2006

The wind is sweeter on the steppe.

It is one of the reasons Craig Norton has come to appreciate his assignment in Mongolia. Some of his fellow CIA officers pitch a fit if they draw a posting here, complaining that the country is dirty and primitive and chaotic. Craig prefers to think of it as unspoiled—for now. Since the boom in industrialization, smoke from thousands of additional coal stoves dirties its pure, sweet air and clouds its endless clear skies. Soon, it will be as polluted as San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, or Beijing. But for now, the skies are clear.

That night—the one Craig will never forget—is that fairy-tale shade of cerulean kissed by the last pinks and golds of sunset. Not a cloud to mar the glorious spectrum of hues. And broad: the Mongolian steppes have the biggest skies on earth. Beneath lies an undulating field of gold, grasses bobbing and bowing on the wind. There isn’t even a trail zigzagging through the grass to mar the scene. That is what Craig likes most about this posting: you can pretend there isn’t another soul around for miles.

Other than the pristine landscape, however, Mongolia has been a bust. Craig only agreed to the posting because it meant he could continue to meet his Russian asset, who had been abruptly assigned to the consulate in Ulaanbaatar. His supervisor wanted to hand the asset off to an officer in Ulaanbaatar, but Craig insisted he stay with him. No one else had faith in this asset, it seemed. Only Craig saw his potential.

But Craig’s superiors had started to doubt his judgment.

The new assignment meant moving into the territory of China Division, however, which made Craig nervous. He has worked his whole CIA career in Russia Division. Now he is an outsider, and the old mandarins in China Division are protective. Territorial, some might say. They are rumored to make life for outsiders near impossible, which he has experienced for himself now in countless petty little ways.

Too, his wife, Lisa, hates it. The Seven Years in Tibet charm wore off after a few months of intermittent electricity ruining pricey electronics and picking up that night’s lamb chops from the butcher’s outdoor stall. She’s threatened to move back to the States, which would leave Craig on his own for the first time since college.

He leans against his car and draws on his cigarette. He knows he shouldn’t smoke, but he’s cocky—too cocky, if you listen to his wife or just about every Chief of Station he’s ever worked for. He needs the outlet for his nerves. There’s plenty of time for his lungs to heal.

There are some mistakes you can’t recover from, but this isn’t one of them.

He smokes and scans the horizon for a sign of his asset. He can’t decide if it’s stupid or a sign of genius to meet in such a wide-open space. He’s used to operating in cities, but there are no skyscrapers in Mongolia. Here, there isn’t so much as a tree or hut to use for cover. On one hand, the visibility is great: you certainly can see anyone coming from miles away. Conversely, you’ll be easy to spot if you’re being followed, but it’s a risk he has to take.

He is admiring the sky when he spots a funny light on the horizon. It stands out against the cloudless night: it is impossible to miss. He drops the cigarette butt and crushes it underfoot, then directs his full attention to this new phenomenon.

His first thought is that it’s a plane of some kind, maybe a helicopter, though he’s never seen a helicopter over this lonesome stretch of steppe. There is no whir of rotary blades, which would be deafening in all this stillness. Oddly, there is no noise at all.

He watches spellbound as the light starts moving. Up. Down. Sideways, then back again. He’s never seen anything move like that. It jiggles, then holds firm. Dances about, then freezes. Speeds off so fast that it seems to disappear, only to reappear at another point on the horizon. As Craig watches, a growing sense of dread and fear creeps over him. He has no idea what he is looking at. It’s like nothing he’s even imagined, let alone witnessed.

The fear is so intense that he forgets all about the asset.

Then, after about twenty minutes, the object disappears. It glows brighter for an instant and then blips out, blending in with the darkening background so seamlessly that Craig can almost believe that it never existed.

Except that he knows that it did.

Now

Langley, Virginia

An instant message pops up on Craig Norton’s screen. I want to see you in my office.

The text is from his boss, who sits not twenty feet away. The man—Williams or Smith or Jones, for all Craig can remember; the bosses come and go so quickly here—could’ve stuck his head out the door to make the request, and the fact that he didn’t is telling. Craig’s last fifteen years at CIA have been bad. Lately, he thinks he achieved actual leper status sometime over the past month. That’s how long it’s been since his boss (Smith? Jones?) has spoken to him. There hasn’t been so much as a good morning or have a good evening when they pass each other in the hall. Sometimes there’s a grunt, if he’s lucky.

Craig closes the door behind him. He has a feeling this meeting is going to require privacy, or at least discretion. “You wanted to see me?”

The man frowns—his default expression as best Craig can tell, no cause for worry in itself—and pushes back from the desk, resting his hands on his round belly. “Did you see that 60 Minutes segment last month?”

Craig has never engaged in small talk before with this man. He hasn’t been Craig’s boss very long, but it doesn’t matter; Craig didn’t engage in small talk with the manager before him either. Bosses stopped taking an interest in Craig Norton years ago. It is unimaginable that he is being called in, now, to talk about his Sunday-evening television-viewing habits. This could be reason for alarm.

He knows the segment the man is referring to. It was the buzz of the office for days afterward. Everyone, it seems, had watched it: The US Navy finally confessed that they had pilots who claimed to have encountered unexplained aerial phenomena in the course of operations. They’d finally broken the silence, shown footage. Confessed that they’d been sitting on credible evidence for years.

UFOs. Craig’s stomach goes sour at the thought of it.

He isn’t sure what to do. If he admits that he’s seen the segment, he may be opening himself up to ridicule. Well, of course you would, his boss might say, laughing. Maybe that’s why he’s called Craig into the office, to give Craig a hard time in private and not leave himself open to harassment charges.

In six months, Craig will be able to retire. When that day comes, he can tell everyone to take their jokes, their sniggering, their innuendo and outright slander, and shove it.

Until then, however, he needs to keep it together. For the sake of his pension if not his sanity. It’s only six more months. Think of what you’ve been through already.

Show this man that, as far as Craig is concerned, it’s water under the bridge, something from his past. He’s forgotten it, so why can’t they?

“I don’t watch 60 Minutes. Not since Andy Rooney retired.” A safe thing to say.

His boss shrugs. “Well, you want to watch this one. It was really something. They showed this footage . . . It’s mind blowing, to think they’ve been sitting on the evidence for years. Denying it all this time.” He shrugs again. “Anyway, because everyone’s making such a fuss over it, the seventh floor has decided to set up its own commission. To get the ball rolling before Congress tells us to do it anyway.”

The knot in Craig’s stomach shifts higher. He can’t believe what he’s hearing. “The Agency’s setting up its own UFO commission?”

“Yeah. They want a review of any information we might have on alien sightings and stuff like that. Now that the navy’s story is out, it’s only a matter of time before everybody else is gonna have to follow.”

Why are you telling me this? Craig wants to shout at this roly-poly, smug Buddha of a man, but he doesn’t. Won’t give him the satisfaction.

His boss hasn’t looked at him this entire time. He’s had his gaze trained on the desktop, as though the pens and stray paper clips and mangled, spent staples are suddenly fascinating. He lets out a sigh. “So anyway, I called you in because the seventh floor is asking for people to sit on the task force, and I gave them your name.”

Craig knew he was going to say this, that the whole thing was destined, and still it makes his heart stop.

The universe has it out for him.

Someone wants to get to him. It’s the only explanation he can think of. Because this task force is obviously a check-the-box exercise that no one takes seriously. And they’re wagering that if they make him be part of it, he’ll be so angry and disgusted that he’ll quit, even though he’s just a few months shy of retirement. They want to drive him out, like it would be an abuse of federal funds if Craig Norton drew a pension and was able to enjoy his old age.

He opens his mouth to speak, but his boss preempts him. “Don’t bother arguing with me, Craig. This is nonnegotiable. You’re sitting on the task force, and that’s that.”

“Why? Why does it have to be me?”

You’re the one who saw a UFO, aren’t you. That’s what he’s undoubtedly thinking. You’re the one who was stupid enough to put it in writing.

They are never, ever going to let him live that down. Never going to let him forget it or get past it.

“I can’t spare anyone else. Everybody else is busy.” The implication being that Craig is not. And that’s true. His boss has seen to that, as has every one of Craig’s bosses for the past decade, as he slid further and further into irrelevance.

His boss cocks his head at him. “I heard you weren’t a half-bad case officer, back in the day. Well, here’s your chance to go out with a bang. The assignment is full time. You start tomorrow morning.”

The next day, Craig goes in search of the room number he was given—a black vault room, meaning it’s hush hush—bringing only his morning coffee and a ballpoint pen with him. The number is unfamiliar and turns out to be in the basement, a bad sign. There are few offices in the basement. It’s mostly given over to mechanical and storage rooms. It’s a dank and noisy maze, the perfect place to hide the Agency’s luckless minotaurs.

The black vault turns out to be much less impressive than he imagined. It’s one large, mostly empty space. There is a conference table with mismatched chairs and a handful of desks, where an IT guy is methodically hooking up desktop computers. It’s obvious that, until recently, it’s been used for storage and has been hastily (and none too thoroughly) cleared out for its new purpose. Tumbleweeds of dust and detritus congregate in the corners.

“At least there’s a whiteboard.” An older man sits at the conference table, flipping desultorily through a little memo pad. He introduces himself by his last name, Ferber. He reminds Craig of a praying mantis, tall and painfully thin, with the buggy eyes of someone with a thyroid condition. His movements are nervous and herky jerky. He seems to need help looking after himself. His clothes (an idiosyncratic mix to say the least; who wears an ascot in this day and age?) are disheveled, as though he’d dressed on the bus. He is a research scientist sent over from the Directorate of Science and Technology, there to answer any technical questions that arise during their investigation. Craig is impressed until he sees that the man doesn’t know how to work the electric pencil sharpener.

“Are we it, then?” Craig counts the desks. There are eight, but that doesn’t mean he’ll have that many teammates. There could be fewer. Whoever set this up might’ve been making a guess or rounding up.

“Someone stopped by earlier, stuck his head in, and then left,” Ferber says. “That’s been it so far.”

Who is in charge? Not Ferber, or he would’ve said as much. The chief, whoever it is, should show up at some point and explain what’s going on, divvy up tasks, hand out the instructions, and be bossy. That’s how things normally go.

Craig picks a desk where the computer has been hooked up and logs in. He sees a new email has appeared in his inbox.

Attention task force members,

You have been selected to participate in the alien sightings task force, project name MOBIUS. You are expected to report for duty nlt noon on Tuesday, June 11.

Great. His morning has been wasted. That’s how little Craig’s boss wants to see his face: he told Craig the wrong time to show up.

The task force has been set up in anticipation of a Congressional directive. MOBIUS will respond to tasking as stated in the directive, but the Director has indicated that he would like MOBIUS to make a thorough examination of all records in the Agency’s possession that could be considered germane to the topic.

While we do not know the extent of materials in our holdings—the Agency has not done a study of this nature in the past and any relevant reporting would be part of general records—we have asked your offices to commit you for a year to this endeavor.

I’m sure you’re as excited as I am to be part of this momentous undertaking. My office is located on the third floor of the Old Headquarters Building, but I will be checking in with you and you should feel that my door and my chat tool are always open to you, should you need me. I look forward to working with you on this groundbreaking assignment.

Frank Millbotham, Director, MOBIUS task force

3N46 OHB

Frank Millbotham is likely a jackass who pissed off someone important and was rewarded with this assignment. Craig eyeballs the room number; unless he is mistaken, it is located smack dab in the middle of Africa Division. Obviously, their leader has no intention of vacating his hard-won office in the thick of things to endure exile in the hinterlands of the basement.

The puzzle pieces are starting to fall into place, and the picture being created is none too promising.

Then

As soon as Craig arrives at the station in Ulaanbaatar the morning after the sighting, he goes to his computer and begins pounding out a cable documenting everything: the unsuccessful rendezvous with his asset, leading to the strange light in the sky with the even-stranger movements. He includes every detail he can think of: the precise time (luckily, he’d checked his watch) and duration, the latitude and longitude as best he can determine, an estimate of how far out it was from where he stood (a wild-ass guess if ever there was one), even the temperature.

However, the longer he types and the more he thinks about it, the less certain he feels.

It sounds crazy, even to him.

But . . . isn’t this what they are supposed to do on field assignments? Report anomalies? And even though this has all the earmarks of a UFO, there is a chance that it could be something else entirely. Something nefarious, a sign of a foreign presence with evil intentions.

Whatever that thing in the sky was, it exhibited capabilities like nothing Craig has ever seen. It was awe inspiring. Chilling.

And under certain circumstances—frightening.

Craig presses Send.

Twenty minutes later, Sara, the station’s reports officer, comes over to his desk, printout in hand. It is Sara’s job to review all the cables before they are released. Knowing that he has Sara as his fail-safe is the only reason Craig was able to push the Send button with impunity.

She spins a chair around to face him and plunks herself down. She is midcareer, solid and no nonsense, and the case officers have come to depend on her good judgment. She looks at him with an unreadable expression, as though seeing him now for the first time.

“Are you sure you want to send this?” She rattles the pages for emphasis.

Craig’s instinct is to dig in his heels. “I know what I saw out there.”

