Chapter 1

Oakland, TN – May 27th, 1983 – 2:50 PM

In ten minutes it would be summer. Although June 21st was still three weeks away, for Jon Edmonds—and everybody else who went to Jefferson Middle School, he was pretty sure—summer started the moment that bell rung, and wouldn’t end until August was almost gone.

And what a summer it was going to be. He would have the house to himself. His sister was taking summer classes at UT Memphis, and would be staying down there most of the summer. She’d come up some weekends, which would be great. Stacey could be a lot of fun in small doses. Most of the time, though, she’d be seven hours away in Memphis, and Jon had found that having his big sister all the way across the state made having one almost bearable.

His mom would be at work, or out—out dating, taking classes, attending seminars or saving the world—almost every hour that she wasn’t asleep. His mother’s constant absence had, at one time, been something that he hated, but now that Stacey was no longer there to either torment him or share the seemingly endless miseries of her life, his mom being gone didn’t bug him so much. It was actually kind of nice.

During the school year, he got his homework done in the afternoon and had the whole night to play videogames, program his computer, read, watch TV, or talk on the phone. Much of the time, his mom didn’t get home before midnight. When Stacey had still been living at home, she had made him go to bed early, had monopolized the phone and the television, and when he had tried to read or work on his computer in peace, she had always sought him out and tried to make him as miserable as she was. She had told him stories about all the terrible things that happened between their parents before Jon could remember, before their father had left. She would go on about how bad their mother was for being gone all the time, leaving the terrible responsibilities of “raising” Jon on Stacey’s already burdened shoulders—

Jon shook his head. He looked to the front of the room, where Mrs. Matthews sat, head down, studiously reading a paperback. He looked around at the other students, most of them, like Jon, waiting patiently for the bell to ring; there weren’t too many discipline problems in the advanced algebra class. He looked up at the clock on the wall. Just five more minutes, and he was free for three glorious months.

There was no point in letting his mind wander into the past, he told himself. That was all over. Stacey was out of his life, and in remarkably better spirits for the few weekends she was in it these days. For himself, Jon was perfectly content to have Pop-Tarts for breakfast and TV dinners in front of the television, and didn’t mind his absentee mother. His dad—Jackson, in his mind; that’s what Stacey called him—hadn’t made one of his awkward, bridge-building appearances for two years running, and Jon was guessing this year would be the same. It was one thing to manage to show up once in a while when you were only four hours away, but quite another when you lived halfway across the country. Last Jon had heard, his dad had moved to California and was protesting something somewhere. All put together, it was very likely that this would be the best summer ever.

Last Christmas, Jackson had inexplicably sent Stacey an Atari 5200, which had characteristically arrived a month late (along with socks and some Star Wars toys for Jon, which were kind of cool but really for a younger kid—he was, after all, fourteen) and his mother had insisted on boxing it up and sending it to Stacey in Memphis, where it had stayed, in the box, until Stacey had come up two weekends ago and given it to Jon. Not only did that bode well for future visits—life away at college was obviously making Stacey nicer—but it was just in time for summer. He already had a Pitfall cartridge, and was saving his allowance to buy another game cartridge in a week or two.

He had recently managed to persuade his mom to let him upgrade his computer—a very groovy TRS-80 Color Computer—to 32K of memory and Extended BASIC, and to buy him an the Editor/Assembler so he could start writing not just in BASIC but also assembly language, like a real, honest-to-God computer programmer. He had also shaken her down for a new chemistry set—a big one, one with almost everything. Being the only child in the house with an almost never-present mother had a few perks beyond controlling the telephone and the TV.

As an added bonus, Dr. Bernhard from down the street had loaned him a book on electrical engineering and given him some cheap “build your own radio” and “build your own calculator” kits from Radio Shack several months ago. The old guy had a wall full of books in his living room, and had, just a little over three months ago, pulled down half-a-dozen for Jon to take home and keep as long as he liked. Electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, even history books.

And it was all in his room at home, waiting for him. Just three more minutes.

Not everything was perfect, of course. He still didn’t have cable television. It seemed like every kid in school had cable now—everybody was talking about MTV, where they played nothing but extremely cool music videos all day long. He had seen MTV over at Johnny Two’s house. Jon and John and Megan eating popcorn and drinking Coke—well, Megan usually drank Tabs—and eating popcorn and pizza rolls and sometimes passing around a pilfered Budweiser. They watched J. J. Jackson and Martha Quinn and the extremely ultra hot-looking Nina Blackwood and the other guys with the big hair intro super-cool videos by Hall & Oates and Men At Work and Thomas Dolby and Johnny Two’s favorite, The Greg Kihn Band—and one of Jon’s favorite, Styx. Johnny Two had HBO and Cinemax, too, the best part of which was Cinemax After Dark. Movies like Emily, with Koo Stark—who was unbelievably beautiful, and in a movie where she was naked and fondling herself and then in a shower soaping up with some other naked woman, which proved beyond reasonable doubt that cable was the miracle of the age—and Emmanuelle in Bangkok, with Laura Gemser, who was, like, a goddess. But since he didn’t have cable, and had to depend on Johnny Two for MTV and Cinemax After Dark, his opportunities to see such high art were usually few and far between.

Given his success with computer upgrades and chemistry sets, he had leaned on his mom for cable, too, but apparently things she considered educational were easier to get out of her than stuff she considered frivolous, and she never watched television.

“Pay for television?” she had asked, brow furrowed. “You’ve got to be out of your mind.”

But, it was a minor issue. Johnny Two—his best friend, John Miller, actually, but Doreen and Stacey had gotten in the habit of calling him Johnny Two early on, and it had stuck—had cable and a BetaMax, so summer entertainment nirvana was never more than four blocks away.

Last but not least in the list of incipient summer goodness, there was Megan. While Jon didn’t have any illusions about the likelihood that Megan was going to end up being his girlfriend or anything, it was likely they would be doing a lot more stuff together this summer. Megan’s sister Carla had a new car and a new boyfriend, and the best and least suspicious exit strategy, as far as Jon could figure, was for Carla to take Megan out “to the library” or some such, and Megan was pretty good friends with both Jon and John, so Carla might drop off Megan at Jon’s house or take them all to the mall and ditch them for a few hours to get some “quality” time with her boyfriend.

Jon suspected that Megan liked Johnny Two significantly better than she liked him, and that the other John was the real reason she’d end up hanging with them over the summer. Most of the time, she seemed focused on Johnny Two—touching his hand, laying her head to his shoulder when she laughed at some stupid joke, putting her hand on his leg. Remembering that Jon was there only when she asked to borrow his homework. Forgetting she knew Jon when some of her friends from gym class were in the hall.

