by Ed Kovacs
But Dao couldn’t relate to the war or the suffering and sacrifice her family had experienced. She could barely tolerate sharing the same roof with them, and lived for cocaine- and ecstasy-fueled weekend rave parties and lots of sex with her Vietnamese boyfriend, a gang member who had a nice car and money. He paid for her tattoos and piercing and frequently gave her twenty-two karat gold jewelry, like the bracelets she now wore and the bellybutton stud and the white-gold nipple rings, all hidden by her work frock.
Dao loved money, the more the better, which is why she carefully collected pieces of the First Lady’s toenails and some tufts of her hair which had fallen to the floor and, unseen by the bored Secret Service agents, tucked them into a coin-size zip-lock bag.
###
“What do you mean my book belongs in the fiction section? Since when is archeology fiction? I’m telling you the information I stole, I mean acquired, in Florence is absolutely genuine.”
The whitish-blue glow of moonlight reflecting off of polished aluminum cast an etheric glow on Dr. Sky Wilder’s rugged features as he exhaled smoke from a Dominican cigar and gazed at the pristinely clear desert sky. He sat up on the thick wing, his back propped against the fuselage of a fully restored WWII-era B-25J bomber. Files, papers, and books lay haphazardly scattered around him, unencumbered by any breeze on the exquisitely still night. A thermos of tea and a bottle of Argentinean Malbec sat between the two men.
“Your book is full of conspiracies, witchcraft, magic spells. I mean, come on Sky, get real. You’ve written six books now, and in all of them you postulate these fantastic theories, a completely ‘outside’ look at events from the past. Doesn’t it bother you that you’ve never been able to prove any of your claims and that some of your peers call you a kook behind your back?”
“Kook? Well I’ve never come up with concrete proof that can’t be denied, if that’s what you mean. But some of my theories are just as valid as those embraced by the establishment, and you know it. There’s a difference between proof, and acceptance. I could present proof tomorrow but that doesn’t mean the mainstream will accept it.”
Sky ran fingers through his thick, side-parted, short brown hair. His straight nose pointed down to lips that were a bit too thin. The jaw sat firm and the chin strong but not dominant. Slight creases had developed from about an inch below his eyes and streaked down to the jaw line, adding depth of character. Being an avid outdoorsman had seasoned his natural good looks, and his slender 5'11” build had very little body fat.
His somewhat prominent blonde-and brown-haired eyebrows, hooding bright green-blue eyes, remained his finest features. If he wore a blue shirt his irises were sky blue. A green shirt made them look aqua. Tonight his eyes looked a bit tired as he once again found himself trying to defend a renegade theory to his oldest friend.
“You’ve marginalized yourself, man. Stick to aviation archeology, locating these old crashed World War Two planes, then restoring and flying them. You’re good at that. But Leonard Wolley or Howard Carter, you’re not. Maybe, Mister Sky, you should leave the heavy lifting to pros like me,” teased Professor Frank Bacavi.
A towering 6’5” and 280 pounds of muscle, Frank was a full-blooded Navajo. His thick, long nose supported $300 Dolce and Gabana spectacles and his coal black hair, coarse as steel wool, spiked stylishly. He’d been best friends with Sky Wilder since their elementary school days in Humbolt, Arizona. The men had gotten PhDs in anthropology together at Arizona State.
“That’s Doctor Sky, if you please, Tonto.”
“Did I mention, General Custer, that you’re about due for a haircut?”
“Where did I lose you, exactly?” said Sky, freshening his antique George V silver goblet with more wine.
“I can go along with the idea that maybe this sorcerer Hui and a couple of royal ladies escaped Egypt after their coup against Ramses the Third failed. Your evidence is fairly compelling though not incontrovertible. But this Book of Curses—”
“Book of Spells,” corrected Sky.