“Do you? Because it doesn’t sound that way to me.” At least she doesn’t ask if he’d had a few drinks before he headed out, as some case officers are known to do. Hitting the bottle hard is common at hardship postings like Ulaanbaatar. None of the other officers brought their wives with them. Craig knows his won’t be around much longer.

“I don’t know what it was exactly, obviously. But I saw something.”

Sara shakes her head with a conviction that he finds unsettling. “Danvers’s not going to like it. He may not let it fly.”

Danvers is the Chief of Station. He is one of the old mandarins Craig has come to hate. He has a reputation to protect and will not want to send out a cable that could leave him open to skepticism or ridicule.

But Craig decides to fight for his convictions. “We’re supposed to report what we see, aren’t we? Well, this is what I saw. You’re right—we don’t know what it is, but isn’t that even more reason to write it up? What if this is some new weapon the Chinese are working on, and they’re testing it out here in the middle of nowhere exactly because chances are slim anyone will find out about it?”

Sara is not impressed. “Is there a Chinese air base nearby?” At the mention of the air base, a young man at a nearby desk raises his head. It’s Josh Rasmussen, the defense-industries lead. Craig ignores him. He doesn’t want interference, not now.

“I don’t know. But maybe this is the first indication of a secret base. Didn’t we just see a report about the Strategic Rocket Forces developing something new?”

“Sure, but . . .” She pauses. Maybe it isn’t worth the argument, especially since Danvers is sure to stop the cable from going out. Sure, the chief will get mad at her for not pulling the plug on this piece of nonsense, but she can always direct the blame back at Craig. He insisted, overrode her concerns. A midcareer case officer outranks a midcareer reports officer every time, and besides, everyone knows his reputation. Craig Norton always knows best—or at least thinks he does.

Except that Danvers is busy elsewhere when the report gets to his desk, his attention needed to handle a kerfuffle with the liaison service. One of the CIA officers made the wrong threat in the wrong teahouse to the wrong liaison officer, and it is all going to take more than glib patter and insincere apologies to smooth over. Danvers tells his deputy to take care of routine matters like cleaning out the queue of reports. The souse doesn’t bother to read them, figuring everyone knows not to put anything stupid in writing and, in any case, levelheaded Sara is their fail-safe. He hasn’t the faintest glimmer what’s in Craig’s report when he hits Global Send and then heads out to find happy hour somewhere.

Now

Next week, Craig telephones his son, Charlie, per his usual routine. Every month on the first, he pays his bills online and then calls his son, getting all his penance out of the way at once. Craig has not been much of a fixture in Charlie’s life. He was parked with his grandparents for Craig’s more exotic overseas assignments, Lisa fearing for her son’s health and safety. During the first couple of years after the divorce, when Charlie was living with Lisa in San Diego, Charlie would call him, and Craig looked forward to hearing his voice on the other end of the line. That stopped once his son went to college, however. It was then Craig realized that if he wanted to have a relationship with his son, one that went beyond sending checks for birthdays and Christmas, he’d have to be the one to pick up the phone.

“How’s it going?” Craig says as soon as Charlie answers. He tries to keep the edge of desperation from his voice.

“Same old, same old.” Is he imagining things, or does Charlie sound bored already, wishing this were over before it had begun?

Charlie manages IT for an insurance company. He married right out of college and had his first child not long after their one-year anniversary, apparently not daunted by his parents’ bad example. Little Tyler is in preschool now, and Lisa grouses about how lucky Craig is to be within driving distance of New Paltz. He can go anytime he wants.

In reality, he’s done this exactly zero times. He’s waiting to be invited.

“What have you been up to?” Charlie asks. “I suppose if you told me, you’d have to shoot me.” It’s a tired joke that neither of them enjoys. Charlie repeats it every time they speak.

The call tonight is Craig’s opportunity. He should be able to talk about MOBIUS. Surely, the fact that CIA has set up a task force isn’t classified—the newspapers have reported on the recent congressional directive. It must be public knowledge, even in upstate New York.

Even though Craig wants to tell his son, even as the words press at his lips . . . he can’t. The weight of years of silence is too heavy to overcome, at least in one go. He remembers all those nights he’d come home to have an innocent Charlie ask him about his day, and he’d deflect his questions. He told himself that kids didn’t really want to know what their parents did at work, and eventually Charlie’s complete lack of interest seemed to bear that out.

“Same here—same old, same old,” Craig says and even manages a chuckle as he delivers the words that feel as damning and final as a death knell. They speak for a total of ten minutes about the latest funny thing Tyler did in preschool and how Jessica wants them to go vegan, and Craig feels relief but also shame as he listens, worried that he is frittering away his relationship with his only child. Trading banalities because, long ago, he lost the ability to let the boy know how he feels.

Then

Once Craig’s cable goes out, the situation in Ulaanbaatar goes south almost immediately.

It starts with a trip to the woodshed. Craig hasn’t gotten along with Danvers, the Chief of Station, not from the first day. It’s a familiar story: Danvers is a product of China Division, doesn’t know the officers from other divisions, and so doesn’t trust them. He especially doesn’t trust anyone from Russia Division, Craig’s home base. It’s typical second-child syndrome: China Division doesn’t like seeing the attention go to more flamboyant, demanding Russia Division. China Division never accepted its number-two position. It is forever crying about the more sinister and imminent threat from the Chinese Menace. As far as its minions are concerned, the officers from Russia Division are hot dogs, not to be trusted and to be actively stymied wherever possible for the good of the nation.

Danvers barely waits until the door is closed before pouncing on Craig. “Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

Craig isn’t sure what he’s being chastised for. As far as he knows, his cable is languishing on Sara’s desk. “What are you talking about?”

“That asinine cable you sent back to headquarters, claiming you saw a UFO! China Division is crawling all over my ass, asking what we’re smoking out here.” With hashish available on every street corner (or so it seems), Ulaanbaatar would be the ideal place for a toke—if not for the fact that CIA officers are subjected to drug tests. Only a fool would risk it.

“Did you stop to think, before you sent out that cable, that you should talk to someone in the station?” Danvers demands.

“I ran it by Sara,” Craig says.

“No kidding, dipshit. I meant, did you talk to Josh?” Josh is their point person on defense industries. He follows the Chinese military, nominally.

But Craig pointedly decided not to approach Josh. He belongs to China Division, the enemy. Why on earth would he do that?

Ah well. Maybe he shouldn’t have ignored Josh the other day. Or maybe he acted subconsciously: he feels squeamish about sharing his recent strange experience with someone face to face. The thought makes him nervous in a way that banging out a report and releasing it into the ether does not.

He starts to grasp his error. “You don’t understand. You didn’t see it. Whatever it was, that thing was eerie. It was definitely not something I’d ever seen before. I had to report it.”

“Had to? Why—did it seem dangerous to you? Did it have clearly hostile intentions? Are you sure it couldn’t have been—oh, I don’t know—completely harmless? Some kid’s radio-controlled toy? Fireworks? A crop duster?”

A radio-controlled toy? Didn’t Danvers read the description in the cable? Radio-controlled toys don’t move like that. “I can’t believe you’re doubting my judgment.”

Danvers falls back in his chair and lets loose a nasty chortle. “Why shouldn’t I? You’ve been here a year, and you haven’t exactly given me reason to have faith in you. How many cables have you sent out? A dozen? And I can count on one hand the number of times you’ve come into my office to talk about your cases.”

Craig fumes. First, they’ve been working together nearly two years. But Craig has only one asset on his roster, the Russian he was supposed to meet on the steppe. If Danvers knew the depths of Craig’s indolence, he’d have lit Craig’s ass on fire a long time ago. But since Craig works the Russia target, Craig reports to Russia Division. And since he’s only got one asset, there hasn’t been all that much to report. It’s not particularly impressive, and another reason he’s been avoiding Danvers.

Still, Craig will not be deterred. “We have a responsibility to report back on stuff we can’t explain.”

“I don’t need one of you Russia House guys telling me what is and is not our duty to report,” Danvers snaps back. “I’ve been doing this since you were in elementary school, counting out your milk money to the lunch ladies back in Bumfuck, Iowa, or wherever it was you came from.” Ann Arbor, Michigan, but maybe he never read Craig’s service record. “You Russia guys—you think you can just put any shit in a report and it’s going to fly. No rigor, no spadework, no due diligence. You’re all sizzle, no steak.”

Now they’ve gotten to the heart of the matter, why Danvers is really upset: the old resentment between the two divisions. It erupts to the surface like deadly hot lava. Too late, Craig sees that he’s really stepped into it. And that’s his problem in a nutshell: he’s an impatient know-it-all who doesn’t like to be told what to do. Like every case officer.

He especially doesn’t like to listen to people whose opinions he considers unimportant. Like Sara. And he realizes in that moment that a lot of people in his life seem to fall into this category lately. That includes his wife, Lisa.

He also realizes that his bosses have been telling him this for the past couple of years. Sometimes you have to listen. To shut up and sit down. Swallow your pride.

Maybe he’s in danger of becoming a jerk.

Or maybe—he blinks at the realization—he already is one.

He told Lisa the night of the incident what he’d seen, sharing the story over cocktails on the balcony of their apartment. She warned him not to let the cable get out. “No organization looks kindly on things that can’t be explained. It’ll just complicate their life. CIA likes that kind of thing least of all, I’d imagine—except for maybe the Defense Department.”

“But that cable—that’s why we’re here,” he says to Danvers now. If he were honest with himself, he’d admit he had written the report because he’d hoped it would be his ticket to stardom. He doesn’t want it to be a UFO: he’d rather it turns out to be a secret Chinese weapon, something nobody’s heard of, and his report triggers an investigation that will set his career back on track after the missteps of the past couple of years.

In other words, he wants to be a hero. He wants to be a big deal. He had a couple of nice successes early in his career, but the past few years, things have slowed, aided by his tendency to argue with his superiors. He isn’t considered a bright young man anymore. He’s bogged down in the great soggy middle with everybody else. He doesn’t think this is fair, not to him. He isn’t mediocre.

That light over the steppe? It is an opportunity. He can’t afford to cast aside any possible chance at redemption.

Danvers jabs a fat finger in Craig’s face. “If you think I’m going to take the heat for your crackpot cable, you’re out of your mind. I’m sending any questions from Lee to you.”

“Lee? Who’s Lee?”

Danvers makes a face like he’s bitten something sour. “Alvin Lee. Deputy Chief of Station, Beijing. He freaked out when he saw your cable. You can dig your own way out of this mess.” He clearly thinks Craig will only dig himself in deeper.

Craig thinks it over. It could be worse. Danvers could’ve insisted he get a psychiatric evaluation or started looking into his homelife to see if there are any problems.

And there are problems to be found. Lisa has been threatening to pack up and fly back to Virginia. There is nothing for Lisa in Mongolia besides Craig. The part-time job in the embassy, “spousal accommodation,” has left her depressed and frustrated. Her tolerance for Craig’s impulsiveness and stubbornness has clearly worn thin.

Craig is leaving his boss’s office when Danvers says one more thing. “And talk to Josh. I want you to get his opinion before the end of the day,” Danvers barks as he waves Craig out the door.

Now

The conversation with his son sits badly with Craig all night. It forces him to have a second whiskey, which results in a slight hangover the next morning. Running late, he must settle for one of the last spaces in the Agency’s gargantuan parking lot, which perpetually resembles a suburban mall on the day before Christmas. He makes a long slog through a gray drizzle into the building. He is standing alone at the back of the elevator, sweating under his raincoat, when who should step onto the elevator but Martin Winchester.

He and Martin go back a long way, though it would be more correct to say they worked together early in their careers but have seen little of each other since. They started in Russia Division at the same time, two boys fresh out of undergrad. But Martin, unlike Craig, never pissed off the wrong person or did boneheaded things, and he has attained the dazzlingly high position of deputy director of operations. Yet—even though he holds the number-two position in the clandestine service, a domain notorious for its snakes and backstabbers—Martin has a reputation for being a good guy. A straight shooter. Craig certainly remembers him this way. Martin has always been nice to him, even in the earliest of days, when Craig had an early bit of success in the field and Martin was just another face in the crowd. There has never been a trace of jealousy, no whiff of sour grapes between them.

Martin speaks first. “Craig Norton, isn’t it? How are you doing?” There is even a smile on his ridiculously handsome face. Craig doesn’t doubt that Martin knows all about his long fall from grace but will have the common decency not to refer to it in any way.

Craig jiggles his briefcase nervously. Should he or shouldn’t he say something about his terrible assignment? The man is only being polite and, in reality, can’t be expected to look after every single employee, but what has Craig got to lose? If nothing else, it will do him good to get it off his chest. “I’ve been assigned to Project MOBIUS,” he says. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

Martin’s eyes narrow slightly. Craig has touched on something Martin cares about. “Yes, I do. Tell me, Craig—because I trust your judgment—how is it going?”

Because I trust your judgment.

It has been so long since anyone had given a flying fuck what Craig thinks that he can’t believe what Martin has just said. Craig has trained himself to keep everything inside: it hurts less to be ignored if you pretend you are hoarding all your precious knowledge, keeping it to yourself because they don’t deserve it. Pearls for swine and all that. But here, by some stroke of good fortune, the deputy director of the entire clandestine service is asking him what he thinks, and by God, Craig isn’t going to blow this opportunity.

