Ethan lay for a moment and wondered what the hell had just happened as the soldiers around him got to their feet. Ethan found himself being lifted upright and a knife appeared in one of the soldier’s hands and sliced through the bonds around his wrists.
He turned as one of them approached him, taller than the rest and a face that he recognized, although he couldn’t believe it.
‘Mitchell?’
Aaron nodded. ‘Oracles or not, I bet you didn’t see this coming,’ he said as he gestured to the carnage around them. ‘Although I was tempted to let the Russians finish their work and save humanity the chance of you breeding another chaos–causing Warner Junior.’
Ethan rubbed his wrists. ‘The girls?’
‘Are safe,’ Mitchell replied, ‘which is more than I can say for you.’
Ethan nodded. ‘Looks like this time we’re working for the bad guys. How are you getting out of here?’
Mitchell gestured behind him.
‘We have boats and I’m going to call for an extraction before Ivan gets his act together and comes back for more.’
‘Good,’ Ethan said, ‘they’re not going to give up easily.’
Ethan joined the soldiers as they hurried back toward the river bank.
‘Whatever happened in DC means that you’re a liability that the government would like to disappear,’ Mitchell said. ‘Lopez agrees that you’ve got no plays left.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,’ Ethan said as he saw Lopez with the girls, sitting together in a military style inflatable assault craft. ‘You want to drop us off in Cyprus and we’ll disappear?’
Mitchell grinned to himself.
‘I would love to, but I suspect somebody else would like to speak to you first.’
‘Jarvis.’
‘The same,’ Mitchell confirmed.
Lopez waved at Ethan as he stepped into the inflatable. ‘Still got a full set or are you half the man you used to be?’
‘The jewels are secure,’ Ethan replied, then turned to Mitchell. ‘They’ve still got one of the girls, she’s called Elena.’
Mitchell nodded. ‘So we saw. We’re going to have to work fast to beat them to Tjaneni’s tomb.’
‘The scribe?’ Ethan asked. ‘What does his tomb have to do with anything?’
‘You’ll find out when we get back to the yacht,’ Mitchell said. ‘For now, let’s just get the hell out of Syria.’
Ethan slumped back in the inflatable as the soldiers started the engines and the craft began chugging down the river in near silence, shielded by the overhanging trees. To his surprise, two of the girls shuffled across to his side and rested their heads against his chest.
Ethan looked up at Lopez, who offered him a motherly look and silently mouthed “aww, get you” in his direction. Ethan was too exhausted to respond and closed his eyes as the sunshine beat down on his face. He was asleep within moments.
***
XXXVI
Mediterranean Sea
Ethan stepped off the small fishing boat and climbed the rope ladder onto the enormous white yacht’s stern, the warm Mediterranean sun glistening off crystalline blue waters all around.
Rhys Garrett’s yacht was anchored ten miles off the south west coast of Cyprus. Ethan, Lopez, Mitchell and his team and the girls had travelled via a private vehicle across Lebanon, staying well clear of the major ports and cities to ensure that no links at all could be made between them and Garrett should the DIA spot them on their travels.
They had then boarded a privately hired, anonymous little fishing vessel, the captain of which being paid handsomely to transport them across to Garrett’s yacht.
Ethan climbed onto the stern ramp, as wide as a barn and filled with jet–skis and a powerboat all lashed to the decks. Above his head he could see the tail rotors of a helicopter perched on the upper decks against the bright morning sky. He turned, and with Lopez helped the girls onto the deck as from inside the yacht he saw familiar faces approaching them.
‘Damn, this feels kinda weird,’ Lopez said.
Lillian Cruz hadn’t aged in the years since Ethan had last seen her, but then that was kind of the point of why Majestic Twelve had sought her so eagerly and why Jeb Oppenheimer had paid with his life in his search for the elixir, the fountain of youth. Behind Lillian was Amber Ryan, youthful and full of spirit still, and with them both Aisha, Hellerman and Doug Jarvis. A tall man in smart casual attire that Ethan recognized as Rhys Garrett followed them, his hands in his pockets but a slightly guarded expression on his features. Finally, behind them all was Doctor Lucy Morgan, a smile on her face as she spotted Ethan with two of the blind girls clinging to his hands.
