The God Complex: A Thriller (27 page)

Kyle rushed to his mother and gave her a hug. “You didn’t even said goodbye!” he said irritably. He may have looked like a strapping young man but he was still a boy at heart.

Cash smiled.
“Hey, Kyle.”

“Hey,” he mumbled in return, turning to Rigs
. “Hi, Rigs, how’s it going?”

Rigs looked briefly and half smiled in response, before being embraced by
Uncle Bill.

“I think you’re on the shit list!” Sophie
whispered.

“Oh,” said Cash disappointed.

“That’s good,” said Sophie. “It means he cares!”

“Where’s your
grandma?” she called across to Kyle, who was loading bags into the truck with Bill.

“She’s making dinner and didn’t want to leave it.”

“Oh dear God,” said Cash in mock horror.

“What?” said Sophie.

“Oh, nothing, I just remember your mom’s cooking,” he grimaced. “The green thing,” he shuddered.

“It’s not that bad
!” She slapped him on the arm. It was solid and stung her more than him.

T
he steward stepped up from behind him. “I wanted to say thank you for a few exciting days!” said the steward, admiring Cash’s muscles.

“
Thank you and the captain.” Cash waved up at the captain, who was keen to get going. “You’ve looked after us fantastically well.”

The steward gave Sophie a
quick hug and was gone. By the time they were driving away from the runway, the small jet was already leaping into the sky.

“Should we not have kept them here?” asked Sophie, realizing they were effectively stranded.

“It costs thousands of dollars an hour to have them sit here doing nothing,” said Cash. “And anyway, they’re only going to Seattle tonight, which is less than an hour’s flight away.”

Cash was pleased to see dinner was not the green thing and
he wondered whether Mrs. Kramer’s culinary skills had improved in the last fifteen years. Cash smiled at Sophie when he took his first bite and Sophie smiled back.

Cash looked around as everybody dug into the
ir meal. Rigs had paused after his first bite. He was a man who liked MREs and even he was struggling. Uncle Bill smiled painfully and Kyle, who knew what he was doing, kept his head down and ate.

“Mom, Cash was asking if you still made your wonderful
chicken and celery dish?”

Chicken and celery
.
Oh dear God, the full horror of the dish came flooding back. He wanted to tell everyone to enjoy what they were eating, since they had no idea what was in store for them. Cash smiled at Sophie, before turning to Mrs. Kramer. “That’s not fair, you’ve already cooked us a wonderful dinner tonight. We can cook tomorrow.”

“Not at all, I insist!” she said
. “I’ll make it for lunch tomorrow!”

Lunch
? Not even twenty-four hours to recover, thought Cash.

Once dinner was finished and cleared away
, Sophie got down to work. Charts were spread across every available workspace in the kitchen. Cash hovered for ten minutes and was unceremoniously dismissed for breathing too loudly. He sought out Kyle, who was learning the finer details of fly tying. Uncle Bill was taking him fly fishing in the morning. Cash hung around but seemed to get in the way. Mrs. Kramer had turned in early, as she had most nights, in order to grieve on her own.

Cash went in search of Rigs
, who he found lying on a sun lounger on a darkened terrace staring intently at the sky above.

“Amazing?”

Rigs nodded. “It makes you feel very insignificant.”

“It’s a big place
.”

“Big enough for more than
just us,” Rigs remarked.

Cash turned to him
. “You think we’re hunting things from out there?”

Rigs shook his head
. “Nope, I think we’re hunting them here; whether they originally came from out there is the question.”

The helicopters had spent the entire day ferrying Atlas Noble staff to and from the hospital ship. Clad in full biohazard suits, the doctors and nurses had worked tirelessly to find and help anyone they could along the Sepik River. When darkness had fallen fully, the living stood at only two hundred thirty one men, women and children. The dead were nearing one thousand times that. It was the single biggest tragedy to have hit the world since the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and was expected to be even greater. The ten helicopters from the hospital ship had covered most of the river’s length but there were still a few villages to visit, though little hope was held out for any more than a handful of survivors.

