by J C Ryan
“Okay, so what did that mean for them after 106 AD?” Mackenzie was encouraged. She could almost see the wheels spinning in Carter’s brain.
“They’d have wealth to squirrel away, and maybe they’d want to keep secrets. But to have the privileges they were accustomed to, they’d need to be Roman citizens. I’ll bet they were absorbed into Roman culture, lock, stock, and barrel.”
“So, what happened to their secrets?”
“Could have been one or more of several things. They’d save what they considered important, of course. That would be anything that gave them a commercial advantage. Maybe religion, but less likely. To act like Roman citizens, they’d have to adopt Roman gods.”
“Regardless of how important records were stored, where would they have put them?” Mackenzie asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Carter returned. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. What they didn’t consider important, they’d have destroyed. A secretive tribe, determined to keep the advantage for themselves? They wouldn’t have wanted anything to fall into the hands of their enemies, or their so-called friends, the people who assimilated them.”
“The Romans?”
“You bet. Imagine you’re a proud, wealthy member of a society where you’re top dog. You’ve got it made. And then along comes a superior military force. If you fight and lose, you’ll lose your wealth and prestige as well. If you concede but negotiate an equally prestigious place for yourself in the new society, how do you feel about your new friends?” Carter watched Mackenzie’s eyes widen, and he knew exactly what was coming when she answered.
“I’d stab them in their sleep,” she whispered. “Figuratively.”
“Exactly. What if they did write everything down, but then when the Romans came, they committed what was important to memory and then destroyed the written record?”
Mackenzie objected. “Then this exercise is futile. It either never existed, or it was destroyed except for oral tradition.”
“I don’t think so. Think about the Nabateans we know today. Wealthy beyond measure and possessing technology even the United States doesn’t have. How’d they get in that position if they didn’t start out with an advantage? Somewhere, the seeds of that advantage are recorded.”
Mackenzie suddenly jumped out of her chair, her eyes sparkling. “Carter! They might have plates somewhere, just like the E- and A-Codices! Same era—prehistory. All their knowledge in nanodots, and only a few with the knowledge to read them!”
Carter laughed. “I wish. Then it would just be a matter of searching for them, knowing what we’re looking for would be different—something that earlier archaeologists might have missed. But slow down a bit. The Nabateans were thousands of years after the Giants. As we’ve discovered, human beings have forgotten a much, much bigger part of their history than what is known to them today.”
“Okay, keep thinking. The Romans didn’t just walk up to the door like neighbors and say, ‘we’re taking over now.’ The leaders of the Nabateans had to have seen it coming. They’d have had time to prepare. What if they did know how to read their ancient records. What would they have done then?”
Carter considered Mackenzie’s question. He had what Mackenzie always described as his “thousand-yard or thousand-year stare”, as his eyes focused on nothing while his brain went into overdrive. After a few minutes, he almost whispered.
“They’d have entrusted it to a few people to hide. And then, because two may keep a secret if one of them is dead, they’d have killed the ones who concealed it.”
“And then?” Mackenzie prompted him in a quiet voice.
“And then, the ones who were privileged to know the location used the knowledge to their advantage—maybe plotting to take over the Roman empire and then the world. The location was passed from father to son until one day the last person with the knowledge of the location died or was killed before he passed it on.” He spoke those last words in an almost inaudible whisper.
Mackenzie could see his mind was working on something. She remained silent, just staring at him, waiting for more. Sitting next to him, she could see he was staring at images on his laptop.
He clicked back and forth between a few screens and started mumbling. A smile broke across Mackenzie’s face. She has seen that act a few times before—a major unveiling was in the cards.
Carter’s mumbling became a bit louder. Mackenzie remained as quiet as a mouse while her smile stretched wider. Then she could make out some of what he was saying. “…seen this… come on… where… see it?”
Suddenly he was out of the reverie. He looked at her and started smiling. “I’m getting old… I—”
“Not on your life, Carter Devereux! Your brain is as sharp as the day I met you. And as for the rest of you—” She stopped talking and started grinning. “No need to expand on that. Now, tell me what have you discovered on your trip into the other dimension in the last fifteen or so minutes?”
He pulled her closer to him and kissed her. He always did that when he came back from the other dimension—she had no idea which dimension it was—but she knew that’s where he often got answers to the most challenging of questions.
When they came up for a breath, he turned to his computer and pointed to an image on the screen. “That image on the rock face you see in the picture there is on a rock just outside Petra. I’ve seen it with my own eyes when I was there.” He paused.
Mackenzie leaned forward to have a better look. It was faint; she had to strain her eyes before she could make out the unmistakable images of five dolphins in the form of a pentagon.
“That’s weird, is it not? Petra is a long way from the sea. I know the Nabateans did a lot of trading and owned some port cities, but dolphins in Petra, in the middle of the desert? What could be the significance of it?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might be able to tell me.” Carter struggled to keep a straight face.
