Chapter 8

Washington, DC – Saturday, May 28th, 1983 – 2:15 AM

That Theresa McNaney was a bitch on wheels.

Gordon Swan flipped through his legal pad. He had filled nearly twenty pages, constructing the time line, trying to structure the case for himself before he assigned any agents. But, damn. That woman could drive a man insane. He had had dozens of questions he needed to get answered and she had fought him like some venomous demon-harpy straight out of hell on almost all of them. Voss had done a good job of keeping things on track, though. He must’ve worked with McNaney before.

Swan looked at his timeline. Donald Bernhard had keeled over into his soup at the food court in the Four Points mall four days ago. State police had handled everything up until now, keeping the DOD in the loop through McNaney—Gordon bet that the boys in gray drew straws for that duty. But the scene, and the trail, was now four days old. Not to mention, it was 2:15 in the goddamn morning. They could have scheduled a meeting for 8:00 am Friday, or even Thursday. Instead of sitting on their asses until six in the evening, on a Friday, before he even got a call. Bureaucrats.

Gordon Swan sat in the conference room alone, rubbing his temples. What a crock of shit. Artifact of indeterminate origins, my ass. Maybe the Christmas Island story was all on the up and up, but absorbing all the radiation? And what about the crap about defense mechanisms? Then, the whole deal about not being able to specifically determine the material—some form of carbon-silicate they were speculating. But material tests were inconclusive. Bernhard had synthesized some sort of alien device with double-A batteries and rubber bands that he had killed himself with, after which, anything that would constitute actual corroborative evidence had disappeared. How convenient.

McNaney and Voss had told Gordon that the current hypothesis was that Bernhard had somehow taken the artifact nearly a year ago, and had substituted a copy, likely—say it with me, everybody—synthesized using technology acquired from the original artifact. He must have heard some variation on that phrase thirty times during the conference. It was the explanation for everything that had no explanation. Well, no explanation except that all these people were out of their fucking minds and this whole thing was a load of horseshit. Eliminating that hypothesis, the only thing left to fill in all the gaps were things synthesized using technology acquired from the original artifact. It was the answer for everything.

Gordon sighed, thumbing absently through the materials in the file jacket. McNaney’s repeated protestations that there had been no determination regarding the origins of the artifact to the contrary, there obviously had been. Somebody somewhere, and probably more than one of them, thought they had a piece of a flying saucer. Some sort of microscopic Martian Rosetta stone. Someone with some clout. They had already burned God only knew how many taxpayer dollars monopolizing Oak Ridge so Dr. Donald Bernhard could, in most likelihood, yank their chain for three years. Consumed the time and resources of who knew how many people at the DOD and NSA. Now, they were going to start burning through grampa’s Social Security at the FBI, looking for little green men.

Gordon reached into his breast pocket and pulled out an Alka-Seltzer. He had some deadly indigestion. He popped the two Alka-Seltzer tablets into his water—the ice had mostly melted, having been brought in an hour before while the conference with Voss and McNaney had still been in full swing. Still, it was cold, and with the Alka-Seltzer fizzing away, it tasted good.

While there might be something to investigate here—fraud and abuse, just to name two things off the top of his head—the likelihood of the case brought to him by McNaney and Voss even remotely resembling reality seemed, to Gordon Swan, extremely slight. But the strings here were being pulled from way above Gordon’s box on the organizational chart. All he could do was do his job, as quickly and discretely as possible.

Gordon flipped forward a few pages in the pad. Towards the end, he had pressed Voss and McNaney on who they were taking marching orders from. They had all the wheres and whos and hows from the frontline—everyone on Dr. Bernhard’s team, the team that had originally noted the artifact, the people who had processed it, the oversight committee and the military and civilian personnel that had handled the Christmas Island investigation. But not who signed off on this project virtually taking over the Oak Ridge lab. No word on who made the call on the “artifact” in the first place.

