‘Wait one,’ Ethan said. ‘Right after she said something?’
‘Yeah,’ Robbie confirmed. ‘It was like she knew what was going to happen before it actually happened. She did it several times, even saw my support team coming through the back door with guns blazing before it happened. If I hadn’t followed her directions, we’d both have been perforated with buckshot and died on the spot.’
‘She could have seen them coming maybe,’ Lopez surmised, ‘perhaps had a view in her cage that gave her an edge?’
‘Her cage was against a solid wall,’ Robbie replied, ‘and besides, that wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.’
‘How come?’ Ethan asked.
‘Because when we got outside I got my first good look at her,’ Robbie replied, and for the first time Ethan noticed goose bumps on the trooper’s forearms despite the heat. ‘Her eyes were gone, totally useless. The medical teams confirmed it a few hours later – that girl was totally blind and had been since birth.’
Lopez looked at Ethan. ‘Second sight? Just like Hellerman said.’
Ethan shrugged, not willing to commit himself yet.
‘Let’s just keep an open mind about this for a moment,’ Ethan said as he crouched down before the wall and looked more closely at the hieroglyphics. ‘Has anybody come down here to decipher this?’
Robbie shook his head. ‘No, we figured it was just insane ramblings or something. A lot of the folk down this way are committed Christians, so anything like this is pretty much the work of the devil to them: they’ll probably destroy it.’
‘Not now they won’t,’ Lopez snapped. ‘This is evidence in an ongoing investigation. Anybody tampers with it, they’ll be facing federal charges.’
‘Why?’ Robbie asked. ‘They’re just drawings.’
The reply came from Ethan. ‘No, they’re not.’
He turned and beckoned Lopez to kneel down beside him, and in the shadowy confines of the corridor Ethan pointed to one particular corner of the artwork.
‘What do you make of that?’
He watched Lopez as she peered down at the hieroglyphics and then suddenly she saw what Ethan was pointing at and her eyes flew wide. ‘No way.’
Amid the rows of servants queuing up to serve the gods was a single figure, smaller than the others, with long slender arms and short legs, a bulbous head and slanted almond eyes far too large for its skull to be human.
‘It’s got to be fake,’ Lopez said finally. ‘Maybe these cultists were on drugs, worshipping some kind of alien sky god and killed themselves. It’s happened before, right? Wasn’t there that cult that committed mass suicide when a comet went past the earth a while back?’
‘The Heaven’s Gate cult,’ Robbie confirmed from nearby, ‘thirty–nine of them committed suicide when the comet Hale–Bopp passed earth in 1997. They believed that it was an alien vessel that would take them to their salvation.’
Ethan pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number. Hellerman answered on the first ring.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’m sending you an image,’ Ethan replied as he set the cell to speaker and took a photograph of the images on the wall before them. ‘Can you identify any of this?’
Ethan sent the image, and a few moments later they heard Hellerman’s intake of breath on the cell.
‘Whoa,’ he muttered. ‘Where did you find this?’
‘It’s right here in Utah,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘We figure it’s just mad scrawlings but thought you might have some insight on how to translate it?’
‘They’re not mad scrawlings, Ethan.’
‘Well what are they then?’
Ethan, Lopez and Robbie listened intently as Hellerman replied.
‘You’re looking at an incredibly precise copy of hieroglyphics found in the tomb of an Egyptian sage and philosopher known as Ptah–Hotep, which is located in Saqqara, Egypt. Ptah–Hotep served during the reign of Izezi, the eighth king of the 5th Dynasty who ruled from 2388 BCE until 2356 BCE.’
‘You’re saying that this thing is several thousand years old?’ Lopez gasped.
‘The original is,’ Hellerman confirmed, ‘and that strange humanoid in the corner is present on the original too.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Ethan uttered.
‘I’m not,’ Hellerman confirmed. ‘Those murals appear in no official Egyptian guidebooks and are never referenced anywhere in accepted archeological papers, making them extremely hard to find. Even on the Internet only a handful of images exist.’
Lopez leaned back on her haunches. ‘I guess if the word got out they’d have a real problem explaining this away.’
‘It’s been conveniently ignored for years,’ Hellerman confirmed. ‘I figure the Egyptian government cannot just erase such valuable evidence so they hope that tourists just walk on by and don’t notice anything out of place.’
Ethan thought for a moment before he replied. ‘We’ve got one more thing to check out here in Utah and then we’ll come back to DC. Can you do some digging into this, find out if there’s any connection between this cult and these hieroglyphs?’
‘You got it.’
Ethan stood up and turned to Robbie Dixon.
‘The girl you rescued, where is she? We need to talk to her and any other survivors of this cult.’
***
X
Defense Intelligence Agency,
Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling,
Washington DC
General Nellis was given no warning of the delegation.
It had been a very long time since he had last had to deal with an unannounced visit from high ranking government officials, especially those who had turned up only minutes before and demanded an immediate meeting, but these were extraordinary times and Nellis had half–expected Homeland Security to turn up at some point.
‘Clear all monitors and shield the main screens in the ARIES Watch Room,’ he said to Joseph Hellerman, who had rushed to the general’s office as soon as he had been called.
