The God Complex: A Thriller (12 page)

The private jet touched down at 10:30 a.m. local time at Gibraltar International Airport. Conrad had never been to the small outcrop before and watched as they sped down the runway which seemed to cross a main road. Cars waited behind a barrier, almost like at a railway crossing. He thought it bizarre, although given his operation brief, it was the least bizarre thing he had seen that day.

It had been a long flight, having departed New York the previous night
on very short notice. They would have arrived earlier had it not been for Conrad replacing one of the originally scheduled operatives at the last moment. A new recruit to DIS, it was to be Conrad’s first operation and despite his new status, he quickly took charge of the operation, delaying takeoff until the arrival of additional equipment that, as soon as they landed was loaded into the rear of their waiting Land Rover.

Conrad
motioned for his colleague, Niklas, to drive, before jumping into the passenger seat. Right as they were about to drive off, an officious looking little man appeared by their side.

“I’m sorry
, gentlemen, but you need to clear immigration and customs before you can enter the country.”

Conrad
remained calm and handed over both his and Niklas’s passport. Being both originally German, they had both US and German passports. In this instance, they handed over their German EU passports, which allowed them unrestricted access to the European Union.

“Thank you, and if I could check your trunk
? I noticed a lot of luggage was loaded into it.”

The UK had some of the strictest gun laws in the world, with little tolerance for anything beyond a hunting shotgun for personal use and even then only after thorough checks
were carried out. It was therefore with some trepidation that Conrad led the customs official to the rear of the Land Rover and popped the trunk.

The official took one look and stepped back
. “What are those?” he asked nervously.

Conrad
followed the official’s eye to see what he had spotted. Two helmets sat on top of everything in the trunk.

“Ah,
they’re for our biohazard suits.”

“Biohazard as in diseases?”

“Yes, we’re medical specialists,” said Conrad.

“Fine, you
’re good to go,” said the official, refusing politely to shake Conrad’s hand as they parted.

Conrad
climbed into the passenger seat and pulled his tablet from his backpack. Dr. Pyotr Vilic’s iPhone was beaming his location to them. Their secret dig, owing to a simple hack of Apple’s iPhone finder, wasn’t so secret anymore.

Conrad
directed Niklas out of the city of Gibraltar, around the Bay of Gibraltar, and up into the hills overlooking Algeciras and the bay below. With less than a mile to the highlighted destination, they stopped and donned their suits.

Dr. Pyotr Vilic, pulled himself head first through the hole, wishing he had foregone dinner the previous night. He clawed desperately to squeeze through the hole that would have been more suited to a small child. Despite his premature attempt at a proper view, he was nonetheless afforded a spectacular glimpse of the cave. Paintings adorned the walls, spectacularly vibrant colors covering every space, images of a life long lost played out across the stone surface, drawings of families, dwellings, encampments, animals, of tools and birds, a history of Neanderthals in their own pictures that would rewrite the history books. He pulled himself back through the hole. In another hour, the hole would be big enough to get through.

“I’d fit,”
said Sara, a petite final year doctorate student.

Pyotr was desperate to know what was around the bend in the cave, ten meters beyond their entrance hole
, but he was also desperate to be the first to see it. Twenty years of waiting. However, Sara could be in there beaming pictures back to them on their video camera. He could see what was there.

“
Alright,” he said. “But you have to take the camera and let us see everything as you see it.”

Sarah beamed.
“Of course.” She rushed towards the small entrance hole, donned a safety helmet complete with light, and shimmied through. Pyotr noted she could probably have been through it an hour earlier such was her slightness of build.

Sara
pulled herself up on the other side of the hole and waited for the video camera to be handed to her. A lead led back to a screen that would let her colleagues see what she was seeing and a powerful light above the camera would also help light her way.

Sara
worked her way along the wall of the cave that Pyotr had seen, capturing the storyboard as it played out. A tranquil image of a way of life that had been the Neanderthals’, before their extinction. Small hunter gatherer communities that seemed to live peacefully. When Sara approached the bend, the images took on a slightly more sinister tone, some basic weapons began to enter into the drawings along with images of battles. Two distinct beings were shown.

