“Belief. The Water flows uphill.”
His father had then later labeled that phrase “Hydra Journal Entry One.”
Danny had no idea what that meant, and it seemed from what he read, neither did his father.
Napoleon was next in his father’s research. It seemed that the French leader had been focused on discovering in Egypt a way to give his troops fantastic strength and long life. It seemed Napoleon didn’t find what Taccola had found, but something different, which Danny’s father had labeled “Hydra Journal Entry Two: The birth of a snake, the path of elephants.”
His father had found reference to the Hydra League in some ancient texts and on stone hieroglyphs. As Danny read, it became clear that his father became more and more worried that the ancient organization still existed. And that he believed that some of the members might have been alive for far longer than humans normally lived.
By the end of his notes, it had become clear Danny’s father believed the Hydra League did still exist, and its purpose was to only allow those worthy to find the Fountain of Youth.
He knew there were ten parts to the Hydra Journals, that they must be followed to find eternal youth, and he again underlined the word “Map.”
His father had then underlined another key phrase. “Fountain of Youth. Not Water. Something else.”
His final entry in his notebooks was “Hydra Journal #3: Under the teaming masses, the river becomes clear, the path muddy.”
Danny looked out at the buildings of Cairo flashing past. He had no idea what to do next. And he didn’t even want to admit to himself how scared he was. He just kept those thoughts pushed back, out of the way, covered with the idea that he had no choice.
To find his father, he had to find the Fountain of Youth, and he had to find that Fountain by following a trail of ancient riddles.
He had never been much good at solving riddles. They just made him angry, and now his father was somewhere at the end of an ancient riddle, protected by men who thought nothing of killing innocent people to protect their secret.
Impossible.
Finally, with one last drink from his bottle of pop, Danny looked around at his friends crowded into the cab. “Do any of you have any idea what to do next, when we get to the dig?”
“We follow the clues,” Ed said.
“That’s our only logical path to the next clue,” Ernie said, “and then the next.”
Craig laughed. “Yeah, that’s going to work.”
“Belief: The water flows uphill,” Bud said from the front seat, shaking his head. “What in the world does that mean?”
“You must put yourself in the shoes of ancients who lived six thousand years ago,” Ernie said.
“The water flows uphill was a belief about the Nile in ancient times,” Ed said. “And on a map with North up, the water of the Nile flows uphill as well.”
“Wish I’d paid more attention in history class now,” Craig said, shaking his head.
“But the Nile is a very long river,” Danny said, at least glad that he now understood the first Hydra Journal Entry. The easy one. “How does that help us?”
“It doesn’t,” Ed said.
“Unless you have the second clue,” Ernie said.
Bud shook his head. “The birth of a snake?”
“The headwaters of the Nile,” Danny said, suddenly realizing what that phrase meant. “The Nile is a long snake on a map.”
“Exactly,” Ed said.
“And the path of elephants?” Craig asked.
Both twins just shrugged.
“So, we go to the headwaters of the Nile, find an elephant, and follow it,” Bud said, shaking his head. “Where will that get us? And that third journal entry seems really crazy.”
“That it does,” Ernie said. “But if we go to the head of the snake, we may find something that will help us understand it.”
“And maybe find the next riddle?” Bud asked.
Danny turned to the twins. “What are we going to see at my father’s last dig?”
“Not much, to be honest,” Ernie said. “More than likely, by this time, since it hasn’t been protected, blowing sand has filled back in much of it.”
Danny nodded. He had thought as much. “Then I don’t need to see it. It might put us at risk again. They might be watching the site, assuming I would go there. We need to get out of this city. Let’s find a way to get started up the Nile.”
“Anything is better than hanging around here waiting to get shot,” Craig said.
The twins nodded, so Bud turned to the driver and gave him new instructions in Arabic. A moment later, the cab was headed south, toward the edge of Cairo.
They rode in silence for a few minutes, then Craig laughed. “This had got to be the biggest wild-goose chase ever imagined. Actually, an ancient, deadly wild-riddle chase.”
“True,” Bud said, “but with a fantastic treasure at the end.”
For Danny, the treasure at the end would be finding his father alive.
Continued in the next issue…
‘Neighborhoods’ got started one night when I was watching the Mayor of Chicago talk about how they were going to stop the violence. Then, in the same newscast, the Congress of this country couldn’t even pass a simple gun registration bill. So, I had the thought that the only way to save the kids was to either get them out of the neighborhood or make their neighborhood bulletproof. I have a five-year degree in architecture, so I used that background to design a building that would work for security, schools, power, green living, and support the people living there without creating even more Projects that had failed in the past.
Then, to give the people a decent chance to make it, they had to have their homes paid for completely, so their money went to education and food, and so much more. So I used the idea of crowdsourcing both the initial investors behind the scenes and out front for the actual purchase of the apartments built like modular homes.
