Ethan saw a face appear on the screen, pointing at the convoy of vehicles now parked out on the deserts beneath where the UFO had appeared. Moments later, the head jerked sideways and twisted away from the camera before it fell out of sight.

  ‘Greg,’ Kyle muttered, his face paling. ‘I told him to get out of sight but he didn’t listen, got all excited about the sighting and then pow, he’s gone just like that. They blew half of his face off…’

  Kyle trailed off and he looked as though he might feint or vomit at any moment. Lopez moved to sit alongside him, and Ethan realised that being on the run for a few days had kept Kyle alive and focussed. Now, the reality of what he had witnessed was starting to hit him and shock was setting in. He’d seen the look before, the vacant stare as the brain tried to come to terms with something so awful that the conscience did not want to confront it.

  ‘This kid’s in way over his head,’ Garrett said quietly as he moved alongside Ethan. ‘We don’t know who’s after him and they’re not afraid of pulling the trigger.’

  Ethan nodded, watching the laptop screen in silence. He reached out and used the keyboard to replay the shooting a couple of times. Greg’s head appeared in front of the screen in the wake of the UFO’s disappearance, and he pointed at the convoy. Moments later, a bullet shattered his skull and hurled him sideways, the boy’s body falling out of sight.

  ‘Who do you think they are?’ Lopez asked as she returned to his side, Kyle now reclined in one of the jet’s leather seats with his eyes closed and a blanket draped over him. ‘Mackenzie must know something. Dugway’s an Army field and it’s probably got CIA spooks moving in and out all the time.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ethan said cautiously. ‘We don’t know enough yet, but we have enough to take back to him and see what we can do next. If Kyle has something else he can show us, then we’re in an even better position and we can use it to trade for his safety with the troops from Dugway.’

  ‘Damn,’ Garrett said, looking wistfully at Kyle. ‘I wanted to know what else it was that he’d found out.’

  ‘There’s time,’ Ethan replied. ‘It’s going to take us a while to get to Virginia and while we’re in the air technically we’re safe. It’ll take them a fair while to figure out what happened to us. Right now, Kyle’s our priority along with Sophie. Whatever the hell is going on out here it’s probably connected in some way.’

  Lopez looked across at Kyle.

  ‘That kid’s exhausted and he’s going to be out of it for quite a while. We need to trade off what he has here for his life. That means talking to whoever these Dugway guys are at some point or another, whether we like it or not.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune,’ Ethan observed with a smile.

  ‘This is a matter of national security,’ she retorted with a playful elbow in Ethan’s ribs. ‘It behoves us to protect the innocent, to stand up for the underdog, to boldly go where no woman has go…’

  ‘I get it,’ Ethan grinned. ‘And we have evidence, just the kind of stuff they’re afraid of reaching the public. Kyle was working alone, but we can do a much better job of getting this out there if we want to. That gives us leverage over them, whoever them is. I say we head back to the Barn and show Mackenzie what we have here.’

  ‘Not much else we can do,’ Lopez agreed.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Garrett asked.

  They both looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’ Ethan asked.

  Garrett shrugged but he was looking at the laptop screen with a gleam in his eye.

  ‘Well, you’ve got this program that can predict where UFOs will appear, we have a private jet than can travel anywhere in the world and we’re on the run from the authorities. I figure that a few camera shots and footage isn’t enough to convince the public that there’s been an assassination here. They’ll think that it’s been faked, it’ll be rubbished by the media, you know how the government likes to spin news to protect itself.’

  ‘You just said it would change the world,’ Lopez pointed out.

  ‘I know,’ Garrett replied, ‘but I wasn’t talking about the footage, I was talking about the software Kyle’s developed. It’s the first thing that crossed my mind, that he’s only using this technology in a limited way because he doesn’t have the resources he needs. Why just use it to go find UFOs? Why not use it to capture one?’

  *

  Langley, Virginia

  General Mackenzie managed to get home from the office in time to see his wife and kids, which was sometimes a rarity these days. Both of his daughters were in high school and were going through a phase where boys and fashion were far more important than giving their old man a hug before heading off to bed, and his wife was always so busy that he often got home at night to find the house quiet and his family asleep.

  Carla met him at the door and he was able to get a few words in to Charlotte, the older of his two girls, in between texts on her cell phone from school friends. Rachel, the younger girl, was still just young enough to run up and hug him before she went to bed.

  ‘Dinner’s in the oven warming up,’ Carla informed him, a little frostily. ‘There’s some wine in the fridge if you fancy it.’

  ‘I do,’ Mackenzie said as he hugged Rachel and then sent her off up the stairs to bed.

  Carla moved off into the living room to watch television as Mackenzie headed into the kitchen. There was no point in arguing with her. She had married into a military life and accepted it, but when he’d been posted to Langley he figured she thought that he would be able to come home a little more often. That hadn’t happened, and although she covered it as best she could he could tell that she was annoyed.

  He saw the oven aglow with light and heat, a meal inside, and the fridge looked inviting as the thought of a small glass of wine entered his head. He was halfway across the kitchen when he saw them through the window.

