The disclosure protocol, p.12
The Disclosure Protocol, page 12
part #8 of Warner & Lopez Series
‘Great, we get off the freeway at the next exit and lose the car,’ he said. ‘The rest is on foot, as quick as we can. You got that, Kyle?’
The kid stared at him vacantly in the reflection of the rear-view mirror.
‘Man, I don’t know what the hell just happened.’
‘We just saved your ass,’ Lopez replied, ‘when I could have still been sunning mine on a tropical beach. You’re welcome.’
‘Sit tight,’ Ethan said to Kyle. ‘We’re here to help, but right now we’ve got to lose the Dugway goons before we’re arrested.’
Kyle nodded vacantly, seemingly taken utterly by surprise at how quickly his circumstances had changed. Ethan was no longer concerned with Kyle’s welfare, however. He was more worried about the fact that the Special Ops team had clearly recognised Lopez and had actively altered their mission to close her down.
Whoever was pursuing Kyle Trent knew all about himself and Nicola Lopez.
***
XXI
Casa de Shenandoah
Ethan pulled the Tahoe over and parked it behind a series of lockups to make it harder to find for the Special Ops teams hunting for them. With Kyle and Lopez, he jogged the last couple of miles, aiming for the sound of helicopter blades. Ahead, in a dusty clearing, a silver helicopter had touched down and was sitting with its side door open amid spiralling clouds of dust and sand.
Ethan helped Kyle aboard as Lopez leaped inside, and then he jumped in and hauled the door shut. Within moments, the helicopter lifted off and climbed away to the west. Ethan saw Rhys Garrett look over his shoulder and give him a thumbs-up from where he sat alongside the pilot as Ethan donned a set of headphones.
‘Welcome aboard, glad you could make it!’ Garrett chortled.
‘We’ve got friends pursuing,’ Ethan informed him. ‘We’re gonna stick out like a sore thumb in this helicopter.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Garrett replied, ‘it’s only a short hop and then we’ll be taking off.’
Lopez frowned. ‘I thought we were already flying?’
Ethan looked down out of the helicopter’s window and suddenly he realised what Garrett had in mind. Below them was a sprawling forty-acre ranch that had its own museum, tennis courts, stables and an immense estate house. But, astonishingly, it also had its own airport terminal and private runway.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Lopez uttered.
‘For when you just have to avoid the queues at the airport,’ Garrett explained cheerily over the intercom from the front seat as the pilot began descending for a landing. They had probably flown less than a couple of miles.
‘You own this place?’ Lopez marvelled.
‘No,’ Garrett admitted, sounding a little disappointed. ‘It belongs to a friend of mine. He picked it up for a bargain a few years back. I would have taken it on if I’d been in the country.’
‘How much was a bargain?’ Ethan asked.
‘Fifty million dollars,’ Garrett replied. ‘It’s almost a crime.’
‘Fifty million,’ Lopez echoed. ‘If only I’d known.’
Garrett’s private jet was waiting for them as the helicopter landed on a pad nearby, and Ethan could hear the jet’s engines already turning as they ducked out of the helicopter and hurried toward it. The helicopter lifted off almost immediately and continued on to the north west.
‘The feds should follow the helicopter and probably won’t have noticed it land here,’ Garrett said. ‘He’s heading out to California. Even if whoever’s chasing you work it out, we should have a decent head start and be able to help you both get lost, in the nicest possible sense.’
Kyle Trent appeared to be in some kind of a daze, having been shot at for the first time in his life only days ago in an attempted assassination and now being hustled aboard a private jet on a ranch worth tens of millions of dollars.
Garrett shut the jet’s door behind them and called to the pilot. Even before they were strapped in they were taxiing onto the runway and moments later the engines roared and the jet accelerated along the runway and then rotated, soaring up into the hard blue sky.
