The God Complex: A Thriller (36 page)

The flight back to Montana was quiet. Sophie didn’t stir from her sleep even during takeoff. It was not until they came in to land that she finally woke up, joining Cash and Rigs in the lounge of the aircraft.

“How did it go?”

“Okay,” said Cash, telling her about the call from Joel.

“Just
okay?” she asked. “Surely that’s great news?”

Cash excused himself
to use the restroom.

Rigs looked at her and shook his head in despair.

“What?” she asked.

He looked away and down to the land below. “You don’t need him to protect you anymore,” he said quietly.

By the time Cash returned, they had landed and the door had opened. Kyle rushed on board, trailing Bill behind him.

“Whoa!” said Kyle walking through the Senator’s luxurious plane. “This is seriously cool!”

“And seriously late for getting back to its owner,” said the captain with a smile. “I’m sorry, but we really need to get going.”

“
Thank you,” said Cash, guiding everyone off the plane.

Cash spent the evening with Kyle. The autographs from the band had rewarded him a few hours of undivided attention. Rigs spent the evening with Bill; it would probably be some time before they had the chance to sit together in silence again. Sophie spent the evening with her mother, the two reminiscing and crying for the Chief. It was a quiet, poignant end to a crazy and traumatic week.

The next morning could not have been more different. Bags and clothes were being thrown around. The CIA jet had arrived early, at 6:00 a.m., to collect them and take Cash and Rigs back to Washington and the Kramers to wherever they wished to be taken, compliments of Travis Davies.

Rigs joined the group as they were boarding the jeep for the short run down to the airfield. Cash was helping Kyle load the bags while Sophie and Mrs
. Kramer took a seat.

“A bit cramped?” said Kyle, boarding the CIA’s Gulfstream jet.

“How spoiled are you?” said Cash, pushing him onboard and into one of the sixteen business loungers.

Sophie spread her papers across the small table at the rear of the jet and pored over them, she had to be missing something.

“Cash,” she called. Rigs looked around. She had been ignoring Cash since Rigs had spoken to her on their arrival the previous night. “There’s something I’m missing,” she said, laying the papers in order for him.

He looked over them. “Nothing I can see,” he said. “You’ve even got your decimals in the right place.”

“But what if we were right?”

“The guardians have called off their attack dogs, maybe we were right and they
simply overreacted.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. Your father found something and we just need to find what it was.”

“Do you have to go back to England?” he asked.

Rigs sat up
.
Thank God,
he thought, at last Cash was going to do something.

“Yes, Kyle’s missed too much school already. But I’ll keep working on it, I’ll have some of the brightest young minds in the world to help me at the
university.”

“And you’ll call me if you do?”

“I’ll call you first!” she said. “Now come on, one more hour, keep looking, there’s something your father did that we’re not seeing!”

An hour later, they touched down at Dulles
. Rigs allowed them all a quick hug of himself, something Cash made them realize was a great honor. Cash gave them all a huge hug along with a quick kiss on the cheek for both Mrs. Kramer and Sophie, and promised to call them soon.

As they waved the plane off, Rigs couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. Something which he had usually not the least bit trouble doing.

“You just let her go? You’ve been drooling over her for a week, a hug, peck on the cheek, ‘I’ll call you’, that’s it?”

“Playing it cool,” smiled Cash.

“So cool you’ll never see her again?”

“Cool in front of Kyle,” he winked.

“You didn’t?” he asked. “When?”

“Last night I got a visit in my room
and—”

A car squealed to a stop at their feet. “Get in!” ordered Travis from the back seat. “The shit’s hit the fan in the Middle East, the Israelis are claiming the Iranians have still got nukes!”

From the moment he had picked them up, they had hardly had a moment to think. Israel was threatening to bring down the entire disarmament agreement unless they were given a rock solid guarantee that they would not face a world where Iran were the only nuclear power. Iran
, who had only recently suffered the humiliation of the devastating Israeli bombings were outraged and in no way ready to offer Israel anything. When the Russian Federation stepped in as an intermediate, Iran agreed to talks, assisted by a significant amount of pressure from Atlas Noble.

The disarmament process was almost complete. The Israeli concern had put a halt to the final batch, which had put all of the nuclear powers on edge. A final batch of less than three hundred warheads awaited destruction. However, Israeli intelligence suggesting that Iran had
retained its secret arsenal in Chalus stood in the way.