“Whatever. This book supposedly contains an elixir for physical immortality. Common sense alone tells us such a thing couldn’t work.” Frank went to work filling his favorite pipe, a 1947 Castello Mi Reserva half-bent carved briar bulldog. “But forget common sense and look at the facts,” said Frank, sounding like a lawyer laying out his case. “The Egyptians were consumed with the notion of an afterlife. They expended vast amounts of wealth, labor, and material on providing for themselves after death; servants, riches, tools, and comfort items were stashed in their elaborate tombs. Then consider the rituals, the embalming and mummification... all of that suggests they didn’t have any such potion that would allow them to live forever in their original physical body.”
“But no one outside the priesthood could interpret their sacred books,” countered Sky. “That formula was one of their most closely guarded treasures, written in arcane characters, interspersed with meaningless hieroglyphics, kept in the most secure part of an unknown temple, hidden by their highest priests. Until Hui stole it, that is. I don’t for a second believe that physical immortality is possible, but history tells us that plenty of people have believed exactly that, and have gone to great lengths in their attempts to achieve it. Don’t forget, the Book of Spells alone is a priceless artifact, whether any of the spells work or not.”
Frank shrugged. “What other kind of spells does this book supposedly have?” he asked as he used a Vektor torch lighter to ignite the aromatic mixture of pipe tobacco.
“The Bible and other religious books tell us that Egyptian sorcerers could heal the sick, cast out evil spirits, control the wind and rain, the rivers and the sea. They could project their souls into animals or other creatures, turn wax figures into living things that would do their bidding, and of course, bring the dead back to life. I mean, Moses performed some pretty potent magic, just read Exodus! And Moses wasn’t talked about only in the Bible. Some Greco-Egyptian papyri refer to his book of spells.”
Frank exhaled a long stream of spice-scented smoke. “Yes, there are such references,” he admitted, “but there’s no evidence that this Hui person took the book with him when he fled to—”
“There’s no evidence that he didn’t,” interrupted Sky. “Hui’s conspiracy to overthrow the Pharaoh is well-documented historical fact, including the names of the thirty or so co-conspirators who were executed. Don’t you think the Egyptians would have noted the fact that they recovered one of their most sacred books?”
Frank exhaled, more than a little audibly. “Here’s where I really have trouble, amigo. Let’s say Hui escaped with the book to Tyre, in what is now southern Lebanon. Okay. That was, what? Twelve hundred BC, or, about thirty-two hundred years ago. Your theory that the secret location of the Book of Spells has been protected over the millennia by generations of some secret society is... let me be kind and call it far-fetched.”
“Frank, far-fetched is where I live. We’re sitting on this plane right now because of my far-fetched ideas of where to look for it and how it could be recovered from the polar ice.”
Sky had earned the right to operate outside-the-box. He’d endured extreme hardship and ridicule by, first, locating the old bomber where it had crash-landed in 1945 and, then, by repairing it on site and flying it off an ice shelf in Greenland. The experts had all said it couldn’t be done, that he was either insane or reckless to try it. Or both. When he succeeded, he not only made international headlines, but became an instant legend amongst the world's legions of aviation buffs.
It wasn’t flying so much that ran in his blood, though he possessed multiple type-ratings, as it was the need for space and a feeling of limitlessness. Claustrophobic, he simply hated being indoors, especially in dark rooms. He excelled at juggling obsessions; there would always be warbirds like the B-25, but locating the Book of Spells is what kept him awake at night.
“Believe me, I have the documents from that private library in Florence that indicate the Warriors of the
Rose, a group loosely connected to Freemasonry, has been safeguarding the Book for close to two-thousand years. Before that, other groups did the same.”
“You have original documents regarding this?” asked Frank, raising an eyebrow.
“Copies.”
“Copies,” frowned Frank. “From a secret library that no one has ever heard of. Maybe that helps keep you on the best-seller list but—”
“Copies made with a handheld scanner. But I took tiny samples of the original scrolls, papers and inks. Some were clearly modern, maybe fifty to a hundred years old. But I carbon-dated one papyrus that talks about the Book of Spells to around eleven-fifty BC. The clincher is the chemical composition of the ink on that papyrus. As you know, the Egyptians were big on using colored inks. And the ink on this particular scroll is bright crimson. Crimson and scarlet, because of their resemblance to blood, symbolized life and represented something indelible or deeply ingrained. It makes sense Hui would use that color.”
