Instinctively, she knew Overproject Excalibur was part of the iceberg hitherto hidden from her and the rest of humankind.
Inside the office suite, she devoted twenty minutes to methodically riffling through the contents of the file cabinets. Most of the paperwork meant very little—requisition forms, duty rosters, personnel records. Still, a vague picture of the purpose of the redoubt emerged. One name figured prominently in memo headings and signatures, a Dr. Connaught O’Brien.
Mildred frowned, turning the name over in her mind. A faint bell of recognition chimed in the recesses of her memory.
In one drawer, she found a square leather packet. It was imprinted with a symbol that was familiar, but slightly different from what she had seen before.
It was a red triangle with three vertical lines enclosed within it. She and her friends had encountered a similar symbol a few months before when they’d jumped into a subterranean installation in Dulce, New Mexico. There, however, the lines had been horizontal. These resembled stylized, round-topped daggers.
The packet’s flap was sealed with a tiny combination lock. Rather than waste time in a trial-and-error process to find the proper sequence, she took a penknife from a pocket and sawed through the leather. She tugged out a sheaf of papers bound in booklet form and a multimedia compact disk in a slip-sleeve. The first page of the papers bore the heading: “Overproject Excalibur. Mission Invictus. Alpha Subject Circumscription. Final report prepared by Dr. C. O’Brien.”
Most of the pages of the booklet were full of technical terms, schematics and diagrams. The last half held color video-scanned images. The photographs were of two dark-haired babies, about three months old, a boy and a girl. The boy looked unusually somber. The girl, on the other hand, grinned gummily and waved pudgy hands.
Mildred wanted to smile, but she couldn’t quite bring it off. The children were certainly beautiful, but their big eyes possessed no pupils, irises or whites. Their eyes were a solid bloodred.
She flipped through the photo section, noting that after a certain point, there were no more pictures of the little girl. There were, however, many of the boy child, obviously encompassing a number of years. It was as if the photographer, whoever he or she had been, had devoted inestimable hours to capturing every month of the youth’s life on film.
When the pictures depicted the boy in what appeared to be his teenage years, their quality subtly changed. Mildred found a series of head-and-shoulder shots. The youth’s smooth forehead was unusually high, his nose aquiline. His mouth was long, with a full underlip. His raven’s-wing black hair was straight and cut short, combed back from a pronounced widow’s peak. His skin was deeply tanned. Only the crimson hue of his eyes marred the classical perfection of his face.
Several photos showed the boy striking poses, wearing only white briefs. He stood with his hands on his hips, or his arms raised to show off bulging biceps and swelling pectorals. The intent seemed almost pornographic.
When Mildred saw the last photograph, she amended that—it was pornographic. The boy looked to be about sixteen years old. He leaned against a blank wall, hands clasped casually behind his back, one leg slightly bent at the knee. He held his head tilted at an arrogant angle, and a slight, superior smile creased his lips. He was in a high state of sexual arousal, and his erection seemed as arrogant as the position of his head.
She slapped the booklet shut, wondering what possible scientific purpose the last few photographs had served and who had taken them—or worse, who had authorized them.
Picking up the CD, Mildred went from one comp console to the other, flipping their power switches. She tried three before a monitor screen lit up and flashed to flickering life. Sitting down before it, she inserted the disk into the drive port, and the red triangle symbol appeared. Beneath it a date appeared: 1/18/08. Absently, she noted the date as being almost exactly seven years to the day after the first mushroom cloud had swallowed Washington, D.C.
A colorless male voice spoke. “Mission Invictus update. Final report. Authorized personnel only. MJ-Ultra Clearance required.”