Decipher (35 page)

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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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There was a crackle of noise. And at last, the faint hint of somebody on the other end. “Bulger!” Maple yelled. “Answer me, damn it! Throw me a rope ladder or something! Put the winch into gear. I gotta get outta here!”
But the response was as garbled as it was intermittent. Had Bulger even heard him?
He struggled with the beam confinement settings on the device, adjusting the focus to give a wider beam. Anything that caused as much death and destruction in its path as possible.
The glass-grinding sound drew closer, until before him, stood another one of those huge, nine-foot-tall men. For a moment, it just stood there, appearing to weigh up the situation and judge the next move. It took a tentative step forward. And that was when Maple fired, slicing into the creature's gut and chopping it in two. The top half of its body slid off and crashed to the ground.
Maple savored the moment, but it was short-lived, because the top half was making its way back to its legs. It gripped one leg and dissolved into the appendage at tremendous speed. Within moments the top half of the body was starting to take shape once again.
Maple wasn't about to wait for an instant replay. He swung his head up and saw a rope dangling just out of reach up the muddy hole. He jumped. Failed with the first try. Made it with the second. Used every muscle in his upper
body to heave his frame farther up the line until eventually he could hook his foot around the bottom portion and begin the arduous monkey climb to the top.
He glanced back down, saw the crystal man standing below, seeming to be at a loss over what to do. And decided that it was a good time to radio again.
He unclipped the unit. Put it to his mouth.
 
There was a crackle of noise. Not from the vid-phone, but from one of the radios scattered across the table. Bulger tried to ignore it. It was cutting in and out erratically. Annoyingly. But it wouldn't go away.
Bulger made his apologies to the lawyer, who simply smiled from his end of the link, and sifted through the units one by one before zeroing in on the correct device. He thumbed the transceiver roughly and growled: “Okay, this better be good, I'm in the middle of stuff here.” The frantic voice cut in and out as the signal failed to penetrate. “Say again. Over.”
“Get—me—the—>
static
<—out—of—here!” Bulger blinked. It was Maple. “I'm on the rope!”
Bulger shot around. Behind him, the only rope still hanging down into the tunnel below was twitching. “Shit!”
He ran for the rope. It wasn't attached to the winch, just tied off around a stake in the ground. He shoved his gloves on his hands; gave a brief nod to Houghton. “Stay on the line,” he shouted. “I'll be just a minute.”
He ran his fingers along the rope until he found a spot where he could pry his fingers underneath and take a good firm grasp. He leaned into it and tugged. Pulled for all he was worth, groaning through gritted teeth, but it was no use. Maple was too heavy.
He staggered to the hole in the ground, careful not to slip on the mud and go hurtling down instead. He pulled out a flashlight. Shone it down. Watched raindrops disappear past the light beam and plummet into the darkness. He cupped his hand around his mouth and hollered: “Maple! Is that you? Maple, can you hear me? What's goin' on?”
There was a muffled response. Loud but incomprehensible.
“Maple, you're too heavy. I can't pull on the rope. You're gonna have to climb out!”
There was a rope ladder. Yes! Now he remembered. Over by his tent, there was a stash of back-up equipment. Not a lot of it, but he distinctly remembered seeing a nylon safety ladder. He held out a hand to the darkness below and waved it. “I'll be back in a second! I'm gonna go get the ladder!”
He found it in a black plastic trunk, under a spare tarp. Pulled it out and rushed it over to the side. It wasn't very long. What to do? It had a single hoop at the top, but he had no time to play around and hook it up to the winch. Instead, he threw the hoop over the metal stake and lobbed the ladder down the hole. He heard it slap against the wet mud with a squelch, angled his flashlight, and could see movement. Yeah, there was Maple's distinctive Panama bobbing up and down, its colored twirl flapping as he clambered up the ladder.
“Boy,” Bulger huffed, “you really had me going there for a while.” He didn't want to stick around at the edge. Besides, he had a phone call to terminate. Bulger spun on his heel and went back to his laptop, not bothering to check on the man and his misfortune.
He sat heavily in his seat. “I think,” he said to Houghton, wiping rainwater from his face, “we better terminate this fairly quickly.”
“Who's that?” Houghton asked, referring to the man climbing out of the tunnel behind Bulger.
“That's Maple. The biggest nutcase the company's money could buy.”
Houghton was impressed as the man strode closer, the gathering winds blowing the hat clean off his head. “Jesus, he really is big.”
Bulger frowned. Turned around to see what the lawyer was talking about, and wished, for all the world, that he hadn't. For standing before him was a giant of a man. And when lightning streaked across the sky, he could see clean through him. He gasped, involuntarily.
And the only thing he could think of saying was: “That's bigger than a thimble.”
Fergus sat stoically at his desk on the far side of the room. He doodled on a notepad in a successful attempt to make it look like he was working, even though everybody knew why he was there. He was the monitor, and he monitored effectively.
He adjusted his earpiece as he paid close attention to the phone call between Houghton and Bulger unfolding across his computer screen. It had become only marginally more interesting than the conversation he was taping right in front of him.
“What is it I can do for you?” the Pope had asked.
“I want a third term,” the President had replied. “I want a third term, and I want gun control. Makes the public more compliant.” And then: “What is it I can do for you?” the President had asked in return.
“You must do what you can to save mankind and save the earth, of course. But afterward, should you find yourself in a position where Atlantis is still standing, I want you to destroy it,” the Pope had responded. “I want all evidence of that destabilizing scourge brought to wrack and ruin. Mankind's past must remain a secret place where only the select few may be permitted to tread. Information is a threat to us. Why else would we have kept the Holy Book from the general populace for more than a millennium? The existence of Atlantis and all that it may teach would make a mockery of modern religion. A society without religion is a society without self-belief and self-worth. Ultimately to retain social control, a little lost knowledge is a good thing. Of course, all that is academic if these scientists cannot save our planet.”
The Rabbi had remained silent on the subject.
Granted, neither man had said it in such blunt terms. But they had said it nonetheless, voiced in the language of diplomacy.
The United States government had thought as much. That was why they had initiated Operation Wrecking Ball to begin with. As they spoke, a team under the auspices of the United Nations was about to enter Atlantis. They were about
to uncover its secrets. And when their job was done, they were going to destroy it because it threatened the minds of the good citizens of the earth. Its very existence called world religions into question.
Organized religion was an odd business, but make no mistake—it was still a business. Business traded. Business understood when it was time to cooperate.
Fergus was contemplating what had been said when events on his computer screen started unfolding at a phenomenal rate.
 
