Sidney Sheldon’s "The End of the World," Summary

The spy thriller changes the rules. The plot centers on a massive government conspiracy surrounding the crash of a flying saucer near the Swiss Alpine village of Uetendorf, where terrified tourists unexpectedly discover the bodies of two dead alien pilots. The intelligence services force their own operative to search for witnesses and then physically eliminate each witness. Sheldon completed this book in 1991, drawing on legends about UFO projects and the mysterious deaths of European engineers.

Order from Fort Meade

Early one morning, Naval Intelligence Officer Robert Bellamy receives a call to the National Security Agency headquarters. The order comes from General Hilliard. According to the official story, a secret NATO probe crashed in the Swiss canton of Bern, its cutting-edge electronic components accidentally discovered by tourists. The general demands the identities of seven bus passengers, the driver, and random onlookers.

The headquarters command categorically forbids the use of European residencies, supplies the officer with false documents, a large sum of cash, and a special black bank credit card for unlimited regular expenses.

An international committee is meeting in a Canadian barracks. An unnamed leader, codenamed Janus, announces to twelve representatives of the world’s major powers the launch of an emergency operation. The commander has no family. A recent divorce from his beloved wife, Susan, has deprived the officer of peace of mind, forcing him to throw himself headlong into risky service.

Arriving in Zurich, an American intelligence officer quickly locates Hans Beckermann, the elderly driver of an Alpine excursion minibus, in a small mountain village through the transport company’s archives. The driver refutes the official version. The frightened man tells of a disc-shaped craft containing tiny, dead humanoids in silvery overalls, and gives his guest a strange metal fragment containing a glowing white crystal found in a wet clearing.

List of witnesses

At the scene of the accident, the unsuccessful English photographer Leslie Mothershed managed to photograph the passengers. The Englishman was hungry for international fame. Wanting to confirm the authenticity of the photos to the press, the ambitious man copied down the exact home addresses of the tourists, ruining someone else’s film in the hopes of selling the sensational photo for exorbitant prices. Bellamy finds Mothershed’s London photo lab. Behind a locked door, the terrified owner categorically denies the success of the shoot, intending to sell the photos for millions of pounds alone. The commander leaves empty-handed. That night, liquidators locked the photographer in a cramped workshop and burned the house, along with all the film.

The search reaches a dead end. The only clue is a casual remark from the driver about a nervous German professor rushing to his morning class at the University of Bern, where the detective, through the rector’s office, identifies the renowned Munich chemist Otto Schmidt. The professor describes the linguistic accents of his fellow passengers before his own death in a staged explosion. The wheels of the conspiracy grind to a halt. As soon as an American officer passes on another name to General Hilliard over a secret phone, local intelligence agencies coldly stage accidents behind the detective’s back, methodically eliminating terrified people across the planet.

The victims die instantly. In the Italian town of Orvieto, a disguised nun poisons Father Patrini in a hospital room after he raved about the imminent arrival of Satan after seeing a spacecraft. A ferocious stallion tramples a Texas rancher to death. Canadian banker William Mann is forced to sign a suicide note about embezzlement before being shot in the temple.

In the dead of night, a Kyiv librarian is strangled by agents. In Washington, lobbyist Kevin Parker is mercilessly assassinated in his rented room, and the Hungarian director of a traveling show, László Buszfekete, is fatally bitten by his own venomous cobra, released into his bed by nighttime visitors. Buszfekete managed to name his last passenger. Before his death, the circus performer described in detail a tall, white-robed woman standing on the wet grass near the wreckage of the apparatus.

Trap

The trap springs instantly. A phone check of contacts leads to a chilling discovery: every single person found died under suspicious circumstances immediately after reporting to their supervisor at Fort Meade, turning the commander into a bloody spotter for the punitive forces. Bellamy is declared a dangerous fugitive. A command post cipher demands the immediate elimination of the spy, sending police forces from half a European nation in pursuit.

Rome is met with a manhunt. An officer burns a fresh fake passport to mislead his pursuers, cleverly plants a tracking card in the back of a French truck, and hires a young streetwalker, Piera Valli, to provide a plausible cover for his risky escape. His companion sincerely rescues the fugitive. Near Naples, the girl lowers the window shade just in time and warns the guest by telephone about an ambush by government agents. The chase continues overland. After causing a row on a boat to Capri to create a false trail, the spy slips away to Civitavecchia, steals a brightly colored hot air balloon at a fair, and flies across the sea to the island of Elba.

Betrayal and escape

The sea refuge turns out to be a trap. His ex-wife, Susan, welcomes the fugitive onto her new husband, Monte Banks’s luxury ocean-going yacht, unaware of her wealthy spouse’s secret involvement in a global conspiracy to eliminate unwanted witnesses. The captain calls for a naval cruiser. Sensing the falseness of the situation, the commander quietly transfers to a passing French fisherman’s longboat and disappears among the hundreds of identical boats in the Marseille commercial port.

A comrade awaits him in Paris. Chinese spy Li Po, once rescued by Robert from a Beijing prison, reveals in detail the secret of the global defense shield against extraterrestrial ships, and then suddenly draws a pistol, loyally defending the secret committee. A blinding flash of lightning throws off his aim. An enemy bullet pierces the commander’s shoulder, after which, in a brutal hand-to-hand struggle, the Chinese agent falls chest-first onto a sharp shard of glass from a table.

The wound requires surgery. At gunpoint, a familiar Parisian surgeon removes the lead without anesthesia, after which the bleeding officer binds the doctor tightly with bandages and falls into a deep oblivion. A vision shows the exact path. In his delirium, the fugitive sees an alien in a white robe, understands her extraterrestrial nature, and contacts his old mentor, Admiral Whittaker.

The Face of Janus

The denouement comes in Utendorf. Having made a meeting with the conspiracy’s top brass a prerequisite for saving his life, the spy returns the missing part of the transmitting device to the beautiful alien, Gracia, right in a forgotten, memorable Alpine clearing. A helicopter descends from the sky. General Hilliard, Colonel Johnson, a terrified Susan with her husband, and the mastermind behind the bloody hunt, Admiral Whittaker, emerge from the rotorcraft to the whine of its blades. Janus sheds his false mask. The aged naval commander mockingly looks into the face of the stunned veteran, openly acknowledging his own sole leadership of the clandestine international committee of twelve leading industrial powers.

The mentor cynically lays his cards on the table. It was the admiral who coldly destroyed his protégé’s family with a fictitious hunt for a mythical spy, and later cynically used his best pilot as a blind bloodhound, eliminating all witnesses to the Alpine disaster. The alien stems the tide of threats. Through a telepathic haze, the celestial visitor projects horrifying images onto the clouds of the destruction of Earth’s biosphere from predatory industrial pollution, melting polar ice caps, sun-baked plains, and a devastating war for resources. The space visitors do not attack. The alien visitors seek to protect Earth’s fragile environment from inevitable collapse, insistently demanding an immediate end to the arms race for the sake of preserving intelligent life in the universe.

The order is cut short by a gunshot. Instead of executing the unarmed commander, Colonel Frank Johnson takes the conspirator into custody, announcing a massive, synchronized arrest of the remaining members of the secret military alliance. A massive ship illuminates the mountains. The alien flagship takes Admiral Whittaker, General Hilliard, and magnate Monte Banks aboard for a lengthy period of reconciliation, leaving the rescued Robert in the warm embrace of Susan, who has returned to him.