The Orion Protocol (25 page)

55

February 9/Dr. Paula Winnick’s Residence/Georgetown

Dr. Paula Winnick’s prewar town house in a posh section of Georgetown was quite some distance from Cairo geographically, culturally, and psychologically. But a jackal-head sculpture in Winnick’s art collection was enough to thoroughly transport Deaver back to the Great Pyramid.

“Jake?”

Startled, he turned away from the Egyptian display, hearing tea things rattling and tinkling somewhere off in the kitchen. Angela called out a question.

“Cream or lemon?”

“Neither, thanks.”

Inside and out, Dr. Winnick’s home had impressed them both as postcard charming, from the ivy-covered fieldstone exterior to the rambling, high-ceilinged rooms crowned with ornate moldings like sculpted cream.

Set off by the deep shine of waxed parquet floors, the exquisite old Persian carpets underfoot seemed too precious to walk on. And adorning every wall were superb pieces reflecting a lifetime of collecting, and not just from Egypt: there were art and artifacts, tools and weaponry from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and more. It was fabulous and a little intimidating.

Joining Angela and Dr. Winnick around a hand-carved Thai coffee table, Jake sat on the silk-embroidered teak couch and sipped Lapsang souchong tea as Angela gave their hostess the background on her investigative
efforts before presenting Winnick with the TOLAS photo of the pyramids at Cydonia.

The Nobelist produced her reading glasses and studied it closely.

“We’d just like to have your reaction, what you think about the possible commandeering of
Mars Observer
, and why NASA might be sitting on this. And if you have any thoughts about who it might have come from . . .”

The intimation was subtle enough to ignore, but Dr. Winnick was not one for ignoring things. She rubbed her eyes and perched her glasses on the top of her head with a decisive stab.

“Well, compelling as this image might be, Ms. Browning, I’m afraid
I’m
not your whistle-blower. Nor, frankly, would I be.”

Her voice sounded flinty and patrician. Sipping at her smoky tea, Dr. Winnick gave Deaver a long penetrating look that might have been a reproach or the acknowledgment of an unspoken issue between them that she was not prepared to broach. At least not in front of Angela.

“Was there something else you wanted to talk about?”

Sitting beside the distinguished scientist, Angela could only take her at her word that she was not their Deep Cosmo. She felt a little disappointed, partly at not having been quite as smart as she thought she’d been.

But there was still the hope of making a powerful ally.

“I’d like to ask you about your work at the Brookings Institute, in 1959.”

“Ah, Brookings.” Winnick glanced at Jake again, seeing where this discussion was going; then she concentrated on Angela.

“I was invited to take part in a congressional study: the Implications and Hazards of Space Exploration. Eisenhower ordered it when NASA was just a high-flying idea that he was crazy about.”

“So, you and Dr. Margaret Mead made a recommendation . . .”

“The entire panel spent a year studying and debating the risks of the proposed space program, and in the end we unanimously advised Ike and Congress that ‘any discovery of alien artifacts’ be kept from the public. Margaret and I wrote the opinion. I suppose that’s what you have a problem with.”

Angela’s face confirmed her assumption.

“I just don’t understand it,” she said. “You’re a scientist. It seems so entirely against everything that you and Dr. Mead would stand for. I just don’t understand
why
.”

“Because of the Law of Unintended Consequences, my dear.”

Winnick included Jake in her grim, worldly smile and then warmed up their cups from an English fine china teapot.

“The potential for worldwide social, political, and religious destabilization in the face of such a discovery represents the greatest single hazard to mankind inherent in the whole NASA endeavor.”

Deaver broke his silence, but with affection and respect.

“Even so, Paula, you must admit the world has moved on in the last forty-odd years. Look at
Star Wars
or
Star Trek
. Polls show at least eighty percent of Americans now believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings. The idea of contact is not such high strangeness to people anymore.”

“In the first-world countries, perhaps you’re right,” Winnick allowed. “But what about the billions of people who aren’t American or European or Japanese? Who never heard of George Lucas or Captain Picard, who don’t know that Americans once walked on the Moon. Half the planet have never even made a phone call! America is not the world, Commander, much as we’d like it to be. Bring us that mask over there, would you?”

Winnick indicated a Polynesian artifact on the wall, lit by a tiny spotlight. Jake took the colorful coconut-husk carving down and passed it to the elderly scientist.

“Impressive,” Angela said, hefting the mask.

“It’s Turaawe. It always reminds me of Dr. Mead and how she used to carry a Victrola when she went into the bush. She had to stop playing it for the natives, though, because, invariably, when she cranked up the music they’d go pelting off into the forest in fright. It’d take days to lure them back.”