Mackenzie was surprised at that. She was so sure he had the answer. She looked at his face and realized he was having her on. She jumped up and threw him off his chair onto the floor and sat on his chest.
By now, Carter was roaring with laughter.
“Okay,” she said, “now you have two seconds to tell me, or I punch you in the throat—just like you taught me to do with bad guys.”
Carter finally got his laughing under control and said, “Seriously, Mackie, I don’t know what it means, but I have seen that same image somewhere else—”
“Where?” she demanded. “You better tell me, or you’re going to regret it.” She clenched her fist and waved it in front of his face, laughing.
“Matera!” Carter yelled.
“Where’s that?”
“In the Basilicata region.” At Mackenzie’s puzzled look, Carter started laughing again. “Mackie, Matera is a city in the Basilicata region of Southern Italy. The Ionian Sea is to the south, not too far, and the Adriatic Sea is about equidistant to the west. “
“Well, I guess we’re going to Matera then?”
“Just as soon as you get off me.” Carter chuckled.
Chapter 42 - Congressional Oversight
Mackenzie looked at her useless cell phone for the tenth time. It was so tempting to call the kids. She didn’t dare even turn the thing on. It had been more than two weeks since she’d been home, hugged her kids, talked to her mother, or saw her beloved wolves.
They’d left the Smithsonian after a few days of work, convinced there were no more insights to be gained. And they still hadn’t been able to stay anywhere long enough to make hanging her clothes up worthwhile. They moved to a different safe house every day or two.
Even though they’d been cleared of all suspicion by anyone who counted, to keep the bad guys in the dark, they couldn’t appear in public and had to stay “on the run.” For as long as it would take to find the real source of the leaks, no one else could know they’d been cleared.
It was understandable.
Mackenzie couldn’t help but be homesick anyway.
***
The story of A-Echelon’s existence and secret funding hadn’t fallen into a vacuum. No story about government, good or bad, went without notice in the nation’s capital. Senators and Congressmen arrived in their offices to find the story among their news brief clippings or had seen it online or on TV before they even left their homes.
From the beginning, Congress had wanted in on the A-Echelon circus. In an election year, it was fodder for political gain, and the politicians just couldn’t help themselves. They wanted—no, craved—the political mileage they thought they could get out of airing the scandal in public.
Every lawmaker and lobbyist in the city jockeyed for position as public opinion swayed this way and that. The media, of course, had taken the position that the existence of such a department was an enormous and scandalous waste of taxpayer money. The political side of the aisle most often associated with the media trumpeted that line as their own.
On the other side of the aisle, the opposite stance was taken on principle. Whatever those guys said couldn’t be taken seriously. Some lawmakers were savvy enough to remember and trot out the seldom-remembered Stargate Project, wherein the Defense Intelligence Agency and others investigated the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications from 1979 through 1991. To the dismay of the naysayers, it had been primarily their party that funded such projects.
Though no specific crime was alleged, the scandal was shaping up to be the defining moment of the Presidential race, and the only opinion everyone had in common was it should be investigated by one of the Congressional oversight committees and the findings published as quickly as possible.
Never mind that both the President and the Director of the CIA claimed national security was at risk. Both sides of the Congressional aisles believed they stood the most to gain from dissecting the whole mess in public. Their insistence was fed by the media and the new game in town, social media. The people demanded answers, and Congress was eager to get them for their constituents.
Back and forth the arguments went. President Grant and Bill Griffin stood between Congress and their targets, James Rhodes and Irene O’Connell, pressing for closed-door hearings. But Congress, with the weight of the people behind them, prevailed. The hearings would be open, broadcast live on CNN and numerous online feeds.
Both parties figuratively rubbed their hands in satisfaction. The folks at home would see how hard they were working and vote accordingly. It was perfect! No cost for the exposure, no need to stump at home this early in their campaigns. This was going to be good!
There are those who are eager to testify before such a committee. James and Irene weren’t among them. Originally meant to be part of the checks and balances among the three branches of government, the establishment of the oversight committees purported to make Congress the watchdog of the people—their constituents—against excesses of the Executive branch and federal agencies.
However, human nature exerted influence. John Dalberg-Acton, who said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” might have warned the earliest lawmakers it was coming. Unfortunately, he wasn’t born until decades after the longest-standing committees, Finance, Foreign Relations, and Judiciary, were established.
Over the years, the system had been turned into a political playball to serve partisan interests and certain individuals’ kingdom-building ambitions. Advocates for every conceivable committee with even a miniscule claim of interest had been arguing, with each other and on the Senate and House floors, that their committee should be the one to investigate. The most opinionated of them all, and possibly the most powerful, Senator Michelle Davis, was tired of the debate and ready to take matters into her own hands.
Davis, the senior senator from California, chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. She was a fifth-term veteran political gladiator, and commonly known among her cowed colleagues as a real ballbuster. Davis shared an intense dislike of the CIA and its James Bond license-to-kill and do-whatever-it-takes ways with many of her colleagues. She wanted to rein them in, get those loose cannons under control, put a leash on them, and tie them to a pole, only to be let loose when the Senate said so.
