The God Complex: A Thriller

by Murray Mcdonald

  “Did you see how fast she was?” marveled Rigs. “She nearly had you and you already had the gun at her neck. Any others?”

  “Nope, all gone.”

  “So they were Sicarii, or whatever,” Rigs shivered in mock fear. “Two words assholes, night vision!” He removed the Air Force’s latest night vision equipment they’d acquired in the armory.

  “We’re lucky they didn’t take it themselves,” said Cash. “Can’t believe we left the box sitting there.”

  “They thought they had us,” said Rigs. “Too cocky.”

  He had recognized Cash’s first signal. When the lights went out, he knew that was his signal to get out. The first kill had been a bonus, a flick of his knife as he brushed past the man on the way out of the armory. He hadn’t had time to pause, he knew the lights would be back on in twenty seconds. His priority was to get clear of his hiding hole and in behind the attackers. At the second signal, he had crept out of his position and been able to communicate with Cash along the corridor as they both moved in for the kill. First signal, position, second signal, kill. They always did it the same way. Cash counted down with one hand three, two and the lights had come on.

  “So what now?” asked Rigs.

  “Switzerland, I suppose,” said Cash.

  “Do we have time for a detour?”

  “Depends on where.”

  “Not far from Switzerland, I’d really like to see the pyramids,” said Rigs.

  “I knew it, you saw something in that photo, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe,” said Rigs. “Maybe.”

  Chapter 54

  Wake Island

  Pacific Ocean

  Anya hardly recognized the small atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean from her plane passing slowly overhead. The former US Air Force base, acquired by Atlas Noble a few years earlier, boasted a massive terminal building that would have rivaled most international airports. The U-shaped atoll, over 1,700 miles from the nearest major landfall, also boasted the world’s first spaceport. In less than two weeks, the transports would commence, ferrying the population.

  The atoll, which a year earlier had housed a few buildings and was nothing more than an emergency landing strip for aircraft experiencing problems, had been transformed. It was more akin to a major international hub. The terminal buildings covered the island while taxiways ran around its perimeter. Every spare inch had been used to maximize the numbers that could be processed through the center.

  Anya was particularly pleased to see how well the platform had come along since her last visit. It stood proudly protruding high above the water level. It was the perfect launch pad for their transports. The colossal metal structure, with its bridges feeding down to the terminals, had become the perfect intergalactic space port, exactly as had been envisioned. All they needed were the aircraft and the spaceships and they were good to go.

  All in good time, she thought. The five spacecraft were not going to be brought on site until the convergence. Likewise, the aircraft. None were as opulent as the Atlas Noble corporate jet, however, numbers and efficiency were more important than comfort. All would maximize the number of people they could carry. There would be no classes on board, just as many seats as they could fit in safely. Over fifty Airbus A380s were scattered around the world awaiting the call, each with over eight hundred fifty seats.

  The runways were empty, the taxiways clear, four small planes sat on an apron, looking tiny in comparison to everything around them. They were four fighter jets that would clear any inquisitive strays, although the chances of any stray flights in the middle of nowhere were all but impossible. Only commercial jets could reach that far and none would fly that far off course due to the amount of fuel they would need to burn.

  Satellites were a concern; Atlas Noble had covered that with some very simple technology.

  Anya lifted the handset by her side. “Can they switch it back on?”

  Anya waited a couple of seconds for the captain to relay the message. The image below her transformed back to how she remembered it. Thousands upon thousands of panels had been placed on top of every single new building. Anya looked down on the image of how the island had been; it was as though everything they had built had disappeared. The image was remarkable, in perfect synch with the sun’s position in the sky, it darkened when the sun set and brightened when the sun rose.

  “Wonderful!” She checked her watch. She was on a tight schedule to make it back in time for Alex’s birthday. “Can we go to Iwo Jima, please?” she asked. It was the main reason for her trip. She was linking up with Caleb Noble, head of transport, on his first experimental fueling exercise for the spacecraft. A helicopter would meet her at Iwo Jima and fly her out to his deep sea vessel stationed above the Mariana trench, the point of the world’s oceans where at its deepest, pressures of 1,000 times atmospheric pressure were known to exist. It was the perfect testing ground for their fueling system.

  Chapter 55

  The suicide of his boss Mike Yates hit Giles Tremellan hard. The head of the UK DIS team had only agreed to take on the role because of Mike. He had been very comfortable with his occasional TV pundit roles which more than supplemented his enviable pension. Mike’s replacement was a capable chap but as far as Giles was concerned, DIS without Mike wasn’t for him. He tendered his resignation and walked away to enjoy his retirement with a significant package.

  Giles sat in his small country cottage. He had bought it for a steal but had to spend a fortune making it livable. He had gone for a simple country theme for the compact one bedroom, one sitting room retreat. Darkness had fallen as he sat nursing a bottle of gin. The occasional bright flicker from the TV was his only source of light. His mind just couldn’t comprehend why Mike Yates would have committed suicide. He had everything to live for. A beautiful family, now devastated, money, security. If there were one man on the planet he’d have said would never have taken his own life, it would be Mike Yates.

