The Portent

by Michael S. Heiser

  “Holy smokes,” Malone exclaimed. Melissa could see he was reading the last page of the handout.

  “Stunning, isn’t it?” Melissa noted. “There were 2.5 million drawings from Skoda in the cache.”

  “I saw that—and that’s not everything.”

  “All in all,” Melissa informed them, “Project Lusty obtained 1,200 tons of documents, which they transferred to the US over the course of several months. It also obtained all the records of the German Patent Office—225,000 volumes. That’s a direct connection to Kammler, as he set up a system of total patent review under his command. If he was the source of the tip, he would surely have told them to go after the patent office. All patents were reviewed for military application.”

  “Like this picture of a triangle craft?” Ward asked.

  “That’s the Lippisch P-13a, created by the German pioneer in aerodynamics, Dr. Alexander Lippisch. The model 13 had passed full trials. It was completely functional and supersonic. After the war, Dr. Lippisch joined some of his friends here in the United States as part of Operation Paperclip.”

  “What a shock,” Malone scoffed.

  “I’m afraid to ask where the documents went,” Clarise muttered.

  “One hundred and fifty tons went to three places in the United States. Two are very familiar to anyone doing UFO research: Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio—now called Wright-Patterson—and White Sands, New Mexico. The third was Freeman Field in Indiana.”

  “So what do you think the Colonel wanted us to learn here?” Neff asked.

  “Well, he wasn’t trying to teach us that the US has UFO technology,” Brian answered. “We knew that. I think the point was to show us the clarity of a connection between UFOs, which most people will presume are alien, and the Nazis. It would be easy to create the myth that the aliens he wants to demonize seeded technology to the Nazis to win the war and exterminate the Jews.”

  “Let me add to the nonsense,” queried Malone. “The aliens were on their side to move eugenics ahead.”

  “All in the name of human progress and evolution,” Clarise added with disgust.

  “As bogus as all that is,” noted Melissa, “the thoughts actually become more potent against the backdrop of where the rest of Becky’s message takes us. We just couldn’t see it before. Now we can. It’s elegantly depraved.”

  “What do you mean?” Neff wondered.

  “If ‘Hg’ is securely identified,” she answered, “that leaves the letters W-E-S-T-O-N.”

  Clarise sat up straight with a realization. “Weston—that’s the name on one of the two autopsy reports you asked for.”

  “It is.”

  “Who was the other autopsy report for?” asked Brian.

  Melissa bowed her head and briefly looked away. “It’s Andrew’s.”

  60

  Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.

  —General Erwin Rommel

  “Sir!” the MP inside came to attention and saluted smartly.

  Colonel Ferguson returned the salute and strode toward the console. The enlisted man seated in front of the viewing screen never heard the door or the guard’s response. He was too far away, and his headset muted one ear. His attention was trained on an array of viewing screens that, to the uninitiated, appeared to be nothing more than a random smattering of blinking dots, like you might see if you ran your finger along the edge of a wet toothbrush and sprayed a mirror. The Colonel stood behind him, searching the specks until he found the one that had present meaning. He bent slightly toward the seated operator.

  “Still no movement?”

  “No, sir. The object is still stationary.”

  “And that’s been the status since the initial trail?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any activity on the other side of the border?”

  “Nothing but the usual traffic, sir.”

  “Let’s see the satellite visual.”

  The operator quickly complied with the necessary keystrokes. The Colonel studied the screen, though there wasn’t much to look at.

  “What’s the refresh?”

  “Thirty seconds, sir.”

  “Activity?”

  “A trickle, sir. Mostly local law enforcement.”

  “NSA link?”

  “Email and phone traffic. No keywords present; consistent with the movement—or rather non-movement, sir.”

  The Colonel stood erect and remained behind the operator in silence. He listened dispassionately to the click-clack of other operators and their occasional directives and responses. Unexpected, but easily dealt with.

  “What’s nearby? Say, within twenty miles or so.”

  “Not much, sir. It’s mostly forest, especially to the north.”

  Excellent. A decision soon pushed its way into his thoughts.

  “Sometimes,” the Colonel said slowly, more to himself than to the operator whose attention he once again held, “you just need to reach out and touch someone when you want information.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Carry on.”

  61

  Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

  —J. Robert Oppenheimer

  “Why did you need Andrew’s autopsy report?” asked Neff. “I could have given you the details.”

  “I needed both reports to see if there were any similarities between his death and that of Weston,” Melissa replied. “It’ll become clear in a moment.”

  He nodded.

  “I started by presuming Weston was a name. It wasn’t hard to run searches for it with keywords associated with the sort of things I specialize in, or that we’ve been talking about. I figured there had to be a relationship of some kind. Once I found some things that seemed pertinent, I presumed I had an ID. Then I widened my searches with the full name. It didn’t take long to discover it in an apparently random death—in Rachel, Nevada. That was too close to Area 51 and where Andrew was found to be coincidental.”

  “So who is he?” Malcolm asked.

