Father Chandra said he was a Jesuit priest.
“They found a letter.” Addie continued reading. “Let me see here.” She ran her finger down the screen trying to find her place. “Okay it says that scholars had been able to deduce some of its previous owners, but not the author. And, the farthest they could go back with certainty, thanks to a correspondence found with the book written by Johannes Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher, was to the early 1500s. Marcus wrote that the manuscript had belonged to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, 1552-1612, who purchased it for 600 gold ducats, believing it was the work of the philosopher Roger Bacon. “Scientists have been able to date it to somewhere around 1405 to 1420.” Addie finished reading and looked up. “It says that the book is probably from northern Italy.”
I googled Roger Bacon. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He lived almost a century and a half before the book was thought to have been written.”
“Maybe the book is older than what scholars think,” Addie said.
“I’m sure it was carbon dated.”
“Oh yeah, I read that it had been carbon dated,” Addie said.
“Then why did you say the book was probably older?” I asked.
“Because you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet,” Addie said.
I shook my head and went back to reading. “They’ve looked at the book under ultraviolet light and found a signature that appears someone tried to erase.
“It says the book is small,” I read. “About 23 cm by 16 cm in size. Let me see, that’s about 9 by 6 inches. That’s about the size of a paperback book.” I looked up at Addie. “You can relate to that, huh?”
“I like hardcovers.”
I chuckled. “Okay.” I looked back down at the screen. “The codex is about 240 pages. But what seems most interesting is the language. In more than six hundred years, no one has been able to decipher it.”
An unknown language. Hmmm . . .
“So the book has pictures of plants . . . Hey,” Addie said. “These pictures show naked, pregnant women.”
“Wait. What did you say? Let me see that,” I said.
It couldn’t be, I thought. The Nephilim? I pulled the laptop Addie was using over to me and gazed down at the pictures. The words in the Book of Enoch stuck in my brain. Naked, pregnant woman. I didn’t see these pictures at Professor Abelson’s house. She just had pages with the gibberish, or, I guess, words, on it. What if a Watcher wrote this book about what Enoch described in his book? I shook my head and took in a breath. I’m sure one thing didn’t have to do with the other.
“And look at this!” Addie said. She was using my laptop while I was looking at the naked women on hers. “It says that these plants, the ones depicted in the Voynich Manuscript, are not found anywhere on Earth. Justin,” she said, “It’s just like the laboratory on Madagascar!”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You wrote that they experimented with plants and things at their laboratory on Madagascar. Maybe these pictures are a depiction of some of the plants they created.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
“Justin. Think about it,” Addie said. “The people from Mars brought the plants here and they had some greenhouse, hothouse, or something or other on Madagascar where they kept the plants from Mars. And they planted them in the ground, too,” she said.
“They were either purposely genetically changed, or they were hybrids of Mars and Earth’s plants.” Addie’s mind was working a mile a minute. “Or,” she said. “After some time, they evolved into the plants that are on Madagascar now. I don’t know why the book would have pregnant women dancing around. But these plants – and the animals that are in the Voynich Manuscript are not found anywhere else on Earth, either, maybe because they’re pictures of the ones that had been on Mars.”
I started wondering if the pictures in the Voynich Manuscript might just be depicting the stories in the Book of Enoch. The idea of the Voynich Manuscript and man’s origins on Mars being interrelated was starting to make me think – maybe so. Maybe it even had something to do with the AHM manuscripts.
And if those three things were related, I knew why there were pregnant women being depicted.
Chapter Thirty
The plans had been finalized right before Simon’s last call. We all had bought our tickets online for the trip to Israel, except for Rennie, before our first “meeting” of our little alternative history detective club had ended. Addie, Jack and Rennie left my house about ten o’clock that night. They were staying at the Marriott in Beachwood, leaving out for home the next afternoon. Claire was going to show them a little of Cleveland before they left. The next time I would see them would be when they flew into New York and met me and Claire at JFK to take the flight over to Tel-Aviv.