“The color doesn’t prove anything. And Hui would have written the scroll after he fled to Phoenicia if your theory is correct. You telling me he carried red ink with him when he was running for his life?”
“I sincerely doubt it. But we know from the Bible what the prophet Ezekiel said about the people of Tyre, the city Hui fled to. Ezekiel spoke of the ‘blue and purple from the isles of Elishah’ in which the people were clothed. Tyre was famous for their blue and red dyes. The isles of Elishah refers to islands in the Aegean Sea, where the Tyrians obtained shell-fish, the murex and papura, from which they produced dark-blue and bright-scarlet colors. Minerals in the ink I tested could only have come from the papura. Without a doubt, the date and geographic origin of that scroll has been vetted, Frank, as coming from the time and location of Hui. I have the contents of those scrolls and no one is the wiser.”
Sky watched as Frank tapped a finger on his chin and nodded. He was chipping away at his old friend's skepticism, but had a long way to go.
“Reminds me of the old days, when we used to steal knowledge,” said Frank. The old days referred to Sky and Frank’s habit, as curious high school students, of breaking into the Yavapai County Public Library and reading research books the librarian wouldn’t allow to be checked out. The boys were repeatedly caught and jailed at the nearby Sheriff’s substation in Camp Verde. After the fifth break-in, noting that nothing was ever stolen or vandalized, the judge used Solomonic wisdom and ordered a library key be issued to the budding scholars.
“Who owns this library in Italy? The Warriors of the Rose?”
“No, it’s some other secret group, with very deep pockets. Top European elite, but don’t ask me who they are. Somebody spent a lot of time, money, and effort to acquire every scrap of information on the Egyptian sorcerer Hui. A lot of the research seems to have been done by a woman, though I haven’t been able to identify her. This group had almost everything I had and a lot of things I didn’t.”
“But by writing the book, they must know you’re onto them.”
“Not really. I tell the story of Hui and the court ladies escaping to Phoenicia and I postulate that the keys for recovering the Book of Spells are carved on three separately hidden stone tablets. But I didn’t play all my cards. And I certainly neglected to mention I copied the coded coordinates to the location of the three tablets.”
“Say that again.”
“Three stone tablets lead to the Book of Spells,” said Sky, nonchalantly. “I have the tablet locations, but they’re in code.”
Although Frank struggled not to show it, Sky knew he had him hooked and felt like a fisherman reeling in a big catch.
“No code is unbreakable with today’s super-computers,” said the big native-American.
“Wrong. A one-time pad code is unbreakable.”
“One-time pad?”
“Also called the Vernam cipher, invented by an American in 1917. Random data is assigned to the message to be encoded. If you and I are spies, I have one copy of the pad, or code key, you have the other. Only we can decode the message, no one else. But the pad can just be used once. The next message would have to be encoded with a totally new set of random data.”
Frank threw his hands into the air. “So you can’t break the code, meaning we can’t find the Book of Spells, make the elixir, become immortal, make billions and live happily ever after, which means I may as well call it a night.” Frank pocketed his pipe and eased himself from the plane's wing to a ladder, gingerly taking a step down toward the tarmac.
“Who says I can’t break the code?”
Frank froze in place and locked eyes with his old friend.
A dry breeze suddenly rose up carrying a scent of desert sage as if adding import to what Sky was about to say. “I flew to Amsterdam last week and met with a key player in this little mystery. I now have pieces of the puzzle that no other researcher has ever had,” he said, ominously. “But if I do break the one-time pad, there will be hell to pay.”
CHAPTER 2
Only about four of Sky Wilder’s 150 flat-as-a-pancake acres outside of Tucson, Arizona were surrounded by fencing. The 1200 meter landing strip that he carved from the desert using heavy equipment stretched outside the fence. Inside the wire sat a double-wide trailer Sky called home, assorted sheds, a cinder block building used as a repair and machine shop, dozens of steel CONEX boxes, aircraft tugs, two forklifts, a rusty old bulldozer, a small crane, five vehicles and four flyable warbirds, including the B-25J.