Jon understood. Johnny Miller was funny. He liked to skateboard, and looked extremely cool doing it, and was definitely in better shape than Jon. His parents had more money, so Johnny Two had more money, and he had a dramatic shock of skate-punk blonde hair—bleached, Jon knew, but the effect was the same. The girls—including Megan, most of the time—swooned. And it was clear when they hung out that Megan and Johnny Two were just really good together. Jon wasn't exactly happy about it, but he couldn't begrudge Johnny Two Megan's affections. Johnny Miller was a good guy.

Looking up at the clock, which barely seemed to be moving—were seconds really that long?—he shook his head and sighed. That’s just how it was. Still, she was gorgeous, she had big boobs, even for an ninth grader, and was prone to wear pretty revealing stuff during the summer. Before, his summer encounters with Megan had been fleeting. This summer, he might have entire days with her, either with the other John but maybe also without him. That had, after all, happened more and more often over the past several months. The opportunities to try and look down her shirt alone would be staggering. He could brush up against her boobs with the ever-useful accidental-elbow maneuver. Maybe offer her a backrub, when they were alone.

Would it lead to her French kissing him and rubbing up against him naked and riding off into the sunset? No. But there was going to be plenty of time to be close to her and maybe catch a look at some excellent cleavage. And that was certainly more than any summer before. It was going to be great.

At long last, the bell rang, its familiar stutter and thump—there was something wrong with it that apparently wasn’t bad enough for anybody to get it fixed—music to Jon’s ears. Mrs. Matthews dismissed the class with a casual wave of her hand, not looking up from the book she was reading. Exam results had been handed back the day before—Jon had aced it, natch—so, on this final day of school, Jon had been given his entire 6th period algebra class to reflect upon the wondrous summer ahead.

He almost didn’t want to leave. He relished the anticipation as much as anything, and sat peacefully in his desk as the bell stopped its laborious rattling and the rest of the class beat a hasty exit.

After a minute, Mrs. Matthews looked up. “Jon? Did you hear the bell?”

“I was just thinking.” Jon smiled. “Planning my summer.”

“Well, good. I hope you have a great summer vacation this year.”

“I’m going to,” Jon replied. “You have a good summer, too.”

Mrs. Matthews laughed. “Well, when you’re an adult, summer vacation isn’t all that big a deal. I’ve got a job teaching summer school this year. So, not a lot of days by the pool.”

“Jeeze, that sucks.” Jon stood up, picked up his book bag, and started heading toward the door. “Sorry”.

“Don’t be.” Mrs. Matthews smiled. “I had some very good summers in my life. Very good. If I spend every summer from now until the day I die teaching summer school, I’ve got nothing to complain about. I had some good summers.”

She stood up, picking up her own books—quite a lot of them—and her purse. She looked at Jon and smiled. “You just make sure you have some summers like that before you’re my age, okay?”

“That’s the idea,” John replied cheerfully. He thought for a minute. He liked Mrs. Matthews, and she liked him, and he always wanted to keep his teacher relationships a little more intimate than flippant. “Thank you.”

She smiled warmly at him; he had clearly struck the right tone. “You’re very welcome, Jon. Now, stop hanging around school. It’s summer vacation!”

“I’m going, I’m going.” Jon walked out the door, turning right towards the closest exit. Mrs. Matthews headed left. “Bye!”

“See you next year, Jon,” she called over her shoulder as Jon pushed open door that led out to the soccer field. Jon smiled. He liked most of his teachers, but Mrs. Matthews was nicer than most.

The weather outside was perfect. It was balmy and breezy and the afternoon sun was cresting the hills in the distance. Jon took a deep breath, and began walking home.

What a great way to start the summer.

Chapter 2

Manassas, VA - May 27th, 1983 – 4:32 PM

Richard Mathers shifted uncomfortably in the small chair in front of Albert Monk’s large desk. Albert Monk was staring at him.

Richard was staring at the alabaster bookends—Roman soldiers pushing heroically against either end of the conspicuously displayed volumes of literature and philosophy that dominated Monk’s desk.

Albert Monk was the editor of the Washington Tribune. The paper had done pretty well in the fifties and sixties and had held its own against the older and better financed dailies, the Post and the Times. Circulation had dropped during the late seventies and in 1979 Albert Monk and the Tribune board had relocated the editorial offices from their expensive real estate in D.C. to cheaper digs in Manassas, Virginia, close to the Tribune’s printing plant and distribution center.

The waning fortunes of the Tribune had probably been a good thing for Richard Mathers—he didn’t think he would have gotten a job working for the Tribune during its heyday, and he certainly wouldn’t have kept the job he had gotten for as long as he had. But, as Albert Monk’s solemn stare clearly indicated, his days of keeping that job were over.

“I don’t like doing this,” Albert said slowly, breaking the uncomfortable silence with what was, for Richard, an even more uncomfortable lack of silence. “But . . . I’m not moving you anywhere else. Not this time.”

“Monk,” Richard started.

“Look, Rich, I know you’ve had some tough times and I’m sorry about your problems—good Lord knows, I’m sympathetic, my first wife couldn’t keep her pants on either—”

Richard bristled. He could feel his face flush.

“—and don’t you even think about punching me. I may be old, but I’m a black belt in Judo and I’ll kick your ass.”

“Jeeze, I wasn’t going to throw a goddamned punch, Albert—”

Monk picked up a copy sheet. “Rich, let me read to you from your latest submission, covering Wednesday night’s city council meeting. Simple reportage. Take a pencil, write down what you see happen in complete sentences. Come in under three hundred words. Easy enough, right?” He cleared his throat. “‘Councilwoman Deandra McNealy argued against any easing of zoning restrictions, all the while clearly not wearing a bra, which might make one wonder if her own display of flesh, as her nipples were clearly visible, might not violate current city ordinances—’ I mean, seriously, Richard. I can’t print this. Even if I edited the stuff about not wearing bras and which councilmen you think put ‘socks in their pants’, what you’re turning in is too incoherent to print.”

“Albert, look, I’m sorry, maybe I was editorializing too much, but—”

Monk shook his head. “No buts. I know you can do good work, but the fact is you haven’t done good work. You haven’t done good work for six months. Maybe a year. You clearly don’t want this job—”

“Albert, I do, I just—”

“—and I don’t want people here who don’t want to work here. So you are out. End of discussion. Grab a box, pack up your stuff, and stop by personnel on the way out. You get two weeks severance pay. The check will be waiting.”

Richard sighed. He looked at Monk. He had blown it, he knew he had blown it. It was a good opportunity, but he had not been able to keep himself together. Too much had gone wrong in his life. And, when it came down to it, Monk was right. He didn’t like his job. He needed money. He had to pay rent. He had to pay alimony. But he didn’t want the job and it had become impossible for him to even keep up the pretense.

