At first, Miller tried to convince Eco that he was there because he was tracking a terror group and that Eco's knowledge of secret societies—especially those with a political motivation—would be of assistance. Eco, however, saw through the charade at once and became impatient.
“Mr. Miller, I am an academic and a writer. I do not consort with the type of individuals I write about in my books. You understand that, I think?”
Eco's English was impeccable, if highly accented and a delivery that was sometimes halting. Miller replied by saying “Yes, Dottore. It's in the realm of the information you have already gathered on secret societies and cults that I need your help.”
Eco sighed.
“Foucault's Pendulum, you mean? Young man, that book is about a hoax. It's about the careful cultivation of a hoax, a fantastic story about a secret cult that does not exist. It's fiction, and even in the novel it is revealed to be fiction, almost from the beginning. Do you know how many people write to me every day from all over the world with more information on this non-existent cult? Do you realize how many people take it seriously, believe in the existence of something I made up? And now, here is a member of the American intelligence community asking me for ... I believe you call it ‘deep background’ ... on something that has no substance whatsoever and therefore cannot have even a shallow background much less a deep one. It's insane.”
“Doctor Eco, I am not here about the specific secret societies mentioned in your book, but about a genuine cult. One that we have reason to believe ...”
“Is about to destroy the world? Something like that?”
Miller was silent in the face of Eco's irritation.
“This obsession with cults and secret societies is one of the first steps towards fascism. You understand that, don't you? Conspiracy, paranoia, secret enemies, hidden plots ... The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion ... I mention that text in my novels ... that was a hoax, too, and people believed in it so strongly they invented the Holocaust.”
“Sir. What if there was another such text, one with the power to inspire thousands ... no, millions ... of followers worldwide. Another Protocols, but one that deals specifically with a kind of religion. One that is at the heart of all religions, all belief systems, and has the capacity to produce another Holocaust, but one of even greater proportions ...”
“Then I would say it doesn't exist,” the philosopher said, interrupting him.
“Perhaps. But for the sake of argument, say there is a text that not only includes religious concepts and images but which goes beyond that to embrace modern ideas about consciousness, genetics, space travel ...”
“Like von D niken? Zecharia Sitchin? Pauwels and Bergier?”
Miller nodded.
“Yes, essentially. But those were non-fiction accounts ...”
“Just barely.”
“Agreed. But imagine a scripture, a religious text, a received document, which incorporated all this material in a coherent, or at least consistent, fashion?”
“Well,” said Eco, leaning back in his leather chair that creaked under his weight. “There have been inventions of this type. All sorts of ‘space gospels.’ Insipid things.”
“Yes. But the one I am describing has an ancient pedigree.”
“Such an origin would argue heavily in favor of its being accepted by a great many people, unfortunately.”
“This is what is happening now.”
Eco leaned forward with renewed interest. “Do you have a copy of this text?”
Miller just shook his head.
“I am looking for it. Which is why I need your help.”
The old novelist looked at Miller for a long time. He was a large man with a round face, mustache, and glasses, and dressed in a fine suit of European cut. His novels had all been bestsellers, which argued for his competence where the manipulation of images and symbols was concerned. In a sense, his novels were proof of the power of semiotics, demonstrations of that discipline in very tangible forms. Eco was a conscious practitioner of the art, and this was the type of expertise that Miller wanted to access.
But he was no dummy.
“Who are you really, Mr. Miller?”
“Sir?”
“Who do you work for? It isn't CIA I don't think. It must be one of the other ones, the ones that get very little publicity and hence no novels written about them.”
“Sir.”
“I thought so. Are you one of Hal Puthoff's boys? Over at SRI?”
Eco had put it all together: Miller's intelligence credentials, his interest in secret societies and cults, and especially his direct approach to Eco himself. This was not a regular CIA dangle; he had been through enough of those before. This man, this Jason Miller, had an intensity about him that suggested something even darker, more clandestine. All his talk about a terror group and then suddenly an esoteric text ... the name of Hal Puthoff came immediately to mind. Science, the military, intelligence, and the paranormal.
Puthoff was one of the pioneers of research into PSI back in the 1970s, out of his office at what was then known as the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. He, Russell Targ and many other luminaries of the time were investigating paranormal phenomena, including even Uri Geller (the famous spoon-bending Israeli psychic). But their chief program, the one that got all the CIA funding, was remote viewing.
You couldn't make this stuff up. Eco knew all about the program, and its continued existence for decades indicated that some of what he had written about government involvement in occultism had a basis in reality, which made the whole story at the heart of Foucault's Pendulum even more delicious. At least, to him.
“I did not work for Puthoff, sir. That was before my time.”
“Of course, of course. But I am on the right track, correct?”
Miller nodded, swallowing.
“Very well. I have a proposition for you. You tell me how remote viewing works and I will tell you everything I know about whatever it is you're asking me. Do we have a deal?”
