The God Complex: A Thriller (10 page)

“We need to leave now!” said Cash.

“Are you kidding!” protested Sophie
. “You need to hand yourselves in and sort this out!”

“Have you seen who they’ve arrested
? Do you think we’ll be able to talk our way out of this?” asked Cash, pointing to the faces scrolling across the television set.

“
They’ve started using my middle name,” said Rigs, watching the screen, tuning out everything around him. His name had changed to Jake Joshua Miller. “See? We’re screwed! I’d forgotten I even
had
a middle name!”

“What
?” asked Sophie in confusion.

“You know
, Lee
Harvey
Oswald, John
Wilkes
Booth— they start using your middle name when you kill a president!” said Cash, wincing when his photo appeared with his full name.

Rigs had to
do a double take when he saw the screen. “And I thought Joshua was bad!” he gasped. “Copernicus, that’s what your dad was saying!”

“We don’t have time for this,” sai
d Cash walking towards the door. “Sophie, get your mom and Kyle, we’re leaving now!”

When
Sophie exited the room, Rigs turned to his best friend. “For fifteen years I thought your name was Cash. We
do
have time for this!” he demanded, keeping his attention focused on Cash.

“Nic
olaus Copernicus founded modern astronomy,” replied Cash.

“Never heard of him,” said Rigs
. “Armstrong?”

“Neil Armstrong
.”

“I know him
, the guy that went to the moon. Sagan?”

“
Carl Sagan, my godfather and another astronomer.”

“See
, no biggie, Copernicus.” Rigs smiled, patting a cringing Cash on the shoulder as he ushered him out of the room.

“W
hat’s wrong with him?” asked Sophie, pulling Cash towards her when they met in the hallway, and pointing at Rigs who was rushing towards the service elevator.

“What do you mean?”

“When you’re around he talks but when you’re not, barely a word!”

“It’s complicated,
” said Cash. “He may be a little autistic.” He always found that seemed to satiate the curious.

“Ah
h, that makes sense. Although, a Marine officer?”

“Complicated
. We made a good team.”

“What kind of team?”

Cash shook his head. That wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. “Come on, we need to get moving!” He moved back, urging Mrs. Kramer and Kyle to speed up.

Sophie stopped walking and pulled Cash aside
. “Wait a minute, why are we coming with you?”

“So we can protect you,” he said simply.

“But you’re wanted for treason!”

“It’s not true,” he said.

“And I’m just to believe you?”

“Do you?” asked Cash
.

“Of course
, but that’s not the point,” said Sophie. “You’ll be making us fugitives.”

“And if you stay here
, you’re targets.”

“Targets for who?”

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Why not?”

“Because we wouldn’t be running, we’d be hunting,” said Cash.

Sophie
noted the sincerity in his eyes and didn’t doubt him for a second. He had lost as much as her that day, if not even more. She had fifteen more years of memories to treasure with her father.

“Where are we going?” she asked, picking up the few items she had save
d.

“A safe house to begin with.”

“And then?”

“
Rigs and I will sort this out,” he said with a confidence she daren’t challenge.

“How?”

“With this,” he said, showing her the flash drive that his father had given to him.

She reached out for it
. “Your father’s research!” she said in awe.

“He mentioned your name when he gave it to me,” said Cash
, looking for a reaction.

“Have you looked at it?”
Sophie asked excitedly.

“So you know what it’s about?”

“Vaguely. He mentioned a couple of things to me over the years.”

“We ready?” interrupted Rigs, with Kyle and Mrs
. Kramer at his side. He didn’t wait for an answer and led the way into the waiting service elevator.

“Cells,” Cash
said when they reached the ground floor. Rigs handed over his without question, and the others did the same. Cash unceremoniously tossed all five cells into the trash cans while Rigs guided the group into the back of a stretch limo that awaited their arrival at the service entrance.

“Where are we going?” asked Sophie as they pulled away.

“Airport,” replied Rigs.

“You
’re joking,” said Sophie. “You guys are plastered all over the news!”