Doctor Ernesto Rojas, the nun
, and the little girl were among the first to be recovered. Ernesto had passed on every detail he could to the staff who had taken care of them. He provided details of the day before the tragedy. It had been a day like any other, nothing, he repeated, nothing was untoward. The doctors had talked to him from behind their masks, asking him countless questions:
The water, was there anything different in its taste? Did he have the same water as everyone else in the village? Did it rain? Was there a flood recently? What was his heritage? His racial background?
The questions went on and on as the doctors and scientists searched for a clue as to what had happened.

Ernesto
wracked his brains for anything he thought was significant but he could think of nothing. The little girl with the nun had heard a loud buzzing during the night, which had elicited a significant amount of interest from all around. When she heard the same noise again, everyone looked around. It was the noise of the plane landing on the deck of the ship. The little girl was adamant the noise was the same. The doctors wrote everything down.

T
he day progressed, and the number of survivors boarding dropped. Fewer and fewer helicopters came back with anything other than news of more dead. Ernesto noted that all the survivors had one thing in common, none of them were Iamult. The vast majority were like him, aid or charity workers. A few were from tribal clans that had been doing business with the Iamults and, in a couple of instances, had married into the tribe. These were the most devastated. Their families had been wiped out, husbands, wives, children. Even although they weren’t Iamult, their children were half Iamult and that seemed to be enough. As the day wore on, the number of doctors asking questions reduced, but the questions were the same and just as probing. The same answers came back, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing different, a few people had heard a plane.

With darkness falling
, the survivors were sent up onto the deck. A ship lay off to the starboard, a small cruise liner, tiny in comparison to the enormous hospital ship.

“The facilities on board this ship are fairly basic and really only meant for sick patients,” said Bea Noble
through a megaphone. “We’re going to have to quarantine you until we can figure out what has happened here but we feel you deserve a more comfortable environment, given what you’ve been through.”

“Would we not be better in a hospital
?” shouted one of the charity workers.

“As far as we can tell, you
’re all perfectly healthy. However, we will be monitoring you very closely. A team of physicians will stay with you on the cruise ship and you will stay next to us here. Should an outbreak occur, we can have you in an operating theatre within ten minutes.”

“I don’t mind staying here,” said a M
édecins Sans Frontières doctor. “I’m an infectious diseases expert.”

“That
’s very kind of you to offer but I’m afraid you are to be quarantined. Not our decision, but the US government’s, which has taken over authority of this ship.”

“I’m an American citizen,” came two shouts that Bea Noble could hear.

“People!” she shouted, her frustration building. “We’re going to turn our wards into refrigerators and create the largest morgue in the world. I’m sorry, but this ship is
not
somewhere you want to be!”

The shouts stopped and the survivors queued up for the short hop by helicopter across to the cruise ship. The Seabourn cruise
liner had been acquired earlier that day as it had sailed past Papua New Guinea on its way to a south Pacific tour. One of the more exclusive cruise liners, Seabourn offered its passengers one of the highest crew to customer ratios of any cruise liner, along with large and luxurious cabins. The survivors were not going to benefit from the crew to survivor ratio but they were certainly going to enjoy the luxury the ship offered, particularly given the medieval existence they had recently experienced.

As each was shown to their suites, all with ocean view
s, complaints stopped. If they were going to be quarantined, there wasn’t a better place they could think of to have to wait it out.

With the survivors out of the way, the doctors could concentrate on the search for an answer. The virologists had been struggling all day to find anything untoward in any of the samples that had been taken. Even the CDC staff who had arrived late in the day were in the dark. There was nothing that looked out of place, no virus, no disease, no parasite, nothing. It was as though a switch had
simply turned off the Iamult race. In effect, that is what Bea had done. The toxin had delivered a genetic code change to the Iamult people, the equivalent to an update for a computer. There was no poison, no disease, no virus. The Iamults’ new genetic code had simply switched them off. Their bodies were programmed to expel moisture, thus leaving behind a mummified corpse, saving the world from even having to deal with rotting corpses.

