by Nick Cook
The uppermost layer of Panel 4 had depicted my life and Hope’s in the most intimate detail. The layer beneath had consisted of that single image of the scan – our baby girl.
But Gapes had layered the entire cabin with meaning.
Panel 4 had held another kind of meaning – spiritual meaning.
Not birth, though. Rebirth.
Why?
Much of what Koori had said resonated in me.
Along with the voice in my head seconds before the V-22 began its death-roll – her voice.
The cell-memory therapy session with Mo, in which I had heard her talking to me. In which she had directed me to the night Jack had died and to my memories of our time at the beach.
And, yesterday, the girl on the peace march.
The ankh hadn’t been the only treasure on that old piece of leather: the Hope Symbol had been there too.
Jack hadn’t simply turned up at the Five Pines by accident.
He had sought out Pam and Hope.
And the tree of life? Did it mean that somewhere deep inside of him, Miracle Mac – who’d had the power to protect his friends and see the future – knew that at some point I would wander into Hope’s life too?
48
KOORI IS WRAPPED IN AN OLD FUR COAT IN BACK OF THE COVERED area of the upper deck. There are only three other passengers on the ferry: an old woman with a small, yappy dog, and a couple of punks – a girl and a boy – laughing as they neck vodka from a bottle.
Koori waits until we are several minutes underway before telling me about the four stages of what he has come to know as ‘persistent consciousness’ – states he has identified in the dead. This stemmed from his work on the remote viewing program at Stanford. None of it was provable in any scientific sense, he says, but came through as enough of a signal for him to have documented it in a paper for his paymasters.
‘Stage One is consciousness in a transient state – consciousness which retains material attachments.
‘Stage Two is consciousness that has shed these attachments – the part of us which comes to terms with things done and learned in this world; consciousness ready to evolve.
‘Stage Three is consciousness that needs to learn from a higher plane – the many other planes of existence.
‘Stage Four is when there’s no more to learn from this life, or from the next, or from existence itself – when it has evolved so far it becomes one with what I call the substrate: the cosmos itself.’
We pass under a bridge and, for several seconds, the world plunges into darkness.
‘Your wife is a new soul, Colonel, a Stage One. She still feels the need to commune with you.’
I guess he sees how much I’m struggling with this.
‘I’ve known this to happen when there is a deep emotional attachment between two people, and when sudden death is involved.’
I tell him about Mo’s cell-memory therapy session, and that, as a scientist, I’m inclined to accept his view that however real Hope’s voice seemed to me, it’s a construct of my subconscious.
Koori sighs. ‘Our primeval relatives heard the voices of their dead ancestors in caves and forests. God spoke to them on mountaintops and on the wind. We have become so fucking rational, Colonel, that we think we know it all. But we don’t.’
He pauses. ‘If the full-up technology of the Grid is anything like the HITS demonstrator, then it chooses the time, the place and the individual with whom it wishes to connect. With HITS, it was subtle. It would send me an image only I would recognize.’
He pulls his cigarette case from his jacket.
‘This used to belong to my father. A dear man I loved very much. Whenever HITS wanted to send a message specific to me, I would receive an image of the case on the heads-up display.’
‘Its version of the ideogram?’
‘Precisely.’
‘And this would be followed by the message?’
‘Yes.’
‘What kind of message?’
‘About what is to come.’
I think back to my encounter with Gapes in the tower. ‘Duke told me he had found ground truth. I had no idea what that meant, until his monitor told me it meant I was the target. Why would he have targeted me?’
‘Because he had information that was specific to you.’
I feel a sudden chill. Jack’s portrait, finished somewhere else. Hope telling me – demonstrating to me – that she was still here and wanting to communicate.
He asks if I’m all right.
I nod. ‘What about Jack?’
‘I spent a long time this afternoon trying to form an impression of Jack, but my belief is that he has gone.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘Evolved.’
‘Like a Stage Two?’
‘More like a Stage Three.’
‘Why?’
‘As you told me, Colonel, symbols carry meaning. They are deeply primal. But the subconscious is also a repository of other subtle forms of information that come to us from realms we really know very little about.’
He pauses again.
‘I don’t know if God is real, but if I were Him and I wanted to convey data, I’d do it in a way that our ancestors understood well. I’d do it via symbols. Symbols that carry meaning. The ankh, the tree of life and the eight-pointed star in a circle, taken together, tell me that Jack’s purpose has to do with protection against a singularity. As he lay dying, he was trying to tell her. But she was too grief-stricken to understand. He was passing the role of guardianship to her. I believe he also knew she was going to die.’
I stare at him. ‘Guardianship?’
‘Some of us have a purpose in life and some of us have a purpose in death. Jack’s purpose was to protect Hope. Hope’s job is to protect you. We’re all here for a reason, Colonel. Via the Grid, she found a means of passing the message to Gapes and now she is passing it to you, via coincidences and dreams.’
‘What message?’ I ask. ‘And what the hell is a singularity?’
‘Whatever Duke saw the day of the system meltdown,’ he replies. ‘Something that involves the President. Something that involves you. Something that consciousness itself wishes to convey with great urgency. Something to do with Jerusalem. Something … unprecedented.’
