal authorities were on their way to take over investigating the biggest terrorist attack in the country’s history.

  Jess had tried to convince them that this wasn’t just an act of terrorism, but once they learned that Pine Gap had been the target, she’d gotten nowhere. The secret base had been the site of numerous demonstrations in the past, so the police felt it had been only a matter of time until some wacko took a more drastic step like this.

  When Jess was finally released, she returned to the Jeep to find Fay lying in the front seat with it tilted as far back as it would go. She opened the door as quietly as she could, but Fay sat up immediately, then fell back with a moan.

  “How are you feeling, Nana?” Jess said as she shut the door.

  “Oh, just a little tired. I shouldn’t sit up that quickly.”

  “You shouldn’t be out here at all. I’ll run you back to the hotel so you can take a nap.”

  “No, I’m more hungry than anything. Any news about Tyler and Grant?”

  “They’re fine. Apparently they’re still being detained for questioning.”

  Fay looked worried. “The police don’t think they had anything to do with this, do they?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know. I gave the police my phone number so Tyler could call us when he and Grant are ready.”

  “Did they tell you anything about those poor dead people?”

  Jess put the Jeep into gear. “Just that they were Russian nationals.”

  “Russians? I am so confused by all of this.”

  “So am I,” Jess said. “As far as we know, the men who attacked you in Queenstown were Americans. They were part of a group who hijacked an experimental robotic truck that they used to pull four trailers filled with explosives to blow up a secret American base in the middle of Australia.”

  Jess kept an eye on her rearview mirror. Although she thought the hijackers would be miles away by now, she was still worried they would make another attempt to get the relic from Fay.

  “Maybe they thought my piece of the wreckage or the wood engraving might be valuable,” Fay said. “Maybe they needed the money to fund this attack.”

  Jess shook her head. “An attack this complex had to have taken a long time to plan. And there are a lot of easier ways to finance the operation.”

  “What if they were planning to sell it for some other reason? What if the Russians thought it was some kind of alien technology?”

  They entered the central business district. There were several restaurants to choose from.

  “Nana, I don’t think they came all the way to New Zealand for an artifact that they’d never even seen, just because they thought it might have some alien—”

  A sudden realization popped into Jess’s head. Her skill with codes included recognizing patterns where there didn’t seem to be any. Now that she had more info about the men who’d attacked Fay, the link became clear.

  Those Russians were killed by associates of men who had come all the way to New Zealand based on what Fay had revealed in the video. Because of something she said.

  Jess slammed on the brakes and pulled to the side of the road.

  “What’s the matter?” Fay asked.

  Jess turned to her. “What exactly did the creature on the spacecraft say to you?”

  “You mean the alien language? Why?”

  “I don’t think it was an alien language.”

  “Jessica, I know you don’t believe that it happened to me, but it did. I’m not going to lie just because it makes me sound crazy.”

  Jess smiled. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Nana. I think everything happened to you just the way you said it did, and someone else knows it did. That’s why they came for your artifacts. Specifically the wooden engraving.”

  Fay embraced her granddaughter with delight. “I’m so glad you finally believe me. The US government has always been so successful at covering up the incident, I didn’t think anyone ever would.”

  “I don’t think that the US government is behind the attack.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. Any time someone has gotten close to revealing the truth about the Roswell incident, the US has hidden the evidence and labeled the person a nut or worse. Mac Brazel—remember the foreman of the ranch in Roswell?—he got the worst of it.”

  Until the events in Queenstown, Jess had never given much thought to Roswell except when Fay would retell the story about the alien or her trips to Peru to decipher the engraving’s clues. Jess would listen politely because she knew it was important to her grandmother, but it wasn’t something she took seriously. As long as the travel kept Fay busy and happy after her grandfather’s death, that’s all Jess cared about. Now she wished she’d paid more attention.

  “I didn’t tell you this morning,” she said, “but I stayed up last night researching the Roswell incident. Did you know there was a book out recently about Area 51? The author claimed a source told her that Stalin created child-sized people with grotesque features. They were sent over to the US in a top-secret Soviet airplane to crash and cause hysteria in the populace.”

  ‘That sounds more ridiculous than an alien spacecraft landing.”

  “I know. It sounds insane, but we just heard that the men who attacked you killed five Russians. Could there be some link between Roswell and the Soviets?”

  “But I saw the alien with my own eyes!”

  “Maybe you were supposed to think it was an alien.”

  “Well, it wasn’t child-sized, I can tell you that for sure. It picked me up and put me on Bandit like I weighed nothing.”

