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  “Until now I believed that it was an urban myth,” he said slowly. “One of those elaborate conspiracy theories that have grown up around secret governments.”

  “Ah, secret governments,” I said glumly. “I never get enough of secret governments.”

  “They do exist, Captain,” said Church. “Any government as large as ours is compartmentalized. Divisions, departments, and groups splinter off, sometimes because they’ve been authorized to go deep and remain off the bureaucratic grid and sometimes to pursue other less official agendas. Congress knows about some of these and provides a degree of oversight, even if buried under layers of secrecy. Others manage to function within our government but without oversight. A case can be made that America would never have become a country had not a secret society of Freemasons taken charge.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve read Dan Brown.”

  Church didn’t smile. “Some of these groups believe — or claim to believe — that they are acting in the best interests of the nation. A case can be built to substantiate some of those claims, just as a case can be built that such manipulation generally has a profit-based agenda attached at some level.”

  “And this Black Book? How does this tie into that?”

  “To be determined. What little I know of the Black Book comes secondhand from a more knowledgeable source.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “You have a friend in the conspiracy theory industry?”

  “Actually, I have several,” he said, reaching for his cell phone again. This time, however, he surprised me. The image on the HD screen changed and suddenly there was Bug.

  “Dudes!” he said brightly. “The Majestic Black Book? Are you freaking kidding me here? How cool is my job?”

  His name was Jerome Taylor, but everyone called him “Bug.” Even his mother. He’s the only person, aside from Church, who has total access to the MindReader computer system. Bug was a former child-star computer genius who hacked his way into Homeland because he thought it would make a good senior project if he found Bin Laden. He’d been arrested and then Church hijacked him for the DMS. Even though Bug’s early attempt at taking down the head of Al-Qaeda hadn’t worked, years later when he had the full resources of MindReader at his disposal, he was largely responsible for putting Uncle Osama in the crosshairs of the heroes on SEAL Team Six. Bug currently ran the MindReader center at the Hangar in Brooklyn. The high-def screen made it look like he was right there in my office.

  “Glad you’re amused,” said Church. “However, we do have a national crisis on our hands.”

  “Yeah, I know. The president, end of the world. Sucks. But … the Black Book? So cool.” He beamed at us like it was Christmas morning. “Tell me we’re really going after it.”

  “First things first,” said Church. “Give me your assessment of the video.”

  Bug gave a dismissive shrug. “Meh. It’s poor-quality alarmist trash. Crap like that wouldn’t even get much play on YouTube.”

  “Pretend it’s real,” I said.

  “Oh, I have no doubt it’s real,” Bug amended, “it’s just that terrorists always make crappy videos. Kind of disappointing because anyone can buy the right software and do a decent job. It speaks to standards and—”

  “Bug,” said Church very quietly.

  Bug blinked in a very buglike way. A cartoon bug. “Um … right. Sorry.”

  “The disaster clips?” I asked. “Are they—?”

  “Most of them are real, sure. News footage. I can locate the sources, that won’t be a problem. I’m doing a search now to find the island with the volcano. Oh, and that last clip they showed was from the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Made by the same guys who did Independence Day and 2012. They got this thing about destroying landmarks.”

  “Do any of those movies deal with the Majestic Black Book?” asked Church.

  “Nah.” Bug screwed up his face as he thought about it. “Actually … I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the book mentioned in a movie. Well, not in a theatrical movie. Not in fiction. You see it all the time in documentaries and on TV, though. Lot of nonfic books about it.”

  “Get me a list of those books and documentaries,” said Church. “And the names of any experts associated with the Black Book.”

  “That’s easy,” snorted Bug. “But why not go straight to the source?”

  “Source?” Church and I asked at the same time.

  “Sure. Junie Flynn.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “She’s the one who first broke the story about the existence of the Black Book,” said Bug. “She’s on all those documentaries.”

  Bug tapped keys and suddenly his image shifted so that he shared a split screen with a photo of a beautiful woman who looked like a 1960s flower child. Masses of long, wavy blond hair, sky-blue eyes, a smile so wholesome it could cure cancer, and a splash of sun freckles across her nose. The photo had been taken against a field of daisies, daffodils, and sunflowers.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I know,” said Bug with enthusiasm. “She’s hot, right? She’s also one of the top experts on conspiracy theories — I mean she’s up there with George Noory and Bill Birnes and guys like that. Written like twenty books and she’s been on Nat Geo, the History Channel, Discovery, and all the others. Junie tracks all of the conspiracies. Her Web site has this great searchable database and there’s tons of stuff about the Majestic Black Book. I’m telling you, man, she’s like a hot version of Yoda.”

  “Then we need to talk to her,” I said. “How fast can you get me her contact info?”

  “Pretty fast, Joe, she’s right here in Maryland. She lives in that old lighthouse in Elk Neck State Park.”

  “Turkey Point Lighthouse? Right at the head of the Chesapeake Bay?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I thought the lighthouse was decommissioned,” I said. “They turned it into a light station.”

  “No, they put it back into operation a year ago and she’s the official keeper.”

  Church turned to me. “You can find this lighthouse easily?”

