Incarnate: Mars Origin "I" Series Book III (2 page)

Giza, Egypt

Aaron Coulter
held the burner phone to his ear with his shoulder as he maneuvered his car
from in front of the Mensa House Hotel at 6 Pyramids Road into the ubiquitous
traffic of the Egyptian streets. He had taken the drive to the Plateau daily
since arriving in Giza. His nerves would overwhelm him if by two o’clock he
hadn’t gone out to check on any damage caused by the looters that seemed to
overrun the site since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. It was almost three. And
even though he had booked a room at the hotel that gave him a stunning view of
the pyramids, he felt a stabbing need to be up close and personal. He needed
reassurance that no one was interfering with his success.

“What is she
doing now?” He had to practically shout into the phone to be heard over the
revving engines and honking horns coming from the street.

“Sitting at her
desk, working.”

The man on the
other end didn’t seem to have enough grit in his voice this morning for Aaron.
Today was the day he needed to make sure things went as he planned. Today Aaron
needed his highly paid assassin to be alert, to be on task – his finger on the
trigger – literally. “Look I’m doing whatever it takes,” Aaron said rolling up
the window so he could make sure his words were heard clearly. Reaching over to
turn on the air conditioning, he made his tone firm. “If he doesn’t cooperate
or get me what I need, kill her.”

“Kill her.”
Castor Armeni’s response was more of a confirmation than a question.

“I want this,”
he said into the phone. “You understand?” Aaron sitting behind the wheel of his
Tamar Blue Land Rover LR4 didn’t feel as confident about today as he wanted and
that bothered him. He pressed on the horn and let out a long screeching blast
at the car that just tried to cut in front of him.

To make it
through today I might just have to kill someone myself.

He hit the horn
again and weaved in front of the car, pressing down on the gas pedal.

He needed to
get an answer
today
.  He needed the permits
today
. The
inability to get permission to excavate the site through simple methods and all
of this waiting was grating on his resolve. This was not like him and he just
wanted to get past this hurdle and get started on what he was meant to do.

“I want to be
the one that discovers this find.” Aaron, speaking more to himself than to the
man on the other end, switched the phone to his other ear. “I want to be the
one that goes down in history. My name in all the books. And if it takes such a
sacrifice on my part -”

“Sacrifice? On
your part?” Castor interjected, his voice seemed to emit some amusement. 

“Yeah. Yeah. On
my
part.
Or
,” Aaron said with emphasis, “the sacrifice of the
life of
someone else
, then so be it.”

“You’re not
sacrificing yourself by killing the girl, at least not in the sense you speak
of. What you’re doing is evolving from an archaeologist to a criminal. You know
that her father is not the one that gives the okay. He’s not the one that can
give you the clearance to dig there. That’s not his position.”

“He’s close
enough to the one who does have the authority. He should be able to persuade
the right people to let me dig there. And he only has until today to do that.”

“If he doesn’t,
then what?”

“Then you kill
her,” Aaron said, shouting. “What do you mean ‘then what’? Isn’t that why
you’re there? If he doesn’t do it then you kill her and he gets to watch her
die.”

“No. I got
that. Kill her. No problem. I mean ‘then what’ about your dig? What do you do
about getting permission to excavate the site? It just seems to me, not that I
care mind you, that diplomacy would be better than terrorism.”

“I’ve tried that.
Didn’t work.”

Castor
chuckled. “Then why didn’t you just threaten the one who can give the green
light on the project?”

“He would never
agree.”

“Not even if
you threaten to kill
his
daughter.”

“He doesn’t
have a daughter.”

Castor grunted
on the other end.

“I didn’t hire
you to agree with me or tell me how to go about this. I hired you to kill the
girl or whoever else I think might need killing to get me what I want. I just
need you to follow through on what I need to be done.”

“It’s not that
I agree or disagree. It’s that I can’t make sense of what you’re doing.”

“Well, then I
didn’t hire you to ‘make sense’ of what I’m doing.”

“Just kill the
girl,” Castor repeated Aaron’s mantra.

