Alien Agenda: Why They Came, Why They Stayed Page 17

  Fifteen minutes later Merit moved from seat to seat waking everyone up.

  He allowed them time to make trips to the toilet, grab water or juice from the refrigerator, and generally shake the cobwebs from their brains. He retrieved a metal briefcase from a cabinet, placed it on the countertop, and snapped open the latches.

  “Okay, folks, we’ll be landing in a little while and it is time to give you your survival kits.”

  Everyone but Melanie, busy with her small crystal ball, waited with anticipation.

  Merit removed a stack of 9 x 12 manila envelopes from the case. Each had a name written in marker on it. He said, as he moved from seat-to-seat distributing each to its new owner, “Inside there’s identification documents—the most important is a passport—as well as credit cards, driver’s licenses, business cards, old movie tickets, all the stuff you might find in a purse or wallet. There is also a sheet explaining your new identities. Take some time now to learn who you are.

  “Be thorough,” Merit continued. “At the very least, if we are lucky, we will have to clear Columbian immigrations to get out of the airport.” He paused and added, “This is important. If we are still here when the people looking for us find out where we are, we are all going to be very unhappy.”

  Jim opened his new passport. He was now Mr. Robert Werner from Parma, Ohio. He had grown up outside of Cleveland and knew the area, so he felt he could wing any questions about his residency. He was also a technical writer for the computer company SAP. He studied the rest of his documents and placed them in the used wallet that gave the envelope its thickness. When he was finished, he felt a little comfort because it looked genuine.

  The plane had taxied into a hangar for private aircraft, and a Columbian official waited at the foot of the aircraft’s door steps.

  Jim quickly concluded Columbian drug lords and their customers don’t relish waiting in immigration and customs lines. So, at the Bogota International airport, passengers on private jets were afforded their own detachment of immigration officials.

  Jim and Merit were at the aircraft door. Everyone else was at the foot of the stairs having their passports examined by an official with a UV flashlight. Merit said, in his deceptively soft southern voice, “Y’all go to the pick-up area. Look for a driver holding up a sign that says ‘Sr. Werner’. That’ll be you.” He smiled then added, “He will take you to a hotel. Get on the Internet. Nice knowin’ you.”

  Jim saw a fuel truck pulling into the hangar and a ground crew preparing the Falcon 900. Jim understood. Merit was out of here, his part done.

  He turned toward Merit and asked, “Why?”

  “Made a deal. Owed a guy a favor. My word is my bond. Now we are even,” Merit said and stuck out his hand.

  “Well, thank you I suppose,” Jim said releasing the handshake and heading down the steps.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: N. Fairfield Rd, Arlington, VA

  Tom Cray knew it was over for now. He knew the powers that be would bluster, pose, and demand action, but so long as Tate and his crew of kidnappers remained silent there was very little chance of discovering anything more.

  They learned, several hours too late, that N321DC had landed in Bogota, Columbia. Four people deplaned and cleared immigration and had been picked up by a hired limousine driver who took them to the Hotel Dann Carlton.

  N321DC refueled, filed a flight plan to Lisbon, Portugal. From there it flew to Cyprus. Flight records indicated the plane had remained there, but it was gone.

  The four people had checked into the hotel, picked up a package at the desk addressed to Mr. Werner, and gone to their two rooms. The next morning the two men, a woman, and a redheaded girl ate breakfast and boarded a bus providing historical tours of Bogota.

  That was the last anyone had seen or heard from them. A maid cleaning the room the two men stayed in found identification documents in the trash can: passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards, and various other documents for Mr. Werner and each of the other three.