  “I believe the Colonel wanted to direct our attention to Professor Claude Weston, formerly of Brown University. Dr. Weston was a professor of comparative linguistics. His specialties were in Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages, but he also seemed to have a working knowledge of Sumerian, Elamite, and Hittite. That may sound like a recipe for irrelevance, but all those fields are related to Aryan mythology.”

  “Boy, that’s like planning to focus on every fringe ancient language there is,” quipped Brian. “Makes me look employable.”

  Nili gave him a scolding look.

  “Sorry,” he apologized.

  Melissa went on. “For starters, it’s fair to say Weston was ethically challenged, to say the least.”

  “I’m positive he wasn’t embezzling piles of grant money with those fields,” Malcolm joked. “What’d he do, steal some antiquities?”

  “Among other things,” Melissa replied. “Weston had a history of being suspected of black market profiteering—paying indigenous workers to steal artifacts from museum storage or digs, assisting in forgery of artifacts, that sort of thing. He managed to get arrested for that one too many times, though he never served time. He eventually lost his position.”

  “He didn’t lose his income, though,” Ward chimed in. “After Melissa had a name, she asked me to do a little detective work on him. I got information on his bank accounts. Somebody was paying him well after his dismissal.”

  “Was it the Colonel?” Brian asked. “Any connection to the government?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot. It’s easy to set up fronts and firewalls to avoid detection. That’s part of what I do here. If it wasn’t Uncle Sam, it could have been private collectors of antiquities. They pay good money for artifacts, black market or legit.”

  “Any next of kin we could talk to?” Clarise asked.

  “He was long divorced and had no children. No immediate personal attachmen
ts.”

  “That sounds like a familiar profile.” Brian looked at Melissa, then Malcolm. “People who’ll be easily missed, and with no relatives who will challenge an excuse for an absence. That has the Colonel’s stink for sure.”

  “How did Weston die? Was there anything suspicious?”

  “He was supposedly killed in a head-on collision with a telephone pole. The collision apparently took place in the early morning hours. The area was very remote. A motorist noticed the vehicle on fire and reported the collision. The autopsy notes that the guy’s face was badly smashed, as was the car’s windshield. There were bits of glass in some of his facial wounds. His upper torso was also badly burned, though most of the car was not. He was positively ID’d through a passport and wallet in a briefcase in the back seat. The corpse’s fingerprints matched the ID.”

  “Sounds pretty tidy, pardon the expression,” Clarise commented. “It feels a little too easy.”

  Melissa looked uneasily at Brian, then Malcolm. “It’s him, all right. But there’s one detail that unmistakably connects him to us. It still unnerves me to be honest.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The investigators also checked dental records in the ID process. The body was missing a tooth … a left incisor, to be precise. It wasn’t found in the car anywhere, including the windshield.”

  “Oh, wow,” Malcolm sighed, stunned by the detail. “Do you think—”

  She shook her head. “I know. It’s the tooth Andrew found in the room at Mount Weather—the room with the Nazi Black Sun in it.”

  “How can you be sure, Melissa?” Brian asked.

  “Andrew’s file.”

  “Really?” Neff said, amazed, again taken by surprise.

  “Ward was able to get not only the autopsy report, but other police report documentation. When I asked for the autopsy, I never imagined I’d be looking for someone else’s remains, but there is was. The CSI found a tooth in Andrew’s pants pocket. He wasn’t missing any, so they knew it wasn’t his. They had no explanation for why a dead man would have someone else’s left incisor in his pants. I have one. The odds against the correlation with the tooth at Mount Weather are extraordinarily slim.”

  “That’s just …”

  “Providential,” Sabi said quietly from the back of the room. “The One who knows all things is helping us, guiding us—even in tragedy.”

  Nili stood up and walked over to the coffee for a refill. “Do we know anything else about Weston that would tell us why his name was part of the code implanted in Becky?”

  “A couple things,” Melissa replied. “Ward can explain. Did you bring your notes?”

  “Got ’em right here,” he said, pulling his phone from his shirt pocket. He tapped in his password, swiped the surface a few times, and then started in. “One of the things I uncovered about Weston was a police report of an incident a little over year ago at a genetics conference, of all places. He had to spend a night in jail for disorderly conduct.”

  “Drunk?” Malone asked over his eyeglasses.

  “Nope. Some scientist claimed Weston had assaulted him. The details are pretty tame, and charges were eventually dropped. I was curious, though, so I called the guy who had filed the charges in the first place. He remembered the incident. He said that Weston had attended a lecture of his at the conference and wanted to talk afterwards. Everything was cordial at first, but then Weston started ranting about having cuneiform tablets, and days lasting more than twenty-four hours in the Arctic, and how the two of them needed to collaborate on a paper that Weston insisted would solve the puzzle of Indo-European origins for good. The guy got freaked out. He said that when he tried to leave, Weston grabbed him and knocked him down. A witness called security, and that was that.”

  “Once Ward gave me the name of the scientist who had the scuffle with Weston, I put it into the scholarly databases to see what I’d find,” Melissa said, picking up the thread.