Often, research was done in the forms of grants with oversight based on petition from civilians–usually contractors hoping for fat government contracts and, by the way, could Joe Taxpayer also pick up all the research and development costs, too?–or from military men looking for advantage or career opportunities or politicians looking for pork. No petitions here. Dr. Bernhard had not read about the artifact in a journal and then put together a grant proposal. He had been tapped, as had Oak Ridge and the rest of Bernhard’s team. Just as Voss and McNaney had been and just as the FBI now was getting the good news that it had volunteered.
So someone else was calling the shots. Maybe the guy that McNaney blew for her current spot in the Department of Defense’s organization chart. Or someone above that.

There were a lot of nuts in the world, and some of them in very high places. Swan had heard that J. Edgar Hoover had worn women’s underwear, and that that might have been one of the more normal things about him. True or not, it certainly could have been. Howard Hughes, America’s first billionaire and at one time the world’s richest man, had spent the last years of his life terrified of germs, shuffling around with Kleenex boxes on his feet, unwilling to cut his hair or his fingernails. Among other things, Howard Hughes’ autopsy had revealed that his body had been riddled with broken off hypodermic needles. Many of them had been in him for years. And Hughes had been a very powerful and influential man, as well as incredibly rich, in many ways that didn’t come to light until after his death, and in some ways that probably hadn’t come to light yet.

Not nearly so impressive, Swan’s immediate supervisor when had been in the field—Deputy Director Geoffery Ramis—had been convinced that people spontaneously combusted. That it had happened to his brother, a CIA field agent that had disappeared in Venezuela. Ramis was convinced that it had happened in five different cases he had investigated in his career, and that it was the explanation for multiple disappearances and unexplained fires or arson. Ramis—who had gone on to a senior position in the State Department—had had an unshakeable conviction that people would sometimes just blow up. They would catch fire on the inside, and rapidly burn away at a temperature high enough to turn bone to ash. Sometimes causing building, car, or brush fires, but usually without so much as scorching the bed they were laying in or the floor they were standing on. On occasion, Ramis had intimated that he knew something more sinister about the origins of these spontaneous combustions, but had never been specific.

Swan, who had always beend dismayed when his normally clear-headed, fact-checking, i-dotting and t-crossing superior began to expound on the reality of spontaneous combustion, had never tried to extract from him exactly what his theories had been. After enough conversations on the issue, where Swan had simply remained neutral to gauge how serious Ramis had been, it had become clear that Ramis was extremely serious and not only believed in it—it was important to him. Important enough that if logic might contradict the conclusions, then logic was simply wrong. By the time Swan had switched departments, he had learned that it was religion to Ramis; to question the factuality of something that, in truth, didn’t have one single shred of definitive, empirical evidence was, to Ramis, sacrilege. Not only sacrilege, it was evidence of the questioner’s incurable stupidity.

And Ramis had moved up in the world, not down. It was scary to think of the strange, wrong, and even terrible ideas people had—people in positions of power, people with resources, people who could not only act on their ideas but make others act on them as well. The huge waste of taxpayer money, from the government-funded research on the “artifact” to the government-funded hide-and-seek mission now to whatever government-funded research that would happen if they ever found the useless thing, was, in the end, fairly harmless. Just a little more government pork, and not that big a piece at that. The people who were making it happen, the people who were pulling the strings—his strings, Voss and McNaney’s strings, maybe even Director Webster’s strings—those people were not fairly harmless. They might end up self-destructing, sure. Usually they did. But not always.

Gordon slapped the legal pad on the table. He picked up the file jacket and stuck it on top of the pad, preparing to take the bundle back to his office, drop it in the file drawer of his desk and lock it tight. Standard procedure, but he was more worried about this sort of material getting out than most regular cases. Leaks about legitimate investigations would most likely not damage his career and leave the Bureau looking insular and stupid. Leaks about little green men, on the other hand, might play well with the Area 51 crowd. But not with John Q. Public. And certainly not with congressional oversight committees.

He stood up, stretched, picked up his pad and file jacket—half-empty cups of coffee and water he’d leave for the early morning pick-up crew—and headed for the hall, putting the case together in his mind. Putting it together on paper could wait until morning.

