Trifariam, The Lost Codex (2012)

by Diego Rodriguez

  “And what about heating up the stone?”

  “They are thought to have taken the granite from the quarry at Assuan and, using methods that are unknown to us, they managed to soften the granite until they could manipulate it like gelatine. That’s why the edges expand a few inches every so often!”

  James fired another question at him, one which would prove to be much more enlightening. “And do you think that this stone was treated with one of those two methods?”

  “I don’t think so - I know so,” replied the archaeologist with astonishing certainty. “How else could they have placed the crystal inside the stone? If the Egyptians, Asians, South Americans… were all similar in their adoration of the Sun, their Pyramids, their psychic beliefs and their understanding of the great beyond, then why couldn’t they have been taught the same alchemical concepts regarding the reshaping of stone?”

  James picked up the crystal and handed it to one of the scientists. It was clean and glinted in the sunlight.

  So then there are two theories, thought James as he made his way back to the plane. Either that lost civilization brought the stone here, or they shared their knowledge and those who laid the stones hid it here themselves.

  Chapter 79

  When the SR-91 Aurora landed on the longest runway in the world, four scientists and an army of soldiers armed with assault rifles had already been waiting for them for a good while. One of them snatched the piece from their hands, practically without asking, and showed it to the rest of his colleagues.

  Two soldiers escorted James to another entrance as he watched the other ten take the scientists in the opposite direction, towards the laboratories. As he walked past one of the largest hangars in the whole complex, he caught a glimpse of what was inside before one of the engineers could finish closing the doors. He saw a gigantic Boeing 747-200B around two hundred and thirty feet long and sixty-five feet wide. It was painted blue and white with “United States of America” written along one of the sides of the fuselage. On the tail was the U.S. flag along with the number 28000.

  “That’s the VC-25A,” said one of the officers accompanying him when he noticed that he was looking elsewhere.

  James was familiar with that designation. That plane was known as Air Force One whenever the President of the United States was onboard. Few people knew that there were actually two VC-25A aircraft which were exactly the same and for the use of the President. They bore the numbers 28000 and 29000 on their respective tails.

  The President is here! Shit!

  They led him inside a two-story building. An elevator with space for ten people went down to a floor whose location completely passed the professor by. However, when they entered a really long corridor with meeting rooms on either side, it was vaguely coming back to him. He eventually realized where he was. He recognized the floor he was standing on, the lighting, the doors on both sides…he had been there before when he had accompanied Charly Humphrey, the Director of Area 51, to his office.

  The officer stopped in front of the only door which was ajar in the entire corridor. “Wait in this room, please. They’ll come for both of you in a few minutes.”

  Both of you? I’m not alone?

  When the soldier opened the door, Richard got up off the sofa which he was leaning back on. He was expecting some illustrious figure to come through the door, but it was his best friend instead. “Shit, what a fright!”

  The pair greeted each other warmly. It was then that James couldn’t take the pressure any longer and he began to cry.

  “Don’t worry. I’m fine.”

  “It’s not that,” he replied. “They’ve kidnapped Lily and my ex-wife!”

  Richard turned pale. He thought his friend was crying because he had found out about how close he came to being killed, but it was something much more serious. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive - I heard them kidnap her myself. She called me in a flood of tears and told me that they were going through the house.” James wiped away his tears with a handkerchief and blew his nose. “After five minutes I heard a man gag and hit her to keep her quiet. Then we got cut off.”

  Richard didn’t say a word. Never would he want to be in a similar predicament, even less so if he was thousands of miles away and couldn’t do a thing to help her. “Who were they?”

  “The ones who are after the Trifariam. Who else could it be?”

  “You do know that they won’t hurt them until they have it in their power, don’t you?”

  “I know! But it’s not easy to picture your daughter tied up in some corner of the planet and you can’t do anything to help her.”

  “What did they ask you to do?”

  “They want us to complete it, but it’s been hours since I heard anything. They told me that if I tell anybody, they’ll kill her. You’re the only one who knows. Nobody can find out.”

  Richard stood up from the sofa, his fists clenched. He was really angry. Rage washed over his whole body and he didn’t even want to imagine what kind of lowlife could hurt such a little girl.

  Just as Richard was going to give him another hug, James felt his cellphone vibrate in his pocket. The screen read “Number withheld”.

  “Is it them?”

  “I don’t know. Quiet, nobody can find out!”

  “Hello. Who is it?”

  There was a silence which dragged on for too long, to the point where the call seemed to have been cut off. Eventually somebody spoke, their voice disguised by a synthesizer. “We will shortly be in touch with you to tell you what you have to do. Now is not the time for silly games - your daughter’s life is at stake.”

  “How do I know she’s still alive?”

  There was another silence which, despite being shorter than the previous one, seemed to last a thousand times longer.

  “Dad,” said Lily eventually.

