by Tom Bane
“So, where does this leave us?” Piper asked.
“Well, it’s related to sunspots and their eleven year cycles,” Tom continued. “The sunspots are the cooler areas of the sun. If you look at the sun through a telescope with a protective screen or through a thin cloud, you can see these dark sunspots. As for the cycles, the equator of the sun is spinning faster than the poles, and what happens every eleven and a half years is that the equator’s magnetic field catches up with its twin at the poles and the magnetic field lines get dragged along and twisted together. They eventually untangle every eleven-and-a-half years.”
“Yes, I think I’m with you,” Piper said.
“OK, let me put it this way—think of it like two long distance runners on a huge track, and the sun is the track. Each runner carries a string attached to the centre of the circular track, which represents a magnetic field. Now, the fastest runner circles the track but he runs at a fast speed, representing the sun’s equator, in twenty-six days, so every so often he laps his opponent, who’s taking thirty-seven days to run around the same track, representing the sun’s polar region. Eventually they get back into sync after eleven-and-a-half years. But by then, the runners’ strings—the magnetic fields, remember?—have become entangled, getting so knotted that the tension eventually causes them to snap and the cycle starts afresh. These entangled magnetic fields store huge amounts of energy that cause the solar wind to fluctuate, but, if you were viewing the two runners from earth, they would meet again at the same starting line eleven-and-a-half years later. That’s what gives rise to the sunspot cycle of just over eleven years and we see the number of sun spots wax and wane in tandem.”
“Well, it’s not really my field,” Piper admitted, “but you sound very convincing. So everything moves in cycles, a ‘Tutankhamun Cycle’ perhaps. Tell me how the earth’s magnetic field protects us from the sun.”
“Right. Well, the particles from the sun have an electrical charge, and they gather in belts, forming a big, fat kind of doughnut of plasma, held in place by the earth’s magnetic field. It’s not uniformly distributed around its surface. On the sun side, it’s compressed because of the solar wind, and on the lee side it’s elongated to roughly three times the earth’s radius. This creates a cavity, in which the Van Allen radiation belts reside. These Van Allen belts are like traps: they trap charged particles and damaging radiation, keeping us safe. The Van Allen belts are what cause the polar aurora, where particles strike the upper atmosphere and fluoresce. People have suggested these could be linked to longer-term climate changes, but amazingly it seems that King Pacal and Tutankhanum both knew about it. You see, our modern solar scientists have predicted that the next solar maximum is going to be in 2012, and the Mayans had already predicted a five-epoch solar cycle that is due to end in 2012.”
“Fascinating,” Piper said. “Absolutely fascinating. And of course it explains their total immersion into the religion of the worship of the sun.”
“Yes, that’s right. It suggests the Ancients understood the cycles of the sun, and not just understood it but used it to try and predict the effects of climate change in a practical way.”
“And, of course,” Piper chipped in, “to have been able to predict long periods of weather, foreseeing events like droughts or famine would have been incredibly useful to these rulers, giving them enormous power. We already know that the ultimate collapse of the Mayans was directly linked to a profound climate change. My God, your father would be proud of you, Tom!”
“Thanks, Professor, I appreciate that. Here, I’ll put Suzy back on.” Tom’s eyes sparkled wetly as he passed the phone back to Suzy.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Suzy enthused. “I heard you mention to Tom the theory about climate change causing the end of the Mayans. Well, it’s not just them. We looked at a chart of the predicted sun cycles and we could see that the solar minima also coincided with the collapse of the Roman Empire and other civilizations. So we’ve been thinking about how they could have known about the sun’s cycles. I’ve come to the conclusion that the Amarna priesthood took the secrets of the sun with them in the exodus to Israel, and then the higher knowledge was passed down through the generations through the Essenes or other sects. It might even explain some aspects of the Kabbalah.”
“And perhaps that’s where the number 13 comes from as well? All that’s left of the original ritual and magic from the Egyptian solar priesthood?”
“Absolutely! I’m sure that’s right. So we think the Egyptian and Mayan elite priesthoods probably utilized their sacred knowledge in a practical way to predict crop yields, famines or global warming. Maybe the Egyptian and Mayan priesthoods knew the sun was about to reduce or increase its activity and that damaging climate change would ensue. I’ll e-mail the chart to you of solar activity over time, so you can take a look.”
“Perhaps the Mayans and Akhenaten thought that, by worshipping the sun, they might placate it,” Piper suggested.
“Tom says the only problem with the solar activity chart is that we can see the climate change pattern, but there’s no obvious scientific explanation for why the solar cycles account for the change. Even though the solar maximum causes the sun to emit more particles, they just get trapped in the Van Allen belts around the earth. The temperature of the sun barely alters across an eleven year cycle. It never varies by more than one percent. So there has to be some other mechanism at work.”
“Well, it still sounds a real breakthrough. Keep me informed, OK? Better still, both of you get safely back to Oxford and then we can work this out together,” Piper said before hanging up.
