by John Lyman
Therefore, I am hereby directing that we continue with executive order #322 for the viral extermination of large segments of the world’s population so that we may herald in a new and glorious age for our future generations.
For the good of all mankind,
Rene Acerbi
The cardinal let the folder slip from his hands onto the table. A sound like that of rushing water pounded in his ears as he closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. Acerbi was a monster.
Dr. Diaz had been correct all along. The victims of the virus had been prepped by altering their DNA, and now, armed with this new information, they knew how it was being done. The DNA of some was being modified by the food they ate, thus creating two genetically different populations who lived and died according to what brand of cereal they had eaten for breakfast. At least they had included a self-destruct mechanism within the virus, Leo thought. That explained why it died out so quickly.
The images of wheat and man painted on the chapel wall now made complete sense to Leo. In a way, a separate species of man was being created-one with immunity to the pathogen and one without, and the one without was doomed to extinction. Just like the variety of ancient wheat that had slowly been erased from existence by human manipulation, so too was a large percentage of the human population about to be manipulated out of existence, replaced instead with a new and different variety … wheat like man!
It was quickly becoming evident that the truth was much worse than he had first imagined. Acerbi was a monster, but what kind of monster? Did he truly believe his actions were justified for the good of all mankind? Sometimes the utopian monsters, those cloaked in veils of righteousness, could be far worse than the egomaniacal leaders who lusted after power for its own sake. Acerbi personified the short man syndrome run amuck-another Napoleon bursting forth onto the world stage in the new millennium.
But whatever kind of monsters Acerbi and his people were, it was obvious they now held the fate of every human being on the planet in their hands. This was a worldwide conspiracy of immense magnitude, and there was no telling who or how many people around the globe had already sworn their allegiance to this madman.
Lev and Mendoza grabbed for the folder at the same time. Mendoza politely deferred to Lev, who read the first page slowly with a mathematician’s organized eye to detail before passing it on. Running his hands through his hair, Lev collapsed back into his chair. Those who knew the professor well could tell by the look on his face that he had just noticed something everyone else had missed.
“What book?”
“What did you say?” Leo asked.
“What book?” Lev repeated. “That memo references a book he calls their master’s book … a book that lives on through its words.”
Evita saw the color drain from Leo’s face. It was as if he had just seen a ghost. “It can’t be! It was destroyed last year!”
The cardinal’s loud words echoed off the ancient castle walls, catching everyone by surprise. The mention of some kind of book had touched a nerve in a man famous for being calm under pressure.
“What if there’s another copy, Cardinal?” John asked.
“Impossible. We all saw it go up in flames in the chapel under the Vatican. According to the code in the Bible, that was the only physical copy of the book in existence.”
A stunned silence descended on those who had been to the barren Negev Desert the year before. Tired of being left out of the loop, Dr. Mendoza finally spoke up. “Could someone please let us in on what’s going on?”
Leo reached for the nearest bottle of wine and refilled his glass. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask Martha and Fredrick to excuse us for a moment.” Leo offered no explanation as he stood and began pacing back and forth, lost in thought. Whatever he was about to say, he had just made it obvious that it was not intended for the ears of outsiders.
“We were heading off to bed anyway,” Martha said. “We’ve had kind of a busy day.”
Sarah leaned over and put her arms around the woman who had risked everything to help her. “You guys saved my life. I hate to think what those people might have done to me if you hadn’t stuck your necks out to help me.”
“That’s the problem with the world today, honey. Not enough people want to stick their necks out.” Martha winked. “Good luck to all of you in whatever it is you have to do. Let’s go, Fredrick. We need to leave these good people alone for a while.”
After they left, Lev pulled up a chair next to Mendoza and poured some wine into the scientist’s glass. “Here, Javier, you might need this before you hear what I’m about to say. A year ago, we were all on an archaeological expedition in the Negev Desert. We had been led there by information we received from the code in the Bible.”
“What?” Mendoza glanced sideways at Evita and Dr. Diaz. “We never heard anything about an archaeological expedition by you in the Negev Desert.”
As an anthropologist who coexisted within the two separate worlds of academia and intelligence, Mendoza liked to be kept informed of the progress of any archaeological expeditions taking place in and around the Mediterranean, but he had heard nothing about Lev Wasserman’s expedition the year before.
“Our expedition was never made public, Javier. Do you remember hearing about the recent discovery of oil in Israel?”
“Of course … the entire world has heard about it. That area of the Negev desert was also flooded with water at the same time. Are you saying you had something to do with that?”
“Yes. It’s a long story, but when we were using the code to look for words and phrases in the Bible, we discovered coordinates that pointed to a specific area in the Negev Desert. Naturally, we decided to mount an expedition to see what was out there, but before we left, we found something even more disturbing … an especially frightening passage encoded in the book of Genesis.”
Lev cleared his throat. “You might want to take a sip of that wine now, Javier, because that passage stated that the coordinates we discovered pinpointed an area reserved for Satan here on Earth.”