Scary fact is that this would work, even though it seems like science fiction at the moment. Especially with a couple of floors as wind tunnels and solar on the sides. This would be a money-generating building without any rents, or just low tenant fees.
NEIGHBORHOODS
May 2016
THE NEWS COMING over the big screen television made Big Ed’s Bordeaux turn almost bitter to his taste. He set the glass aside in disgust and kept watching.
Heat shimmered outside the cool, air-conditioned comfort of his recreation room in his penthouse apartment. Around the apartment the city of Chicago spread out, stretching along the lake in both directions as far as anyone could see.
Big Ed sat in his big leather chair, especially designed for his six-four height, his feet up, his slippers kicked off, as he watched the Chicago evening news, watched the carnage of innocent children being killed.
Nothing seemed right. Everything in the world felt off, out of kilter for him and this city he loved. Outside, all over the city, all over the world, everything seemed to be coming apart.
Guns couldn’t be controlled, kids died in the streets every night, and the summer was predicted to only get hotter. And heat meant more innocent people dead.
It made him angry, sad, and disgusted.
Something had to be done, but not a soul could figure out what that should be.
All anyone could do was watch.
He tried another sip of his wine. The bottle had cost him almost seven hundred dollars, yet the flavor he had savored a few minutes before now twisted his stomach as story after story flowed across the screen in front of him.
Like most nights, the mayor came on, vowing to stop the violence, but he had been saying that now for years and he hadn’t managed to do a thing about it. It just got worse.
Not one person knew what could be done. No one had any ideas at all. And Big Ed had no doubt that if this continued here and in the other cities around the country, the world would soon follow.
Something had to be done, but here he sat, comfortab
le in his large apartment above Lakeshore Drive, watching just like a regular person watched a baseball game from the stands as others struggled with the problem and failed over and over.
Big Ed considered himself anything but regular. Just the idea of “being regular” made him angry. So far in his life, he had proven he was far, far from regular. A self-made millionaire, he prided himself in being unique in everything he did.
Even in casual evening clothing, he looked elegant. No one ever caught him messed up or even underdressed in the slightest. He took pride in that, and the art collection that covered his walls, and the collections of books and magazines stored in special rooms throughout the penthouse.
He took pride in being able to help artists establish themselves, help start-up companies get going, support the right charities and projects to make the world better.
A perfect dresser, a collector of fine art and books, wealthy beyond his dreams, his life should have been full. He should have felt satisfied.
Yet now, sitting here in the luxury of his apartment, he felt empty and helpless. On this hot evening, he could do nothing but sit and watch the news once again report the latest sad death of some child with real promise, gunned down without a reason.
Behind him, the door to the media room banged open. He didn’t bother to turn around. It could only be one person, his good friend and attorney, Carl.
Carl dropped into the overstuffed leather chair beside him. Carl was just about as opposite to Big Ed as any person could get. He normally never got out of jeans and a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His dark hair seemed to never be combed and was always too long. Always.
Big Ed always looked dapper and perfectly dressed compared to Carl. Yet Big Ed admired Carl for his intense brain and drive and ambition. The two had been friends for decades, and their tastes in women and art were the same.
Carl was the only one allowed to come into Big Ed’s private media area without even knocking. They were that close.
“Someone’s got to do something about this,” Carl said, pointing to the news.
“I’ve been sitting here thinking the same thing,” Big Ed said. “But what?”
Carl only shrugged as Big Ed once again tried his wine, then pushed it away in disgust. Nothing was going to seem right, taste right, feel right from this moment forward. Not until he tried to solve the violence problem this city (and every city in the country) faced every single day.
He was tired of being just a normal person who sat and watched.
Disgusted, he clicked off the news and stood, heading toward his office that occupied one corner of the entire floor of the building.
Over his shoulder, he said to his best friend. “Come on, we’ve got a city to save.”
“Oh, oh,” Carl said. “Here we go.”
Big Ed just smiled as he kept striding toward his office. Every time Carl said that about one of his hare-brained ideas in the past, they had worked just fine. But right now Big Ed just wished he had an idea.
Any idea.
No matter how crazy it might seem, any idea was better than sitting there, watching children die, and doing nothing.
June 2016
One month later, Carl finally uttered the words Big Ed had been expecting. “You can’t do that.”
“Sure I can,” Big Ed said, smiling at his friend who had already downed two bottles of water since coming into Big Ed’s climate-controlled office twenty minutes before. Outside it was another one of those days, with temperatures coming close to a hundred and the humidity at the same level. The city was bracing for yet another night of violence, while at the same time trying to get people to cooling shelters where possible.
Sweat dripped off Carl’s face, and his t-shirt was stained.
“A brutal Chicago summer day,” was what one newscaster called it.