‘My, you’ve changed,’ she observed.
Aisha dashed past them all and threw her arms around the girls with him as though she had known them a lifetime. Hellerman almost stumbled toward Lopez and embraced her, Nicola’s scowling contempt for Jarvis briefly melting.
‘I thought you guys were dead,’ he said, looking at Ethan.
‘Nearly were,’ Ethan replied as Jarvis approached and shook them all by the hand while the oracles collapsed into a mutual embrace, whispering to each other in Arabic.
‘Good to see you all again,’ Jarvis enthused, ‘and in better circumstances now than ever.’
Lopez folded her arms.
‘Seemed the same to us when we were under fire and abandoned in Syria,’ she said as she surveyed the yacht around them. ‘Looks like you’ve been busy with that thirty billion of yours. Pity we had to walk away from a few hundred million of our own to keep your location quiet.’
Jarvis frowned and looked at Ethan.
‘The DIA offered us a cut of the Majestic Twelve pie if we found you and turned you in’ Ethan explained.
Rhys Garrett moved forward and replied for Jarvis.
‘The yacht’s mine,’ he said, ‘and that thirty billion is tucked away safely in over a thousand accounts around the world and earning more interest per day than even I know what to do with. We’re making plans, Nicola, and right now we need to find out what we’ve got here from your expedition in Syria.’
‘You’ve got a few unemployed DIA agents,’ Ethan said as he looked at Hellerman. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘Homeland,’ Hellerman replied apologetically, ‘at least that’s what they called themselves. They shut us down even as I was watching the Apaches approach your position. They knew what they were doing and they knew it was wrong, but it was like they couldn’t wait even the couple of minutes it would have taken to get you out of there. Somebody wanted you guys buried out in those deserts.’
Mitchell hefted bags of M–16 rifles onto the deck as he replied.
‘Right now that’s what they probably think happened, which will give us some breathing space until the Russians catch up with us again.’
‘We need to consolidate what we’ve achieved here,’ Garrett said, ‘and find a way forward.’
‘The Russians might have the edge on us there,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘They still have one of the oracles, the one who is supposedly the best, a girl named Elena.’
At the mention of that name the other girls looked up and Aisha spoke softly.
‘Elena sees more clearly than the rest of us,’ she said. ‘She will lead them to their prize, and there is nothing that we can do to stop them.’ She stood up. ‘Unless you let me use the headset again.’
‘No way,’ Lopez said. ‘We’ll find them soon enough, you can be sure of that, without you having to wear that awful thing again.’
‘It might save time if she…,’ Jarvis began, but then fell silent as Lopez directed a violent glare in his direction.
‘Do we know where they’re headed?’ Ethan asked.
Jarvis nodded as he gestured toward the yacht’s interior. ‘We’ve got an idea, but there’s a lot to fill you in on. Lillian’s been getting to the bottom of it all.’
Jarvis led them through the vessel to the bathrooms, allowing them some t
ime to get cleaned up as the yacht raised its anchor and began sailing south. An hour after arriving, Ethan walked up onto the yacht’s upper deck with a belly full of food and feeling revived after his labors in Syria. The rest of the team were all sitting around a large table near the bow, where a small pool glistened in the sunlight as the ship forged its way across the ocean
‘We’re headed south,’ Ethan said as he took a seat opposite Garrett. ‘What’s the destination?’
‘Egypt,’ Garrett replied. ‘There’s a lot for you all to catch up on, so I’ll let Lillian and Lucy fill you in as they’ve been working together on unraveling what Majestic Twelve were up to all those decades before they were finally destroyed.’
Lucy produced a series of photographs and laid them out on the table as Lillian spoke.
‘There’s so much material here in Majestic Twelve’s files that it’s hard to know where to start, but one thing does keep coming up. A phrase, repeated often in the communications between the members of Majestic Twelve over many years on secure networks. They keep talking about The Watchers.’