  “Sweetheart! Are you okay?!” James couldn’t keep the tears of joy from flowing down his face, into the crow’s feet that with lack of sleep had turned into deep furrows.

  “Yes, Dad. When they came into the house, we had just come back from visiting the Memorial Jefferson and I bought you the Notarikon games you asked me to get you. Mom is with me, she’s asleep.”

  James weighed up the possibility that she was in fact dead and Lily hadn’t realized. “Have they hurt you?”

  “No,” she replied.

  They were in a dark room of around thirty-two square feet, the walls of which were covered in a thick layer of concrete which made it a dismal and gloomy place. Despite how he had treated her mother, who had been tied up and gagged, the kidnapper had not thought it necessary to do the same to a girl of fourteen. What problems could she possibly give him?

  The captor monitored all the girl’s movements and words. After a minute long conversation, he thought it had been enough. He quickly walked over to the girl and tried to snatch the cellphone from her hands. The girl didn’t want to give it to him and started to wave her arms and legs about, hitting him wherever she could cause the most pain. She wanted to hurt him. The man wasn’t the least bit frightened and squeezed her arm tightly until she screamed in pain.

  “What’s going on?! Lily! Leave her alone! She’s just a girl!”

  Richard clenched his fists with rage. He observed the situation from a corner of the room where his growls could go unheard.

  The cellphone fell to the ground and Lily grabbed on to the jacket that the kidnapper was wearing. She pulled on it hard with one arm while she clung onto his shirt with the other, but his violent blow was enough to send her flying to her knees. Furious, she got up and ran at him again, screaming. This time she took her anger out on the pockets of his pants. With the first yank she could hear one of them rip, and with the second attempt she had the pocket in her hand. All his belongings scattered across the room, including a wallet which fell open when it hit the floor. The girl looked at the first identity card and read the name before he could give her a sharp kick, knocking her to the floo
r, just four inches away from the telephone. Making sure that her father could hear, she whispered the name: “Michael Ranley.”

  The kidnapper didn’t even realize and simply picked up the phone and switched it off.

  Chapter 80

  “What’s happening? Is she okay? Did you hear her voice?”

  James knelt down on the floor. He couldn’t contain his desperation any longer and started to bang his fists on it. “I heard how they were treating her! I heard everything!”

  “Don’t worry, they won’t kill her. They need her.”

  “She said that her mother was sleeping in a chair. What if they’ve killed her and she thinks she’s asleep? My daughter couldn’t take that.”

  “They’ve most probably left her unconscious so that she doesn’t give them any trouble, they’ll have sedated her. Plus they don’t beat around the bush - when I found the first piece of the source, somebody tried to kill me and I’m sure it was Alpha 2.”

  Richard told him about his adventure in the Bermuda Triangle, the ruins which they found and how his life had been saved just as he had been staring death in the face, but his friend’s words did nothing but remind him how several aspects of his conversation with his daughter had not made any sense and now, thinking about it rationally, it made him take stock of the entire situation.

  For starters, it was odd for his ex-wife to take Lily to visit the Jefferson Memorial. She hated those kinds of monuments and their daughter knew that. Meanwhile, it was also strange how she had changed the order of the words; instead of saying “Jefferson Memorial” she had said “Memorial Jefferson”. But the most incredible thing of all was that James had never asked his daughter to buy him twelve Notarikon games. Clearly Lily was much cleverer than even he had given her credit for and she was trying to send him a secret message.

  His mind was suddenly flooded with images which reminded him of that trip the three of them had made to the mountains. They had intended to spend four days skiing as a family and they had rented a beautiful house at one of the summits, far away from civilization. The weather turned crazy and it snowed for two days straight. The cold was so intense and unbearable that they couldn’t even go outside for five minutes without icicles forming on their eyebrows or chins. To kill time, James had shown his daughter a game which kept her occupied for hours. He wrote a text, eight lines long, on a piece of paper and asked her to decipher the hidden message. After two hours, the girl gave in.

  “Lily, come here,” said her father when he realized that she couldn’t do it. “Look at the letters at the beginning of each word; the first one starts with L, the second with I, the third with L, the fourth with Y and so on with all the others.

  Lily set about writing them down on a piece of paper, creating a long line of letters. She read them intuitively and was able to work out where each word started and finished. The message read: “Lily, you are the best daughter a father could have. If you were not in my life, my world would have already ended”.

  The girl hugged her father and he kissed her on the cheek.

  “This technique is called Notarikon. It’s a method used by Kabbalists to hide messages within a text.”

  The girl folded her arms. “Dad! How could I have solved it if I don’t even know who Kabbalists are?!”

  “Well now, that’s really difficult to get your head around.” James looked thoughtful for a few seconds, choosing the right words so that his daughter would understand perfectly. “The Kabbalists actually believe that there could possibly be messages hidden in the Bible. They believe that if you dissemble the word of God using certain techniques, those valuable messages will be revealed.”