Mrs
. Kramer’s ears perked up; it appeared she hadn’t been watching the news channel.

“All over the news?”

“It’s a mistake,” said Cash casually.

“A mistake about what?” asked Kyle
. Obviously he hadn’t seen the news either.

“Nothing
,” said Cash. A look from Sophie made it clear the matter wasn’t closed as far as she was concerned.

“Does anyone wonder why Rigs is called Rigs?” asked Cash
, trying to change the subject.

Nobody bit
. “I mean, his name is Jake Miller, so it’s not like it comes from his name,” he continued to his uninterested audience.  No response. “He’s from Texas, so cowboy or Tex might be more appropriate, wouldn’t you think?”

“Cash, nobody cares,” said
Sophie, suddenly protective of Rigs now that she was aware of his condition.

“
You will when we reach the airport.”

“
Why, because he’s on the no-fly list?” asked Sophie sarcastically.

“Forget it,” said Cash and he too
, like the rest of the occupants, stared out of the window in silence; a silence that allowed the crushing loss to flood over him.

“So why is he called Rigs?” asked Kyle, suddenly interested
. A sign they had driven past directed them towards the executive terminal reserved for private aircraft.

Cash snapped out of his despair
. “Well, as I said he’s from Texas, so it’s not because of that. Or is it?” he teased.

“His family found oil on their ranch?” Kyle
guessed.

Rigs laughed
and Cash nodded. The car slowed to a stop by the steps of a mid-sized private jet.

“Welcome to Mineta
, San Jose Airport’s executive terminal,” announced the driver. He got out and opened the rear door for the passengers.

“So you’re loaded?” asked Kyle
, now impressed.

Rigs
nodded awkwardly, stepping aside to let the very eager Kyle aboard.

Cash and Sophie brought up the rear
while Rigs helped Mrs. Kramer aboard.

“So Rigs’ family are oil barons?”

“Their ranch has oil,” said Cash. “I don’t know how much and I’ve no idea how big it is. Rigs doesn’t really talk about it and has no real interest in it. As far as he’s concerned, it destroyed his family and is the main reason he joined the Marines.”

“
But it doesn’t stop him enjoying the benefits.”

“First time we’ve ever flown anything other than coach. Yep
, he’s got money but he doesn’t flaunt it or push it in your face. He’s one of the guys.”

“With a nickname Rigs, after oil
rigs?”

“
Only a handful of people know why he’s really called that.”

“Seriously?”

“Honestly, he doesn’t even use it to pick up women.”

“And you would?”
asked Sophie.

Cash stopped, the twinkle in her eye was a twinkle he
remembered all too well.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked into his eyes, tearing herself away as the first teardrop began to fall from her own. She dashed onto the plane leaving Cash alone on the runway.

“Come on,”
said Rigs, popping his head out of the airplane’s door. “We need to get out of here!”

Cash
looked away from his friend, a tear dropping from his own cheek. He rubbed it away, plastered a smile onto his face, and bounded aboard the flight. There was an empty seat next to Kyle and Cash didn’t hesitate to sit next to his son.

“So where to?” asked Kyle.

Cash looked at Rigs, who looked back at Cash. “Nowhere,” replied Rigs taking a seat at the back of the plane.

“Next stop, nowhere!” announced
Cash, much to the confusion of all aboard.

Sophie slotted the flash drive from Cash into the laptop she had borrowed from the cabin steward. Professor Harris had mentioned an interest in ancient sites
. She had even read the article about him,
‘The Astronomer Turned Archaeologist’
. However, Sophie knew the Professor too well; his interest lay in the sky not on the Earth.

The file opened a picture
of two interconnecting black circles filled with white dots of varying sizes and intensities that seemed to explode out from the centers of each circle. The further from the center, the more the dots reduced, but not necessarily their intensity, as some even at the extremity of the circles were almost as intense as the dot in the center.

The left hand circle had far less of its area covered with dots, with vast areas of blackness, in contrast to the circle on the right,
where only the far extremities of the circle were in blackness. There was something familiar about the image. Its setup was not dissimilar to a star chart, the image of a view of the northern and southern skies, however, Sophie didn’t recognize any patterns amongst the dots.