Pyotr was astounded, images of battles between what looked like Neanderthal and Homo sapiens
— modern man— were played out in the drawings. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.

“What is that?” asked one of his assistants
. “Go left, Sara!” he shouted, having caught something in the corner of the screen.

Sara
swept the camera around, images flashing past wildly, and shone the light onto the left hand side of the cave.

“What was that
?” Pyotr said, catching a glimpse of one of the images during the sweep. “Was that some kind of bird swooping down?”

“With fire spilling out its tail
?” said another assistant, having noticed the same image.

“
Sara, go back!” they shouted, but then Sara’s light fell on the full scale of the cave and the hundreds, if not thousands, of skeletons that filled it.

“Oh my
God…” said Pyotr in wonder. All eyes of the group were utterly transfixed to the small screen. So much so, that they had not noticed the arrival of Conrad and his colleague dressed in full biohazard suits.

Sara
scanned the camera across the cave, easily two hundred feet wide and twice as deep. Skeletons littered over half of the floor area, while the other half was filled with tools and weapons never before seen. Everything had been pristinely preserved. It was the find of the century, if not millennia Pyotr thought triumphantly which, as a last thought, was not an entirely bad way to go.

Conrad
and his colleague wasted no time. By the time the research assistants were aware they were under attack, they were already falling to the ground, with two bullets in each of their heads.

The images on the screen beamed back blissfully unaware of the carnage outside.
Sara scanned back and forth, capturing the final drawings, a massacre drawn to tell of a historic battle, the only witness to a catastrophic moment in the extinction of an entire species. If they had had time to analyze the drawings, they would have made the most startling discovery. The Neanderthals had been the victors in nearly every battle, stronger and more intelligent than their homo sapien rivals. It was exactly as evolution had predicted, the survival of the fittest.

“Why are we wearing these stupid suits?” asked
Conrad’s colleague.

“To protect us
from what’s down there,” said Conrad.

“Skeletons and drawings according to those pictures,” he said, moving to remove his helmet
. The heat was almost unbearable in the midday sunshine.

“Don’t
!” shouted Conrad but too late. Niklas removed it and gulped in the fresh air.

Conrad
shook his head and instructed him to help deposit the bodies into the cave. They had no concern for artifacts, and enlarged the hole in minutes to ease the depositing of bodies into the cave.

The noise
, not unexpectedly, alerted Sara and she scurried towards them, receiving two bullets for her curiosity. Conrad walked along to the main section of the cave and gasped at the scale of what lay before him. The skeletons were neatly stacked, apart from the last few. They had obviously died last. The last images depicted a sick and dying people, imprisoned in a cave.

“What is that?” asked
Niklas, dragging Pyotr’s body into the main section and seeing the bird with fire tails swooping down.

“That is the moment that Neanderthals were wiped off the face of the planet
,” replied Conrad.

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“So what
does the bird mean?” asked Niklas.

“Mean?”

“What does it symbolize
? It looks like it’s breathing down onto the people.”

“It doesn’t symbolize anything, it’s as it is, a disease being delivered to wipe out the Neanderthals.”

Niklas looked around at the hundreds of skeletons lined behind them. “So they were all killed by the same disease?”

“Yes, they were the last of their kind
. Killed by a disease so deadly it will live on in their bones,” said Conrad, raising his pistol to the back of Niklas’ head.

“How
do you know all this?” asked Niklas suddenly aware of how much Conrad appeared to know that had nothing to do with the images on the wall.

“Because,” said
Conrad to Niklas’ falling corpse, “my ancestors were the ones who wiped them out and left them in this cave.”

Conrad
gathered up all the communications equipment and set charges at the mouth of the cave to ensure its secret stayed safe for another 30,000 years. He deposited all of the team’s communications products across Algeciras on the drive back to the airport in Gibraltar. If anyone tracked their last known location, they would not uncover the dig site. With all of his tracks covered, Conrad boarded the waiting private jet.

“Mr
. Noble!” shouted the officious customs officer.

Conrad
Noble turned to face him at the top of the steps, etching a strained smile on his face. “Yes?”

“Was everything
okay? Have we got anything to worry about?”

“No, everything’s fine
,” he said dismissively.