“Go on,” Monk said. “I wish you the best, Rich, I really do. But I’ve got a paper to run.”

Richard stood up. “Do you try to look like the editor in All The Presidents Men on purpose? You know, the real guy doesn’t look like that.”

Albert just barely cracked a smiled. “Maybe Ben will give you a job.” He exhaled, and stood up, looking at Richard pointedly. “Your check is waiting. I’ve got work to do. I hope you get it together. Now go, before I call security.”

Richard walked out of Monk’s office. He went to the supply room and found a box that looked like it would be large enough to hold most of his belongings, and went back to his cubicle. Someone had already found a box for him, it seemed. People could be so helpful, when they were getting rid of you. He decided to use the one he had gotten for himself, instead, and started putting his personal items away. Coffee mug, paperweight, stapler, pen and pencil set, a few reference books . . . it was depressing to see how few personal things he even had to pack up.

Richard sighed. He stopped by a few desks and said a few goodbyes. A few people weren’t around to say goodbye to, but Richard figured they’d hear the good news soon enough.

At the front desk, he stopped one last time. The woman behind the desk smiled sweetly. “We’ll miss you, Richard,” she said.

“Ah. The word has already reached the front line, I see.”

“Yeah. Most of us figured you were going to get canned pretty soon, though.”

“Oh. Nice. Rachel, is Deb here?”

“Sorry, dear, no. She’s in DC interviewing some house members about the increases in federal spending under Reagan. Reagan promised a balanced budget, after all. You know, spending was lower under Carter.”

“She’s making house calls?”

Rachel smiled. “Now, you know Debi always gets more dirt when she shows up in person. Can’t imagine why, in Washington, being a gorgeous girl around all those amoral, unprincipled men.”

“Yeah. Well, when she gets back, tell her I was fired.”

“I will, sweety. Did you remember your check?”

Richard looked back blankly at Rachel. He had forgotten. The thing he needed most in the world—money—and he had forgotten to get his severance check.

Rachel smiled, apparently unsurprised. “I’d go back up and get it if I were you. I don’t suspect security is going to let you back in after you leave.” Rachel cocked her head to the security guard at the door who, indeed, was eyeing Richard very closely.

Richard sighed. “Thanks, Rachel. Don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

She smiled again. She was a good receptionist. She was always smiling. “You’ll suffer,” she said sweetly. “Go on now.”

Chapter 3

Washington, D.C. – May 27th, 1983 – 7:02 PM

Before the phone rang, Deputy Director Gordon Swan thought he was going home.

After it rang, he realized he was not. It was FBI Director, William Webster, who told him that he had a priority project, and that there would be two gentleman from the NSA over in an hour to discuss it with him. End of conversation. If you wanted any future career in the Bureau—or if, as in Gordon’s case, you just wanted to make it until retirement—you did not say no to the Director.

Gordon Swan sighed as he put the phone back in its cradle, and then picked it up again and called his wife to let her know that he wouldn’t be home until everybody else was in bed asleep. If then. Unsurprisingly, the news did not go over well.

Next, he punched the handsfree button on the phone. “Jack, I think it’s going to be a long night for me. You think you could run go get me a turkey sandwich—plenty of mustard—before you pack it up for the night?”

“Will do,” said Jack loudly, making the tiny speaker in the phone buzz with static. “Want I should get you some coffee?”

“That would probably be a good idea.”

Gordon took off his glasses and rubbed his temples. Another long night. What was it going to be this time? Getting his marching orders from the NSA or the DOD was generally guaranteed to be unpleasant. There would be long nights, travel, paperwork—oh, the paperwork. His agents couldn’t swat a fly without a warrant and it would take them a month to get one if Gordon didn’t walk it through every step of the way. Any investigation where anything was going to get done, there’d be dozens of warrants, and there was plenty of paperwork for every warrant and he’d end up keeping track of it. Others in the Bureau would dump all the grunt work on the agents who were supposed to be working the case. Which was why, in his opinion, it took forever for their cases to get resolved, if ever.

The problem with getting results over avoiding grunt work was that tough cases often got shunted to him. He closed his eyes and moved to rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I’ve got to start pushing all the damn paperwork on my agents,” he muttered to himself.

“Director Swan?” It was Jack, with a deli sandwich neatly wrapped in white paper and a cup of coffee—black with two sugars. Gordon found himself sorry Jack would be moving on at the end of the summer; he was a hell of a lot better than his previous full-time assistant. But, of course, Jack was young and ambitious and planning to move up in the Bureau. It was good to win the favor of the Deputy Directors if you were planning on being a career man.

“Thanks, Jack. Good man.”

“No problem, sir. You need anything else?”

“Nah. You go home. You’ll miss all the rest you're getting now when they make you a Deputy Director one day.” Gordon felt a tinge of jealousy as he said it, but smiled all the same.

“I can only hope, sir.” Jack turned and walked out the door, his footsteps vanishing quickly down the hallway. He was good. Did what he was asked to do, and didn’t overstay his welcome. He would move up, Gordon thought. Sort of reminded him of himself, when he was younger.

Gordon sighed, and thumbed through his in box. There was nothing that couldn’t wait—but, it wasn’t like he had something else to do, and there was normally no way of being sure when personnel was going to arrive to meet for “emergency” sessions. And people in the NSA, DOD and CIA were known to keep the FBI waiting.

He pulled out a marked and coded folder—a report on a recently resolved case that needed his stamp of approval. It was a thick, thick report. His agents had been working with both the IRS and the DEA in prosecuting a New Jersey drug kingpin. They had nailed the guy good, and the evidence for the case was plentiful. The DEA was going to handle the prosecution on drug trafficking and the IRS was going to handle the prosecution on income tax evasion so the Bureau, except for the agents being called as material witnesses, was done.

The report, however, was 250 pages of ass covering. And he had to read it all, to cover his ass. To be Jack, he thought. Young and ambitious and with something in life to look forward to. Because he hasn’t been around long enough to know better.

Seventy-five pages into the report, his phone rang. He pushed the handsfree button. “Yeah?”
“Howard Voss and Theresa McNaney here to see you, sir.”

Theresa? Swan thought. Director Webster had said to expect two gentlemen.
“Could you show them to conference room three and let them know I’ll be there in two minutes?”

“Yes, sir.”

Gordon hit the release button. He sighed, grabbed a legal pad, and made his way down the corridor to the conference room.

Chapter 4

Oak Ridge, TN – May 27th, 1983 – 9:15 PM

Sheer bliss. Summer was going to be sheer bliss. Jon had talked to both his friend John—and they just used their names when they talked to each other; nothing clever like Johnny Two or Mr. Miller, because they both knew who was which—and Megan, who had called him. She hadn’t exactly been in a good mood, and had done nothing but complain about her parents for an hour and a half, but she had been talking to him. For an hour and a half! During which, he had beaten his previous high score in Pitfall. The boy was hot tonight.