“Funny,” Jake said, already guessing the impending moral.

“Also kind of heartbreaking,” Angela added. Winnick nodded in agreement.

“What’s most heartbreaking is that there are no Turaawe masks being made anymore, because the Turaawe, as a people, no longer exist.”

She waved an aging hand at the entire Pacific Islands collection.

“Before she died, Margaret gave me all these things because she couldn’t bear to look at them anymore. It was her own contact with remote island groups she was studying that ended their isolation and
unintentionally
caused their demise.”

“And she blamed herself.”

“ ‘I killed them with curiosity, Polly.’ That’s what she said. When she went back in the ‘50’s she was just devastated. After being exposed to our metal knives, cooking utensils, and machine-woven cloth, the Turaawe culture was substantially lost in a single generation. Wood carving, boatbuilding, weaving, dancing, singing, most of their language and oral history was almost entirely gone. We can see the same thing replicated again and again from Africa to the Amazon to the hill tribes in Southeast Asia.”

Angela saw the connection.

“So, in Brookings, you and Dr. Mead were raising an alarm.”

“Loud as bells, my dear. Loud as bells. We had to get people thinking. Even well-intended contact by a technologically superior race can wipe out entire human cultures just as surely as black plague, genocide, or natural catastrophe. And we know that because we’ve done it ourselves. Who knew what we might find, venturing out into the solar system?” Winnick held up the Mars photo for emphasis and then tossed it back down on the table.

“Even just the confirmed discovery of alien artifacts would irretrievably alter the course of human civilization. Overnight and forever. It is a lesson of history that we ignore at our peril.”

Jake felt this last point being directed most sharply at him. He gave Angela a warning glance and then spoke to Winnick with the intimacy of an old friend.

“I told Angela everything, Paula.”

“Oh, God.”

Winnick slumped back into the couch, the shared secret of Apollo 18 seeming to occupy the room with them now like an undesired guest.

Angela tried to remedy that, leaping into the breach.

“Believe me, Doctor, I have assured Jake and I want to assure you: this goes no further without the Commander’s expressed consent.”

“Please.” Winnick waved her off, visibly upset. But Angela pressed on.

“You know what Jake found on the Moon. And you don’t want it disclosed because you still believe we’re at risk.”

“In ways that we could not even anticipate, much less control.” Dr. Winnick set her cup and saucer down with an emphatic clatter. “What you are talking about is imposing a momentous change, by fiat, on all of human civilization. An absolute paradigm shift of the first magnitude. Laying the groundwork for momentous change takes time. Unless what you want is to trigger fear-driven demagoguery and violent social chaos that would make Pan-Islamic terrorism and Mao’s Cultural Revolution look like walks in the park. People have to be brought along the pathway step-by-step. We found the fossilized Martian microbes in the Antarctic in 1984. And released the fossils for study in ’94 just to test the waters, so people could get used to the idea of something alien but nonthreatening: former microbial life on another planet. Next maybe we’ll see how they handle microbes or chlorophyll living on Mars today. And if we take it slowly, and gradually roll it out in digestible bites . . .”

Deaver shook his head, making an impatient noise.

“Paula, how can mankind ever grow up as a species if the truth about who we are, the nature of the universe, the nature of reality, for God’s sake, is perpetually being held hostage by those in power?”

“It’s not being held hostage. It’s being unfolded, Jake. Maybe slower than you or Angela would like, but there is such a thing as wise stewardship.”

“But isn’t this knowledge a birthright?” Angela said, sounding idealistic if not naive. “Don’t We the People have any standing here?”

“Oh, please.”

“No, really. Our tax dollars do pay for the space program.”

“So what?”

Winnick batted down the argument like Agassi slamming home a winner.

“If you paid for a very expensive meal that was going to poison you,
and you knew it, would you eat it anyway so as not to have wasted the money?”

The Nobelist pushed herself to her septuagenarian feet.

“Forgive me. But I’m afraid I can’t join your crusade to end the world as we know it. However, I can offer you some absolutely wonderful lemon poppy-seed cake.”

It was an olive branch of civility putting an end to argument.

“I’ll take it,” Jake said.

“Let me help.” Angela gave Deaver a look, gathering their cups and accompanying Winnick to the kitchen. “By the way, what was it that Dr. Mead used to listen to on her Victrola, out in the jungle?”

Dr. Winnick laughed easily.

“You mean, what music scared the natives off into the trees? Oh! Any strong, disembodied singing voice would do it. Caruso would do it. But there was something about Edith Piaf. ‘La Vie en Rose’ scared the dickens out of them!”

