I drained my glass and began to peel a pack of Camels. I said, “Yeah, and I’d like to know what it is, but I’m sorry. I don’t buy fifteen-thousand-year-old Martians and sixty-five-million-year-old dinosaurs.”
Russell levered himself to his feet and stood a moment, leaning on the table, his eyes lost in thought. Then he sighed and said, “Well, whether you buy it or not, there may be more truth to it than you care to believe.” He made his way to the sideboard, speaking absently as he went. “Who’ll join me in a Bushmills?”
We both said we would and he brought a decanter and three Waterford tumblers to the table. While he was pouring, he said, “We have access to archived material that most people don’t even know exists.” I saw Hook look at him sharply. “There are secrets that are known and accepted within…” He paused while he pushed the cork back into the bottle. “I wouldn’t call them circles, exactly, Liam. Perhaps I should say, at certain levels of power.”
Hook handed me a glass and kept one for himself.
Russell sipped and went on. “One of those secrets is the existence, fifteen thousand years ago—though by then it was already ancient—of a great civilization, technologically as advanced as our own, or more so. That civilization had its hub in the Caribbean. It was destroyed by global warming and rising sea levels.”
“Atlantis. You’re telling me she was telling the truth about that.”
He nodded. “Yes… We also know that they were at war.”
I couldn’t keep the acid from my voice. “With intelligent dinosaurs?”
“In all probability, yes.”
Hook drew breath, hesitated a second then spoke. “In any case, Liam, at this stage it really doesn’t matter if it’s all an elaborate deception or the truth. The fact is that there are some very powerful people out there with access to extraordinary technology. And for whatever reasons they may have, their intention is that our environment should change catastrophically—very soon—and become largely uninhabitable for us. I think you have to ask yourself, why would they want to do that?”
I looked at him a long time. “Us?”
There was a flash of irritation on his face. “Yes, Liam, us. Humans.”
I sighed and sipped my whiskey. I was about to ask them the billion-dollar question. “And what can we”—I gestured around the table—“a professor of mathematics, a brigadier in the SAS, and a ne’er-do-well grafter like me, do about it?” I turned to Russell. He was watching me impassively. I went on, “You asked me to track Maria’s abductor. I did it and I wound up in a subterranean lab where they grow human vegetables… Come on, Russell! You want me to believe you and trust you? That’s a two-way street. It’s time you came clean and stopped keeping me in the dark. Who the hell are you and what are you about?”
He nodded. “You are quite right and I apologize, but we are plagued by difficulties, Liam. Nothing is clear-cut and we have enemies everywhere. And our most dangerous enemies are in our very own governments, in the highest offices. Some of them are hybrids themselves, as you’ve heard. Yet others are human, working against humanity in exchange for the promise of vast power in the New Order.” He paused, frowning at his glass. “Haven’t you ever wondered why, when humanity is confronted by the real and present threat of extinction, the world’s governments are so reluctant to do anything about it?”
Hook took over. “Our”—he hesitated—“let’s call it a Council, for now, was established just before the Second World War. Certain individuals who shall, for the moment, remain nameless realized that powerful government and public figures were being manipulated and controlled by a shadow organization, apparently for the purpose of changing the climate and the environment. We were formed to work against them.”
I interrupted. “You’re talking Dan Brown Illuminati bullshit.”
His voice was real quiet when he said, “I think you owe us a little more respect than that.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry.”
He pressed on. “I’m surprised what you’ve seen already has not made you more open-minded.”
Russell said, “It’s a lot to take in, Liam, but unfortunately we haven’t got much time. And what makes it worse is that the enemy is made of smoke and mirrors. They appear, change, transmute, vanish and reappear somewhere else, as something different. They are extraordinarily powerful, and they are masters of illusion. Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminati is a better comparison than Dan Brown’s.”
He stared at his whiskey a while, like he was seeing all of the world’s history in the spirits in his glass. There was total silence at the table. Then he said, “You know that Adam Weishaupt founded them in Bavaria, the very same day that Washington declared America’s independence.”
Hook spoke as though he hadn’t heard. “Speaking plainly, we need you, and Maria, to join us. This project you have described is immensely dangerous. If they pull it off, the consequences are unimaginable.”
I held up a hand. “Wait….” I shook my head. “Let’s take this one step at a time. What has this to do with Llyn Celyn and the fusion reactor? What the hell do you mean by ‘join you’, but, before that, I want to know where Maria is and what Joanna did to her. I want to know what the hell is going on with her.”
Russell said, “She’s in Wiltshire. She’s under observation. She’s agreed to help us to”—he frowned and hesitated—“help us to understand. Technologically, we are vastly outgunned by them. They are way ahead of us. But we are beginning to understand how they work, and with her help we can go a lot further. It seems somehow she is still linked to—”
I said, “To Banks and del Roble.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “It seems as though they somehow mapped Joanna’s neural ‘codes’, for want of a better word, into Maria’s brain, so Joanna is”—he spread his hands and shook his head—“quite literally a part of Maria. It’s as though she has two people living in one brain.”