Yes, I was going back to Jerusalem. I got goose bumps just thinking about it. And this time with a whole different mindset. Not the frantic, crazy, crying person I was when I went back to find the AHM manuscripts. I didn’t want the new people to see how loony I really could be.
Everyone had been gone more than an hour and I still hadn’t gotten up from the kitchen table. I had so much to think about.
In one week I was going to Israel to find Dr. Sabir’s proof he’d left, and two complete strangers were going with me. I cradled my chin in the palm of my hand, and grinned about the day’s activities.
First, all those crazy phone calls from Simon. What was up with that? Then there had been people coming in and out of my house all day. A mysterious priest, who was trying to push me to go to Italy. And three “fans” of my work from a book club in Baltimore.
Jack was a different story. What his story was exactly, I wasn’t quite sure. Addie was feisty, evidently like her little Maltese dog she talked about constantly in between gulps of coffee. She said next time she’d bring Zeus, that was the dog, with her. I told her don’t bother. I don’t do dogs. Especially if they run in a caffeine induced high gear like she does.
Addie seemed to have the answer on where to find the clues, and confidence in me deducing them. And that the Voynich Manuscript had something to do with it.
While I believed that Dr. Sabir had all the proof laid out for me in his buried cache, I wasn’t so sure that I could do anything with the Voynich Manuscript. If it even was a part of it. Dr. Sabir certainly hadn’t mentioned it.
And, even if I could decipher it, that didn’t mean I could figure out what it had to do with anything. Heck, I’d learned Ge’ez and gone over the Book of Enoch fifty times since first talking to Simon, and I didn’t see it yielding any facts on how to build a spaceship that could travel the galaxy. Being able to read something and finding the clues in it apparently were two different things. I eventually had stopped trying to understand the clues in Enoch myself because I was spinning my wheels for nothing. I knew the clues in Enoch would all be clear once I got the stuff Dr. Sabir had left.
Before she left, Addie told me to find out what happened to Dr. Sabir’s notebook that I had sent to Ghazi. She’d thought we would need it. I tried to tell her that I had a photographic memory and we didn’t. I didn’t tell her, though, that I had a complete copy of it on floppy disks because I didn’t have a computer that could read them and I knew she would have bugged me about seeing them.
But she insisted that I should be curious about it, and about what happened to Ghazi. Why he never called to confirm he got the notebook or that he had donated it to the library. I couldn’t argue with that.
I stroked my fingers on the keyboard of one of the two laptops still opened on the table. And while I was at it, I started thinking, maybe I should check up on this group of scholars going to Italy, and Father Nikhil Chandra.
But before I could get to it, I saw my brother, Greg’s name pop up on my Caller ID.
“Heard you were going back to Jerusalem,” he said, first thing after I picked up.
“Who told you that?”
“What? You think I don’t know what you
’re up to?”
I sucked my tongue. “What are you talking about, Greg?” I got up from the kitchen table and walked toward the front of the house.
“Looks like to me you would have had enough of those things.”
I could feel the knot tying up in my stomach. I didn’t say anything.
“So now I gotta go babysit you and make sure you don’t go over to Jerusalem acting like Indiana Jones. And keep you from having a nervous breakdown on Holy Ground. Again.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Greg. And no one asked you to go anywhere with me. I’m going for work.”
“Liar.”
“I am not lying.”
“I read your book.”
My heart stopped. I needed to sit down.
“In the Beginning,” he said, as if I didn’t know the name of it.
I walked into the living room and sat on the couch. My hand was trembling. I almost dropped the phone.
I knew he was going to choke me. I put him in that thing, used his real name, and then wrote all about man coming from another planet. Oh brother, I could just see his reputation as Mr. SuperLawyer going up in flames.
“Catchy title,” he said, and then started laughing. “You ain’t got nothing to say, girl?”
