“What about Simon?”
“What about him?”
“He’ll think . . . I probably should tell him . . .”
“So, I’ma have to tell you what I found out. Wasn’t going to tell you until we got home. But that little twit, Simon - ”
“Stop calling him a twit. He’s my friend.”
“That little twit, Simon, didn’t tell you that the Sentinelese killed two fishermen a few months back, did he? Two fishermen that accidently floated into their waters, drunk, asleep, not causing any problems. It was an unprovoked attack by the Sentinelese. And, I know he didn’t tell you that the Indian government is writing up legislation so that there won’t be any more of these “contact expeditions” because they are too dangerous and these people need to be left alone. He didn’t tell you that either, did he? And did he tell you that those visits do not work, never have worked, and that the Sentinelese are not responding well to their efforts?”
My eyes, I’m sure, showed him I didn’t know any of that. I knew it might would have been difficult but Simon told me that it wouldn’t be dangerous. That he had worked with the government there and all was well.
Did I need to put Simon on my list of people to watch? What kind of nefarious things did he have afoot?
“So, what time does our plane leave,” I asked Greg, pulling the covers off of me and swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Dr. Sabir had been wrong. I had been wrong.
There was no revelation in the Book of Enoch. Not in the Latin/Hebrew/Aramaic copy. Not in the Ge’ez one.
And, there were no people that I could think of that could read the Voynich Manuscript.
Nothing good had come out of any of what I had gleaned from Dr. Sabir. Nothing at all. I’d been spinning my wheels. And nothing came from me having a copy of the Voynich Manuscript. I should have written The Dead Sea Fish and left it at that. I was never going to find proof of anything.
I needed Dr. Sabir to have left me something concrete. Something other than suggestions. Innuendos. Guesses.
Or, I needed better help than the crew I was currently hooked up with had to offer.
I’ve heard Greg complain so many times that his clients think that the law is like they see it on television. People get divorce papers in the mail, they sign them, mail them back, voila they’re divorced. Not true. Or that a lawyer could come in the middle of the night and get you out of jail. He says that’s not true either, and it makes his job so much harder trying to convince his clients that TV is the not the real world. And now I got myself caught up in the fantasy. Finding clues, deciphering their meanings, it was not as easy as what it looked like in the movies. Especially when you have people trying to kill you.
Oh wait, that is like in the movies.
And it’s especially bad when the clues lead you down a dead end street.
But with Hannah Abelson dead, and the dark blue Taurus not seen recently outside my house, I felt a little better about things.
I looked over at my copy of the Voynich Manuscript. Was the answer really in there? Just looking at it made me feel like crying. I really felt that gloom that always comes before a major bout with depression. I couldn’t let it go. I just felt like I wanted to lock myself up in a room and mope. I was kind of glad that The Dead Sea Fish hadn’t been published because then I would’ve had millions of eyes looking at me, waiting for me to show proof, instead of the two, four, six, eight . . . I counted in my head, yeah, eight. The eight eyes belonging to Mase, Claire, Greg and Addie.
But . . .
If I was going to stick to this newly found bravado I’d adopted while in Connecticut, this CNN courage mantra, I’d been reciting, or this unselfish, unstoppable quest to save the world, there was only one thing to do. The only thing I could think of to do, the only thing left to do.
I had to decipher the Voynich Manuscript.
Oh, I forgot to say, “Cue the organ music.”
I pulled the copy I had over to me and turned the pages. All the plants depicted, all in glorious Technicolor. Some even filled with tens of smaller depictions of plants. If there wasn’t anything real in this book, someone had a very vivid imagination. Or, could they really be plants brought down by the Ancients?
I contacted a botanist and had a long conversation about the pictures in the book. He wasn’t familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, but suggested that I might try to identify some of them by looking at manuscripts and books of plants that were written near or around the time the book was thought to be written.
Plants from 1430. Hmmm . . .
I was able to get my hands on one. And plants from South America seemed to resemble a few of those in the book. Of course Addie thought the plants came from Madagascar. Couldn’t test that hypothesis though, couldn’t find any plant pictures from the early fifteenth century from there.
So maybe the book didn’t have anything to do with ancient languages from Europe. Or with Asia. Maybe it was South American.
Yeah, that really narrowed that down.
Did the Book of Enoch just write the story of things that happened as a consequence of the migration and not how they accomplished it? That’s what Nikhil had said. Is that why I couldn’t find the answers in it?
And then there were the dancing, naked women?
Mothers to the Nephilim?
I turned the page. There was a whole page of that convoluted writing. Sometimes the writing looked to me like it was Arabic. Then other times I saw Sanskrit lettering and some Ge’ez, I thought. I turned the book upside down. There were some places that looked Chinese, Persian and Taiwanese. But never enough so that I could make out a word of it.
