The Genesis Code (18 page)

The Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago, Illinois

“The most important revelations are often revealed in giant leaps of sudden insight. Dr. Ambergris made his leap of insight when he read an article one morning in the newspaper,” said Vasquez. “The
Washington Post
reported that the U.S. Department of Energy commissioned a study about creating warnings for nuclear waste storage. Nuclear waste will remain deadly to humans for over ten thousand years. The problem they were trying to solve is this: How do you warn future generations, perhaps ten thousand years in the future, that the nuclear waste contained inside is deadly?”

Vasquez paused to let them ponder the issue for a moment, then continued.

“Most likely, the cultures that exist today will be gone in ten thousand years. The languages that we speak today will be incomprehensible ten thousand years in the future. After all, how many people do you know that can speak Sanskrit or read Aramaic? Do you remember how difficult it was in college just to read Shakespeare in the Old English translation?”

Madison took a seat on a wooden bench next to a statue of Osiris.

“Professor Thomas Sebeok, of the University of Indiana, headed the study. Care to guess what he recommended? Sebeok’s recommendation was
the placement of large symbolic signs and the creation of a myth and legend,
based on his observation that the oldest known human messages were oral traditions passed down verbally from one generation to the next.”

Grace took a seat next to Madison.

“What if Sebeok’s ideas had already been employed by ancient humans? Sebeok recommended the placement of large symbolic signs. How about the monolithic stone pyramids and temples of Egypt, China, and Central America?”

Madison nodded, his mind struggling to keep up.

“Sebeok recommended the creation of myths and legends to preserve the knowledge of grave danger,” said Vazquez. “How about literally dozens of references in the mythologies of dozens of ancient civilizations to the same advanced mathematical and astronomical concepts?”

But how does this relate to the code Ambergris found hidden in the genome?

Madison had a moment of clarity. The puzzle pieces came together in his mind.

“That’s what all of this is about. That’s what Dr. Ambergris discovered. Someone in our ancient past went to incredible efforts to send us a warning from tens of thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

A warning hidden in the mythologies and architecture of humanity’s oldest civilization.

Grace felt a sudden chill.

“A warning about what?” she asked.

The Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago, Illinois

“Dr. Vasquez, is there anything else you can tell us? Any other pieces of the puzzle?” asked Madison.

“There’s one more thing I can show you,” said Vasquez. “Let’s go into the next room. It’s a recreation of the interior of the Mayan Temple of the Sun.”

He escorted them through a large door into the next room. Madison was stunned by the sheer size of the gallery. The ceiling rose fifty feet overhead, supported by mock-ups of wide corbeled arches. Intricate stone carvings of celestial imagery adorned the walls.

Near the doorway, on a waist-high platform, stood the fearsome form of Chac, the Mayan Rain God, chiseled in white stone. In his right hand, Chac brandished a feathered staff adorned with two intertwined serpents coiled along its length.

Xenon floodlights mounted on steel tripods were spaced around the room, pointing inward toward the chamber’s principal occupant. A massive stone monument dominated the center of the room.

“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?”

The xenon lamps illuminated the twelve-foot-tall Mayan stela, bathing it with an eerie blue light. The stela was covered with a series of glyphs and pictographs.

“Are these Mayan glyphs?” asked Madison.

“Yes and no. They’re a hybrid of Mayan and Olmec. The top portion is historical. It says that the city where this stela was discovered was modeled on the original capital of a lost homeland.”

“Interesting.”

“Dr. Ambergris was most interested in this portion of the heiroglyphs. Look at these lines of text here in the middle.”

Vasquez pointed to a line of inscriptions resting on the Mayan symbol for the water goddess, Chalchiutlicue.

“It says,
In the fourth age of man, destruction came in the form of torrential rains and floods
.”

Vasquez moved his finger down to the next sequence of glyphs, adjacent to a carving of the face of Chac, symbolic of the current Mayan Age of Man. His tongue was depicted as an obsidian blade, signaling his need for the nourishment of human blood. Chac’s features were wrinkled, representing his advanced age.

“This sequence says:
In the fifth age, there will be a movement of the earth and fire in the heavens and we shall all perish.
”

“The end of the current Age of Man,” said Grace. “In 2012.”

“And look at this,” said Vasquez.

He pointed to a detailed pictograph carved into the stone. It depicted a tall, bearded figure holding a feathered staff. Coiled around the staff were two intertwined serpents.

“Look familiar to you at all?”

Grace considered the image. “It actually looks a lot like the staff of Aesculapius.”

Vasquez nodded. “Dr. Ambergris thought so too.”

“Who, or what, was Aesculapius?” asked Madison.

“Aesculapius was a Roman physician who was such a skilled healer that he became a god,” said Vasquez. “The image of his wooden staff with a snake coiled around it was adopted as the symbol of the medical profession by the American Medical Association.”

“But the staff of Aesculapius only had one serpent,” said Grace. “This looks a more like the caduceus.”

“Exactly what Dr. Ambergris said. The caduceus, which was probably the prototype for the Roman version,” said Vasquez. He turned to Madison.

“The caduceus consists of two intertwined serpents encircling a wand or rod. It was carried by Hermes in Greek myths and Mercury in Roman mythology, the messenger of the gods.”

The messenger of the gods.

Madison scrutinized the intertwined serpents.

“Remind you of anything else, Grace?” asked Madison.

Grace was struck by a sudden insight.

“It looks like the double helix of DNA,” she said.

“Damn right it does.”

“My god,” said Grace.

