by Jerry Ahern
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The next morning, Michael and John Rourke sat alone in the conference room, awaiting the start of yet another meeting. Albeit this one would be different, at least that was their hope. “You have any idea what this dynamic information is supposed to be about?” John asked his son.
“Not really, all I know is that General Sullivan asked for the meeting and specified he thought you ought to be here,” Michael answered.
The Marine Guard outside knocked on the door before stepping in, “Sir, they’re here.”
“Send them in,” Michael instructed as he and John stood to greet the new arrivals. General Sullivan followed by Colonel John “Mad Jack” Ball entered.
Sullivan saluted, “Good morning, Mr. President... Mr. Rourke. I appreciate your time. I think you’ll find this interesting. You know Colonel Ball?”
Michael shook hands with Ball, “No, but it is my pleasure. I’ve heard a lot about you from my father.”
“Mr. President, it’s my honor.”
“Morning Jack,” John said. “You guys want some coffee?”
“Yes, thank you,” Sullivan said.
“I’ll get it,” Ball said, as he walked to the credenza and poured two cups. “Either of you ready for a refill?”
Michael shook his head but John offered his cup. Sullivan opened his attaché case and powered up his laptop. “Things got so crazy when it became necessary to rescue the First Lady, the original purpose of this mission sort of slid under the carpet. I want to show you what she found. Colonel Ball was sent primarily to search for this information and luckily he found it. You will remember that the First Lady was interested in examining several stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe. It has been supposed this could actually be the site of the temple put up by Noah and his family following the Great Deluge.”
“The site includes several massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. These megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. Currently, we are convinced it’s the site of the world’s oldest temple.”
“It is composed of several ringed structures; each ring has a roughly similar layout. In the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower sixteen feet and weigh between seven and ten tons. We think it was the first human-built holy place,” he said. “Actually, the first ‘cathedral on a hill.’”
“When Göbekli Tepe was first examined, it was dismissed by scholars and anthropologists in the 1960s. Recently, the broken pieces of limestone that earlier surveyors had mistaken for gravestones took on a different meaning. I’m not going into the Biblical or theological connections; I will say that archaeologists have their theories. Evidence perhaps, of the irresistible human urge to explain the unexplainable.”
“There is a surprising lack of evidence that people lived right there, which researchers say argues against its use as a settlement or even a place where, for instance, clan leaders gathered. Göbekli Tepe’s pillar carvings are dominated not by edible prey like deer and cattle but by menacing creatures such as lions, spiders, snakes, and scorpions. It’s a scary, fantastic world of nasty-looking beasts. One theory that seems to have gathered a greater degree of validity is that this is not only a spiritual meeting place but also the world’s first library; 6,000 years before a written language was developed.”
“Mrs. Rourke found the proof that there is definitely some connection between events playing out today and the history that was from so long ago. Fortunately, she had previsions to secure the information and, equally fortunately, her attackers didn’t find it. Look at these,” he said, as he activated the view screen.
Images similar to ones Michael and John were familiar with came up. Michael leaned forward and pointed, “Can you enhance that one?”
“Yes, Sir,” Sullivan said, hitting a flurry of key strokes.
“Dad, is that what I think it is?”
John studied the image, “Can you enlarge this, General?” Sullivan hit two buttons and the image filled the screen. It was a color photo of one of the stone pillars. Instead of being covered with images of beasts and birds, it held only two images. The first appeared to be a drawing of a ship remarkably identical to the UFO John had recovered and was now being examined by General Rodney Thorne and flight engineers. The other was a representation of something John had seen on the belt buckle of a dead alien he had examined so long ago in the frozen waste land of Canada above the Arctic Circle. The same emblem that had formed the tattoos he had discovered on the chest of clones.
He looked back at his son. “Yes, Michael this is exactly what you think it is.”
Chapter Sixty
Following the Sullivan briefing, John arranged for a conversation with Jose Zima, the linguist from Mid-Wake. Rourke’s head was swirling with the implications; and though tired, tried to clear his mind to focus on the conversation at hand.
“Dr. Rourke,” Zima said, “I have a story to relate. When the last President of the original United States, Andrew Connelly, had determined to commit suicide rather than be captured, he gave an envelope that contained two letters to the chief of his Secret Service detail, Mike Clemmer. One letter was to the American people; it was published and now is one of our national documents. But Clemmer was never able to deliver the one to the Connelly’s wife, Marilyn. Fourteen years ago, the letter to the First Lady surfaced.”
Handwritten at the bottom were a series of letters and figures. Everyone thought the president, about to commit suicide, had lost it and scribbled nonsense. The message remained a mystery for years.”
“Ten days ago one of our cryptanalysts, who has a passion for puzzle solving, stumbled across it in a magazine article. He recognized it was an obscure code and he set out to decode it. He reasoned that it was probably a book cipher, that is a cipher or code in which the key is some aspect of a book or other piece of text. Books are common and widely available in modern times; however, users of book ciphers take the position that the details of the key are sufficiently well hidden from attackers in practice. This is in some ways an example of security by obscurity. It is typically essential that both correspondents not only have the same book, but the same edition.”