I had gone over Professor Abelson’s translation notes, again. I must have gone over those notes a thousand times. Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration, but I’d gone over them at least fifty times. Probably more. She seemed to be able to make some sense of it. She said that it wasn’t the language just written out, she said it was encoded.
Encoded.
Why not? Everything else I had learned about the Ancients had been encoded. Why not encode a language that no one knew?
Sure, I’ll tell you my secrets, but first you have to figure out the language I’m written in, and then you’ll have to decode me.
Or was it the other way around . . .
God, I wish I knew.
Chapter Fifty-Five
“Maybe it’s a secret society, like the Priory of Sion or the Illuminati,” Addie said.
Addie came up for the weekend. She was beginning to be a regular at my house. I think she would have preferred to stay with Greg. Every time she came, she either wanted to go over Greg’s or made sure I called him and had him over my house. He and Mase got such a kick out of her school girl crush. But I made her stay with Claire, since she insisted on bringing her dog with her.
She was in town now because I’d decided we still needed to look for Martians. Nikhil said that the people that knew about it weren’t in a secret society, but he was a known liar. Yeah, okay, I believed he knew of other people who knew the secret (so, I guess, I thought of him as not a total liar), but I didn’t believe that I couldn’t find them and that they wouldn’t help me if I did.
So moving past the uncontacted people, I forged ahead. Secret Societies.
Greg concurred. He had said, with a wink of his eye, that it was better than looking to sixty thousand year old people who couldn’t read.
We were out back on my patio, searching the Internet on our laptops, and eating barbeque ribs and potato salad. We were brainstorming.
“A secret society that has been around for a long time might just be how all the Martians – the Ancients – stayed together,” I had announced when we had headed out back to get the grill going.
“I really think that it could be the Priory of Sion. Listen to this - ” Addie said, reading off her laptop.
“Wait,” Greg said. “Didn’t somebody already write that in
a book?”
“Yeah. And I don’t think that it’s a real society,” Mase added.
“Yes it is,” Addie said. “Just listen. The Priory of Sion started in 1099 AD. That’s Ancient, right, Justin?” Before I could answer she kept reading. “Members of this secret society include Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci. That could be why they were ahead of their time as scientists.” Addie looked at me.
“They claim to be royal descendants of Jesus,” she read. “But what’s really important, other than their members consisting of prominent scientists, is that they wanted to become the next “hyper-power,” just like the Holy Roman Empire.”
“I don’t know what website you’re reading from, Addie, but I’ve just found ten websites, including a US News and World Report article that says the society is a hoax,” Mase said. “The founder was a real guy and he had a little club, or whatever, but that’s about it. Not enough proof for that being our Martians.”
Addie sucked her tongue. I agreed with Mase. We kept looking.
Addie read out loud the bio of every secret society that she ran across that was older than dirt.
“Hey, what about this one,” Mase said. “The Bilderberg Group. Listen to this.”
But I didn’t hear a word he said because that name seemed awfully familiar to me. Where had I seen it before? Then it hit me. Nikhil Chandra.
I got up and headed in the house and into the foyer.
“Hey, where you going, Justin,” Greg called after me.
“I’ll be right back,” I said over my shoulder.
I pulled open the drawer to the foyer table. There it was. The business card. I slowly picked it up. Nikhil Chandra, Consultant. I flipped the card over.
The Bilderberg Group.
Right there in black and white. Right in my foyer table drawer.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Talk about hiding something in an obvious place.
The Bilderberg Group.
Everyone looked at me when I came back outside.
“Well?” Addie said.
“I think that it just might be the Bilderberg Group.”
“What is that?” Greg asked.
“Nikhil Chandra wrote the group’s name on the back of his business card.”
“Why’d he do that?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know.”
So, we looked up the group on the Internet. Not so secretive, I thought, they have a website.
Not an ancient society, Addie noticed. Not even a hundred year old society. Not an underground group of fanatics.
I started reading the information from the web out loud.
“The group was founded in 1954 and had the elite of the day in its membership.
“A hundred twenty to a hundred fifty members, meeting every year at their annual conference where, so it’s reported,” I read. “Members ‘foster dialogue between Europe and North America’ through discussions that are informal, and purportedly, off-the-record.”
I looked up at everyone, their eyes locked on me. “Get this,” I said. “The topics that they discuss? Megatrends and major issues facing the world.”
I felt a chill go up my spine.
“You guys,” I said. “This could be the Saboteurs all together in one place every year.”
They looked at me. I don’t think they were really buying that idea. I even had to laugh at that one. It seemed so far-fetched.
Not that my idea of them being in the jungle was any more logical.
But right in Chicago? Or Switzerland? I didn’t think I would find any of the Ancients there. Well, at least the descendants of the Ancients. Although, look at Nikhil, he was quite civilized, other than the stalking part of him.
