The God Complex: A Thriller (40 page)

Rigs was stuck in a tomb. Ironically, that’s exactly what everyone thought it was. However, Rigs had worked out that it was definitely not a tomb, which was obvious since the Nobles had gotten their hands on it. Cabling ran through and up into the ceiling area above him in the King’s Chamber. He had tried to get back into the Queen’s Chamber but it was locked tight.

Most worryingly, the cabling was shrouded in a metal casing, unlike any he had seen before, which suggested it was being protected from something. He thought back to whatever Anya Noble had put in the Queen’s Chamber. The equipment was also of an incredibly sturdy construction. He had a feeling that whenever it was switched on, he was unlikely to survive.

He climbed back up into the spaces above the King’s Chamber. Height was what he wanted. He remembered the stone that he had marked. Why would anyone have gone to that height to move a stone? It wasn’t just that there was no way it could have been moved, they’d have needed heavy equipment to move it and it would have been tight against the other stones. There had to be a mechanism, as there had been for Anya Noble, only she knew where it was and had the means to use it with her ring.

He reached the top space and was blocked by the pointed roof above him. There was nowhere to go. He lay back and tried to look for even the tiniest hint of a crack in the stonework. There was still almost half the height of the pyramid above the roof to look at. He crawled back down and looked at the cables. They went up into the ceiling above the King’s Chamber below, but they weren’t in any of the crawl spaces. Where did they go? They were obviously connecting to something else.

He covered every inch of the thirty-by-twenty chamber like his life depended on it, trying not to think that it actually did. He tried the small anti-chamber. Same result. He tried the Grand Gallery, even trying to move the silver hoops in an attempt to stop whatever the pyramid might do. They didn’t move. The cabling was impossible to uncouple, and its metal casing preventing any attempt to tamper with it.

Rigs lay down in the gully of the Grand Gallery and wa
ited. He had little else to do.

Travis Davies had spent the afternoon trying to call Cash and Rigs, although the chance of Rigs ever answering a call seemed remote. They hadn’t checked in since he knew their mission in Iran had been a success. The Iranians had been apoplectic ever since, in stark contrast to their restrained fury at the previously unsuccessful Israeli bombing.

After the first hour, he was furious. After the second, he thought they were inconsiderate. When it stretched to beyond three hours, he was worried, very worried. He had called everyone he knew, still nothing. The Israelis he spoke to denied any knowledge of even having been involved, although
they were delighted with the result and thanking him if he were involved. Passport checks returned nothing. He was desperate and was going out of his mind with concern. He was about to call the President when he suddenly changed course and called Senator Noble instead.

The Senator promised to make some calls and
get back to him.

He made one, to Conrad Noble
, and discovered the truth. A truth that Travis Davies could never know. The woman was crazy. They were all crazy. Cash Harris wasn’t a Noble. He may have some Noble blood in him, but being a Noble was as much a state of mind as anything else. He had learned long ago that the Homo Sapiens were no better, no worse than those who had created them. Their traits and characteristics were the same. The Nobles lived and worked to a code, just like the overwhelming majority of the population. The Nobles’ belief that because two hundred thousand years earlier that they had altered a genetic code in an ape to create Man in their image made them better was a nonsense. Nobles weren’t any better, nor any more intelligent. But they all thought they were and they had knowledge and that knowledge was power. The Nobles had used that power to their maximum advantage throughout history, and Senator Albert ‘Bertie’ Noble had every intention of keeping the knowledge and the power exclusive. He had no qualms about wiping out half the population, or the whole population when the time came. At least he was doing it with a sound understanding, unlike his idiot family. What was she thinking? Telling Cash Harris the truth, was she mad?

He checked the time. If they accepted Cash Harris as a full Noble, they wouldn’t lift a finger to harm him. He was furious. The only person who could deal with it was him. No
one outside the family could get anywhere near the launch site and the minute Cash Harris had the chance, he’d have Travis Davies, the CIA and the full force of the US military stopping them. What annoyed him even more was that he was genuinely fond of the boy and he was going to have to kill him.

He called his pilot to prep the plane and then called Travis Davies. He told him to stop hunting for the pair. Cash Harris and his sidekick hadn’t made it back. He fended off a torrent of questions with ‘that’s all they would tell me’ and ‘I’m sorry I can’t disclose who they were.’

