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?”
“One simple reason: that little cube you unearthed was, it seems, the probe’s central processor and ship’s log—in effect, its artificial intelligence module. All Atropos had for seventy-five years was the ship, dumbly defending itself. You found the brain.”
“But how did it become separated from the ship?” Skip asked.
“It seems the probe was severely damaged roughly ten million years ago, shortly after it was launched. When it crashed here, that cube either separated from the main craft and hid for evasive reasons, or perhaps it was ejected by the crash and became buried nearby. Atropos, as I alluded to, never went back to the site after its initial excavation: there was too much public curiosity by then. Their hope was that time would do their work for them, concealing any remaining traces of the crash…and for a great many decades, it did. But that’s one reason your own dig caused them such anxiety—they couldn’t be sure nothing remained behind from the 1947 extraction that might be found more easily today.” The general paused. “In any case, you can see the scar on the ship from that earlier damage: the oval wound in its side. Now that the cube has been reunited with the probe, however, the ship has become docile. It’s no longer dangerous, in protective mode.”