  “Even outlandish stories have a kernel of truth to them. What if the Russians are involved? We won’t know until we figure out what that piece of wood from Roswell means and why it depicts the same figures found in the Nazca lines. And I think the key is what the creature told you. Can you repeat it?”

  “Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um.”

  Jess opened her cell phone and dialed a number in her contact list.

  “Who are you calling?” Fay said.

  “Michael Silverman. He’s a professor of Russian at the University of Auckland, and a well-known authority on its different dialects. I confer with him from time to time when I need something translated.”

  He answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “Mike, it’s Jess McBride.”

&nbs
p; “Hey! How’s my favorite codebreaker?”

  “I’m fine. Listen, I don’t have much time and I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Find another Russian virus on your system?”

  “No, but I do need something translated.” Jess put the phone on speaker. “Mike, I’ve got you on the line with my grandmother, Fay Turia.”

  “The one who does all the adventures around the world?”

  “The same.”

  “Hi, Fay. Jess talks about you every time she calls.”

  Fay smiled. She leaned over and talked loudly into the phone. “Nice to talk to you, Michael.”

  “So what do you need translated?”

  Jess nodded for Fay to speak. “Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um.”

  “Say that again?”

  Fay repeated it, and they heard typing. The phone went silent for a minute.

  “Mike, you still there?” Jess said.

  “I’m here. You sure that’s Russian?”

  “That’s what we were hoping you could tell us.”

  “Well, the pronunciation is way off if it is. I parsed the sentence into its syllabic components. The only part of it that could be remotely Russian is pree vodat kah. If I’m hearing it right, it means ‘leads to’.”

  “So if it’s Russian, it means ‘rah pahnoy leads to zay nobee um’?”

  “The last part might be a single word. Zaynobium. Don’t ask me what it means. I just tried plugging several different spellings of it into Google and got nothing except a link to a video of your grandmother.”

  The word was meaningless to Jess. She looked at Fay, who shrugged back at her.

  “What about the first part?” Jess asked.

  “That’s interesting. The first thing that popped into my head was a slightly different pronunciation. Rapa Nui.”

  “As in Easter Island?” Fay said, her eyes shining with revelation.

  “It’s just a guess,” Silverman said. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.

  “No, Mike,” Jess said. “You’ve been very helpful. Thanks.” They said goodbye and hung up.

  Jess was mesmerized by the chain of events. A supposed alien crash-lands at Roswell, hands Fay a wooden engraving showing figures from the Nazca lines, and utters a phrase implying that the map on the other side depicts Easter Island.

  “What do you think Zaynobium is?” Fay said, but Jess couldn’t even hazard a guess.

  Fay thought about it for a moment and then bounced in her seat with excitement. “Maybe that’s the alien home planet!” She took the wooden tablet out of her bag and looked at it again with new eyes.

  “Let’s talk about it over lunch.” Jess moved to get out of the car, but Fay put her hand out to stop her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To that restaurant.”

  “But we have to find Tyler and tell him what we found out.”

  “Nana, you need to eat.”

  “I can eat later. Do you realize this is what I’ve been searching for the past five years? Rapa Nui could be the missing piece of the puzzle!”

  “But how could Easter Island be linked to both Roswell and the Nazca lines?”

  “Some anthropologists think the Nazca people could have migrated from South America to Polynesia.” Fay removed the ancient engraving from her bag and reverently ran her fingers over the grooves etched into the wood. “The person who made this map might be a descendant of those voyagers. If he left clues to the lines’ true purpose, it would mean that somewhere on Easter Island lies the answer to one of the world’s greatest mysteries.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Tyler and Grant had spent the last hour seated at a conference table, reciting to Morgan, Vince, and Kessler the sequence of events over the past two days that led them here. They included everything, including the cryptic items that Nadia Bedova asked about outside the warehouse.

  “Do you know what Bedova meant by Icarus?” Morgan asked.

  Tyler knew the myth to which it referred: the boy who escaped Crete only to fly too close to the sun, which melted his waxen wings and caused him to fall to his death. “Sounded like a code name to me,” he said. “Maybe it’s a Russian spy.”

  “Or a secret project,” Grant said.

  “And you don’t know what’s happening on July twenty-fifth?” Vince said. His eyes had flinched noticeably when Tyler had told them that part. It obviously struck a nerve.

  “No idea,” Tyler said.

  “What about Wisconsin Avenue or the Baja cartel?”

  Tyler shook his head. “Perhaps if you shared some information about the Killswitch, we could be of help.”

  Kessler straightened in his seat. “That is my project. And its real name is Lightfall. ‘The Killswitch’ is Collins’s nickname for the device, and everyone on the team started calling it that.” He was obviously unhappy about sharing this information.

