Diablo Mesa(52)

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and quickly trained his binocs in that direction. A small herd of horses was cresting a hill and disappearing down the other side, moving fast, disturbed by the invasion of their domain. Horse Heaven Hills—an apt name, he thought as he made his way down the far side and continued on.

He hiked northward, up and down the hills, sometimes following narrow horse trails. But he saw nothing except occasional horses, shy as deer, fleeing as soon as they spied him. After a few miles, the hills petered out into a broad valley dotted with red sandstone buttes. This, he thought, must be Los Gigantes: the giant ones. Beyond that stood a range of foothills rising into mountains, purple in the late-morning light.

Banks took a break in the shade of an oak to drink water and eat a granola bar. It was a little crazy, he mused, the way he’d ended up in this place. It was all very sudden. He’d gotten the call just three weeks before, in his South Kensington flat—some woman on the phone saying that Lucas Tappan was on the line. At first he thought it was a joke, one of his friends taking the piss, but when Tappan got on the phone he quickly realized it was real. And then came the offer, the unbelievable compensation, and the demand that he drop everything. A week later he was here, at the ends of the earth, preparing to excavate an alleged UAP crash site. Although he had long believed UAPs were real, he had serious doubts about the Roswell site. All those doubts, however, vanished when the mass spectra had come in, revealing an unknown superheavy element present in trace amounts. That floored him like nothing else had in his life. He’d gone over it a hundred times and there was no way of getting around the evidence. It was a smoking gun, proof that an intelligently engineered, extraterrestrial object made of exotic compounds had indeed crashed at the site. The full significance was still sinking in. Clearly, this discovery was going to change his life—but exactly how, he couldn’t yet predict.

Other implications, too, were inescapable: that the U.S. government had indeed found a UAP at Roswell and covered it up. What had happened in the seventy years since? Had the bloody government been reverse engineering the technology? Had they been in contact with the ETs? How would they react to having their long deception uncovered? He felt himself sailing into uncharted waters.

And then there was Tappan, who insisted they keep the superheavy-element discovery under wraps. He wondered why.

His radio crackled, Tappan again. “Greg, any signs?”

“Nothing.”

“Let’s continue into the valley with the buttes and reconnoiter there.” Tappan sent a GPS coordinate specifying where they should meet.

“Got it.”

He finished the granola bar, took another gulp of water, and continued hiking into the valley. He wondered again what could have happened to Bitan. The man had grown up in the Negev, so it wasn’t as if he was ignorant of a desert environment. It would be hard to get lost. Even if his GPS had died, all he’d had to do was climb a hill and look around to determine which direction to go. While he might have had a fall or been bitten by a snake, Banks thought it more likely Bitan had engineered his own disappearance. The lights Skip had seen hinted that someone might have met him out here and picked him up. Although if that was the case, why hadn’t they seen any tire tracks?

The valley he was hiking in was a dramatic place, with the great buttes of sandstone rising hundreds of feet. There was no shade anywhere.



Three hours later, they were back at their jeeps, having found no trace of Bitan beyond the lake bed—no footprints or other evidence of human presence. At 1 PM, after seven hours of fruitless searching, to Banks’s relief Tappan called it a day and they headed back to camp.





33



AT FIVE O’CLOCK, Nora entered Quonset 1, her brother reluctantly in tow, for a meeting called by Tappan. Skip hadn’t wanted to come—he was embarrassed and afraid he’d be fired—but Nora had persuaded him it would be worse if he stayed away. All the scientific staff was there. They took seats around a large conference table at the back of the building. Tappan was the last to arrive, striding in at five minutes past, heading directly to the head of the table. Instead of sitting, he placed his hands upon the back of the chair and passed his gaze over the troubled group.

“Well,” he finally said. “As you all know, we weren’t able to find Noam Bitan. We aren’t sure if the disappearance was intentional or accidental. Naturally, we’re concerned, and it’s been reported to both the FBI and the county sheriff.”

He glanced around again.

“It turns out, as most of you now know, that Dr. Bitan had discovered something of great significance to our project—a discovery that may explain his disappearance.” Yet again, his gaze swept the room, this time coming to rest on Skip. “He took his assistant, Skip Kelly, into his confidence. I’m going to ask Skip to now share that confidence with us.”

Nora glanced over and saw pure panic on Skip’s face.

“M-me?” he stammered.

“Yes, you.” Tappan drilled him with his eyes. “I can understand why you felt compelled to keep that information from the rest of the team—but now the time has come for you to share it with everyone. We need to hear it from your own lips.”

“Yes, sir,” said Skip. “I’m really sorry. I realize I’ve let down the team.”