“Intertwined serpents are common images in the mythology of ancient cultures,” said Vasquez. “They appear everywhere. Ancient China, Egypt, Sumeria. They were also used by the Olmec, the Maya, and the Aztecs.”

Madison struggled to fit together the various pieces of this historical puzzle in his mind.

Fossil evidence that humans walked the earth hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago.

Evidence of advanced scientific knowledge scattered throughout the writings of our ancient past.

References to advanced scientific knowledge encoded in ancient mythologies and architecture, warnings to future generations.

A coded message hidden in human DNA.

“Dr. Vasquez,” asked Madison, “does Mayan mythology tell us what happened to end the previous Ages of Man?”

Quiz’s Office
Subbasement, Millennium Tower
Manhattan, New York

Quiz had completely lost track of time. His stomach growled a reminder that he hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

Quiz popped open another Diet Coke and pulled open a bag of chips.

Stuffing a handful of chips in his mouth, Quiz scrolled to the next entry in Dr. Ambergris’ journal.

The Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago, Illinois

“Take a look at these,” said Vasquez. At the opposite end of the gallery, four enormous stone slabs stood upright behind a wall of glass.

“What am I looking for?” It appeared to Madison that they were bare stone, painted a dull greenish brown.

“Take a closer look,” said Dr. Vasquez.

Madison walked over to the glass. On closer inspection, he realized that the earthy coloration was a thin layer of mold that covered almost the entire surface of each slab.

“Paint,” said Dr. Vasquez. “The Olmec and the Maya sometimes used ground-up plant and animal tissues to make colored pigments. There’s a bas-relief mural of Chac, the Mayan god of rain and lightning, on these stones. It was found in the Temple of the Jaguar. We had it crated up and shipped here. The surfaces of the slabs are covered by mold that was attracted to the organic compounds in the paint.”

Without warning, Vasquez switched off the lights, plunging the chamber into complete darkness.

“Hey, what gives?” asked Madison.

“Just wait,” said Vasquez’s voice from the darkness.

He turned on an ultraviolet lamp near the center of the room. Instantly an intricate mural sprang into existence on the stone slabs.

“Nice trick,” said Grace.

“The UV light picks up the contrasts of the pigments. Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for the idea. Archaeologists have been using this technique for years.”

On the elaborate mural, Mayan artists had painted a fierce manifestation of Chac seated on a throne. Above him, renditions of stars and constellations portrayed the complex cosmology of the heavens. The constellation of Orion was centered above the throne.

Priests wearing jaguar masks engaged in ritual bloodletting, piercing the tongues and lips of slaves with obsidian blades and long thorns. Offerings of crocodiles, turtles, peccaries, and jaguars were arrayed at Chac’s feet. To the left of the throne, a naked young woman, her body painted blue, was stretched over a stone altar. A jaguar priest had torn open her chest with a flint knife and removed her heart, holding it high above his head in sacrificial offering. Within the mural were long lines of Mayan hieroglyphs and dot-and-bar numerals.

“Let me read this to you,” said Vasquez. “It says:
The first men were the People of the Serpents who came from the east with their leader Quetzalcoatl, the Serpent of the East, who could cure by laying on hands and who revived the dead. Quetzalcoatl possessed great wisdom and spoke the language of life and the stars
.”

Vasquez moved to another set of hieroglyphs.

“
The First Men were endowed by Quetzalcoatl with great intelligence. They saw far. They succeeded in discovering great wisdom. They examined the four corners of the heavens, the four points of the arch of the sky, and the round face of the earth
.”

Madison arched an eyebrow.

“
Then the Heart of Heaven blew mist in their eyes and clouded their sight. Their eyes were covered and they could see only what was close. In this way, the wisdom and knowledge of the First Men were destroyed
.”

“Sounds a little like the Adam and Eve story in Genesis,” said Grace. “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden after eating from the Tree of Knowledge.”

“And don’t forget who lived in the Tree of Knowledge,” said Madison. “A serpent.”

Vasquez began reading the next set of hieroglyphs.

“
Quetzalcoatl came to the aid of man after the flood that ended the fourth Age of Man. Together with Xolotl, the twin, he descended into the underworld and retrieved the remains of men killed by the deluge. He milled their bones like corn on a grindstone. Upon it, he released his own blood and wrote in the language of the gods, thus creating the flesh of the current Age of Men
.”

“Quetzalcoatl took the bones of men and regenerated human life,” said Madison. “He wrote in the blood of man using the language of the gods. Grace, could this be the origin of the Genesis Code?”

The Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago, Illinois

The faint murmur of voices echoed from the next room. Crowe paused and listened intently.

Madison. Grace. And another man.

That must be Dr. Vasquez with them.

Crowe stuck a hand inside his blazer and gripped the handle of his 9mm, pulling it from the leather shoulder hoslter beneath his left arm.

The metal was cold against his fingers.

Crowe crept to the double doors leading to the room where Madison and Grace were engrossed in conversation with Dr. Vasquez. He pushed the door open ever so slightly, peering through the crack to gauge the location and distance to his quarry.

Excellent.

Their backs were turned.

Madison made large gestures in the air with his hands as he talked. Dr. Vasquez stood with a hand on one hip, his head cocked to one side as he listened intently to Madison’s speculations.

The lighting in the room was dim and the overhead spots cast a faint blue glow over everything in the gallery. The unsuspecting trio stood no more than sixty feet away.

He mentally repeated the strategic mantra taught to British special forces during combat training.

Observe.

Orient.

Decide.

Act.

Crowe removed a silencer from his breast pocket and screwed it tightly onto the barrel of his 9mm.