  The first few words from the news headline caught his attention. For a start, it wasn’t about Papua New Guinea or the poisoned river. He had been given an assignment in Egypt the day he resigned.

  “An Egyptian aid office was destroyed today in an apparent bombing. Although troubles have continued since the unrest, this is seen as a particularly strange attack due to the target. The three female workers worked with young vulnerable mothers.”

  Young mothers. He thought back to Yvonne Winston and her report about that exact subject, wondering if it had potentially been the reason for her death. Her death weighed heavily on Giles. He had no issue killing in general but innocents, that was a different matter. Unlike any death he had been involved in before, Giles had dug into her background quietly through a few of his old contacts. They found nothing. The woman was a saint. Her life was all about helping those who couldn’t help themselves.

  Mike’s suicide was shortly after Yvonne Winston’s death. Giles knew Mike, and innocents weren’t his game either. He rubbed his face. The gin had taken its toll, three quarters of the bottle had gone over the evening. He stumbled to the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water. His mind was racing. Mike Yates hadn’t committed suicide, he just wouldn’t have.

  More awake but just as intoxicated, he opened his laptop and typed a search into google. Three searches later and his hunch was scarily coming together. There had been over forty-two deaths around the world in the previous year of people who had worked with underage mothers. He tried another angle. Statisticians. They hadn’t suffered such devastating losses but it was notably higher than any previous year.

  He was about to search for teenage pregnancies when he noticed his statistician search had netted a couple of interesting results. A number of government statistical bodies had been outsourced to a private organization. The UK’s Office for National Statistics was outsourced in a multibillion dollar deal for the government. He didn’t even remember it happening but there it was in black and white, two years earlier. Fed Stats, the US Sta
tistics, the same, a massive windfall for the US government. A more detailed search showed that the same organization controlled the majority of all data gathering companies around the world and had become, as its website proudly boasted, the world’s premier data source and analysis company. Even the UN was listed as one of its clients.

  Giles grabbed his jacket. A noise from the kitchen stopped him in his tracks. The back door had been locked. He looked around for a weapon, grabbed the gin bottle, upending it, sending the last quarter spilling to the floor.

  A face appeared at his living room door. The light from the TV cast an eerie grayness across her face. It was the young DIS woman who had killed Yvonne Winston.

  “Giles, are you alright? I’ve been trying to call you!”

  “Why are you here?” he said, raising the gin bottle and ready to use it.

  “I’m worried about you. We’ve not been able to contact you since you left.”

  “I thought you were in Egypt,” he said.

  “No, we were turned around even before we landed. DIS was pulled from it. To be honest, we’ve been pulled from pretty much everything,” she said. “You can put the bottle down. Have you got another one? I could do with a drink.”

  Giles began to relax. His mind was working overtime and the gin wasn’t helping.

  “Over there,” he tilted his head toward the liquor cabinet.

  She moved across and opened it, withdrawing a bottle of vodka, pouring herself a good measure. “You?” she asked, looking over at him.

  “I think I’ve had enough,” he glanced at his bottle of gin.

  As she downed the glass, Giles moved, catching her off guard, swinging the empty gin bottle and crashing it into her temple as hard as he could.

  The shock in her eyes was betrayed by the stiletto blade that was in her hand. She slumped to the floor.

  “Bitch!” said Giles, taking the blade from her limp hand. “I’m not drunk enough to know you’d have come to the front door! Anyone with you?”

  She looked at him blankly, he had hit her harder than he had intended. She was barely conscious.

  She was a ruthless killer, emotionless. He slipped the blade through her side in between her ribs and into her heart. “See how you like it,” he said.

  They had forgotten who they were dealing with. A former SAS commander, Giles knew how to look after himself. It was almost insulting they thought she’d have been able to deal with him, drunk or sober. Giles grabbed his jacket and disappeared into the night.

  Chapter 56

  “Cash,” Sophie nudged Cash trying to wake him up. He rolled over reaching out to her.

  “Sophie,” he mumbled.

  “Cash! Wake up!” She pushed him harder, almost pushing him off his seat.

  “Yeah, what?!” he said, coming instantly out of his sleep.

  “I need to show you something,” she said. “Come with me.”

  Cash rose, stretched, and Sophie led him back to a large dining table that sat behind the lounge area of the Senator’s private Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

  “Where is everyone?” he asked, looking around for Rigs and the Senator.

  “The Senator went to his bedroom shortly after you feel asleep. Rigs is in one of the guestrooms.”

  “One of the guestrooms?”

  “Yeah there are two, the other’s mine when I’m done here.”

  “And I get a seat?”

  “A very comfortable one which you had no difficulty sleeping in. I’ve been trying to wake you up for five minutes.”

  “Still, a seat versus a guestroom, seems a bit—”

  “Look, I’m working through these numbers again; it still doesn’t make any sense. The calculations are taking me around in circles. Can you have a look and tell me if there’s something I’m missing?”

  Cash pulled up a chair and looked over the work Sophie had spent days poring over.