“Yep. Kill the
girl.”

“Kill her now
-”

Aaron
interrupted Castor before he could finish his sentence. “
If
I don’t get
what I want. Then you kill her. If I have to be disappointed, so does everyone
else.”

“You’re just a
flex of my trigger finger away from your disappointment trickling down on
everyone else.”

Aaron smiled.
That’s all he needed to hear. “I’ll get back with you when I find out if we all
get to be happy, or if we all get to be disappointed.”

Aaron pulled
the burner phone down from his ear, and looked at it. The line cleared, the
screen went black and he threw it on the passenger seat. Putting both hands on
the wheel and peering out over the road, he thought about his “plan.”

The plan
that would make him happy. . .

Castor Armeni
was an unfortunate part of that plan. An integral part of the plan no doubt now
that he’d been unable to get permission to excavate through the usual channels.
And maybe this way wasn’t the
best
way to get the permits, but right now
it was the only way.

Aaron banged
the palm of his hand on the steering wheel of the car. “God dammit.” He pulled
the car over to the side of the road, slowed down and then stopped. He was
almost to the plateau, he could see it from where he sat. He stared over at the
pyramids.

On the Giza
Plateau. Directly under the paw. That’s where Aaron wanted to be. That’s what
would make him happy. That was the plan – the only plan - to excavate there. He
could visualize it. One hundred degree heat. Dunes of excavated sand piled high
and orange-colored tine rope sectioning off the area. Working inside his air
conditioned trailer on the edge of the buzz of activity where straw hat, and
bandana clad people dug their way underground until they hit on that first
corridor leading into what he knew . . .

He shook his
head and threw those thoughts out. He didn’t want to get too excited for what
might turn out to be a bloody nightmare. Castor was right. After he killed the
girl, then what? How would he get in to dig then?

He believed
what he’d read, years ago as a child, when he first discovered his love for
archaeology. His first fascination had come with his discovery of the myth of
Atlantis. Researching everything a twelve year old boy could get his hands on;
he’d ran across the dubious psychic Edgar Cayce. And what he read made his
heart leap.

In a more than
likely drug-induced fugue state, Cayce had claimed that underneath the Sphinx
lay a storehouse of ancient records. And although Aaron held no
credence to the clairvoyant abilities of the man, who as a famous speaker to
the dead had never contacted anyone living after his own demise, he had come to
believe one idea that Cayce espoused.

Holding on tightly to the steering wheel he closed his eyes
momentarily and drew in a breath, remembering his excitement at reading the
account he smiled. According to Cayce there was so much more in the underbelly
of the Giza Plateau than mummies, sarcophaguses and golden rods and stools.
Much more than even the Vedas or Christian Bible could tell. There, laying
hidden for hundreds, maybe thousands of millennia, per Mr. Cayce was
the history of all humanity. Beneath the paws of the six
thousand year old half man, half lion stone structure, and within the dusty
confines of complex catacombs that traveled for miles was the Hall of Records.

The Sphinx was the doorway to the secrets of the meaning of life and
of Man’s true origin.

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

“I can’t tell
you how I know.”

Her voice was
shaky and hesitant. She spoke in whispers and I could hardly hear her. Even so,
I took to whispering, too.

“Why did you
tell me you needed to talk to me?”

“I didn’t say
that.”

“You came
running out of the building. As my husband and I were driving off. You put your
fingers up to your mouth and ear. The sign for ‘I’ll call you.’ Right?”

“Uhhh . . .”
She started breathing heavily.

“Are you okay?”

“I really
shouldn’t do this,” she said. Her voice wavering.

“You haven’t
done anything. Yet. And if you don’t want to tell me, then don’t. But you
called me.” I remembered her well because she’d worn a
1950s-style
pencil skirt the last – only time I’d seen her. It was after my meeting with
the Bilderberg Group. I remembered I had thought her behavior strange. She was
acting even more strange now than she did then.

“I have to tell
you. I’d feel bad if something . . . I need to tell you. ”

“What did you
say? I couldn’t hear you.”

