Irrefutable Proof: Mars Origin "I" Series Book II (24 page)

Chapter
Forty-Eight

Cleveland
Heights
, Ohio

I
didn’t really trust that Father . . . uhm, that Nikhil Chandra. He wasn’t a
priest, I didn’t think. How do you lie about that? But he sure knew a lot of
stuff about all the things I had discovered. Still he had said that he would be
of no help to me unless I provided proof.

Well,
wasn’t that what I had been trying to do for the past nine months? Get proof?

Practically
getting killed in the process.

We
all were all in my living room. Claire, Mase, Greg, and me. Addie was on Skype,
something I made Claire learn to use. Although I was trying desperately to find
advanced technology used by people thousands of years ago, I wasn’t all that
keen on using it myself. I was happy with an electric typewriter, a rotary
phone and a transistor radio.

“Now
you can decipher the book,” Mase said. The three of them were standing over me
where I sat on the couch, flipping through the pages of the copy of the Voynich
Manuscript I had received in Italy.

“No,”
I said, hesitantly. “I can’t decipher the book.” I may have had a copy of it,
but Mase was terribly confused if he thought that meant I was going to one day be
able to read it.

Everyone
looked at me with disbelief and questions etched into their faces. I glanced
down at the screen on the laptop – yep, so was Addie.

When
I got back home from Italy with my copy of the book, no one cared to hear about
my experiences. They couldn’t have cared less about Nikhil Chandra’s story. All
they wanted to know was how fast I could decipher the Voynich Manuscript so I
could tell them what our ancestors knew.

“There
is no way to decipher the book,” I said. “At least for
me
to decipher
it.”

“Then
why did you go get it? Why did we go back to Jerusalem, almost get killed, for
the other stuff. Why did we need Dr. Sabir’s research notes and Hannah
Abelson’s interpretations? I don’t understand.” Greg was sounding pretty upset.

This
is one of those times that I really believed that Greg was going to choke me.
He had threatened to do it all my life, but now I could almost feel his grip .
. .

“Yeah,
I don’t understand this at all,” Addie chimed in.

“C’mon,
you guys. I went to Jerusalem because I thought Dr. Sabir had figured out the
clues. Maybe the Voynich Manuscripts has something to do with this, I’m not
sure. But you really didn’t expect that I would be able to decipher an unknown
language that no one, and I mean no one, has been able to decipher in hundreds
of years.”

“Uhm,
we kind of did,” Greg said.

“Thanks,
Greg.” The one time he has any confidence in my abilities, it really was
something that I couldn’t do.

“How
do you propose, Justin, to find out what the book says?” Greg asked.

“I’m
going to find someone who can read it.”

“You
mean a Martian?” This time it was my own husband turning against me.

“Yes,”
I said quietly, almost in a whisper. “A Martian.”

Greg
and Mase turned, almost in step with one another, walked over to the couch and
sat down. Addie glared at me, her face the size of the 19” monitor. Claire came
and sat next to me, as if she thought she might have to help defend me from an
attack.

“So,
who’s going to go and help me find a Martian?” I said, and grinned.

“Justin.”
Greg, staring at me, said my name and nothing else, then he looked over at
Mase, shook his head, and noisily sucked in a breath. I could see the veins
near his temple pulsating.

“Justin.”
This time it was Mase that said my name. “How are you supposed to find a
Martian? It just isn’t possible.”

“Do
you actually think that you know where a Martian lives?” Greg’s look of disgust
had morphed into something that was beginning to resemble amusement. “Do you
actually think, and I’m feeling really frustrated about this because you had
me, after all of this, starting to believe your theory about man’s origins. But
do you actually think that what you’re saying is sane? That you think that you know
where to find a Martian?”

“No.
She doesn’t know where a Martian is,” Addie’s voice blared through the speakers.
“Because there aren’t any Martians.”

“Yeah
there are,” I said, looking around at everyone. “And I know where to look for
one, too.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

Of
course there was no such thing as Martians. I only said it like that because
that’s the way the conversation was going.

Man.
Human beings.
Homo sapiens.
That’s who lived on Mars. Us. They all knew
that, too.

So
it wasn’t as if I were looking for a “Martian.” I didn’t have to go out and
find an alien. I just had to find people who hadn’t forgotten the knowledge man
came to this planet with. The ones Nikhil Chandra talked about.

That
shouldn’t be so hard.

Right?

Nikhil
said they existed. I knew what to look for. Easy. I figured out who I thought
they were, and then found there were plenty of them around.

