“So it’s not against the rules?”
“Of course not,” Amanda said. When Astarte didn’t ask any more questions Amanda turned to Cameron. “Say, Cam, if we’re right about Bezaleel being a key to all this, then it stands to reason that the Templars would have made a big deal of him, right?”
Astarte sighed. Here they go again. She stared out the window and thought about Uncle Jefferson.
“I agree,” Cam said. “Can you find anything tying the Templars to Bezaleel?”
“Give me a few minutes.” She punched at her smartphone. Twenty years ago the research she and Cam were doing in an hour-long car ride would have necessitated a team of researchers visiting libraries scattered around the world. In many ways it was this explosion in technology that had allowed for so many breakthroughs in historical research.
“Okay,” Amanda said, “I have something. I’ll read it to you: ‘Bezaleel bears a remarkable similarity to Azazel, one of the fallen angels who rebelled against God in the Book of Enoch.’”
“The Book of Enoch,” Cam said. “Hmm.” She and Cam had often come across the Book of Enoch in their research as it was an important part of Freemasonry.
She continued reading. “‘Azazel released to humankind the secrets of metallurgy and the manufacture of jewelry—’”
“Sounds like Bezaleel, a goldsmith,” Cam interrupted.
“‘—and also taught women to be promiscuous and enjoy sex,’” Amanda whispered, glancing at Astarte in the back seat.
“Aha. Now you’re talking.”
“‘For these transgressions God condemned Azazel to remain forever bound, hung upside down.’”
“Can’t be having women enjoying sex,” Cam said.
“At least not in a patriarchal church,” Amanda responded. “So there’s more: ‘The only known statue of Azazel is in the choir area of Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland.’”
Cam grinned. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” Again, through their prior research Amanda and Cam knew all about Rosslyn Chapel. Purportedly a Christian house of prayer, it was in reality a monument to Freemasonry, paganism and worship of the Sacred Feminine. Not surprisingly, it was built by a family—the Sinclairs—with prominent historical ties to both the Templars and the Freemasons.
“That’s perfect.”
“Some people say he also taught women the art of witchcraft. Here’s a picture of the statue; the official literature says the statue depicts Lucifer, but this website I’m on insists it’s really Azazel.” She angled her screen toward him.
CARVING OF AZAZEL, ROSSLYN CHAPEL
“Yup. Bound and hung upside down,” Cam said. “So is it too big a stretch to say the Templars would have venerated this Azazel guy—or angel—not only because he built the Ark of the Covenant but because he was, well, a feminist? You know, teaching women to enjoy sex and wear makeup and all.”
“I think that’s fair. That was the big fight the Templars were having with the Church. They recognized the need for balance between the masculine and the feminine, both in the Church and in society as a whole.” She paused. “And for our purposes I think we’ve figured out why Bezaleel is decorating our ark. It’s another strong connection to the Templars.”
Cam glanced again at the image of the statue from Rosslyn Chapel. “I just love that they put a statute of this angel in there. Talk about standing tall and giving the finger to the Church.”
Willum met them at the front gate of the compound. Astarte waited in the car with Amanda while Cam and Ellis approached Willum.
“They accepted the deal,” Ellis said. “Congratulations.” He smiled. “Now the government won’t blow up your compound.”
Willum took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind. Deal’s off. I’m not giving up the fuel cell.”
“What?” Cam sputtered. “Why?”
Willum shrugged. “I thought about making some speech about not wanting to make the world a more dangerous place, about not wanting to be looked at like the guys who invented the nuclear bomb. But in the end it’s simpler than that. I don’t like the pricks at the Defense Department getting their way. Fuck them.”
Ellis nodded, trying to act like he saw it coming all along. “So maybe they will blow up your compound after all.”
Willum shrugged again and pointed his jaw toward the armed troops mulling around outside the gate. “I don’t think there are many guys out there willing to murder their fellow Americans.”
“Well,” Ellis said, “for your sake I hope you’re right.”
Willum turned to Cam. “According to your friend here, I may be dead by morning. You owe me an explanation about the ark.”
Cam nodded. He did owe him at least that.
Ellis hadn’t expected Smoot to renege on their deal. It simply didn’t fit his personality profile. From everything Ellis had read Smoot was risk-averse, apprehensive, even a bit meek. That was why he built this compound and retreated to it—he wanted to insulate himself from conflict. But now he was almost inviting it. It was almost as if he had undergone a personality transplant. Odd.
In any event, even though Ellis hadn’t expected it didn’t mean he wasn’t prepared for it.
He hopped into his car and pulled out a satellite phone. “Elder Bigelow,” he said. “I’m calling about the matter we discussed earlier today. If you’re free in, say, one hour, I can meet you at the hotel and show you the relic.”
“And what about the girl?”
“I don’t think she’ll be available tonight. But we can discuss that matter as well.”
Amanda wasn’t comfortable bringing Astarte into the compound so she took the SUV and drove back into town for some dinner. Willum opened the gate for Cam to enter and the two of them walked the perimeter fence in the fading daylight, the pace slow to accommodate Cam’s wound.