“Satan!” Mendoza’s face broke into a nervous smile as he reached for his glass. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Professor.”
“I wish I were, but it’s a fact, and we can prove it. We also found an encoded reference to a mysterious book. We had no idea what any of this meant until we arrived at the coordinates and discovered a huge underground cavern. That’s where we encountered the demonic entities.”
“What?” This was getting stranger by the minute. Mendoza swiveled around to see if anyone was laughing, but no one was. Evita and Dr. Diaz were frozen in place, staring at Lev in disbelief.
“Are you trying to tell us that all of you have seen an actual demon?” Mendoza was beginning to wonder if these people were for real. Although he had never discussed his religious beliefs with Lev and the others, he believed in God and the Devil, but all of this talk of Satan and demons was bordering on bad pulp fiction.
The original eight members of the team traded looks but remained silent as they waited patiently for the Spanish members of the team to absorb what Lev had just told them. There was more to come, and they knew it would sound even more bizarre to anyone who hadn’t witnessed it for themselves.
“We didn’t encounter just one demon, Javier … we encountered five.”
Mendoza almost dropped his glass.
“Beneath our camp, we discovered an immense underground cavern that contained a huge dome-like structure that towered at least six stories above our heads. It was actually very beautiful, with brilliant, light-emitting crystals representing the constellations embedded in the pale blue walls. However, we quickly discovered that they had been placed in a reversed pattern, as if someone was looking at the earth from the heavens far away. In the center of this enormous space was a raised area made from large blocks of angled white stone, and beneath that, was a clear black floor that extended down into the earth as far as the eye could see. We were standing over a crystal abyss. T
hat’s where we found the book. It was red, and it appeared to be floating there right under our feet, encased in the transparent crystal floor.”
“But this is fantastic!” Javier exclaimed. “We must see this place! You must take us there! An archaeological site like that, in that area, could pre-date the pyramids. Were you able to date its construction?”
“Since the beginning of time, Javier. Since the celestial battle between heaven and hell, when Lucifer was banished from the sight of God. We had found Satan’s cathedral here on Earth, created by him for the sole purpose of having a secure location to hide a book … his book … the Devil’s Bible.”
Mendoza and Diaz sat there blinking, as one does in the first stages of disbelief, while Evita clasped her hands over her stomach and let out a quiet gasp.
“We learned the book itself was like an unholy relic. Some of our own Christian relics are able to perform miracles in God’s name. The Devil’s relic, if that’s what we can call it, had the power to cause great evil in the world. That was the most likely reason it was hidden here on earth. Apparently, Satan’s timetable and God’s timetable for the end of days don’t agree. We also learned that the Devil’s Bible had been out in the world before and was sealed back up to await the end of days. It had the power to jumpstart the reign of the Antichrist before the rapture, leaving millions of Christians here on Earth to suffer until God could gather them up. From the code, we learned that God wanted Satan’s book destroyed by a specific group of people … chosen ones.”
“Let me guess,” Mendoza said. “They were your names … all of you on the Bible Code Team.”
“To be honest we were all shocked. I mean, can you imagine how you would feel to see your own name actually spelled out in God’s book? It was like a biblical story from the Old Testament, only it was taking place now, in modern times. Another strange fact was that most of us had names that meant lion … Leo, Lev, Ariella … even John’s last name, Lowe … all lion names. We were all God’s lions, soldiers caught up in a celestial war, and I believe we’ve just been drafted once again.”
“Why didn’t God destroy the Devil’s Bible?” Diaz asked, his face a frozen mask of doubt.
Leo’s green eyes bored in on Diaz with such intensity that the man actually felt a twinge of fear.
“I like the way you always get right to the heart of things, Dr. Diaz,” Leo said. “In answer to your question, I believe God has always involved man in the war between good and evil. We must be participants in our own salvation. I believe that’s one of the reasons why He placed the code in the Bible in the first place. He knew where civilization would take us, and that one day, rather than relying on faith alone, man would begin to look for secular proof of His existence. How better to communicate with an advanced civilization hooked on computers than through a code so complex that it would take computers to unravel it. He’s given us a contemporary tool that we can use to continue our dialogue with Him.”
Evita and Leo looked at one another for a long moment. No wonder he had turned pale at the mention of a book, she thought. The entire story sounded fantastical, but she had no doubt that these people were telling the truth. “I was wondering, Leo, besides the code, was there anything else that led you all to believe you had been chosen?”
Ariella cleared her throat as she brushed a long strand of hair back from her face. “We had all been having the same dream. In the dream, we all saw a storm over the desert, and we all heard the word chosen echoing in the background. Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it?”
“Actually, my dear, what we are about to tell you sounds even more like a movie.” Mendoza glanced sideways at Evita. “Go ahead, Dr. Vargas … tell them. They need to know.”
Instantly, the members of the Bible Code Team were on high alert.
“The three of us have also been having dreams with the word chosen echoing in the background, but our dreams are quite different from the ones you describe.” Evita looked off into space before continuing. “Instead of a storm over a desert, we see bodies … thousands of bodies lying in the streets of deserted cities. It’s more like a horrible nightmare.”