“Yes,” Rourke said, “I’m familiar with them. Book ciphers work by replacing words in the plain text of a message with the location of words from the book being used, realizing the code is to replace individual letters rather than words and those letters are identified by numbers. For example, 2/15/3 would indicate page two, line fifteen, third letter.”
Zima nodded. “Exactly, the main strength of a book cipher is the key. The sender and receiver of encoded messages can agree to use any book or other publication available to both of them as the key to their cipher. Someone intercepting the message and attempting to decode it, unless they are a skilled cryptographer, must somehow identify the key from a huge number of possibilities available. Anyway, he found it was not gibberish after all. President Connelly and Mrs. Connelly were both fond of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. I won’t bother you with the details; suffice it to say the key to the code was from the illustrated 1867 hardcover edition of Maud Mueller. It was a romantic poem published in 1854 that dealt with a young woman named Maud who meets the love of her life, but neither of them react to their meeting and both grow old separately. Seems an old friend had given the President two copies and they were the same edition; each had the original cloth covering. My analyst found what is probably the only surviving copy in the Library of Congress and, in less than 20 minutes, had it deciphered.”
“And?”
“The President had directed his wife to go to a specific location when things settled down. The location has been determined to be 43 degrees, 52 minutes, 41 seconds North by 103 degrees, 27 minutes, 30 seconds West. Do you know where that is?”
John shook his head, Zima continued. “A forgotten national monumen
t called Mount Rushmore in what used to be South Dakota. It has busts of four former presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt; each sixty feet tall. Now it sits locked, possibly forever, under probably a couple of hundred feet of glacial ice.”
John smiled, “I know Mount Rushmore. I was there several times before the Night of the War. If my memory serves, it took about fourteen years to complete Mount Rushmore and several hundred men and women to carve the monument. Incredibly, no one died while building Mount Rushmore, although some of the workers died later of the lung condition silicosis. They had inhaled dust during the carving of the granite. I thought it had been destroyed.”
Zima shook his head, “Nope, still there, but it has faded from general knowledge. Here’s the point of why I asked you to meet with me. It seems that Gutzon Borglum, the monument sculptor, built an interesting special feature that a lot of people knew about initially but was forgotten over the next two decades. He included a ‘Hall of Records’ in the design, the goal being to create a repository for our nation’s charter documents and history. In 1941, when Borglum died, work on the Hall came to a halt. Then, in the mid-1970s, the Hall of Records was completed in secret under military contract; we still don’t know the Hall’s dimensions. Several items with the story of our nation were sealed in a vault in the unfinished Hall of Records.”
“Like what?” Rourke asked. His interest peaked.
“Sixteen porcelain enamel panels containing the text from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, along with a biography of Borglum, and the story of the presidents were sealed in a teakwood box, and then placed in a titanium vault, and finally sealed shut under the weight of a 1,200 pound granite capstone inside the unfinished hall. It seems however, that these were not the only items placed in the Hall of Records.”
“Those documents were to remain buried for thousands of years. Borglum literally had it in mind to send the message of our country to future civilizations. He said, ‘you might as well drop a letter into the world’s postal service without an address or signature, as to send that carved mountain into history without identification.’ The public never had access to the Hall of Records because the Hall is located behind the heads, near the cliffs—public safety was a concern. Very few people even knew it existed.”
Rourke frowned, “You mentioned some other items were placed in storage, any idea what?”
Zima smiled again, “Yes, in the days and weeks before the Night of the War, tensions were climbing. The situation kept vacillating between imminent war and possible peace. No one knew for sure which way the pendulum would swing. The last president of the original United States realized that while peace was possible, it was improbable. Our studies show that just days before the Night of the War, Connelly ordered the original documents associated with those sixteen panels to be transported from their public locations in Washington and placed for safe keeping in the Hall of Records then had the Hall resealed by a company of combat engineers; all in complete secrecy.”
“We also believe a copy of the original report concerning the alien contact with the German government in 1933 had been smuggled out of pre-war Germany by one of our operatives—an original, never declassified report on the Roswell incident, as well as what are referred to as ‘artifacts’ from the crash—went to the Hall. We also believe that a copy of the formal agreement between an alien race and the U.S. Government held at Holliman Air Force Base in 1954 was included.”
“The terms of this agreement supposedly allowed for an exchange of technology, of anti-gravity, metals, alloys, and environmental technologies to assist the earth with free energy and medical application regarding the human body. In exchange the aliens would be allowed to study the human development, both in the emotional and consciousness makeup, and to reside here on Earth. That particular document, and original exchange material, in fact had been stored in the Blue Moon NSA facility, but was moved to the Hall of Records shortly after the Night of the War to protect them. And the biggest possibility is the President’s Book of Secrets, long thought to be an urban legend, is housed there also.”