Suzy now realized the significance of Tutankhamun’s name, the “living image of Amun.” That was the clue. To be a living image on the walls of his tomb, the figure needed to be imbued with the life force. It needed to be alive, a state depicted as an aloft standing figure. But the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun, being hauled by the twelve disciples, was inanimate and dead. It was devoid of the life force and lying flat horizontal and could therefore not to be counted as a living image, as she had later concluded when she was in the tomb, but now she was putting the puzzle together in her mind.
The four pictures that the alabaster vase projected onto the walls of their Mexican motel room were the key symbols on the walls of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, pictures of the pharaohs, priests, gods and scarab beetles. On the north wall of Tut’s burial chamber there were seven living figures; on the south wall there were three. That gave thirty-seven. On the east wall were twelve living figures and twenty on the west wall, revealing 2012, which was the Mayan-predicted end of time.
Suzy made a deliberate effort to slow herself down. She felt so close now to putting the whole picture together, but feared that, like a pack of cards, it might tumble if her logic took a wrong turn.
Howard Carter had knocked down the akhet or hidden doorway in the tomb to penetrate the burial chamber. So, there were originally seven figures on the South Wall, four of them had been destroyed. That meant a total of twenty-six living images on the East, North and South walls. Anybody viewing the tomb today would see the South and North as thirty-seven and East and West as 2012, but the original tomb had the number twenty-six in there as well on the East, North and South walls. It was magical, there were sacred numbers encoded on the four walls linked by the akhet! Therefore, with twenty-six as the deeply hidden number, the tomb designers knew the secret code. And this meant the Mayans and Egyptians shared the same beliefs and higher knowledge. It would appear that there was more than just cocaine to link them now.
Suzy went through the mysterious message in her head once again: To find the Tutankhamun Cycle, look for the hidden doorway.
That was the meaning of the tomb and the hidden doorway: the akhet once again, the hidden doorway that Howard Carter had knocked down. How had this gone unnoticed for so long, Suzy wondered. As the enormity of it all struck her, her heart began to accelerate. It was not just Pacal and Tutankhamun who were linked
. There was the tomb of Jesus with the light, or Lux, shining through the dome of the Holy Sepulchre. Could that be a hidden doorway as well? What if it symbolized the year 2012? Twenty archways filled the roof of the basilica and they were inscribed with twelve golden rays of the sun illuminated by a central column of light—it was 2012 in the tomb of Jesus as well as in the tomb of Tutankhamun. She reached out and grabbed Tom’s arm.
“Tom, I’ve got it, I really think I’ve got it!” This time it was Suzy who had tears in her eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY
“I’m sorry, sir,” General Christie said.
“You’ll be more than sorry—the Israelis went straight to the Defense Secretary,” the Boss barked. “It’s your career on the line here, General, not mine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Apparently one of our agents trained some of the Israeli Special Forces, the Golani Brigade, when he was in the Navy Seals. When they took the corpses to the morgue, some Israeli commando recognized him. We can hardly deny knowledge convincingly under the circumstances. You should have done your homework better, General. This is not looking good. Yet again, your execution looks sloppy, not just in Israel but in Mexico.”
“Yes, sir. But in Mexico we’d had intelligence that Senator Carmel’s daughter was making the same journey as Suzy da Silva. Then we established she’d taken an earlier plane and so we were safe to proceed with the HAARP microburst operation. But when that failed, we couldn’t trace the senator’s daughter. It was possible she had taken the same tour as the targets, so we couldn’t take out the tour bus just in case.”
“I don’t want a list of excuses, General. You have to build in multiple redundancies in every execution. Every avenue must be covered, every i dotted, every t crossed. If something does go wrong, you have to have an alternative plan, got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, because we have to fix this, General. You must take personal charge of operations on the ground and this time I want a Plan B and a Plan C, D, E and F. This has got to be thought through as thoroughly as a game of chess. We need to identify all the moves in advance if we are going to secure a checkmate.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get your ass over to Oxford. Track down this Professor Piper. Turn on the charm, tell him what’s going on. And we’ve got to appeal to the moral fiber of these two kids. We’ve tried scaring them off. Now let’s try convincing them gently. They need to see that it’s in their interests to comply. Explain to them that we cannot guarantee their safety. That nearly always has the desired effect.”
“Yes, sir.” Christie was impressed that the boss was changing tactics to a more subtle approach.
“No need to admit anything about the Great Pyramid assassinations,” the Boss continued, “or the unfortunate death of Brooking’s father. We’ll blame that on quote-unquote evil Islamic forces. If we need further scapegoats, we can find them later.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
When Tom was first accepted to Christ Church College at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, his colleagues had quickly nicknamed him Little Tom, in reference to the college’s famous bell, the loudest in all of Oxford. Now, as he made his way toward the college’s main entrance, he heard his namesake, Great Tom, chime one hundred and one times. Inside the college, the walls reverberated as the bell signaled the traditional warning for all the colleges to lock their gates, one of the countless traditions that lived on in modern day Oxford. Tom walked past the gowned gatekeeper, tipping him a pound coin as tradition dictated, to meet Suzy who was waiting for him on the cobbles inside the entrance archway. They gave each other a friendly kiss as the sun’s dying rays cast a bright scarlet red sky over the city’s finest rooftops.