56

Outside and across the street, the surveillance baton had been passed to a dark blue Dodge van with blackout windows and faux phone-company markings.

Inside, two FBI agents wearing headphones kept vigil, recording everything that was said in Dr. Paula Winnick’s living room.

“I don’t see why the fuck they don’t just swoop on this guy,” the younger G-man said.

“Sure,” his partner said, sipping flat diet Coke and finishing off the soggy end of a Subway sandwich. “He’s just chillin’ with some fuckin’ TV journalist. Who’s she gonna tell?”

“Oh.”

The dish antenna on the roof of the mock-Verizon truck did a decent-enough job and they were getting everything on reel-to-reel. They just could’ve done without the steady stream of folks from the neighborhood wandering over and trying to peer in through the tinted one-way glass.

The two agents knew
why
, but it was still a pain in the ass.

“You’d think a neighborhood like this’d already
have
broadband.”

“Shhh.”

The junior agent shook his head as a housewife braving the cold in a bathrobe and pajamas began rapping on the blacked-out windows.

“We gotta repaint this truck.”

57

Three months earlier/The Great Pyramid/Giza

Urine and bat guano
. Deaver imagined the laugh he’d get telling his students about the dominant fragrances to be found inside the Great Pyramid. Breathing in the stale air and bent almost double as he moved down the close corridor, Jake was also aware of an oppressive density that pushed in on him from every direction.

These people were small
, he thought, avoiding dusty cobwebs and glad for even the few bare, low-voltage electric bulbs strung haphazardly above them.

But the sense of traveling thousands of years back in time was a palpable thrill, and once they reached the King’s Chamber, Jake was able to stand upright under high vaulted ceilings.

Mancini played the light from his halogen lamp across the surrounding walls, which were covered from the floor to a height of fifteen feet with a gorgeous panorama of hieroglyphs.

“Genesis,” he said out loud, the word echoing off the hard surfaces.

Jake stared at the epic story etched in stone: the Egyptians’ account of the origin of mankind and the birth of civilization. It was a history repeated with small variations in cultures around the world, a celebration of the First Ones, ancient gods who came down from the sky and presided over the artistic and scientific development of human society.

Jake pored over the exquisite carvings, some still holding their vegetable-dye pigments after millennia in the dark.

“My God, Marcus . . .”

“Come, there is something I want to show you.”

The Italian archaeologist motioned Deaver over to a low section of the vaulted ceiling. He then reached up and removed a stone facing that covered the entrance to a dark, narrow shaft.

“This leads up to the top of the Pyramid at a very precise angle. Take a look.” Mancini moved so Jake could peer up the shaft. Though it was noon outside, he could see a small portion of the sky, black as night, and three stars that were perfectly visible. Deaver recognized them immediately.

“The belt stars of Orion.”

“
Si, si,
the shaft totally blocks out the sun. Now the interesting thing is, the three pyramids here on the plateau are aligned in precisely the same geometric relation to one another as the three stars there.”

Jake considered the symbolic meaning more than the pure engineering feat.

“Like holding up a mirror to Orion.”

“ ‘As in heaven, so on Earth.’ The astronomer priests did real science, tracking the precessional motion of the Earth on its axis.”

“Pre-Copernican.”

“Oh,
si
. Long before Copernicus. They measured time in epochs of twenty-six-thousand-year cycles, the precessional cycles.” Mancini replaced the stone facing. “They wanted very much to know what time it was.”

“And you have a theory about why.”

“Only a guess at what I cannot yet prove.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

Mancini took a moment, gathering his thoughts on the hypothesis.

“I believe . . . that part of why the whole complex at Giza was created was to call attention to the recurrence of catastrophic celestial events.”

“Extinction events.” Jake nodded.

“Not just the K/T event that did in the dinosaurs. There were two Taurid asteroids that ended the last Ice Age, impacting in the ocean off Japan sometime between nine thousand and eleven thousand b.c. and then another mass extinction in the Bronze Age that is just coming to light.”

“The underwater ruins off Cuba and Turkey and India.” Deaver
could envision a cascade of ancient cross-cultural connections. “So, perhaps the Pyramid is predictive. Like a planetary alarm clock.”

“
Si, si
. To awaken mankind. To remind us that our solar system passes through dangerous territory in its long journey around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. To pass down awareness of a cycle of catastrophe, in case we had forgotten.”

Jake made a note to himself to revisit the mathematics memorialized in the Cambodian ruins at Angkor Wat, the geometry of the Mayan pyramids in Central America, and the historic myths of Quetzalcoatl and Plato’s Atlantis.

