The Serpent's Coil

by Christy Raedeke

  “Piece of cake,” Mom replies, kneeling down in front of the keypad. With her face as close to the door as she can get it, she looks intently at every key. “Should only take two tries,” she says, pushing four numbers. We listen for a click, but nothing. “If it wasn’t that, it has to be this,” she says, punching four numbers again. We hear the magic click.

  “What a keen gift you have,” Donald says.

  I’m always astounded by her talent. “How did you know the numbers?”

  “Simple human patterns,” she answers. “Everyone presses very hard on the first and last number, almost as hard on the third number, but pretty light on the second number. Security in this office is through the roof, so this keypad is probably just for internal use. Without high risk, the code would rarely change. I just looked at what keys were a skosh more worn. The only thing I had to guess on was which was first and which was last.”

  I’m more impressed than ever.

  There’s nothing in the room but one metal chair. The walls are made of dark, one-way glass and the faint smells of cigarette smoke, coffee, and pee hang in the air.

  “Lovely,” I say.

  “I guess ‘Interview Suite’ is a euphemism,” Mom says, using the chair to prop the door open. “Well, this is a perfect place to put them.”

  I tap on the glass to make sure they can’t break out. It’s so thick it almost feels like stone.

  Shaking his head and looking at the ground, Donald says, “Ah, the horrors that have gone down here.”

  I don’t even want to know. I just want to keep moving so we can get out of this place. “I’ll go back and get them,” I say.

  I run back full-speed through the hallways, because they’re creepy with a capital C, and then lead Dad and Alex back to the Interview Suite with Jules and Claude. There’s something really, really satisfying about seeing Jules D’Aubigne and his dad being dragged along the floor in their five-thousand-dollar suits. The Magistrate has been taken down. For now.

  They prop both of them up against the wall and Dad double checks the tape on their wrists and ankles, then rips the tape off their mouths.

  “Wouldn’t want anyone to suffocate,” Dad says. “We need them alive for when the authorities come.”

  I don’t have the heart to tell Dad we don’t know what authorities to trust.

  “Come with me then,” Donald says as he closes the door to the Interview Suite. “You’ll want to see the server room now.”

  He walks us through the maze of hallways to a door with a card-key sensor on the outside. I hand him the keys that Mr. Papers scored from the D’Aubignes. “Server room requires two keys so no one can ever get in alone,” Donald says as he swipes one card after another. When the door opens, Dad smiles. A room full of humming servers is his happy place. He sits down at a computer, but Donald pulls him away.

  “After all I’ve done, I’m taking the fall for this, not you. Tell me what to type and I’ll do it.”

  Dad shakes his head. “We only have a few hours; there’s no way I could do this remotely. Fiona and Alex, I’ll need you to go wrestle up some laptops, hack in, and come back to help me write these programs. I’ll start by getting the lay of the land here.”

  “But you think it’s possible?” I ask. “Can it be done?”

  “Anything is possible,” Dad answers.

  I look at the time at the bottom of the screen. “Donald, what time do we need to be out of here?”

  “Five thirty in the morning at the latest, lass.”

  “Okay Dad, that gives us about ten hours. What do you think?”

  “We’ll do what we can here, but when dawn comes and we need to get out, we’ll take the servers with us. If what you say has been happening really has been, we need to take these to the CIA.”

  “What? We can’t do that! You don’t realize how infiltrated this Shadow Government is—they have people everywhere! They’ll just take the servers, smile, and hide them. And then most likely kill us.”

  He pulls out his phone. “Not if we have someone there we trust. I’ll call Scott Dilazzaro, my old friend at the Chronicle. I’ll have him meet us in the lobby at 5:30 tomorrow morning to help escort the servers to the CIA. He can call in other reporters, or anyone else he feels could help.”

  “But isn’t Scott, like, the technology editor?”

  Dad points to the rows of servers. “Is this not technology?” he asks.