It was funny. The sort of sharing of miseries, of grousing about parents and general, implacable unhappiness of life, that Jon found so tiresome and even grueling from his sister was bearable, even kind of nice, from Megan. And, more and more, it had been Jon she had been calling to share her miseries with. Even if sometimes Megan could descend to a desolate bleakness that was far blacker than anything Stacey had ever cooked up, from Megan, it was a privilege. Even if, in the end, it meant he was the “friend” and Johnny Two, or some other eligible young buck, got the boyfriend position. Something was better than nothing, and it seemed harmless to let himself fantasize that maybe one day she could be sharing her misery in person while he consoled her, and as her voice trailed off and their heads slowly moved closer to each other, their lips almost touching . . .

On the television, Jon’s little Pitfall dude got stung by a scorpion and fell into a tar pit. All right, maybe he was getting too distracted thinking about Megan. But, it was time to move on to something else, anyway. Is was getting near ten, on the first official day of summer vacation, and he had barely scraped the surface of what he wanted to do with this immensely valuable time. Time to start programming. He had some ideas he wanted to play with, and wanted to make sure this summer ended in a finished program—he wanted to write an adventure game like Zork or Bedlam or one of the Scott Adams adventures, and he didn’t want to have to do it in BASIC. Maybe one day, he could do really cool video games like Pitfall. But he knew something that advanced was still a long way away for him. But a text adventure? He was up to it.

So, he disconnected the Atari 5200 from the old RCA television and hooked up his TRS-80 Color Computer, stuck in the Editor/Assembler cartridge, and got to work.

“Thanks for listening, Jon. You’re a really good guy,” she had said. How could that not lead to a kiss? Like, a French kiss. When a girl sounded that grateful, she’d put her tongue in your mouth, given half a chance. Jon was sure of it. If only she had been coming over tonight.

Jon shook his head. Yes, it wasn’t even the first official day of summer, but summer vacation was short and Megan wasn’t there to kiss or be kissed. He needed to focus. Flipping the manual open, he began work again on the second tutorial—generating a siren sound that changed pitch by which key on the keyboard was pressed.

It was just that she smelled so good. There had been long pauses in the phone conversation where Jon had just listened to her breathing, and he could almost smell her hair. Like flowers and water. Then she would start again, telling him about her parents, or her friends and school, or her own general depression, her voice low and deliberate, as if she were tasting the words as she said them. She could talk, sometimes, in this low, smoky voice—like everything she said was at once a seduction and a secret. It was wonderful to listen to.

“I just wish someone would take me out of here. I wish I could get out. You ever feel like that, Jon?”

“Sometimes. Not all the time. It’s better now that my sister moved to Memphis.”

“Yeah. And you’re mom’s never home, is she?”

“Nah, she’s got other shit to do.”

“You’re lucky. My mom and dad are home a lot. They argue all the time. They are always yelling. I can hear them now. Right now, they are fighting about some stupid, trivial, nothing piece of shit thing. They won’t let me do anything.”

“Damn, that sucks,” John had replied wisely.

“Yeah.”

In his mind's eye, he was no longer just reliving the earlier phone conversation. Instead, they were sitting his living room, talking by candlelight. As she talked, she took his hand and moved it towards her breasts, which seemed suddenly larger than before–

“Oh, for the love of . . . ” Jon muttered, trailing off. What the hell was wrong with him? He had cool stuff to work on right in front of him. He’d pick the real, live Megan over programming or video games any day of the week. But just thinking about her? Re-imagining their phone conversation? He could do that while he drifted off to sleep, or when he was stuck somewhere boring. Right now, he had a challenge, and he wanted to get to it. If he got to the end of the summer not knowing Editor/Assembler, he’d never catch up. There were already twelve-year-old kids submitting assembly language programs to the contests in the Color Computer magazines. If he had to stretch out learning assembly through 9th grade and into the next summer, how would he ever catch up?

If it was the real, live, warm, supple Megan, whose hair smelled like flowers and rain–then, sure, he’d give up learning to program forever for the real deal. But for just thinking about her? That was nuts.

Anyway, when it came to even having a shot at Megan, it wouldn’t hurt to have some sort of impressive accomplishment tucked under his belt. If he could be writing commercial-grade text adventures and programming in assembly by the end of the summer, he reasoned, well, that would seem pretty damn impressive to him.

So, back to work.

Three lines into the tutorial, he could almost feel Megan’s lips against his. He could feel her tongue teasing him. He had never actually French kissed a girl, but he had seen it on TV and in movies often enough and it looked like it would be really cool. So long as the girl didn’t have bad breath, which Megan wouldn’t. He could see it in his mind, as if watching a film, and Megan was almost chewing on his face, working her mouth and jaw so vigorously and intensely it was almost like she wanted to eat him. As they kissed, her hand wandered down towards his lap . . .

“Crap!” Jon stood up, dropping the Editor/Assembler manual on the floor. He was having issues. It wasn’t the first time he had had these sorts of thoughts, of course, or had been excited by them. But this was the first time the opportunity to play video games or work on his computer hadn’t been able to trump them. I’ve got to get back on track, he thought. How am I going to get anything done if I keep getting all weird over Megan?

He knew a cold shower was supposed to help, but he didn’t like the sound of that. “A walk around the block,” he said. “I’ll walk around the block. That’s supposed to help.”

Jon grabbed his keys, put on some tennis shoes, and ran out of the house. But he made sure the door was locked; his mother would kill him if she came home and the door was unlocked. Walking briskly, he made his way around the block in the warm night air. He circled the block four times before deciding that it wasn’t, as a practical matter, doing him much good. Maybe, he thought, he should just give it up and give it a clean start tomorrow, and do his programming tutorials first thing in the morning, before he did anything else.

As he finished his fourth and final circuit and turned down the cracked cement walkway that led to the door of their admittedly cheap, but very functional, rental house, he stopped with a jerk.

The mail! He had forgotten to check the mail. What the hell was he thinking? That was always supposed to be the first thing he did when he got home. If his mom got home and found out he had forgotten to check the mail, there would be hell to pay. Absolute hell. Among a dozen other things, Doreen Edmonds was paranoid about people in the neighborhood stealing the mail and doing something sinister with it. He had forgotten to get the mail before she had gotten home once last Fall, and the ensuing ass-chewing had been vicious. Worse than the time he had set his bed on fire when he had tried to improvise his own chemistry set out of common household cleansers.

