The Extinction Code (9 page)

‘Okay,’ Ethan said, ‘then we need to move quickly. The last thing Wilms told us was that a new player had approached Majestic Twelve with a proposal. He died before giving us a name, but what about this place called Varginha? Did you learn anything about it?’

‘Varginha, Brazil,’ Hellerman said. ‘Well, what do
you
know about it?’

‘It’s probably hot,’ Ethan offered, ‘but I’ve never heard of it.’

Lopez also shrugged and shook her head. Jarvis did not seem surprised, and instead picked up a remote and activated a screen on the wall nearby. Ethan turned to see what looked like news reports coming out of the region, some of the footage blurry and indistinct.

‘What are we looking at?’ Lopez asked.

‘A news report, one of several, broadcast in 1996,’ Jarvis explained. ‘The media went into a frenzy down there after three young girls, sisters Liliane and Valquiria Fatima Silva, and their friend Katia Andrade Xavier, reported the discovery of an injured alien creature hiding in backstreets in the town. They said that they had seen the “devil”, a biped about five feet tall with a large head and very thin body, with what they described as V–shaped feet, brown skin and large red eyes. It seemed unsteady and the girls assumed it was injured or sick. Nobody took much notice until a half dozen other people saw the same creature and the police got involved.’

‘And what happened then?’ Ethan asked.

‘That’s when things got real interesting.’

‘I hate it when he says that,’ Lopez murmured.

Jarvis gestured to the screen, which was showing numerous news reports in Spanish, scenes of frightened civilians, police vehicles and cordons, news crews being denied access to areas of woodland and what looked to Ethan like a hospital.

‘The police showed up and one or two of the officers involved got a look at whatever it was that had spooked the girls,’ Jarvis explained. ‘They got all riled up about it too, and the government rolled out some big wheels to take a look and started cordoning off sections of the city. Nothing much happened after that, and the police reported that the girls must have encountered a local homeless man nicknamed “
Mudinho
” who was known to the police and who often squatted in doorways, never washed himself and so on.’

‘V–shaped feet and large red eyes?’ Lopez replied. ‘Could three girls have all made the same mistake?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘Then, two days later another creature was reported as being found near or on a road just outside the city, and a convoy of military trucks and personnel were despatched to find it. At the same time the owners of a local farm, named Oralina and Eurico de Freitas, reported a large UFO hovering over their land.’

‘Mass hysteria,’ Ethan figured, ‘maybe even mass hallucination created by the news reports and rumors?

‘Again, that’s a possibility,’ Jarvis agreed, ‘but it’s what happened
after
these events died down that’s got our interest. A third sighting of a suspected alien creature was reported from a local zoo, and in the aftermath of the sighting three of the animals in the zoo in the immediate vicinity of the sighting mysteriously died.’

‘Coincidence,’ Lopez suggested.

‘Gunshots were heard that night from the local area where military vehicles were operating, and at least one police officer was said to have had direct contact with an unknown species of animal out in the woods. One month later that officer, a man named Marco Eli Chereze, died in hospital from an unknown disease.’

Ethan’s interest was sparked, and he saw an image of the young officer appear on the screen.

‘He was just twenty three years old,’ Jarvis went on. ‘An expert physician was assigned to treat him, a man named Dr Cesario L. Furtado, who confided later that he had never seen an illness like it. The victim was treated at Bom Pastor Hospital before being transferred to the hospital Regional Do Sul de Minas, where he died on February fifteenth, 1996. The incident itself became brief global news, with a piece written about it in the
Wall Street Journal
and a book by Doctor Roger Leir,
Des Extraterrestres captures a Varginha en Brazil
, said by many to recount what was a “New Roswell” in UFO history.’

‘So what’s the big deal?’ Lopez asked. ‘Was he killed by an extra–terrestrial, if there ever was one, or did the military commit some mistake and decide to silence him in order to cover it up?’

‘That’s what we’re interested in,’ Jarvis said, ‘because the police officer’s family fought for information but were denied an independent autopsy. Whatever happened at Varginha, the Brazilian government went to great lengths to cover it up.’