  He dials the number and fills Scott in. Apparently Scott has some good ideas of his own that Dad seems to like. Hanging up, he says, “Well, there will be a film crew along as well! Scott’s part of a PBS documentary on why the San Francisco Bay area has always been at the forefront of technology. Pretty handy coincidence; this way he doesn’t have to tip off another news outlet, but he can still get everything on tape.”

  Mom and Alex walk in with laptops and fistfuls of different cords. Dad connects them all together and then says, “Commence the hack!” as if he’s telling NASA he’s ready for blastoff.

  Alex looks at me, terrified, and shrugs. “I don’t really know what to do,” he says to my parents as they both tap away at their keyboards. Mr. Papers jumps on his lap as if to console him.

  “Watch and learn, son. Watch and learn,” Dad says. “I’ll let you know when I need you.”

  Donald and I have nothing to do. He looks at me and motions with his head to follow him out.

  “What’s up?” I ask, once in the hallway.

  “I want to show you something,” he says. “Something not very many people will ever see.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Donald leads me to the elevator and we go to the forty-eighth floor, which is as high as the elevator goes in the building. Because the pyramid is so tapered at that point, it’s not nearly as big up there as you’d think and one glass conference room takes up the entire floor. Donald walks over to a special door that he opens using Claude D’Aubigne’s key card. Inside is a metal staircase, which we climb for several stories until we reach a platform. A metal ladder above us stretches straight up, farther than I can see.

  “You first?” he asks.

  “No way,” I say. “Uh-uh.”

  “It will be worth it. You have my word.”

  “I’ll only go if you go first.”

  Following Donald up the metal staircase, I consciously talk to my hands with every rung. You can do it, I say. You have a strong grip. We climb at least ten stories on this straight ladder before a hole appears at the top. Donald climbs up through the hole and then reaches down to help me up. I am too afraid to let go, so I hoist myself up. We are in a tiny round room, a room so small we can’t stand upright, completely encircled in glass.

  I can feel the building swaying with the wind. It’s difficult to believe that we’re not going to blow right off in this little bubble. We can see the entire city aglow beneath us, and out past the glow is the glossy black bay. It’s absolutely beautiful.

  Donald sits on the floor facing Fisherman’s Wharf and the bay, so I sit too.

  He unbuttons the cuff on his long-sleeved wool shirt to massage his wrist. That climb was an arm-burner. I catch a glimpse of the outside of the FRO spiderweb tattoo that I’d seen on Barend Schlacter.

  “You have one, too?” I ask.

  “Aye. It’s like a brand. You get it when you’re initiated into the Fraternitas.”

  “Is this symbolic of the web of deceit that they weave?”

  “More than that, lass. The spiral represents the inherent spin energy of the universe, but nature’s way is to spin it clockwise. In this symbol, the web gets spun counterclockwise to show man’s dominion over this force. The twelve sections represent the twelve signs of the zodiac that the Earth travels through as it moves through the Precession of the Equinoxes.”

  “That’s creepier than I even imagined.”

  “I reckon I’ll have something pretty drawn over it soon,” he says, rolling his sleeve back down.

  “Pretty spectacular view you have here
,” I say.

  “It’s more than just pretty. Are you ready to hear the secrets of Tlamco?” he asks.

  “Is that what they call this little clubhouse?”

  “No, it’s the name of the city that sat here thousands of years ago.”

  “Before San Francisco?”

  “Far before. Do you know of the Great Circle around the Earth? The way many of the world’s most mystical and powerful places are connected by circles?”

  I nod. “Bolon told me about it,” I say. “It’s amazing how many magnificent old temples were located along the Great Circle.”

  “Tlamco, or San Francisco, shares a similar relationship. Do you happen to have your sketchbook on you?”

  “Always,” I reply, pulling it out of my sweatshirt pocket.

  Donald uses the pencil I keep in the spiral coil of the book to draw part of a globe.