“No, this time you really can’t,” Carl said. “I know how much money you have, and it’s not enough to even build one of those complexes. In fact, just starting it would break you, and you’d be out on the streets. Then I’d have to house and feed you, and your tastes are a tad bit beyond my budget.”
Carl pointed at the very rough building model taking up the middle of the room. Actually, it was four buildings reaching forty stories into the air. Each one covered four city blocks, and was connected every ten levels over the streets by corridors.
When it was done, it would be completely self-contained and would furnish its own power, heat, water, everything. Nothing would be on the two lower floors, but restaurants and shops would be included on third and fourth floors.
Big Ed had worked with an entire firm of architects over the last two weeks, ever since he’d woken up with this idea in the middle of the night. The model of the prototype alone, in rough form, had already cost him just under twenty thousand to be rushed to this point. But seeing even the rough model, he now knew it would work.
He stared at the model for a moment, then turned to Carl. “You got the investors lined up for the engineering companies?”
“Four brand new engineering companies are incorporated and off the ground,” Carl said. “Investors are coming a little slower. You’re going to need to talk with some of them, give them the old presentation of whatever this is going to be.”
“Oh, I will,” Big Ed said, smiling. “They hear the possibility of exclusive patents and long-term sales income, and they’ll be on board and pouring in money, no problem at all.”
Carl snorted and said nothing.
Big Ed knew that reaction from his friend. A “I’ll believe it when I see it” reaction. It was typical from Carl—but Big Ed had always delivered in the past.“How about the land companies?” he asked.
“All set up,” Carl said. “Investors are coming a little easier into those because there’s land under their investments. Not good land, but land.”
“It will be great land in time,” Big Ed said, pointing at the model of the large four-building complex. “How soon can we have the first four-block site under wraps?”
Carl shrugged. “We got top realtors on it as I speak. Maybe a month for the first full four-block site.”
Big Ed nodded. “Hold off on any of the old factory grounds that will take major EPA cleanup, since they’ll take some time. But try to have a few new corporations ready to buy those up when you can. We want every possible block of land we can get on the South Side.”
Carl again only nodded and took another long drink of his water. Then he said, “Getting you in as an investor on these companies is not cheap. I’m buying in as well, and we’re both in a few million at this point as minor investors. But that’s going to go up as I set up more and more companies.”
“By the time it’s all said and done, I don’t plan on us spending much of our own money on each complex,” Big Ed said. “And that money should be returned in time if we do this right. Who knows, we might even make a profit.”
“What else?” Carl said, laughing.
“And after we get the first couple complexes up and people see how this will work, others will want to buy in. I promise you that.”
Carl snorted again, shook his head, and dropped down into an office chair. He put his tennis shoes on the coffee table and took another long drink of water from the bottle.
“So, explain it to me,” he said. “Because I sure can’t see how you’ll build a complex of forty-story buildings without more millions than you and I could scrape together on a good day.”
“We get investors to only build the frame and utility cores,” Bid Ed said, smiling. “Like a big shell of a building with the public and business areas in place.”
“That alone is going to take some major investors,” Carl said, shaking his head, “to even get that far.”
“Not the way this will be designed,” Big Ed said, smiling. “Investors in green energy, green living, are going to be jumping at the chance to toss money at the building when they see the plans.”
“So why only build the core structure?�
�� Carl said. “Why not build the entire thing, walls, apartments, and all?”
“Because,” Big Ed said, smiling and staring at the model, “we want the people on the streets to have their own place to live, a place that is safe. And it needs to be paid for as well, otherwise this won’t work.”
He walked over and took out a square from one side around the thirtieth floor and held it up for Carl to see. “Modular construction.”
And then Big Ed showed Carl everything he was planning. Slowly and carefully, as much for Carl as for himself, working to see if in his explanation he could find even one thing that might stop this idea.
And after an hour of talking and Carl asking questions, Big Ed couldn’t think of one major problem that would stop his idea.
Neither could Carl.
September 2016
Big Ed was feeling the excitement. Things were getting closer and closer.
They’d had their share of problems in the last two months, all the while keeping the idea tightly under wraps.
Zoning had been a huge issue, and if this had been any other city and any other area of the city, the politics might have gotten in the way. But Big Ed knew who to get on the side of the building to move things along, who to get to approve permits, who to get to just look the other way. He bribed no one, but he made sure that the violence in the streets and the deaths that still happened every day would be blamed on anyone who didn’t support this project.
And when that hadn’t worked, Carl and his massive firm of lawyers had swooped in and just plain overwhelmed anyone who wanted to stop the plan with more paperwork and filings and suits than anyone could possibly handle.
Just over two months after explaining it all to Carl, the architects had delivered their full model to Big Ed’s office in his penthouse.
On any new idea that came out of the design and engineering sections of the buildings, Carl had filed patents for Big Ed and all the investors of the varied companies.
Smith's Monthly #6 Page 9