Сидни Шелдон – The Doomsday Conspiracy (страница 14)
Robert's palms felt suddenly moist. “You saw the UFO?”
“
“Can you describe it?”
Mandel shuddered. “It—it seemed alive.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean … there was a kind of light around it. It kept changing colors. It looked blue … then green … I don't know. It's hard to describe. And there were these little creatures inside. Not human, but—” He broke off.
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Were they alive?”
“They looked dead to me.” He mopped his brow. “I'm glad you believe me. I tried to tell my friends, and they laughed at me. Even my wife thought I had been drinking. But I know what I saw.”
“About the car you towed …” Robert said.
“
“Did the driver pay by check or credit card?”
“I don't take checks, and I don't take no credit cards. He paid in cash.”
“Swiss francs?”
“Pounds.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I remember I had to check the rate of exchange.”
“Mr. Mandel, do you happen to have a record of the license number of the car?”
“Of course.” Mandel said. He glanced down at the card. “It was a rental. Avis. He rented it in Geneva.”
“Would you mind giving me that license number?”
“Sure, why not?” He wrote the number down on a piece of paper and handed it to Robert. “What is this all about, anyway? The UFO thing?”
“No,” Robert said, in his sincerest voice. He took out his wallet and pulled out an identification card. “I'm with the IAC, the International Auto Club. My company is doing a survey on tow trucks.”
“Oh.”
Robert walked out of the garage and thought dazedly,
There could only be one explanation, and Robert felt a sudden, cold chill.
The huge mother ship floated noiselessly through dark space, seemingly motionless, traveling at twenty-two thousand miles an hour in exact synchronization with the orbit of the earth. The six aliens aboard were studying the three-dimensional field-of-view optical screen that covered one wall of the spaceship. On the monitor, as the planet Earth rotated, they watched holographic pictures of what lay below while an electronic spectrograph analyzed the chemical components of the images that appeared. The atmosphere of the land masses they overflew was heavily polluted. Huge factories befouled the air with thick, black, poisonous gases while unbiodegradable refuse was dumped into landfills and into the seas.
The aliens looked down at the oceans, once pristine and blue, now black with oil and brown with scum. The coral of the Great Barrier Reef was turning bleach-white, and fish were dying by the billions. Where trees had been stripped in the Amazon rain forest, there was a huge, barren crater. The instruments on the spaceship indicated that the earth's temperature had risen since their last exploration three years earlier. They could see wars being waged on the planet below, which spewed new poisons into the atmosphere.
The aliens communicated by mental telepathy.
On earth, thousands of feet below the spaceship's orbit, Robert placed a call from a secure phone to General Hilliard. He came on the line almost immediately.
“Good afternoon, Commander. Do you have anything to report?”
“Yes, I know. There were important security reasons why I couldn't tell you everything earlier.”
General Hilliard said, “I'm going to tell you something in the strictest confidence, Commander. Our government had an encounter with extraterrestrials three years ago. They landed at one of our NATO air bases. We were able to communicate with them.”
Robert felt his heart begin to beat faster. “What—what did they say?”
“That they intended to destroy us.”
He felt a shock go through him. “
“Exactly. They said they were coming back to take over this planet and make slaves of us, and that there is nothing we can do to prevent them. Not yet. But we're working on ways to stop them. That's why it's imperative that we avoid a public panic so we can buy time. I think you can understand now why it's so important that the witnesses are warned not to discuss what they saw. If word of the Idents, as we refer to them, leaked out, it would be a worldwide disaster.”
“You don't think it would be better to prepare people and—?”
“Commander, in 1938, a young actor named Orson Welles broadcast a radio play called ‘War of the Worlds’ about aliens invading the earth. Within minutes there was panic in cities all over America. A hysterical population tried to flee from the imaginary invaders. The telephone lines were jammed, the highways were clogged. People were killed. There was total chaos. No, we have to be prepared for the aliens before we go public with this. We want you to find those witnesses for their own protection, so we can keep this under control.”
Robert found that he was perspiring. “Yes. I—I understand.”
“Good. I gather you've talked to one of the witnesses?”
“I've found two of them.”
“Their names?”
“Hans Beckerman—he was the driver of the tour bus. He lives in Kappel …”
“And the second?”
“Fritz Mandel. He owns his own garage in Bern. He was the mechanic who towed the car of a third witness.”
“The name of that witness?”
“I don't have it yet. I'm working on it. Would you like me to speak with them about not discussing this UFO business with anyone?”
“Negative. Your assignment is simply to locate the witnesses. After that we'll let their respective governments deal with them. Have you learned how many witnesses there are?”
“Yes. Seven passengers plus the driver, the mechanic, and a passing motorist.”
“You must locate them all. Each and every one of the ten witnesses who saw the crash. Understood?”
“Yes, General.”
Robert replaced the receiver, his mind in a whirl. UFOs were real. The aliens were enemies. It was a horrifying thought.
Suddenly, the uneasy feeling Robert had had earlier returned in full force. General Hilliard had given him this assignment, but they had not told him everything. What else were they holding back?
The Avis rental-car company is located at 44 Rue de Lausanne in the heart of Geneva. Robert stormed into the office and approached a woman behind the desk.