He tells Martin everything. It’s only been a little more than a week, but things are not looking good. Only half the desks are occupied and all by deadwood happily off-loaded by their current bosses. These people have no interest in solving the problem they’ve been given. They’re too close to retirement to risk getting sacked. They’re afraid to bring up something that will anger the wrong office director. He tells Martin that the scientist on loan from the DST is perhaps insane but certainly useless, and subsequently, they can’t get an answer to any of the scientific questions that need answering. The task force spends its days bickering and flailing in equal measure.

Craig has gone on for so long that they’re at Martin’s floor, and the two of them now stand in the hall, Craig doing the talking and Martin relegated to listening. Martin’s minions pass by, wondering who is with their boss, who has their boss’s undivided attention. Martin is undoubtedly late for his first appointment of the day, yet no one interrupts them.

Martin’s forehead is creased. He frowns heavily. “Well, that’s not what I’d hoped to hear, but I can’t say I’m surprised.” He takes a deep breath. Apparently, he’s not going to leave it there. “Okay, so tell me, Craig: What would you change to make it work?”

The question takes Craig completely by surprise. It wasn’t something he’d been thinking about, but he must’ve been mulling it over in the back of his mind, because he finds himself rattling off a bunch of suggestions. Bring in a new team, people who aren’t afraid of upsetting a few applecarts. Not more old hands: Better to go with younger people who are actually curious about the topic and not yet trained to be afraid of failure. They’re also more adept at crunching data and have been dying for an opportunity to dig through the stockpiles of information hidden in agency repositories.

And they need a real liaison to the DST, someone the directorate respects and will listen to, who will get them the answers they need.

Nor would it hurt to get them a new team lead. He hasn’t seen Frank Millbotham since the project started. There hasn’t even been a second email. Craig isn’t entirely sure Frank Millbotham is a real person, that he isn’t an all-purpose persona trotted out by management as a bulwark to protect them from the peons.

At the latter, Martin grunts. “Millbotham is real, all right. I don’t know if I can unseat him—you know how these appointments go; some people don’t like to be taken off prematurely, makes it look like they screwed up—but I’ll see what I can do about the rest.”

Martin Winchester, high muckety-muck of the Clandestine Service, looks at Craig in a way Craig hasn’t seen in a while. As though Martin remembers Craig in the Time before Everything Started to Fall Apart, when he was known for more than just being stubborn. “Thank you, Craig. This has been very helpful.”

Then

Craig sits sheepishly beside Josh Rasmussen. Josh is at the wheel of the Gonow Kairui SUV, one of the station’s small fleet of Chinese-manufactured automobiles. The thinking is that a Chinese model will help them blend into the local traffic better than a Ford or Chevy, but Craig can’t help feeling it has the opposite effect, being so new and shiny. Heads turn everywhere they go. There are very few brand-new automobiles on the streets of Ulaanbaatar.

Josh hasn’t spoken since they left the station. Craig has no idea where Josh is taking him. He doesn’t blame Josh for being wary; they’ve only spoken a handful of times since Josh joined the station six months earlier. The young man comes from China Division, no doubt getting worked over on a daily basis by the old mandarins back at Langley. It’s like the worst kind of fraternity hazing. If it doesn’t kill you, it turns you into a younger version of them: fearful and defensive, ready to attack anyone who dares encroach on your turf.

“Danvers said I should talk to you,” Craig says, emphasizing the word talk. No one mentioned that a road trip would be part of the plan. He told Josh what happened that night on the steppe as they walked to the garage. It pains Craig, but he’s come to realize that he’s going to have to tell his story to strangers. Not just this once but many times. He kicks himself for not thinking earlier—before he’d committed it to a cable—how silly the story sounds, and that it sounds sillier every time he repeats it, until the telling of it will drive him crazy.

But darn it, he’s right, too: this is what they are supposed to do. What good is it to only tell headquarters what it wants to hear? If you leave out the messy stuff? Sure, you don’t know the implications when you stumble across something new and unexpected, but your job as a case officer is to report it and let others sort it out. He has done nothing wrong, and he resents being punished for doing his job.

They are outside Ulaanbaatar, heading onto the plains, and Josh still hasn’t said anything. He has a good poker face (something you develop at Langley; it’s never a good idea to let people know what you really think), but Craig can tell he’s skeptical. Behind those chunky eyeglasses, the recent Princeton engineering grad is forming his arguments.

After they’ve been driving for what seems like days, they stop at an innocuous spot. It’s some distance from where Craig was that fateful night, but he also knows distances can be deceiving on the steppe. But it is the middle of nowhere, as far as Craig can see. Josh goes to the back of the SUV, rummages through a duffel bag, then slams the rear door and starts trudging toward a stand of brush. Craig scrambles to follow him.

Past the brush is a sheer drop. It provides a commanding view of the valley below, a basin that stretches for miles. In the center of the basin is some kind of complex. A handful of large buildings, roads carved out of the featureless red plain. They are so far away that Craig can’t see features, only shapes: black boxes for buildings, cars the size of dots.

Josh lies on his stomach in the dirt and trains the binoculars on the site. That’s what he fished out of the duffel bag, Craig figures.

“Why are we here?” he asks as he drops to the dirt beside the engineer.

Josh hands the binoculars to Craig, then points to a spot in the valley. “This is a secret Chinese air base.” Damn, there really is one. Does Sara the reports officer know? Maybe this is why Danvers got upset with him?

Josh continues. “Technically, it belongs to the Mongolian armed forces. They built it with the support of the Russians, but that ended a while ago. Now they let China use it for testing, the stuff the Chinese don’t want anybody to know about.”

Craig lifts the binoculars to his eyes. A huge aircraft is being wheeled out. “We think that might be a prototype of a new, fifth-generation fighter the Chinese are developing. We call it the J-XX. It’s like a stealth fighter, supposed to be super maneuverable, short takeoff capability.”

Does that sound familiar? Craig knows what Josh is implying: this might be what he saw in the night sky. He watches as the aircraft is wheeled out to the empty plain. There is no runway to speak of. The jets fire up, the high whine rolling across the empty canyon floor. Craig has to abandon the binoculars once the plane takes off: it is airborne in no time. It is nothing at all like a commercial airliner, the way they lumber down the runway to eventually find lift like fat Christmas geese. No, this is breathtaking. It is like a dart or missile; no, even those comparisons are feeble. It banks over the complex below, making impossibly tight, steep turns. It slices through the air and is out of sight in no time.

Josh rolls onto his side to watch it climb. “It appears to have a top speed of about two point five Mach . . . can climb sixty thousand feet per minute, according to intel.” He looks squarely at Craig. “Compare that to a Lockheed Martin fighter in development, the X-35. It can do one point five Mach, maybe.”

Craig lifts the binoculars, searching for the aircraft. It is long gone.

He lets out his breath. He’s never seen an aircraft so fast, so nimble.

But as unbelievable as this was . . . there is no comparison.

He hands the binoculars back to Josh. “I get what you’re saying, but . . . this isn’t what I saw. I swear.”

“What you’ve just seen is state-of-the-art, cutting-edge technology, Chinese or otherwise. This is the best we, as a species, can do.” Josh stands up, dusting off his clothes. “What you describe in your cable? It’s technically impossible.”

Craig follows him back to the car. He resists the urge to raise his voice. “Yeah, Josh, but that’s the thing—what if it’s not? What if it actually exists? I know what I saw—”

Josh stops short of the car, spinning around to face Craig. “So what do you think it was? Aliens?”

Craig bites his tongue. Would that be so bad?

Josh pokes a finger into Craig’s chest. “You have no technical training, Craig. There are a lot of things that could’ve caused what you think you saw. It could’ve been, oh, I don’t know . . . refracted light. An astral phenomenon. Some projection playing tricks on your eyes.”

Refracted light? Where would a projection even come from—the steppe stretches for hundreds of miles in every direction. Craig saw no one that night, not even a bump on the horizon that could’ve possibly played into Josh Rasmussen’s alternative explanation. He resents what Josh is insinuating: that he is too stupid, too uneducated, to know what he’s talking about. This entire conversation is ridiculous, and there is only one explanation for it; Danvers primed Josh to smack him down. This is all a sham devised to keep him in his place. To keep them free to do their important work without Craig Norton bothering them with his ridiculous theories.

“You say there’s no way what I saw could exist. You’re going to deny the possibility that the Chinese, or somebody else, could’ve developed a technology that we haven’t yet imagined and are testing it on the steppe,” Craig says, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. You’re that arrogant.

Craig’s disdain bounces off the young officer like acorns off a metal roof. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s impossible for an object to move at those speeds and in the manner you described. It would violate the rules of physics. It’s flat-out impossible.” He flings open the driver’s side door. “Your cable is causing a lot of embarrassment back at headquarters. It makes us look like we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Maybe we don’t. But of course, Craig doesn’t say this out loud.

“It really stirred the hornets’ nest. Mr. Lee is furious.”

That name again. Alvin Lee.

Craig gets into the passenger seat, fuming. There was never the possibility of enlightenment in talking to Josh Rasmussen, of getting closer to the truth. Danvers sent Craig over so Josh could crush his spirit. He wouldn’t be surprised if Danvers emailed Josh his marching orders as soon as he’d finished talking to Craig. Shut this nutcase down.

As Craig sits through the drive back to Ulaanbaatar, something starts to crystallize inside him. A realization that things are predetermined, that the people in charge know what they want and what they will allow, and nothing he says or does will change that. He is powerless to change their minds.

It’s the first day of Craig Norton’s hardening. The day that something inside Craig Norton starts to die.

Now

Craig arrives at his desk in the vault with a mocha latte and sausage biscuit. He may have gotten stuff off his chest talking to Martin Winchester, but he knows that is as far as it will go. As soon as Martin gets to his desk, he will be inundated with a thousand more important things, and their little talk will be wiped from his memory. It is a feel-good moment but nothing more. As Craig has learned from the past fifteen years, if you expect nothing, then you won’t be disappointed.

So he is surprised an hour later when Ferber stands abruptly and starts cleaning out his desk—which is so cluttered that it looks like he’s been there a year, even though they moved into the office less than two weeks ago. Behind him, the other two officers stir, shutting down their computers.

“What are you doing?” Craig asks Ferber, afraid to get his hopes up.

“Looks like I’ve been reassigned—again,” Ferber says with forced cheerfulness. “DST wants me to come back to work on a project. Says they can’t do it without me. What can you do?” He shrugs, but he is clearly delighted to feel important again. “They’re going to send someone else to take my place here.” Somehow, Craig manages to keep from clapping.

Ferber’s replacement arrives that afternoon, a youngish man in a hoodie and glasses. He casts a dubious look around the crappy surroundings—who can blame him—then goes up to Craig with an outstretched hand. “I’m Nicholas Washington. Ferber’s replacement.” It turns out that Nicholas is an actual astrophysicist, hired straight out of his doctoral program at University of California, San Diego. San Diego. The back of Craig’s neck prickles at the confluence with his life. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. “Why did I take the job? Well . . . anyone from my class could work for NASA, but how many astrophysicists ever get to work at CIA?” he says through a big grin. “And getting to see all the spooky space stuff the Agency knows about? How cool is that?”

The rest of the new team trickles in throughout the afternoon: Amy and Audrey, two analysts who have spent the last couple of years tracking nuclear materials through world arms markets. Tanika, a liaison from FBI, her Rolodex full of contacts. Steven, a military analyst who specializes in prototype aircraft, cutting-edge stuff. He comes down lugging forty pounds of reference books.

By quitting time, they have brainstormed on a course of action and assigned roles. Craig remains quiet, dazed by the quick turnaround but also feeling a little conspicuous. He’s old enough to be their father. Still, it was his idea to bring in younger people, wasn’t it? No one his age would’ve taken the assignment seriously.

Then it happens, the thing he has been dreading. Everyone is calling it a day when Amy asks Craig how he ended up getting assigned to MOBIUS. With his jack-of-all-trades background, he doesn’t quite fit the model.

He might as well tell them. It is bound to come out and better they hear it from him. He doesn’t want them to think he was trying to hide it. “I’m the author of one of those reports you’re going to read.” He takes a deep breath. “Fifteen years ago, I saw an unexplained phenomenon over the Mongolian plains.”

He says all this as unemotionally as he can. No one at the Agency trusts emotion. Emotion would sink him, destroy all credibility. If you let yourself get emotional, then you aren’t clearheaded. You are susceptible to bias, and you can’t make sound decisions if you are biased.

And even though the top brass at CIA always say failure is an option and that you need to embrace risk, the truth is everyone at Langley really, really hates to fail.

The room is as quiet as the vacuum of space. There is complete and utter silence.

Before anyone can break that silence, Craig grabs his briefcase and bolts from the room.

The next morning, Craig goes in early, unable to sleep and anxious to see what might be in his inbox. He could be dismissed if the rest of the team complained, Millbotham deciding it is a liability to have a team member with skin in the game. It was stupid to tell them, he sees in hindsight, but damn, it felt so good to finally say it aloud in front of people, like an alcoholic at his first AA meeting. What he hadn’t reckoned on was the intense attack of paranoia afterward. The certainty that he’d made an irrevocable mistake.

