The God Complex: A Thriller

by Murray Mcdonald

  “Two stagehands, guns,” said Rigs, bringing Cash fully up to speed as they approached the curtain. “Get them out of the way!” he said to Cash, motioning to Alex and the band. Cash moved towards the band and Alex, to keep them safe.

  “Shoot them!”

  Cash turned around and recognized Antoine Noble easily enough; he just didn’t quite understand why he was telling his security men to shoot him and Rigs.

  He threw up his hands while Rigs threw himself behind the curtain and straight into the unsuspecting stagehands who had been startled by the shout.

  “We’re helping you!” Cash bellowed, watching Rigs struggle with the two stagehands through the space in the curtain. Cash couldn’t move. Three guns were trained on him. Nobody else could see what Cash could. The curtain obscured their view, except for Alex.

  “He’s telling the truth!” said Alex.

  Cash didn’t blink, he raced through the gap and field-kicked one of the stagehands in the head as he scrabbled on the floor with Rigs and was about to reach his gun.

  “Took your time,” mumbled Rigs, rolling across the floor with the other. Cash grabbed one of the two loose guns from the floor and placed its muzzle on the stagehand’s temple. He stopped fighting instantly.

  The Senator joined the scene, two of Conrad’s security men flanking him on either side. “Good work guys,” he said on behalf of the Nobles. “Anyone seen Blake?”

  Anya joined the group. “He snuck out of here when he saw you, you’d have thought he’d seen a ghost.”

  Antoine let go of his son and walked towards them. “I’m sorry…” he said. “You saved my son! I thought…”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Cash. “It’s all good.”

  Antoine gave him a hug. “Thank you,” he said, moving towards Rigs, who took three paces back, ensuring he didn’t suffer the same fate.

  “Don’t mind him, he’s special,” said Cash, winking at Rigs.

  “If there’s anything I can do…”

  “Well, actually,’ said Cash. “There is one thing…”

  Chapter 59

  The attackers admitted to Conrad and his men everything they knew, which was very little. They had been hired to kill two men, Antoine and Alex Noble. Their passes would get them into the backstage area, where two guns were hidden with the band’s equipment. They were to wait until the speeches were underway and then shoot them both, making their escape during the ensuing chaos. It was only after they arrived that they had seen the level of security and realized it wasn’t going to be as easy as suggested. They did not know who hired them; it had all been done online. That became irrelevant after Blake, when confronted, admitted it. He said he was what was best for the Nobles. Antoine was an unworthy leader. Everybody, according to Blake, was unworthy. Only Blake really understood what being a Noble truly meant.

  “Where are the two attackers?” asked the Senator.

  Conrad looked out of the library window to the lake.

  “To the Nobles,” toasted Antoine, as the three of them shared a drink in the library.

  “To the Nobles!” the others chorused.

  “Cash and Rigs,” said the Senator, “are nowhere near understanding what’s going on.”

  “You want me to call off the Sicarii?”

  “To be honest I think you’ll find the Sicarii want to be called off. Cash and Rigs have taken out five of them— three dead and two crippled.”

  “Are you sure they’re no danger to our plans?” asked Conrad.

  “Call Anya, I’ll tell her what I know and let her decide.”

  “Okay,” said Antoine.

  After ten minutes of explaining everything they knew, Anya agreed.

  “They’re nowhere near. If they don’t have the professor’s results—that he spent years pulling together along with his research— they’re months, if not years from putting it together.”

  “They’re looking for what’s going to destroy Earth,” laughed the Senator.

  “You have a soft spot for them?” asked Antoine.

  “They just saved my favorite nephew and great nephew’s lives, so I guess so.”

  “Okay,” said Antoine. “Done. Now if you don’t mind, I have to talk to my son.”

  The three left the library. Anya pulled the Senator aside while Conrad went to call off the Sicarii. She led him into an adjoining room.

  “Thank you,” she said, giving him a hug.

  He smiled. “What for?”

  “How long have you known?”

  “The moment he walked in front of my committee. I know a Noble when I see one. I checked his background and lo and behold, his father was Charles Harris, the boy my niece used to gush about at university.”

  “You brought him here for me?”

  “After what happened to Charles…”

  “Don’t, please. I got to hold him for a few minutes before I had to leave him. I left a note to Charles, telling him I couldn’t have anything to do with him or the boy and came home. He tried to contact me through the only details he had for me. I told him to tell Copernicus that his mother had died in childbirth. After that, he never tried to contact me again. What sort of mother…”

  “One with no choice,” said the Senator, wiping away her tears.

  “He-he has a son,” she spluttered. “I have a grandchild!” she bawled, throwing herself into the Senator’s chest.

  Chapter 60

  “I can’t believe all you asked for was the band members’ autographs!” said Sophie. “The man has more money than—”

  “Everyone,” finished Rigs, causing them both to look over. Rigs had taken the seat at the rear of the lounge area on the Senator’s plane and they thought he had gone straight to sleep. The Senator had stayed behind to help his family cope with the trauma, insisting they go ahead without him.

  “Yes, everyone,” she agreed.