He ran back to the mailbox and pulled open the door. It was loaded with mail, top to bottom. Letters and bills and magazines and a fairly sizeable box. Jon felt his pulse quicken. He felt the skin on his arms and back dimple up with goose bumps. A palpable sense of nearly avoided doom settled on him. Dear God, if I had forgotten to get this mail . . .

No time to waste. Jon pulled all the mail out and rushed into the house, sorting it quickly, just in case his mother showed up early. It was almost eleven, and it was rare on Friday nights she would get home that early. But it did happen.

Bill, bill, bill. Doreen Edmonds, you could already be a winner. Dorna Edmund, you could already be a winner. Bill. Victoria’s Secret—Jon liked sneaking a peak at it, but did not like to think about why his mother got the stupid thing. The thought of her wearing this kind of stuff was just unpleasant. It made him shudder just to think about it. J.C. Penny—that was more like it. Ms. Magazine. A subscription offer to Popular Mechanics, addressed to Jon. Maybe he could guilt his mom into getting that for him. He sat that aside. And . . . a box. A box wrapped in brown butcher paper, with Jon’s name and address neatly penned in blue ink on the top.

For a moment, his heart sank. All thoughts of Megan were finally wiped from his mind. A box. Addressed to him. No return address. That didn’t bode well. The obvious, and depressing, thought was that it was something from his dad. Some object with some letter he didn’t want to read. Some peace offering sent ahead of coming down and wasting futile hours and even days of the valuable summer time to try and make up for—or, let’s be honest, make excuses for—having been gone since before Jon was born. A curse on what was supposed to be the most perfect summer ever.

He needn’t have worried. At least, not about that. Inside was an unlabeled video cassette with a square of notebook paper loosely inserted with it.

Urgent! it shouted, in the same neat, blue-inked penmanship that the box had been addressed with. He could almost believe it was from his dad, but a video cassette with no label? When his dad, Mr. No-Money-For-Child-Support, ought to know they wouldn’t have a BetaMax. Well, perhaps saying he ought to know was giving his dad too much credit. But they didn’t have a video cassette player, and the only person he knew that had one was the other John. And urgent. Who would send him a BetaMax video cassette with a note that said “Urgent!”? Was it a joke? What could possibly be on it?

Jon was dying to find out, but he had to admit that nearing eleven o’clock at night was too late to call up Johnny Two and see if he could come over and watch some weird video tape that came in a box with no return address. John would be fine with it, but his parents would be home, and they’d pop a gasket.

Jon shook his head. Weird. He put the note down and picked up the video cassette again. It was compact and seemed heavier than he remembered Johnny Two’s video cassettes being. The surface seemed slicker, too. He rubbed his hand over it. It was cool, even cold to the touch. And, as he listened closely, he could swear he heard something whirring.

The video cassette shifted in his hands. The center plate, where the label should have been, rotated and rose up from the tape. The surface of the clear plastic that allowed one to see how much tape was currently unspooled clouded and turned silvery, and sprung up, stopping at a forty-five degree angle. The black piece on the opposite side also clouded and then turned a reflective silver, and lifted away from the body of the video cassette at a forty-five degree angle.

“Jon,” the video cassette said, clear as a bell. “Do not be—“

There were sparks flashing between the two elevated, reflected plates. Jon squealed and tossed the video cassette on the floor. He struggled to breathe; his feet felt frozen in place, and his heart was beating a hundred miles a minute. “Omigod,” he said. “Omigod. Omigod. Omigod.”

The tape, black and lifeless and completely normal, sat quietly on the floor.

Jon just stood, staring at the video cassette, for a full five minutes. It did nothing.

“I’m going crazy. First, I can’t stop thinking about Megan, and now this.” But, even in his highly agitated state, that didn’t sound right. There was a big leap from a teenage boy being unable to get his mind off an attractive girl, especially one that might possibly like him, and seeing household objects come to life. And he wasn’t exactly seeing all the household objects come to life. Just this one video cassette. That had arrived in the mail, with no return address.

Jon waited another five minutes. Then he bent over, picked up the cassette and held it for a moment. He waited.

Nothing. It was just a video cassette, that was all. He was just . . . tired. He had over exerted himself walking around the block. Or maybe he had been drugged. He had taken some aspirin earlier for a mild headache; maybe he had taken one of his mother’s indecipherable prescription drugs by mistake? Sometimes she would put them in regular medicine bottles. That seemed feasible.

The tape whirred again, and this time, more rapidly, the two silver panels lifted up and the center plate extended itself and rotated.

Jon let out a strangled gurgle, throwing the tape over to the sofa. “Omigod omigod omigod.”

The video cassette sat silently on the sofa, doing nothing.

“What’s going on?” Jon asked the empty room. “What is this?” He was breathing in rapid, sharp exhalations. His throat felt tight. He felt light-headed. He wasn’t entirely sure what hyperventilating was, but as he seemed unable to control the rapidness of his breath, he thought he just might be doing it now.

Jon ran to the kitchen, peaking over the divider between the living room and the kitchen area—in truth, it was just enough room for a person to squeeze in between the stove, refrigerator, cabinets and microwave–to make sure the video cassette hadn’t moved. It hadn’t.

He began searching for something to hold the tape with, or maybe just poke it with. For a fleeting moment, he had a crystal clear vision of the cassette, whirring and clicking, sprouting mechanical legs and leaping at him from across the room, shooting sinewy, web-like magnetic tape all over him. Then it would descend, reflective, silvery fangs sinking into his neck with high-pitched whine of an electric motor.

He looked up at the video cassette. No movement. It was just sitting there, being a tape.

“Okay, good, Jon.” He wiped sweat off his forehead with his shirt. “Schools out and I’m going nuts.”

He quickly rummaged through the drawers, looking for the BBQ tongs. They never actually used them, at least that Jon recalled, but he knew they were in there somewhere. Then, he put on the bright yellow oven mitts that dangled off the oven handle for added protection.

He approached the tape slowly. No change. It just looked like a blank video cassette.

“Careful, careful . . . ” Jon muttered to himself, sweat beading on his forehead. He extended the cooking tongs gingerly towards to the video cassette. “Careful . . . ah!” The tong slipped as he tried to grab the cassette. The video cassette did nothing.

“Damn,” Jon cursed, and made a second pass. This time, he got one side of the tongs firmly under the video tape, and clamped down. He lifted it in the air, held it steady—and as far away from himself as he could with the tongs—and waited.
Nothing happened.

Sweat was beading into his eyes. He spared a moment to glance away to the kitchen clock, a yellow cat with a swinging tale and rolling eyes that told him it was 11:15. He stood as still as he could, holding the video tape out in front of him, watching it carefully.

It began to shake. Jon gasped, and then realized his arm was shaking. The tape wasn’t doing anything, it was him. He looked back to the clock. It was now 11:17. Nothing had changed.