After a week of negotiations in Moscow failed to achieve agreement, the Israelis threatened to pull out of the disarmament process entirely, going as far as sending a detachment of commandoes to retain possession of its arsenal, which was being held under UN security within the Israeli territory while the decommissioning process took place. A similar situation existed across all of the nuclear states. The UN was ensuring the process went without a hitch. Iran had changed all of that.

After a call from an irate President Mitchell, Travis Davies pulled Cash and Rigs into his office. “Pack a bag, we’re going to Beirut.”

“Beirut?” asked Cash.

“Back door channels, I’m meeting with my Iranian counterpart.”

“You know the boss of the MISIRI?”

“No but, surprise, surprise, some Brit ‘
went to uni with the chap’,
” he said in his best posh English accent. “The Nobles have been throwing some serious weight about and I mean serious weight to make things happen and this is it.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“I get the okay for you two to take a couple of our weapons experts on a quiet tour of Chalus, check they did bomb the living shit out of it, and placate the Israelis. Easy.”

Rigs gave a thumbs up from the back of the office, where he waited near the door
. It sounded good to him.

“Well if Rigs agrees, must be good,” said Travis. “Let’s go!”

Taking the CIA boss into the heart of one of the world’s terrorist hubs was no small task. Although great improvements had been made in what used to be known as the Paris of the East, Beirut was still a boiling pot of tensions between many groups, not helped by a significant influx of Syrians following the Syrian civil war. Travis Davies was taking an enormous personal risk and putting a huge amount of faith in the British old-boy network.

Their flight touched down in darkness and a twenty-man CIA team met them, as agreed by the Lebanese authorities, on the runway. From there, it was a circuitous and clever misdirection of numerous identical blacked out SUVs chopping and changing with each other before driving off in three separate directions. Almost ninety minutes after landing, Cash and Rigs snuck out of the CIA aircraft, parked in a secure hangar with Travis Davies and climbed into a beat up Toyota sedan.

“Clear!” said Cash as they exited the airport. Nobody was following them. Thirty minutes later, they were drinking a beer on the terrace of a hillside safe house in Beit Meri, looking down on the lights of Beirut and the Mediterranean beyond.

“Well that was the easy part,” said Travis, taking another long pull on his ice cold Bud.

“For him,” whispered Rigs. It was he and Cash who had thought up the arrival plan.

“I need to make a call. You two, keep the noise down
,” said Cash.

Travis raised his drink, Rigs looked out across the city.

“Sophie?” Travis asked when Cash disappeared.

Rigs nodded
.

Cash spoke to Kyle for ten minutes, hearing his latest conquests at rugby, a sport he was going to have to get to know a hell of a lot better. Ten minutes was the longest conversation yet, as the two were still in the infancy of getting comfortable with each other. “So, here’s
Mum,” said Kyle.

Cash stopped himself correcting him.
It’s Mom,
he thought to himself. The sooner he could talk them back to the States, the better, he thought. Football, that was a game he understood.

“Hey, you,” said Cash.

“Hi, Cash,” replied Sophie while Kyle was still in earshot. He had spoken to her every day since they had parted over a week earlier but still he could have talked to her for hours.

“It really isn’t a great line,” she said after a few times having to get him to repeat things.

“I said any luck?”

“No, still nothing. Where are you? The line’s getting worse.”

“I can’t tell you because we’re not here.”

“Give me a clue,” she said.

“Hmm,” thought Cash. “I can see a cedar tree.”

“Oh dear God, don’t give up the day job,” she sighed.

“Why not?”

“Seriously, it’s only what the country’s most famous for after terrorists!”

“Well you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

“No
, but if you get the chance, visit Baalbeck, it’s a big part of your father’s research and one of the oldest settlements in the world.”

“Anything there that can help us?”

“Don’t think so, but remember to look out for the foundation stones, there are three of them, that’s all I’ll say.”

After concluding his call,
Cash returned to the deafening silence of the terrace. All decided it was time to call it a night.

The call at 6:00 a.m. from the Iranians was not at all what had been expected.
Travis hung up having barely uttered a word.

“Well guys, the meeting’s off.”

What?” said Cash.

“The very fact that I was willing to come to Beirut is good enough for their intelligence Chief. His plane will pick you up in an hour at the airport and take you to Chalus with the weapons’ team. I’ll head back to London and catch you there when you’re done.”