“How’re you doing?” asked a smiling Suzy, feeling much more comfortable back in her trademark blue jeans, and a figure-hugging pink t-shirt.
“Not too bad, thanks. You certainly look fabulous, I must say!” He gave her the time-honored quick up and down, accompanied by a cheeky grin. Before she had chance to come back with a suitable riposte, he offered her his elbow and they hurried out of the college and dashed up St Aldates on their way to New College. The professor had summoned them to a meeting, warning them to be there at 21:10 on the dot.
“Come on, we’d better get a move on. What do you think Piper wants at this late hour?”
“No idea, but it must be urgent. Maybe he’s found a new biscuit he wants to share with us.”
“Ha! You reckon he’s grown tired of his Scottish shortbreads?”
“Well, it has to be something monumentally important like that, don’t you think?” Tom seemed very relaxed, and Suzy decided to tackle what was bugging her far more than Piper’s mysterious rendezvous.
“So,” she asked as they turned into Blue Boar Street, “what‘s been keeping you? I didn’t see you yesterday at all.”
“Oh, did you miss me?” Tom dodged the friendly swipe at his shoulder.
“I was just catching up on some sleep and musing on what we’ve discovered. And you know what? I’ve got a surprise for you.” He pulled a crisp US dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to her.
“What’s that for?”
“Turn it over and take a look on the back,” he prompted. “How many arrows do you count in the right eagle’s claw?”
Suzy turned it over and examined the round eagle symbol, then smiled.
“Thirteen.”
“And now, how many olive leaves in the left eagle’s claw?” asked Tom.
Suzy counted again as they continued walked briskly along the uneven paving stones.
“Thirteen!”
“The number twenty-six again, this time in the bald eagles’ claws. That’ll keep the conspiracy theorists busy for a while,” he joked.
“I’ve got one better than that!” challenged Suzy. “Of course,” she teased, “only a true patriot of the Unites States would be able to unlock the secret.”
“Go on then, try me,” grinned Tom.
“Right—you ready? How many stars and stripes on the American flag?”
“Thirteen, of course, signifying the thirteen colonies that rebelled against the British monarchy.”
“OK, and how many white stars in the blue rectangle?”
“Fifty, of course, signifying the States of America.”
“Exactly!” she clapped her hands in triumph. “There you go!”
“There you go what?”
Suzy smiled and shook her head, waiting for him to figure it out.
“No! Fifty minus thirteen! Thirty-seven! Whoa!”
Suzy pressed the buzzer for Professor Piper. It was 9:10 pm exactly and the red sunset had almost completely dissolved into the dark night, the moon’s disc rising like a majestic sentinel over the turret tops of Carfax Tower in the far distance. They didn’t notice the two large black Mercedes vehicles halting across the road, their engines subsiding in unison to an almost silent hum.
“Thirty-seven on the American flag, and twenty-six on the dollar bill. The conspiracy theorists will go nuts!” laughed Tom, as Piper’s nervous voice crackled over the intercom. When he opened the door of his room, both Suzy and Tom could sense there was something wrong. Although he was trying to present his normal bombastic manner, Piper seemed nervous, glancing over their shoulders as he steered them in, speaking like a hushed choirboy.
“Such interesting times we live in,” he muttered, leaning on the desk and pointing them toward the two armchairs. Suzy and Tom both gave him a puzzled look as they took their seats. The atmosphere was awkward and it was Piper who tried to lift it. “I’ve been doing some research on China, in the light of your findings. Those same numbers you mentioned as being sacred, twenty-six and thirty-seven, are encoded into the tomb of the terracotta warriors of Emperor Shi Huang Di. It’s amazing what you can find once you know what you are looking for.”
“Wow,” exclaimed Suzy. “So Tutankhamun and King Pacal were not alone.”
“Indeed not,” Piper
smiled, with a paternal look in his eyes. “That’s how it looks.” He fell silent for a moment, as if plucking up the courage to say something. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times before blurting out as he walked to the door, “There’s somebody who wants to meet you.”
Opening the door, he stood back to allow two women to walk through. The first was a short but striking woman, dressed in an American military uniform with the rank of general. She was followed by a slightly built, exquisitely pretty Indian woman.
“Suzy, Tom,” Christie held her hand out to each of them in turn, “I’m General Christie from the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Don’t be alarmed,” Christie added, when she saw their expressions. “I know many people believe we are men in black, working for aliens, but we are simply servants of the American taxpayer, just like any other government organization.” She paused, as if to let someone else speak, but no one did. The professor was leaning on his desk again, staring at his feet.
“May I introduce Renu Dikparti,” Christie continued, ushering the other woman forward. “She’s a scientist from the University of Colorado. She works very closely with us at DARPA. Renu has managed to open my eyes to many things. I hope she will be able to do the same for you.”
Renu acknowledged them with a tiny bow and sat down beside Tom and Suzy, placing her laptop and a special 3D projector on the desk between them. She seemed shy, like someone who was more used to working in a lab coat than making presentations to generals and professors.