Ethan sat very still for a long moment as he digested this new information and looked at Mitchell. ‘You ever hear of them when you were working for the cabal?’
Mitchell inclined his head slightly.
‘They were mentioned from time to time,’ he replied. ‘Never to me, but I occasionally overheard conversations about them.’
‘What are they?’ Lopez asked.
‘The Watchers are a supposedly mythical being recorded since the very earliest days of human civilization,’ Lucy Morgan said. ‘They first appear in Sumerian culture, the first true human civilization that we’re aware of, and Sumer itself means “Land of the Watchers”. The Sumer civilization emerged around southern Mesopotamia over five thousand years ago.’
Amber Ryan raised an eyebrow. ‘What do we know about them, and why would Majestic Twelve be interested in an ancient culture’s myths?’
‘That I can explain,’ Lucy Morgan replied. ‘‘We have hard evidence, covered up by governments for decades, that ancient cultures show hints of interference by advanced technologies. The Sumerians record the presence of a figure they named Oannes, an aquatic being who taught them the arts, metallurgy, cosmology and other skills at the dawn of their civilization.’
Lillian reached out for a laptop and scrolled back through a few pages.
‘There was something else here, a bit like that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at the time other than the fact it was an odd thing for MJ–12 to record and…. Here it is: …evidence of the Watchers Ir, neter and Oannes.’
Hellerman exuded a pulse of excitement as he heard the names.
‘Ir was a name given by the Chaldean civilization to their originator god, a Watcher named Ir. In Egyptian, Neter means “Watcher” and described the beings who guarded the gates of heaven and hell to the Egyptian afterlife. They were described as small, gray beings the size of children, with a humanoid form.’
‘Aliens?’ Lopez uttered, as though appalled.
‘And the Bible also describes such figures within it,’ Garrett said, showing a surprising knowledge of the legends himself. ‘The Watchers are often considered one and the same, fallen angels who came to earth and bred with humans. Their offspring were known as the Nephilim and were described as giants, not physically but in intellect and knowledge, and they often had six fingers and toes which may hint at genetic defects.’
Ethan felt a theme developing and a new thread to the mysterious nature of Majestic Twelve’s ultimate goal.
‘They were researching ancient historical references to what would now be termed the “ancient alien” hypothesis,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never knew them to have taken things so far back in time. We always thought that Roswell or similar was the proximal cause of their entire conspiracy.’
Lucy Morgan shook her head.
‘Can’t be,’ she said. ‘You look at history and you see that it’s littered with records like these. More to the point, Sumerian culture features a proto–language and script that has no known origins.’
‘Really?’ Amber Ryan asked. ‘I thought they had something called cuneiform?’
‘They did,’ Lucy confirmed, ‘but their language remains foreign and shows no resemblance to Indo–European, Semitic or any other language. The only true record we have of the Sumerians is from their successors, the Akkadians, who created a Sumerian–Akkadian dictionary that allowed us to decipher their records.’
‘Islam contains similar beings,’ Mitchell rumbled, ‘the angels Harut and Marut, who descend to earth and are consumed by human frailties before being washed of their sins by god himself.’
‘Common themes,’ Jarvis echoed thoughtfully. ‘Much of the work Ethan and Nicola did in this area during previous investigations showed links across entire continents that bridged ancient cultures that had never encountered each other; identical legends, events, the emergence of technologies.’
‘So MJ–12 was interested in these Watchers,’ Lopez said. ‘That means that they must have considered them to be a reality, something tangible?’
‘The general consensus that we reached at ARIES was that all of mankind’s religious legends were in fact the memory of real events, distorted by time and the retelling across hundreds of generations,’ Hellerman said, joining the conversation. ‘I didn’t believe any of it myself to begin with, but year after year there seems to be more mounting evidence suggesting that there is something in all of this, not least of all your discovery Lucy some years ago in the Negev Desert of Israel.’
‘So what do we do about it?’ Amber Ryan asked. ‘Why are we going to Egypt?’