  “This all means nothing to me,” he concluded quickly. “Perhaps a quick breakdown of what it all means?”

  Sophie stuck her pen behind her ear and stretched across in front of Cash. Her fragrance hit him like a sledgehammer. He reached out. She slapped his hand away. “Not now,” she said sternly.

  Cash looked at her. She was too busy to notice his smile as she prepared the papers she needed. She had said ‘not now’, thought Cash, not ‘never’.

  “It all starts with these drawings and artifacts,” Sophie said. “They clearly depict a world exploding. From there, we have a number of calendar references to that same event, but remember the calendar is an astronomical one, so it doesn’t give a date as such, it gives us the astronomical event of when that will happen. That’s where the measurements come in. A number of structures are placed very precisely and track the movement of the stars, which over time move in the sky; it’s all to do with our rotation. The universe itself is constantly moving, but all you need to know is that they move a little over time, so we’re talking tiny movements over thousands of years.”

  “So what is it that’s supposed to destroy us?”

  Sophie sat back and looked him in the eye. “You see, that’s exactly why a fresh pair of eyes can help. I’ve been entirely focused on the when and not the how.”

  “What are all these marks?” he asked looking at one of the drawings.

  “Your father found similar ones across many of the sites. They’re markers for the precessional cycle. It’s a number that’s repeated over and over, ‘25,920’. It’s complicated, but it’s to do with earth’s wobble and is the time taken for the wobble to work through 360 degrees, approximately 25,920 years. It’s broken down into the twelve signs of the zodiac, which tells us where we are in the cycle, each sign lasting approximately 2,160 years.”

  Cash looked at her blankly.

  Sophie grabbed a pen and paper. “Okay, imagine March 1st was the first day of spring, and we had the spring equinox on that day. Each year, the equinox— the time when the equator of the Earth is directly in line with the center of the sun— because of the wobble, is a little later. In the span of 2,160 years, it would move by a month. The spring equinox would be April 1st. Over 25,920 years, it would complete a full cycle.”

  “So summer will become winter and winter summer.”

  “In theory yes, but not in practice.”

  “Now you’ve seriously lost me…”

  “Yes, but our calendar takes the precessional cycle into account, so each day the wobble is taken into account. So spring will still be in March. However, the stars aren’t, and we can monitor our progress through the cycle with where we are in relation to the stars.”

  “And they knew about his back then?”

  “It appears so. Nobody’s certain of when the next cycle is due to start. Some say it’s already started, others say it’s not for another four hundred years. It’s not an exact science and one we’re still getting to grips with. Think of it like a spinning top, sometimes the wobble is more pronounced than at other times as it spins. From your father’s work, it would seem that the ancients were all in agreement; the new cycle is only eighty years away. All of their markers from your father’s work and my calculations say we’re on the cusp of the eighty year countdown to the new cycle of Aquarius. I’m not sure why it’s an eighty year countdown, but that seems to be the marker they’ve used across the sites.”

  “And you’re not worried it’s the countdown to the end of the world?”

  “No, it’s the same for each cycle - eighty years before the cycle. None of the other markers for the prediction are in synch, nowhere near. That’s why I’m getting numbers from hundreds of thousands to millions of years before the Earth meets the markers for the prediction of its destruction.”

  “I think I’m getting it, let me have a look,” said Cash poring over the papers. He pointed out a couple of miscalculations.

  “How do you do that?” asked Sophie when he pointed out a decimal point in the wrong place. “I need a calculator to work that out and you simply glance at it and
know it’s wrong!”

  “I’m good with numbers,” said Cash.

  “I know, and it’s why your father was so disappointed you never went into astronomy.”

  Cash stopped with the papers and looked at her. “Seriously? My father was disappointed I didn’t go into astronomy?”

  Sophie winced. “He was disappointed about a lot more than that,” she admitted. “Though seeing you must have made him very happy,” she said, a tear dropping from her eye.

  Cash wiped it away. “Please don’t.,”

  Sophie buried her head into this chest and threw her arms around him, tears streaming from her eyes. Cash lifted her up and took her to the empty guestroom and laid her down gently. She patted the bed next to him, where he lay down and they fell asleep, fully clothed in each other’s arms.

  ***

  “We’re here,” said Rigs, startling Cash awake. Sophie wasn’t by his side.

  “Where’s Sophie?”

  “Working on something like a fiend,” he said, looking at the fully clothed Cash and undisturbed bedclothes. “Having a good dream were you?”

  Cash got up and rushed out to Sophie, who was tearing through her papers.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing, nothing at all, just something you said last night. What’s going to destroy us... What if the markers aren’t for the Earth? What if they’re what’s going to destroy the Earth?”

  “Huh? I don’t get it.”

  “I was working on the basis that the calculations your father was working on were related to the calendar and the precessional cycle. But the calculations were meaningless because, according to the calendars, the Earth is safe for a very long time, which is very different from your father being right about everything. Your father needed Hubble 2. He wasn’t working with the calendars as his research suggested. He must have moved on, realizing, like us, that it wasn’t about the calendars.”