Jon slowly brought the video cassette closer to him, and then placed it gently down on the free oven mitt. He was now holding the video cassette. He stood for thirty seconds, carefully holding it in his left hand. Nothing happened.

The fear was subsiding and the curiosity was rising. Certainly, he reasoned, if it was going to blow up—or turn into some sort of mechanical spider and kill him—it would have done it by now.

Putting aside the tongs, he grabbed the tape firmly with both hands, still wearing the oven mitts. He waited. The yellow cat’s tail swung back and forth, marking the seconds. Thirty seconds. Forty. Nothing happened.

“What the hell?” Jon marveled, beginning to doubt he had actually seen what he had seen.

He took his left hand out of the oven mitt, and touched the video cassette with his bare fingers. The surface was smooth and cold; it felt like polished marble. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a regular video cassette.

The tape whirred and clicked. The two silver panels lifted up and the center plate extended itself and rotated. The area above the center plate began to sparkle.

“Yah!” Jon yelped, his heart jumping again. Not quite as much this time, though. He immediately withdrew the hand touching the tape, and with two beeps and a series of rapid clicks, it was back to normal. It looked just a like a video cassette.

“Okay. This is weird.” Jon put his hand back down on the tape, waiting. A few moments later, he heard the clicking start and he lifted his hand off. It stopped. “Freaky,” Jon muttered. “Freaky, freaky.”

He put his hand down again, this time placing just his palm against the top of the video cassette. He waited. Tick, tock, went the kitty. Nothing.

Jon thought for a moment, then placed just one finger firmly against the side of the video cassette.

This time, it was faster, the panels were up and the center plate extended before he had time to gasp, yelp, or gurgle. The center plate was practically spitting sparks. In a tinny, but clearly recognizable voice, the tape started talking to him.

“Jon, don’t be alarmed. As you have received this, I will be dead. Well, for the time being, anyway.”

Curiosity was gone again. Now, it was just pure fear. Jon couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He just stood there, over the sofa, holding the spark-spitting tape in a large, yellow oven mitt, one finger almost comically extended, pressed firmly against the left side of the cassette.

The voice the tape was speaking with was Dr. Bernhard’s.

The sparks emitting from the two silver panels began to coalesce over the center plate of the video cassette, forming a translucent image. It took Jon a moment to make it out, but it was a head. Dr. Bernhard’s head.

“Holy shit.” Jon blinked. “Holy, holy shit.”

“I’m so sorry, Jon, to put you in this position,” the translucent head spoke. “But I am afraid you are in tremendous danger. And I’m afraid I’ve put you in it.”

Then the phone rang, and Jon screamed.

Chapter 5

Washington, D.C. – May 27th, 1983 – 9:20 PM

At about the same time Jon was finding himself too distracted by thoughts of Megan Kincaid to continue to play Pitfall, Deputy Director Gordon Swan was sitting down in conference room three with Howard Voss and Theresa McNaney.

They were already in the room, standing and waiting by the door, when he arrived. Howard Voss stepped forward immediately and thrust his hand out to Gordon. “Howard Voss, Deputy Director with the NSA. This is Theresa McNaney, a Special Operations Coordinator at the Department of Defense.”

So, it wasn’t just the NSA, but the entire Department of Defense. Gordon could just see the paperwork. Miles and miles of it. That, and the ego battles, the smoothing over of ruffled feathers and, of course, the finger pointing. If he could just get the assignment and proceed with an investigation, it would be fine. But, inevitably, the Department of Defense–and probably the NSA, if they were materially involved in the issue-–would take a hands-on approach. It was the simplest solution for agencies who couldn’t conduct their own domestic investigations. They used the Bureau as their eyes, ears, hands and feet. And, normally, they ended up making it impossible for the agents in the field to get the job done.

“Is this room secure?” Theresa McNaney asked. She did not extend her hand.

Gordon shook his head. She couldn’t have been a day over thirty. When he started in the Bureau, she would have been in junior high school. Is this room secure? No, we’re in the middle of FBI headquarters, Gordon thought. We have people drop in and bug rooms all the time. Hell, I invited the press.

“It is,” he said. “Please sit.”

“Mr. Swan, this is a fairly unique situation,” Theresa McNaney began, taking her seat.

“Everything we discuss here is completely confidential. Only agents you assign to this case should be informed of anything we’ve discussed, and then only on a need to know. We’ll also want the agents you assign to get DOD clearance when they begin.”

“Of course.” I’m missing dinner with my family to get treated like a two-year old by some intern who just happened to give the right person a blow job, Gordon thought. That’s just great.

He glanced over at Harold Voss, who looked a little uncomfortable that Ms. McNaney was informing a Deputy Director of the FBI of the obvious. He decided then that, irrespective of what he was told, he’d spend most of his time conferring with Voss.

“This is our situation,” she continued, pulling a file jacket out of her attaché case. She expertly pulled out one picture and flipped it down in front of Gordon.

She must’ve been practicing that all day, he thought.

“This is Dr. Donald Hermann Bernhard. Up until three weeks ago, he was working on a highly classified project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. An internal investigation was begun approximately three months ago, regarding irregularities with the reporting process and due to a general lack of progress in regards to the project—”

“So what was this project?” Gordon interrupted.

Theresa McNaney looked visibly perturbed at being interrupted. “Research regarding an artifact. Now, once the investigation began–”

“What kind of artifact are we talking about?” Gordon asked.

The woman frowned. She obviously did not like how this was going. Where do they get these people? he wondered. He tried to resist, but he couldn’t help himself. “Is it bigger than a breadbox?”

The frown deepened. “It was an artifact of unknown origins. No, it was not bigger than a breadbox. Deputy Director Swan, may I continue?”

Gordon looked down at his legal pad, writing studiously, and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Ms. NcNaney, in order that I might prepare to conduct an investigation, I will ask questions when and where I feel appropriate. If you want to give a speech, perhaps you should join Toastmasters.” As he spoke, he continued writing, not looking up. He was writing, artifact of unknown origins, my ass. Someone’s pulling my leg.

“Deputy Director Swan, I was assured you would be cooperative.” She seemed to actively be trying to inject an edge of menace to her voice.

Gordon looked up at her. “Ma’am, I can’t help you if you won’t let me ask questions. If you just want to make a speech, you obviously already have all the answers. If you have all the answers, what in the hell do you need the FBI for?”

“Deputy Direct Swan,” Harold Voss interjected, “we will both be happy to answer any of your questions, whenever you want to ask them.” He looked at Theresa, who conspicuously avoided his eyes. “Obviously, time is of the essence for everybody, so . . .”

“So,” Gordon said. “Artifact of unknown origins. What is that? Are you saying we’re talking about some sort of alien artifact? Somebody steal a flying saucer?”

