The deepest, most secretive subterranean section of the Defense Intelligence Agency was its Research and Test facility, concealed not just from the public but from most of the agency’s many thousands of employees. Most were informed that it contained the agency’s archives, the record of countless covert missions, which was true enough in and of itself.
But Jarvis knew that it did not reveal the whole story.
In a far flung corner of the archives, in an area purposefully allowed to gather dust, was a door emblazoned with an aged warning sign of high voltages within. The door had a single visible lock, to which only a handful of the agency’s personnel held a key. The key would not work on its own, however, for most of the locks inside the door were on the far side and controlled from a secure location in the Director’s office. One could only access the door with their key if the other locks had been accessed by the director himself.
Jarvis slid his key into the lock, turned it, and waited.
Moments later he heard mechanical and electrical locks open and the door hissed open before him. He walked into a narrow tunnel filled with old fuse boxes, cables and pipes, and strode down it until he reached another door. Above this one, a dusty looking camera flashed a red light, and as the door behind Jarvis closed again so the one in front of him opened.
The laboratory within was large, manned by a dozen or so people had picked from the agency’s thousands of staff. One of them was Hellerman, who hurried up to Jarvis’s side and started speaking as though he had never done so before.
‘Oh my God, sir, thank you so much for letting me know about this place. I can’t believe all of the incredibly cool things you’ve got hidden away down here and I really wanted to say that I…’
‘Where is it, Hellerman?’
Hellerman controlled himself and pointed down the laboratory. ‘It’s just over here.’
Jarvis followed him to a workstation where a Perspex box contained a perfect chrome sphere of material that looked to him like a ball of mercury, the liquid flowing around itself as though it represented the weather patterns on a tiny planet. Beneath it was the gold disc, broken now into two pieces.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘The disc was merely the container,’ Hellerman enthused, ‘and the Black Knight a drone of sorts, perhaps one of thousands distributed across the galaxy by an advanced species. We deciphered the symbols upon it using Amy’s work from Antarctica and it opened to reveal this.’
Hellerman pointed excitedly at the sphere.
‘And this is what, exactly?’ Jarvis asked.
‘Hell, I don’t know!’ Hellerman almost shouted, his face beaming with delight, ‘that’s the exciting thing!’
‘An educated guess?’ Jarvis pushed.
Hellerman glanced at the sphere. ‘It’s a computer drive,’ he replied. ‘It’s a liquid metal, variable state memory system so advanced that I nearly pee my pants even thinking about it. It’s using the quantum state of the metal in order to maintain immense volumes of information, comparable to the entire memory capacity of every single computer on Earth ten-fold.’
Jarvis peered at the sphere and saw his own distorted reflection in it.
‘Can you access it?’
Hellerman’s delighted expression faltered slightly as he too looked at the sphere. ‘No. In fact we don’t even know where to start, except to be certain that we can’t take a keyboard and a USB and just plug it in.’ Jarvis peered at Hellerman, who shrugged. ‘Sorry, I just get real excited by things like this. Whatever it’s for, Majestic Twelve knew about it and wanted it real bad.’
Jarvis nodded and stood up from it.
‘Keep this to yourselves,’ he ordered. ‘Do everything that you can to understand what it is and how it works. If we can access it, our country will have a sufficient technological advantage over the rest of the world that will never be surpassed.’
‘You got it,’ Hellerman said as his head bobbed up and down like a deranged parrot.
Jarvis walked away from the laboratory and out of the subterranean section of the building. He used the elevator to return to the ground level of the agency, and then left work for the day. He did not use his cell phone until he had driven ten miles away from the agency, and then it was a burner cell that would not be traced. He dialed a number from memory and waited, the line picking up on the second ring.
‘Yes?’
‘We’ve got it and we’ll figure out how to use it sooner or later.’
A long silence on the line before the reply.
‘We’re taking an awfully big risk here, Jarvis. Keeping me out of ADX Florence and off the law enforcement radar will only last so long.’
‘It only has to last so long,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I want this all to come to an end, but I sure as hell don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. We’re each other’s insurance policy, Aaron: let’s make sure all our cover is perfect before we both disappear.’
Jarvis shut off the line as he drove, opened his side window and tossed the phone over the side of the bridge and down into the Potomac. As he closed the window he reflected on how little time he had left to complete his mission, just like Mitchell.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dean Crawford is the author of the internationally published series of thrillers featuring Ethan Warner, a former United States Marine now employed by a government agency tasked with investigating unusual scientific phenomena. The novels have been Sunday Times paperback best-sellers and have gained the interest of major Hollywood production studios. He is also the enthusiastic author of many independently published Science Fiction novels.