‘You think they’ll try to access the ARIES complex?’ Hellerman asked, somewhat stunned.
‘I don’t know how much authority they carry,’ Nellis replied. ‘Get down there and make sure everything is shut down. They don’t get in unless the President himself says that they can.’
Hellerman hurried away as Nellis closed his notes and his computer screen and sat in contemplative silence as he considered his position. The closure of the campaign against Majestic Twelve had been an earth–shattering event and one that had only narrowly been contained by the administration. Many high ranking senators and congressmen had been intimately involved with the cabal, whether they knew it or not, so far had MJ–12’s tentacles reached into the political system. The president had effectively been forced into a delicate position by what should have been heralded as a great victory against the forces of corruption and greed, because widely publicizing the success of the operation would also have exposed the sheer degree to which politicians were controlled by businesses.
Most all people knew that democracy in the modern sense was merely a veil, a sheen of respectability placed upon governments that provided the population with the impression that their vote counted. In truth, it didn’t matter who sat inside the White House at any one time: the campaigns of all presidential hopefuls were funded by big business, and big business didn’t spend millions placing a president in power for the good of the population: they did it to ensure that political decisions reflected their own desires. Corporate funding was the disease that placed profits above people, election after election, and as a result the deeper details of the exposure of Majestic Twelve, including its name, had been kept far from the media and public eye.
The White House had cleverly steered the media away from these inconvenient truths by placing huge spin on how much tax payer’s money had been recovered from the illegal activities of powerful businessmen as a result of valiant government missions: in excess of an astonishing thr
ee billion dollars.
What made Nellis more uncomfortable was that in addition to those three billion dollars, some thirty billion remained unaccounted for and the chief architect of Majestic Twelve’s demise, Doug Jarvis, had unceremoniously disappeared within hours of the exposure coming to light. Homeland would only give Nellis so much time before they took over the search for a man who had once been a dedicated patriot and was now probably the most wanted individual on earth.
Nellis heard a knock at his door and before he could respond the door opened and four men in dark gray suits walked into the general’s office and closed the door behind them.
‘General Nellis,’ the first of them announced, ‘I’m sure you’re familiar with us all?’
Nellis knew all four men by sight, high ranking former military figures from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines. All of them were in their late fifties to early sixties, ram–rod straight backs and hard jaw lines forged from decades either on the front line or on the parade grounds of military bases across the country.
Nellis shook hands with Dillinger, Marston, Green and Foxx before they sat down, the ice broken a little by the simple gesture. Whatever happened next, it was business and not personal, but that didn’t prevent Nellis from feeling anxious as Dillinger spoke.
‘You’re probably aware of why we’re here.’
‘MJ–12,’ Nellis replied without hesitation.
‘No,’ Dillinger said. ‘MJ–12 are finally history, and frankly I can say good riddance. The cabal had become twisted and corrupt and deserved the ending it received in South America, but we’re not here to deal with that. We’re here to deal with thirty billion dollars.’
Nellis nodded, actually relieved at Dillinger’s candor.
‘So are we,’ he replied. ‘My team have been on the case since before the administration made its announcements concerning the funds recovered from MJ–12.’
‘And yet you have achieved nothing,’ Green said sharply.
‘We were not prepared for the scale of the deception, nor the professionalism with which the funds were distributed and concealed from us.’
‘You weren’t prepared for a defection from within your own department either,’ Foxx added as he tossed a photograph of Doug Jarvis onto the desk between them. ‘You weren’t prepared at all, general.’
‘The administration needs to place a cap on this and start picking apart what happened,’ Dillinger went on before Nellis could reply. ‘If the media were somehow to figure all of this out it would blow the White House wide open and leave us all facing accusations of incompetence, not to mention the public outcry of yet more political corruption.’
Nellis spoke quietly.
‘The corruption of politicians is not the fault of this agency.’
‘Nor is it within the remit of Homeland Security’s various agencies’ investigative reach, unless the security of this country’s borders could be compromised by said corruption,’ Green countered. ‘The apparent disappearance of Douglas Jarvis would suggest that, considering his security clearances and knowledge of our intelligence services, your security has been very much compromised.’
‘And we’re working on it,’ Nellis assured Green. ‘Jarvis is a patriot and unlikely to be willing to part with any state secrets that he may have…’
‘Who said anything about a willingness to part with state secrets?’ Dillinger interrupted him. ‘Do you think that the Chinese or the Russians will wait for someone like Jarvis to decide to spill the beans on ARIES or any other DIA projects? They’ll wire him to the mains and crank the handle until he’s screaming state secrets to anybody who’ll listen!’
Nellis sighed.
‘There’s no place for conjecture until we know where he is and why he’s gone.’
‘You don’t think thirty billion dollars is anything to do with why he jumped ship and betrayed his country?’ Foxx uttered.
‘We don’t know that he’s betrayed anybody yet,’ Nellis snapped back.
‘Are you kidding?’ Dillinger asked.
‘Jarvis, as I’ve come to know him, has what you might call an unusual way of working,’ Nellis replied. ‘Despite all that’s happened, I don’t for a moment believe that he’s betrayed his country or that he’s suddenly become slack enough to allow himself to be captured and interrogated by rogue nations.’
