The Mars Project by Julie Steimle (i can read with my eyes shut TXT) 📕

But Darren chuckled over it, knowing that indeed Zormna’s bodyguard was definitely not her boyfriend. They barely liked each other.

Then he went inside the gate, cross the track to go into the stadium to sit while keeping guard himself. He knew the look of warning Jeff gave him was also asking him to keep an eye on Zormna as well. Because he knew Darren would willingly do it. After all, Jeff could not be with Zormna all the time.

Both Sam and Adam looked at Darren one last time before both decided to head home themselves. Though, as they did, Sam noticed a dark blue sedan on the curb. And inside were two men watching the activity in the football field—watching her.

*

“He’s here, Mr. Sicamore,” a young male secretary said, leaning in the door.

The five-nine, dark-haired head of the project raised his head and nodded. “Send him to the briefing room, Marc. I need to think for a while.”

He looked back down at the file in his hands, staring at the pages upon pages of data they had gathered on Zormna and the new mystery—that boy she called Jafarr. He had been examining and reexamining every document and every fact they knew about her and that boy. Zormna’s school records were laid out rather neatly. According to it, she truly had once attended an Irish military academy and was even raised there. The school held all her records up from when she was five years old to when she was said to have left. But because this was definitely a lie, they had investigated this academy and all it connections to see if it was a fake. But the academy was legitimate and long established. However, their FBI investigators had not found the place until that summer, or the lead to it. Where did that girl get such an alibi all of a sudden? And why did she bother when she must have already known they knew what she was? And, more importantly, who was that boy? Was he really named Jafarr or was that a code for something? Was he really from Missouri, as his paper trail says he was? Or was he as they suspected him, from the same place Zormna came from? All these questions swamped Agent Sicamore, and he felt he was drowning in a flood of uncertainty.

A head peeked in the room.

“They’re waiting sir,” the secretary said.

Mr. Sicamore nodded. “Thanks, Marc.”

He stood up and gathered up all the files into the folder he had lying underneath it. Marc, the secretary, still stood in the doorway.

“What is it, Marc?” the FBI agent said, looking up.

“I know this project is high priority and everything, but don’t you think this guy you pulled in is a bit strange?” Marc asked.

Agent Sicamore smiled with a nod. “He is, but I think that’s what you get when you spend most of your time in the dark. He is making excellent progress, for that matter,” he said, patting his secretary on the shoulder, “and that is all I am allowed to let you know.”

Marc nodded with a small apologetic grin. “I know sir. It’s just that you haven’t seemed yourself lately, and I hate to see this work destroy you.”

The agent nodded. “It’s ok, Marc. Nothing I can’t handle.”

The secretary nodded again and stepped out of the way. Mr. Sicamore passed through the door, holding the file tightly in his hands. They walked together down the stark hall to the locked door conference room at the end, parting once Marc knocked at the door then handed him the extra stack of papers.

“Don’t overdo yourself,” Marc said in parting.

Agent Sicamore nodded.

The door opened a crack. Then it opened wider once Marc had gone down the hall. Agent Sicamore slipped into the darkened room where he strode over to his seat. He sat down quickly.

“Glad you could join us, Mr. Sicamore,” said a voice in the darkness. “Agent Simms, if you would.”

A light turned on in an overhead projector. At the end of the room, the bright screen blinded them with schematics. “Our satellite should be reaching Martian space within the next few hours. So far we have had no contact with any ships or interference.”

A voice cleared on the left of the projector. “Uh, sir?”

“Yes, Agent Keane?” the directing voice responded.

“Yes, sir, but uh, I think I need to know why we sent a spy satellite to Mars again. NASA already has so many in orbit,” the agent asked.

The deep voice, sounding a degree exhausted by this interruption, sighed. “According to Agent Sicamore and his team, they have discovered living breathing aliens among us; humanoid and nearly identical to our kind. And they have possibly uncovered a plot to conquer the Earth.”

“As inane as this might sound to the rest of you—but doesn’t this seem all too cliché?” Agent Keane asked.

Mr. Sicamore cleared his throat and leaned nearer to the man as he said, “I suppose it does sound like an old nineteen-fifties comic book. But I assure you we have found humans that, all otherwise left unexplained, have come from Mars.”

Agent Keane laughed. “Ok, ok. I realize that you have been working on this project long, but humor me, a new timer. How do you know they are from Mars?”

The room hushed. All the older agents on the project glanced at one another.

Agent Simms spoke up. “The radio broadcast. You read the file on it?”

The man nodded in the darkness. “Yes.”

“Then you know the signal came from Mars to that woman’s house,” Simms said.

Shaking his head incredulously, Agent Keane smirked. “I’m sorry, but I find that file a…hm…bit sketchy in relation to what we are discussing now. Are you sure that woman wasn’t simply crazy, sending signals toward Mars?”

“The same radio sent another message to Mars after her death, two years later when her ‘niece’ arrived,” Agent Simms concluded.