His paranoia is understandable. The past fifteen years have been a career disaster. Upon returning to Langley from Ulaanbaatar, he was pushed out to a dead-end teaching position in western Virginia. The post—a guest lecturer in the school’s small security-studies program—had been held by a retired case officer who had died unexpectedly.

The message could not have been any clearer: he was being sidelined.

After that, it was one meaningless staff position after another, shuffling papers while watching his career slowly circle the drain. His homelife was no better: Lisa had made good on her threats and moved out before his assignment was over. She filed for divorce, and Craig returned to northern Virginia knowing he had to start over as a single man. Sure, Craig could’ve retired, but at this point he had nothing: no wife, no life, nor the will to start over at a defense contractor alongside hundreds of other washouts. He was convinced there was nothing else for him.

Eventually, Russia Division’s ire with him aged and oxidized and lost its raw edge. Whoever’d had it out for him personally moved on to another target. The management who’d been in place at the time left, and for new management, the question of what to do with Craig Norton was obviously not at the top of their brief. All that remained was the vague understanding that there was something off about Craig Norton. He was as good as retired and resigned to riding out his remaining time.

Today, however, roughly two weeks into his MOBIUS assignment, Craig is surprised how much the idea of leaving bothers him. If someone had suggested at the very start that he deliberately try to get kicked off the team, he’d have done it. Now, he can only think how disappointed he will be to leave.

He wants to get to his email early in case the worst has come to pass. He wants to be alone when he finds out. It would be too pathetic to have to pack his things and shuffle out under the pitying gazes of the others. He doesn’t want any insincere goodbyes or false promises to keep in touch.

When Craig arrives, however, Nicholas is already at his desk. He grins when he says good morning (does he always smile so much?) and barely stops talking long enough to let Craig check his email.

There is no terse note of dismissal.

That doesn’t mean the other shoe couldn’t still drop. Perhaps the team just needs more time to think about it.

Craig realizes Nicholas is staring at him. “You should probably know that the team came to a decision after you left last night,” he says.

And there it is: the second shoe dropped like a bowling ball. Nicholas is the last person Craig would expect to deliver the news, but maybe, deep down inside, he’s really a sadistic bastard.

Nicholas leans forward, his hands on his knees. “We thought it would be best to examine one case in depth—give it a really thorough examination and see what we could learn from it. Maybe we’d develop a methodology from it, something we could use to investigate all cases, and, well . . . we decided to start with yours.”

“Mine?” It’s Craig’s worst nightmare come true. Not to mention that he’s never, ever thought of what happened as his case. Heck, he’s spent the past fifteen years trying desperately to distance himself from it.

The scientist, oblivious to Craig’s discomfort, is lit up like a Christmas tree. “We thought, what could be better than having the person who experienced it here in the room with us? You could answer our questions. Guide our investigation. We could assess how your memory of what happened might’ve been affected over time. Plus, you can help us keep the record straight. But that’s only if you’re up for it. We all agreed: if you don’t want to do it, it won’t be a problem. We’ll respect your decision. No questions asked, it’s totally up to you. But if you’re willing”—Nicholas practically thrums with excitement—“we thought it would be a great opportunity.”

Craig feels as though he’s swallowed his tongue. Never in a million years did he imagine anyone inside the building would actually want to listen to him. He thought his experience was a painful secret he’d have to live with in guilty silence, like accidentally poisoning your neighbor’s dog. Can he actually retell his story in front of a bunch of people he works with? Can he trust that they won’t use this against him down the road or turn his daily life into a living hell?

But . . . there is no down the road. He will retire in six months. Whatever hellscape might come from this, he’ll be free to walk away from it.

Besides . . . he has a feeling that, this time, things might go differently.

It starts at 9:00 a.m. with the team gathered around him.

He takes a deep breath before recounting what happened that night on the plain. He screws his eyes shut as he searches his memory, the memories he has locked away for so long. It’s funny how it all comes back to him, down to the feel of that raw Mongolian wind brushing his cheek and riffling his hair, the ticking of his car’s engine as it cooled. They ask more questions than he’d ever thought to ask himself: What was the exact color of the light emitted by the object in the sky? Can he approximate the size? Did the shape change? The noise it made, was it constant or did it oscillate? Did his surroundings change while this happened—did the crickets stop chirping, or did the temperature drop or rise? He doesn’t have answers to many of their questions, which shows how much he doesn’t know, what he didn’t pick up on or allowed himself to forget. Under their questioning, he does remember one detail he forgot: how the light made this funny movement a couple of times, like a figure eight. He marvels at the difference of being questioned by subject matter experts. They know which details matter.

The two hours are exhilarating but also humbling. Their pens and pencils bob continuously as he speaks. They take down every word like pigeons pecking hungrily at seed.

At the end of it, Amy chews on the eraser end of her pencil. A clever woman who seems to be able to draw on every ounce of her considerable experience, she is shaping up as the de facto team lead. “I’d say we have a lot to work with. Nicholas, why don’t you look into which propulsion technologies were in use at the time and which ones were emerging? And maybe give us an overview on what was happening in the research community? Steven”—the aircraft specialist—“can you find out what was in China’s aerospace pipeline? Maybe Craig witnessed them putting a prototype through its paces? Craig, how about if you, me, and Audrey”—the younger WMD analyst—“go through cable traffic and see if China Division did anything after your report?”

The thought of having anything to do with China Division chafes. “I don’t have access to their cables. And they’re not going to give it to me either.”

Amy smiles, happy to be the one to give him the news. “What do you mean? You have access to any cable you want. We all do. No one can stop you. Deputy Director Winchester made sure of that.”

Craig pauses, reluctant to touch the keyboard. He’s hesitant to start burrowing his way down the rabbit hole of cable traffic. Who knows what secrets he might unearth? His cynical side says he is worried for nothing, that he knows what to expect in these reports: boring meetings with foreign liaisons, regurgitation of an argument with an ambassador’s staff or a Chief of Station’s unfiltered opinion of a visiting congressional delegation. There will be little that could be considered exciting or meaty. It is better for everyone’s blood pressure if clandestine operations are run like a dentist’s practice or insurance company: reliably, and with as little drama as possible. That way, it’s easier to spin up energy when it’s really needed.

The first thing Craig hunts for is his old cable. He finds it in the reports database, a long-forgotten piece of radioactive flotsam. Though he can barely force himself to read it, he does. He’s surprised to find it isn’t as crazy as he remembers. It almost reads normally, except for the use of the term UFO. He can’t help but grimace when he comes across it.

He jots down the cable number and date/time group. These two numbers will enable him to follow any threads through the cable traffic—not that he expects any follow-up. No, he expects that his cable sank out of sight shortly after he’d sent it.

But when he runs the query, he is surprised to find a half-dozen cables that cite his, stretching out over a period of months.

China Division took his cable seriously, and he never knew it.

He braces himself before starting in on these new cables. He expects the worst. Ridicule, mockery. But no. It turns out that China Division ordered the stations in Ulaanbaatar and Beijing to look into what might’ve possibly been in the sky that night. Ulaanbaatar, it seems, investigated his claim right under his nose, without telling him, with no intention of ever telling him. Maybe that was why Danvers, the Chief of Station, freaked out: headquarters sent him scurrying in a dozen different directions, and he didn’t like it.

Craig reads the cables greedily, devouring them like candy. They are, predictably, concerned about the secret Chinese testing facility, the one that Josh took him to see, but nobody mentions the possibility of a UFO. In one cable, Beijing Station helpfully notes, WE CANNOT RULE OUT THAT IT WAS A FOREIGN SERVICE (RUSSIAN?) SURVEILLING THE CHINESE AIR BASE THAT NIGHT.

From there, though, things get murky. There is no record that Russia Division was ever queried, or any of the offices working China’s other nemeses, such as India or Taiwan. Nor does anyone question whether it could’ve been a Western nation; is that because Langley assumes that if a Western ally had such power, they would know about it already?

He goes through the cables a second time, then a third. Judging from serial numbers sprinkled here and there, it looks like some are missing. There are also references to internal memos. He doesn’t want to jump to suspicion off the bat: there are reasons why the reports are missing. They could be tangential to what he saw but involve a supersecret project protected behind restricted access. He’ll ask Millbotham to assign a staff officer to dig these up. They’re supposedly authorized to see everything, right? He’ll put that to the test.

Secondly, his cable sparked a lot of activity in 2006, but there doesn’t seem to be any record of what came from all that work. And it was all kept from him, he thinks bitterly, as though he couldn’t be trusted with it. Who would’ve decided to keep Craig in the dark? He’s pretty sure the mysterious Alvin Lee has something to do with it.

Craig’s team of smart and eager young officers needs to know if anything came of the work China Division put into this fifteen years ago. They are determined to solve this thing, and they should be given every chance possible.

Craig can help, but it means choking down the shame and uncertainty that have hung for the past fifteen years around his neck like the chains of Marley’s ghost.

It means venturing into the belly of the beast. Paying a visit to his old nemesis: China Division.

He starts with a request to the group’s chief of staff. From the cables he’s read, it sounds like China Division had a number of people trying to get to the bottom of Craig’s cable. One of them might still be around, might even have kept notes. Some of those old officers can be such pack rats. It’s a shot in the dark, but it’s all he can think of. If it fails, he’ll just have to think of something else.

Request assistance tracking down individuals who worked on the China internal team during summer 2006 and would have participated in activity pertaining to ref cable . . .

He’s not sure if he’s still persona non grata with China Division, but he’s betting that’s been forgotten. It’s not like they have a wanted poster of him hanging over the coffee mess, after all. The next day, an email appears in Craig’s inbox.

Susan Wang had been on the team tasked to look into the 2006 Mongolian UAP incident. Contact Wang directly to set up meeting.

He decides not to take anyone from the team with him to meet Wang. No reason to get their hopes up. If it goes nowhere, no one else has to know. They’re too young to expect disappointment.

Craig needs to email Wang a couple of times before she agrees to meet. Didn’t the chief of staff set this up? Apparently not. He has a bad feeling about this.

The sign outside her office reads CHINA CYBER BRANCH. So she’s off the political team; well, times change. He wonders, as he follows Wang to a conference room, if she knows he’s the author of that infamous cable, that he’s the man who sent her office off on a mad scramble.

Probably nothing surprises Susan Wang these days. She looks close to retirement age. She’s undoubtedly been through a lot in her career, seen as many ups and downs as Craig. “I don’t envy you getting this assignment,” she says after Craig has introduced himself and explained about MOBIUS. “I don’t think stuff like this is taken very seriously.”

“We’re hopeful that it’ll be different this time.” It’s what Craig imagines Amy would say.

Wang closes her eyes as she thinks back. “They pulled people off every team in the division to work on the cable. From what I can remember, we assumed that it was either a new Chinese weapon or something that had been developed by one of China’s enemies to spy on them. Those were the options.”

They didn’t think for a minute that it might be a UFO.

“It was very strange, right from the start. Right after the cable came in, we saw a flurry of communications between the base and military headquarters in Beijing, not going through the usual chain of command. This was a little research station in the middle of nowhere, so this was highly unusual. The military analyst on the team said it was what you’d see if something bad happened. We assumed it was the crash of a military prototype. These military officials descended on the base. That’s when the front office got interested. They directed the stations in Ulaanbaatar and Beijing to put more assets on the case. Ordered additional satellite imagery.”

“And?”

She deflates. “Nothing. Whatever happened there must’ve been really hush hush. It took a while to get imagery. Too much cloud cover. By the time we got a satellite over the base, the Chinese had locked everything down.”

Craig deflates too. It was going so well.

Wang raises a finger. “Oh—I just remembered a strange thing that happened. There was a guy on the team watching high-level party communications. The secretary-general of the National Security Commission was rushing out to make a visit . . . That’s like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs scrambling to visit some little research base in Nebraska. The really weird thing is that there was this back-and-forth about making sure they had decontamination equipment. We couldn’t agree on the exact translation of the term they used; it was kind of obscure, and we weren’t sure what they meant. What kind of decontamination would they need at the base?”

Wang shakes her head as the memories come back. “The chief of the section was going crazy over this. He wanted to know what was going on. He decided to task one of our assets—an officer on the secretary-general’s staff—to go to the research base. To go on that trip. The asset went, but we never heard from him again. He disappeared.”

Craig does a double take. “What?”

“The asset had enough clout to get inside and see what was going on. Only he was never heard from again. Don’t get too worked up over this—I don’t know how it is with the Russian target, but in China people disappear all the time, even when you’re in the party or the military. We know that he got onto the base, but he never came out.”

The story keeps getting stranger and stranger. “And then what happened?”

She shrugs. “Beijing Station went crazy. We got an order from the deputy COS to shut everything down. Just like that.”

A familiar story. “You get spun up and spun down,” Craig says.

“Yes, but this was different,” she says, her tone testy. “The chief of the political branch, the guy who’d been so gung ho. He shut it down like—boom. One minute we’re going all out; the next we’re told to drop everything. He was afraid of Lee.”