Travis replaced the handset, almost numb. Cash and Rigs were a constant. When you needed them, they were there. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it but had to. He looked for Sophie Kramer’s number, picked up the phone and thought twice. He was in London, only fifty miles from Cambridge. She deserved more than a call. He called his security team, deciding he’d deliver the news personally.

An hour later he was consoling
her mother at Sophie’s Cambridge home. Mrs. Kramer was frantic with worry, and had no idea where either her daughter or grandson were. The school had informed her Kyle had been collected earlier that day.

Travis made some calls. Nobody knew anything, he feared the worst.

Sophie had thrown herself around him
when he boarded the plane, whispering in his ear, “It’s another planet that’s dying. I think the Nobles are the guardians.”

“I’m not sure
‘guardians’ is the right word but yes, they are. But there’s more, much more.”

Anya left them to chat. She had work to do and disappeared after takeoff to her private office on the upper deck.

The second she disappeared, Cash scoped out the plane, ignoring Sophie’s inquisitive look. A security team was stationed outside the cockpit. Four were Secret Service types. They didn’t worry him. His biggest problem was the flight door. Even if he did overpower them, the door was the same as those fitted to commercial airliners, made from reinforced solid steel and opening outwards.

Cash found Sophie, made sure Kyle was happily out of earshot
, and told her everything, giving her as much detail as had been given to him. She sat shocked, intrigued, disgusted but, as an astronomer, desperate to ask Anya a million questions while strangling her superior body to death.

“They’re aliens but they look like us,” she said, struggling to get her head around it.

“
We
look like
them
. They created us, well half of me,” he corrected.

After an hour, Anya joined them tentatively. “I understand this is a fairly major piece of news,” she said
. She sat, joining them in a small lounge at the rear of the plane.

Sophie decided to get the practicalities out of the way. “What’s the other planet like? What’s it called?”

“I’ve never been there. I’ve seen videos and images that are in the archives. It’s not dissimilar to here, although slightly larger and unsurprisingly, since we named this planet, it’s called Earth. We call this one New Earth.”

“And your people have been flying around the universe for a long time?”

“Our historical records go back over five million years.”

Sophie fired question after question. Anya took them all in stride, detailing as much as she knew about the universe. Much of the detail was lost on Cash as the conversation became more and more detailed about the universe, its size, movements, how it worked, whether they knew of its creation, what they thought and why. Cash could see Anya was enjoying the conversation but he wanted to revisit some far more important topics. He let them talk a while longer
eventually, when Sophie never slowed her questions, he asked for a timeout.

“Sophie, would you mind giving me and my mother a few minutes?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Sophie. “I’m sorry I’ve rather taken over. You said you have videos?”

“In the archives, I’ll show them to you,” promised Anya.

“How are you going to do that?” asked Cash, as Sophie walked away to find Kyle.

“Do what?”

“Show her the videos, if she’s dead and you don’t need her any longer?”

“People like Sophie will be fine,” said Anya.

“Fine because she’s with me, fine because she’s Kyle’s mom or fine because she’s intelligent?”

“All of those things,” said Anya.

“So how many?”

“How many what?”

“How many need to die for you to bring your people to ‘New Earth’, the planet the humans prepared for you, unwittingly, and under the illusion that being born here means they belonged here.”

“Half,” said Anya, looking away.

“Half what?” asked Cash.

“Half the population
.” Anya swallowed hard.

“How many are you bringing here?” he choked.

“One billion. Our population has been strictly controlled, which should have been the case here.”

“Can you not hear what you’re saying?” pleaded Cash. “You’re talking about billions of Sophies, her father, my father
— the world is full of good people, intelligent people who make a difference, do things, help one another. And you’re just going to kill them because you have a billion of your own, whose own planet is dying? We’d have welcomed them with open arms, we’d make space for them, help them.” He paused. “Don’t you see what you’ve created? Helped create with our hard work?” he said, pointing down to the world below them. “Do you think you’re better than us?”

“We created you,” she said, her answer wavering.

“You didn’t. Antoine didn’t. That was tens of thousands of years ago.”

