Jake shook his head grimly. “Nice try. But you can’t really think we don’t have the rest of the footage.”
“What are you talking about?” she said.
Jake touched his laptop and the video jumped ahead. David Desh was now bounding down the stairs. Kira had forgotten he had returned to the basement briefly, while she had waited upstairs, to see if any of the guards had carried wallets or ID.
The guard with the knife protruding from his chest was dead. The other three were unconscious, but in good health. Desh made no move to check their pockets. Instead, he calmly took a knife and surgically slit each man’s throat, one by one, using great care so he wouldn’t get blood on himself. Like a butcher slaughtering cattle.
Kira’s eyes widened in horror and she choked back vomit.
It was his total lack of expression, his clinical detachment, that was the most frightening of all.
“Good acting, Miss Miller—or Mrs. Desh—whatever you’re calling yourself these days,” said Jake as the video stopped. “You do shocked and horrified about as well as I’ve ever seen.”
“This footage was doctored,” croaked Kira weakly, still not recovered. “It had to have been.” But she looked even less sure than she sounded.
Jake frowned and shook his head. “Sure it was,” he said sarcastically. “You do realize we’ve analyzed the hell out of this footage. Not a single frame has been altered in any way. It’s one continuous shot. If the first part you saw is accurate—and you admitted as much—than the last part is also.”
Kira turned away with a look of revulsion. David Desh was the most compassionate man she knew. Yes, he had killed in battle, but never helpless men. Not like this. True, her therapy brought out the worst in human nature, and it could be brutally difficult to control this Mr. Hyde personality. But a loss of control this great was shocking. And worse, he had never told her about it after he had returned to normal.
This would have been important information for her to have. At the time, they had little experience with the effects of enhancement. And she would have expected him to be horrified by the actions of his alter ego, to be beating himself up for not finding a way to prevent them. Yet he hadn’t said a single word, nor had he appeared the least bit remorseful.
They had been through so much together. But what she had just seen made her question everything she thought she knew. Could she trust David Desh? She would never have believed this possible of him, even enhanced. How could she possibly have misjudged him so greatly? And if he could keep this from her, what other secrets might he be keeping?
But as she turned her thoughts back to the video she had just seen, she had a startling realization, one just as disturbing as her husband’s betrayal of her trust.
23
The object continued to hurtle toward Earth, its speed now below a million miles per hour. Nearly every gravitational wave detector on Earth, and every space and ground-based telescope, tracked every inch of its arrival. It continued to decelerate with smooth and steady perfection, never deviating one iota from its direct course to the birthplace of humanity.
The world kept revolving. People still needed to work and feed their families. Planes still flew and buses still ran.
But alien visitation was the topic on everyone’s mind, spurring endless debate and endless speculation. It filled up all news and entertainment forums almost absolutely. And rightly so.
It was a seminal moment in history. Perhaps the seminal moment in history. Humanity was no longer alone in the universe. A stunning development. Nothing would ever be the same.
Everyone had an opinion on the subject. Religions took the news in a variety of ways. Some clergy embraced the idea of intelligent alien life. Others saw it all as a ruse, the work of the devil, to test the faith of true believers. God had made man in his image. If intelligent aliens existed, why hadn’t God, or Allah, or Christ, not made mention of this important fact?
And of course the crazies came out in droves. The nutcases. The conspiracy theorists. The end-of-the-worlders. Only this time they had almost as much chance of being right about events to come as were the most sober and rational scientists.
Science fiction had speculated about aliens and first contact for decades, but with every last one of Earth’s billions now engaged in their own speculations, all ideas ever considered by this burgeoning genre were touched upon in a matter of hours by someone around the globe, along with scores of ideas that had never been previously contemplated.
The object was small. Was it filled with aliens the size of ants? If so, was there a minimum brain size necessary to support intelligent thought? Was it simply a hotrodding robot? A computerized probe? Would it send out a signal to awaken huge colony ships buried under miles of ice in the arctic, or under the ocean floor? Was it coming to bring the final enlightenment? To welcome humanity into a vast intergalactic community? Or was it coming to destroy humanity? Was it a modern day flood sent by a vengeful God to punish the race for turning the entire planet into a den of iniquity that would make the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah sick to their stomachs and flush in embarrassment? Or was it just a scout? Would it simply fly by, record activity, and then never be seen again? Was it randomly sampling planets, or was it aware of the presence of humanity and actively seeking it out? Had it been sent by an alien army corps of engineers to puncture a hole in spacetime and create a stargate for the good people of Earth to use? Was it pure good? Pure evil? Pure indifference?
The conjecture never ended. Peaceful prayer meetings sprang up across the globe, conducted by a number of different religions. Riots broke out. Con artists, crazies, and spotlight seekers arose who insisted they were in contact with the incoming craft, and who declared themselves prophets.
But the majority of the world’s inhabitants continued going through the motions of living their lives. Billions upon billions adopted a wait-and-see fatalism.
Oblivious to the commotion it was causing on its target world, the small craft effortlessly tapped into the near infinite amount of energy available in every square centimeter of vacuum, and hurtled onward.
The people of Earth watched. And waited.
24
Kira had been so intent on watching the video Jake showed her, she had failed to consider the implications of its very existence.
The footage had come from Sam Putnam’s basement. From the safe house they had been in. But her brother, Alan, had never seen it. In the last minutes of his life, he had wanted to know how they had managed to escape from Putnam’s concrete dungeon.
So Putnam hadn’t been fully forthcoming to Alan. He had been playing a game of his own.
And why not? He was an intelligent, highly placed operative in the NSA, who had amassed power that was unequaled. And he was a true psychopath. Alan was an even bigger psychopath, true, and was behind Putnam’s meteoric rise through the NSA, but it would hardly be surprising to learn Putnam hadn’t been the loyal puppet he had appeared to be.
But both Putnam and her brother were dead. So how had Jake ended up with this footage? The most likely explanation was that it was recovered by someone who had been working closely with Putnam or her brother. And if this were the case, all bets were off.
“Before you showed this video,” said Kira, “I had asked you for your source of information about me. The existence of this footage has raised some disturbing possibilities. So the answer to this question is more important than ever.”