I swallowed hard. “Uhmm.” I really didn’t have anything to say, even if I could talk, which I couldn’t. And, what could I say?
“I liked your book.”
I did drop the phone.
“What did you say? I asked after picking it back up.
“I said, I liked your book. Glad you decided to set the record straight in the new one. Makes me think you’re kind of toughening up.”
The new one? How does he find out all this stuff?
“Uhm, yeah, but telling the world. I’m not so sure about that.”
“Why wouldn’t people want to know?”
“What did you say? Why would people wanna know?”
“No. I said ‘wouldn’t.’ Why would people not want to know about their origins? To coin a phrase, Author Justin, about ‘in the beginning’?”
“But can’t you just see it? Government people chasing after me to permanently silence me.” I was repeating Addie’s rendition of how it would go. “Scholars would be accusing me of trying to perpetrate a hoax. Fanatics lying in wait to kill me.”
“Justin. There you go with those conspiracy theories again. No one tried to do anything to you last time you went on your quest to unravel true historical mysteries. You wrote a book, what? Thirteen years ago, and you’re still alive.”
“What about our reputations? Your reputation?”
“I’m retired. I still do a case here and there, and my name is on that firm, but I’m not trying to have the coroner come and pick up my body from a courtroom. With nothing to do, I’d probably take to drinking or fishing. And, I’m not keen on doing either one of those things. I may as well hang out with you.”
“Hahaha.”
When did he get to be so faithful and loyal to me and my doings? I thought.
“Okay, Mr. Martyr,” I said. “But this time I’m not hiding behind fiction. This time I’m going to present proof.”
“Good for you. When we leaving for Jerusalem?”
“Uhm. Next week. Just booked my flight about an hour ago.”
“The saga continues,” he said, and chuckled. “Check the flight you’re on and see if they got a first class ticket available for me. And let me know. Michael going?”
“Uhm, no. I hadn’t asked him. Claire’s going, though.”
“Good. The more the merrier.”
I probably should have told him about Addie and Jack. I’m sure he would have had something to say about it. But he did say, “The more the merrier,” and didn’t even grumble when I told him Claire was going. I’m going to just have to hold him to being “merry” when he finds out about the Baltimore book gang.
After I hung up from Greg, I remembered I was supposed to call Professor Abelson and let her know when I was leaving, just in case her “husband” wasn’t going to be home. Whoever heard of a seventy or eighty year old man going on business trips? I knew it was late and hoped because of it she wouldn’t pick up the phone. I’d rather leave a message. I scrolled through my contacts where I had put her number when I picked her up at the hospital.
I had saved it under the name “Scary Lady.”
Chapter Thirty-One
After hanging up from Greg and leaving the message for Professor Abelson, I walked back in the kitchen to retrieve the laptops and put them away. The house was dark, my big chef’s kitchen devoid now of all the laughs and people. I had had fun.
I walked quickly across the room to the kitchen table, the terracotta stone floor cool to my bare feet. Mase’s laptop was dead. I shut the top and walked back through the hallway to his office and plugged it in.
I headed back to the kitchen to get mine but remembered Addie telling me to find out about Ghazi. I may as well do it now, I thought. I slid my fingers over the mouse pad, and the screen lit up. Good, I had a little battery power left.
I pulled out one of the chairs and sat down. I clicked on a new tab and googled Ghazi’s name. I got nothing. I looked through several pages. No mention of him. So then I googled a couple of people who I remembered worked with Dr. Margulies. After twelve years, thinking of the names of people he worked with was no easy feat. Finally, I came across a few, but only two that had an email address. One was an archaeologist; the other was a professor at Hebrew University.