And there it was. Miller explained how it worked, how he was taught and then the personal modifications he made, and Eco suggested the use of an eidolon: an image, an idol or a two-dimensional symbol, which contained within it the “spiritual” aspect of the thing represented by the symbol. He cautioned Miller not to be too literal-minded about his choice, but instead to let an accumulation of ideas and images form to create a perfect gateway to the part of the brain that controlled remote viewing. And, most importantly, to share the eidolon with no one else. Not even Eco himself.
In return, Miller spoke about his personal mission to find the mysterious book before the terror groups did.
“It was composed, according to what we have been told, sometime in the eighth century by an Arab who may or may not have been a Muslim. It is not a particularly Islamic text; in fact, it was written in Arabic originally but contained much that was not in that language, suggesting an earlier composition. Its philosophical context is definitely pre-Islamic and polytheist.”
Eco raised an eyebrow. Something was nagging at his memory.
“And what does this text actually say? What does it do?”
“Well, we don't really know. We only have bits and pieces. We know from the chatter ...”
“Chatter?”
“Intercepted communications, mostly between members of various guerrilla and terror groups that we collect from phone calls, text messages, emails, social media postings ...”
“Yes, please. I understand. Go on.”
“Well, the chatter indicates that the book contains a set of instructions for, ah, making contact or communicating with, ah, forces that exist ... well, elsewhere. It posits the existence of a gate, which we assume to mean a theoretical construct that would permit access to other modalities of ...”
Eco, by this time, was smiling incredulously.
“What?”
“I'm very sorry my American intelligence operative friend, but what you ar
e telling me is very funny.”
“Well, I admit that it strains belief but we are talking about a kind of religious or occult text ...”
“No, no, no. You don't understand. I know the book you are talking about. I know it very well!”
“Seriously?”
“Certainly. There is even an obscure reference to its theme in Foucault's Pendulum.” He began pulling out books and papers from a stack next to his chair. “This is not my office, unfortunately. I am only here for a short while. Ah, here ...”
“But ... I read that book. Carefully ...”
“Not carefully enough, I am afraid,” he said, passing a copy of the book over to Miller with his finger pointing at a passage. It was a reference to the word Cthulhu.
“What is that?”
“Ah, you have never heard of it?”
“I don't think so.”
“It is a reference to the stories of an American writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He created what is sometimes—erroneously—referred to as the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ and ...”
“Wait! What did you just say?”
“Lovecraft, he ...”
“No, no. The other word. How did you pronounce it?”
“Oh, you mean Cthulhu. Ku ... tu ... lu.”
Miller sat back in his chair and looked away. There was a window with a view of the old city of Turin. In the distance, could be seen the church known as “Granma,” a weird round-shaped edifice about which many strange tales were told. Turin was where Nietzsche went insane. It was also, briefly, a town where the French sage Nostradamus resided.
“Kutulu,” he whispered, half to himself. “I didn't catch that before. I saw all those consonants and my eyes just passed over the word.”
“Lovecraft himself suggested that the sound made by the letters was a sort of blurting noise rather than a word we could pronounce using human speech apparatus, but the link between Cthulhu and the word chthonic is so close that ...”
“I heard that word. Not that long ago. In a different context.”
Not understanding, Eco plowed on.
“But that is what I am trying to tell you! There is no Cthulhu. There never was. It was a fictional device, an invention!”
Miller looked away from the window and directly at the philosopher.
“And the book?”
“The book! Another fabrication! It doesn't exist, Cthulhu doesn't exist ...”
“The book,” Miller insisted. “Where is it? What is it? What was it called?”
Eco sighed in frustration.
“You are wasting your time, and your government's time. The book doesn't exist. The Necronomicon doesn't exist!”
Miller paused, and looked down at his shoes. His heart was racing, and he felt half-in, half-out of the room he was in, the city, the country, and the world. Without realizing it or intending it, Umberto Eco had just put the pieces together for him.
He had just fallen down the rabbit hole.
In Iran, Miller opened his eyes.
“Zaranj,” he said to himself. “They're going to Zaranj.”
Chapter Nineteen
Kafiristan
They call it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it's the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two and thirty heathen idols there, and we'll be the thirty-third.
—Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King
They stopped short of the Afghan border.
They were outside the village of Milak, on route A-71. They could look across the border from where they stood. They parked by the side of the road to consider their next move.
Adnan and Sangar got out first, telling Angell to sit back and wait. The two men walked up and down outside the car, talking in low voices and glancing over at the crossing at Zaranj.
“This could get hairy,” said Sangar.
Adnan nodded, slightly, with a look back at Angell still sitting in the car.
“We'll be met once we get through.”
“It's the getting through that'll be tough. I don't like it.”
“There is a US Marine base, FOB Delaram, up a little ways north of Zaranj.”