  Kate Hollister was happily refocusing on more important technical snooping: ferreting out terrorist threats instead of virtually chasing a nun and a little girl around the world. The filters were set to trigger and reactivate the kidnapping investigation. Kate knew eventually something would throw the switch again. Try as she might, she could not imagine how finding the woman and the girl could take precedence over terrorist threats. In the scheme of things, how important could they be?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  My name is Jim Tate. I decided when my wife died that Einstein had been right about living: life is worth living only if you have someone to live it for. I decided when Crypto, the best dog that ever tolerated me, passed on, it would be more important to tell this story than to live out what is left of my life in lonely resentment over the time I wasted with my career and not with my family. I was a good government man for almost four decades. I did what I was told and kept my mouth shut. No more.

  You are ready to learn the bottom line. Now hear this.

  It turns out our tribe did not sell our planet to the colonists for beads and trinkets. We sold it for drugs, the kind that generates unbelievable wealth and power. Once the new science and technology was shot into our political veins, we were hopelessly hooked. The black SUV squad had a busy second half of the twentieth century. Anything that threatened the continuation of the Truman Treaty was dealt with swiftly and severely. No one was exempt, not even President Kennedy.

  By the time Eisenhower gave his famous Military-Industrial Complex speech, we knew alien experiments on sleeping victims were increasing annually. Six months before Kennedy was assassinated, we knew the alien goal was to genetically alter the human race for their own purposes and that one of the side effects would be to increase the number of people born with autism by five hundred to a thousand times. It was only after President Bush and Rumsfeld were stood up in the high-desert night that we realized we had been cut off. Cold turkey. No more new toys to feed our addiction.

  Human nature is often to suspect the worse of fellow men. It naturally follows not only should we know non-fellow men are at some point going to break their agreement, but just knowing they will makes it okay to break the agreement first. Hence, knowing the HCU would break our treaty (which they did not, they simply let it expire and did not show up to renew it) we spent a few decades improving the Project Rainbow projectors and developed new energy-based weapons in preparation for the day the HCU would cross us.

  So now you know everything about how we came to be where we are. Why we are here and what we are going to do about it are uncertain.

  The best theory for the ‘Why’ of it all goes back to how the aliens came here in the first place: nuclear detonations disturbing parallel universes. Without going into quantum mechanic details (which I couldn’t anyway) here are the basics.

  Every universe is connected to dozens (maybe thousands) of other parallel dimensions. Myths from every culture contain stories of abductions and heroic trips to other worlds. Granted, the crossing from one dimension to the next was usually accidental and more often than not ugly things found their way to our side of the dimensional fence. Distilling these stories to common elements, we find dimensional crossings are almost always accompanied by booming, bass sounds, musical (though not necessarily pleasant) notes, strange light displays, earthquakes, solar alignments, and electromagnetic activity.

  Imagine all of these elements are involved in a connection between dimensions. Further imagine these elements are constantly fluctuating relative to the specific connection and to each other. A single doorway to another dimension might randomly open for a few seconds before the fluctuations close it for another 13 billion years.

  Now imagine two or three autistic savant riverboat pilots stationed in a craft between dimensions with equipment capable of manipulating the fields and forces that allow dimensional connections. Each operates a machine, each remembers precisely the patterns of sound, light, and energy that culminate
in opening the door between worlds. Their job is simple: keep this one door open. Keep it open so a never-ending stream of cargo continues to flow, feeding unimaginable colonial expansion into billions of universes.

  I was a good government man. What a waste. If I had my life to live over I would have had more children and kept less secrets. I’m too old to father more kids, so I guess I’ll just keep less secrets until the SUV pulls up outside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: A New Home

  There is an orphanage that has two new residents; an autistic, red-haired girl named Melanie, and a new teacher named Sister Fran. This is the second wonderful gift from God in the same year. Only a few months earlier they received electricity, so now the children have light at night, don’t have to carry water from the well, and someday soon a very generous man will send them a computer. The children are very excited about receiving the computer.

  Most of the children in the orphanage are normal, fun-loving, homework-hating, put-your-chores-off kids. There is one, Crista, who looks a lot like Melanie. She is autistic and does not talk either. They came together like two peas in Mendel’s pod.

