Diablo Mesa(101)

“Beginning in early 1947, small detachments of Atropos were housed at high-value targets, especially Los Alamos. Soviet infiltration of the U.S. was by then well advanced, and the Atropos units were able not only to eliminate many traitorous scientists, but also to identify, monitor, and if need be kill Soviet sleeper agents embedded here.”

“You almost sound as if you approve of this, General,” said Tappan.

“I don’t disapprove. The problem is, the unit apparently operated with unlimited funding and no accountability. That’s a recipe for corruption—or, perhaps worse, hubris and radicalization.

“When the Roswell crash occurred, the Atropos team from Los Alamos was first at the site. Finding an alien ship with advanced technology was not only extremely interesting—but once it appeared to be hostile, that discovery ended up morphing into their raison d’être. At the cost of numerous casualties, they recovered the craft and moved it to the Pershing site. Eventually, rather than try to move it again, they built a secret base around it, dramatically expanding the underground bunker system.”

“What about the two bodies we found?” Nora asked.

“Those, as Agent Swanson here determined, were two Soviet sleeper agents, killed by Atropos. The dial-a-yield device was used as bait, its guts removed—and it was a prototype anyway, which is why it was of no value and buried with the bodies.”

“Why did Atropos just leave the bodies there?” Tappan asked.

The general gave a cynical smile. “Hubris, initially. That’s an extremely remote location, and at the time they were in a hurry—and mightily distracted by having found an alien spaceship, as you can imagine. Later they seem to have decided the bodies were safe there, and that any attempt to remove them carried a higher risk than simply leaving them. As you know, they doused the faces and fingertips with acid to hinder identification. They didn’t know, obviously, about the Soviet dental work. The two scientists who disappeared from Los Alamos in 1947 were, of course, the contacts of those murdered sleeper agents. Atropos also killed them, erased their features with acid, and buried their bodies elsewhere in the desert. We found them as well.”

He went on. “As the years passed, it seems Atropos became almost a cult. They made very little progress in understanding the ship. Yet their appropriations from the government’s black budget were vast, and they had spread their operatives through not only the CIA but the FBI, the military, and—unfortunately—NASA. They were extremely adept at scrubbing any obvious signs of their existence from government bureaucracy, hiding their movements behind veils of secrecy, and keeping a minimal profile, interfacing with authorized branches enough to ensure legitimacy. The fact that they had formed so early, in addition to the continual and inevitable turnovers in government, helped. Anyway, in the absence of hard information, a lot of paranoid ideas evolved. Guarding the thing became a sort of religion, in which they continued certain rituals passed on from the earlier generation. Anyone interested in contacting beings from other planets started to look like enemies to them…because getting the attention of the alien civilization that sent this probe was, in their view, akin to inviting extinction.”

“Servandae vitae mendacium,” Tappan quoted.

“Lies in service of lives,” the general said. “Precisely. In any case, new inductees, poached from the special forces, were sworn in at a secret ceremony, where they would be given a blood oath and then be shown the alien ship. While the rest of the world got over its ‘Invaders from Mars’ phobia, their secrecy and paranoia increased. They found fewer and fewer candidates worthy of recruitment, and their numbers dwindled. That only made them more insular and unaccountable. And then you came along, Mr. Tappan, and overturned their little world.”

“But how did Lime infiltrate the FBI?” asked Corrie. “Everyone thought he was totally legit.”

“And he was: at least on the outside. He was a patriot in his own way, like all Atropos members, and he contributed to the success of several important FBI operations. As I intimated, numerous Atropos agents led double lives in the three-letter agencies: lives that they could slip in and out of if and when necessary. They continued to kill espionage targets and sleeper agents, even after the two bodies at Roswell. That included the scientist so cleverly murdered at Los Alamos in the nineties—he was spying for the Chinese, actually.”

“How did you find all this out?” Nora asked.

“We captured some low-level fugitives from the base and picked up others embedded in the various agencies. The core brain trust, people like Rush, who were at the site at that time, decided to go down with the ship, so to speak. The major general directing Atropos from Washington committed suicide. So did that Nobel scientist, Eastchester. Tragic. Clearly, there were skeletons in a great many closets. Additional information was gleaned from search warrants and extralegal intelligence gathering in the wake of the explosion…and your own earlier debriefs. Much of the last three months has been dedicated to piecing this history of Atropos together. The fact that it operated so long, in secrecy and with minimal interference…well, it’s extremely distressing, to put it mildly.”

“And what about the probe?” Tappan asked.

“We had a great deal more success than Atropos did—although we can’t really take much of the credit.”

“Why do you say that?”