“I said, ‘I
have to tell you.’ I need to tell you . . .”

The line went
silent.

“Hello?” I
said. I couldn’t take this. She was making me nervous. I didn’t know if this
woman was looney or if I needed to be truly fearful of something.

Why doesn’t
she just spit it out?

“Hello,” I said
again, a little too forcefully.

“Yes.” she
said. “I’m still here.”

“Are you going
to tell me?”

 “I . . .
I don’t think he would ever hurt you,” she said. “But there are people in his
group. They all have an agenda.”

“Which group?”

“The one he met
with you about. I can’t really talk.” Her whispering got even lower. I put my
finger in my ear.

“Okay,” I said
hurriedly, straining to hear. “Just tell me what you can.”

“I heard them
talking,” she said. “They had been watching you. You and the Father . . .”

“You can’t go
farther? What? I can’t understand you.” I looked at my cell phone. Was my
reception bad? I went and stood in front of my French doors.

“Father. The
Father,” her voice was a strained whisper. “Father Chandra I think is his
name.”

“Oh. Nikhil.
Yes. Father Chandra. What about him?”

“They know
about him. And that’s how they found out about you. Like I said, I don’t think
he would hurt you. But I’m not so sure anymore. I am sure that
they
would. They would hurt you. Ask the Father about it.”

“Ask the
Father?”

“Yes. Just tell
him my name.” I heard static and then, “I have to go.”

“Wait. Who is
‘they’?”

“I have to go.”

“What’s your
name?” Nothing. “Hello?”

“Elaina,” she
whispered. “Tell the Father.”

“Okay. Hello? .
. . Hello? . . .” I looked down at the face of my cell phone again. It was on
the Home screen. She had hung up.

“A
riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Churchill could
have easily been describing Nikhil Chandra when he made that statement.

I called Nikhil as soon as I got off the phone with Elaina. I refused
to call him Father because I wasn’t sure if he was one. And he refused to talk
to me about the phone call until he saw me in person.

“Don’t say a word, Justin. I’ll come to you. We can talk about it
then,” he had said in a voice almost as low and strained as Elaina’s.

I hadn’t the faintest idea where he lived. When I first met him he kept
popping up every time I turned around. But after I told him about Elaina’s call,
it took him three days to make it to my house.

To
this day I still don’t know if he is who he says or if he just told me that to
get his foot through my door. That’s the way secret societies do things, which
he swears he is not part of, still I often find myself believing that he is not
only part of one, but maybe the head person in charge.

I
was sitting at my desk in my study. It was dark out now and I had turned on the
flood lights outside the French doors that led out to my flower garden. I
thought about when I first met Nikhil.

He
just walked into my life one day. Knocked at my door, said he was a Jesuit
priest from John Carroll University. Then, without a second thought invited me
to go to Italy as part of a committee to work on the Voynich Manuscript
translation. I hadn’t even ever heard of the manuscript before he told me about
it. I told him I didn’t want to go, nor did I care about the manuscript and to
please leave my house. He smiled, that knowing smile he has, and left.

And
of course as soon as he left I Googled him. Isn’t that what everyone does these
days? And good thing I did. I found out that John Carroll University had never
heard of him, nor had the Cleveland Diocese. A lying priest?

Now
this lying priest was the key to finding out about the “they” who would hurt
me. The “they” that Elaina could barely talk about.

I
may not ever find out who Nikhil Chandra really was, but he knew things and he
knew people. And he could get things done. And he always seemed to pop up at
the right time.

He
got me to Italy and on that translation committee for the Voynich Manuscript -
a six-hundred year old codex written in an unknown language. The language
turned out to be the language of the “Ancients” – the name I had given to our
otherworldly ancestors.

Not
that he ever gave me any inclination, or showed me in any way, that he could, I
just felt like Nikhil could protect me if the need arose. And not out of
character for him, once he got to my house and I told him every little sordid
detail about the phone call, he promised me that he would. “From anyone and
anything,” he had said. Which was good because I was definitely worried after
that phone call about the possibility of something happening to me.