A crystal-like giant stood over Jack Bulger. Looked to the blocks of darkened Carbon 60 under the tarp, and back to Bulger again in successive glances.
On his end of the line, the lawyer sat forward, mesmerized. “Thanks, Jack. I'm glad you brought this to my attention.”
Jack Bulger cocked his head. He knew what that meant. Houghton had surmised something about the situation that suggested he was about to become the biggest loser in all this.
Suddenly the crystal figure grabbed Bulger. Wrestled with him for a moment before putting him over his knee and breaking his back. It peered forward to get a good long look at Houghton, revealing the mysterious letters etched across its forehead in Atlantis glyphs, then it grabbed Bulger by the skull and dragged him across to the hole.
He dropped the body over the edge, before jumping down behind him.
 
Fergus was stunned.
He covered his mouth, horrified. An inanimate man protecting his domain. An automaton carrying out its master's orders. An image of a man endowed with life. There was only one creature that matched the description. Mentioned briefly in Psalms 139:16, it had its roots firmly planted in ancient Jewish literature—and some Jewish literature that was not quite so ancient.
In the late 1500s a Rabbi known under the acronym The Maharal, or Moraynu HaReaw Judah Loew ben B'zalel—Our Teacher Judah Loew son of B'zalel—was Chief Rabbi
of Prague, at the Altneuschul Synagogue. Legend had it he created an effigy of a man and brought it to life. Designed to protect the ghetto, as all such effigies were designed to do, it took its orders too literally and ran amok. Whereupon Rabbi Loew was forced to terminate the creature and reduce it to dust.
Around this time, records showed that Rabbi Loew was invited to discuss alchemy with Emperor Rudulph II. It was not known if they discussed the creature. But it
was
known what the creature was called. It was—
“The Golem,” Fergus murmured under his breath. “Dear God save us,” he added, letting his eyes rest briefly on Rabbi Stern.
The Golem. The perfect mechanical servant who was brought to life by having a sacred word, or one of the names of God affixed in some manner to its head. The only way to stop it was by removing that word.
Fergus stood, switched his computer off and made his brief excuses as he left. He had not liked the tone of the Pope's discussion. And he had not enjoyed the phone call he had been monitoring. Both left a bitter taste in the mouth. For in both cases the only conclusion he could draw was that by carrying out the orders of the papacy and removing Richard Scott from his academic post, he had inadvertently placed his friend in such a position that it endangered his life, whether by the forces of Man, or the forces of God. And Fergus was responsible. As he walked the corridors of the chambers of God, the least he could do—the very least—was warn his friend. Because as it happened, Richard was probably the only person on the planet in a position to decipher what was written on the Golem's head. And remove it.
 