Lucy gestured to the images she had laid upon the table, and held one of them up.
‘This is a picture of a stele dedicated to the Pharaoh Thutmose III,’ she said. ‘It was in part commissioned and designed by the scribe Tjaneni, a name that has come up several times in this investigation. Tjaneni was Thutmose III’s greatest scribe and is known to historians for recording the Battle of Megiddo in 1457 BCE. The Tulli Manuscript, also coveted by the Vatican among others, is also likely to have been written by Tjaneni’s hand around the same time and describes a remarkable encounter with what sounds very much like alien spaceships just days before the battle.’
Lillian picked up the story as Ethan listened.
‘Tjaneni then abruptly disappears from the historical record, and nothing is heard from him again. The trouble with this is that he is known to have still been alive, so what could have happened to him to have him vanish from the records in such a way? It turns out that this image we found explains why he disappeared, and why the Russians are searching so intently for his tomb.’
Lucy then raised another image, and this time everybody gasped.
The hieroglyphic image she held was of four Egyptians, their wrists permanently attached to carrying rods suspended on their shoulders, and between them a large ornate box topped with two cherubim facing each other with their wings touching.
‘That’s the Ark of the Covenant!’ Lopez exclaimed.
***
XXXVII
Lucy Morgan nodded.
‘This is indeed the Ark of the Covenant, portrayed many centuries before the Hebrew Torah, or Old Testament, even existed.’
‘Whoa, easy tiger,’ Amber Ryan said. ‘There’s a few million Jews who’d beg to differ.’
Hellerman spoke up in Lucy’s defense.
‘The Ark was never a Hebrew legend, but an older Egyptian one adapted for their supposed historical account of their origins. The tablets that Ethan and Nicola obtained from the Vatican describe how it came to emerge into Egyptian lore. To say that it’s explosive would probably be the greatest understatement ever uttered in the history of mankind, ever.’
‘Why?’ Mitchell asked.
‘Because what Tjaneni found was powerful enough to change the world around him, and likely to him represented as great a threat to hum
anity then as nuclear war does now. He describes the discovery in a cave of an object of extreme power.’
Ethan leaned forward. ‘Okay, now I get the Homeland’s interest in keeping this to themselves. What else does it say?’
Hellerman focused on an image of the tablet and read directly from the Sumerian script.
‘In the year twenty–two, on the third month of winter, sixth hour of the day, among the scribes of the House of Life it was found that a light from the previous day had fallen amid the deserts. The scribes visited the place where the sky had met the earth, and therein they discovered a brilliant light so vivid and bright that no man could look upon it and survive. Two of the scribes were lost to the strange and powerful creation, turned to dust and ash by its power, and the beings of light who left it behind were nowhere to be seen.’
‘Beings of light,’ Ethan echoed the description. ‘Like you described before, how the gods were glowing beings that couldn’t be looked upon, like Lucifer.’
‘Exactly the same,’ Hellerman agreed, ‘although I suspect that it was the object itself that they left behind that glowed with such intensity, rather than the beings themselves. It’s sometimes tough to translate Sumerian directly.’
Hellerman returned to his reading.
‘The object was found in a chest that measured two and a half cubits by one and a half deep and one and a half wide. Its surface was covered with the finest gold, polished to a sheen as reflective as the surface of a still lake beneath a setting sun. Atop the box were two Cherubim, their wings meeting in the center, and the whole was born aloft on two rods held by four men.’
Ethan stared into the glowing coals for a moment and then he looked at Hellerman.
‘Majestic Twelve were looking for the Ark.’
Hellerman nodded. ‘That’s what I thought, and it explains why the Russians are searching out here too and trying to beat us to the prize. From what I can understand from the inscriptions, Tjaneni travelled south from Saqqara to Karnak and from there to his death, vanishing into the desert with forty followers who died with him in order to protect a secret. It is from that Egyptian story that comes the later legend of the Lost Tribes of Israel wandering the deserts for years.’
The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6) Page 24