Uncontacted
people.

Uncontacted people were
part of Dr. Sabir’s research. Finding a remnant of the people
who had come to this planet from Mars was something he had written in his
notebook.

I sat alone in my study. I looked out of my French doors, my
mind wandering.

Dr. Sabir had written that in order to find people who could
read the manuscripts, we need only to look for groups of isolated people. Lost
tribes. Communities of people who had not taken part in global civilization.

Few people had remained totally uncontacted by the world, but there
were more people than anyone would imagine that had not been tainted by outside
influences. And they lived all over the globe.

I narrowed it down to two that I thought could actually be
“the Martians.”

The Sentinelese people were my first guess. They had been
isolated for more than sixty thousand years. Sixty thousand.

Hard to imagine.

They
were believed to be the last
pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated.
They had lived
among themselves for fifty-eight thousand years before Christ was born.
Millennia before the oldest stories of the Bible. They may have witnessed the
whole thing. Maybe even been a part of it.
Maybe
, I thought,
their
ancestors were the ones brought down on spaceships
.

The Sentinelese lived near India. I believed the Indian race
was the one that was originally meant for this planet. So it made sense that
they could be the people I was looking for.

They lived on North Sentinel Island.

I glanced over at my bookshelf at my big,
awkward-to-get-down atlas, and wished for a smaller version. Instead, I turned
to my computer and Googled a map of Asia.

Andaman Islands
. Located
right there, in the Indian Ocean. I touched it with my finger. In the eastern
part of the Bay of Bengal. It was just a dot in a sea of blue. A teeny-weenie speck.

And there were only about two hundred and fifty or
so of them.

Was that all that was left of the Ancients?

Another fact that had made them my number one
choice was their language. Their language was considered unclassified. And, those
few from the outside that had had contact with them had come back to say that
they spoke a language that is markedly different from any other language on
Earth. It was uniquely their own. It was even completely different from other
languages in the Andamans.

The Sentinelese were hunter-gatherers. No one had found any evidence
of them having either agricultural practices or methods of producing fire.

They didn’t use
fire
.

It was what the Ancients had wanted. For us to be devoid of
advanced knowledge. Only, if it had not been for the Saboteurs, we would all be
like the Sentinelese. We might never have had the knowledge that sets us apart
from all other species of animals.

But what made me leery of them as the contacted people were
their features. They were closer to being classified as negrito peoples than
mongoloid. They were, in comparison to other Indians, short, most less than
5’5”, they had dark skin and “peppercorn” hair, characteristics that were more
common to the continent of Africa than the country of India.
Didn’t quite go with what the AHM manuscripts said, but still a very good
choice.

My second choice of uncontacted people were the Apurinã. They
lived in Amazonas, a state of Brazil, located in the northwestern corner of the
country. Close to the Peru border. Peru was the home of the Nazca Plains, and I
knew that had something to do with the Ancients.

I felt the area was right. It was in the New World, where lots
of Indians were found. They were definitely the right race. They were Awarak,
some of the ones I pegged when I first translated the manuscripts as being the
“one race.” And the Jesuits, in the mad dash to evangelize the Indians, had founded
several Spanish missions in the Amazon territory. The Jesuits were the ones
that had the Voynich Manuscript right before ole’ Wilfrid got his hands on it. Indians.
Voynich Manuscript. Jesuits. It all made sense. It gave the Apurinã tribe
another check in their box.

The problem with them was that the Apurinã language (also
called Apurinã), was not an unknown language. If someone could speak their
language, and they spoke the language written in the Voynich Manuscript, then
someone would have deciphered it by now.

I Googled Expedia to price tickets from Cleveland
to India to Brazil and back. Then I dialed Simon’s number. He said if I needed
him, all I had to do was call.

Chapter
Fifty

Simon Melas couldn’t finish his western style omelet and hash
browns he had ordered. He wet his lips, turned up the glass of orange juice to
drink, and spilled it down the front of his brown plaid shirt.

“Shit.” He turned his head around to see if anyone heard him,
and grabbed a napkin and brushed it down his shirt.

Finding out what Justin was working on was one thing, but then
Hannah Abelson had wanted too much. All over some stupid notebook sixty years
old that Justin had found.

All those years she had helped him get grant money for his
research, all he had to do was keep an eye on Justin. Well, he had. How was he
supposed to know she’d written that book? She hadn’t told anyone. Heck, he
didn’t even meet her until after she had published it.