“It’s not my decision,” she said.

Finally, he was getting somewhere.

“Your history goes back five million years, who’s to say somebody didn’t play around with a few genes and create you guys?”

Anya considered the point. “Who knows?”

“Adolf Hitler,” said Cash.

“What about him?”

“He thought because of who he was, he was better than others. He believed that his Aryan race was superior to others. He killed
six million Jews. Once you guys get a taste for it, maybe you’ll hit six billion,” said Cash, standing and leaving Anya alone. He wanted to spend his time with his family.

The Senator rushed into his library. He only had thirty minutes to get to the airport and make it to the spaceport in time.

The laptop
Bea had given him to release the toxin into the world’s water supply was sitting where he had left it, along with the post-it note of instructions she had stuck to its lid. He grabbed it and turned back towards the door which was swinging closed. He hadn’t closed it behind him. He looked to his left, a man was sitting on his seat by his book-lined wall, in his favorite reading chair. His foot was outstretched having just shut the door.

“Sit down,”
the man ordered.

“Do you know who I am?” boomed the Senator.

The man pointed a silenced pistol at the Senator. “I won’t ask you again.”

“This is an outrage,” he said defiantly, taking the only seat available, the one behind his desk.

“And please don’t think I was stupid enough to leave your gun in the drawer, I’ll save you that disappointment.”

“
What do you want?”

“I want to understand what you’re doing.”

“Doing?”

“More specifically,
I want to know why a subsidiary of a trust that you are a director of has control of most data and statistical analysis bodies and why you are killing innocent aid workers who in particular help young pregnant girls.”

“I do no such thing!” boomed the Senator in his most disgusted tone.

Giles Tremellan fired the pistol and caught the Senator on his upper right arm.

The Senator grabbed at his wound.

“That’s just to show I’m not playing here.”

“Who are you?”

“Giles Tremellan, formerly DIS. Nearly
very
formerly.”

The Senator did his best to hide any recognition of the name.

“I was a very good friend of Mike Yates. I noticed you have a very interesting video on your computer there. If you hit the space bar it will play, move the screen around so we can both see.”

The screen came alive. Mike Yates was standing up and smiling to greet a very attractive woman. She laid down a phone to allow Mike to see. The resolution of the spy camera that the Senator had fitted was good enough to see what had turned Mike Yates’ face white. His daughter was on the woman’s screen, filmed through the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle that tracked her every movement in the schoolyard. The woman’s voice was clearly audible. “In less than five minutes, the bell will sound and the sniper will fire. You’ll see it here in front of you, unless you copy this note and then jump off this building. Four minutes thirty seconds,” she said. Mike looked at his daughter on the phone for less than a second before he had scribbled the note and ran from the office. His body was seen, a minute later, falling in front of his office window.
“And thirty seconds to spare,” she said, before picking up the phone and smiling at the spy camera.

Giles had watched it five times already. His anger still
swelled when he watched it again. “Why are you killing the aid workers? I won’t ask again!” he threatened.

“You wouldn’t understand,” replied the Senator.

The condescension of the answer infuriated Giles. He squeezed the trigger, sending a bullet thumping into the Senator’s chest.

The Senator felt for the wound, his eyes opening wide as the blood pumped onto his desk. He scrabbled for the laptop that Bea had given him. He opened the lid and hit the ‘On’ switch. Giles stood up and walked around, intrigued at the desperate last motions of the Senator. The screen lit up, a map of the world was displayed, a large area shaded red, predominantly Africa, Asia and South America. The senator was trying to move the cursor to a box that said ‘Yes’. Giles watched him struggle for a second before helping him by moving the cursor for him on to the ‘Yes’.

“Do you want me to press it for you?’ asked Giles.

The Senator
nodded, his hand still trying to do it for himself.

Giles pulled the trigger again, moving the cursor off the ‘Yes’. “Yeah right,” he said. He powered the laptop off and put a bullet through it for good measure. He had uncovered enough over the previous few days about the Senator to realize that whatever he was into was only ever good for the Senator. ‘Yes’ to him probably meant ‘No’ to everyone else. Giles would never know it wasn’t everyone,
only half of everyone. All three point five billion of them.