Hook said, “From what our boffins can gather, those codes are sustained by some kind of link, rather like a radio, with del Roble and Banks.”
I said, “Can they fix it?”
Russell looked drawn and gray. He said, “They’re not sure. There are signs… It’s possible that if we can’t break the link, her own brain might start to…to die away, a bit like Alzheimer’s.”
I felt sick and my head seemed to swim.
Russell took a big pull on his drink then said, “But to answer your first question, del Roble’s purpose has always been to kill the fusion reactor program. The last thing they need is clean energy. They need us to keep pumping out CO2.
“But perhaps more than worrying than that is their continued growth in power. Politics is the art of accruing and retaining power, nothing more. And power means one thing—control. Their whole research and development program seems to be aimed at one thing, control. Control of human behavior, of the human mind. It seems Llyn Celyn is to be a front for that research here in Britain. At the highest levels of power, politicians and high-ranking military are abdicating to them in droves, buying their seat at the high table, while the bulk of humanity is sentenced either to death or to spiritual and mental slavery.”
I said, “But they want to keep us human. They are fascinated by our ability to feel. They kept telling me their greatest drive was to learn to feel like us. I think Joanna really was prepared to jump ship on the promise of learning to feel.”
He and Hook stared at each other a moment. He refilled my glass and passed it back to me.
Hook said, “Yes. Fortunately, until now, they don’t seem to have been able to get it quite right.”
Russell began to speak suddenly. “In 1947, what was taken to be an alien spacecraft crashed in New Mexico near the Roswell Air Force Base. The American military recovered the craft and the crew. Most of them were dead. Two survived. One was shot and killed by a trigger-happy soldier. The other was taken into captivity. This was not the first craft to crash, but it was the first to be recovered largely intact. And it was the first
time we were able to capture one of them alive.”
I raised an eyebrow and said, “We?”
He paused. After a moment, he said, “Let’s just say for now, Liam, that the independence of Western governments is more apparent than real. At the highest level of political power, in the West, we are all, effectively, one.”
He watched me.
I shrugged and said, “Okay. If you say so.”
“I do. Very few people know what really happened at Roswell, but the important point is, it marked a turning point in our relationship with ‘them’.” He sipped his drink and replaced it carefully on the table. “You have to understand that until 1947, our relationship had been a distant one. They had connected with certain individuals for the purpose of guiding us toward the industrial revolution. But during the warm, they became more active, more involved, observing us more closely, perhaps because of the rapid advance in our military and industrial technology, particularly that of the Germans, perhaps because they were guiding us into the Cold War and the arms race, and unprecedented emissions of CO2.” He paused, watching me a moment. “As I say, nobody knows exactly what happened at Roswell, but since then their contact with certain members of the IT and defense industries and certain political figures has gotten much closer and much deeper. And it seems that with the crashed craft, the US industrial-military complex had at its disposal technologies that had been, until then, undreamed of.
“And with these new technologies, it became essential to create a department whose function would be to reverse engineer the technology recovered from the crash. To that end, General Hap Arnold, Jimmy Doolittle, Donald Putt and Hoyt Vandenberg all strong-armed President Truman into creating an independent Air Force, separate from the Army. This had been an ambition of the US Air Force’s for a long time, but, after Roswell, it happened almost overnight—on the 18th of September, just two months after the crash. Then, in the face of fierce opposition from the Air staff, on the 23rd of January, 1950, just two and a half years after Roswell, the Air Research and Development Command came into being as a separate, independent organization. Its function, in theory, was to research and develop weaponry for the Air Force. Its actual function was to develop technology from the captured craft.”
I said, “Why would that cause fierce opposition?”
Hook answered. He said, “Because, despite its name, the ARD Command put the research and development of weapons under the control of a desk at the Pentagon. That desk was not controlled by the Army or the Air Force—or even the President.”
I took a slug of whiskey and lit another cigarette. I asked the question, but I already knew the answer. “If it isn’t under the control of the military or the President, who controls it?”
He smiled at his whiskey. “Who do you think, Liam?”
I stared into my glass. “The Federal Reserve… So, basically you’re telling me that the Military and Air Force Research and Development desk at the Pentagon, which is charged with the reverse engineering of a spacecraft recovered in 1947, is run by the world’s biggest private banking cartel.”
“Yes. The R&D desk is used to filter reverse engineered technology into the private sector. Who are the big names in the Federal Reserve, Liam? Who were the names behind the corporations that drove the huge military advances post 1950?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Think, Liam. The Roth banking empire, the Bank of England, the Rockford family… The House of Saude, the bin Abbasids…”
I stared at him.
Hook said, smiling, “Strange bedfellows, don’t you think?”
I thought a moment while they watched me. Something inside me was telling me I knew all this was true. I said, “And the technology that has come out of this has not been solely military, has it? There has been another, more important technological advance.”
Hook nodded his head at his whiskey. “Oh, yes, Liam, there has. The microchip. The technology of the great zombie apocalypse. The information revolution that, ironically, has led to the most ill-informed, uneducated, unquestioning generations in human history.”