He looks out across the black water of the harbor and the lights of the city dancing on its surface.
‘Now, for all our sakes, why don’t you tell me what Duke showed you in that cabin?’
I reach for a sheet of paper and write down what Hetta and I found on the crazy wall:
Panel 1. (Rembrandt) Crucifixion > Ascension = God.
Panel 2. POTUS > Church = Threat.
Panel 3. Al-Mohandis (The Engineer) > ‘15ski’ =Proof.
Panel 4. Cain’s Life > Fetal Scan (rebirth?) = Mac.
Panel 5. Skyline > St Mary Magdalene = Jerusalem.
‘Who is the Engineer?’ he asks.
‘Somebody jihadists believe will rid the world of us.’
‘And fifteen-ski?’
‘Shorthand. The word was transliterated from the Cyrillic: Pitnatsat.’
‘And the significance of St Mary Magdalene?’
‘The Russian Orthodox church on the Mount of Olives.’
Koori holds the note under the light.
‘Oh, my.’
‘What?’
‘How best to explain this?’
He turns to me.
‘Remote viewing is an imprecise art, especially when it pertains to the future. It is prophecy. But prophets don’t see events with crystal clarity. They glimpse them.’ He pauses. ‘Duke is no different from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel – Jesus, even – all of whom, of course, are revered by Muslims as prophets too.’
‘But this was shown to him by the Grid.’
‘Yes. Jerusalem. Devastation. Judgment. Every element is there.’
The elements of Revelation.
‘And the Russians?’
‘The Russians h
ave their place in end-times prophecies, too. Ever hear of the Church Committee?’
I nod. ‘Set up after Watergate. ’75?’
‘And ’76. Its brief was to investigate abuses of power by the FBI, CIA and NSA. It was named after the man who led it, Senator Frank Church, and blew the lid off of the intelligence community’s illegal mass surveillance of a swathe of the US population – since right back in the fifties. Stop me, please, if any of this is sounding a little too familiar.
‘The most disturbing of their findings was a cache of CIA files nicknamed the Family Jewels. Most of them were destroyed when the Agency knew it was about to be subpoenaed.
‘The Church Committee didn’t know what to do with a lot of the contents. Some was classified, some just too damn weird. So it bundled everything into what came to be known in the viewing community as File 15 – the one they didn’t make public.
‘At Stanford, we used to refer to it as the motherlode. It held everything we were interested in: clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, even clues to the remote viewing process itself. My guess is that Jack was a part of what the CIA called its behavior modification study. That they took him away to try to explore his gift for clairvoyance; to find out if they could exploit it. Jack would have testified to the committee for sure.’
‘Is that it?’
‘No. Our handlers always believed there was a Soviet equivalent of File 15. We searched all over for it in the seventies and eighties.’
‘But didn’t find it?’
‘But didn’t find it.’
I look at Panels 2 and 3. Church and Pitnatsat. ‘Was Abnarth on the Church Committee?’
‘He was a young staff member.’
‘Did you know that when he became a senator, in ’92, he sent a trade delegation to Russia, ostensibly to help US tech-entrepreneurs broker deals involving Russian-developed intellectual property?’
‘No.’
I tell him about Ted van Buren’s meeting with M. M. Kalunin, the man who’d been in charge of the Soviets’ psychic warfare program, and their discussion about the survival of consciousness post-mortem.
The ferry begins to slow as we approach our destination, Hammarby Sjöstad, a waterside district on the edge of the inner city.
‘If the Russians had an equivalent of File 15,’ I say, ‘if Kalunin had sight of it, what do you think it might contain?’
He purses his lips.
I try again.
‘Gapes’s cabin display contained multiple layers of meaning, to confuse the Grid – to allow our investigation to get ahead of the people monitoring us. The first layer was what we called the welcome message: I saw the face of God. You shall too. Bear true faith. Hope. Pray.
‘The Grid depicted Jerusalem leveled in some kind of nuclear event at which President Thompson was present. It also grew out of experimental hardware that you and Gapes helped develop for the HITS program – with hardware that seems to have been financed by a convenient Russian venture capitalist.’
‘So Duke found proof.’
‘Of what?’
‘Something involving File 15, or its Russian equivalent.’
I nod.
Something involving the Engineer.
‘The Russian banker,’ Koori says. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Ilitch. Kalunin’s son-in-law.’
‘What else do you know about him?’
‘Not enough.’
Koori reaches for another cigarette. ‘Then perhaps I can help.’
We settle ourselves in the business center of a hotel overlooking the Hammarby waterfront, but not before I have passed through the lobby, where on the TVs, I catch more imagery of Jerusalem – the preparations being made for the arrival of the delegates.
At this time of night, few people are still up. I log on using a proxy ID and type in ‘Vladimir Ilitch’. There’s nothing to indicate that the man whose image Gapes placed on the wall of the cabin – a man in his youth, who bore a resemblance to Napoleon – would become one of the most powerful figures in modern Russia. There are no pictures, no narratives.