‘They denied an autopsy?’ Ethan echoed in amazement. ‘Even after all the media hype around the incident?’

Jarvis gestured to the screen, which now bore images of heavily redacted military reports that Ethan assumed had been obtained by agents from beneath the noses of the Brazilian military and police.

‘The police superintendent who was in charge of the police presence on the night the incident occurred requested to be present at the autopsy, on behalf of the family of Marco Chereze. He was denied, in direct contravention of the laws of the Nation. It was only a year later that the Military Police, bombarded with public outcry over the cover up, were forced to open up some of the files they had created, which is essentially what you’re seeing here on the screen.’

Lopez moved closer to the screen, her eyes scanning the documents.

‘It says that Chereze died of a generalized infection, but it doesn’t give any details.’

‘And that’s the problem,’ Jarvis said. ‘This thing, whatever it was, killed him within a month and yet there was no cause of death on the certificate. There is no mention of the symptoms he suffered, no details of those symptoms escalating in any way: it just says he died of an infection and that’s it.’

‘So they don’t have a clue what killed him,’ Ethan said. ‘What about the family, anything from them?’

‘Nothing,’ Jarvis replied. ‘The victim’s sister, a Marta Antonia Tavares, visited the hospital frequently while Chereze was still alive but was always denied access to her brother and was repeatedly denied access to both his medical records and even to the doctors who were treating him.’

‘And all of this happened as a result of a close encounter of the third kind that supposedly didn’t happen?’ Lopez asked.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Jarvis replied. ‘You don’t cover something up if there’s nothing there to cover up. The Military Police claimed that Chereze wasn’t on duty that night, among various other claims that were quickly proven false by the local media, not to mention Chereze’s own family who waved him off to work that evening. Before long, the whole independent investigation ground to a halt when key witnesses began recounting their statements and refused to talk to reporters.’

‘Government sanctioned cover–up,’ Lopez said, ‘we’ve seen that before.’

‘Death threats were made,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘Only people who have since grown too old to care anymore are willing to speak on the record about what happened, and what few records there are remain consistent and independently verifiable. The Policeman Marco Eli Chereze was confronted by a biped of some kind and came into close contact with it, and that contact killed him within weeks.’

‘Again, why are we here?’ Lopez asked. ‘This all happened decades ago, the trail would have long ago run cold.’

Jarvis’s normally composed features seemed to Ethan to become somewhat pale, taut with concern. He pressed a button on the remote and the screen changed to an image of some kind of cave system.

‘What do you know about the collapse of bat colonies across the United States?’

Ethan blinked. ‘Well, nothing?’

‘Or the dramatic decline in pollenating insects, such as the common bee?’ Jarvis tried again.

‘Aren’t they being killed off by some kind of fungus?’ Lopez asked. ‘A bee disease?’

‘Partly,’ Jarvis agreed, ‘although the companies that manufacture chemical pesticides like to play down the correlation between pesticide use and bee decline. What about the dramatic acidification of ocean water, the unprecedented decline in amphibians and the disappearance of more species in the last fifty years than in the preceding five thousand?’

‘You’re talking about climate change, right?’ Lopez hazarded.

‘No,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’m talking about what’s now being described by science as the Holocene Extinction.’

‘That doesn’t sound so good,’ Lopez said.

‘It isn’t,’ Jarvis replied as he stepped away from the screen.

Hellerman took his cue from Jarvis.

‘The Holocene extinction, sometimes referred to as the Sixth extinction, describes the decline of global species during the present Holocene epoch that began around ten thousand years ago in the wake of the last Ice Age. The large number of extinctions span countless plants and mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods. According to the species–area theory and based on upper–bound estimating, the present rate of extinction may be up to a hundred forty thousand species per year, which makes it the greatest loss of biodiversity since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.’

‘Since the what?’ Lopez asked.

‘The K–T event, as it was known,’ Hellerman explained, ‘the bolid impactor that killed off the dinosaurs.’