“Alvin Lee?”

“He was DCOS Beijing at the time.”

Craig grits his teeth. All roads seem to lead to Alvin Lee.

Wang nods, thoughtful. “Yeah, it was perplexing. The front office told us to say in our report that the inquiry was inconclusive.”

Inconclusive.

Craig tries not to show his discouragement. He didn’t realize until this moment how much he’d been counting on Susan Wang. But it’s not fair to be disappointed: she’s given him a lot, threads to follow up.

Wang purses her lips in concentration. She is digging, wanting to end on an upbeat note, to give him something useful. Finally, it comes to her, and her whole face lights up. “There’s one thing you might be able to use . . . One of the officers on the team remembered seeing something in the news, right around that same time, that sounded uncannily like what happened in Mongolia. Only it had happened in the United States. We told our superiors, who promised they’d go to the FBI. But we never heard if anything came of it.”

The information Wang has given them provides numerous leads to track down. But so does the news that a similar incident happened in America, and the ball passes to Tanika, the staff officer with connections at FBI. Everyone waits breathlessly at the regularly scheduled team meeting the next morning, wondering what she will be able to tell them.

She flips her notebook open and goes to the last entry. “After what Craig provided from his meeting with Susan, I reached out to the FBI UAP task force—”

Craig interrupts. “FBI has a task force too?”

“Yeah, it’s called the X-Files,” Steven jokes.

Amy waits for laughter to stop. “After the 60 Minutes segment, every agency in the intelligence community set up their own investigation.”

Tanika nods. “Yeah, that’s what FBI told me. Anyway, I told them we were investigating one case and heard they handled something similar around the same time.” She cast a sympathetic look in Craig’s direction. “I didn’t expect them to have anything specific, to be honest. It happened a long time ago. The FBI handles a lot of cases. I didn’t think they’d have records on anything this, uh, small . . . and besides, the UAP movements that Craig described, well, I bet you hear that a lot. Without video, how are we going to make a match?

“But I got an email from one of their agents, and he said he might have something. I’ve asked him to meet with us, and I was wondering if anyone else wanted to accompany me . . . ?”

The room falls silent. Craig looks up to find that he is the center of attention. “Me?”

Tanika shrugs. “You’re our firsthand witness. You’re in the best position to respond if they have questions. I think it has to be you.”

The next day, Craig and Tanika drive together to FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s unpleasant, weaving through slow, choking traffic on Constitution Avenue and dodging tourists, a perennial DC problem. Craig wonders if the agent they are to meet will be anything like Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agent of the TV show The X-Files. He wonders if there is a real X-Files, an office of UFO investigators buried in the basement that has been in existence but never talked about. He’s merely humoring himself, of course; he knows from his own painful experience that it’s unlikely a government agency would do anything so frivolous or leave itself open to criticism—another reason the 60 Minutes segment was so unusual. Nor would any FBI agent wish to be tainted by such an assignment.

In real life, no one wants to be Fox Mulder.

They are met at the entrance by a long-faced middle-aged man who introduces himself as Dave and says he is part of the FBI task force. As he leads them through the dim, meandering halls of FBI’s headquarters, Dave fills them in on the bureau’s task force. It’s composed of four agents: two analysts and two field agents. They are strictly focused on answering the congressional directive, without the broader writ that CIA’s task force enjoys. They were given a list of questions to answer and told not to widen the scope on their own initiative.

The space Dave takes them to is no different from the one in Langley’s basement: no fancier, no better equipped, and certainly no cleaner. The message is clear: This is a temporary assignment, so don’t get comfortable. Dave takes them to a makeshift conference room carved out of a corner with freestanding partitions. The other three officers, working dutifully at their desks, are not invited to join them, even though, without walls, they will certainly overhear every word that’s spoken.

Dave fishes a report out of a messy pile of paper and slides it toward Tanika and Craig. “I think this is a match for the incident you described. Same general time frame, same description of movements,” he says with a nod to Tanika.

28 JUL 2006

ALBION, IDAHO

SPECIAL AGENTS WILLIAMS AND O’CASEY, BOISE OFFICE, RESPONDED TO A REQUEST FROM LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT TO DEBRIEF ALBION RESIDENT MARK PARKER REGARDING AN UNEXPLAINED AERIAL PHENOMENON ALLEGEDLY SEEN IN THE SKY OVER HIS RANCH FROM 9 TO 15 JULY 2006.

MARK PARKER: WHITE MALE, 64 YEARS OF AGE, DIVORCED

LIFELONG RESIDENT OF CASSIA COUNTY, IDAHO

PRIOR MISDEMEANOR ARREST RECORD FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, PUBLIC DRUNKENNESS

ON THE EVENING OF 15 JULY, THE COMPLAINANT CONTACTED SHERIFF OF CASSIA COUNTY CONCERNING WHAT HE DESCRIBED AS UNNATURAL MOVEMENTS OF LIGHT ABOVE HIS RANCH IN MAGIC VALLEY. SHERIFF OFFICE IGNORED PARKER, A KNOWN SUBSTANCE ABUSER, UNTIL IT RECEIVED SEVERAL ADDITIONAL COMPLAINTS OF A SIMILAR NATURE. AT THIS POINT, IT CONTACTED THE BOISE FBI OFFICE. SHERIFF CASSIA COUNTY MADE IT CLEAR THAT IT DID NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES TO INVESTIGATE THESE CLAIMS.

SAS WILLIAMS AND O’CASEY INTERVIEWED PARKER AT HIS HOME. HE TOOK SAS TO THE SITE WHERE HE WITNESSED THE PHENOMENON, WHICH HE CLAIMED TO SEE THREE TIMES OVER A PERIOD OF SEVEN DAYS. PARKER SAYS HE SAW A LARGE GLOWING LIGHT IN THE NIGHT SKY MOVING ERRATICALLY. THE MOVEMENTS WERE DESCRIBED AS EXTREMELY RAPID AND DISCONNECTED. PARKER SAYS IT MOVED FASTER THAN HE COULD FOLLOW. EACH TIME, THE OBJECT APPEARED FOR APPROXIMATELY THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE VANISHING. HE SAYS THE ENGINE SOUND WASN’T LOUD LIKE A CONVENTIONAL JET.

NO ACTIVITY WITNESSED BY SAS AT THE TIME OF VISIT.

Craig flips the paper over. Nothing. “That’s it?”

“No follow-up? The report says the sheriff’s office had received additional complaints about the incident,” Tanika adds.

Dave shrugs. “X-Files notwithstanding”—he grins as though he has waited years to say that—“the FBI isn’t really set up for that kind of thing. The sheriff collected a few additional statements, but he seemed to think that most of the witnesses had been drinking or weren’t sure what they’d seen. There are a couple military bases not too far from there, including the Mountain Home Air Force Base, and none of them reported any exercises those nights. No reports of anything strange either.”

Later, they are back on the sidewalk outside FBI headquarters. Craig stares forlornly at the dark, impenetrable glass in front of him but sees only a reflection of himself. He looks small, alone. “That’s that, I guess. A waste of time.”

Tanika slides on a chic pair of sunglasses. Craig sees his face reflected in the lenses, widened parabolically. Not so small. “I don’t know that I agree. You read the report: there were other sightings in the area. And now we have a name: Mark Parker. Maybe we should take a trip out there ourselves, see what we can find out.”

“Really?” He closes his eyes to conjure up the scene he’s replayed in his mind nearly every night for fifteen years: meeting someone else who’s seen what he’s seen. “You think we should do that—go all the way to Idaho?”

“Sure. Like Fox Mulder always says, the truth is out there somewhere.”

Once they’ve returned from FBI headquarters, however, Craig is confronted by a downcast team.

“What’s wrong?” Craig asks, his stomach dropping.

“They’re saying the whole Mongolia episode is a hoax,” Nicholas says. “They’re saying that the matter was put to rest back in 2006—”

“Debunked,” Audrey interrupts, angry. “They said it was debunked.”

“—and somehow we missed it.”

“They’re trying to discredit MOBIUS,” Amy says.

It feels like every molecule of air has been sucked out of the room. Like they’ve lost an overtime win or an election. Nicholas ushers Craig to his computer. It’s an email, sent to Winchester from the chief of staff in China Division, talking about an old incident, something they’re calling “the Chinese Roswell.” It says the investigation into the 2006 Mongolia incident found ties back to this hoax, and that’s why it was called off. There is a memo dating back to 2006 attached to the email.

Craig is sweating, and his stomach squeezes itself into a knot as he skims the attachment. He’s pretty sure it’s one of the documents he’s been looking for, but not the only one. What happened to the rest?

“‘Chinese Roswell’?” Steven asks, incredulous. “Craig, do you have any idea what they’re talking about?”

“None at all.” It sounds like a bad joke.

Amy paces behind him, arms crossed. “We’re going to need to find out what this is all about. That’s the first order of business.”

Craig continues reading: It was determined in 2006 that the field officer did not do his due diligence prior to issuing his cable. It was a shoddy piece of reporting and resulted in the diversions away from priority targets in China and Mongolia in order to address what amounted to a frivolous inquiry.

Blood pounds in Craig’s skull. No no no.

The officer responsible for the fiasco in 2006 was Craig Norton. China Division finds it unconscionable that this same officer has been assigned to Project MOBIUS. Until this officer is removed from MOBIUS, China Division has made the decision not to support the work of this task force.

It’s signed by the chief of China Division: Alvin Lee.

Craig falls back in the chair. A tremor passes through him, and his throat tightens. It doesn’t get any more vicious or personal than this. Lee has decided to play hardball.

He tamps down his panic and looks up at Nicholas. “Has there been any response from Winchester?”

The astrophysicist shakes his head. “If there is, it hasn’t been shared with us.”

Craig sinks into his chair. His heart pounds against his ribs as he thinks through his options. He could run to Winchester crying foul, but that would be the nuclear option. That would put Winchester’s back against the wall, force him to confront China Division. He might not want to go to war over MOBIUS.

Alvin Lee has been the director of China Division for a few years. Craig has heard it said by old, sour China hands (gossip being the currency of spy work) that all Lee ever wanted was to be chief, to rule his domain like a Tang emperor. A man is pretty bulletproof at Langley if he doesn’t want to rise any higher.

People think the directors at CIA are omnipotent or that, at least, they manage a harmonious lot of like-minded bureaucrats. In reality, it’s more like being the head of a council of fractious Afghan warlords. It’s like Thomas Hobbes’s description of life: nasty, brutish, and short. Martin Winchester will be gone sooner rather than later, but Alvin Lee will likely live on, ensconced in his office in China Division, as hard to remove as a dug-in tick on a hound dog.

And Alvin Lee is a man who knows how to nurse a grudge, obviously.

What did he do to make an enemy of Alvin Lee? He has no idea what Lee is up to, but whatever is going on, it should be between the two of them. “I’ll get to the bottom of this,” he says, sounding more confident than he feels. “I promise.”

Chinese Roswell. The damning memo eats at Craig like acid.

He decides to work late. Going back to his apartment would bring no relief. What would he do besides try and fail to watch a basketball game and numb his frustration with too many beers? After saying good night to his colleagues one by one, Craig sits in the semidarkness of the vault, thinking. He’s rattled, but he also knows what he has to do next.

There’s only one person who can tell him what the hell is going on. One person who can answer his questions.

Alvin Lee.

Has he ever met the man? He doesn’t think so. When he tries to picture him, Craig comes up blank. Yet this man he doesn’t know has ruined his career and cost him his family.

It’s going to end tonight.

Craig glances at the clock—nearly 9:00 p.m. He turns off the lights on his way out of the vault. The alarm to the black vault and all its secrets automatically sets behind him.

It’s never completely silent at headquarters after normal hours. There are always odd pockets of activity. The buzz of the watch center. The to-and-fro of the team that puts together the President’s Daily Brief. Janitors with huge buffers work on the gleaming terrazzo floors. But as Craig walks down the empty main corridor and listens to the echo of his footsteps, a thought forms in his head. He gets in the elevator and punches the button for the fifth floor.

The fifth floor of the old headquarters building is still and nearly as dark as a tomb. He feels like a night watchman as he makes his way down the hall. At the far end, there’s a sliver of light: a door’s been left ajar. Craig knows, without knowing, whose office that is. Knows who will be in there.

The door moves silently, without a creak. There’s a receptionist’s desk and a few chairs. A coffee table displays the latest editions of China Daily and the South China Morning Post. There are also magazines in Chinese script that he can’t read, covers that show smiling young models gesturing to shiny products and unsmiling middle-aged men lined up on a dais.

There’s a strong light coming from around the corner. Craig hears the distant sound of paper rustling. Someone is working back in one of the offices.

He takes a deep breath, holds it. The time has finally come.

He knocks once with his knuckle on the open door. It’s a big room, nearly as big as MOBIUS’s entire vault. A boss’s room. An older Chinese man sits behind the desk. He’s white haired and wears nearly invisible wire-framed eyeglasses. He’s probably been working for fifteen hours, and yet his dress shirt and tie are unwrinkled and crisp.

The plaque outside the door reads ALVIN LEE, CHIEF, CHINA DIVISION.