  “You kidding?” I asked. “I know every inch of that place. I camped at Elk Neck with my family all my life. I took my nephew there half a dozen times.”

  “Good,” he said. “Take a helo and go out there. If you think she’s a viable information source — and if she’s cooperative — then we’ll set up a coded video conference call with her, Bug, Dr. Hu, and Dr. Sanchez. If she stonewalls you, arrest her and bring her back here.”

  “‘Arrest her’?” I asked, smiling.

  “Feel free to use charm if that will work better, Captain. Whatever gets the job done. If this threat is real then we need to get ahead of it and we don’t know what our timetable is.”

  Before I could even reply Church called Gus to prep my Black Hawk.

  “Whoa, hold on,” I said. “Before I go gallivanting off I’d like a few answers. I mean, what the hell is this book? What’s the connection to all of those natural disasters? And why would someone go to such insane lengths as to capture the president of the United States in order to get it?”

  “Are you serious?” Bug asked, appalled at my apparent stupidity. “There are people making billions off that book.”

  “According to rumor and speculation,” murmured Church.

  “Who’s making that kind of money?” I asked. “And how?”

  “Probably half the big shots with defense contracts,” Bug said. “Anyone working on advanced stealth technology, space-based phasers, military space fleets, hypersonic technology vehicles, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, cloaking devices, antigravity drives—”

  “C’mon, Bug, we can’t do most of that stuff yet.”

  “You don’t know that, Joe,” said Bug. “We’re researching all of it. And, hey, that nifty microwave pulse pistol you brought in the other day? That’s the sort of thing people like this would build.”

  “Wouldn’t most of that fall under DARPA’s umb
rella?” I asked.

  DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is a big group within the Department of Defense. They’re the geeks responsible for a lot of major scientific breakthroughs from the Internet to combat exoskeletons.

  “DARPA works with independent contractors, too,” said Bug. “GE, Shelton Aeronautics, and like that. DARPA doesn’t do all of its own research in-house, and it sure as heck doesn’t do its own manufacturing. It only has a three-billion-dollar budget. And, there’s a lot of extremely weird and highly profitable stuff being done in the private sector based on ideas either borrowed from DARPA or gotten from some other source — like the Black Book. And I’ll bet that’s where DARPA got most of its stuff, too. It’s all there in the book, man, that’s the bible for weird tech.”

  “You’re talking like I should know what that book is and I don’t, Bug. What the fuck is it?”

  Bug took a breath. “Okay, Cliffs Notes version. On September 24, 1947, President Harry Truman convened a special group of scientists, military leaders, and government officials — a dozen of them — for the express purpose of studying wreckage recovered from a crash site in New Mexico. This group was called ‘Majestic Twelve,’ or MJ-12. However, according to Junie Flynn, MJ-12 was only the front for an even more secret group, a deeper level of shadow government called ‘Majestic Three,’ M3. A trio of people who had been given control of an enormous black budget to study the wreckage in case there was anything of military value. Bear in mind, these were the early days of the Cold War. The international arms race was already spinning out of control. Junie says that the members of M3 created a book that was a catalog of all parts recovered from the crash. The only complete catalog, they say, with exact specifications, which makes it particularly valuable.”

  “Whoa, slow down — what crash site in New Mexico? Are we talking Russian spy planes or—”

  “Joe,” said Bug, amazed, “haven’t you been listening? This is the Majestic Project. The Black Book is a complete catalog of all the parts salvaged from the UFO that crashed in Roswell.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Camden Court Apartments, Camden and Lombard Streets

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 7:04 a.m.

  They looked like giant insects the way they swarmed out of the stairwells at both ends of the hall. Twelve men in black BDUs with Kevlar body and limb pads, helmet-cams, and full SWAT kit. The whole unit was split into four-man teams, with two men armed with MP5s, a point man carrying a ballistic shield and a Glock.40, and one team leader with a Remington 870 pump shotgun. Despite the speed of their approach they made almost no sound as they converged on the door to apartment. There were more men in the fire towers and in the lobby and out on the street. Two FBI helicopters were in the air.

  The raid was being conducted entirely without assistance from local police. The suspect had ties to the police department as well as city government. His brother was a detective, and his father was the mayor.

  The point man for the raid was Special Agent Sullivan, a twenty-year veteran with the FBI who had spent the last ten with Hostage Rescue. He was a tough, humorless man, very good at his job and totally unsympathetic to anyone who came into his operational crosshairs. When such a target was a crooked cop and suspected terrorist — well, Sullivan didn’t figure he’d lose a lot of sleep if the bad guy was home and kicked up a fuss.

  The teams clustered around the doorway, close but well back from any angle where a round fired from inside could hit them. The walls were brick but the apartment doors were only wood.

  A burly agent hustled up with a breeching tool — a heavy weight with a blunt end and sturdy handles. He positioned himself in front of the lock and looked to Sullivan, who finger-counted down from three.

  On zero the big man swung the weight and the wood around the lock turned to pickup sticks.

  “Go — go — GO!” bellowed Sullivan and the men in the black body armor poured through the door into Joe Ledger’s apartment.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Warehouse, Department of Military Sciences field office

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 7:05 a.m.