“Mind control.”
“Yes.”
I said, “Okay. I’ll join you, and I’ll do whatever you want me to do, but on one condition.”
Russell said, “I suspect your condition fits very snugly with our aims. Name it.”
I told them what it was. Russell smiled and nodded, and Hook burst out laughing.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I was in Maria’s bedroom. They had been keeping her sedated. She didn’t know it, but we were in Wiltshire, at Russell’s family home. The window was open and a cool breeze was stirring the edges of the curtains. Two oblongs of light lay twisted across her bed, but her face was in shadow. She had just opened her eyes and was watching me, watching her.
She said, “Where am I?”
I put my hand on her knee. “Everything’s fine, baby. We’re going home.”
She blinked. We were quiet for a moment.
Then she said, “What about—?”
“It’s over. Del Roble is dead. Banks is dead. Joanna—Dr. Loss—is dead.” I gave a small laugh. “You remember this whole thing started with a serial killer?”
She nodded, not smiling.
I said, “That was Golika, the guy I called Rinpoche, literally bred for the job. He’s dead, too, baby. It’s over.”
She gave an uncertain smile. “I still have this knowledge. I still feel her inside my head.”
I nodded. “Russell has talked to the best neurologists there are.” I sighed, like a school teacher explaining a difficult lesson in simple terms. “You have to understand, honey. It isn’t her in there. They mapped her neural networks into your brain, but they’re not really yours. And they will decay with time. They will fade and die. I promise.”
She smiled for the first time like she might mean it. “Really? You promise?”
I took her hand and squeezed gently. “I promise, baby. You’re going to be fine.”
She said, “I don’t remember much. We were in Cordoba—”
“You’ve been unconscious. They’ve been doing tests, looking for the biochip.”
“Where are we?”
“We’re in Scotland. It’s an MOD training camp they’re letting us use. Hook pulled some strings…” I shrugged and smiled, covering my misdirection. “He has friends in high places. They have the same school tie.”
She smiled down at her hands and made small folds in the quilt. She seemed wrecked. She had deep shadows under her eyes and I knew that what she had in her brain was slowly killing her.
She said, “When can we go?” Then she looked up at me and there were tears in her eyes. “When will we be back to normal?”
I moved closer, took her in my arms then kissed the top of her head. She wrapped her arms around me and I felt her tears soaking through my shirt.
I whispered, “Real soon, baby. Real soon.”
After a bit, she pulled back and I took her face in my hands. It felt small and frail.
I kissed her lips real softly and said, “I have some things I have to take care of, here in Scotland.” I shook my head. “Some debriefing stuff, but Tom and Hook are going to take you back home, and Tom will stay with you until I get back. Okay?”
She frowned. “How long will you be, baby?”
“You’ll be home this evening, and I’ll be with you by tomorrow evening. It’s over, honey.” I kissed her again. “It’s over.”
She smiled and stroked my face. “My hero. You rescued me from Hell.”
I laughed. “Yeah…”
* * * *
Rinpoche had dressed himself in a woolen hat, a brown vinyl jacket and old jeans. In London, that made him totally nondescript. He hung around the corner of Vicarage Gate as evening fell, smoking rollups and flicking stumps into the gutter. He knew they thought he was dead—he and the Seraph and Banks. In his left hand he held a rose. It still had the thorns on it. At seven p.m., he sa
w the black Land Rover pull up and a big blond guy get out and stand on the sidewalk looking up toward the Gate, then back down the hill again. He had SAS written all over him.
Two more guys got out, with a woman supported between them. He was too far to see her face, but he knew it had to be Maria. She seemed weak. Without Joanna to support her, the chip was killing her. He smiled in a way you’d describe as thin. He was going to get there first. He wanted Murdoch to experience, first-hand, the total destruction of a person he loved.
He felt a slight stirring in his belly, a warmth, but nothing more. Rinpoche had never experienced horror or dread or sheer sexual arousal. He knew Joanna had come close, and he hungered for the experience. Like del Roble, and Joanna before she had been destroyed, he found Maria and Murdoch strangely fascinating. There was an intensity about them. Maybe tonight, with Maria, he would get close to rupa.
* * * *
Maria had had an early lunch with Russell and Hook in her room. They had talked and Russell had reassured her that all the research they had done proved pretty conclusively that Joanna was indeed dead, and that the strike on the facility in Algeria had eliminated del Roble and Banks. There was no sign of them anywhere. As for Golika-Rinpoche, Tom had seen to him in Cordoba. They’d given her a mild sedative and told her to rest and that a car would collect her shortly and take her down to London. Hook and two of his men would accompany her.
The car had arrived just before two. She had been very sleepy and she had sat in the back and dosed fitfully, aware of the occasional murmured conversation from the front and the swift flitting countryside as dusk had fallen and had turned to evening.
She was aware, then, of the stop, start of city traffic—of the lights, amber, green, red, that occasionally flooded the car as it idled at crossings, in busy streets.
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