River. They finally pulled up outside what once was part of the old navy dockyards, the towering old storage warehouses. Nearby, extensive building work was under way converting the unused buildings into flashy new apartments.
The SUVs rolled toward a particularly battered-looking warehouse that faced away from the city, and as they approached a loading door raised automatically, allowing the three vehicles to roll inside. Ethan looked over his shoulder and saw the rollers close up again as though swallowing them whole.
“Why the cloak-and-dagger routine?” Ethan asked the agents.
“Keeps you out of the media eye,” one of them explained. “FBI would have broadcast your arrests to the world, and we don’t want that to happen.”
Ethan felt a slight tension return to his body.
“Are we going for a swim wearing concrete flippers?”
The two agents laughed, but said nothing as the SUVs rolled to a halt. The doors were opened by agents from the outside, all of them competent-looking men with earpieces and carefully concealed weapons.
Ethan stepped out, and was quickly hurried away by two agents in the opposite direction of Lopez.
You understand the importance of the situation?”
Ethan nodded.
“I can understand why you’re doing this, yes.”
Ethan was sitting in a comfortable room buried deep in the center of the old warehouse, his voice sounding oddly muted and monotone in the anechoic chamber built into the solid concrete of the dock. The differences between this room and Patterson’s macabre operating theater were the soft couch, the coffee and doughnuts, and the straight-talking man who sat opposite. In his forties and with a long, serious face, he was the epitome of the discreet but capable government agent, and called himself Mr. Wilson.
“The DIA can’t afford this kind of security leak right now,” Wilson explained. “People think that to maintain security around delicate matters people like us use violence or intimidation, even murder. We don’t, if at all possible. We prefer to keep people on our side and explain to them why we are doing what we’re doing.”
Ethan nodded.
“That’s very reasonable and convenient, as I quite like being alive.”
Wilson smiled.
“The simple fact is that we don’t know what these aliens were, what they were doing here seven thousand years ago, or whether they visit us now. The remains found in Israel by Dr. Lucy Morgan will remain under lock and key for further study, and will not reach the public domain for some decades yet.”
Ethan frowned.
“Surely people are ready for this kind of thing?”
Wilson nodded in agreement.
“Absolutely correct, Ethan, if you’re referring to the educated, prepared countries of our Western world: barely one sixth of Earth’s population. We in the West might be mentally prepared for the presence of extraterrestrial species and their visitation of Earth, but what about the rest? What chaos might be caused in the Middle East, the former Soviet States, South America, and elsewhere?”
Ethan raised an eyebrow.
“Surely they’re prepared enough not to commit mass suicide.”
“Perhaps,” Wilson conceded. “But combined with that uncertainty is the fact that we ourselves don’t know why these … beings visit us. We don’t know what they want. We don’t know where they come from. We don’t know if they’ll arrive in greater numbers in the future. All the talk about conspiracy by government to conceal the truth, like Roswell, is utter crap. We don’t know the goddamn truth ourselves and are just trying to keep a lid on things until the rest of the world stops blowing itself to hell. Then, maybe, we’ll start seeing how we might deal with all of this.”
“If they’re hostile, we need to work together,” Ethan said.
“Exactly,” Wilson said. “And even if they’re not, we don’t want one country welcoming them with open arms as another opens fire or tries to steal technology to get the upper hand. It’s just the kind of shortsighted thing that some dictatorships might try, and God knows what would happen if we pissed these beings off. As it is, they can infiltrate our airspace with impunity and make a mockery of our defenses even when we do detect them.”
Ethan finished his coffee and set his mug down.
“So, silence all around then?” he guessed. “It never happened.”
Wilson nodded frankly.
“Dr. Sheviz is in the care of Bedouin nomads, which I think we can both assume will not be a pleasant experience for him. Most of the other key players are dead. Lopez and you will sign an official secrets declaration, as will your friends Safiya and Aaron Luckov before their return to Israel. All trace of events will