Rourke immediately perked up. “You think it is real after all?”
“Total speculation on the Book,” Zima admitted.
“Jose, do you believe these records could still be in this Hall of Records?”
Zima nodded, “We do and we think we have located it after all of these years. Problem is, like I said, it is buried under a lot of ice.”
Rourke sat for a long minute deep in thought before asking, “But you think it is possible the Hall of Records still exists and is still sealed?”
“Actually, I think it is probable. We have found no indications that any attempt to retrieve the materials was made after the war. Within those next 100 years, when humanity was trying to survive, the glaciations across North America were completed and the monument faded into history. Plus the fact we are in possession of what we believe is the only remaining document that ever addressed the movement of the materials to the Hall.”
“Lastly, is the fact that the letter to President Connelly’s wife, Marilyn, wasn’t deciphered until ten days ago. And that was more of a pure accident than anything. I think the Hall of Records still lies in the granite around the presidential statues, completely undisturbed.”
“Then,” Rourke said, “that could be where we’ll find the answers we’re looking for.” Rourke’s thoughts were scattered, so much information... so little actual data. “Jose, there is a lot going on and I feel like something my dad said a long time ago.”
“What’s that?”
Rourke took a deep breath, “He said, ‘I feel like I’m trying to shoot a black bird in a dark room at night with a BB gun.’ He was talking about trying to make a decision with damn few facts and a lot of speculation. There may, and I underscore may, be only one place to find some historic facts I can use to answer these questions. The problem is we’re probably going to need a way to decipher those answers, and that technology no longer exists in this world.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Rourke walked slowly out to the parking lot and climbed into his truck; he was still weighing the possibilities of Zima’s theory. He sat there with his hand on the key without turning the ignition, Could this be the answer, the proof? It could be an interesting gamble. I agree with Jose, Rourke thought. Probably the Hall of Records has remained sealed all of these years and if it has...
Rourke had heard the conspiracy theory and legend that the Presidents of the United States have passed down a book from George Washington to Andrew Connelly. I really thought it was a legend, he reflected, but it was rumored to have added facts and histories, earth-shattering in scope and implications, and that this book’s location is only known to the President and the National Librarian of Congress. If a president died unexpectedly, as with the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, the National Librarian would inform the next President of the book. After each President leaves office, the location is changed.
If it shows the truth about the alien landings at Roswell, New Mexico and Rendlesham Air Base, in the UK, and many other UFO events, that could be invaluable with the threat and conspiracies we have going. Plus I’d like to know the truth about the JFK and RFK assassinations; the location of the Holy Grail—tying in with the Fort Knox conspiracy theory; the fates of various high-ranking Nazis following World War II—and the facts concerning the U. S. government’s assistance of them; even the identity of the Antichrist.
Assuming there is a book, and assuming it identifies the Antichrist, we are led to wonder if he and that President are on the same side, or one and the same person. Or if that President feared for Earth’s immediate future. Even more insidious, in terms of realism, is the claim that the book told of the Vietnam War before it took place and also told of the imminent a ttack by Russia, which initiated World War III.
Rourke flipped open a small notebook and started writing. Prior to President Andrew Co
nnelly, only eight American presidents had died while in office—most by natural circumstance such as illness. In 1841, William Henry Harrison first became ill with a cold and thirty days, twelve hours and thirty minutes later, died. The next was Zachary Taylor, his cause of death has never been fully established, but has always been thought to be severe gastroenteritis.
Lincoln was next, his assassination occurring just five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and was followed by James A. Garfield who was shot just four months into his term as America’s 20th President. He lingered on throughout the summer but did not survive his injuries. William McKinley was shot by Leon Czogosz on September 6, 1901 and died nine days later. Warren G. Harding’s sudden death in 1923 led to theories he had been poisoned or committed suicide. Suicide appeared unlikely since he was planning for a second term election. Some thought an affair with a mistress had led Mrs. Harding to poison her husband but symptoms prior to his death pointed to congestive heart failure.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the next president to die in office in 1945. His death was attributed to a massive cerebral hemorrhage or stroke. John F. Kennedy was assassinated at 12:30p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday November 22, 1963.
Little was actually known about President Connelly’s last hours. His death had not taken as long as some of his predecessors, nor was it as immediate as Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s. Zima had said a Rear Admiral Corbin told Connelly, “They—the Russians—got way too much of our stuff while it was on the ground. Sixty percent of the U.S. population was estimated to be dead or dying—about 145 million people.”
But the details of almost everything else were lost. The Chief of Connelly’s Secret Service detail, Mike Clemmer, later reported that as his last acts as President of the United States, Connelly handed him an envelope with the presidential seal in the upper left corner. Then Connelly said, “And now, give me your revolver. That’s an order, Mike. There are two letters in the envelope. One is to my wife; the other is to the American people. Thurston Potter knows what to do with them. This is my last order, Mike. Give me your gun.”