He hated to do it, but he decided to put the best available agents on the job. He would need high efficiency and total discretion. It could not get out—get out to anyone—that the FBI was look for some sort of alien artifact. The FBI fought crime and did paperwork–and three guesses which it did more of–but it did not go looking for E.T. the Extra Terrestrial throughout the malls and multiplexes of suburban America. This case could not get leaked. Not to the press, of course, but not to other agencies, either. Not to other agents in the FBI. Not to other directors, aside from Director Webster’s discretion, over which Swan would have no say. But he hoped and suspected Director Webster was as skeptical of this foolishness, and as anxious to keep it in low profile, as Swan was. Which might be, he supposed, why Webster stuck the duty on him. There were, Swan knew, less cynical deputy directors in the FBI than himself.

Also, the Bureau was not short of deputy directors who would not do well with a bitch on wheels like McNaney.

Bitch on wheels. It wasn’t a phrase that Swan really used, though he’d heard it used more than once around the office. He couldn’t help but notice, however, that it was starting to come up in his head every time he thought of McNaney. Hopefully, he could spend more of his time dealing with Voss. Maybe submit written reports to McNaney and be out if the office when she called to bitch at him.

So, who to put on the case? Greg Willet was on a child abduction assignment—little redhead girl, kidnapped right in front of her school, with at least two creeps involved, demanding a ransom that was more money than her parents had access to. He would have been Swan’s first choice; there was none better in the Bureau than Greg Willet. But kidnapped little redheaded, freckled-face girls were a lot more important than political maneuvering or personal butt-covering to this father of three. His youngest was eight, same age as girl that Greg Willet was busy trying to bring home, alive and in one piece, to her desperate parents. The world was better served with Greg right where he was.

Frank Andrews, had just come off a case and was busy plowing the paper work. He was good. Not Greg Willet, but good, and Swan knew he was discrete. Discretion was what this particular case demanded most, ahead of speedy resolution. Vic VanCleef was available, too. He was a big lug, and suitably threatening—when all 6’4”, 250 lbs of agent VanCleef showed up, in a fresh brown suit and tie against a crisp white shirt with his FBI badge and ID held up high, knees got wobbly and people talked. People cooperated. VanCleef could also make sure that people kept quiet. He looked a little like Moose from the old Archie comics, but VanCleef had a mind as sharp as a razor and he heard and saw everything. He was great on the interview, and he was great at making not-so-bright people think he was dumb and they were clever. More than one case had cracked while Vic VanCleef just stood, watched, and listened. And he could turn them off the same way he could turn them on; not only was he discrete, if he wanted, he could make sure that everybody else was discrete, too. VanCleef was definitely on it.

He flipped through the other agents he knew would be turning in paper soon, without a locked-down assignment. Janet Brewer, maybe. She had shown promise. Actually, she was quite good, but Swan didn’t know her well enough, he decided. Off the list. Maybe Lydia Chelsea? Her, he knew. She was dependable, she didn’t rock the boat. That would make three agents, which he thought would be fine, at least at the start. There was more he needed to learn before any more agents could do any good.

He was still debating about Lydia as he arrived in his office and put the file jacket and legal pad away. He grabbed absently at his pocket and realized he had left his pencil. Well, not a big thing. He locked the drawer with the files, and tabled any more thought about this case until tomorrow. He’d decide if Lydia was going to round out the threesome then. Until then, no more thinking about the case until he showed up in the office Monday morning.

Well, he did allow himself one thought. He thought that he’d probably heard the last from FBI Director Webster on this, and that from now on he’d be dealing mostly with McNaney and Voss. If Webster called and said “Jump!”, Gordon Swan would ask, “How high?” If Voss or McNaney called and said, “You have to miss dinner with your wife and kids again because we’re career political flaks that think somebody elected us Ronald Reagan and we’ve got you on a leash,” he was going to tell them to go fuck themselves.

There, the last thought. He closed the door, turned off the light, and went home to his sleeping house.