Ethan looked out of the windows and saw Las Vegas sprawl before him, a vast patchwork of streets and buildings that glinted in the harsh sunlight. The jet banked around to head east, climbing rapidly. Ethan’s ears popped as he saw Vegas slip into the haze, the deserts stretching for miles in every direction as they climbed up through ten thousand feet.
‘Okay,’ Lopez said as she turned to Kyle Trent. ‘You’ve got lots of talking to do and we’re all ears.’
Trent stared at her, stunned into silence. Ethan could see that he was looking at Lopez as though she were a work of art, while at the same time trying to formulate a response that didn’t sound ridiculous.
‘Try starting with why they’re trying to kill you,’ he suggested.
Trent blinked. ‘Who the hell are you people?’
‘We’re the ones who aren’t trying to shoot you dead,’ Lopez said. ‘We’re working for the government.’
‘But those people who were chasing me work for the government!’ Trent snapped, panicked.
‘There’s government, and there’s government,’ Ethan explained. ‘Some departments work in such secrecy that they become a law unto themselves. We’re the ones who work by the book, more or less. Look, we were sent here to find you and possibly protect you, if it came to that, and it has so we need to know everything that you know or this could end really badly for everyone.’
Trent eyed them all suspiciously.
‘What, you’re going to throw me out of the jet without a parachute if I don’t talk?’
‘No,’ Lopez replied. ‘We don’t do that sort of thing, and nor does the part of the government we work for. However, you’re in deep kim chi Kyle, and we think we know why.’
On cue, Ethan produced copies of the images that General Mackenzie had given him. The perfect photographs of UFOs taken by an anonymous source were handed to Kyle and he looked down at them.
‘Been busy, Kyle?’ Ethan asked.
Kyle stared down at the images. ‘Oh shit.’
‘I’ll say,’ Lopez replied. ‘Kyle, if you don’t help us to help you, you’re looking at thirty to life in a security max prison for conspiracy, trespass on military property and probably treason for attempting to coerce the government of the United States into disclosure about top secret operations.’
Kyle didn’t put up much of a fight as he stared down at the images.
‘I thought I was doing the right thing,’ he pleaded. ‘The government knows more about UFOs than they’re saying. Everyone knows it and yet so few do anything about it! The people have a right to know about this! The government doesn’t own us, we own the government and until someone stands up for that they’ll continue to walk all over us!’
‘I agree,’ Ethan admitted, ‘but not all conspiracy theories are what they seem. Our evidence is that the government does know more about UFOs than they’re admitting, but they keep quiet because they don’t know what the hell these things really are. Their biggest concern is the panic they fear would be caused if they were to admit that these things are flying around in our skies with impunity.’
‘People already know that they’re doing that!’ Kyle argued. ‘We haven’t collapsed overnight into dribbling cavemen, have we? People would rather know the truth and deal with it than have that truth hidden from them and be denied knowledge of the existence of life beyond this planet. Don’t you think that people would rather deal with what’s real than live in ignorance?’
Ethan found himself performing a rapid recalculation of his perception of Kyle Trent. Far from being a socially outcast computer hacker with a millennial chip on his shoulder, the kid was impassioned and determined and even now was fighting his corner. The thing was, not only was Ethan starting to like the kid, he was finding it tough to counter his argument.
Like most all folk, Ethan wanted to know what UFOs were. He wanted someone to speak out and explain what the hell they were doing whizzing around all the time. The public fascination with the subject was displayed for all to see in the popularity of endless documentaries about unidentified flying objects and supposed alien encounters, some stretching back into ancient history. Likewise, the march of civilisation and the Enlightenment had taught humanity that religions did not possess meaningful answers to any of life’s mysteries and that science and discovery, even if painful at times, were largely responsible for mankind’s emergence from brutality and suffering. People could take the hit, even if it made them feel vulnerable.
‘People have been seeing these things for thousands of years,’ Kyle added. ‘They haven’t harmed us yet.’
Ethan and Lopez exchanged a glance.