She opened up the file menu for the flash drive. Only the image file showed, no other folders or documents
were visible, just one file that was 3.2GB in size. 3.2GB for two black circles with some dots on seemed ridiculously large. She opened the file again, stared at the patterns and drilled into individual clusters. Were they galaxies? Constellations? She didn’t recognize any of them. Sophie was one of the world’s leading astronomers, and there weren’t many galaxies, constellations or stars that she couldn’t identify in the sky, even with a fleeting glance. Why had Professor Harris mentioned her name to Cash if the images wouldn’t mean anything to her?

The
longer she stared, the less sense it made. She had studied vast areas of the galaxy and beyond, with the world’s most powerful telescopes. Nothing she was looking at was vaguely recognizable, yet something was familiar.

“Hey
, Mom,” said Kyle walking past. “How cool is this plane? There’s even a shower in the loo!”

“Very cool,” she said
, looking back to see the restroom was empty. Kyle’s mention of it had suddenly brought her need to use it into focus. She stood up and pointed down at the screen. “Look at this and see if it makes any sense to you,” she said before making her way to the restroom.

Kyle was already back
in his seat next to Cash when she returned. Fat help he was, but it was good to see how comfortable he was with his father. Despite everything that had happened, they were both managing to laugh and joke with each other, ably assisted by Rigs.

Sophie sat back down and stared at the screen
. She closed her eyes and the dots remained in her view.

“Hey
, Mom?” said Kyle, startling her.

“Hey, you
. That loo is very cool,” she smiled. “No luck?” she asked, pointing at her screen.

Kyle handed
her a magazine that he had gone back to his seat to retrieve.

“A range chart for the Bombardier Global 6000?” she asked looking at the pages he
was holding open.

“Look at the map of the world and imagine your circles with dots centered there and there,”
Kyle said, pointing to Western South America and Northeast Africa.

Sophie laid the map down and did exactly as her soon to be fifteen
-year-old son had instructed. The left hand circle was predominantly South America, the dots disappearing where the oceans surrounded the land mass, while the right hand circle was Africa, Europe and a portion of Asia. Once again, the blackness correlated to where the oceans were.

“That’s amazing, thanks
, son,” she said.

“Astronomers,” he scoffed with a smile, heading back to his father
. “Spend so much time looking out there, they don’t see what’s right in front of them.”

Sophie was instantly reminded of a
similar remark from Professor Harris in relation to archaeologists. The answer wasn’t always to dig deeper and deeper, sometimes to look back, you had to look up.

B
oth fields looked to the past for their answers, Sophie considered, although in a very different manner and with very different skills. Ultimately, everyone looked into the past. The time an image takes to travel to your eye is already technically in the past, although due to the small distances, infinitesimally so. However, on the scale of the universe, the distances are so great that the images we see are the images as they appeared in the past. The sun’s image is eight minutes old by the time we see it. The image of the closest star beyond the sun is four years old. Others, from the deepest depths of the universe, are billions of years old.

The more you consider the time and scale of the universe
, the more mind blowing it becomes. Sophie’s lectures always began with a number of mind blowing facts, none more so than the scale of the universe. If one grain of sand represented our sun, the star at the center of our solar system, there are not enough grains of sand on earth to represent every star in the universe. Our sun is a million times the size of Earth, but that is nothing compared to the largest sun discovered, VY Canis Majoris, which is a billion times the size of our sun. To put that into perspective, a passenger plane can circle the Earth in just under two days. It would take over 400,000 days, equivalent to 1,100 years to circle VY Canis Majoris.

Sophie snapped out of her teaching mode and back to the image. She
now had a reference point. The map in the magazine wasn’t particularly detailed but she knew enough from her basic geography to see that the right hand map centered in Egypt. She could see that in North Egypt, one large dot, larger than any other on the circle was surrounded by smaller dots. The concentration at the center of the dot was far greater than on any other. Had the large central dot signified a star, she’d have been able to identify the name, age of discovery and distance from Earth. Since it was a map of the world, she could only hazard a guess, but given Professor Harris’ interest in ancient buildings, she guessed one of the only few sites she knew: the Pyramids at Giza.