  “You said Kyle really liked them?”

  “He’s a teenager, he loves Corvettes as well, you could have asked for one of those!”

  “His Uncle Rigs can buy him one of those,” smiled Cash, noting a nod from Rigs.

  Sophie gave up. The seatbelt sign had lit up.

  “We’re nearly there,” she said.

  “Are you sure about this?” asked Cash. “You really need these measurements?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Okay, but this time, we’re not taking any chances,” said Cash. He grabbed his HK416 and checked it was ready for use. Rigs was packing a small rucksack full of ammunition.

  “We’re landing three miles from the site and it’s dark, we’ll be fine.”

  “We will be because we’re ready for whatever comes at us,” he said, placing the US Air Force’s night vision glasses in his top pocket.

  The plane touched down at MoD Boscombe Down, a former RAF base and test range for new aircraft. They taxied to the apron where an old Ford sat waiting for them, with ‘Alfie’s’ emblazoned on the side.

  The steward apologized; it was the only car service they could find at that hour in the quaint English countryside.

  Cash exited first, his HK416 leading the way. Sophie followed with Rigs at the rear. Cash relaxed as he neared the taxi. There was not a soul in sight.

  “I’m not sure you’re allowed those things in these parts, my lad,” offered the taxi driver cheerily as they climbed in.

  “It’s alright, we have permission,” Cash lied. “We’re on important business for the government.”

  “Some people might be stupid enough to fall for that, but important business in Alfie’s cab? I’m not so sure. I might sound simple,” he turned and faced them, “but it’s after midnight and if the tip’s big enough, Alfie might just forget what he saw, if there’s no trouble, that is.”

  Rigs handed the driver a wad of dollars.

  “No trouble,” promised Cash, his fingers crossed just in case.

  Less than five minutes later, they had arrived. Sophie eagerly waited for Rigs to give her the all cle
ar. Finally the thumbs up released her. She grabbed her equipment and rushed across to the center of the stone circle. It was dark, with an eeriness that seemed to multiply as you neared its center.

  “Stonehenge is a bit creepy,” she said, setting up her kit in the pale moonlight.

  “So how old’s this place?” asked Cash. He scanned the area with his rifle after donning his night vision glasses.

  “Ten thousand years, but the majority of the big stonework’s nearer half that.”

  “Five thousand years and they were moving stones like that?”

  “Yep.” Sophie aimed her laser precisely as described in the professor’s notes. “Some of them weigh fifty tons and were transported from one hundred fifty miles away.

  “But why here? Why not build it where the big stones were?”

  Sophie stopped. “Come here.”

  Cash looked at Rigs who stood well back, as always, overseeing the whole area. Cash walked forwards. Sophie directed him to the center of the circle.

  “Whoa,” he said, stepping back.

  “What?”

  “It’s like someone walked over my grave!”

  “That’s why they built it here, some connection to the Earth’s energy.”

  She hit a button on the laser and a beam shot off into the sky.

  “So what is it you’re measuring?” he asked, following the beam off into the distance.

  “Well, I thought it was simply points that aligned with particular points on the calendar. Which they do at each site, see? The laser just cuts the top of that stone, which relates to a point on the calendar. However, it has been the same at each site, it just nicks a point on the calendar before continuing off into space.”

  “You think it’s pointing to somewhere out there?”

  “I think it’s pointing to something out there. Perhaps a comet that is hurtling towards us that we don’t know exists?”

  “But how would they know ten thousand years ago if we don’t know now?”

  “You’ve heard of Halley’s Comet?”

  “Vaguely,” he replied.

  “It’s visible to the naked eye every seventy-five years as it orbits around the solar system. There are probably many more that we don’t know about. Their orbits, maybe every five hundred years, a thousand, perhaps every two thousand years.”

  “Or every 2,160 years,” said Cash.

  “Exactly. Maybe they think the next time it comes around, it may hit us.”

  “Like the movie Deep Impact?”

  “Precisely,” said Sophie.

  “So we send up some nukes and blow it into a billion pieces.”

  “Yes,” she said, noting down her findings.

  “But we don’t have any nukes anymore,” said Rigs, who had wandered within earshot.

  Chapter 61

  Alex Noble played with the new ring on his finger. He couldn’t stop staring at it. The talk with his father had changed his entire perception of who he was, what he was, everything. Initially, he had thought his father had gone mad, owing to a near death experience at the hands of their would-be killers. But then he had produced the ring. The ring that opened the door to history. Literally history, the history of the world that lay deep beneath where he stood.

  They had walked through the archives that chronicled the world as it had been, as his father explained, how the Nobles had shaped it. They had shaped the world into what they wanted it to be, controlling the population in a way that suited them. They walked back through time, his father pointing out the points in history where the Nobles had had to intervene and make changes to how the world thought or behaved, using the humans’ base instincts to control them.