Theresa McNaney opened her mouth to say something, and Harold Voss quickly said, “There is no official classification of the object. That’s why we were doing the research. It is possible that the object was of extra-terrestrial origin—at least that was speculation in some quarters—for a variety of reasons, all of which are in the file. Technically, the determination of origins is unknown, but wherever it originated, it is like nothing else on earth that we know of.”

“Nothing else on earth, eh?” Gordon asked, one eyebrow cocked skeptically. “As a rule, the FBI tracks down real, flesh and blood criminals, not little green men. The DOD is serious about this?”
“Very,” Voss said quickly, again speaking ahead of Theresa. “The NSA as well. And there is no positive conclusion that the artifact was extra-terrestrial in origin. What is clear is that it represents technology way beyond our own. We’ve—I’ve seen examples of it, with my own eyes. Now—”

“Now the artifact is missing and Dr.—what was his name?” Gordon asked.

“Donald Bernhard,” Theresa and Harold both said simultaneously.

“And Dr. Donald Bernhard took it. Security lax at Oak Ridge?”

“No.” Theresa McNaney again. She was apparently determined not to let the discussion get away from her. “And Dr. Bernhard’s record was impeccable. He worked at Los Alamos for almost twenty years, with distinction. He was instrumental in almost every weight-to-yield increase in our nuclear warhead technology in the late sixties and early seventies.”

Harold Voss, to Theresa McNaney’s clear displeasure, thumbed through her file jacket and pulled out a one-sheet dossier and pushed it over to Gordon, who picked it up and began reading.

“It is now our belief he had been in possession of the artifact for some time, and had substituted a similar object at the ORNL, possibly synthesized with technology acquired from the original artifact. It is our belief he had been concealing his progress with the artifact, and had gotten much closer to understanding how to decipher it than he had indicated in his reports, and had possibly learned to make use of the artifact to develop unique technologies, some of which he may have applied to get around the security at Oak Ridge—”

Gordon looked up from the dossier. Artifact. Unique technologies. What a load of bullshit. “Says here he was teaching at UC Berkley before he got the assignment at Oak Ridge. That didn’t set off red flags?”

Theresa flushed, apparently with anger. Jeeze, is there anything I could say that wouldn’t set this bitch off? Gordon wondered. Oh, the people you meet doing government work.

“He’s not a communist spy, if that’s what you mean, Swan. He was practically kicked out of Berkley for some of his anti-Communist leanings. He wrote a piece defending the arms race. He made a speech at Berkley about ‘the nuclear deterrent’ and was booed off stage. He published a piece just a month ago praising SDI. He’s on President Reagan’s short list to receive the Presidential Freedom Award. He had the highest level of security clearance available to a civilian for nearly twenty years. This is not a communist sympathizer or reactionary.”

McNaney’s nostrils flared. Swan glanced back down at the dossier.

“Perhaps there was outside pressure. Something involving a friend or a family member? Somebody in the old country? This says he was born in Austria, he went to school in England, Austria and France before getting his masters at MIT. He’s been around. Outside pressure?”

“There was no outside pressure—“ Theresa started.

“—that we know of,” Voss finished for her, although Gordon seriously doubted that was how Theresa was planning on finishing her sentence. “It is certainly possible. However, we’ve tapped the channels available to us and we’re out of options. If there was outside pressure on him, we do not know where it came from or of what nature it might have been. We suspect there was something in his investigation of the artifact that led to his decision to mislead his superiors and steal the artifact itself.”

Gordon tapped his pen on his yellow legal pad. He scratched his nose. “Is Dr. Bernhard dead, then?”

McNaney looked over at Voss, apparently meaning to exchange a look, but Voss just looked straight at Gordon. “Yes. We managed to track him to Los Angeles. We had released his picture to some of the hotels and restaurants in the area—”

“Why were you looking in L.A.?”
“Given his recent residence in California, it was high on our list of likely destinations, along with New Mexico—and Dr. Tsukishiro Yukito at Oak Ridge confirmed Los Angeles as a likely destination, based on previous discussion—”

“Dr. Tsuki-who-so?” Gordon asked.

Theresa McNaney tapped the table loudly with one finger. “It’s all in the report.”

Gordon frowned, then looked up at Voss. “Go on.”

“We located him in L.A., and an operative tailed him to the Four Corners Mall. When the state police closed in on him, he dropped dead.”

Gordon arched his eyebrows. “Dropped dead?”

“Dropped dead. Fell over, into his soup.”

“Soup?”

“He was eating lunch at the food court. The police closed in, cleared out the area, and took him out in a body bag.”

“What happened? Heart attack? Suicide? Poison soup?”

Voss smiled. “No, no poison soup. No heart attack, either. It may have been suicide.”

“May have been?”

McNaney thumbed through the file jacket and pulled out another photograph. “This is from the mall security camera. See that item he’s holding up?” Gordon did; in the blurry picture, it just looked like a blob. “We believe this may have been his method of suicide. Or, possibly, that he unintentionally killed himself. In either case, we believe the object was one synthesized from technology he derived for the artifact.”

“Huh.” Against his own better judgment, Gordon was beginning to consider the possibility that there might be a legitimate case here. Not in that there was legitimately some sort of alien artifact, or that half the stuff these two were telling him had more than a passing relationship to the truth. But, the guy was working on the project. He did disappear when they started investigating him. He did end up dead, half-way across in the country, at a mall in L.A. There was something there, even if Voss and McNaney weren’t giving him the real story.

“Did you locate the object?” Gordon asked.

“We believe we did,” McNaney replied. “It was a plastic box with a fairly crude system of wires and batteries, what we believe to be a phone speaker and a fairly large voltage capacitor.” She thumbed through the file jacket and then pulled out another picture. As she said, it was a plastic box, what looked like the speaker element from a telephone, some batteries and a capacitor. There was also a crudely wired toggle switch. “We believe there were other elements, utilizing technologies developed from the artifact, that are missing from the mechanism retrieved from the scene.”

Gordon shook his head. The sense that his leg was getting pulled on, and hard, returned. He tossed his legal pad and pen on the table. “So where the hell did this artifact come from?”

Voss leaned forward. Now that he was answering questions, he seemed excited. Did he actually believe this garbage? “It was recovered from Christmas Island off the coast of Australia in 1962 by the discovery team that was preparing for American nuclear testing. We believe that it may have been uncovered or in some manner revealed by the Mosaic G1 or G2 nuclear ground tests conducted by the British on Christmas Island in 1956. It went through review in late 1963 with a number of other items, mostly nuclear glass and rocks and other objects, marked as unclassifiable and put in containment storage in New Mexico.”

“Unclassifiable, huh? What the hell does this thing look like, anyway?”