Nothing.
Except for this: Ilitch’s generosity to the Russian Orthodox Church, which sits strangely alongside Hetta’s assertion that his father was a Tatar Muslim. Ilitch has given billions to it. And in return, their praise for the oligarch you never get to see is fulsome.
If it weren’t for Ilitch, the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, one of Moscow’s oldest places of worship, would have collapsed. It’s been restored to its former Tsarist glory. The bill appears to have topped six hundred million roubles. He has also donated rare icons to the church, and given it millions more to distribute to the poor.
‘I’ll never get within a mile of him,’ I mutter.
‘So maybe you should try focusing on his wife.’
‘I wouldn’t get within a mile of her either.’
‘If Ilitch were still married to her, you wouldn’t.’
‘They split?’
Koori closes his eyes. ‘Recently. Rather quietly.’
‘Do you see anything else?’
‘Books,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Books,’ he repeats. ‘There is a connection between Sasha and books. She’s also close to money. A place that’s dripping with it.’
When I Google ‘Sasha’, ‘Ilitch’ and ‘books’, I draw a blank.
It’s the same when I try ‘Sasha’, ‘Ilitch’ and ‘author’.
The only thing that comes close is Sasha Mikhailovna, dealer in rare books off Tretyakovsky Proezd, in the heart of Moscow’s Kitay Gorod district, right by the Kremlin. All I know about Mikhailovna is that it’s a patronymic. When I Google the father of Russian consciousness research, I discover that Mikhail was M. M. Kalunin’s first name.
The return ferry is a fraction busier than the one on the way out – half a dozen businessmen and women and a couple of late-night revelers making the journey back to the center of the city.
We’re halfway there when Koori tells me I’ll be putting myself at great risk.
‘Is that a prediction?’
‘No. It’s a fact. For the past month, you’ve been off their radar screens. Cross that border and you’ll light up like a beacon.’
I know.
‘Is the future written?’ I ask.
‘Yes and no.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Research suggests that every moment we make a decision, the future splits. Simply put, in one version, there’s an apocalypse in which Jerusalem is utterly destroyed. In another, there isn’t.’
‘Is this what we’re being shown – the Apocalypse?’
‘Are you religious, Josh?’
‘Why?’
‘In Revelation, technically the world isn’t destroyed. The nations are healed by God’s promise the curse will be lifted. That is the essence of the New Jerusalem. A world renewed. Reborn.’
‘If the Engineer had managed to get hold of a nuclear device, would he be guided by that distinction? If he believes he’s fulfilling a prophecy, wouldn’t he go ahead and push the button?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What would it take?’
‘Take?’
‘For you to know.’
‘More than what you’ve got,’ he says.
‘Stani?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you get involved—’
‘I became involved the moment I sketched out that eight-pointed star.’ He manages a smile. ‘And retirement wasn’t much fun anyway.’
I write down a name and address.
He studies it. ‘Can I trust her?’
‘Completely.’
We agree that I go east, he goes west.
49
DOMODEDOVO AIRPORT, MOSCOW. RECENTLY MODERNIZED, BUT not so you’d notice.
It’s seven o’clock in the morning, still dark, and most of those around me have stumbled off flights from distant parts of the Federation and the territories of the former Sovi
et Socialist Republic: Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Tashkent, Petropavlovsk.
When I finally get to the head of the line, I’m confronted by a blue-shirted officer of the Federal Migration Service. She’s at least seventy, with gray hair molded like a bagel. She beckons me to the booth. I hand over my passport. She flicks through it till she finds the page she’s looking for.
She spends almost a minute subjecting it to microscopic scrutiny, then looks up. ‘Diplomatyeskii.’
I nod.
She places Sergeyev’s visa under a scanner. My passport had been couriered to my office the day of the V-22 crash. Molly had overseen its delivery to my apartment when she knew I wasn’t coming back. Eyes down, the passport official says something to me in Russian, and gets irritated when I don’t give an immediate answer.
‘How many … days?’
‘A week,’ I lie. I don’t want to give any impression of urgency.
She gives me the stamp. I’m in.
By the time I clear customs, I know that, as unsophisticated as everything appears, my details are already being scrutinized by the FSB.
I take the Aeroexpress and watch the sun rise over an endless succession of gray apartment blocks in Moscow’s southeast suburbs. Steam vents from roofs. Factories belch smoke into a fine muslin layer of smog. Several centimeters of snow cover the ground.
I take a short taxi ride from Paveletsky station to my hotel, the Kempinski, across the river from Red Square.
I set off across the Moskvoretsky Bridge twenty minutes later, having showered, changed and wrapped up warm. Never having been to Russia before, I spend a minute or two appreciating my surroundings. I get out my phone, take 360-degree shots of St Basil’s and the Kremlin walls, take several more of the Lenin Mausoleum and views over the Moskva River, then head to the eastern side of the square.
GUM is more a mall than a store. Its three levels are linked by escalators. Glitzy shops occupy each floor. I sit in a cafe, examine the tourist map I picked up at the hotel, then head for the restroom, enter a cubicle, lock it and sit down.