He stares at Craig over the tops of his glasses. He doesn’t look surprised to see him even at this late hour, only annoyed. “Can I help you?”

Craig stands up straighter. “I’m Craig Norton.”

Lee sighs and gestures to the chair opposite his desk. As Craig sits, he takes a closer look at Lee. He looks like a typical bureaucrat, but this is CIA. The most dangerous men are trained to appear nondescript, to be able to blend in anywhere. If he worked in the field—and Craig knows he was at Beijing Station, so there were postings to many smaller stations before that—then he’s probably survived some close calls. Knows how to handle himself. Can fight dirty. That’s a given.

Craig knows he needs to watch his step. Still, Alvin Lee has a lot of explaining to do.

Before Craig can open his mouth, Lee speaks. “I want to assure you that everything that’s happened, it’s not personal. It’s never been personal.”

A squawk escapes Craig. “I’ve seen the memo to Winchester. You made me look like a crackpot.”

Lee gives him a slow, patient smile. “Have you read your own cable, Mr. Norton? The one you wrote all those years ago? You have to admit it sounds a bit histrionic.”

He has read it recently, and he doesn’t think it sounded that bad. Still, if he’s learned nothing else from this whole painful experience, it’s that he handled it all wrong. He was cocky; he wanted to be a hero. If he could go back in time and change it, he would.

Craig decides to go on the offensive. “Why tell Winchester’s office that it was linked to a hoax? That was deliberate misdirection. You know there was no connection to any ‘Chinese Roswell’ case.”

Again, Lee gives Craig his maddening smile. “No, Norton, you’re wrong. It would be irresponsible not to bring up that incident. There are similarities between the two cases. People will inevitably equate the two. It’s better to get it into the open, have someone look at it. But as for your allegation that this is some sort of conspiracy against you—that’s egotistical nonsense. It’s all in your head. You’re wasting my time and, more importantly, the Agency’s time. We have real targets to follow, real missions to perform, and you’re keeping us from doing our job with these crazy delusions of yours . . .”

Craig leaps to his feet and pounds on Lee’s desk. It’s insubordination, but he’s pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to complete the paperwork necessary to fire him before his retirement. His blood thrums in his veins, and he’s invigorated in a way he’s only felt once before, when an eight-year-old Charlie got lost in the woods while they were on a camping trip. It was only for a few hours—thank God—but he remembers it like it was yesterday, feeling like he’d tear down the whole goddamn forest to find his son.

“You’re not going to scare me away, not this time. I know my cable wasn’t worthless. I know there was an investigation back here at Langley—that you shut down. Something took place at that air base, and you’ve done your best ever since to bury it. You’re leaving me no choice but to go to Winchester. He’ll force you to cooperate, and then we’ll know. It’ll all be out in the open, whatever secret it is you’re trying to bury.”

Lee goes very quiet. Suddenly, the man seems tired. He seems older than he did at first, aging before Craig’s eyes.

He sets his glasses aside and rubs the bridge of his nose. His eyes are glazed; his mouth droops. He reaches for those glasses again, his hand now trembling. “Do you know how long I’ve worked at CIA? Forty-five years. My family moved to America when I was thirteen. I became an American citizen so I could join the army, because I believed in my new homeland. I came to CIA after that. I was eligible to retire a long time ago, but I didn’t. My family wanted me to, of course, but I couldn’t. Russia may have been enemy number one, but I knew that China was evolving. The country was going to be a big problem for the United States—bigger than it already was, bigger than we dreamed—and we weren’t ready for it. We weren’t paying attention. But that was my job, to pay attention. I have worked the China target my whole life, just as you worked Russia. I wasn’t going to leave until I’d done everything I could to make them see. I couldn’t throw it all away on—one mistake.”

“The asset, you mean? The one that was sent in with the high-level visit?” Craig asks coldly.

Lee nods slowly, acknowledging a ghost that has haunted him for years. “That asset was our only source for the National Security Commission. But he disappeared during the site visit. He’d given us a lot of good intelligence, and now he was gone. Without him, we would be flying blind. The seventh floor would be out for blood if they discovered I’d cut the investigation short, but it was clear there was no point to prolonging it. We’d never know what happened on that base. We’d lost him. But that wouldn’t matter to the seventh floor. They’d need a scapegoat. There’d be outrage, congressional hearings, the whole nine yards. I had no choice but to bury it.”

Craig doesn’t want to believe it. “You were one of the men leading China Division. They’d have taken you seriously if you’d said something.”

“An Asian? Born in Guangdong, not a native American? In order to get to this position, to climb this high, you can’t take one wrong step. Not one. If anyone found out, my career would’ve been over.”

Craig feels the iceberg in his heart melt a tiny bit.

Lee sits upright, shoulders back. “I knew my luck was not going to last forever. I knew one day, my secret would catch up with me. It wasn’t hard to scare people off before: no one took UFOs seriously. But with that 60 Minutes piece, it was obvious that the tide had turned. When I heard they were setting up MOBIUS, and that Winchester had assigned you to the task force, well . . . you’ll be happy to know that I’ve decided to retire. To get out before anyone discovered what I’d done.”

He turns away from Craig, his face growing stony and resigned. “I’m not going to be remembered, not like one of the Agency directors. I’m no George Tenet or Leon Panetta. Very few people will be sad to see me go. I’ll just be another old man watching the sunset from his condo in Maui.” His smile is one of self-pity. This is not the way he wants his career to end, but he’s accepted it.

His eyes are steely and unflinching. “I’m gone in two weeks. Once that happens, you can do anything you want. But if you go to Winchester before I leave, I’ll crush you—and your team. You’ll be responsible for ruining those kids’ careers. That’ll be on your conscience, not mine. You can finish this investigation of yours”—he says those last words with a sneer—“but you let me leave with my dignity. Dignity—that’s something we can both understand, isn’t it, Norton?”

That’s how this all started, with Craig trying to restore his lost dignity. As much as he dislikes Alvin Lee, in that moment he can completely understand.

At the end of the day in this line of work, it’s all you have.

“Do we have a deal, then?” Lee asks. He sits out of the light, his face mostly hidden in deep shadow.

The whole thing sounds vaguely sinister. Could it be a trap? Lee could be buying time to stage another maneuver, to outwit Craig once again.

Or it could be the least painful way to move ahead. You don’t want to cross a man like Lee. To preserve his legacy, he would undoubtedly go on the offensive. He might destroy evidence. He would certainly strike back, poison the well. The rest of the team is young with long careers ahead of them. No telling what they might be in for.

“Okay,” Craig says, letting his breath out slowly. He rises. “You have a deal. But once you’re gone, I’m going to tell Winchester what you did, and we’re going to look for that missing asset. We’re going to find out what happened in Mongolia.”

Craig pauses in the doorway and sees Lee is smiling at him. Smiling. “If you do . . . I hope you’ll come to Maui and tell me.”

Craig and Tanika fly into Salt Lake City and throw their suitcases into a rental car to make the three-hour drive north on Interstate 84 to Albion. Craig has spent his working life overseas, and this part of the United States is new to him, though he tries not to let Tanika see.

As she drives, he stares out the window at the countryside, turning over in his mind the conversation with Alvin Lee. It’s strange to see it all from his perceived nemesis’s perspective. Overriding a last, lingering objection, Craig decides to do as Lee asks. He’ll let the man retire with dignity, even though it’s more consideration than he was ever given.

The drive starts out wonderfully, with the snowcapped Wasatch Mountains forming a scrim high in the distance. Majestic. Breathtaking. Next, the highway takes them past modern industrial parks with chain hotels and local restaurants.

But farther into the country, all familiar trappings fall away. Signs of life are farther and fewer between. The land empties, becomes scrubbier, rangier. While Craig found it almost impossible to imagine what he’d seen in Mongolia happening in Salt Lake City, here in the great empty plain, it seems entirely possible. They roll by the Lonesome Dove RV Park, a bump on what seems to be an endlessly flat prairie. The park is nothing more than a few travel trailers and an outbuilding advertising ICE and COFFEE and FROZEN TREATS. Beyond this is all gold and bronze and pale-blue sky. It’s the place you’d go for a spectacular view of the sunset.

Albion is little more than a crossroads. They looked up the location of the county sheriff’s office before heading out of cell phone range and now drive there straight away. As luck would have it, when they roll into the parking lot, the sheriff is at his desk.

“Mark Parker?” The sheriff is an older man in a dusty brown uniform, cowboy boots on his feet. He rubs his chin. “No, can’t say I know the name. There are some Parkers out this way, though. Could be he has relations.” He looks the name up on his computer, finds an old entry for someone named Mark Parker, and scribbles down the address. “Let me take you out there—you’ll never find it on your own. GPS isn’t worth a damn out here.”

After a half hour’s drive down a couple of twisty roads and through two cattle guards, the sheriff’s car pulls to a halt outside a weather-beaten mobile home. There’s an old pickup truck out front and a black dog lying on a picnic table. The dog growls a little when Craig and Tanika get out of their rental car, but it doesn’t move from its perch.

A middle-aged woman steps out of the house. She looks as weathered as the property. “Sheriff? What can I do for you?” she says, worrying the clasp of a bracelet on her wrist. The sheriff obviously doesn’t make a lot of calls here.

“Sorry to trouble you. These folks are from Washington, DC,” the sheriff says, taking a couple of steps toward the house. “They’re looking for a man by the name of Mark Parker, and this is the last known address for him.”

She seems confused. “Mark Parker was my uncle.”

Was, Craig notes.

They sit around the woman’s Formica kitchen table as she hands out plastic tumblers of ice water. Her uncle took his life eight years ago, she explains. Enough time has passed that she can say this matter-of-factly. Life was hard for him. He was a drinker. This was his ranch, she says, but she inherited it. Her mom, Parker’s sister, passed shortly after him. Emphysema.

Craig feels like he’s been punched in the chest. This was a long trip to make for another dead end. The sheriff rubs his chin again, casting a look over his shoulder toward the door. Thinking it’s time to make that long drive back to town.

“Had your uncle ever talked about seeing a UFO?” Tanika says abruptly. “Right here on this ranch?”

For a minute, the woman is wary. How much do you say in front of strangers, especially strangers who’ve come all the way from the nation’s capital? She looks to the sheriff for guidance, but he just shrugs.

Eventually, she gets up and walks into the other room, then comes back with a cardboard box. She sets it down on the kitchen counter. More Formica, an old pattern Craig remembers from his grandmother’s house. Something that makes you think of the 1950s. Atomic asterisks and boomerangs.

“I’d heard that Uncle Mark used to talk about seeing a UFO. Used to talk about it too much,” she says, closing her eyes. A painful memory. Craig’s heart beats faster when she opens her eyes and starts to rummage through the box. Could her uncle have saved evidence of the encounter? Some photographs, perhaps?

“The FBI report said some of his neighbors had also seen something around that same time . . . ?” Tanika asks, hoping to jar some memory.

The woman shakes her head. “From what I heard, they did at first, but they changed their stories when my uncle started getting a lot of ribbing over it. People here can be—tough. In the end, it was just one more thing that . . .” Pushed him over the edge; she doesn’t have to say it.

Tanika tries again. “Do you know who they were? Have any names?”

“I’m afraid not. I just heard this through my mom. I wasn’t even living here when it happened. But I seem to recall that he claimed to have proof . . .” She digs through the box like a terrier on the scent of something.

Craig’s heart speeds up again. What could it be? A photograph would be best. Notes. Is that too much to hope for?

She triumphantly pulls out a VHS tape. She shakes the black plastic box.

Tanika and Craig exchange a look. It might as well be the Dead Sea Scrolls, written in Aramaic. Is there any equipment in the office that can read it? When was the last time either of them saw a VHS player? Were people still using them in 2006?

“Have you looked at it?” Craig asks. “Know what’s on it?”

The niece shakes her head.

Tanika holds out her hand. “Do you mind if we take it with us? We’ll return it.”

The niece hands the tape to Tanika. “You can keep it. You can take the whole box, if you want. I’ve never gone through it. Never needed to.”

Back at the motor lodge, Tanika and Craig sort through the contents of the box. There are receipts from the lumber-supply place and the feed store. A couple of bank slips. There’s also flotsam from previous lives, including a service medal (army?) in a battered case and an employee name tag for a long-gone tractor-supply store. In the end, the only thing they’re left with is the VHS tape.

They stare at the object sitting between them. “I think we’ll need to wait until we get back to Washington. Maybe tech support can find a way to read it,” Tanika says.

Craig gets an idea. He snatches it up and heads for the door, then across the gravel parking lot to the motor lodge’s front desk. A taciturn middle-aged man sits behind the counter reading a paperback.

Craig gives the room a quick scan. It looks like a landscape from the 1970s.

He holds the tape aloft. “Do you have a VHS player?”

They rummage around the back room until they find an old no-name VHS player covered with about two inches of dust, an ancient beast of a machine still attached to an old cathode-ray television set. How many porno tapes were played on this combo? It whirs to life when they flip the power switch.