She rushed down the hall to her office, struggling not to shout at and shoulder everyone out of her way, with only moderate success. Reaching the privacy of her office, she kicked off her thousand-dollar, black, leather, Christian Louboutin pumps, opened the top drawer of her desk, grabbed a pack of cigarettes and lighter, and lit one up. No one who knew what was good for them would point out the universal No Smoking regulations to her. Least of all her staff.
She put her feet on the desk, and with the first puff of smoke, she mumbled, “Bunch of retards…”
For the past three hours, she’d had to use every bit of restraint she could command with colleagues debating and reasoning which committee should be investigating the A-Echelon debacle. For three full hours, they’d been squabbling. It must be the Foreign Relations Committee; Why not Judiciary? Intel and Armed Services; What about Homeland Security? One stupid question and argument after another nonstop for one hundred and eighty minutes.
What a colossal waste of time!
“Idiots,” she snarled through the cloud of smoke drifting to the opening of the ventilation duct in the ceiling above her. “Homeland Security… John Macnab… you must be shitting me. The Intelligence Committee, my committee, should have this. We’re the only ones with the brains to handle it. There’s a reason it’s called the Intelligence Committee. Homeland Security should be second on the list, maybe—a distant second. But it ain’t over, Johnny boy. I’m going to pull the rug from under your feet.”
This was going to be the biggest scandal DC had seen since Watergate. A scandal for the history books—and the end of the CIA’s free rein. She’d been cautioning presidents and senators about the CIA for years, but no one had listened. Now they would have to admit she was right all along.
She stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray, put the latter away in a locked drawer of her desk, and picked up the phone to call in a few overdue favors, make a few promises, and utter a few carefully veiled threats.
Chapter 43 - Gotcha, you bastard!
April 6
It had been about two weeks since the newly-formed team of Sean, Dylan, and Kelly White had planted bugs in the “milk” plane and in Russell McCormick’s apartment and car, and to Dylan’s frustration, nothing had come of it.
The pilot and crew never approached the “chocolate box”; there was no chatter in the plane about anything more important than the last basketball game.
The bugs in McCormick’s apartment and especially those in his car produced more interesting insights into his personality, but nothing regarding the leaks. Dylan got a laugh out of playing the best parts for Kelly and watching her kick the walls and furniture because she couldn’t kick the son of a bitch she was still pretending to care for.
She could now see the narcissistic tendencies she’d been blind to before. The bugs were sensitive enough to pick up the scrape of his razor as he shaved in the mornings. The slap of his hands on his face to apply the aftershave she’d come to hate, and then his smug voice.
“Well, hellooo, ladykiller! Go get ‘em, tiger.”
The first time she’d heard it, she’d mimed sticking her finger down her throat, which made Dylan laugh until he cried. The second, third, and fourth times were just too much. “Okay, Dylan, I get the point. Don’t do it to me anymore—I know I was an idiot.”
Dylan grinned. “How about this one, then? He’s in the car.”
He clicked on the sound file, and to Kelly’s disgust, Russell’s voice again came through loud and clear, singing, “I’m Too Sexy.”
“He really thinks he’s God’s gift to women,” she remarked.
Dylan just nodded. He didn’t want to rub salt in her wounds.
“One has to wonder how he g
ot past the psych testing when the FBI hired him.” Kelly had her chin grasped between her thumb and forefinger.
Dylan shrugged. “Some are born that way and some become that way.”
***
April 12th
A week later, Dylan had enough data to start spotting patterns in McCormick’s movements. He was studying the GPS tracking log for anything obvious.
McCormick kept a reliable schedule. Morning: to work, either from his place or Kelly’s, and then back again, with side trips on the way back to locations that turned out to be restaurants. Kelly confirmed that on those nights, they’d gone out to dinner, and she’d been with him for almost every minute. Unless he was exchanging information with someone in the restrooms, those places were a bust for clandestine activity.
Sometimes he’d go from work, to his place, and then to Kelly’s, then back to his place, and to work the next morning. Other times, he’d go from Kelly’s to work in the morning. Must have spent the night those times. Dylan knew Kelly was sensitive about that and saw no need to ask her about it.
He’d just about given up on finding anything interesting when he spotted an anomaly. The day before, Russell had driven somewhere else in the afternoon. Dylan pulled up a map and overlaid McCormick’s route on it. He’d taken a drive out into the countryside, or what passed for countryside in this crowded area near Washington, D.C. Outside the Beltway and across the Potomac.
As Dylan zoomed in on the map, it looked more and more familiar. Of course! Hyde Field. The Devereuxs used that airport for their travels, and the “milk” plane was hangered there, too. Coincidence? Dylan didn’t believe in them.
And wait. There was another trip in that direction, too. When?