“Used to be. After the Afghan elections they're ready to redeploy Stateside. They may have already gone. Even if they left a small contingent here you know they'd pretty much stay on base. And the smugglers practically run the place under the noses of the Afghan security forces—the ANA—and the Marines. I can't see anyone coming out here to save your ass.”
“If we can manage to get to the Zaranj airfield we might be able to hitch a ride to Kamdesh. It's just north of the town.”
“Seriously? Look around you.”
The area was pure desert. It was hot, dusty and dry, with a temperature north of 90 degrees F. The land was flat, and a paved road led the way to the checkpoint with a caravan of trucks and cars choking it: the pride of the brand-new Highway 606. From a distance the city of Zaranj looked like something you would see on an Etch-a-Sketch, faint straight lines that would be erased if you just shook the sand a little.
“The Zaranj airfield is a major terrorist target. The ANA has to patrol the tarmac every day to make sure there are no IEDs. Getting past the guards and hopping a flight to Kamdesh ... man, there is no such thing, anyway. You'd be lucky to get a ride to Kabul, and from there you're pretty much fucked. There's no one you can trust to get you the rest of the way to Kafiristan.”
As they stood there talking, they could see a plume of dust about three kilometers from their position.
“You see that? It's nothing. A car, a truck. But you can see them from miles away. Just like they'd see you. The ANA won't give a shit until you get close enough to border control, but the Taliban and the smugglers will.”
Sangar looked up and around, as if he couldn't believe what he had to say.
“Man, we have a job to do here in Iran. It's what we're trained for, and what we know. This ... this is not in our job description. You know what I'm saying? This is a suicide mission. And not in a good way.”
“We came all this way, and you're just now telling me not to go?”
“I did my part, man. I got you this far. I wanted you to see what you were up against. If the smugglers don't kill you, the desert will. This place makes Yazd look like Vegas. You see what I mean? Just look. The land past Zaranj is all desert. Pure desert. It's isolated and desolate. Taliban nation, man. They bring bodies out there and leave them to die. They don't have to kill them. They just leave them there, dug halfway into the ground. They aren't found again for years, and when they are they're just rags and bones.”
The plume of dust was getting closer. Adnan could just about see the silhouette of the car that was causing it. It was headed their way. Probably an Iranian making his way to the border town to trade bootleg CDs, or something.
“If we don't go now, Bahadur and Firooz would have died for nothing.”
“This is war, man. People die in war. They knew what they were getting into when they signed up.”
“Yeah, well, then I guess I do too.”
Adnan was irritated, but not at Sangar. He knew his friend was right. Sangar had spent three years in the States getting his master's degree in engineering and learning to speak English like a surfer from the beaches south of LA. But there was no way he could abandon the mission at this point. His orders from Aubrey were clear, and when you talked to Aubrey you were talking to the highest levels of the American intelligence “community.” You might as well be talking to the President. Even better: presidents come and go, but people like Aubrey remained from administration to administration and got things done.
The approaching car appeared to slow down as they were arguing. Angell noticed it in the rear view mirror and then turned to watch it. He saw the car slow but it didn't stop. He caught a glimpse of the driver who did not seem to take notice of them at all. The car continued on and joined the line behind the traffic heading into Afghanistan.
Angell turned bac
k around to face Adnan and Sangar who were still talking by the edge of the road.
WHUMP!
A flash of light preceded by microseconds the sound of the explosion as the car that had just passed them detonated on the highway into Zaranj.
Adnan and Sangar hit the ground as a reflex and Angell simply stared out the windshield at the plume of dark smoke that erupted near the border control point.
This is where we are going? he asked himself.
“This could work in our favor,” said Adnan when he got back in the car. “The border guards are probably cowering somewhere and not watching who comes in. There's chaos at the checkpoint, damaged vehicles, broken bodies. Small fires. All their attention is focused on survival right now.”
“You still have to get through that mess,” offered Sangar, getting behind the wheel. “You could probably walk through, if you can sidestep the blast site. But the road looks completely torn up there. No vehicle is going to make it through now, not until they clear that away and do some repairs. Could be days. If you're going to go, it had better be now while everyone is still shaken up.”
“Agreed,” Adnan replied. He looked over the backseat at Angell. “You ready to go?”
Angell looked out at the devastation caused by the suicide bomber, and could only nod.
The look on his face caused both Adnan and Sangar to laugh out loud.
Sangar drove them as close as he dared, then stopped the car. With the engine still idling, he held out his hand to Adnan.
“Good hunting, my friend.”
“Give my best to everyone. I plan to be back here in seventy-two hours. After Kamdesh we should be able to hop a military transport back to Zaranj or maybe a ticket out of here. I'll keep you informed along the way.”
Angell and Adnan got out of the car, carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs. Sangar waited until he saw them get onto the highway and make their way towards the border, then made a U-turn in the sand and drove away, back towards the heart of Iran. He would hole up in one of the towns they had passed and wait for a signal from Adnan.
The Lovecraft Code Page 27