Conrad
Noble was in the air within minutes, jumping the queue of waiting aircraft. He was head of the Atlas Noble Security division, ultimate owner and only client of the Defense Initiative Services.

Deep Space Mission – Last Hope

Log entry 14

Mission Commander

We have slowed and taken up a low orbit around our new home. It is beautiful, with oceans and lands as blue and green as our own. Of the hundreds of billions of galaxies and possibilities our scientists scanned, I truly believe they could not have picked a more perfect new home.

I hope this communication is received, as I am pleased to say that the previous missions have been successful. I repeat, they have been successful. Although we are not able to communicate with our people on the ground, we can see numerous messages laid out across the surface of the planet.

The planet is viable and is, according to the messages we are able to decipher, a perfect solution to our dying home. From what we have been able to understand, the polarity of the planet is responsible for the inability of our communications systems to work once we break through into the atmosphere. It would also suggest the reason no ship has returned, our engines are similarly affected and as a result, the main engines will not have the power to allow us to leave once we land.

We were all aware before we left this was a one way journey, but at least we know it is not in vain. We have a future. Our people will live on.

This may well be the last communication that you receive; we will try once we land as directed by the messages below. If it is, I promise we will be waiting with a warm welcome when you come.

Alain Noble, Mission Commander, Last Hope

Antoine Noble
turned away from the mission logs and stared absently across the lake. Whenever he needed the motivation for what needed to be done, no matter how difficult, he found the strength within the logs. Antoine had many houses around the world but after his momentous trip to the UN, there was only one he wanted to visit. Geneva was where he felt most at home. His happiest childhood memories were all forged within the confines of the palatial home, one of the oldest and most magnificent homes to honor the shores of the lake of a city that predated the birth of Christianity.

T
he secret his family held was known to only a handful of people. The implications on the future direction of the planet, were the truth to be known, would be catastrophic for the plans his family had put in place to save the population. A plan that had been in preparation for more years than even Antoine was aware. His first knowledge of the truth was handed to him on his twenty-first birthday, when his father took him into the confidence of a secret only the Nobles knew about and even then, only a select few at the top echelons of the Atlas Noble empire were fully aware. Antoine would soon be having that same conversation with his own son, although for his son the timescale was all the more pressing. He was destined to live a very different future from Antoine and the Nobles before him who had strived to ensure their children had a future.

Antoine walked across his study to
a wall of books that would have been a prized possession of any of the world’s great libraries. First editions of some of the most notable works ever to have been published adorned the shelves that stretched the length of the wall and twelve feet to the ceiling. Many visitors to his inner sanctum had noted how priceless the collection was. Antoine would smile in appreciation, it was nothing compared to what lay behind.

As a child
, he had known of the secret doorway. His father had done little to hide it, nor did Antoine. His son likewise was fully aware of the section that would swing open. It was no secret, as the door went nowhere. Behind it stood a wall of metal; no dials or knobs adorned it; it just stood there for no apparent reason. Alex had asked many times what the point of a secret door to nowhere was, as Antoine had asked of his father. Like his father before him, Antoine had simply smiled and promised one day he would know.

Antoine pulled open the not so secret door and pressed the ring his father had bestowed up
on him over thirty years before against the metal wall. The wall slid away and allowed Antoine entry to the lift behind. He stepped in and on pressing the panel to his right, closed the metal wall and began the journey to the depths of the Noble family vault, buried deep in the Swiss bedrock, one of the most stable areas in the world. Antoine’s mood instantly improved when the elevator arrived at the vault floor. The history of the Noble family’s achievements stretched out before him, the vast chamber stretching deep into the distance.

“Antoine?
” a voice called out to his left.

“A
nya,” he smiled, greeting his sister with a kiss.

“
Congratulations on the treaty,” she said.

“
Thanks, at least when the news breaks and we can’t hide what’s inevitable any longer, nobody can do anything stupid,” he said, all the while taking in the view around him.

She shook her head
. “You know I disagree with you. I don’t think anyone is that stupid.” She led the way into the depths of the chamber.