“I know what I'm looking at, Ralph,” Scott conceded. “But what
am
I looking at?”
Gathered around the workstation with Matheson, the team watched as he operated the controls on the system and a three-dimensional model of the Giza tunnel system rotated about an axis.
“I've run it three different ways,” Matheson said, “and I get this every time. It's from this data Sarah brought with her.” He patted one of the little data pods carefully. “This is
the tunnel system. Some of it's really deep, ten miles down. You could mine for just about anything there—coal, copper, diamonds—and never go deep enough to realize these things were also down here.”
Scott was puzzled. “That's a lot of detail. You got all that from radar data?”
“No.” Matheson tapped a button. More views of the tunnel system popped up in various shades of fluctuating orange. He knew his software and he flew around the system at lightning speed. “There was more than just radar data being recorded on these things,” he said. “I measured the resistance of the electricity flow in the Carbon 60.”
“I didn't know you could do that.
How
could you do that?”
“I designed these little units,” Matheson said modestly. “I know what they can do. The flow gave me not only a rough estimate of tunnel length, but told me whether the flow was singular. Whether it split off, diverged or converged with other electrical flows.”
“You're describing a power grid,” Hackett commented.
“That's what it is,” Matheson agreed. “All the data combined—radar, electrical, seismic—gives me enough information to build up a rough picture of the real layout of the tunnel system
beyond
Giza. That place where this Eric guy frazzled? That acted like a transformer on a power grid, but different. The closest analogy would be a Tesla Coil. Whatever, the point is it was drawing current. And Sarah's right, it's converting earthquake energy, then stepping the electrical current up to a level capable of traveling great distances. A modern level—”
“What do you mean, modern?” November asked.
“We're talking about regular AC current running at 60 cycles per second,” Matheson told her. “You could easily take your TV down there and hook it up. Modern, November, modern.”
“Sixty,” Pearce wondered. “There's that magic number again.”
“I don't get it,” Sarah said. “Why would they need to shunt so much energy around to just blast it off up into space?”
“Because by blasting it off into space, the pyramids act
like a release valve on a steam pressure cooker, diverting energy away from us. In effect, saving our damn lives. That Chad earthquake was real powerful. It should have done a lot more damage than it did.”
“You think this is what's happening in Atlantis as well?” November queried.
“Why not?” Matheson replied. “We can't get in touch with the Chinese base, can we? What if they were sitting right on top of something that acted in just the same way
this
acted?”
Pearce was nodding. “And blasted a beam straight through the ice and destroyed them. That's what I saw. Yes!”
“That Atlantis is sucking solar flare energy down into itself, we've seen. Now we're expected to believe that it's also blasting energy back up into space again. Why? It's a contradiction. Why would it do that?” Hackett demanded.
“Have these energy blasts been registered at any of the other sites?” Sarah asked.
“Not that I'm aware of,” Matheson replied, “but Giza and Atlantis are the only sites we can be sure have been tampered with excessively by man. Maybe you inadvertently switched something on.”
“But
how
are these sites connected?” Hackett wanted to know.
Matheson eyed Pearce sympathetically. “Scientifically speaking … ? That's what I gotta figure out.”
“Well, y'all, I'm done here,” November cut in. She'd been working on the video images all afternoon. Capturing all data on the language written on the C60 in the Giza tunnel system and the footage Sarah had recorded especially for Scott. She'd compared the glyphs with those they had studied in Geneva, and she had compiled the results as best she knew how.
Scott jumped to his feet. “What have we got?” he asked excitedly.
Proudly, she announced: “We've got an alphabet.”

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