‘That all depends on who we’re talking about,’ Lopez replied. ‘Look, start from the beginning, okay? How the hell did you get photographs of UFOs like these? Are they fake?’
Kyle Trent gave a snort of a laugh and shook his head. ‘No, they’re not fake. They’re as real as we are sitting here.’
‘Then how did you take them?’ Ethan pressed. ‘If they got out they’d cause a media storm like nothing we’ve ever seen. How did you even know where they would appear?’
Kyle smiled, almost ruefully.
‘That’s the big irony in all of this,’ he said. ‘It was the government who showed me how to do it.’
***
XXII
‘You’re going to have to give us a little more than that,’ Lopez said.
Kyle sighed and leaned back in his seat as the jet levelled off at thirty-five thousand feet, high above the sprawling Nevada deserts that were flecked with white cumulus clouds.
‘I want to know who I’m talking to first,’ he said, glancing at Garrett.
‘I’m Ethan Warner,’ Ethan said. ‘I served in the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, became a journalist and then was hired to work for the Defence Intelligence Agency. This is my partner, Nicola Lopez, former Washington PD and we’ve been working together for several years now. Believe me, we’ve seen some stuff and nothing you’re telling us sounds impossible.’
Trent glanced at Garrett. ‘Who’s the money man?’
‘I’m an international property developer,’ Garrett replied. ‘I got involved with these guys when researching my father’s murder. They helped me solve it and put the people responsible behind bars. I’d trust them with my life and I think that you should with yours, because right now there are some real unsavoury people who would like to see it come to an end.’
Kyle seemed to sense that Garrett was both telling the truth and genuinely concerned for his safety.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked, glancing out of the windows.
‘Virginia,’ Ethan replied. ‘From there, anywhere that’s safe.’
Kyle suddenly sat bolt upright in his seat. ‘My parents, they’re…’
‘Safe,’ Garrett replied. ‘I tipped off a media team about the lights at Dugway last night and sent them canvassing the area, gave them your parents’ address. The media don’t know that you’re missing yet but I made sure that I got word to your folks that you’re safe with us. The media are hovering around Vernon right now so the military, or whoever these guys were, will find it hard to threaten them in any meaningful way.’
Kyle seemed to relax again.
‘The pictures, Kyle,’ Lopez said, ‘how did you take them?’
Kyle picked one of the images up and smiled, as though fondly recalling the night that it was taken.
‘Because of something called big data,’ he replied. ‘You ever heard of it?’
‘Sure,’ Ethan replied. ‘The Internet, marketing strategies, gathering information on browsing so that adverts are targeted more efficiently, things like that right?’
‘Right,’ Kyle agreed, ‘except that big data is capable of so much more and the government have been using it to catch criminals. The irony here is that I used the same process that they use, in order to catch a UFO.’
Lopez frowned. ‘How does that work?’
Kyle got himself comfortable in the leather seats as he replied.
‘There is a program which gathers data in large quantities, called PredPol, which is short for Predictive Policing. It’s been in use for some years in Los Angeles. It’s a data-crunching program that lists all known crimes in a given area, compiles all the details about those crimes, and then is able to generate an algorithmic predicition of where crime will happen based on that prior data.’
Lopez blinked.
‘That’s awesome, and it sounds like that movie, Minority Report.’
‘It’s much the same, except that PredPol is reality and it actually works,’ Kyle said. ‘Trials in the Foothill area of Los Angeles saw a twelve per cent drop in crime when the software was trialled there in 2011. PredPol was used not just to predict crime based on past data, but to also factor in things like the time of day, the weather, how close pay-day was and a bunch of other data that might affect how criminals operated. The police were able to show up before crimes were committed and criminals were thus deterred and prevented from carrying out burglaries and assaults or whatever. Police forces are using or trialling the program all over the world now. Burglaries were cut by over a quarter in Manchester in the UK by routing police vehicles through areas when PredPol predicted crimes would take place at certain times.’
Ethan realised that he was starting to get a sense of where Kyle was going with this.