By now, Tanika has caught up to him and joins the two men staring at the TV screen. Craig tries to keep his hopes from racing ahead. He never thought in a million years that he’d see the phenomenon again, the vision he has replayed over and over in his mind. Who knows how accurate his memory is, after the inevitable erosion of time? But will Mark Parker’s footage—captured by some old-school device, ancient by modern standards—be any good?

The television crackles to life. The quality is terrible; you can’t even tell what is on the screen for the first minute. It’s just a screen full of grainy blackness with a man muttering in the background. He sounds drunk, too, and Craig’s hopes plummet. You can’t tell from the pitch-black footage, but it sounds like he is walking. Brush crunches underfoot, and he utters the occasional swear.

But then something bright flares in the center of the screen. The camera hovers over a tiny, vibrating pinprick of light. Then it zooms in—it’s not a great close-up; he’s undoubtedly using an old model of camcorder—and you still can’t tell what this is, but the light is at least bigger than a dot. You can tell, too, that it isn’t moving in a straight line like a plane or even a satellite but jiggling like an impatient teenager. Or maybe it’s the rancher’s hand trembling from drink or fear or plain uncertainty.

For he is a man by himself in the middle of nowhere, as something moves overhead that he cannot explain.

Was this what I saw? Craig struggles to match this image to the one in his memory.

In his recollection, it was much clearer. Did he polish it up through all those repetitions, until he made it into something that it wasn’t?

Memory is fallible. He knows that. He’s always tried not to kid himself.

But . . . there are similarities in its movement. The longer he stares, the surer he becomes. It is hard at first to be certain because of the blackness, the lack of edges and horizon, the complete absence of context. There is no way to judge size and distance and hence speed. In that respect, it is very, very different from what he saw. But the stop and go, the sudden crazy jumps, accelerating and disappearing . . .

And then—there it is. The figure-eight movement. Sideways, up, and back. Sideways, up, and back.

The movement is as characteristic as a fingerprint. They are undeniably the same.

Tanika glances over the motel clerk’s head to Craig, looking for a sign. An indication that they haven’t wasted their time. That they have done good.

He nods.

She breaks out in a grin.

The night they return from Idaho, Craig can’t shake feeling a bit blue. The VHS tape, that’s pay dirt, but it’s hardly a slam dunk. He knows how things get discounted, brushed off.

Craig’s life has been all one way since that night on the Mongolian steppe. Since the night he looked innocently to the skies.

Most of the damage he’s done, he can’t undo. His career is almost over; Lisa has remarried. There’s only one avenue for redemption left to him.

It’s late at night, and he’s alone in his apartment. He stares at his cell phone. The moment has come to start to turn back time.

He picks it up, presses the button next to his son’s name.

“Dad?” Charlie is understandably confused. It’s not their regular night. When was the last time Craig called off schedule? He can’t remember.

“Hey, son, how are you?” I just felt like calling, he thinks but cannot say. Instead, he says, “Hey, did you watch that episode on 60 Minutes a while back? The one about UFOs?”

“Sure,” Charlie says uneasily. This is the weirdest conversation they’ve ever had.

Craig takes a deep breath. His voice jumps an octave. “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a UFO?”

He ends up telling Charlie most of what happened that night. Not all of it. He leaves out the Russian asset he was supposed to meet, instead saying he just happened to pull off the side of the road for a smoke. But he describes the rest of it to the fullest extent possible: The eerie light, the insane way it moved. The impossibility of it. The excitement, the fear. How twenty minutes passed like twenty seconds.

How it ended up costing him his marriage and his career.

He tries to keep that part light.

“Geesh, Dad,” Charlie says when he finally finds his voice. He sounds like he’s seen a ghost. “How come I never heard about this before?”

No, wait—he knows. The reason is familiar.

“I wanted to tell you.” Craig can hear how lame it sounds. Has he sounded like this all of Charlie’s life?

There are questions. Most Craig can answer. How big does he think it was; how fast was it traveling? Was he scared? Did he think he might be abducted?

When Charlie has run out of questions, he says, “Anyway, I’m sorry this happened to you.”

Craig is surprised to hear himself say, “That’s okay. I’m not sorry. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in my entire life.”

“Oh yeah?” Charlie sounds grateful to hear that his father’s life wasn’t completely ruined. “What other amazing things have you seen?”

They have the longest conversation of their life as Craig tells him of the things he’s done and seen while posted to the world’s most remote corners. The singing dunes of Khongoryn Els, also in Mongolia, which produce a sad, lonely hum when the wind passes over them. The fairy-chimney rock formations in Cappadocia, central Turkey. The grove in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where Russian cosmonauts plant tree seedlings before going into space.

An hour speeds by, until Craig hears Jessica in the background asking Charlie to give their son a bath before bed.

“I gotta go, Dad. But this was really fun.” There is a long, thoughtful pause. “This is all I ever wanted, you know. For you to talk to me.”

It hits Craig like a punch to the gut. He’s afraid for a minute that he’s going to be sick. “I couldn’t; you know that—”

“Not the classified stuff. Not the secrets. Stuff like this. I wanted you to share your life with me.” He pauses again, surely not meaning to beat his father up. Not at this point in both their lives.

Charlie sighs as a shriek of a child’s laughter explodes behind his voice on the line. “I just wanted for us to be able to talk.”

Craig returns to the office to find that Amy has been researching the Chinese Roswell incident. The team gathers around the conference table. “As best as I’ve been able to find out, they’re referring to an incident that took place a few years earlier, a UFO sighting in a tiny place called Lun, not too far from Ulaanbaatar. Some local men said they’d found a crashed UFO. Claimed they had alien corpses and everything. I’ll spare you the suspense: it turned out to be a hoax. They seemed to be following the Roswell playbook, hoping to bring in the tourist trade. Considering they’re in the hinterlands of Mongolia, I’d say they were ambitious.”

“Very entrepreneurial of them,” Steven laughs.

Craig feels like his head is going to explode. “The two stories are nothing alike. Why in the world did China Division link them?”

“That part’s not clear,” Amy says slowly. “I went through all the reports I could get my hands on but couldn’t find any connection. The best I can reckon is that the two just became conflated.”

“It’s not entirely inconceivable,” Nicholas joins in. Always logical, that boy. “They happened only a few years apart, in the same general location . . . It was bound to be raised.”

Just like Alvin Lee claimed, but it’s hard for Craig not to see a deliberate attempt to discredit him. Without proof, he knows better than to say that. It sounds too paranoid. “We’ve got to push back. Point out to China Division that this assumption is wrong. Put the burden of proof on them. If they’ve got evidence, they need to show it.”

Amy nods. “We’ll take care of this, Craig. Leave it with me.” She understands that it would be unbecoming for Craig to have to defend himself against this smear. He’s grateful.

Later, Craig is visited by the officer Millbotham assigned to dig up the cables. She comes to the vault carrying a notebook. She sits across from him at the conference table, looking over the tops of her glasses, low on her nose. “Those cables you asked about? You’re not going to be happy with what I have for you. Quite the quagmire there.”

“Are they restricted access?” Craig has decided he will go to Winchester if that’s what it takes. He’s tired of messing around.

“From what I could find, no . . . but it looks like some of them simply vanished.”

Craig shakes his head. “I . . . I don’t understand.”

“It looks like the reports were issued because I found them referenced in other cables . . . but when I tried to track down copies, I was told they didn’t exist. If they were simply behind a firewall, we’d be able to get to them. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s like someone gathered up all the copies and had them destroyed.”

That would sound paranoid if not for where they are, sitting in a black vault in the basement of CIA. Craig has heard of stranger things.

Still, it’s a lot of trouble to go to. Somebody has something to hide.

His mind flits back to the conversation with Lee, his confessed cover-up. He gave no guarantee that he’d hand over evidence to Craig before he departed. He might be destroying whatever records are left.

Craig walks the woman to the door. “Keep digging, would you? Oh, and supposedly one of the assets sent to look into the base back in 2006 disappeared. Can you see if you can find anything on that?”

The staff officer gives him a skeptical look. “Only if you can guarantee that I’m not going to disappear too.”

Craig thinks of the cold look on Alvin Lee’s face. “I wish I could.”

Craig is working late, alone, when there is a buzz at the door. That’s one good thing about working in a vault: no one can sneak up on you. It’s strange, though, for someone to come at this hour.

He goes to the door and finds an older man standing in the semidarkness of the underlit hall. He’s Asian, maybe Chinese. He looks like he’s slept in his clothes. It’s hard to tell his age, but his dark-gray hair makes Craig think he’s close to retirement. He has that beaten-down look, reeking of surrender. He has a file under his arm.

“Are you Craig Norton? I saw you were active on IM,” the man says. That damn text messaging app—it makes it too easy to be stalked. The man continues, “You don’t know me, but, well, I need to talk to you.”

They go inside the vault and sit at the conference table where the team has their regular morning meetings. Underlit, the space seems small and intimate, like it was made for just the two of them. Craig shivers despite himself.

The man puts the folder on the table, then slumps. He seems unhappy. “I’m not going to give you my name, okay?” Craig notices that he’s slipped his badge in his shirt pocket, too, so he won’t be able to catch a glimpse of his serial number or anything Craig could use to trace him. “If it got back to Lee that I talked to you, it would be . . . bad.” He clears his throat and sits up a little taller. “I heard about the task force, and I thought, Great, good, it’s all going to come out. Finally. Only then Lee ordered everyone not to cooperate, and, well . . . I realized this was my last chance.”

He fidgets with his lanyard as he avoids looking Craig in the face. “There are things you need to know.”

Craig almost cannot breathe. He puts a hand on the conference table to steady himself. “What have you come to tell me?”

The man presses his lips together as though he might be rethinking what he’s about to do—oh no—but then takes a deep breath and plunges in. “I work in China Division. There’s just a few of us left who worked on that team back in 2006. I heard you talked to Susan about it. The thing is, they split the task force up. We worked on different parts of the puzzle. It was quicker that way. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I didn’t understand why we were doing anything, really. It seemed like just another check-the-box exercise.

“I was working the PRC air target, but R&D. Defense industries. I was mad they put me on the task force. I thought your report was a big joke—at first. But then we saw the National Security Commission was sending the secretary-general to the site, and they were so worried about making sure everything was decontaminated before he showed up, and I knew something was up.” He lets out a long sigh. “You know what happened next. The front office here pulled the plug. I argued with my section chief to let me keep going, but he warned me to drop it. Beijing Station chewed him out. Lee said China Division looked like a laughingstock.”

“So you did as you were told?”

The man shakes his head. “I couldn’t. I knew something was up. That visit by the secretary-general—it didn’t make sense.” The man opens the folder and begins flipping through pages. “Ever since that night, I’ve been keeping an eye out for anything related to that site or what might’ve happened that night. I never found what you’d consider a smoking gun, but there was definitely—a trend. Stuff that, by itself, you could explain away, but when you put it all together . . .” He continues flipping. “A bunch of the guys working at the site were later moved to a new air force unit. This new unit was kept under wraps, treated like a ‘black’ program. There are a couple units like this in the Chinese military. We do our best to keep track of them, but it’s hard . . .” He shrugs. “Years later, I see scientists assigned to this black program linked to some breakthrough technologies. If it had been just one or two guys, no big deal. But so many of them? Every single scientist I could find who was at that site went on to make some extraordinary discoveries. That would be like an entire graduating class of engineers becoming the next Steve Jobs. That never happens. And the secretary-general? He went on to head the Chinese space program. That program’s responsible for making China a power player in the space race. They’ve been leaving both us and the Russians in the dust lately.”

You’d think they would have briefed the president on this. “And you never tried to get the case reopened?”

“Sure, I did. But every time, Lee squashed it. Said it wasn’t a high enough priority. Told me to let him know when I had proof, not speculation.”

That muted alarm bell in the back of Craig’s mind rings again. Under other circumstances, this could be cause for concern. But Lee explained all this, didn’t he? He was actively suppressing any inquiry. Covering his ass.

He closes the folder and pushes it across the table to Craig. “This is everything I have. It’s yours now. I’m retiring at the end of the week. I figure Lee won’t be able to do anything to me then.”

Craig leafs through the folder. There are a lot of reports there. Maybe one of the missing ones; who knows.

He wonders if he should tell this man that Alvin Lee is retiring soon. But he should know this. Surely an announcement’s been made to the workforce by now.

Craig walks him to the vault door. As he’s leaving, the man looks Craig square in the eye. “I hope you’re able to get to the bottom of this. I’d like to know what really happened. We need to know.”

Kirtland Air Force Base stretches before them like the campus of a well-funded state college plopped down in the middle of a white-hot desert. Brilliant concrete buildings connected by straight sidewalks and set among large parking lots. All no nonsense, well done, solid. Craig has come here with Nicholas and Steven, and they’re waved through a guardhouse, and then Steven, the team’s aircraft specialist, pilots the rental car past a big white sign—WELCOMETO SANDIA SCIENCEAND TECHNOLOGY PARK—with colorful flags fluttering overhead.

All Craig knows of Albuquerque, New Mexico, comes from watching Breaking Bad on television. The city is flat as a pancake, with no buildings higher than a couple of stories, and neighborhoods and industrial parks and strip malls bleeding one into another with no seeming plan. The sun is so oppressive that it seems to obliterate everything, so all you see is the pale yellow of the sand and ocher of the rocks. Once you get outside town, the roads are long and lonely and take you out into unforgiving expanses of desert. Exactly the kind of place where you might expect to encounter alien spacecraft.