Leo glanced over at Lev before leaning forward and placing his elbows on the table. “We’ve known all along there were others like us. Last year, when Sarah first told us she had been having the same dream as us … we knew. We’ve been waiting all this time to hear from other chosen ones.”
In a space that amplified sound like the walls of a cavern, silence reigned as everyone waited for the next person to speak.
“When did you say the book was destroyed?” Mendoza asked.
“Let me go back to the desert for a moment,” Leo said, closing his eyes as if he were being transported back to another time and place. “Down in that cavern, we were surrounded by demons guarding Satan’s book. Without divine intervention, none of us would have survived what we experienced down there. Something happened … something we can’t explain. We sensed a presence right before the earth began to shake and huge fissures opened up beneath us, releasing the book from where it had been encased in solid rock. The demons seemed to evaporate right before our eyes and we were able to make it back to the surface just as the cavern collapsed. Oil came bursting up to the surface, igniting a tower of flame, followed by geysers of water that flooded the desert for miles around. It was like being present at a biblical event from the Old Testament, only it was occurring in modern times.”
“Is that when the book was destroyed?”
“No. We took it with us. We knew what it was, but we had no idea of its power or what we were supposed to do with it. It wasn’t until later that we realized the book was more like a living entity. We learned that, whenever it had been taken from the cavern in the past, bad things happened … really bad things. We believe the book was a way for Satan to physically release evil out into the world without interference from God … a kind of trump card if you will, and he used unsuspecting humans to accomplish this by periodically allowing the book to be discovered. For the past year, we’ve been trying to pinpoint the number of times it has made an appearance out in the world before. Some of our information has come from passages we’ve discovered embedded within the Bible Code, and we’re still trying to verify some actual sightings throughout history that seem to come from reliable sources. To date, we’ve only been able to document five separate occasions, but the appearances we’ve documented have always coincided with some horrific events that occurred whenever the book was out of its hiding place. For instance we know that it was out briefly during WWII, at a time when millions died around the world and nuclear weapons first appeared on the scene, and that it probably made an appearance in 1918, during WWI and the great flu epidemic that took fifty million lives. We weren’t aware of any of this at the time we removed it, but after Houston…”
“Which brings up the point of why you weren’t warned by the code to leave the book in the cavern,” Evita said.
“Probably because the time had come for the book to be destroyed,” Leo said. “We’ll probably never know all there is to know about the code, but we have noticed something that appears to be a constant theme throughout. We’ve discovered that everything seems to occur according to a specific timetable, but the details of the timetable are still a mystery. It’s like God is whispering across a crowded room, and we can’t hear everything He’s trying to tell us. All we knew at the time was that God wanted the book taken to a place of His own choosing to be destroyed. After we arrived back at the villa, Daniel discovered an encoded passage in Genesis that spelled out the fact that the ancient Christian chapel under the Vatican was that place. We almost didn’t make it. As I said, it was like the book was alive, and it had a very powerful protector. We came close to being killed more than once before we made it to Rome, but we had a pretty powerful protector ourselves.”
“But the book was destroyed, right?” Mendoza asked. “I mean, you all saw it go up in flames.”
“Yes … right after we deli
vered it to the chapel. That’s where the most miraculous event in this whole story occurred. After making our way through the catacombs under the Vatican, we entered the chapel with the book. Morelli and I were still just priests then, and we were joined by the pope, who was a cardinal at the time. The rest of the Bible Code Team was also there. It was in the chapel where we encountered the most powerful demon of them all-Agaliarept, Satan’s grand general over hell. After battling the demon for a span of time none of us could remember afterward, we saw the chapel fill with light as seven of God’s most powerful archangels appeared. They cast out the demon and saved our lives. After the angels departed, the book erupted into flames and burned to ashes on the altar in the chapel. Up until now, we had assumed that the world was no longer in danger from its influence, but it’s beginning to appear that we missed something.”
Diaz rubbed his eyes as he looked across the table at Lev. He had been waiting patiently, listening to the entire story. “Professor, earlier you said that Satan’s timetable and God’s timetable for the end of days don’t agree? When did you learn of this?”
“After we returned from the desert with the book.”
“Please excuse me, Professor. What I meant to ask was how you discovered the information.”
“From the Devil’s Bible. That was the very first thing we were able to decipher. We’ve been studying it for the past year, and some of the information is fascinating. We’re preparing a paper on it.”
“But the book no longer exists.”
“True … that’s why we copied it. The book was a treasure trove. Despite the fact that it was an instrument of Satan, we couldn’t let it be destroyed without first making a copy of the text. To an archaeologist, that would have been unforgiveable. The information it contained was priceless. I mean, we were dealing with ancient symbols and language the world had never seen before. Additionally, we were beginning to suspect that the Devil’s Bible also contained a code. Another reason we all agreed that the text needed to be preserved. Without it, we would never have discovered the fact that God’s timetable and Satan’s timetable for the end of days don’t agree.”