Unsurprisingly, given the Iranians’ offer to let them tour the site, Chalus was nothing more than a bombed out hole in the mountain. The Israelis had destroyed every inch of the complex with devastating efficiency, even more impressive given how deep inside the mountain the complex had been located.

Ten hours after leaving Beirut for Chalus, they were touching back down again. Their confirmation had already restarted the decommissioning process. Within twenty-four hours, the horror of nuclear annihilation that had threatened the world for over seventy years would be over.

With three hours of daylight left, Cash asked if Rigs minded if they made a short detour before flying to London. Cash headed out to the taxi rank. Rigs pulled him back having caught sight of a map that was on the wall.

“It’s miles away, over the mountains,” said Rigs, pointing to the private leasing company whose office sat in the terminal building. “I’m sure my trust fund can cover the cost of a chopper.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Cash, leading the way and starting the negotiations, which were concluded when the cost reached half what they thought it would be.

With two hours of good sunlight left, they landed in the Bekaa
Valley, more famous across the world for its ties to drug cultivation and hostage storage during the Civil War than the magnificent Roman ruins.

A tent near the entrance appeared to be a must-stop. Cash and Rigs were ushered in by overly eager locals. It soon became apparent
when they entered the tent that their only option was to keep moving through. Lines of glass cabinets displaying the personal mementoes of suicide bombers lined the walls while videos played in the background of attacks on Israeli positions by Hezbollah. As much as they wanted to snap the inanely smiling terrorists’ necks, it wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

Cash had to keep checking on Rigs. His ability to control his emotions at times was tenuous. Fortunately, he played along. They sped through the tent, remaining silent, not giving away the fact that they were American which, given Rigs’
silence was no real issue.

“Let’s do something about that before we go,” whispered Rigs
when they walked into the ruins. Cash nodded eagerly, it had sickened him to the core.

Cash hit the speed dial on his cell.

“Hey, I used to be number one,” Rigs protested.

“Hey, you,”
Cash said when Sophie answered. “Guess where I am?”

“Baalbeck?”

“Shit, will you stop that, how did you know?”

“It was that or outside
, but the line’s still bad.”

“So what are the sites here then?”

“You’re looking for tall columns, six of them still standing together.”

Cash looked around and saw them instantly, over sixty feet high.

“Got them.”

“
Go towards them and walk around behind them, .keeping them to your right. You want to get to the back of the temple where you can see the base of the structure.”

“
We’re not far from it. Impressive columns!”

“They were added by the Romans about two thousand years ago. There were fifty
-four of them which supported a massive roof. It was one of their most impressive and sacred sanctuaries.”

“
Okay, we’re here,” he said, looking at the wall.

“Tell me what you see
.”

“I see a wall, different sized blocks on the different layers, large then larger then much smaller as they built the walls of the temple. The foundation stones are huge.”

“They’re bigger than three hundred tons each.”

Cash looked at them
. “And they lifted them two thousand years ago?”

“The
three hundred ton ones are the smaller ones at the base, the larger ones are the three main stones that are at the top of the platform and weigh anything up to a thousand tons each. According to your father’s research, they were laid long before the Romans even existed, thousands of years earlier.”

“That’s not possible
. These things are laid perfectly together, twenty feet off the ground, a thousand tons?!”

Rigs looked at him as he repeated ‘a thousand tons’ and looked up at the wall with greater interest than he had been previously.

“As impossible as you say, it’s staring you in the face. Did you know they used to call Baalbeck ‘Heliopolis’ after the sun god who flew around on his chariot?”

“I’ve only seen pictures but I imagine without anything other than the three massive stones as a platform, before the Romans built the temple on top, that may have made a good
, solid landing site?” Cash mused. “So if the city was Heliopolis, what’s the temple called?”

“Temple of Jupiter,”
Sophie said.

“Temple of Jupiter
? Why Jupiter?”

“He was the Roman god of gods, their equivalent of Zeus
.”

“So nothing to do with the
actual planet Jupiter?”

“Well
, it
was
named after him.”

“Why did they worship another planet?” asked Rigs, only hearing half the conversation.

“They didn’t,” said Cash. “They worshipped the god not the planet.”

“What?” asked Sophie.

“Sorry, I was talking to Rigs.”

“What did you say though?”

“I said they worshipped the god, not the planet.”

“I need to go,”
Sophie said and abruptly hung up.