The second circle was trickier, with far fewer dots and a center she was struggling to pinpoint. Peru, Chile or Bolivia was as close as she could guess without a more detailed map to use as a reference. Her knowledge of ancient sites in the area wasn’t particularly great either
. The only one she knew for definite was Machu Picchu in Peru, but without a better map she couldn’t be sure and given the number of dots, there were obviously plenty more than she was aware of.

So,
all she had was dots in two circles and a huge amount of unaccounted for data. She clicked again on the dots, but nothing happened; there were no hidden links. She moved the small arrow around the page hoping its icon would change to a pointing index finger. She tried the corners of the image and every pixel on the screen. Nothing.

“Ladies and gentlem
en, we’re making our final approach,” the captain announced. “Please fasten your seat belts.”

Sophie checked her watch, surprised at how quickly they had reached ‘nowhere’
. She had been at it for hours. The rest of the cabin had fallen asleep while she had persevered with trying to unlock the mystery of Professor Harris’ work.

She hit the keyboard in frustration,
and when her palm made contact with the space bar, a small window appeared on the screen requesting a password. A password window unlocked by ‘Space’?! She could have kicked herself. She typed ‘Sophie’, the last word the professor had uttered before dying according to Cash. The window flashed back, asking again for the password; it wasn’t Sophie.

Sophie
wracked her brain as the plane touched down. What did she know that would unlock the files? It must be something Professor Harris would have known she would know.

“Any luck
?” asked Cash, joining her as the plane rolled to a stop.

“Not yet, there’s a password protecting his files.”

“Sophie?”

“Tried
.”

“Kyle?”

“He’d have said that to you.”

“I didn’t know who Kyle was then
.”

Sophie typed it in and hit
‘Return’. The password window reappeared, this time with a warning: , ‘One attempt remaining’.

“That’s not good,” Cash
commented.

Sophie closed the lid of the laptop and removed the flash drive.

“Don’t we need that?” asked Rigs, directing the question quietly to Cash.

“Yes
, but it’s borrowed. We’ll need to buy one here,” Sophie said, handing the laptop over to the steward.

“You’ve not looked out
of the window, have you?” asked Cash.

Sophie bent down and looked at a wall of trees
. She looked across to the other side, to another wall of trees.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Nowhere,” said Rigs, turning to Cash. “Ask him how much for his laptop,”

The steward shrugged.

“A thousand dollars?” Cash offered.

The steward
immediately handed the laptop over.

“Where are we?” Sophie
asked Cash.

“
Rigs’ family’s hunting lodge. You can only get here by plane. It really is nowhere. It’s not on any maps or charts.”

“It’s obviously somewhere
…”

“Northern Montana, not far from the Canadian border.”

A jeep appeared by the plane’s steps as they disembarked. The man that exited the jeep was as mountain as they came, with a rugged and haggard face half covered by a graying beard. His face easily said seventy, while his strong, muscular frame and rigid composure spoke of a man at least twenty years younger. Despite the lines, his face glowed, a welcoming warmth and a sparkle lighting his eyes when he caught sight of Rigs. He rushed forward and threw two meaty, powerful arms around Rigs, bellowing, “Master Jake!”

Rigs took
a few seconds to recover from the over familiar and unwelcome contact, although he did his best to hide his discomfort.

“Everyone, this is
Uncle Bill, he looks after the lodge,” Rigs said, his eyes fixed on the ground.

“Just
Bill, please,” the big man said, beckoning them towards the jeep and clasping another hand fondly on Rigs’ shoulder.

“What about the crew?” asked Cash.

Rigs looked back. “I assume they’ll head back to the nearest major airport and pick up another charter.”

“Where they will most likely see a news channel or newspaper with our faces
on it?”

“Ah, good point, we can’t let them do that
.”

“No, we can’t
.”