  At night, when the two play with their sets of crystal stones, some claim to have seen a soft glow in their room.

  About the same time Melanie arrived at the orphanage, men sitting outside smoking after dinner claimed they saw strange, glowing lights near the peaks of the sacred mountains.

  7 July, One Year Later

  I am not sure I will ever return to the United States. It’s very beautiful here, and things are working out very nicely. Just like 1947-07 promised.

  We stayed at the orphanage for nearly a month. At first it was boring beyond belief. Well, for myself and Mr. Blue.

  Sister Fran, who spoke fluent Spanish, took immediately to teaching the children. They ranged in age from infant to fifteen. She taught English and French to all ages, and math, physics, and world geography to the older kids.

  Melanie and Crista were like long-lost twins who never spoke. They became inseparable and extremely adept at performing feats of ‘magic’ using their sets of small crystal balls. I actually saw one that involved placing the nine balls, the largest in the center, in the tic-tac-toe layout. They hummed their tunes and worked their hovering hands in circular motions until the crystal balls began to vibrate, then one by one they rose from the floor. As they took on a glow, they formed a circle of about a foot diameter and slowly circled the larger center crystal. The glowing balls faded in and out of existence for two or three minutes until the girls allowed them to slowly come to a stop and let gravity have its way. They seemed to smile at each other.

  Sometimes, late at night, Melanie and Crista sit cross-legged on their beds playing with their crystal marbles. They say you could see the glow coming from under the door.

  Three times after these episodes men would come from the mountains to talk to Mother Superior. Without giving away too much, the area’s ancient myths testified to a place of oracles. It was high in the mountains, not terribly far from the orphanage. When the indigenous people were conquered, the shrine built to the oracle was destroyed.

  I occasionally take weekend trips and camp in a valley below the oracle’s ruins. I bring no electronics. It is a quiet, unplugged sort of place. I learned to meditate there, which has helped me enormously to work through all the choices I made that cost the loss of so many years of my life and my family. Two or three times, while asleep in my tent by the oracle, dreams came to me. In them someone spoke to me, maybe the oracle: I can believe almost anything at this point. The voice told me things about myself, things hidden so deeply the only sign of their existence was a swath of self-destruction. These dreams introduced me to my real self and somehow, just knowing the truth allowed me to bring it to the front of my thoughts and address it. I feel much better now.

  I stopped going on the oracle overnighters. It felt like too much, too soon. My emotions were vibrating like high-tension wires. It took some time and help from Sister Fran to deal with the dark things rising in my soul. The next and last time I went to the oracle was on a field trip with Melanie, Crista, and Fran.

  Sister Fran had come down from the orphanage to take care of weekly business in the village. As was our custom, we were breakfasting on the patio of a small café.

  “Melanie made me aware she wants the two of us to take her and Crista to the oracle this Thursday,” Sister Fran said as she picked up her tea and blew across its surface.

  Sister Fran was always cautious to phrase her conversations with Melanie and Crista so that she did not give the impression either of the girls had actually spoken words.

  I understood that Melanie never actually spoke, and knew that if she ever did, Sister Fran would make such a case of it that there would be no doubt about the mode of communication.

  “Did she say why?” I asked, taking a slow sip of the rich, powerful coffee. So special was the coffee here that I quickly gave up first cream and then sugar.

  “I didn’t ask,” Sister Fran said. “Melanie hardly asks for anything anymore now that she and Crista have each other, so when she requested this outing I knew it is important to her.”

  Sister Fran picked up her pastry and, just before taking a small bite, said, “We have to go Thursday morning. We can come back Friday morning.”

  On my previous journeys to the ancient sacred place, I had the luxury of time, and since I do not have a vehicle at my disposal, I alternately rode and walked two burros up the mountain tracks.

  “Have you borrowed the truck?” I asked, knowing the orphanage’s fifteen-year-old Ford F-150 was the only way for us to go there and back so quickly.