“You’ve spent your life in a very different world to mine
. I deal with these people day in day out, and if there’s one thing I can guarantee, when their backs are to the wall and they think they’re going to lose control, they’ll do anything to show how powerful they are. And don’t forget,” he added, “it was you that told me that the electromagnetic pulse generated by nuclear weapons, if anyone did use them, would destroy everything you had achieved.”

Anya nodded
. “Yes, but I didn’t say it
would
happen, I was replying to your question if there were any potential risks to our work.”

“Even the slightest risks have to be managed
. Nothing can interfere with what we’re doing, our future and the entire population’s future rest on it.”

“Hubble 2
,” Anya said, her tone changing to one of disapproval.

“You yourself warned me of its capabilities and you were correct
.”

“Not that we’ll ever know.”

“We do and it did.”

“It worked
?” she asked in surprise. “But it had only just been launched, how can we know for sure?”

“Because they knew exactly where to look
,” Antoine crowed.

“They did?”

“Professor Charles Harris, it seems ,worked out where to look.”

“Charles did?” she asked
, surprised.

“Seems his interest in ancient ruins paid off. An interest
, if I remember, he picked up from you.”

Anya turned
her attention to a computer screen. “Well if he knew exactly where to look, he didn’t need Hubble 2.”

“He didn’t?”

“Not at all,” she said starting to walk again, with Antoine hanging on her every word. “Given current technologies, as we near the date of convergence, everything becomes clearer, although it is at the limits of what’s currently available but if you know where to look...”

“So if somebody finds his research?”

“Yes, they could uncover the truth before we want them to. It’s a shame Charles had to die for the sake of three weeks.” Her tone and words were as close to a complaint as she would ever dare make to her older brother and head of the Noble household. His authority was never questioned and never challenged.

Both remained silent as they continued to walk through the chamber filled with antiquities and treasures,
each categorized and sub-categorized by date, period and significance. Books, scrolls, tapestries, tablets, the further they walked the older the works became, the first printed book, the first Koran, the first Bible, the first Torah, each step took them back in time. Vases and works of art from the Romans blended into those from the Greeks, the Egyptians and finally the Sumerians. They had reached the end of the chamber, hundreds of thousands of square feet of works that documented and heralded the progression of the human race back to its very beginning, the dawn of civilization.

A
nya opened the vault door they had reached at the far end of the chamber and the dawn of civilization. A small sub-chamber appeared with another vault door at the far end. Only once one vault door shut would the other open. The main chamber was strictly controlled from both an atmosphere and security perspective. Constant humidity and temperature were strictly maintained to protect the works. Once the main vault door was closed, Anya opened the second to reveal a corridor that led to a clinical scientific lab, bustling with activity. The Atlas Noble company logo adorned the walls. A wall of glass that stretched the length of the lab, some one hundred feet, had a view of a metal tube approximately three feet in diameter within a tunnel five hundred feet below ground level. The tunnel stretched off into the distance either side of where the glass wall ended, circling for a total of 27km, almost 17 miles. The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, lay before them, widely heralded as one of the great engineering milestones of mankind.

Its purpose, publicly, was to further investigate theories and principles of physics
, advancing the understanding of physics and through it, the make-up and origins of the universe. The scale of the project was massive, with requirements that dwarfed the capabilities of any one country, but thanks to Atlas Noble bringing together over one hundred countries and thousands of companies, the accelerator had been completed. It had been Atlas Noble’s single largest ever investment and a personal mission of Antoine.

Antoine looked away from the most advanced piece of human engineering to the other wall, where the schematics and plans for the accelerator were displayed. Not the ones that had been given to the scientists who had subsequently built the accelerator but the originals. Antoine looked at the stone tablets that pre-dated human civilization,
ones that his ancestors had rescued from the depths of the great pyramids in Egypt thousands of years earlier, stored for a time when technology could create the device the tablets described in great detail.

“Magnificent,” said Antoine
, not taking his eyes away from the tablets.

“Truly,” agreed A
nya, her eyes transfixed on the accelerator. Although to the outside world, her title was Head of Archives, her background was as a physicist, which, given the project underway, could not have been more appropriate.

“How far away are we?” asked Antoine excitedly.

“Hours, days, weeks at most.”

“
But before the convergence begins?” he asked excitedly.

“Yes.”