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the way.’
    ‘Majestic Twelve must have pissed off a lot of people over the years,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Enough that Mitchell may be able to leverage some of them into helping him.’
    That list, Ethan reflected, might even include serving members of the administration. Majestic Twelve was, in effect, a descendent of The Silver Legion of America, also known as the Silver Shirts, an underground American fascist organization founded by William Dudley Pelley in 1933 that had been headquartered in North Carolina. A white supremacist group based on Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts, the Silver Shirts had built a fortified headquarters in the hills of Los Angeles and had been some fifteen thousand strong. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 killed off public support for the legion, but the remaining members were ready when the Nazis were defeated to bring into America survivors of the Third Reich along with all of the wealth stolen from within Germany during the final days of the conflict.
    After the war, the founding members of the Silver Legion used their wealth to invest in the industrial–military complex. They prospered, became powerful and when in 1947 the first hints of extra–terrestrial technology coming into the hands of the United States government began to circulate, they were there to pick up the threads of what had begun in Germany many years before with Die Glocke , a rumored extra–terrestrial device captured by scientists and designed to bring a crushing defeat to the allied forces. Ethan and Nicola had located just such a device in an abandoned German facility six months before, buried deep beneath the ice floes of Antarctica.
    ‘We need to get onto this first and figure out what it is that brought Channing to the attention of MJ–12,’ Jarvis said finally. ‘If MJ–12 are making another play for dominance then whatever they’ve got in mind it won’t be healthy, and that mention of biological experiments gives me the creeps. I’ll have Victor Wilms transported out of Florence ACX as soon as possible and we’ll give him a hint of what life’s like in general population to see if he’ll fold. Why don’t you go down there before Norway and find out if Wilms knows anything about Aubrey Channing?’
    ‘If we make him think he’s going into general population, we might lose any trust he has in us,’ Lopez pointed out.
    ‘His resolve will fail a lot quicker if he feels really threatened,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘We just have to make him think we genuinely don’t give a damn about him. What’s left of his bravado is due to him believing he’s still important, still has leverage.
    Hellerman hurried across and handed Ethan a scribbled note.
    ‘The professor behind the original note works in Spitsbergen, at the Doomsday Vault.’
    ‘The what now?’ Lopez asked.
    ‘The Doomsday Vault,’ Hellerman said in reply. ‘It’s a facility used to store seeds and DNA in the event of a global extinction event.’
    Ethan tucked the address into the pocket of his jeans and looked at Lopez.
    ‘Nothing like doom and gloom, huh?’
    ***

VI
    Florence, Colorado
    ‘Damn me it’s hot here.’
    ‘Quit whining, this is nothing.’
    Ethan Warner drove along Highway 67 beneath the flaring white orb of the sun that scorched the barren deserts surrounding them. The sky was a flawless light blue, the temperature forecast to be in the high nineties.
    ‘It’s okay for you, coming from Mexico,’ Ethan complained.
    Despite the air conditioning in the vehicle, he felt uncomfortably hot as the sunshine blazed through the windscreen. Beside him, Nicola Lopez sat with her boots up on the dash as she played some sort of game on her cell phone. Her dark eyes flicked left and right as she played, long black hair framing a perfect face and sculptured lips.
    ‘That’s racist,’ she pointed out.
    ‘It’s not racist to state a fact,’ Ethan defended himself. ‘I come from Illinois, remember?’
    ‘I think you’re just