She had a point. I stared into my coffee. It was very black. I said, “Go on.”
She snapped, “Every Native American civilization, surrounding the Caribbean Sea as far as Mexico, has a tradition of a nation that sank below the ocean, with a name like Atlantis. The Toltecs, Nahuatlacas, the Aztecs—and all the races that settled Mexico—trace their ancestry back to Aztlan or Atlan, located in the Atlantic. You know what happened to this place? It sank after a great flood.” She leaned forward and her face flushed with anger and tears spilled from her eyes. “What a fucking coincidence that Plato put Atlantis right there, and it sank right at the beginning of the interglacial period, when the fucking ice caps were melting! Does that have a familiar fucking ring to you, Mr. Bullshit?”
“Okay…”
“Maybe you’d like to explain to me, Liam Mr. Fucking-Know-It-All-Murdoch, how Solon, two-thousand five-hundred years ago, knew that the Atlantic was a vast ocean and beyond it lay another vast continent. And how he knew that ten thousand years earlier the interglacial had begun.”
“You made your point.”
“Then please shut up and listen!” She glared at me, her breath coming heavy. “You demand the truth over and over, but you ignore it when it stares you in the face!”
I didn’t answer and we were quiet for a while.
Then she said, “Their empire lasted for millennia. They reached a level of technological advancement similar, perhaps a little more advanced, than what you have today. But they were constantly at war, with each other—just like you, and also with the Saurians. Their great genius—your great genius—is the ability to organize systematically and attack in packs. Those Saurians who had remained on the surface—or visited the surface—were decimated and driven below, but at a cost.”
She sipped her coffee and sat thinking.
I said, “What cost?”
“They began to produce CO2, just like you. The population of the world was far less, and the volumes were far lower. But the climate was also a lot colder and, over time, it only took a few degrees, coupled with the natural cycles of Earth, to cause a catastrophic collapse of the ice sheets. The amount of ice that melted is inconceivable. Trillions upon trillions of tons of ice fell into the Atlantic. Sea levels rose, there was torrential rain and there were hurricanes that devastated the planet. Not only that, but the massive displacement of the weight of the ice caused Earth’s crust literally to spring back, triggering earthquakes that would have measured ten and twelve on the Richter Scale.”
“This is the origin of the myth of the Flood.”
She nodded. “It is universal. Atlantis, the Flood… There is not a culture on Earth that doesn’t have it. The human race was decimated and the culture was all but lost, along with its military might. You can imagine what happened next.”
I looked at the stark, blue-white sky. Seagulls were wheeling overhead, crying their weird, desperate cry across the sea. I said, “The balance of power shifted. Some of the”—I felt embarrassed using the name, but I shrugged—“some of the Atlanteans survived. They retained some of their science, but they had lost their industrial and military base.”
“Manu, Noah, Jehovah, Deus… The names are all there if you search for them. As the climate began to settle, what emerged was that temperatures had risen substantially. The elite who had survived withdrew into mountain refuges, just as before them the Saurians had withdrawn to underground refuges.”
“Agarte…”
“Yes, to name but one. The event had been traumatic and there were those, like Manu, who believed that humanity needed to rethink its relationship with the planet and with the Saurians. They formed a counsel. They called it the Seven Sages, others called it the White Counsel. The name is irrelevant.
“There was one among the Saurians who agreed with them. His name will remain unspoken for now. The important point is that the bulk of surviving humanity was reduced, in a few decades, to primitive, savage tribes, struggling day to day simply to survive. They stayed that way for nearly five thousand years. In that time, a new war began. A different war. A war for their minds and spirits.”
My coffee was now very black and very cold. I knew what she’d meant but I decided to ask, anyway.
“Lucifer? The Garden of Eden?”
She ignored me, as though I hadn’t spoken, then went on, “As the climate warmed, so more and more Saurians began to make sorties to the surface. Many simply vented their hatred on the warm-blooded, savage race who had taken their world from them. They stole and ate their babies, stalked them in the night, became the stuff of nightmare and legend. Others tried to bridge the divide by teaching and by giving spiritual guidance. Inevitably, this deteriorated among your ignorant tribes into superstition, cult and, eventually, religion.
