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- The key locations used in this novel exist, including Area 51 and surrounding government lands, the secret JANET terminal at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, the Little A’Le’Inn, and of course national landmarks such as Hoover Dam, the Las Vegas Strip, and the Washington Monument.
- All of the science in the novel that may seem like fiction also exists, and that which is not later explained in the narrative itself is available for review/independent confirmation by searching in the narrative.
- The US government research site that Dr. Cassandra Landis is recruited to work at exists, at least on satellite images and official documents; although its exact purpose, layout and name are open for speculation. An isolated complex of buildings in the Nevada desert ten miles south of the main top secret airbase at Area 51, some say “S4” is nothing more than a solar research site; others suspect it’s much more than that and may indeed be the true top secret government site, with Area 51 merely the grand facade…
Somewhere in the Nevada desert, approximately 83 miles NNW of Las Vegas, 1997…
She was standing atop a high desert foothill panting from her extraordinary run, the dimming desert panorama as a backdrop. A magnificent if eerie sunset had finally prevailed through a crack in the cloud deck above, slanting quiet light under the heavy layers of rolling overcast. In turn, muted blues and oranges highlighted the fulsome clouds, like massive sail ships surging above the seas of faded yellow and dark green desert slopes surrounding, making for a strange, but stunning scene that marked an uncommon end to a fairly common day in the desert.
While drinking in this perfection, something imperfect caught her eye. A curiosity had materialized high in the sky, just above the mountain range in the distance—coldly, silently disturbing the view. The stark, unmoving speck fascinated her because it was such an unwavering point against the surging gray clouds. It disappeared, winking out, leaving wonder in its place.
Then, as if to prove it was really there, it appeared again, this time closer to her—now a black dot about the size of a small plane, but still unwavering, still defiant despite the high winds. After hanging in the sky just long enough to intrigue, it bent in on itself, vanishing again.
By the time it began appearing and disappearing beneath the low overcast like a stone skipping across an upside down pond at her, it hit her: this wasn’t a two-dimensional graphic on some scientific white paper, or a blurry image on a faded piece of grainy film.
The object in the sky was moving towards her.
My God, it’s so … real.
As it slinked in the sky in her direction, its only sound the desert wind, her initial reaction to seeing the object in action was visceral—one of pure, child-like curiosity. She scrambled to take out her military-grade handheld GPS, which had a camera on it…
Then abruptly, the object was gone again. This time, her long search of the horizon found nothing. For too long a while actually, it was just the sound of her own heavy breathing and the occasional desert wind gust.
Suddenly, she was afraid. Her instinct wanted nothing more than for her to get away, to run before she saw too much.
But she knew it was far too late for that.
In that next moment, before she had a chance to turn around fully, it was right behind her, right above her: massive, hanging in the sky, eclipsing the textured heather gray twilight naturally, as if it were always part of the landscape.
No noise.
No noise at all.
Slowly, it began to emit a soft, phantom electric blue glow, as if building up to something. She tried again with the GPS, hurriedly aiming it upwards to capture pictures, video—any evidence to protect herself—but when she went to do so, the device was suddenly dead, useless. Looking up past the lifeless device in her trembling hands, her stomach
did a somersault when she realized:
The backdrop was moving. The seamless, unearthly metal the object was made from had begun to bend inward, like mercury in a bottle.
She knew the object was doing what it was supposed to. Dropping the navigation device, she found herself raising her arms in triumph; spreading her palms in worship at it. Fear gave way to scientific wonder and revelation; dread gave way to pride.
Unlike its approach, the object stretched outside in for what seemed like minutes to her, hovering above, and as the envelopment became more pronounced, her world became increasingly darker. She recognized that because of what it was doing, she was about to pass out…
…but just before she did, lying crooked and smiling oddly in awe and fear on the sandy shrublands of the Nevada desert floor beneath it, she noticed one final image on what anyone else in the world would classify an alien spacecraft.
On its underside, a symbol…
My name is Jordan Prichard. I was an investigative reporter for the Post. I had it all. Then I had nothing.
My part in the conspiracy started two months ago, in Maryland—before I even arrived in Nevada—on a raw, gray day. The wicked mid-March wind dragged heavily on my long black overcoat as I stood on a high hill to the left of a small, fresh grave. On the opposite side, a lovely but sad black woman in her late thirties stood numb. The grave divided us. A priest was speaking somberly at me; a loud, formal tone hardly heard over the wail of the wind:
“…and though it may be difficult to find meaning in this your troubled time of mourning, it is important to remember that sometimes He speaks to us through the people in our lives, sending us a message; a hint, using their voices. If your hearts and ears are open you will find the deeper meaning you seek through this message.” The priest paused. “In closing, I am reminded of that panacea passage from scripture: ‘Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock…” at this word the priest looked directly at me, his gray eyes piercing, as he continued, “…and the door shall be opened unto you.’”