The Ancients had one government. One world order. So I learned from the manuscripts. A government that couldn’t, or didn’t, I don’t know which one, stop mass destruction of their planet by some sort of nuclear holocaust.
And now, maybe those that knew were gathering every year. An elite group. Governments around the world coming together as one. That’s what it sounded like to me.
I voiced that opinion out loud.
“I think that could be right,” Addie said.
“The website,” I continued to read, “said that the ‘participants are not bound by the conventions of office or by pre-agreed positions. As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights . . .’”
Then a thought hit me. “Maybe they could read the Voynich Manuscript,” I said. “Or know someone who can?”
“If they could, then why haven’t they made themselves known?” Mase asked.
“That’s a good question,” I said. “I don’t know. But it’s worth a try. Don’t you think?”
“We should try everything,” Addie said. “So what now?”
I eyed everyone with a devilsh look on my face. “Well, of course, now the only thing left to do is to try to find a way to get in and talk to the Martians.”
“Here we go again.” Greg leaned back in his lawn chair and covered his eyes with his hand.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
We needed to contact the Bilderberg Group. The website didn’t have a “Contact” tab, but it did list the names of current and past chairpersons and steering committee members under the “Governance” tab. We decided to each contact a different member from the list. We were also able to find a couple of people that weren’t members but had been invited to previous meetings. We needed to find a way in. To get an invitation to come to a meeting, to get a phone call set up with someone, or something.
Mase wrote to two people from the media. Both had been invited to previous meetings. I called around to a few people in the world of academia and got a few leads. I sent out about four emails, all to people that had been members. I sent an email to an astrophysicist here in the United States, one to a paleontologist in Amsterdam, and one to an anthropologist in Germany. I thought myself pretty clever because I wrote to the anthropologist in German. Hopefully, the recipient would feel some kind of kinship – science and language and all. Then I sent an email to Bruce Cook, the current Chair of the Bilderberg Group. He was also a U.S. Senator.
Martians at the Capital. Sounds like it could’ve been a Tim Burton movie.
Greg made several phone calls and had Anne, the secretary at the law firm follow up with letters on his letterhead. He wrote to several politicians that were members. And Claire wrote to two research scientists, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins and a neurologist in the UK.
And then we waited to see what would happen.
Greg got an answer back first. It read:
Mr. Vandiver,
In the early 1950s a number of people on both sides of the Atlantic wanted to bring together like minded citizens that were the pillars of society, both in and out of government. The purpose would be to informally discuss the problems facing the world. Such meetings, they believed, would create a platform to understand the forces and trends affecting the countries around our globe.
The first meeting that took place was at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland, from 29 May to 31 May 1954, hence, they have been called the Bilderberg Meetings. That first meeting was chaired by H.R.H. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, as he did for a numbers of years after that.
There are no “members” of Bilderberg, other than those on the steering committee. In its stead, each year an invitation list is compiled by the international steering committee. Individuals are chosen in the light of their knowledge, occupation and standing in our global society, representing finance, science, industry, labor, education and journalism. This is to ensure many points of view are included in our discussions. Of the 80 to 100 participants, approximately one-third are from government and politics. However, each participant attends representing personal viewpoints and does not attend or comment in an official capacity.
From the beginning participants have come from North America and Western Europe, and from various international organizations. Since then,
the meetings have opened up to participants from more than one hundred countries. However, the official languages are still English and French.
The meetings take place in a different country each year. The discussion at each meeting is centered upon topics of current concern in foreign policy, world economy, and scientific technology. Contemporary issues are often discussed as well. We encourage freedom of speech and opinion. Thus, the meetings are closed and off the record. At no time in the past have participants proposed any resolutions, taken votes to enact a mandate, or issued policy statements during or after the meetings. We intend to continue the meetings in that vein in the future.
Essentially, Bilderberg is a high-ranking and flexible international forum. We stimulate and support opposing viewpoints that will, in our opinion, further closer and mutual understanding among the countries in the world.
Whatever that meant. It was signed by some nondescript person. I got the next response. It was the one I sent to the anthropologist in Germany. He wrote back in English. The letter said:
Dr. Dickerson,
In the early 1950s a number of people on both sides of the Atlantic wanted to bring together like minded citizens that were the pillars of society, both in and out of government . . .
Every letter that we got, and all were answered, said the same exact thing.
So much for getting information straight from the horse’s mouth.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Two men showed up at my front door. I was home by myself, sitting in my study staring at the pages of the Voynich Manuscript as I had taken to doing lately. I peeked out of one of the windows by the door and was met by a man in a black suit with a badge that he flashed on the other side of the glass. The other one was clad in Air Force dress blues and a red beret. He stood about a foot behind the one with the suit and the badge.
Irrefutable Proof: Mars Origin I Series Book II Page 23