Ethan began to pick up the threads of connections between dinosaurs and the Varghina Event of 1996.

‘Wait one,’ he said. ‘Are you suggesting that what happened in Brazil all those years ago might have something to do with this extinction event?’

Hellerman nodded.

‘You ever read about the
Conquistadores
and their conquering of South America?’

‘Sure,’ Lopez said. ‘They walked right into the Inca and Aztec Empires and wiped them out.’

‘That’s right,’ Hellerman agreed, ‘but they didn’t do it using weapons in the classical sense. In fact, what they really did was get lucky by having smallpox and influenza.’

‘Wow, that does sound lucky.’

‘It was as if you were a tiny force of perhaps a hundred starving men, far from home, facing hundreds of thousands of heavily armed warriors in their native land,’ Hellerman explained. ‘The native Americans had no immunity to the diseases carried by the
Conquistadores
. When Cortez and the others landed, they inadvertently infected the native populations with diseases that ravaged them as effectively as any weapon of war. The Spaniards did not destroy the ancient American civilizations by courage in battle: they made them sick in huge numbers, sufficient that they were able to win battles with massively inferior numbers.’

‘And you think that what’s happening now is a similar thing?’ Lopez asked. ‘That all those species going extinct is being caused by some kind of sickness?’

‘Not exactly,’ Hellerman cautioned her. ‘The Holocene is unique in that it has seen the disappearance of large land animals known as megafauna, starting around ten thousand years ago, which was about when mankind really got going. Megafauna outside of the African continent that didn’t evolve alongside humans were massively vulnerable to predation by early humans and many died out shortly after we began spreading across the Earth. It’s been suggested that the extinction of the mammoths, whose habits had maintained grasslands, resulted in the growth of major forests and that the resulting forest fires may have resulted in early human–induced climate change.’

‘So we’re the bad guys again,’ Ethan said.

‘We were just another species struggling for survival back then,’ Hellerman said. ‘We did what we had to do, but now there are seven billion of us. Some believe that anthropogenic extinctions may have begun as early as when the first modern humans spread out of Africa up to two hundred thousand years ago, which is supported by rapid mega–faunal extinction following human colonization in Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar. We’re a global super predator, Ethan, and our reach as a species that preys on other apex–predators is unprecedented. Extinctions of species have occurred on every land mass and ocean with a human presence, with overfishing, ocean acidification and the amphibian crisis being a few examples of an almost universal decline of biodiversity.’

‘What about this virus then?’ Lopez asked, somewhat confused. ‘How does that play into things?’

Hellerman took the remote from Jarvis and switched the screen to a new image, this time of the caves once more, in which were millions of bats.

‘White nose syndrome,’ he said. ‘It’s claimed between six and seven million bats, with the decline in some cave systems exceeding ninety per cent, a truly pandemic and dangerous disease. The disease is caused by a fungus,
Pseudogymnoascus destructans
, to which the bats have no natural immunity. While this in itself is bad for bats, the wider implications are many and varied. The extinction of so many bat species has resulted in the Forest Service estimating that the die off could mean that two and a half million pounds in weight of insects wouldn’t be eaten, resulting in wide ranging crop destruction in New England alone, with bats saving farmers in the United States some three billion dollars annually in pest control measures, not to mention bats’ crucial pollination and seed dispersal habits that further support ecological balance.’

‘You’re talking about the butterfly effect, right?’ Ethan said. ‘That the knock on effects of one event can be blown out of proportion as they spread.’

‘Pretty much,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘The predicted effects of all of this are alarming, and they share similar features with other outbreaks such as Colony Collapse Disorder, the abrupt disappearance of all western honey bee colonies due to an unknown disease, and
chytridiomycosis
, another fungal disease linked to the worldwide decline in amphibious species. These animals are all known as “sentinel species”, creatures that underpin the foundation of natural eco–systems around the world. If they go, we all go in an extinction event, and that’s what’s so frightening about what’s happening: it doesn’t take a meteorite impact to wipe out all life on earth. If we lose insects and bees, within years everything will die out.’