  “Look here, lass. If you draw a straight line from the massive temple at Angkor Wat to the mysterious Nazca lines in south America, and then draw a circle around it, San Francisco sits right on that great circle.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Aye. And if you divide the miles from San Francisco to Nazca by the miles from San Francisco to Angkor Wat, you get exactly 1.618, also known as Phi—the Golden Ratio. This is a very sacred place on the Earth, with very powerful energy. It is no mistake that you were born here.”

  “And no mistake that the Fraternitas is headquartered here?”

  “Aye. Not only in this city, but in this building in particular.”

  “What’s so magical about the building? The fact that it’s a pyramid shape?”

  “It goes much deeper than that. Look down. Do you notice that all of the streets in this section of the city are on a very precise square grid? There is only one exception—the only diagonal street is Columbus, the street that runs from Ghiradelli Square to this pyramid. The angle of that street is directly in line with the Great Circle that links San Francisco, the ancient land carvings at Nazca, and the temple at Angkor Wat.”

  “No way! That’s incredible!”

  “It doesn’t stop at that, either. Some powerful math is encoded in this very building. Tell me, how many days in the sacred Tzolk’in calendar?”

  “Two-hundred and sixty.”

  “You know how tall this building is? Exactly 260 meters.”

  “What a—” I was going to say coincidence, but I know better by now.

  I don’t know if it’s the swaying of the building or the incoming knowledge that’s making me feel dizzy, but I have to put my palms on the floor next to me to keep from spinning.

  “Did Li ever teach you the correlation between DNA and the Chinese I Ching?” Donald asks.

  “You mean that they’re both based on the number 64?”

  He nods. “Yes. Always been a profound connection there, with the number 64. Now take a guess at how many meters tall this spire is, atop the building?”

  “Sixty-four?” Now I have chills on top of vertigo.

  “Aye. See, this building, symbolic in its shape of a pyramid, encodes the two things central to Mayan cosmology: the 260-day human calendar and the 64 codons in our DNA. It weaves together two ideas central to the evolution of our species by representing both time and our human makeup.”

  “So whoever built this building had to know this stuff?”

  “Likely it was someone on the planning commission—it was the city that told them it could not be as high as the architects had designed it. It had to be 260 meters. Could’ve very well been someone from The Council on that planning commission. They’re headquartered here for good reason as well.”

  “So this building was originally a place of good power?”

  “Oh, yes. Once the pyramid was finished, it was covered in crushed quartz, giving it its sparkly white color as well as the awesome transmission power of a huge quartz crystal. See, this is precisely why the Fraternitas have moved in—they’ve been harnessing the power of this building’s sacred architecture and crystal composition to further their plans.”

  “You’ve just blown my mind. I can’t believe I’ve looked at this building thousands of times and never realized any of this.”

  “It works on a more subtle level, lass. But it’s had its influence over this part of the world for a very long time. It’s also no coincidence that Silicon Valley—which could also be called Quartz Valley, for that is what silicon is—is the leader in technology focused on the power of the quartz crystal, the heart of all computer technology.”

  “And the Fraternitas has been sucking the same energy from this place?”

  “The wealth that they’ve accumulated since moving into this building has been astounding. They now have more power than ever in the worlds of military, banking, and world government.”

  “Not after today,” I say.

  “I reckon not. They never figured you’d understand the power of the true Holy Grail.”

  I turn to look at Donald. “What do you mean?” I ask. I’ve heard about a lot of weird stuff, but no one has ever mentioned the Holy Grail.

  Donald reaches for my sketchbook again and makes a simple drawing. “Recognize this?” he asks.

  “What, two spirals?” Then I see what it really is. “Oh! It’s the inside of a torus!”

  “Aye. The Holy Grail isn’t the golden cup of lore, it’s a map to the basic structure of the universe, from the largest thing to the smallest thing.”

  “And this is what the Fraternitas has been trying to block in us?”