  I turned to Church, expecting to see him shaking his head in denial. Or smiling. Or telling Bug to stop shoveling the bullshit.

  Instead he stood there, silent, the muscles at the corners of his jaw flexing.

  After a long moment I said, “Oh, come on!”

  “We need to remain open to any possibility,” said Church.

  Bug said, “Junie Flynn says that M3 keeps adding to the Black Book. Stuff from other crashes.”

  “Other crashes?” I demanded.

  “Sure. There are UFOs all over the place. It’s in the news, Joe, and lately there have been a ton of new sightings in the Southwest, all over Mexico, in Canada, Russia, Europe. UFO sightings are way up.”

  “Sightings or crashes?”

  “Well, okay, sightings are up, but there have been bunch of crashes since the forties. The Black Book has data on all of them, and some stuff stolen from other governments, too. We’re not the only ones doing this, but we’re ahead of the pack because Roswell was the first crash in the modern era, and the first one where they were able to recover anything of value. The Black Book has specifications, schematics, analyses of materials, metallurgic reports, weights and measures. Everything. Like I said, the Majestic Black Book is the bible, Joe, the holy grail for reverse-engineering technology from alien spacecraft.”

  “No way,” I said, shaking my head. “Maybe this book is packed with technological secrets but they’re going to be from pretty ordinary sources. This is weird enough now without bringing aliens into it.”

  “Hey, man,” complained Bug, his face flushing, “I wasn’t the one who brought up the Black Book. The president himself just asked us to find it.”

  “He didn’t say anything about little green men.”

  “It’s implied, Joe, it’s implied.”

  “Can we take a moment here,” I said, “maybe take a breath, return to the real world? We’re talking UFOs. We’re involved in a conversation in which UFOs are an actual thing. I know we deal with some very weird shit here in the old D of MS, but do you really think we should waste our time running down a lead like this? You want me to drop everything and go talk to a conspiracy theory nut who lives in a lighthouse?”

  “Tell me, Captain,” he said quietly, “what other lead were you planning to follow?”

  I opened my mouth to fire back a crushing reply, but there were no words on my tongue. Ghost gave a low, significant whuff.

  To Bug, I said, “How many copies of the Black Book are there? Maybe we should send teams to every possible location and—”

  But Bug was already shaking his head. “There’s only one copy. The copy. It’s supposed to be kept in this incredible safe with all sorts of booby traps and stuff.”

  “Uh-huh,” I murmured skeptically. “And are there trolls and dragons guarding it?”

  “I’m just repeating what Junie said. She also says that the Majestic charter does not allow the book to be photographed or copied in any way, and for anyone to see it the book has to be checked out by one of the three governors of M3.”

  A knock on the door saved me from saying something that would probably have hurt Bug’s feelings. Gus Dietrich poked his head in. “Got some news about those four guys you tussled with, Joe.”

  “What kind of news?” I asked.

  “Bad, very bad, and strange,” he said, stepping into the room. “First the bad news — those names are bogus. Stephen Albert, Benjamin Carr, John Woods Duke, and Mark Bucci are names of dead American composers.”

  “Somebody has an interesting sense of humor,” mused Church.

  “Ha-fucking-ha,” I groused. “What else?”

  “That’s the very bad news. They were taken to the ER at Harbor Hospital. At least that was the plan. A pair of ambulances showed up, EMTs loaded them, and they too
k off with a patrol car leading the way. The ambulances made a sudden left and by the time the cruiser saw them turning and circled the block to find them, the two ambulances were gone. Cops tried to radio the EMTs and got nothing. Helicopter flyovers failed to locate the vehicles. Police are searching for them, but there are a million warehouses, multicar residential garages, and boathouses in that section of town.”

  Bug looked at me from the big screen on the wall. “I can put somebody on that. Lot of ambulance services have GPS units, so we can probably track them. The ambulance company might also have a remote vehicle disabling system. Lot of them do because of all those warnings from Homeland about how easy it would be to use a vehicle like that as a car bomb.”

  “Gus,” I said, “send everything you have to Bug and keep me posted.”

  He nodded and headed for the door.

  “Wait,” I said, “what’s the ‘strange’ news?”

  He turned with an enigmatic smile. “Oh yeah … that little metal doodad you found? I had the geek squad look it over. Get this … they can’t identify the material. They’re not even sure it is metal. But it might take a while for them to figure out what it is.”

  “Why?” asked Church.

  “Because X-rays won’t penetrate it and when they tried to run it through the MRI there was some kind of system failure. The geeks are trying to reboot the medical computers now.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did that metal thing cause the crash?”

  “That’s what they’re trying to figure out now.”

  Church pursed his lips for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, Gus, keep us posted.”

  But Gus lingered for one moment more. “Oh, and Joe — your bird’s smoking on the roof. You want Echo Team on deck?”

  “No, this is just a pickup. We don’t want to scare our expert more than we have to. Flight crew only. I’d rather have Top meet with the cop who lost the ambulances. Tell him to spread the team out and help with a search of the harbor area. I want those vehicles found.”