Walker shows me her hands, then very slowly reaches into the front pocket of her FBI-issue windbreaker. She removes a stuffed Manila folder, rolled-up and rubber-banded. She opens it up, reaches inside and pulls out a Polaroid photograph. Walker hands it to me and I find myself examining a close-up of a dead Agent Purdy – or what’s left of him. Half his face is melted away, disintegrated into ash on the concrete underneath him.
‘I thought you said it was a heart attack,’ I say.
‘It was,’ Walker replies. ‘Thing is, afterward, Purdy started to dissolve away. Just like one of the Mogadorians.’
I shake my head. ‘What does that mean? Why?’
‘He’d been getting treatments,’ Walker says. ‘Augmentations, the Mogs call them. Most of the senior MogPro people have been getting them for years.’
The term ‘MogPro’ rings a bell from They Walk Among Us, but I don’t know how this all adds up with the augmentations Adam told us about.
‘Back up,’ I tell her. ‘Start at the beginning.’
Walker self-consciously touches her streak of gray hair and for a moment I wonder if she’s having second thoughts about this confession. But then she hands me the folder she’s been clutching, meeting my eyes.
‘First contact was ten years ago,’ she says. ‘The Mogadorians claimed they were hunting fugitives. They wanted to use our law-enforcement network, have free rein to move around the country, and in exchange they’d provide us with weapons and technology. I was just out of the academy when all this happened so I obviously wasn’t invited to any meetings with the aliens. I guess no one wanted to piss them off or turn down weapons more powerful than any we’d ever seen, because our government caved real quick. The director of the bureau himself was in on the negotiations. This was before he got promoted. Might’ve been why he got promoted, in fact.’
‘Let me guess,’ I say, remembering the name from Mark’s website. ‘The old director was Bud Sanderson. Now secretary of defense.’
Walker looks momentarily impressed. ‘Right. You connect the dots, you’ll find a lot of people who negotiated with the Mogs ten years ago have done real well for themselves since.’
‘What about the president?’ Six asks.
‘That guy?’ Walker snorts. ‘Small fish. The ones who get elected, who give speeches on TV – they’re just glorified celebrities. The real power’s with the people who get appointed, who work behind the scenes. The ones you’ve never heard of. They’re who the Mogs wanted and that’s who they’ve kept around.’
‘He’s still the president,’ Six counters. ‘Why doesn’t he do something?’
‘Because he’s kept in the dark,’ Walker says. ‘And anyway, the VP is a MogPro guy. When the time comes, the president will either go along with the Mogs, or he’ll get removed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, holding up my hands. ‘What the hell is MogPro?’
‘Mogadorian Progress,’ Walker explains. ‘It’s what they’re calling the, quote, intersection of our two species, unquote.’
‘You know, if you ever want a second career, I know a website you could write for,’ I tell Walker as I start paging through the documents in her file. There are specifications for Mogadorian blasters, transcripts of conversations between politicians, pictures of important-looking government guys shaking hands with Mogs in officer uniforms. It’s the kind of document dump a site like They Walk Among Us would kill for.
Actually, a lot of this stuff was already on Mark’s website. Could Walker have been the one feeding him information?
‘So your boss sold out humanity for some upgraded weapons?’ Six asks, leaning over the back of the couch to glare at Walker.
‘That sums it up. We weren’t the only country to sign up either,’ Walker continues, her tone bitter. ‘And they knew how to keep us on the hook, too. After the weapons, they started promising medical advances. Genetic augmentation, they called it. Claimed they could cure everything from the flu to cancer. They were basically promising immortality.’
I look up from the file, stopping at a picture of a soldier with a rolled-up sleeve, the veins on his forearm blackened as if his blood had turned to soot.
‘How’s that working out?’ I ask, tapping the photo.
Walker cranes her neck to look at the picture, then locks eyes with me. ‘What you’re looking at is one week’s withdrawal from Mogadorian genetic injections. That’s how it’s working out.’
I show the photo to Six and she shakes her head in disgust.
‘So basically they’re killing you slowly,’ Six says. ‘Or turning you into Mogs.’
‘We didn’t know what we were getting into,’ Walker says. ‘Seeing Purdy disintegrate like that, though … it opened some eyes. The Mogs aren’t saviors. They’re turning us into something inhuman.’
‘And yet you guys are still dealing with them, aren’t you?’ I reply. ‘I heard there’s people trying to go public on some captured Mogadorians, but someone’s squashing the story.’
Walker nods. ‘The Mogs claim their genetic augmentations will only get better with time. A lot of the good old boys in Washington want to stick it out and stay the course. They’ve never seen a human being disintegrate, I guess. Guys like Sanderson and some of the other high-ranking MogPro cronies, they’ve already started receiving more advanced treatments. All the Mogs want in exchange is our continued cooperation.’