I tore my gaze away from the priest, and again was staring at the grave marker: a large sandstone obelisk, like a scaled down version of the Washington Monument. I couldn’t take my wet eyes off it.
Finished, the priest bowed his head slightly and offered a look of sympathy, but in the end left the pair of us standing on that hill, alone against a charcoal-smudged sky.
The wind howled for a long moment; a storm about to break. I slowly turned my back to the gravestone. I reached out my left hand across the grave to my wife, Caroline. With her left hand she took it, but absently, still staring at the cold ground crying. Massive black cumulonimbus clouds, well defined, were moving swiftly across the sky as a backdrop. There we stood in the turbulent gloom, holding hands across the grave…
…when slowly, achingly, Caroline began to pull her hand from my grasp.
I looked down at my hand. Her wedding ring was in it. A physical representation of a loving reality lost. A keepsake.
Her love was the only thing that ever seemed real to me, I thought.
She left the graveside, heading to the right. After another long moment, I walked away too, but to the left. The sound of one car starting. Then another. Separate cars now, for separate lives.
The lonely stone obelisk that remained behind read simply, ‘Rachel Prichard,’ and gave the dates. Our daughter didn’t make her fourth birthday.
Reporter’s Note: The following account of events has been interwoven with my own, to give a chronology to the alleged conspiracy, and my unconscious involvement in it.
On that same fateful mid-March day two months ago, across the continent from me and Washington DC, another stone obelisk stood at attention. At one hundred forty feet, this one was much larger than the one that stood at the head of our baby girl’s grave. It was bathed in spotlights from below and set against the backdrop of a dark glass pyramid, jutting thirty stories high in the pre-dawn hours of another glorious desert morning.
Near the base of the obelisk outside the Luxor hotel, on a boulevard world-famous for teeming with out-of-the-ordinary people, a nondescript woman in nondescript clothes sat in a government issued sedan at a stoplight.
Dr. Cassandra Landis, PhD in nonlinear advanced applied physics and CEO and Chairperson of one of the largest aeronautics firms in the world turned left off the Las Vegas Strip and onto El Diablo Drive.
Unlike her last day on the job—allegedly witnessing the object in action out there in the Nevada desert—she told me she sure as hell didn’t want to be late for her first.
Dr. Landis recounted to me the story of her hiring into a secret government project in the course of some investigative reporting that I conducted into her claims, during and after a press conference on the matter of her disappearance and the alleged conspiracy surrounding it. I am still working to corroborate her allegations.
So scientifically, at least, Dr. Landis was excited about her new job opportunity; the mysterious circumstance of her hiring, her unspecified workplace she was heading to, and the promise of a new challenge helped. She’d been bored lately, she said. Success had led to deadly complacency; and complacency was a beautiful rut, but a rut nonetheless. Oh, she was quick to tell me that she was happy with her life: her career, rebuilding her late father’s company for the 21st century; her doting husband Steve, a stay at home dad who didn’t mind her being the high-profile breadwinner; their son Alex, who was becoming his own little man way too fast.
But this short aerospace engineering consulting job for the government, a joint venture with the government’s main defense contractor EG&G, was meant to be a release from the tedium of the everyday; a mental adventure for her, though one that would still have her home by dinnertime.
Cass would soon find out that like everything else, freedom had its price. And adventure could so easily trip into danger…
The sheet of instructions in the hiring packet given by her enigmatic US government employer simply directed her to report to McCarran Airport outside
of Las Vegas, to a commuter flight heading out of a special, restricted section of the airport property known as the JANET terminal.
Nestled behind both a parking lot full of cars and a large yard full of mothballed planes, the secret air terminal sat relatively in the open. Across the boulevard from the Luxor, in full view of the hotel’s mock Sphinx and stone obelisk, sat an ordinary fleet of six model 737-66N passenger planes with prominent red horizontal stripes called ‘cheatlines’ running down their fuselages, and five Beechcraft executive turbo props with similar blue stripes running horizontally down theirs. The planes were lined up in two rows in front of a low-slung terminal building, their registration numbers in full view of one of the most heavily trafficked areas of the world. I confirmed: they are still there today.
So it was with unbridled enthusiasm that Dr. Landis turned onto Haven Drive in front of the airport terminal and headed towards the parking lot gate, anticipating her new position, but also with trepidation towards the unknown. Despite being a top scientist in her field, head of a major corporation, and having done high-level government contract work before, Cass told me she was still nervous as hell. And she loved it.