‘That’s a level of faith that should never be placed in any single agent or operative,’ Dillinger pointed out. ‘We all know that.’
‘Jarvis is unlikely to be working alone,’ Nellis replied. ‘He would have made plans for his disappearance months before doing so, and we know that in the weeks before he vanished he was working with a man named Aaron Mitchell.’
‘Former Vietnam veteran,’ Foxx confirmed, ‘and until recently a paid assassin for Majestic Twelve. Why would Jarvis be working with somebody like that, the enemy of our country?’
‘Mitchell was also a patriot, once,’ Mitchell reminded them. ‘He worked for MJ–12 until he realized the level of corruption he was being paid to support. He betrayed MJ–12 and then actively went after them, presumably with Jarvis working alongside him.’
Foxx frowned.
‘What are you getting at here? Jarvis working with an enemy of the state isn’t exactly what I’d call a defense.’
‘Depends on what you’re defending,’ Nellis smiled bleakly. ‘If I know Jarvis like I think I do, he’s seen enough internal corruption that he decided to take matters into his own hands.’
Dillinger frowned. ‘You think he’s gone rogue and set up his own little cabal?’
Nellis shrugged.
‘Doug told me once that he was tired of defending his country only to see that country defrauded by the people who are paid to govern it. He’s an old man now, with nothing to lose if he’s caught. My guess is that he’s on a warpath of his own to expose whatever other corruption he can find in our political system, and now he’s got the funds to do it.’
Dillinger glanced at his companions briefly before he spoke.
‘I think that you and I both know that such leaks as we’ve seen in the recent past are precisely the kind of media attention we’re trying to avoid.’
‘Why?’ Nellis demanded. ‘Don’t you want to ensure that congress and the senate are filled with representatives devoid of criminal intent? Don’t you want to see the people have respect for their leaders again?’
‘Not at the expense of civil unrest or even a collapse of government,’ Dillinger replied. ‘We’ve already seen the mess that Wikileaks has made of public perception of government. Throwing another few senators to the dogs isn’t going to help our mission.’
‘And what is your mission, exactly?’ Nellis asked.
‘To ensure that our government is presented to the people in the way that it should be, when compared to the governments of other countries.’
‘Like North Korea or China,’ Nellis murmured wryly. ‘That doesn’t inspire confidence in either our government or Homeland Security.’
Foxx peered at Nellis suspiciously. ‘You sound like you’re on Jarvis’s side.’
‘I’m on the side of the American people,’ Nellis snapped. ‘How about you?’
‘We’re representing officials elected by those people,’ Dillinger said smoothly. ‘We need Jarvis found regardless of his intentions and we need the thirty billion dollars he somehow managed to pilfer from Majestic Twelve returned to the government. The Defense Intelligence Agency cannot be used by people like Jarvis for criminal acts, and right now we don’t believe enough is being done to locate him.’
‘We have other duties,’ Nellis said defensively.
‘The ARIES program,’ Foxx said. ‘This isn’t the first time we’ve been here, general. This department of yours was subject to discontinuation orders from the CIA and the FBI in recent years under charges of lack of security. Homeland now believes that your program is again in danger of spilling national secrets all over the headlines and we cannot guarantee th
at Jarvis will not go the same way as Edward Snowden if he has come to believe that all government officials are somehow corrupt.’
‘Jarvis is no fool, he wouldn’t sell secrets to Wikileaks,’ Nellis shot back. ‘We’re not talking about some low–level programmer here; we’re talking about a senior operative with decades of experience.’
‘Which is why it becomes all the more important that he is found and brought to justice,’ Foxx insisted. ‘If he cannot be found, then the only viable alternative is to shut down the ARIES programme.’
Nellis stared at Foxx in disbelief. ‘You want to shut down one of the most successful DIA initiatives of all time?’
‘We don’t want to,’ Dillinger replied, ‘we’re forced to. If you cannot keep the program watertight, then the program ends.’
‘We have operatives working across the globe,’ Nellis said. ‘You can’t just pull the plug on them overnight.’
‘We can and we will,’ Dillinger replied as he set a sheet of paper down on the desk between them. ‘A Presidential Order, laid out as a result of both the Edward Snowden affair and the exposure of MJ–12 a few months ago. We’re closing down all and any programs that operate outside Homeland jurisdiction.’
Nellis stared down at the order and he could see in an instant that it heralded a complete sea–change in the way the administration operated its intelligence services.
‘The president was the man who signed ARIES into operation,’ he said in reply.
‘And he’s serving the last few months’ of his second term,’ Dillinger pointed out. ‘He knows as well as you and I do that ARIES and other classified operations like it have operated throughout his tenure as president. If somebody like Jarvis has gone rogue, then everything that the DIA did over those eight years could become public knowledge, and he would be considered liable for signing ARIES into operation in his first year as President. You think he wants that hanging over his legacy?’
Nellis shook his head.
‘I believe that he has the integrity not to try to sweep our operations under the carpet to save his own reputation. I also know for a fact that he would not shut ARIES down at this moment.’
The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6) Page 7