“Meanwhile, the human elite who had established themselves in mountain refuges in the Himalayas and the Andes began to echo the activities of the Saurians. They would kidnap young girls and boys that grabbed their fancy, breed with them and tell them they were the beloved of the gods. Soon religions sprang up around them, too. They became Thor and Odin, Zeus, Apollo, Krishna, Yahweh…
“But where your gods grew decrepit, we did not. About ten thousand years ago, we began to help your tribes to cultivate the land and build cities. We taught them the basic skills of metallurgy…”
She went quiet, staring toward the sea and the ridges of white foam that gradually moved away from us in oblique lines. I pulled out a pack of Camels and began to peel it. I lit two and handed one to her. She glanced at it, then at me, took it and stared at it a while before taking a drag.
I wasn’t sure if I believed her or if I thought it was all a crock of bull. But something inside was telling me that somehow, in a way I could not explain, it was true. And besides, I was curious about where it was leading. I was also aware that she’d reached a point in her narrative that she thought was important.
I said, “So what happened?”
“The highest Saurians, the Ael, wanted to teach more. Remember that Eve did not eat an apple. She ate the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that was offered to her by a serpent. This was deliberate. The Saurians knew well the nature of humanity, and they knew what they would do with this knowledge if they were not taught also to love and respect their new home.” She took a deep drag then examined the burning tip while she tapped away the ash. “Remember that the Saurians do not think in years, as humans do. They measure time in centuries and millennia. And they knew that human greed and avarice—and their war-like nature—would lead them again to the excesses of Atlantis. But this time they would do it all over the globe, unconstrained by the ice age.”
“What are you saying?”
She seemed not to hear my question. “I don’t know what happened to your ‘gods’. Over the centuries, they faded and were replaced by one—Yahweh, also called Allah. Yahweh, who banished the serpent. Perhaps they died. Perhaps they were killed. But your civilizations flourished, and with them, your wars and your empires. In the end, the Ael and their Seraphs despaired of you, and as your empires came and went, they began to guide and nurture them in a different way.
“The first to receive this new attention was Rome. With Rome, your technology advanced by leaps and bounds, founded on the law of five, the Eden Cypher, and directed at ever more efficient ways of slaughtering each other. And, finally…”
She turned to stare at me, almost as though I disgusted her.
I waited then said, “Finally, what?”
“Three times you were given the chance—Greece, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Each time you sought power over wisdom, and finally, you came at last to where you were always going to wind up—in the Industrial Revolution. Guided by the scaly hand of the London Masonic Lodge, you set about building factory after factory after factory, all over the globe. From London, you had already sent forth the Founding Fathers to America—the new Atlantis—to build more factories and yet more factories, all making…what?”
&
nbsp; I shook my head. “I don’t know. Shoes? Cars? Steel? Weapons? I don’t know! What are you getting at, Maria?”
She was shaking her head long before I’d finished. She leaned forward, stared me in the eye and half whispered, “C…O2!”
I don’t often gape, but I think I gaped. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not kidding you, Liam. It was the most effective weapon ever created against humanity, and you manufactured millions of tons of it yourselves, to satisfy your own unbridled greed. Let the damned humans gorge themselves and sate their lust. Let them ravage their home and murder each other over plots of land they want to rape and pillage. Let them rob each other and sack each other’s cities and homes, if all the while they are pumping CO2 back into the atmosphere on a scale the Saurians would never have been able to manage. Because that way, Liam… That way they will—in typical human fashion—make the world uninhabitable for themselves, but eminently habitable once again for the ancient masters of this planet—the Saurians.”
I was in disbelief. “Are you seriously telling me…?”