‘So, you wrote a similar code or program or something?’ he hazarded.
Kyle grinned, and shrugged, almost coy. ‘Well, sort of.’
‘You stole the code, didn’t you,’ Lopez said, seeing straight through the kid.
‘I didn’t steal it,’ Kyle retorted, ‘exactly. I borrowed it. It’s not my intention to make money from what I’m doing, only to expose what the government has been hiding.’
‘So, you borrowed the code, presumably via hacking,’ Ethan said. ‘Then what?’
Kyle resumed his story.
‘So, I then wrote my own code,’ he said as he directed a harsh glance at Lopez, ‘which was designed to trawl the internet using PredPol and search terms such as UFO, sighting of lights, UFO photograph, dates and times, words like pilot or police and so on, so that I could have a reasonable chance of obtaining data from well-trained observers who had recorded their experiences with big organisations like MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network.’
Ethan had heard of the organisation known as MUFON. Established in Illinois in 1969, the organisation had grown to become the most widely respected civilian research group into the UFO phenomena, with chapters in almost every American state. The group prided itself on its efforts to introduce the scientific method into its investigations, in an attempt to understand the phenomena better in the face of dismissal by the United States government. The only official US investigation into the UFO phenomena, Project Blue Book, had concluded that the phenomena was nothing unusual and most often the result of mistakenly misidentified aircraft, meteorological events or even swamp gas, and rejected the hypothesis of extra terrestrial visitors entirely.
‘MUFON picked up the slack where Blue Book left off,’ Ethan said.
‘Pretty much,’ Kyle agreed, ‘and they had been compiling data since 1969, literally thousands and thousands of sightings, many of them by civilian and military pilots, trained observers who could tell the difference between something ordinary and something extraordinary. I made sure that my program could differentiate between brief sightings and extensive ones, and especially that it could detect sightings with visual and radar confirmation. Then I let it loose and waited to see what would come back.’
‘What did it find?’ Garrett asked, intrigued by Kyle’s story.
‘Man,’ Kyle shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’
‘Try us,’ Lopez insisted. ‘You wouldn’t believe half of what we’ve dug up in recent years.’
Kyle shrugged, and from his pocket he produced a small Flash RAM drive.
‘I can do better than that,’ he said. ‘I can show you. This contains a copy of much of my work, and it has film on it of what happened at Dugway last night.’
***
XXIII
Las Vegas, Nevada
Vigor Vitesky hated the heat.
The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky as he stood with his men near the entrance to the Galleria Mall and watched the American agents running around like headless chickens as they sought to figure out where Kyle Trent was.
Vigor’s greatest assets in this business, he felt, were his patience and persistence. The Americans were overly emotional about everything, whereas he preferred to watch from a distance and evaluate with a clear mind. That Kyle Trent was a slippery customer was clear from the fact that two four-man teams of American agents had let him slip through their fingers. Vigor doubted that Kyle Trent had managed to pull that off on his own, however, and judging by the four police cars gathered around a loading bay where a large truck was parked, and the agents on the roof of the building, Kyle had gone up and then down before making good his escape.
‘He had help,’ came a voice from Vigor’s right.
Vigor turned to the youngest of his team. Although a fully trained field agent, Ivor was also an expert in computer hacking and had already accessed a local traffic camera network used by the city to monitor automobile accidents and traffic snarl ups.
Ivor showed him footage on a cell screen of a youth, a man and a woman leaping from the mall roof onto the truck and then down to the ground. Moments later, they pulled out of the parking lot in a silver vehicle just before the second American team could cut them off.
Vigor watched the two Americans helping the youth, who could only be Kyle Trent. It had taken Vigor some time to make the connection between the American youth and the events in Scotland. The police officer whom he had persuaded to assist had been able to inform him that a CIA officer had gotten in contact with the police just days after the event. Following that lead had led Vigor and his men to the United States, both to monitor the CIA officer in question and also to pursue Kyle Trent.