“Marcus, does this relate to the Mayan calendar?”

“You mean, does the world run out of time on December twenty-third, 2012? I don’t know what to think about that. There is still so much to learn here.”

“I understand.”

The former astronaut’s eyes then fell on a singular object dominating the center of the room: a polished marble sarcophagus. He ran his hands along the coffinlike sides and Mancini moved the light to illuminate the elegant symbols etched all around it. Deaver recognized one picto immediately.

“Horus?”

“Yes, very good, the Great Pyramid was a temple of initiation for The Followers of Horus. One of the spiritual practices of the order, which included the reigning king, was to lie here in meditation for three days.”

Deaver traced another glyph in the stone.

“And this means ‘sun boat,’ right?”

“Yes, sun boat. Or solar boat.”

“May I?” Jake indicated the interior of the sarcophagus, where the high priests and kings of Egypt had lain.

“Of course, of course.” Mancini helped the former Apollo astronaut climb into a different kind of capsule made for a very different kind of star journey. Once stretched out inside the cool smooth marble, Jake took a few slow deep breaths.

“Can you read to me what it says?”

“Sure.”

Mancini’s low voice sounded soothing and almost hypnotic as he walked around the sarcophagus and translated the meaning of the glyphs.

You must cross the sky-river in your solar boat . . . The Followers of Horus prepare you for your Journey to the First Time . . . Your Father is waiting for you among the Great Ones whose mouths are equipped . . . You must fly to be with him in the Du-At . . .

“Sirius. The star home of the gods.” Jake nodded, closing his eyes.

With his arms across his chest as though lying in state, Deaver began noticing a subtle change in energy, which he experienced as a high-frequency oscillation or hum inside his skull. It seemed to be building in intensity with a rushing, psychotropic quality that was heady but not unpleasant.

It’s my nervous system. I’m hearing my nervous system,
he thought, the resonance transposing itself, modulating up the scale to a higher frequency.

Within moments, all jet lag and physical weariness had dissolved, dissipating into the marble trough wherever it touched his body, leaving Deaver’s mind keen and alert. His essential self seemed lighter, or at least more lightly tethered to his body, and he experienced the locus of his consciousness as if it were floating in the hard casement of his head.

But only because he wished it to be floating there.

The idea occurred to him that if he wished to go somewhere else, anywhere he wanted to go, that he could simply go there. And leave his body behind.

But before he could test this idea, the image of an immense hawk appeared in his mind’s eye, rotating slowly and unblinkingly above him.

You must cross the sky-river in your solar boat . . .

He was awed by this vision, so vivid and dreamlike, though he was certain he was awake. And the words he heard in his mind’s ear seemed charged with meaning and even a sense of personal mission.

The Followers of Horus prepare you . . .

It was like a mythological riddle was being posed by this supremely intelligent spirit animal; a puzzle for Jake himself to decipher.

Yet Jake was not just himself. He was much more, something profoundly older and more complex, belonging to a noble lineage with sacred duties and tasks that must be performed.

The Followers of Horus prepare you for your Journey . . .

The spirit animal, if that’s what it was, was speaking to him now, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Deaver watched in a kind of rapture as the mythic creature began transforming itself from the form of a hawk into something else: a jackal the size of a man.

No, it’s a man wearing the mask of a jackal,
he thought.

The creature slowly turned toward him as if angry at being discovered.

Oh, it’s not a mask
. . .

“Unnhh.” Jake opened his eyes, not remembering having closed them.

Dr. Mancini smiled and helped him out of the sarcophagus with an air of ceremony, as if welcoming him back to the dimensional world. He then led the way out of the stone passage toward the light of the sun god, Ra.

“It has a certain power. No?”

“Yes, it does.” Deaver checked the luminous dial on his watch and felt a new respect for The Followers of Horus and their seventy-two-hour ritual entombments: all of five minutes had passed since he’d lain down inside the sarcophagus. Then Mancini’s voice was echoing off the hard stone walls.

“Commander, stay where you are.”

Up ahead he could see the Italian Egyptologist or at least his silhouette at the tunnel entrance. He was in some kind of argument, speaking in rapid-fire Arabic with Jake’s bodyguard, who was gesturing emphatically.

Puzzled, Deaver stood still a moment, hunched over in the dim, low shaft.

Listening beyond the voices of Mancini and the agitated driver, he could just make out the chaos of people shouting in excitement or alarm and the sporadic Orville Redenbacher
pop-pop-pop
of what sounded like automatic weapons fire.

Jake then hurried up the tunnel toward his host.

“Marcus, what’s happening?”