  “Yes.” Sister Fran took a draught of tea, looking around the small village square with a cautious eye for people who do not seem to belong. “I’ll pick you up at 10:00 AM,” she said, then quickly added, “If you are in, that is.”

  The paranoid residue of the ordeal that brought us to this place was receding, but it was not gone. It may never leave us completely. I found myself glancing around corners, covertly studying people passing through the village.

  I climbed into the truck’s passenger seat Thursday morning. The girls didn’t mind being crowded together on the truck’s single seat. Once we cleared the village, Sister Fran drove like a NASCAR dirt-track racer.

  We arrived in the early afternoon. Fran spread a heavy blanket on the ground for the girls to sit on while I unloaded the truck. I erected two tents, then poured a glass of water from the ceramic pot lashed in the pickup’s bed.

  Fran made two fires: one for cooking dinner, and a larger one for warmth against the night chill.

  It had been a clear day, but by the time the light faded enough to reveal the amazing spectacle of the stars, dark, bruised clouds hung about the mountaintop and descended toward us as the temperature dropped.

  Fran and I cut and hauled some large logs to the big fire, as the clouds would bring cold mist and the flames needed to be robust to generate enough heat to keep the mist off the wood.

  Dinner was sandwiches made with local sausages and bread.

  After dinner we lit the lanterns in the tents and waited for Melanie to let us know when it was time to move to the oracle. The girls sorted and re-sorted their crystal spheres. Sister Fran read a thin book, which was treatise on St. Thomas Aquinas’s writings about angels. I sat on the tent floor looking outside at the fire’s flames flickering in the thickening mist.

  About 10:00 PM, Melanie and Crista stood and put on their plastic ponchos and stood just outside the tent waiting for us.

  We formed a single-file line of hooded figures, barely visible in the lanterns’ light. As we moved up, the temperature dropped, and the mist might as well have been rain. I led the way with one lantern and Sister Fran brought up the rear of our tightly spaced group holding her lantern high enough keep her eyes on the girls as much as the ground.

  What should have been a fairly easy fifteen-minute ascent to the spot that marked the oracle tu
rned into a half hour of making sure each step was secured against the slippery rocks and wet mud. At one point I thought we had missed it then, for the first time, I felt Melanie in my head. “A little farther.” As Sister Fran had said, it was more a feeling than a voice.

  We reached the small plateau on the mountain’s side that holds the oracle. The cloud and accompanying mist made it impossible to see, but I felt its presence.

  About thirty feet before reaching the cliff facing containing the oracle, Melanie and Crista stopped. They held hands, then looked at us.

  “Stay here,” Melanie’s creepy communication instructed. This was my first experience with Melanie talking to me. Quite frankly, I didn’t like it. It felt alien.

  Sister Fran said, “No, honey, we need to come with you.”

  “Stay here,” came again, stronger this time. I don’t know if I could have followed if I tried, but I let the two girls slowly fade into the grayness.

  Fran stepped up to be by my side.

  “You okay?” I asked, using my hand to wipe the water off my face.

  “Did you feel that?” Fran asked. I found myself speaking very loudly. A deep tone had built its volume so slowly I just now noticed it had dampened all other sounds.

  “That!” Fran shouted and braced herself against an unfelt wind.

  Then some miniscule force sliced through my body at the speed of light. It was not there, then, a fraction of a second later, it moved through me and was gone almost too quickly to notice.

  Through the rain, where I supposed the girls stood at the oracle, a soft, blue light pulsed, barely visible in the mist and fog. At first the pulses were slow, one every two or three seconds, and the brightness of the electric-blue light waxed and waned. Each pulse was faster and brighter than the one before it. At some point, when the bluish light created a strobe effect, I could see the girls holding hands before the oracle, their free hands’ palms flat against the slick, wet surface. I tried to move, but all I could do was watch and wonder if the light came from the oracle or the girls. It was not possible to tell.