Once they arrive at their destination, they are escorted to a conference room by a young woman in a white lab coat. At the table are two men in jeans and polo shirts, and both seem very, very serious. Nicholas set up this meeting: apparently, he had been talking to their aerospace team about a technical question and sent the Albion footage for their opinion. It still seems inconceivable that these men of science can talk about such things without laughing.

The younger man introduces himself as Robert. He gives a little overview of the laboratory and the areas in which they do research. It’s extensive, to say the least, but Craig has a hard time imagining there’s an Alien Technologies Division somewhere in the organizational chart. Robert says they were intrigued by Nicholas’s call. “We looked at the video you sent,” he says, meaning what Mark Parker caught on videotape. “There were similarities to the 60 Minutes footage, that’s for sure.”

“Unfortunately, the jury is still out on what it was that those pilots saw,” the second man, Scott, says. “In some instances, there’s a strong case that it’s some kind of terrestrial phenomenon or maybe reentering space junk. In other instances, we have no idea what’s the culprit.”

“The video you gave us is pretty old, and the tape looks to have been used several times before,” Robert adds. “Without further analysis, it’s hard to say what you have there.”

Craig lets out a sigh. He didn’t realize how much he’d been pinning his hope to that footage. It’s tough to let it go.

Then Scott pulls the laptop toward him and taps on a few keys. “However, we didn’t ask you out here just to tell you that. We have something we’d like you to look at. One of our colleagues in Shandong Province in China sent this. He took it at a Chinese military demonstration he’d recently been invited to, like an air show. They’d asked that no videos be taken, but he managed to sneak this out somehow.”

The video shows a sprawling airfield, like an airport, only with far fewer aircraft and none of the variety Craig would recognize. It reminds him of the base he spied on with Josh Rasmussen fifteen years ago. A small plane tows a larger one onto a runway. The larger plane is an odd shape, very sleek, and blinding white. A handful of men in jumpsuits and uniforms scurry around it, making last-minute adjustments. There’s chatter in various languages in the background, small talk.

The small plane is detached from the other and rolls away. A few minutes later, the white plane comes to life. It fires up, but the sound is weirdly electronic, unlike a rocket or jet engine. There’s no fire or smoke, though the aircraft seems to glow with a strangely intense light.

And then it is gone. It disappears in the blink of an eye. Craig struggles to remember the experimental fighter he saw take off on the Mongolian steppe that day, how it moved. There is no comparison.

There is, however, a comparison to something he’s seen. Something he’ll never forget.

Nicholas lets out a low whistle. Steven shakes his head in disbelief. “What is that?”

“Our colleague says the event was held at a PLA Strategic Support Force facility not far from Shandong. An air force unit that he’d never heard of before,” Robert says as he gestures to the screen. “We’ve asked him to forward any additional information he has, including the address and directions to the base.”

The aircraft is suddenly back, hovering in the air. It seems to vibrate, moving ever so slightly in a jerky fashion. There’s something familiar about it.

“Can you slow that down?” Craig asks.

It takes the two scientists a minute to figure out how to do it, but eventually the movement on the screen slows down to half speed, quarter speed, then slower still. So slow that it looks like a still photograph.

Except for one thing. The white plane is moving, though its movements are barely discernible.

But there it is. Craig would recognize it anywhere.

Sideways, up, and back. Sideways, up, and back.

Craig makes an appointment with Martin Winchester. He’s doing this on his own, though he feels a little guilty about keeping it secret from the team. He’s not sure what he’s got, but he thinks it might be really important—the kind of important that requires discretion. The kind of thing that the deputy director of operations might not want to discuss in front of a crowd.

He stands at the entry to Martin’s office on the seventh floor. It’s the kind of place you dream about having one day for yourself: big enough to hold a conference table for eight, a sofa and two armchairs on the far side of the room, the whole thing looking out through a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass. The walls are decorated with mementos from Martin’s career: a bit of an American flag rescued from a faraway hilltop, its edges frayed; a photo of Martin wearing a shalwar kameez, the traditional tunic worn by men in Afghanistan; an old foreign-looking handgun mounted on a plaque. It’s the kind of testament to a career well spent that Craig stopped hoping for a long time ago.

“Thanks for taking the time to see me,” Craig says as Martin rises from his desk.

He gestures to the armchairs. “I’m curious to hear what your team has been up to.”

Once they’ve taken their seats, Craig runs through it all for Martin. How his cable kicked off an investigation back at headquarters but that it was called off. He tells the boss about the missing reports that have yet to be found, though he leaves out any mention of the missing Chinese asset because of the deal with Lee. Time enough to track this down once he knows Lee is out the door.

Craig pulls out a laptop to show Martin the Mark Parker videotape footage. “It’s the same as what was on 60 Minutes,” Martin says, catching Craig’s eye. “This is what you saw?” It seems to Craig that his old friend looks at him a little differently, as though seeing him for the first time.

Martin gestures at the screen. “Here’s a thought—it just came to me—could this be some kind of illusion? Maybe it was all an attempt to deceive.” Deception is something anyone at CIA can understand. Their whole lives are about deception, in one way or another. It’s what magicians call diversion: they divert the audience’s attention with the left hand so they don’t see what they’re doing with the right. And it’s been a part of spycraft since the very beginning. But Craig doesn’t think he’s ever heard it used as a rationale for an alien sighting.

“Save that thought: I have two more things to show you.” First, Craig steps through the evidence given to him by the Chinese military analyst of a secret technical unit that seems to be tied to the Chinese space industry. Then he shows Martin the footage from Sandia of the experimental aircraft.

Martin nods solemnly at the monitor. “So what we’re looking at here could be alien technology? That would mean that the Chinese have made first contact.”

The room is still.

Martin doesn’t want to believe it. This is very bad news. If true, the director will need to go to the president and admit to an unthinkable intelligence failure. The fact that there is evidence in the Agency’s own databases, evidence that they dropped the ball, is damning.

And Martin Winchester will be the one to tell the director the bad news.

“How could this have happened right under our noses?”

Craig knows better than to say: I tried to warn you, but no one would believe me.

“Everything you’ve just told me: we’re going to have to go through it all, of course. Verify everything. Chase down every lead. Leave no stone unturned.”

Of course. He’ll put Amy and Audrey on it. Those two women are relentlessly thorough.

Martin rubs his fingers together as he thinks, a nervous habit. “You said it was Alvin Lee who shut down the investigation, back in 2006?”

“Yes, but . . .” Craig’s first instinct is to protect the man, to dismiss what Lee’s done, because—well, it’s understandable, isn’t it? It was about UFOs, for God’s sake. Even though Craig isn’t sure what prompted Lee to override China Division. Fear of looking like a fool, he supposes. Everyone knows there’s no such thing as flying saucers.

“I’m not necessarily blaming Lee,” Martin rushes to say. “It’s just that from what you’ve told me, it almost seems like he was on some kind of mission . . .”

“Yeah. I suppose.” But something is bothering Craig, something sharp and painful like a sliver of bone caught in his throat. As a matter of fact, it’s the kind of thing that, under other circumstances, might be viewed with suspicion. Should they be curious as to why Lee inserted himself every time something came up that touched on the Mongolian incident?

It’s almost as though Alvin Lee has been keeping tabs on it.

Craig’s eyes meet Martin’s. The same thought occurs to both men simultaneously.

“There’s one thing I haven’t told you.” Craig feels like a fool for not realizing his mistake earlier. “It has to do with an important missing asset, an officer in the Chinese military. Lee was afraid of getting punished for his disappearance and made me promise to keep it secret until after he retired.” Lee told Craig he was going to retire in two weeks . . . which means he should be gone by now.

But Martin’s brows furrow. “What do you mean? Alvin Lee hasn’t said anything about retiring.”

The first thing security does is to send a big black SUV to the Lees’ residence in McLean. The vehicle rolls through the elegant suburban neighborhood like a shark, with a minimum of fuss. No sirens, no flashing light bars on the tops of police cars, no uniformed men breaking down doors. One man stands in front of the other, blocking most of the view from the street, so the second man can do something with the lock.

Lee and his wife are gone, of course. In the master bedroom, the drawers were left open, clothes strewed all over the floor, suitcases absent. The plane tickets aren’t for Maui but Malaysia, where the Agency obtains surveillance-camera footage of the Lees getting into a taxi, disappearing like smoke into the crowded streets of Kuala Lumpur. The FBI finds out that their financial accounts were emptied out right around the time Craig met with him, the money disappearing into an offshore account. They’ll track it down, but the agents are pretty sure the trail will end in China.

All the clues lead the FBI to believe that it wasn’t preplanned. Turns out they left their children in the dark. The lead FBI agent shares with Craig how he had to tell the son and two daughters—grown with children of their own—that their father was a traitor who left them high and dry. Their children will probably never see their grandparents again, and the grandparents were okay with that.

“China Division is doing a hard scrub,” Martin tells Craig a few days later. They sit in a corner of the cafeteria, discussing traitors while the rank and file of the workforce ambles past. “But the thinking is he was recruited while he was deputy COS in Beijing. He told the Guoanbu about your cable, and they told him to make sure it went nowhere. He’s probably responsible for the disappearance of that asset too. If he found out anything, Lee could’ve given him up to the Guoanbu.” He takes a minute, inhaling steam from the paper cup. “It wasn’t easy telling that to the director.”

“Well, it’s not like it happened on your watch. This started fifteen years earlier. And you caught it now—that’s what matters.”

Martin smiles, though they both know that’s not how the seventh floor will see it. They’ll be dealing with this for years to come.

The rest of the team is told about Alvin Lee, of course. They’re tasked with coordinating with China Division to detangle the web of misdirects he left behind. They’re up to their ears in work but take an impromptu coffee break at the conference table, happy to all be together, if only for a few minutes.

“Had you always known it was a UFO?” Steven asks Craig, over the rim of his paper cup. “From the moment you saw it?”

Craig gives them a self-effacing grin. He doesn’t mind sharing his experiences with the team. He feels like it’s something he should do. “I’ll be honest: I wanted it to be some whizbang Russian or Chinese aircraft, some piece of technology we didn’t know about, because it would’ve been good for me. Good for my career. But the truth is I knew right away that it was alien. That it wasn’t of this world. Maybe that’s why I went ahead and wrote that report. Because I couldn’t deny it existed.” Maybe that’s why he sent the cable fifteen years ago: To force the Agency to go down this path. To force CIA, with its immense resources and capabilities that no one else has, to try to find the truth.

“I bet it’s pretty wild to think that the Agency is taking it seriously now, huh?” Tanika says.

Nicholas is thoughtful. “But . . . what does everyone think? Will we find concrete evidence that the Chinese government made contact with the aliens? I find it hard to believe they could keep something like this secret all that time.”

Heads nod. The movies always assume that the United States will be the one to make first contact. But it’s not necessarily the case.

“Ops Directorate is tasking stations around the globe to look for evidence of foreign contact with extraterrestrials,” Amy says. “That’s a big step. It shows that the seventh floor is taking this seriously.”

Steven whistles. “Things certainly have changed a lot in fifteen years.”

Amy continues. “One last thing to consider: this is just one case. A quick scrub of the reporting database turned up fifty-eight reports of unexplained events in the last ten years. In the follow-up report sent to Winchester’s office, I highlighted a dozen that merit a follow-up investigation.”

A laugh goes around the table. “I think that’ll keep us busy for a little while, at least,” Tanika says. “We’re entering a new era, all because Craig Norton couldn’t let it go.”

They lift their coffee cups. “To Craig. And his stubbornness.”

They’re all beaming at him like loons.

That night, Craig calls his son.

He and Charlie have been talking about what Craig will do next now that retirement looms around the corner. They have been talking about Craig coming to New Paltz to take his grandson fishing and hiking in the Catskills. Charlie has raised the possibility—maybe, just maybe—of Craig moving out of DC and trying New Paltz.

“We have UFO sightings in the Catskills, too, you know.” Charlie is teasing Craig, but Craig will not bite. He thinks of the cases waiting to be investigated. He thinks, too, of Alvin Lee hiding somewhere in China. He wonders what China has learned from their alien contact and where that leaves the West. Trailing behind, no doubt.

The object in the sky over Mongolia may have taken aspects of his life away from him, but it has given him his life back too. He even called Lisa to let her know things have improved with Charlie. And to apologize for letting their marriage rot on the vine.

Craig is working up the courage to tell Charlie that he’s pulled his resignation. With the task force looking so promising, it’s hard to leave.

Though that doesn’t mean he can’t take a well-earned break.

There are lesser plans to make and things to decide: The route to take to upstate New York. Where to take his car for a long-overdue service. Whether his old fishing gear is still serviceable, or whether he needs to invest in some new equipment. Pleasurable tasks. Moments to savor.

He’ll research, too, whether there have been any UAP sightings around New Paltz.

He’d like to introduce his son and grandson to the family business.

Table of Contents

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BLACK VAULT