  You could always tell a government pool vehicle. It wasn’t so much that they always used glossy black SUVs, although that often was the case. It was more that they always managed to look somehow out of place. There had been some rain recently, bringing with it fine dust and sand from the mid-west. It had settled on most of the cars in the street where Mackenzie lived, and yet this SUV, parked on the opposite side of the street to his home, was clean. It hadn’t been polished to a mirror shine, but the wheels were also clean and it bore no adornments of any kind. Two men were sitting inside. Neither were looking his way but the dead give-away was that one of them was sipping from one of those cheap coffee cups, the type served over the counter in fast food joints across the country. Observation team, setting up for the night.

  Mackenzie watched them through the window. They weren’t moving, they weren’t paying his home much attention but he knew somehow that they were watching him back, observing the simple rules: don’t look directly at the target, don’t stay in the same place for too long, don’t make yourself stand out. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done the same kind of work himself in his career.

  Mackenzie was high enough up in the chain at Langley to know that this kind of observation was only done on known targets. It was not routinely performed on serving officers within the CIA, so that ruled out Langley as the source of the agents inside the car, if agents they were at all. Mackenzie could not see the vehicle’s plates as it had parked in close behind another vehicle, another ploy to help concealement. They could of course be a protection detail, but he would have been informed and besides, he had not asked for one.

  The temptation was for him to phone the office and send two of his own people out to see who was watching him, but he knew instantly that doing so would lose him the advantage. They didn’t know that he was aware of them yet, as he hadn’t noticed the vehicle when he had arrived home. It was only by chance that he had glimpsed it through the small kitchen side-window that looked out over their neighbour’s front lawn and up the street.

  Mackenzie decided that he would deal with this the old-fashioned way.

  He strode to the front door of his home and out into the warm dusk air. The light was fading fast now, the horizon to the west glowing with last light and a few stars twinkling in the heavens above as he walked down his front lawn and turned left, heading for the parked vehicle.

  If he had needed any further confirmation that he was being watched, the vehicle started its engine and pulled out as its headlights lit up. Mackenzie quicked his pace. He wasn’t about to let them drive off without finding out which agency they worked for. Mackenzie strode off the sidewalk into the path of the car and blocked the way.

  The vehicle began to slow as Mackenzie advanced towards it, even as his wife appeared at the front door to their home and called out to him.

  ‘Scott, what’s going on?’

  Mackenzie turned to call his response, but his voice was drowned out as the vehicle’s engine suddenly screamed and it shot toward him.

  Then he heard the gunfire.

  In a terrible moment he realised that the men in the car were armed and out to kill. The gunman was pointing a machine gun out of the passenger window of the car, the muzzle flaring with flame as he fired not at Mackenzie, but at his home.

  ‘Get down!’

  Mackenzie’s voice was a scream, frantic in his own ears as the car rushed toward him. He hurled himself up into the air, one boot slamming down onto the hood of the vehicle as he vaulted up and leaped over the car as it shot beneath him. Mackenzie flew through the air and rolled as he landed, managing to get one boot down as he slammed into the asphalt.

  He crashed down awkwardly but came up onto his feet and ran toward his home, panic giving flight to his legs as he rushed to his wife’s side without thought for any injuries he might himself have sustained. The front porch was peppered with bullet holes and the living room window was shattered as he leaped into the porch.

  ‘No!’

  Mackenzie hurled himself to his wife’s side where she lay and stared down at her.

  ‘I’m okay!’ she said instantly. ‘I got down before they shot at me! What the hell is going on?’

  Mackenzie launched himself up the stairs inside even as his daughters rushed out from their rooms, screaming in panic and hurling themselves into his arms.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, over and over again as he wrapped them up against his chest and held them tightly.

  Behind him, Carla got to her feet and brushed herself down as she looked up at him, and for the first time General Scott Mackenzie realised that he had gotten himself into something that was way over his head.

  ***

  XXVI

  Kansas

  Ethan could see out of the jet’s windows the lights of America coming on as darkness consumed the sprawling fields of Kansas far below. Here at eighteen thousand feet or so he could still see the sun setting on the horizon behind them, beams of light shafting through towers of evening cloud glowing pink and gold in the sunset. Below, the land sprawled in shadow, and for some reason he felt a sense of despair or foreboding overwhelm him from nowhere.

  The America below them seemed strange, a place they had not been for some time that had changed it seemed beyond all recognition, and the growing shadows seemed to reach out for the jet as it descended through wisps of blue-grey cloud toward the glittering lights of a city far in the distance.

  ‘We’ll be on the ground in ten minutes to refuel,’ Garrett informed him as he walked back from the cockpit. ‘From there we’ll fly you to Langley, where you can debrief your commander. What will you do then?’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

  The truth was that he was deeply concerned about what had happened at Dugway. The footage of Kyle’s friend Greg being shot in cold blood was troubling him more than he might have anticipated, but there was also something else not quite right about the shooting that he couldn’t put his finger on.

  Then there was Garrett’s suggestion.

  ‘Have you thought about it any more?’ Garrett persisted.