McNaney pulled another photograph, this one full color, out of the file jacket. “Pyramidal in shape. Pretty beaten up. A scuffed and weathered appearance, but otherwise not terribly remarkable.”

“So why was it unclassifiable?”

“It was noted at the time that unlike everything else retrieved from Christmas island—and I mean everything else; even shell fish 100 yards off the beach made the Geiger counters start clicking—it was not radioactive. At all. It also did not respond to chemical identification.”

“So they didn’t know what it was made of.”

“Correct.”

“And they packed it up in a box and put it in a government warehouse.” He shook his head. That would be about par for the course. Gordon had laughed until there were tears in his eyes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when it had ended with the Ark of the Covenant, the holy repository for the stone tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, being wheeled into the depths of some giant government warehouse, to be lost among all the other boxes. His wife—and some of the other patrons of the theater—had looked at him like he was crazy, but it was so true. Certainly, that was the most credible part of Voss and McNaney’s story so far.

“Containment facility,” McNaney corrected.

“And there it would have stayed,” said Voss, “had there not been an investigation into the Christmas Island nuclear tests. At issue was mostly the exposure of soldiers and even some civilians to the blasts, as well as the effect of fallout and lingering radioactivity on much of coastal Australia and the indigenous population. Congress appointed an oversight committee, and everything was dug up. All the paper work, all the records, all the test data, and all the materials and samples taken at Christmas Island.”

“Uh huh.” Gordon picked his pad and started writing again. “Go on.”

Voss continued. “The military investigators going through the materials had pretty broad authority, and when none of the crated material showed any signs of radioactivity—”

Gordon blinked. “None of it?”

“None of it. Going back through all the Christmas Island data, it turns out there was something that originally flagged our interest in the artifact, and it’s not clear why there was no follow up.”

McNaney leaned forward before Gordon could ask the obligatory, and what was that?

“The artifact was in the center, give or a take a yard, of an area of zero radioactivity. It’s why they examined the area closely enough to find it in the first place. There was a roughly 22.5 yard circle around the location where the artifact was discovered where there was no radioactivity. On an island that has some radioactivity on every square inch of it. In the middle of ground zero—not 40 yards away from where the tower for the second Mosaic test stood.”

“And, when we got it, we packed it in a crate and put it in a warehouse—I mean, containment facility.”

“It doesn’t seem the report was taken seriously at the time, or that there was any follow up,” Voss said. “But, when the military researchers noted the same phenomenon in 1977, it was taken seriously. Jim Turney, the lead investigator, believed the lack of radiation in the samples represented tampering or substitution. So, he ordered a full regimen on everything—carbon dating, x-rays, materials testing. He even secured access to an electron microscope to go over all the materials, nanometer by nanometer.”

“And he found little green men.”

McNaney flushed red again and leaned forward, her eyes wide. “As we have already told you, there has been no determination in regards to the origins of the artifact—”

Voss interrupted. “What he found was that most of the materials were about what you’d expect, other than the lack of radiation, except for one. The artifact was covered with symbols and diagrams—billions of them. Only visible under electron microscope.”

McNaney, glaring back and forth between the two men pulled a set of photographs from the file folder and slapped them down in front of Gordon.

“It is not a known alphabet or ideographic system or code,” Voss continued. “Many of the diagrams were recognizable as star charts, planetary maps, cartography, what could potentially be charts of the elements, diagrams of molecules, atoms, electrons. What appeared to be possible explanations of mathematical systems, one with a base of eight and one with a base of twenty-four. While some of the diagrams seemed recognizable and offered some clue as to some of the meaning of the symbology, we ended up with over twenty of our top cryptologists and linguists at the NSA trying to crack the code, and we were making no progress—”

“And this Dr. Bernhard,” Gordon said, looking back down to the dossier, “you think he ‘cracked the code’? I don’t see anything about cryptology here. Speaks three languages, right? But he’s not a linguist.”

“We have been reviewing the reports and records from the project since Dr. Bernhard took position as research head,” McNaney said. “We cannot find any indication as to how or to what degree he was able to decipher the artifact and possibly synthesize technology based on the data from the artifact.”

Gordon looked back down to the Dossier. “His wife died in a car accident in 1974. They were married . . . twenty-seven years. He resigned his position at Los Alamos the next year.”

Voss and McNaney looked at Gordon expectantly as he looked from the dossier to his legal pad. Finally, he looked up at them. “Did it ever occur to you that Bernhard thought you were a bunch of idiots and decided he would take you for a ride? That he was old and tired of life and thought you guys were a bunch of dumb asses looking for little green men in some kind of fake alien artifact and thought he might go out with a bang? See how far you guys would take this bullshit? See just how much of the government’s money he could waste?”

McNaney was turning red again, but Voss just looked steadily at Gordon. “There is no human technology that we know of at this point in time that would be capable of producing the artifact. We can see the symbols and diagrams, but we are not capable of producing them. Not that small. It’s at least twenty years ahead of our best etching technology. Not to mention that we’ve only been able to analyze twenty percent of the data after six years of active research. How much longer would it take to create that amount of randomized data and unique ideography and diagrams?”

“This isn’t some sort of prank,” McNaney interjected, glaring at Gordon.

“And I’ve spent a lot of time at Oak Ridge,” Voss said. “That’s why I’m here. The artifact is not just data. It is an active example of a form of technology unknown to us. I have seen it in operation.”

“Operation?” Gordon asked. “What kind of operation?”

“The activation of what appeared to be a defense mechanism, which injured three people. The projection of what appeared to be holographic images. The active absorption of radiation—heat and light radiation as well as radioactivity. The generation of strong magnetic fields. And more. It’s in my report, which is included in the file jacket.”

Gordon sighed. “And you’ve got Bernhard, but you can’t find the artifact.”

Voss nodded. “We’ve been conducting our own investigation, but haven’t turned up anything. The incident at the mall in L.A. attracted some attention, and we have limited authority for domestic investigation. It would be difficult for us to make much further progress without the assistance of the FBI.”

Gordon just shook his head. He was going to be up all night because some kooks at the DOD really thought they had some sort of extra-terrestrial codebook. Even if they managed to find the artifact—which, for all anybody knew, Bernhard could have just tossed off a bridge or thrown in a dumpster somewhere—what was likely to come of it? Except that, after funding got cut for the current research, it would be stuck back in a crate in a warehouse somewhere. And the world would be no closer to meeting E.T. than it had been before.

But there was no choice about the investigation. The Bureau would be doing it, and Swan would be in charge. He wouldn’t be able to stick it on somebody else. William Webster had called him personally. Which meant other people, important people, behind the scenes took this very seriously.

It was going to be a late night.

“Okay,” Swan started, putting pencil to pad. “I’ve got some questions.”