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several years, both officially and unofficially depending on who was in charge of the agency at the time and who was in the White House. The current Director of the DIA was Lieutenant General J. F. Nellis, a former United States Air Force officer who had been appointed DNI by the current president
    Their task was to investigate cases the rest of the intelligence community had rejected as unworkable. The connection to a high level agency like the DIA had come from a former colleague of Ethan’s named Douglas Jarvis. The old man had once been captain of a United States Rifle Platoon and Ethan’s senior officer from his time with the Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their friendship, cemented during Operation Iraqi Freedom and later, when Ethan had resigned his commission and been embedded with Jarvis’s men as a journalist, had continued into their unusual and discreet accord with the DIA where Jarvis continued to serve his country.
    Since joining the agency they had completed nine investigations, involving everything from alien remains excavated from ancient cities around the world, free energy devices, technology so advanced it had allowed terrorists to infiltrate the minds of key government and military figures, and alien technology that had crash–landed deep inside the Antarctic. It had been there that Agent Hannah Ford had lost her life, the victim of an extremely well equipped rogue organization that operated entirely outside the US Government.
    The SUV reached the DIA building within twenty minutes, blue lights allowing them to bypass the traffic already building up around the Potomac and Capitol Hill. Ethan got out and followed Nicola to a security check point inside the entrance to the Defense Intelligence Agency where a pass was clipped to her shirt by a security guard.
    The DIA’s south wing entrance, in front of which was a fountain before perfectly manicured lawns, made up only a tiny part of the vast complex. Huge, silvery buildings with mirrored windows contained some of the most sensitive intelligence gathering equipment in the world, including vast 24/7 Watch Centers manned by agents monitoring events across the entire globe.
    Lopez led the way through a barrage of security measures, enduring full X–Rays and pat down searches. They finally passed through the checks in time for Jarvis to meet them in the main foyer of the building, the polished tile floor emblazoned with a large DIA emblem in the manner of all the intelligence agencies.
    ‘Welcome back,’ Jarvis greeted them, his hands in the pockets of his dark blue pants, his white hair stark against his suit and shirt, all a similar shade of blue. ‘How are you holding up, Ethan?’
    ‘I’m fine,’ Ethan replied without elaborating. ‘Where’s the fire?’
    ‘Come with me,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’ll show you.’
    Ethan followed him as large numbers of civilian staff strode this way and that through the building. Surprisingly, for a highly secretive intelligence agency, two thirds of the DIA’s seventeen thousand employees were civilian, which allowed selected freelance operatives to act in concert with official employees like Jarvis. Represented in some one hundred forty countries and with its own Clandestine Service, to which Ethan and Nicola were now attached, the agency suffered only from a lack of influence in law enforcement, often forcing Ethan and Nicola to work alongside police and federal law agencies around the country who were less than inclined to open up to direct interference from such a clandestine agency.
    Jarvis led the way into the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Research and Intelligence Engineering Section , otherwise known as ARIES.
    Created to support the work of other agencies such as the NSA, CIA and DARPA, ARIES was tasked with emulating the technology of other nations that had been uncovered by overt overseas operations, for the purpose of finding effective defenses against those technologies. In a world