“Hey, I’m sorry if you think I lied to you,” Cam said.
Willum shrugged. “Truth is the first casualty of war.”
“But I’m not a soldier. And I’m trying to stop a war before it starts.” He put his hand on Willum’s shoulder. “Honestly, Amanda and I are just trying to help.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
They walked in silence. Every fifty feet or so a pair of armed National Guardsmen crouched, hunkered behind Plexiglas barricades on the other side of the electrified fence.
Willum gestured toward them. “What, they think we’re going to start shooting at them?” He shook his head. “What a waste this all is.”
Cam lowered his voice. “You really can’t just give them the fuel cell and get this all over with?”
He sighed. “You know, if I thought it would, as you say, get this all over with, I’d do it. But our government is out of control. If they don’t attack here, they’ll attack somewhere else; if not me, some other imagined enemy. This country has to wake up and understand the government serves the people, not the other way around.”
Cam nodded. He didn’t agree, but then again nobody had thrown him into jail and took his son away and dropped a missile into his compound. So he understood where Willum was coming from.
“So,” Willum said, “tell me what you’ve learned about our ark.”
“Your ark.”
Willum smiled. “For now, I think it’d be best if you kept it. If we put it into the compound it might end up as scrap metal.”
Cam explained how they believed the arks—both the original and the replicas—were capacitors used to convert heavy metals, often contained in desert sand, to the white powder of gold. The powder in turn was then used as some kind of energy source to power the ark.
“Hmm.” Willum stared out into the desert dusk for a few seconds. “Interesting.”
“This goes back to the time of the Pharaohs. The Egyptian priests fed the white powder—they call it mfkzt—to the Pharaohs supposedly so they could communicate with their gods. Apparently the ancient Jews did the same thing.”
“Fascinating. And you think the ark we found
was made for the same purpose?”
“Yes. Again, the Jews are wandering the desert. Again, their leaders want to communicate with God. The Calalus leaders are part of the Levi tribe—the priests—so they know all the secrets of the ark and the white powder and how to handle the ark without getting electrocuted.”
“You know, if the priests ate the white powder of gold, it might put them in some kind of resonance with the ark itself. That would allow them to approach and even touch it. I can explain the science to you if you’d like….”
Cam held up his hand. “No, no, I trust you. But it does explain how the priests could approach when others couldn’t. Anyway, we found ‘House of Levi’ inscribed on one of the faces of the ark. Also a portrait of a guy named Bezaleel, the goldsmith who built the original Ark. I won’t bore you with the details, but all this ties everything back to the Templars and the French noble families. It all fits.”
Willum shook his head. “So the Templars really were here.”
“Yes, they came looking for their Calalus ancestors. And they found the replica ark.”
“And they probably died here. At least rough Hurech did. And the others left the ark for some lucky bastards like us to stumble upon.” He clasped Cam’s shoulder. “I might not live through the week, but I’m sure glad you solved this mystery for me.” He smiled. “Now I won’t have to haunt you from the grave.”
Cam slowed as they approached another pair of soldiers. “Speaking of graves, are you sure it’s okay to walk around in the open? What if they decide to take you down?” Cam had grown to like the paranoid Willum. And it wasn’t even clear how paranoid he really was—maybe they really were out to get him.
Willum shrugged. “Not going to happen. At least not yet. I turned down their deal, so it’s going to take a day or two of meetings in Washington to figure out what they want to do next.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Well, tonight I’m going to talk to my people. Clarisse is writing the speech now—I’m not very good at this kind of stuff.”
“Mind if I stick around?”
“For good? Or just for the speech?”
Cam chuckled “Just the speech. Then I’ll go back to the hotel.” They walked in silence for a few seconds. “So you think this will go on for awhile?”
“Yes. Remember the story of Masada, where the Israelites held out in a mountain fortification against the Roman army for, like, six months? Well, that could be us.”
“Eventually the Romans won, right?”
“Well, the Jews all committed suicide. So I guess you could call it a win.”
“But they stayed true to their beliefs.”
“Yes.” Willum smiled. “Not just that—before they died they emptied the sewerage cisterns onto the Roman troops below.”
“Ugly.”
“Just one final ‘fuck you’ to the authorities before meeting their maker.”
“You have something like that in mind?”
Willum bit his lip. “It’s not nearly as … aromatic. But not giving them the fuel cell makes me feel pretty good about myself.”
With Smoot having rejected their deal, there was nothing for Georgia to do at the compound so she returned to the hotel.
The day had pretty much been a disaster. Amanda was angry at her over the visit to the Mormon church. And understandably so. But how do you say no to a scared little girl who begs you to let her go pray?
And with Smoot reneging on the deal the chances for a peaceful resolution at the compound had dimmed. Georgia had been amazed when Ellis had orchestrated the original deal—it had seemed too good to be true, and now it turned out that it was. The longer this went the more likely it would be that some trigger-happy redneck would give the order to fire. It only took one idiot to start a war.