“Am I telling you that for the past ten thousand years your history has been guided and directed by Saurians masquerading as gods, demons, prophets and Enlightened Beings, directing your steps toward the Industrial Revolution? Yes! That’s what I am telling you. And since then, there has hardly been a major public figure who was not either a hybrid or a puppet of the Saurians.” She sucked on her cigarette and blew smoke aggressively into the wind. “They have given you chance after chance to learn, and every single fucking time you blew it! Every conspiracy theory you can think of, from JFK to the Illuminati, from Roswell to the Bilderberg Group… Every one of them is a smokescreen for this one simple conspiracy.”
My head was reeling again. It was too much to take in. All I could think to ask was, “But… But what happened to the…what you called the human elite?”
A twisted distortion of a smile made her look suddenly ugly. “Why? You think Yahweh might come back and save you?”
I shook my head.
She barked a nasty laugh. “Shall I tell you something, Liam? It is your oh-so-human leaders who are begging us for the technologies that will destroy your environment. Your oh-so-human leaders fully support our plan, either to turn you into an army of brain-dead androids, or, when you are wiped out by the coming holocaust, replace you with walking vegetables, so that they can rule as princes under the Saurian emperors. If you want anyone to save humanity, Liam, don’t expect humans to do it.”
I stood and walked to the rail and stared down at the churning ocean. I could see Algeciras approaching and the vast rock of Gibraltar to the West. I was hit by a wave of desolation. How do you save an entire race of intelligent beings who seem hell-bent on their own destruction? The grind of the engines changed as we began to pull in toward the port. The gulls were screaming overhead. I was trying to put everything she had told me together, trying to make sense of it, trying to decide if I believed any of it, some of it or all of it.
She came and stood beside me, looking down at the churning sea.
I said, “So, the purpose of the facility, the purpose of this whole project, the trees, the labs, the ships…”
She was nodding. “Yes…”
“The purpose of all that is to provide a contented slave race for…” I was shaking my head, shrugging, spreading my hands.
“Not for the Saurians, Liam. Not for the Ael, they have never used slaves. They have never needed or wanted them. They are individualists and loners. Slaves are a human thing. This slave race was commissioned from us by humans in nineteen forty-seven by your political masters, when they realized it was too late to turn back climate change. We already make millions of them, mainly for the sex industry. You, and your human hunt for feeling and sensation.”
There was a blast from the foghorn above our heads. The gulls wheeled crazily against the scorching sky. The sea churned and eddied beneath us. Ahead, Algeciras, the gateway to Europe, bustled. Cars sped back and forth, trains screamed in steel agony, planes roared into the heavens, factories billowed black and gray smoke, and five-hundred million Europeans lived their lives like ignorant sheep, staring into their phones, tablets and computers, passively having their brains programmed, shuffling steadily, obediently, toward their enslavement and eventual slaughter.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We took the Autovía del Mediterráneo out of Algeciras then headed east. I could have headed north to Jerez and Seville, aiming to cut over western Spain and cross the border at Irun into France. But being the obvious thing to do, I chose not to do it. The second most obvious thing to do would be to follow the Autovía del Mediterráneo all the way up to Barcelona and enter France through Cerbère, on the French-Catalan border, but I didn’t do the second most obvious thing, either. I was pretty sure Golika-Rinpoche and del Roble were going to find us, but I didn’t want to make it too easy.
I headed east in the Daemon toward Malaga. The heat was oppressive. The thermometer in the car was showing fifty degrees Centigrade. But with the hood down and cruising at a hundred miles per hour, it was tolerable. By midday, we hit Benalmádena, with it’s crazy Stupa flashing golden light under the sun, and ten minutes later, before we hit Malaga, we peeled off onto the AP46 and took off north, toward Cordoba.
We didn’t talk. We didn’t even look at each other. It was good to be in Europe. It was good to be driving in the sun and the wind, pretending for a couple of hours that we were back in the real world. Back from Godzilla in wonderland. But inside, I was growing tired of Joanna. I had killed her to save Maria, and now she seemed to have taken possession of her, and I was wondering if I would ever get Maria back.