  “I’ll bet it’s not a new kind of blender,” Grant said.

  “You are an idiot,” Morgan said. “This is a DARPA black project. Lightfall is a weapons program.”

  “What does it do?” Tyler asked.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Kessler said, jumping out of his seat. Tyler could imagine how shaken the scientist must be, knowing his life’s work had been stolen.

  “Dr. Kessler,” Morgan said, “this is more important than anything else you could be doing right now. Please sit down.”

  Kessler looked at the door and grumbled, but he took his seat, massaging his temples as if he were soothing a headache. After a few moments, he said with a tired voice, “You, of course, know what an EMP is.”

  Tyler nodded. “When an H-bomb explodes at high altitude, it blasts out an electromagnetic pulse that fries anything with a computer chip.”

  “So the Killswitch is a nuke?” Grant said.

  “No, it is much more sophisticated than that,” Kessler said. “Under Project Lightfall, we designed the bomb to emit the pulse without a thermonuclear explosion. The weapon has the capability to penetrate hardened bunkers and vehicles, even at low altitudes, and it leaves no residual radioactive fallout.”

  “So it could be used in conventional wars,” Tyler said.

  “It’s not my place to say where or how it’s used. That’s for military commanders and politicians to decide.”

  Grant grunted.

  “I suppose you have a problem with me being a weapons developer,” Kessler said.

  “Not at all. When I was in the Rangers, I wouldn’t have minded setting one of those babies off over a tank division that I was about to engage. Would have made my job easier.”

  That seemed to calm Kessler. “We were planning to do our first test next week at the Woomera range south of here.”

  “Why Australia?”

  “The Australians have material critical to operation of the weapon. It was a joint development.”

  “What material?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  Tyler was confused. “If the weapon was stolen, then why the truck bomb?”

  “A cover-up attempt,” Morgan said. “If that truck had made it through the gates and blown up Pine Gap, everyone here would have been killed. The ensuing investigation would have come to the conclusion that the weapon was destroyed in the explosion.”

  “How powerful is the bomb?”

  Kessler rubbed his mouth. “It depends on the yield of the trigger. That’s what we were hoping to find out with the tests. But my estimate says that an airburst at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet would disable everything within a thirty-mile radius.”

  Grant leaned forward, slack-jawed at the weapon’s destructive potential. “That’s the size of Washington.”

  “Or Paris. Or Beijing. If the Killswitch is used to take out a major city, the effects would be catastrophic.”

  “Now you see why we need your help,” Vince said. “You can identify the thieves.”

  “How did they steal it?”

  “We’re still
tracking that down. But it looks like it was done in transit, on the way here from the Alice Springs airport. The truck never showed up. With the police investigating the warehouse deaths and the explosion, we’re stretched thin looking for it.”

  “What about the airport?” Tyler said. “Roadblocks?”

  “The Alice Springs airport is tiny, so we’re checking every plane flying out. Roadblocks are more difficult. We can’t have the police stop every car and truck leaving the area to do a thorough search without telling them what they’re looking for.”

  “You can’t exactly put out an all-points bulletin advertising that the US military lost something that could send Sydney or Melbourne back to the Stone Age,” Grant said.

  Vince nodded. “The press would get hold of it in no time, and then we’d have a panic on our hands.”

  “But it can’t be set off,” Kessler protested. “Not without the trigger.”

  Morgan sat with a mixture of sigh and growl. “Dr. Kessler, it’s about time you tell us exactly how the Killswitch works. And I mean everything.”

  Kessler stood and glared at Morgan. “I reiterate my protest. These men are not properly vetted—”

  “Your protest is noted,” she said. “Continue.”

  He seethed for a long minute before finally throwing up his hands in defeat. “All right,” he said, pacing as he spoke. “Do you know what hafnium is?”

  Tyler didn’t hesitate. “It’s a metallic element. It doesn’t have many uses, but it’s important in the cladding of nuclear fuel rods to control the reaction.”

  Grant tapped the table. “Wasn’t there something about a bomb that used a hafnium isomer? I read about it a few years ago. DARPA was developing it, but there was some controversy over whether it actually worked.”

  “How do you know that?” Kessler said in amazement.

  “Well, we are experts in explosives. Reading the literature on the subject is kind of a job necessity.”

  “After those articles came out, all future press communication on the process was halted,” Kessler said.

  “Let me guess,” Tyler said. “Because it works.”

  Kessler nodded. “It’s called induced gamma emission. And yes, it works. Hafnium-3, the isomer you mentioned, is the most powerful non-nuclear explosive in existence. One gram of it has the explosive power of three hundred kilograms of TNT.”