  He nods. “But you found the key. One of the most powerful creators of this force is the human heart. If you can manage to get the largest generation of kids ever on this planet to all put out coherent waves of love, you will be able to overcome all the imbalance the Fraternitas has worked toward for centuries.”

  “Is that really what the Holy Grail is? A symbol of vortex energy?”

  “’Tis. And the Flower of Life, the Three Hares, also both ancient symbols of this energy. If we understand nothing else, this can guide us to a new way of living. ’Parently in those Sanskrit books lies the key to how to work with it.”

  “Oh! That reminds me—I need to check in on Justine and Tenzo. He’s translating them for us.”

  “Sure hope he’s trustworthy,” Donald says. “And well guarded.”

  A gust makes the building sway and we both grip the handrail until our knuckles are shiny and white.

  “Best head back then,” Donald says weakly. He’s gone gray and waxy-looking from the swaying. I just hope he can make it down that ten-story ladder.

  Climbing down is infinitely harder than climbing up, because you’re looking at the space below you and seeing how far you could fall. By the time we reach the platform, my hands are calloused and achy from gripping so tightly.

  Now the elevator seems like a safehaven. I’m almost afraid when it dings for the thirty-third floor. What if something happened while we were gone? I can’t even guess how much time has passed. It almost seems like we went to outer space and back.

  The floor is quiet. Winding our way back to the server room, we’re relieved to see Dad, Mom, and Alex all tapping away at their computers.

  Alex glances at me with the look of someone who has just hit a home run. “I’m hacking, Caity! I’m hacking! I just learned how to Daisy Chain!”

  “Sweet! What’s the plan of attack here?”

  “A nice combo plate,” Dad says. “A Trojan Horse, some worms, and a few multi-functional viruses. You know, back when I was doing some work for the World Bank, the programmer in charge was a bit of a jerk; he kept telling us that his cryptography was Deep Magic. It’s delightful to finally see that what he calls Deep Magic is pretty much a kluge.”

  “What’s Deep Magic?” Alex asks, wide eyed.

  “What fools say about programs that are so good it seems they were written by wizards,” Mom answers. “Be wary of anyone who says that about his own work.”

  “I love this,” Alex says.
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  “I’m glad,” Mom says, patting his hand. “You’re doing a fine job.”

  “How much more time do you need?” I ask.

  “A couple more hours. We’ll be fine—out of here by four in the morning.”

  “Great. I’ll be right outside the door if you need anything.’

  “Any sodas around here, Donald?” Dad asks. “Can’t really call it hacking without sugar and caffeine.”

  As Donald walks off to the kitchen to fetch some drinks, Mr. Papers and I sit outside the server room. I open up my laptop to check email. It’s really early in the morning on the East Coast, so Justine is probably not online, but there might be something in the drafts folder.

  Bingo: there’s a draft email from Tenzo. In the subject line is “Translation” and there’s a Word document attached.

  It can only be one thing.

  FORTY

  I open Tenzo’s email. He has written only one sentence:

  The world will never be the same.

  My throat swells and I take a deep breath before I click on the Word document. I can’t believe I’m finally going to see what was written in these books thousands of years ago. These books have ripped my family apart and led me around the world. My beloved Uncle Li died for them. I double-click on the icon and the document opens.

  Introduction

  The one intelligent and conscious universe has been known for thousands of years. As we move into a period of darkness, that knowledge will be lost and suppressed. These texts will be guarded fiercely. Symbols of old will be carved in stone and in the earth, at all of the most powerful places on this world. Though their meaning may not be apparent, these symbols will still resonate with the truth encoded in them. Those who can see truth will be drawn to these symbols and will work to understand them.

  We need not wait forever. The time will come again when all will be revealed. The light will shine on the truth when the winter sun resonates with the full power of our Galaxy’s Center. Those who feed on the dark will starve, and those who have been waiting for light will feast as the Pieces of the Sun fall to feed them.