By the light of the computer screen I composed a quick email to the archaeologist. I asked if he knew how to get in touch with Ghazi, and if he did, could he either send me Ghazi’s information, or please pass on mine to him. I read it over and thought I should make it sound more urgent. So I added that it was very important that I speak with Ghazi as soon as possible. I read it again, highlighted it and copied the message to the clipboard. Then I clicked send, opened up another email and pasted the message in. I typed the professor’s email address in, and sent it on its way as well. Sending two, I thought, was better than copying both of them in the same email.
Then I opened up a new tab on google and searched for the information on the trip to Italy for scholars to help decipher the Voynich Manuscript. I found an announcement that read, “An international Voynich conference has been organized for 11 May 2012. Booking for attendees starts 1 February 2012.”
Seemed funny that John Carroll would write a date like that, with the day first, then the month. And why didn’t their website come up? So I googled John Carroll University and clicked on their website. I couldn’t find anything about the conference. Not under their “About” tab, or under their “News” or “Events” listings.
Hmmm . . .
I typed Father Nikhil Chandra into John Carroll’s faculty search box. Nothing. I took the word ‘Father’ off. Still nothing. I knew I was spelling it correctly. I could see the card he gave me in my head. So I checked under their “Alumni” tab. Again, nothing.
I had starting typing his name in a general google search box, when I got a ding from AOL that I had a new email. It was one from the professor at Hebrew University. I got excited.
“Good,” I said aloud, one step closer to finding Ghazi. I’d been such a terrible friend. Not looking him up before now. I’ll just finish checking on Father Chandra later.”
I clicked on the email and opened it up. Sure enough he had information on Ghazi. It wasn’t exactly the information I expected to get, though.
Chapter Thirty-Two
John F. Kennedy International Airport
November 7, 2011
“When we get to Israel, I want to look up Ghazi’s death certificate.”
We were all sitting at JFK, waiting to board our flight to Jerusalem. Addie, all of sudden, turned, put her face in mine, and blurted out her request. It startled me. I had told her about Ghazi’s death soon after I got the email.
She hadn’t really said an
ything since we all had met up in the boarding area. When I first saw her and Jack waiting for us at our gate, she ran to me, hugged me and Claire, and was all smiles, babbling how happy she was. But then I introduced her to Greg, once he returned from the restroom, and she turned red, started blushing and flubbing her words. I stood back and watched. How cute, I thought. She likes Greg. I tapped Claire on her arm, and we giggled.
Greg was a good fifteen years older than her I guessed, but my brother was very good-looking. He had dark, smooth skin, low cut hair that was sprinkled, like his neatly trimmed goatee, with just a touch of gray. And he and the gym had an up-close, personal, and intimate relationship, and it showed. He was dressed in a white, French cut shirt, first three buttons undone, shiny gold cufflinks, a pair of black slacks, and black leather huaraches shoes.
After Addie got herself together from the initial shock of seeing Greg, she didn’t say much of anything else, other than whispering, at a barely audible level, that I should have told her about my brother. Told her what, I wondered. The next thing she said, more than a half hour later, was her abrupt question.
“Why?” I laughed. “Why do you want to see his death certificate? Don’t you think that’s kind of morbid?” Was that the only thing she could think of to say?
“Don’t you care about him?” she asked me.
“What kind of question is that? He was a friend. Unfortunately, no one thought he was good enough of a friend to notify me of his death. And, of course I care.”
“I just think it’s suspicious.”
There she was being suspicious again.
“What’s suspicious?” I asked.
“He gets the journal and he dies. Maybe he was murdered.” Addie drew her words out to make it seem conspiratorial. Her eyes were big, and she held her hands up like she was trying to get me to understand.
That made Greg and Claire laugh. Deep down belly kind of laugh. I even breathed out a little chuckle. We all remembered how I said Dr. Sabir had been murdered, actually how I went on and on about how he was murdered when I first found out about his death. Only to find later he’d been struck by lightning while trying to fix a flat on his car. She sounded just like me. Always making more of things then what they really were.
Irrefutable Proof: Mars Origin I Series Book II Page 14