  “And?” Malcolm pressed, intrigued by the path the conversation had taken.

  “You’re going to love this, Brian,” she said with transparent sarcasm. “It’s the article I asked Clarise about.”

  “What is it?” he asked, his curiosity piqued.

  Melissa opened a folder and read the first page. “ ‘A European Population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete.’ ” She peered at him over her glasses, closed the folder, and handed it to him. “There are some summaries of the findings in there, too, for lay readers like us.”

  Brian paused for a moment, unsure of how to respond. “Crete?”

  “Crete.”

  “And this is based on genetics?”

  “Yep.”

  “Does it suggest a geographical origin for the population?”

  “The authors suggest the Minoans likely came from somewhere in Anatolia. The genetic trail leads north from there.”

  “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “The study used mitochondrial DNA from thirty-seven well-preserved ancient Minoans,” Clarise interrupted. “They were found in an undisturbed cave ossuary in east-central Crete. They were in wonderful condition. Most of them were haplogroup H.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Sorry. Mitochondrial haplogroup H is the one that arose in Western Asia about 25,000 years ago. Some geneticists and geographers use the term ‘southwest Asia.’ But both terms refer to what’s now known as the Middle East.”

  “And what people in my field call the ancient Near East,” Brian added.

  “Right, but North Africa is excluded in terms of the genetics,” Clarise explained. “Paleo-genetic studies have established that haplogroup H was carried to Europe by migrations. Haplogroup H is a genetic descendant of haplogroup HV, which was also spread across that region. Haplogroup HV overlaps with haplogroup J, which isn’t mitochrondrial DNA, but DNA from the Y chromosome. That’s thoroughly Middle Eastern.”

  Melissa broke in again. “The study has the Minoans genetically similar to—and this is their term, not mine—Nordic Romans.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Melissa looked at him with raised eyebrows. He’d learned to read that as a sign of amusement. This time was different.

  “Wait a minute—Minoans!” Ward blurted out, drawing everyone’s attention. He smacked his hand to his forehead. His eyes darted to Clarise, who stared at him, startled.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The police let me go through Weston’s briefcase, the one in the back of the car.”

  “And?”

  “It was just a bunch of papers, nothing that seemed important. But one was about some tablets from some place in Mesopotamia … it begins with an ‘m’ …”

  “Mari?” Brian suggested.

  “Yeah! That’s it!”

  Brian hung his head. He didn’t seem excited about being right.

  “There were papers about these tablets. They said something about Minoans and some other place called Kabri. Do you know that one?”

  “No,” Brian replied, now looking at him again. “I don’t know the place, but it should be easy to find out.” He looked around the table.

  “We’re not yanking your chain,” said Clarise, who could see the apprehension on his face. “I don’t know why this would rock your world. Why don’t you let the rest of us in on it?”

  “It’s all about Aryan mythology,” he answered, “the mythical origins of the Nazi master race idea.” He turned to Melissa, a helpless expression on his face. “Where do we even begin? It’s so convoluted and … bizarre.”

  “After the first round this morning,” Madison said, “I think we’re prepped for bizarre.”

  Melissa shook her head. “The only point of clarity in my mind right now is that the Colonel will milk this for everything it’s worth. He knew this would get a real rise out of the two of us.”

  “We’re going to have to start from the beginning and give them the framework. There’s no good shortcut,” Brian noted.


  “I know.” Melissa paused in thought, trying to find the right mental foothold. She looked up. “The only way to really grasp why all this is important and how it relates to the late Dr. Weston is to go back to the mid-nineteenth century, to British colonization of India. That’s where the whole Aryan debate begins. That debate is really about the question of Indo-European origins—where the singular people that settled in India and Europe came from.”

  “India and Europe?” Malone questioned. “It seems the people of India and Europe couldn’t be more different. I know Nazi goons like Himmler went that direction to find some people known as the Aryans, and that the swastika actually comes from ancient India, but I never understood the logic. They don’t look anything alike.”

  “No, they don’t,” Melissa said, smiling knowingly, “but you’re just thinking of how they look today. The fact is that the major language of India, at least apart from the southeastern regions, is a member of the same language family as the languages we know today spread throughout Europe. They’re all in what’s now called the Indo-European family. And you’re right about the swastika; the name comes from a Sanskrit word, svastika, which means ‘good to be.’ It was a good-luck symbol.”

  “Talk about something being lost in translation,” Malcolm quipped.

  “Languages are grouped into families because of overlaps and similarities in their grammatical properties,” Brian explained, “and where they disagree in kind with other languages. Since all the languages of European peoples belong together along with Sanskrit from India, people in the nineteenth century assumed that all the people speaking the languages in a family were of one race.”

  “And that’s the ‘master’ race?” Malone asked.

  “It’s part of that idea. We know today you can’t really equate race and language, but before the science of genetics came along, race was defined by language. It’s antiquated thinking, but it was dominant until recently.”

  “We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves already,” Melissa steered the conversation. “That’s easy in this subject. But let’s go back to the nineteenth century.”