After getting out of the still idling car at the security gate, she described handing her newly acquired badge briskly to the armed guard, an ex-soldier, who took a long couple of minutes scanning her, patting her down and reconciling the face with the picture on the badge. He was matching her features. Not only her obvious, distinguishing ones—her crystal blue eyes, her dark, shoulder length hair which was pulled back into a ponytail, height and weight—but the minute ones as well received heavy attention: like the permanent three inch burn mark on her left hand and arm, the result of an encounter testing a new propulsion drive.
As the guard bore down to the last laugh line and mole—usually a disconcerting thing for a woman in her late forties—Cass said she knew that his trained eyes weren’t judging her, or even ID’ing her anymore, but searching her for visual cues of excess nervousness. Finally, he took her thumbprint on a laser fingerprinting device, then still made a phone call. After a harrowing full minute with him on the phone, but still watching her, the newbie was put through.
Once parked, she got a better look at the openly secret terminal at McCarran, her commuter hub for the next indefinite period of her career. She got out of her car and walked to the terminal building—no escort needed, she noticed. Inside the terminal, everything else about
the scene seemed normal—but ominously so: a normal wait to board with other passengers, a normal ticket call counter, a normal door leading to a normal walk down the plane jet way. She looked around at the others: three women, six men, but she told me she could not recall their faces. All nondescript.
Normal.
But Cass showed me the instructions in the packet, which also told of government ‘minders,’ or anonymous guards, sprinkled into their midst.
Unseen eyes that are always watching.
After a short wait, which she thought was seemingly precipitated by her arrival, they called for boarding. Cass queued up to board, and when there, handed the ticket to the smiling gate attendant. She walked down the jet way carrying nothing; no carry on allowed—there or back—per strict instructions.
Inside the cabin, as Cass faced her unidentified, already seated colleagues, she counted them. She recalled thinking a stray thought: Was this the new Majestic 12? But the passengers were unfamiliar to her and paid her no mind, so she headed back behind them. The others continued talking and chatting and laughing like they were old friends, or at least regular morning commuters. Cass made her way to a window seat separate from them but not far, so she could hear. Mostly idle chatter, nothing work related, she noted; but again, nothing that wouldn’t occur on any subway or train or carpool heading to work anywhere in America at that moment. She slipped off her shoes. She remembered lifting the plastic window shade to get some light.
And that was when the normalcy came crashing down for her.
Their windows were blacked-out. Both ways.
This detail was something I easily confirmed as well, with a telephoto lens. From her ‘window’ seat onboard the plane that carried employees to their new workplace, Cass looked around the dim cabin: the other passengers continued to talk and move as if they were on the subway, heading to a normal nine-to-five job.
A late arrival to the phantom flight had come and sit next to her, a nice little old lady Cass knew as Mrs. Flack; a widow, no kids, who said she’d been working at the base over a year. Despite Mrs. Flack being thirty years Cass’s senior (she placed her at about mid-seventies), they had a lot in common. They both rode horses and both had an insatiable interest in science as it related to the future. During the taxiing process, Mrs. Flack showed pictures of her horses and her grandkids, who of course knew nothing of what grandma did. She was so very warm and friendly, that suddenly Cass felt
comfortable enough to ask,
“And what is it that you do here?”
It was as if someone scratched a needle from the record. The other passengers, who up to this point had pretended not to be aware, suddenly were acutely keen of hearing. They quieted their revelry to a murmur, and several uncomfortable glances pinged around the cabin before landing on the little old lady, seeking a reaction.
“We’re … not allowed to discuss each of our unique roles, Dr. Landis, or where we work. Strict instructions prohibit, I’m afraid.” She touched Cass’s arm, squinted and confided a motherly, “It’s safer this way, dear.”
The murmur among the other passengers quickly turned back up to a normal, if nervous, chatter. As the plane took off for her new workplace, destination unknown, Cass settled back in her seat and reflected on how she had gotten to that point…
She said she was approached through professional channels. A closed-door job interview was set up for her in her private executive office over lunch, and since her dealings with government aeronautics contracts occurred all the time, even her secretary would not be suspicious of the two government lawyers who were to conduct the interview. The perfect cover. Before arriving, they asked for a signed nondisclosure, just to keep the interview itself secret.
“We know who you are. We know what you’re capable of,” was how the interview began, and for the next hour and a half, the government lawyers—who Cass described as two unusually muscular men in impeccably tailored suits; one white, the other black—showed her hints and scraps and peeks at scientific data and schematics which she could not keep, but nonetheless made it difficult for her not to accept the position, which they offered her on the spot.
“Time is a factor, Mrs. Landis,” said the white lawyer.
“It’s doctor Landis, thank you,” replied Cass absently, still reviewing the ‘teaser’ data in one hand while finishing an apple with the other. “And I’m afraid you’ve left me with nothing here…” she paused, then looked up and continued, “…but raging scientific curiosity … and not much of a choice.”
The black lawyer nodded his approval of her curiosity and her tease and replied, “You’ll soon be receiving a packet with instructions.”