Chuckling, “You mean that little girl, Zormna Clendar, don’t you?” Agent Keane stood up in the darkness, not so much inclined to leave but in protest. “I’m sorry. I just can’t believe that this girl is a Martian, let alone a threat. I mean…I’ve watched her. She is…a gorgeous conundrum, sure. But in my investigation thus far, and from what I’ve read, psychologically—with her traumatized background and obvious military school history, which you yourselves have a record of and have investigated yourselves in Ireland as legitimate…. Well, I just can’t believe that she’s an alien from another planet.”

“No, no,” Mr. Sicamore interrupted, waving his hand. “We’re not thinking alien from another planet, just human from another planet.”

The room went immediately silent. Sicamore could feel their uneasy gazes on him. This wasn’t an old argument, but it was a pertinent one he had been trying to bring up recently.

“What do you mean, Sicamore?” another voice broke in.

“I mean we discovered that they are completely human as far as DNA shows. I think they’re just another breed of human, another race. They are just so close to Caucasian that they can blend in easily. The fact is, they aren’t even a different species.” Sicamore paused. “But they are from another world.”

“Come on…” Agent Keane asked more seriously. “Human but from another world? Is that even genetically possible?”

“It is if our ancestors are not in fact from this world,” Agent Sicamore said.

Several of those in the room huffed while others gasped.

“Look, it is just a theory. What I’m saying we don’t know how long they have been here.” Clearing his throat, Agent Sicamore continued, “The thing is, that aside, they aren’t the only ones of their kind we have come across. If you read the file you would know that the girl’s great aunt, her benefactor, was murdered not long after we had interrogated her.”

Agent Keane nodded and folded his arms. “The coroner reports say it was a drug overdose. And she was known as mentally unstable.”

Mr. Sicamore shook his head. “Asiah Clendar did not take any medication. None was found in her home, and her doctor said she refused to take anything more than herbal supplements. She took no over-the-counter medicine at all. And she was seeking homeopathic remedies for her obesity. But all the same, she was found overdosed on laced aspirin. Besides never using aspirin, it was laced with crystal meth.”

“With what?” In disbelief, Agent Keane asked, “How?”

Those agents in the room all murmured and shook their heads.

“Read the files again, Agent Keane. You should already know this,” Agent Simms said plainly.

The man sighed with a roll of his eyes. He had found the files rather dull. He just didn’t buy into the idea that there were aliens, or ‘humans’ as Agent Sicamore insisted, on other planets. Fact was, he had originally thought the FBI had transferred him to the project to keep the whole thing from blowing up in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s face. Now he realized that wasn’t exactly so.

Agent Keane knew about the downward spiral Mr. James Sicamore had taken since he had met that woman known as the crazy lady of Hayes Street. Everyone in the main Bureau had thought he was nuts for believing her Martian stories, and they would have cancelled the project if it weren’t for the increasing evidence Sicamore had found to support his theory. His biggest and best was how the old woman had died. She was obviously murdered, and it definitely had not been the FBI who had done it. But there had been zero clues as to who had perpetrated the crime. That is, until Zormna Clendar showed up. If Zormna Clendar had not used her great aunt’s weird science projects stashed in a room disguised as a pile of junk to send a radio broadcast to Mars, it would have been over, because that was how they had found that girl.

And even then, Zormna Clendar would have been dismissed as a weird (yet striking) Irish immigrant had she not been so militaristic in her behavior. The FBI had also found her keen attention to their presence unsettling. And as paranoid is as paranoid does, they kept watching her. Never mind that Zormna continued to insist that she was from Ireland and openly accepted that her great aunt was crazy. Because on top of that, they had noticed other things…weird writing on Zormna’s homework and textbooks, which they could not decipher. And the girl occasionally cursed in a dialect they just could not identify at all. Even the bizarre mark branded into her shoulder raised up questions with few answers. Yet nothing had been certain about Zormna Clendar until after they had picked her up the day of the school Olympics for what had originally intended to be a very quiet interrogation. She ought to have gone in and out of their care without incident, like her great aunt had. But Zormna had fought them, admirably for a solider. And they had to resort to tranquilizers and sodium pentothal to extract the truth from her. And the truth was, she did believe she was from Mars—even though she had publicly denied the idea as lunatic and had shunned the space-obsessed nut, Darren. And worse, she really was part of a military—and not just some private Irish school.

So why had they brought in Agent Steve Keane? A specialist in covert ops? He knew it once he entered the office a week ago that he wasn’t there to clear out the kooks, though he had originally thought he was there to debunk everything. He could see Zormna was already being trailed by some of the best agents at job. It was because of Jeff Streigle, the boy with the almost perfect alibi and apparently amazing connections to something bigger, that he had been brought in.

The agent closed his eyes and listened to the rest of the briefing. Most of it was to bring everyone up to speed. Yet as the agents rehashed what they had dug out of those two teenagers under sodium pentothal,