  They walked back to a time where Muhammad had been born, or as his father had said, was written about. They walked back farther, the birth of Jesus Christ, also written about. They walked back further and further, into the depths of the archives, beyond the time of Noah and the ark, beyond the first civilizations, and came to the end of the archives. A vault door sat in the middle of the wall. An array of glass tubes standing floor to ceiling covered the back wall. A perfectly preserved ape sat in the first tube; the next tube had a slightly more developed ape. Alex walked down the line, tube after tube, with perfectly preserved examples of ancient man. The last two tubes contained a Neanderthal man and a Homo Sapien, modern man.

  “Modern man,” said Antoine, “nothing more than an overdeveloped ape,” he said, waving down the line of tubes.

  Alex had stared, not fully comprehending. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Neanderthal man,” said Antoine with wonder. “He was an amazing creature, stronger and more intelligent than modern man. But too much so, and the look wasn’t quite right,” said Antoine.

  “He can’t have been, natural selection, the strongest and fittest always survive.”

  “You don’t get it?” Antoine shook his head.

  “Get what?”

  “This, all of this, modern man, religions, wars, everything you see in here,” he spun around slowly, his arms outstretched, “we created it. Modern man, the missing link from the apes, we’re it. We genetically altered them.”

  “To be like us?”

  “To look like us, not be like us.”

  “So who are we?” asked Alex, struggling to take in what his father was saying. “Gods?”

  Antoine laughed. “To humans perhaps, but no, we’re just as mortal as man.”

  “I don’t understand. Why create man when we were already here?”

  “We needed workers, we needed to build a world.”

  “Why not build it ourselves?”

  “Why do it ourselves, when we can have the humans do it for us?” asked Antoine, walking back towards the vault door.

  “But wait a minute,” said Alex, stopping at the vault door next to the start of where history started in the archives, around 6,000 BC and the Sumerians. “The Neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago and Homo Sapiens were around at the same time. We’re talking about a time tens of thousands of years ago, before any of this stuff?” He gestured down to the Sumerian relics. “What were we doing for all those thousands of years?”

  Antoine nodded, his son was catching up. “This is only half the story,” said Antoine with a smile, opening the vault door.

  Chapter 62

  Sophie had worked tirelessly on the flight back to the States, collating her work and recalculating it, based on the new theory. They weren’t looking for a date on the calendar but a point in space. In theory, if they were thinking along the right lines, the four points that she had from each of the sites they had visited would intersect at some point in space. If they were wrong, they wouldn’t.

  The professor’s research had stopped at the point where he had simply been analyzing his results against the various calendars at the sites. His notes didn’t cover the theory that they were now working on. The thought being that he had not updated his notes, which he wouldn’t have until he had proved his theory was right, which, unfortunately, was the day he was killed.

  “They don’t intersect,” Sophie had said, as they neared Washington D.C. where they were due to meet briefly with Travis Davies to update him on their efforts.

  Cash walked over to the table that was covered with her workings.

  “I’ve tried everything I can think of, nothing works. All of the points are going off at crazy angles, I can get two to intersect but they point to a spot on the moon!”

  “Maybe it’s a gigantic bomb in disguise,” Cash joked, trying to cheer her up.

  She smiled at his attempt. “Your father was right, about everything. I’m missing something,” she said, her eyes scanning over her work.

  “Maybe some rest and try again?” he suggested. “A fresh look at it might change things.”

  “It can’t hurt but I really don’t think so. I can’t think of what else I could try. I’ve taken curvature, wobble, everything I can think of into account.”

  “Sleep,” sa
id Cash. “Take some sleep into account. Why not crash here while we check in with Travis?”

  Sophie didn’t need to be asked twice, she stood up, kissed him on the cheek and disappeared into the guest room.

  Rigs raised an eyebrow at the kiss. After Sophie closed the door behind her, he winked. “At this rate, five years and you might just get in there!” he laughed, watching his friend’s puppy dog eyes follow her every move.

  “Sometimes I wish you did your quiet man shit around me,” said Cash. He strapped his seatbelt for landing.

  Rigs stared at him quietly.

  “Very good,” smiled Cash sarcastically. “And they’re right, you are intimidating!”

  The meeting with Travis had been arranged off site. He didn’t want them anywhere near Langley until he knew what and who they were up against and more importantly, who he could trust.

  Travis’ rookie bodyguards had surrounded the coffee shop. His cryptic message to Cash on the Hotmail account the Senator knew about, simply said he’d be driving out for a coffee. Cash knew exactly where he would be.

  No car had been arranged. They slipped into the crowds at Dulles Airport and made their way to the cab rank, both checking for any tails. Happy they were clear, they jumped into the first cab in the line, after watching three move off with other passengers.

  “Great Falls, Virginia,” said Cash. They were heading for Katie’s Coffee House, famous for its Saturday morning car rallies, and equidistant for Dulles and Langley.

  They stopped the cab on Walker Street, where Rigs jumped out and walked past the sign for the Village Center, a small shopping complex that housed Katie’s. Cash told the driver to drive back to the turnpike while Rigs disappeared between the Wells Fargo and Bank of America buildings.

  Giving Rigs a few minutes, Cash then gave the driver the correct address, arriving six minutes after dropping him off. With no signals from Rigs to the contrary, Cash walked into the coffee shop and took his seat next to Travis, who was sitting impatiently waiting.