She flicked on the television set in her room, ordered a burger from room service and found a bottle of wine in the mini bar. Unable to find a good movie, she settled on a cable news channel. A Survivalist from Idaho, a heavy-set woman with her hair pulled into a ponytail and her fleshy chin jutting out challengingly toward the camera, discussed the Casa Grande compound standoff. “This just shows how messed up our country is right now. If the people in that compound were illegal immigrants, the government wouldn’t have bothered them. But instead they harass and intimidate and basically goad them into fighting back. Now an innocent woman is dead and who knows how many others will die also?”
The interviewer, a Ken-doll whose dark, tailored suit contrasted with his guest’s threadbare floral blouse, asked, “So what are others in the Survivalist community doing?”
“You know, this has really mobilized us. One of the things that has really caught on is that thousands of people—many of them Survivalists, but also many other Americans who are just fed up—are taking steps to quit their jobs.”
“Quit their jobs?”
Georgia leaned forward. How would that help?
“Well, it’s like this. Our government is a hungry beast. Insatiable, in fact. And we feed it with tax revenue, right? Well, how are taxes in this country collected?”
“Income taxes and sales taxes, mostly,” Ken-doll said.
“Exactly. So, for example, in our compound in Idaho we have thirty families living there—let’s say fifty adults. We grow our own food, make our own clothes, etcetera. We are not totally self-sufficient, but nearly so. And when we need to buy anything, we go into town and barter. So cash almost never changes hand. None of us have an income, and we don’t really buy anything.”
“So you don’t pay income tax or sales tax.”
She showed a mouth of clean, crooked teeth. “Right. We call it going off the grid. Like I said, we have thirty adults. When we lived back in society, we each would have paid, maybe, ten thousand dollars a year in taxes. Now, we pay almost nothing. So just from our little compound we are denying the beast $300,000 per year. When you start to get tens of thousands of people doing the same thing, you’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars in lost tax revenue.”
“Do you really have that many people?”
“We didn’t last week.” She smiled again. “But we do now.”
Clarisse gathered the residents in the picnic area and fed them burgers and mashed potatoes. She sent runners out to feed the sentries the same meal—no sense making people fend for themselves.
The plan was for Willum to address the residents at seven o’clock. The speech would be broadcast through the entire compound—not only could the sentries hear it but also the Guardsmen outside the fence. In many ways, the words Clarisse had written were intended for them.
Willum slowly eased himself off the picnic bench and, standing on a wooden platform, took the microphone and cleared his throat. “Good evening, good evening to my friends.”
It was not a word used often within the compound or generally in the Survivalist community. Sure, friendships were made. But people generally thought of themselves as business associates or teammates.
“I believe we are at a crossroads. I believe America is at a crossroads. What happens here over the next few days and weeks will determine the course of history for our country.” He paused and took a deep breath. Clarisse looked around—not a single eye was not on him. Willum was not normally a dynamic speaker, but the enormity of the situation seemed to have lifted him.
He continued. “Will our leaders call for an attack on American citizens? Will this country pursue a path that elevates the rights of the governing over the rights of the governed? Will this turn into Kent State or Waco or Ruby Ridge all over again?
“Over the past decade or so we have witnessed a fundamental change in the way our government sees itself. We have become a mirror-image of the old Soviet Union and China models, where the people exist to serve the state. Today, in America, our leaders do not believe they work for us—rather, they see themselves as queen bees, ensconced in Washington, while we workers devote our lives to paying taxes. We are nothing more than pollen coll
ectors to them. And, if need be, we are disposable.”
Willum spread his hands. “Well, I for one do not appreciate being a slave to my government. Or of being disposable. And I don’t believe millions of other Americans like it either. As many of you know, they offered me a deal to end this standoff. But it required me giving them technology that would only strengthen their power over us.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t in good conscience do that. Just as I couldn’t in good conscience give up Boonie to them.”
Clarisse had been blind-sided by this decision. But she shouldn’t have been—the looming danger had altered Willum’s personality just as it had the others. He had become more idealistic, more spiritual, more messianic. The world in his eyes had become a palate of black and white, with little gray area in between. She shook her head—he had become the Moses-like figure she had pushed him to be.
He continued. “So now, tonight, I am making a choice. The leaders of this great country can push a button and wipe this compound off the face of the earth. We all know that. But if they do so, they are going to have to do so while millions of Americans bear witness.” Willum smiled. “And I don’t think they have the guts to do it!”
After the applause died down, Willum gave the compound residents a final chance to leave. The children had been evacuated earlier in the day, with some of their parents accompanying them. But none of the remaining adults chose to follow. Clarisse knew they wouldn’t. Now she just had to hope Willum was right about the White House not having the guts to take them out.
Well, so much for getting that fuel cell peacefully. Ellis clicked the stop button on the video link, ending the clip of Smoot’s speech at the compound. Smoot and his gang weren’t coming out without a fight. And the problem with a fight is that it might destroy the fuel cell prototype. Smoot likely hadn’t figured it out yet, but keeping that fuel cell was probably the only thing keeping him alive. But at some point the White House would value the President’s falling opinion poll numbers more than the fuel cell—they couldn’t let him continue to look weak indefinitely.
Powdered Gold: Templars and the American Ark of the Covenant (Templars in America Series Book 3) Page 22