  Lily smiled. She had not understood his explanation. Why would they hide secret messages in the Bible? she wondered.

  James just smiled back at her. He sometimes forgot that she was only fourteen years old.

  Richard gently shook his friend by the arm. He hadn’t said anything for a few seconds and was absolutely wrapped up in his own thoughts. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Lily gave me a hidden message when she spoke to me!”

  “What?! What do you mean?!”

  “MJ… MJT.”

  James explained to him about the clues his daughter had given him during the few short minutes they had to talk, and how by taking the first letters of the words Memorial Jefferson and twelve and keeping them in the same order, they formed the combination “MJT”.

  “Even so, I don’t know what the hell it means,” he sighed.

  Richard frowned. “Umm… I think you’re missing something,” said Richard, still astonished at the mental agility of James’ daughter. She was able to think of something so magnificent and simple while her life was in danger. She was clearly as intelligent as her father.

  “Shit! And what does it mean?”

  Chapter 81

  “Majestic 12,” stuttered Richard in a slightly lower voice than usual.

  “What is that?”

  “Majestic 12 or MJ-12 is the name of a secret committee formed under the Presidency of Harry S. Truman in 1947, and whose objective was to investigate UFO activity all over the world. The government has always denied its existence, claiming that all the documents which surfaced were actually false. However, UFOlogists have always clung to it as their last thread of proof to believe in extraterrestrial life. There are endless theories, some of which suggest that the MJ in ‘MJ-12’ does not mean ‘Majestic’ but ‘Majority’. This would mean that behind it all was a ‘Committee of the Majority’, a secret organization which seeks the creation of a new world order and controls contact with extraterrestrials via secret areas such as Area 51. Others believe that it is a group which exchanges technological information with extraterrestrials in return for biological tests on humans.”

  James immediately remembered the word Mary had said in front of him and his pursuers on top of the Pyramid of the Moon: Majority.

  “What does the twelve mean?”

  “The organization was comprised of twelve people, all of whom had very influential positions in the society of that time. There were scientists, military chiefs and government officials, all of them having the freedom to operate in total impunity and answering only to the President.”

  “But how was it discovered?” asked James as he sat down on the dark leather sofa.

  “It was thanks to two documents. The first was created by the President Harry S. Truman to approve the formation of a committee to investigate the UFO incident at Roswell. The second was prepared by MJ-12 in 1952 to inform the incoming President, Dwight Eisenhower, about the existence of the committee.”

  “What?! Where did they find them?!”

  “I can’t tell you for sure, but I think somebody sent an anonymous message to the UFOlogists Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera in 1985, telling them to look in the U.S. National Archives for documents which had recently been declassified. They found a roll of 35mm film which was in black and white and had yet to be developed. The film contained negatives of the document intended for Dwight Eisenhower.”

  “Fuck! And what do you think?”

  Richard smiled and chewed his lower lip as he thought about how to respond. “I genuinely believe it was a plot on the part of the government to slur the reputations of the UFOlogists. There were certain errors in the documents which had escaped them in the heat of the moment. But if you think about it carefully, why would the U.S. government waste time discrediting two UFOlogists with a solid reputation? I think that there is some truth in all this, but I don’t know how much exactly.”

  James nodded. “Have any more documents been found relating to Majestic 12?”

  “Of course. The most spectacular is that of Milton William Cooper,” he said as he sat down next to him. “He was a former member of the U.S. Intelligence Service and decided to clear his conscience when he was on his deathbed by making public a document which went into great detail about how everything started. Majestic, contact with extraterrestrials, the loc
ation of their bases, kinds of EBEs, experiments - “

  “EBEs?”

  “Yeah, Extraterrestrial Biological Entities.” Richard saw that James was looking at him in disbelief with a large dash of cynicism thrown in. “James, I didn’t believe these theories either but your daughter has definitely sent us a message in code which relates to ‘MJ-12’. Obviously it must have something to do with all this for her to think it was of paramount importance.”

  “Okay, tell me what that document says!”

  “The document is grouped into twenty-eight points and can easily be found on the internet. The first four sections talk about UFO sightings and how the U.S. government came to learn that we weren’t alone in the universe. According to him, it was through the salvaging and study of several extraterrestrial spacecrafts and bodies. He goes on to mention the first victim to get caught up in the whole mess.”

  “Who was it?”

  “James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense and somebody who was in favor of making everything public. He was admitted to hospital for a nervous breakdown, a flimsy excuse for dragging his name through the mud, and he was later murdered. One of the last chapters also talks about another much more significant assassination, that of Kennedy.” James started to pay closer attention than before. “It is thought that President Kennedy also wanted to make the situation public and he gave MJ-12 an ultimatum. Milton claims that it was a secret agent from the organization who was driving the car and it was he who killed him. His name was William Greer. All the witnesses present at the scene were killed over the following two years.”