It was after two when we crested the hill and saw Cordoba spread out below us. As we drove down into the city and crossed the Bridge of San Rafael, from the South Bank to the north, the heat was fantastic. I glanced at the thermometer and it was showing fifty-two degrees Centigrade. I knew that in inland Andalusia in the summer, temperatures peaked at four and five in the afternoon—in another two or three hours.
We cruised up the main avenue, past the old Alkazar, then turned right into the shade of the trees in the Jardines de la Victoria. I wound down a couple of narrow streets onto the Avenida Dr. Fleming and pulled into a car park that had been built into the old city walls. I took our bags from the trunk and we stepped out into the blazing heat.
I glanced at Maria. She was pale.
“We’ll find a hotel, eat, rest, buy some clothes, get a few hours’ sleep and move out about four in the morning. You okay?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
There was a plaza set against the old city wall. It was like a small Roman theater with a fountain in the middle, surrounded by cafés and terraced restaurants. In the wall, there was a giant, mediaeval archway that led into a maze of narrow, cobbled streets. My instinct told me to go to ground there. So we ducked in past two mesones that looked like medieval taverns, a club where they did the dance of the seven veils and a labyrinth of tiny streets that hadn’t changed since the wheel had been a controversial novelty.
After a couple of minutes, we came out to a cobbled square dotted with orange trees. It could have been a Hollywood film set for a kasbah in an Indiana Jones movie. Thousands of people milled, spilling off narrow sidewalks. There were jewelers on every corner, selling silver filigree. There were bars and ice-cream parlors with chairs and tables sprawling across the road, and cars, motorbikes, horse-drawn carriages, taxis, gypsies selling tired, nicotine-stained dreams and tourists renting vicarious freedom by the week. All were jostling, gazing, competing for space.
We pushed through the crowd and suddenly the narrow street opened into a large esplanade, and there was the most bizarre building I had ever seen in my life—the mosque-cathedral. It was a vast, sandstone construction with a great tower rising over one hundred and fifty feet into a stark sky. There was a giant Arabesque door set in the base of the tower that led into a square, m
aybe two-hundred feet across or more. At the far end was the main body of the mosque-cathedral, with its great arches and the huge dome of the cathedral rising above it. At first glance, it was Spanish renaissance, but when you looked closer, you saw that it was just renaissance twiddles on top of Arab architecture that was probably over a thousand years old. As I stared, I became aware that Maria was talking to me.
“It was built one thousand three hundred years ago by Abd-al Rahman I, a Umayyad prince from Syria, nicknamed the Umayyad Hawk. He was descended from one of Mohammed’s cousins. His whole clan was massacred by Abu Abbas as Saffah, in Palastine. Abd-al Rahman was only fifteen. He was the only one to escape. He crossed North Africa on foot with his faithful servant, Badr, and after seven years he finally landed at Torrox, age just twenty-two. He raised an army and took Cordoba in a single battle. Throughout his reign, he refused to build a mosque. His life had taught him to be an atheist, not to believe in the god of his ancestors. But he was persuaded by his advisors, just before he died, that for political reasons, for the sake of his dynasty, he must. So he did. He built this. It is the only mosque in the world that faces southeast instead of east. A small act of defiance against Allah, Yahweh, Mohammed and religion.”
I stared at her. “How do you know that?”
She smiled without much humor. “He was six foot tall, red-haired and blue-eyed. He was a hybrid, like all his clan.”
We were standing under the minaret tower, in the vast archway that gave onto the Patio de los Naranjos—the patio of the orange trees. She began to walk away, into the glaring sunlight of the courtyard. I followed her. There was an ancient stone fountain set among the orange trees and she headed for it. The sound of its splashing, trickling water was cool in the heat. I caught up with her as she bent over and drank from her cupped hands. She straightened and spoke without looking at me, wiping the water from her chin.
“You should never come here without drinking the water.”
The Deepest Cut Page 25