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change. Back in Kansas that night in July, | told myself that | was seeing an illusion, something that if | wished real hard, didn't have to exist for me. Then, after | went to the White House and saw all the National Security Council memos describing the "incident" and talking about the "package" and the "goods, "| knew that the strange figure I'd seen floating in liquid in a casket within a casket at Fort Riley wasn't just a bad dream | could forget about. Nor could | forget about the radar anomalies at the Red Canyon missile range or the strange alerts over Ramstein air base in West Germany. | only hoped all of it would never catch up with me again and | could go through the rest of my army career in some kind of peace. But it was not to be. There, mangled like somebody else's junk, were the trinkets | knew would involve me in something deeper than | had ever wanted. Whatever else | had to do in this life, here was a job that would change it all. You know how in the movies when Bud Abbott would open a closet, see the dead body hanging there, close the closet door, open it up again, and find the body gone? That's what | actually did with the file cabinet. Nobody was there to see me, or so | believed, so | opened it, closed it, opened it again. But this was no movie and the stuff was still there. So here it was, some of the material they'd recovered from Roswell. And now, just like a bad penny, it turned up again. | heard footsteps outside my door and caught my breath. There were always sounds in the Pentagon at night because the building was never empty. Somewhere, in some office, in parts of the building most people don't even know about, some group is planning for a war we hope we will never fight. Therefore, more than any other building except for the White House, the Pentagon is a place where someone is always walking around after something. "That's why | gave you this, Phil, " he said, but he wasn't laughing, wasn't even smiling. "You know how valuable this property is? You know what any of the other agencies would do to get this into their hands?" "They probably want to kill you anyway, but this makes them even more rabid. The air force wants it because they think it belongs to them. The navy wants it because they want anything the air force wants. The CIA wants it so they can give it to the Russians. " "What do you want me to do, General?" | asked. | couldn't figure out what he was thinking unless he thought | should just bury the stuff and leave it at that. "| need a plan from you, " he said. "Not simply what this property is, but what we can do with it. Something that keeps it out of play until we know what we have and what use we can make of it." answer. "The same people who lost Korea for us and who you had to fight over at the White House, " he said. "You know exactly who | mean. We got to keep whatever's valuable here from falling into the wrong hands because as sure as we're standing in this Pentagon, it'll find its way right to the Kremlin. " There were people floating around Washington right at that very moment who, even out of the most well meaning intentions they could muster, would have shipped this Roswell file over to Russia while patting President Kennedy on the back and congratulating him for contributing to world peace. Just as there were people who would have cut Trudeau's and my throat and left us right on the rug to bleed to death while they packed that file away. Either way, Trudeau didn't have to quote me chapter and verse to explain that he was handing me one of the most important assignments | would ever receive from him. He was giving me the keys to a whole new kingdom, but neither he nor | knew what in the world we could do with this stuff, short of keeping it out of the hands of the Russians. At the very least, that was a start. "Then that's your job right away. What do we have? Anything usable here? Put together people you can trust from the specialists we have and go over the contacts at our defense contractor lists. And this is only part of the property we have. There's some more of it downstairs in the file basement that the other intelligence agencies don't know anything about. Came here from New Mexico instead of going out to Ohio. Don't ask me why. It's coming up to you right now in boxes. Just put everything together, take some time, and evaluate this for me. " 19 General Trudeau peeked his head around the door. "Look inside?" he asked. "What'd you do to me, General?" | said. "| thought we were friends. " "They'd probably kill me, "| said. This had all the makings of a plot, pure and simple. "Look, who's our biggest problem?" | asked, but it was a proforma question because | already knew the "We have to know what we have first, "| said.