Sure, he knew, he messed up on his own. He had taken the
money. Over the years he had taken a lot of money from the grants he received.
And when it had been found out that he had taken it, Hannah had promised she’d
help clear his name. Until she found out Justin had written that book. Then
she’d had no time for him. She had a whole different agenda.

Hannah wanted Justin dead.

Being a spy, a liar and thief may be no lesser a sin to murder
in God’s eyes, but it was in his.

Until now.

Hannah had had a one-track mind. Brushing him off every time
he’d tried to call. She had listened when he called and told her Justin had asked
about the Book of Enoch. But then no time to talk to him about what
he
needed.

Then she just flipped out on him.

She’d make sure he never got another dime of research money
, she’d said. Simon thought back,
reflecting on that last conversation he’d had with Hannah. Her last
conversation.  

And,
she
said,
he could forget about being the big man at MIT any longer.

That was just too much.

He had gone to her house. He just wanted his life back. That’s
all.

He picked out several diced tomatoes on his plate and pushed
them around with his fork. His reputation was shot to hell. And not being able
to get government grants for his projects meant he was out of work. No funding,
no excavations, no traveling. No nothing. He had needed Hannah.

Surely anyone would understand how a man could crack under
that kind of pressure.

His hair in a ponytail and wearing tight jeans, he felt
everything was tightening around him. He sighed heavily, and jerked off the
rubber band that held his hair. He pushed back the plate and buried his head in
his hands, his hair cascading down, covering both. His body was suffused with
tension. He wobbled his leg back and forth underneath the table, and fought to
breathe through the all-consuming knot in his chest. He sat, frustrated at his
weakness, a peculiar feeling rising from the pit of his stomach.

He had been at that table in IHOP for more than an hour, going
over what he’d done. He hadn’t meant to do it. She had let him in the side door
and from the moment he stepped into her house she had lit into him like a wild
woman.

She had starting marching around her little house in a tirade,
acting like
Rumplestiltskin
. It seemed like she was already upset when
he got there. She started shouting that she would kill Justin, and she would
kill him, too. Then she turned and glared at him, calling him a little
chicken-shit.

She was crazy
,
he’d thought.
Who did she think she was?

She sat down in that big chair of hers, she was such a tiny
woman, and it looked like it could swallow her up. She’d been furious, her face
beet red, and she was out of breath from her rant. She was taking in deep
breaths through her nose. He could see her chest rising and falling, trying to
suck in enough air.

What if she couldn’t get any air?

A pillow was right there. All he had to do was put it over her
face . . .

 “Can I get you anything else, sir?” The waitress stood over
him.

“No.” He snapped at her without lifting up his head.

Now what to do about Justin?

He lifted up his head. Reaching over, he picked up the pepper
shaker and screwed off the top. He poured half of it onto the table in a little
pile. Then he turned and called the waitress, telling her to bring him a pot of
coffee.

He leaned down close to the pile of pepper. Holding his hair
back, he blew it, the granules scattering across the table.

It was Justin’s fault that he wouldn’t get his reputation
back, or his ability to get more money restored.

I’ve already killed once . . .

He’d arranged the trip to North Sentinel Island for Justin.  And
then it was off to Brazil. She had called him. All was well between them,
Justin had said. And she needed his help.

That created two opportunities to get her back for what she
had done to him.

The only problem was that she was dragging along one of her
siblings. That brother of hers, Greg, he had met him in Israel,
and he had seemed to be very protective of her. Brazil would be the best place.
Simon knew the terrain there better. He thought he could make a more realistic “accident”
of it there. But he’d try when they got to India, too.

He had tried to talk to Justin before she went to Israel,
to get her to stop whatever she was doing that was consuming Hannah. Instead of
listening to him, she had accused him of trying to shoot her. It hadn’t been
him, at least not that time.

Maybe, he considered, he should’ve pushed Justin a little
harder to get her to stop. Maybe he wouldn’t be sitting at IHOP a murderer if
he had. But that probably wouldn’t have helped, Hannah had seemed so
determined.

And Justin was just as determined. Even after he’d sent her
that warning written in Sanskrit, telling her if she wanted to live she needed
to give up whatever she was trying to do. But she just wouldn’t listen. She
just wouldn’t stop.

What could be so important?

It didn’t matter anymore. Hannah hadn’t helped him because of
Justin, and Hannah got what she deserved. Now, so would Justin. And then he would
just disappear.

He pulled a napkin out of the holder, wiped his hands, and
threw it on top of the half-eaten omelet. He pulled a twenty out his pocket and
threw it on the table just as the waitress came back with his carafe of coffee.