  Ethan was struggling to get his head around what Garrett had in mind. Sure, Kyle Trent’s mission to expose the reality of the UFO phenomena was startling and ground breaking enough, but now Garrett was proposing something even more extraordinary. Ethan didn’t even know for sure if it was actually possible.

  ‘How the hell would we catch one of these things even if we did find it?’ he asked.

  Garrett shrugged as he took a seat beside Ethan’s.

  ‘I’m not the expert here, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that we could recruit someone to help us, and Kyle over there must know a thing or two about UFOs, right? If we could find a way to just disable one long enough to tether it or something…’

  ‘Great work genius,’ Lopez murmured sleepily from a nearby seat. ‘They can cross entire galaxies, outrun fighter jets and vanish in an instant, but a rope lasso’ll hold ‘em down no probs. Maybe we should head down to Texas and send in the cowboys.’

  ‘I’m not saying it would be easy,’ Garrett defended himself, ‘but these things are rumoured to have crashed from time to time all over the world. If they can crash…’

  ‘They can be controlled,’ Ethan finished the sentence. ‘The problem is we don’t have any idea of how they’re controlled, so we can’t really figure out a way of hijacking them. About the only way we could do it would be to…’

  Ethan looked at Garrett, who nodded quietly.

  ‘Forget it,’ Lopez cut in. ‘I know what you two are thinking and it’s not a good idea.’

  ‘How do you know what we’re thinking?’ Garrett asked.

  ‘Because you’re men, so the first think you’re thinking is that maybe you could shoot one down.’

  ‘I’m hurt,’ Ethan said.

  ‘And offended,’ Garrett added.

  ‘Am I wrong?’

  ‘No,’ Garrett replied with a cheery smile, ‘but the idea wasn’t to damage it, just knock it off balance a bit so that we can get a closer look.’

  ‘Knock it off balance a bit,’ Lopez echoed with a smirk on her face. ‘Seriously, that’s your idea?’

  ‘You got a better one?’

  ‘Yeah, quit dreaming and let’s get this kid on the ground and back with his family. That’s our priority. You want to get all E.T. on these things, go do it on your own time.’

  ‘I am on my own time and this is my jet,’ Garrett reminded her.

  ‘Minor technicality,’ Lopez shrugged, ‘when your humanity is at stake.’

  ‘Nicola’s right,’ Ethan said.

  ‘I am?’

  Ethan knew that they couldn’t even think about pursuing such a challenge without Kyle Trent’s skills and some serious support, and right now the kid needed help, not more dangerous running around.

  ‘We need Mackenzie behind us on this first,’ he said to Garrett. ‘We can fill him in on what we’ve found, but his mission priority was to bring Kyle in and get to the bottom of how he got those images of UFOs. We’ve done that.’

  ‘Aren’t you even a little bit curious?’ Garrett pressed. ‘Imagine, this could be the discovery of a lifetime, perhaps the greatest in all history: the discovery of other intelligent life in our universe, right here on our own planet. We could utterly annihilate every government cover-up of this phenomena in every country in the world in one fell swoop.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ethan said, ‘and if any of those countries got wind of what we were up to before we achieved it, we’d be on the end of a major fell swoop ourselves. You know how much they do to cover up these kinds of things, how much energy they put into dismissing anything that even hints that UFOs might be a real thing. They’d gun us down on sight, and Kyle’s experience is proof that they’re willing to shoot first and ask ques…’

  Ethan’s train of thought slammed to a halt as an image of Greg being shot flashed into his mind. That was it. That was what was wrong with the video they’d seen.

  ‘Christ,’ he uttered and hurried across to the laptop.

  ‘What is it?’ Lopez asked.

  Ethan opened it and hurriedly accessed the footage of the shooting. He began playing the video again. He could see Greg move in front of the camera, then Greg was shot, and then moments later he heard the report of a rifle.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘What is?’ Lopez asked. ‘He got hit by the troops. They’re far out, enough that the bullet hits Greg before they heard the report.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but Kyle said he measured the distance to the UFO as being a quarter of a mile, and that the distance made the UFO half the size of a football field. That means that the report would have reached them within a quarter second or so, if the troops on the plain had fired the fatal shot. But the report takes almost three quarters of a second.’

  Lopez blinked.

  ‘You clever little boy you,’ she said. ‘That means the shooter was three times as far away.’

  The three of them looked at each other.

  ‘The Americans didn’t shoot Greg,’ they said together in unison.

  ‘Someone else did,’ Ethan added. ‘And right now, we don’t know who.’

  Ethan was about to say something else when his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw Mackenzie’s number on it.

  ‘General, we’ve got news for you,’ he said as he answered.

  ‘It’ll have to wait. Wherever you are, get the hell out of sight. I just survived an assassination attempt and they shot at my wife and children. Someone’s coming for us, all of us. Get undercover as fast as you can!’

  The line went dead immediately, and Ethan’s blood ran cold in his veins as he looked up and saw the jet’s cockpit ahead, the city ahead of them, a line of shimmering red, green and orange lights in the blackness. Lopez was looking at him with a concerned expression on her face. Ethan gave her a feeble smile.

 

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