An intact cockpit from a DC-3 stood beheaded, in search of a body, near neat rows of engine cowlings, lower and upper gun turrets, air compressors, gear assemblies, propellers, Wright R2600 engines, tires, cockpit canopies, wing assemblies, vertical stabilizers, and thousands of smaller parts, all neatly labeled World War II era items purchased from collectors who’d chosen to liquidate their inventories. It was Wilder’s private airplane junkyard, or “boneyard,” and the wind whistled as it eddied around the disassembled pieces of war craft, giving life to the notion that with enough effort the disparate elements could be properly reassembled and one day take to the skies.
As they silently walked toward Frank's shiny Ford Ranger pickup truck that looked more pampered than a Beverly Hills French poodle, Wilder took note of the wind stirring amongst his collection of old aircraft parts. Desert winds sometimes seemed to impart some kind of electrical charge. It was an amorphous kind of feeling, but the night could become electrified when the wind blew, and he was struck by how, just as the parts sat waiting to fly, the parts of the Hui puzzle also waited patiently to be put together to achieve some greater whole.
Finally Frank spoke as they stopped next to his fancy truck. “So who's this 'key player' you met with in Amsterdam?”
“Arabella Ronhaar. She's the only surviving daughter of Piet and Lina Ronhaar, who both died during World War Two. She works as an astrologer out of her second floor apartment on Nieuwe Keizersgracht. Since the day her father was killed in nineteen forty-three, she's never spoken to anyone outside the family about her last moments with him.”
“No one ever tried to interview this Arabella person?”
“On the contrary. Over the years, researchers and investigators offered huge sums of money for her cooperation. They even gave her the coded coordinates hoping she would break the code. But she knew the people who had approached her were fronts for Carl Rockow.”
“The SS colonel you mentioned earlier.”
Sky nodded. “Exactly. He survived the war, escaped punishment, and spent a small fortune until his death trying to locate the three tablets of Hui. Arabella's standard response to any inquiries over the years was that she was a little girl in nineteen forty-three and had no recollection of her last day with her father.”
“Why did she talk to you?” asked Frank, who unlocked his truck remotely, causing it to chirp as the parking lights flashed.
“She's an astrologer, so I hired her to do my star chart.”
“White-eyes, you conned her!”
“Negative, Cochise. After I sat down, I told her I’d written a book on Hui. She said she’d been waiting for me to walk through her door for the last forty years. She opened up to me like a long lost friend.”
“Strange.”
“What's strange is that my best friend, famous anthropologist Professor Frank Bacavi, drives a truck that looks like it just rolled off of the showroom floor,” said Wilder, as he reached out to touch the pickup.
“Hey, don't smudge it, man,” said Frank, swiping Sky's hand away. “Just finish the story already.”
Wilder smiled. He might be needing his friend's help, and he knew, without question, that he'd get it. “Arabella told me all about her dad. She remembers that last hour they spent together as if it were yesterday. He was an amateur Egyptologist. And he gave her his pendant, an Egyptian abdju fish.” Sky pulled his cell phone from a pocket and showed Frank a photo he’d taken of Arabella's pendant.
“I’ve seen this before. The abdju was thought to act as a pilot for Ra, the sun god, when he traveled on his solar barge.”
“Move to the head of the class, young lad. Piet told Arabella to show the pendant to his friends and tell them he loved his three daughters. Obviously, those are clues to breaking the one-time pad.”
“Did she try to break the code?”
“She tried but gave up. Her father wasn’t a cryptologist, he was an astrologer, and was working on his daughter’s birth charts just before the Germans showed up. I’m betting he didn’t flee with his family because he wanted to encode the coordinates. Which means he had to work fast. Arabella and I both suspect the code key is located in the girls’ charts.”
Wilder handed over a manilla folder and Bacavi stared at Arabella’s astrology chart. A large circle was bisected into twelve sections like a pie. The signs of the zodiac were evenly spaced around the perimeter. Acute and obtuse angles had been created by connecting planet location points on the circle to each other.