Cass nodded, and started to get up, but was startled when the white lawyer tossed a
thick manila envelope that slapped onto her carved mahogany desktop. The aforementioned packet of instructions. She looked at the two men. Despite the obvious time-dilation gag, they had straight faces. “Well, you did say I’d be receiving it soon, didn’t you,” Cass quipped, and sat back down.
“We’ve fast-tracked the standard security checks, Mrs. Doctor Landis,” said the white lawyer, watching Cass stick her still unfinished apple on her letter spike, and pick up the packet from her desktop.
“Like we said—we know who you are…” chimed in the black lawyer, reiterating his earlier quote.
“…we know what you’re capable of,” completed the white one.
Hesitantly, she broke the wax seal on the legal sized envelope—which she noticed bore the embossed emblem of the President of the United States; unusual, since the president usually doesn’t have clearance on such matters—and opened the legal-sized envelope. Besides the aforementioned sheet of instructions—which she noted and I confirmed had no destination at its end, on page two—Cass remembered the packet also contained a set of car keys, an already customized government badge complete with her picture and fingerprint, a fifty dollar gift card to The Gap, and an airline ticket. All of these she was able to produce for me, for confirmation.
“Your employer’s made it easy to say yes,” smiled Cass, albeit weakly; she was actually nervous. “It’s rather exciting.”
“We’d like to have you sign one last release form,” said the muscular white lawyer, as if in rebuttal to Cass’s “easy to say yes” comment, to bring her back down to Earth. He slid the single piece of legal sized paper across the desktop to her. She began to read, but was interrupted by the large black lawyer.
“In layman’s terms, it simply states that should you make one misstep while at your new workplace, you will be, at best—without a trial—shipped off to Leavenworth, Kansas for the rest of your life, under the charge of treason.”
Cass just looked at the men. Despite this ominous warning, she was used to the ‘industry’ and its quirks, used to all the legal near-cloak-and-dagger from her earlier work at Los Alamos and NASA, and all those government contracts she’d been a party to. She kept her own legal counsel on these secretive matters. A woman in her position had discovered long ago that the less her husband and son and
corporate lawyers knew, the safer they all were. Besides, most scientists would gladly waive their Constitutional rights for a peek inside Pandora’s Box.
And so Cass signed.
“And where is my new workplace?” She finished signing and initialing, and handed the newly legal document back, without being allowed to make a copy.
“Dr. Landis,” the white lawyer said almost too flatly, taking the signed release form. “Don’t make us have to kill you.”
Cassandra Landis smiled an uneasy smile, not sure, at least at that point, if the men were kidding or not.
The next day, as per instructions, after kissing her husband goodbye and dropping her son Alex off at school, she drove her black Boxster S to the office, starting a ritual that would carry on for months. Some women practiced the following kind of deception and led a double life for love or lust, she said; Cass did it for science.
Dressed in a smart pinstripe business suit, mostly for show, she rode the private elevator from the garage to the executive office as normal, a large soft designer carryall bag in hand. The elevator doors opened directly on her private office. After checking in with her secretary, confirming her “negotiation meetings with top government officials” for the next few weeks, she shut the door to her office. She changed into the nondescript clothes bought with the gift card, a simple matter of dressing with the change in mind: adding
a light tan twill jacket to a white blouse; removing a business skirt and putting on plain khakis; adding a size larger navy baseball cap with her hair stuffed inside and adding some white tennis shoes. She made the transfer to an unmarked government sedan that was to be parked in a dark corner of the underground garage where the security cam would be disabled. She left her cell phone, personal items and business clothes behind in her car. Nothing by which to identify her or call attention to her as she traveled to her “new workplace.”
Unseen eyes that are always watching…
The landing gear came out noisily, snapping Cass’s reverie, and after what seemed to her like an absurdly short flight on that first day, the passengers soon felt the bump of touchdown.
They’d arrived at work. But … where?
The group exited the plane via an antiquated mobile staircase that led right down onto the runway—no jet bridge—what they called a “hardstand,” in flight jargon, Cass explained. They herded across a desolate tarmac, and an unnerving sense of where they were pervaded.
The sight that befell Cassandra Landis as she squinted her eyes to adjust to the early morning brightness was still somewhat of a surprise, until she remembered her geography—both of the US and its pop culture. She said she never really believed in the place’s existence, and quite frankly the myth never held her attention. Despite what she was brought up by her father to believe, and despite whatever the media thought, the government had nothing but the best interest of its citizens in mind for keeping its secrets.
She would come to change her view drastically over the next weeks, she said, but for that first time, as she walked across the tarmac in the direction of the bus with blacked out windows that would take them to the hangers beyond the flight line, she thought, whatever work they were doing here fell under the auspices of national security. And since she’d been in this type of job before, ...
