Chapter Eleven

DAY THREE

Bern, Wednesday, October 17th

Bern was one of Robert’s favourite cities. It was an elegant town, filled with lovely monuments and beautiful old stone buildings dating back to the eighteenth century. It was the capital of Switzerland and one of its most prosperous cities, and Robert wondered whether the fact that the street cars were green had anything to do with the colour of money. He had found that the Berners were more easy-going than the citizens from other parts of Switzerland. They moved more deliberately, spoke more slowly, and were generally calmer. He had worked in Bern several times in the past with the Swiss Secret Service, operating out of their headquarters at Waisenhausplatz. He had friends there who could have been helpful, but his instructions were clear. Puzzling, but clear.

It took fifteen phone calls for Robert to locate the garage that towed the photographer’s car. It was a small garage located on Fribourgstrasse, and the mechanic, Fritz Mandel, was also the owner. Mandel appeared to be in his late forties, with a gaunt, acne-pitted face, a thin body, and an enormous beer belly. He was working down in the pit of the grease rack when Robert arrived.

“Good afternoon,” Robert called.

Mandel looked up. “Guten Tag. What can I do for you?”

“I’m interested in a car you towed in Sunday.”

“Just a minute till I finish this up.”

Ten minutes later, Mandel climbed out of the pit and wiped his oily hands on a filthy cloth.

“You’re the one who called this morning. Was there some complaint about that tow job?” Mandel asked. “I’m not responsible for …”

“No,” Robert reassured him. “Not at all. I’m conducting a survey and I’m interested in the driver of the car.”

“Come into the office.”

The two men went into the small office and Mandel opened a file cabinet. “Last Sunday, you said?”

“That’s right.”

Mandel took out a card. “Ja. That was the Arschficker who took our picture in front of that UFO.”

Robert’s palms felt suddenly moist. “You saw the UFO?”

“Ja. I almost brachte aus.”

“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 colours. 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.

“Ja. The Renault. It had an oil leak, and the bearings burned out. The tow job cost a hundred and twenty-five francs. I charge double on Sundays.”

“Did the driver pay by cheque or credit card?”

“I don’t take cheques 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 licence 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 licence 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, It looks like we have a fucking UFO with two dead aliens on our hands. Then why had General Hilliard lied to him when he knew Robert would discover that it was a flying saucer that had crashed?

There could only be one explanation, and Robert felt a sudden, cold chill.

Chapter Twelve

The huge mothership floated noiselessly through dark space, seemingly motionless, travelling at 22,000 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 analysed the chemical components of the images that appeared. The atmosphere surrounding the land masses they passed over 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. The Amazon rain forest was a huge, barren crater, where the trees had been stripped. 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, spewing new poisons into the atmosphere.

The aliens communicated by mental telepathy.

Nothing has changed with the Earthlings.

It is a pity. They have learned nothing.

We will teach them.

Have you tried to reach the others?

Yes. Something is wrong. There is no reply.

You must keep trying. We must find the ship.

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 would like to report that you are a lying sonofabitch. “About that weather balloon, General … it seems to have turned out to be a UFO.” He waited.

“Yes, I know. There were important security reasons why I couldn’t tell you everything earlier.”

Bureaucratic double-talk. There was a small silence.

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 intend to destroy us.”

He felt a shock go through him. “Destroy us?”

“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 staged a radio broadcast called War of the Worlds, about aliens invading the earth. Within minutes, there was panic in cities all over America. An 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.”