While the team searched for an answer
, Bea looked over the survivors’ reports. She noted the plane had been mentioned a few times; it was their only oversight. Planes seldom flew over that area at night. It was an anomaly. Thankfully, Bea had the ability to alter the reports before they made it into the database. She left two reports in, one was from the little girl who had never seen a plane, let alone knew what one sounded like. She described it as a buzzing sound. The other was from a man who, according to his report, didn’t know where he was and clearly wasn’t entirely sane. The seven other reports of hearing a plane were deleted.

Bea moved on to the heritage report. She found it fascinating that the mixed race Iamults also
succumbed to the reprogramming. That was an unexpected find and one she would have to consider moving forward. The rest of the list was particularly unremarkable.

A knock on her cabin door was followed by Dr
. Paul Lockhart, director of the CDC.

“They said I’d find you here
,” he said walking in and hugging her.

“It’s good to see you,”
Bea said, moving her papers away. “I didn’t think you were coming after the first transport of your people arrived without you!”

“Wouldn’t have missed it
. No way was I was hiding back in the office with this going on here. I had to meet with President Mitchell and caught the later flight. I didn’t want to hold my guys up, I’m sure you needed the help.”

No
,
she thought. “Of course,” she said aloud. “They’ve been great but I’m afraid we’re struggling to find anything.”

“My guys want to concentrate on the water
. They think it’s definitely something the victims have ingested and as they all have the same source of water…”

“It certainly makes sense.”

“I see the survivors are enjoying a little luxury at Atlas Noble’s expense, I understand.”

“Please, we’d rather keep that quiet. The opportunity arose and we took it.”

“It must be costing a fortune, offering to fly two hundred passengers home after compensating them for their loss and hiring a ship for their exclusive use in the meantime?”

Bea smiled.
“Atlas Noble can afford it.”

“Hell, the US
government could afford it, but would they have done that? I don’t think so.”

“Those people have witnessed a horror beyond our imagination
, it’s the least we can do,” replied Bea, looking down at her sheets and reminding herself again of the wonderful cross-section of the human DNA spectrum offered by the survivors. Combined with their previous exposure, their overnight demise would be chalked up as a delayed reaction to whatever had killed the Iamults.

It had been a difficult few days for Cash. He had tagged along with Bill and Kyle on their fishing trip but it was clear from the minute they left to the minute they got back that Kyle would have preferred he hadn’t. Unperturbed, he joined them the next day for a hunt, dragging Rigs along too, hoping Rigs could keep Bill busy enough for Kyle to have to talk to Cash. Instead, Kyle spent the day talking to an unresponsive and highly uncomfortable Rigs, leaving Cash and Bill both out of the picture.

The third day was to be a hike into the mountains that surrounded the lodge. Cash decided to sit it out. He was trying to
o hard and getting nowhere. Kyle needed some space and time to come to terms with everything that had happened. It had been less than a week since he had lost his grandfather. Cash suddenly realized that, in fact, he’d lost both his grandfathers! And he was piling on the pressure to get to know him as his father.

“You ready?” called Kyle through the lodge as he and Bill prepared to leave.

Rigs wandered out halfheartedly. Bill had insisted he join the group. Rigs was not looking forward to it. He loved hiking. He loved getting one to one with nature. He simply wasn’t keen on the thousand plus questions he was due to be assaulted with over the day.

Sophie and Cash ushered Rigs to the door
, ready to wave them all off.

“You not coming?” asked Kyle looking at Cash.

“No,” Sophie jumped in. “I need him to help me today.”

Cash recovered quickly
. “I’d have loved to but…”

“I’m nearly there and I just need a little bit of help.”

“Shame… it’s a lovely day,” said Kyle, turning and joining Bill and Rigs.

Rigs
threw Cash a look that could kill and they disappeared.

“What was that for?” asked Sophie,
referring to Rigs’ angry look.

Cash laughed
. “That was for me not going with them.”

“Is he jealous?”

Cash laughed even harder. “Only of the peace we’ll get from our son!”

Sophie
looked hurt.

“He loves Kyle, he just doesn’t love his inquisitiveness, particularly of him.”

“I don’t get it,” she said, her arms folding.

“Kyle spent the day firing question
s at him, like, which rifle’s your favorite? Which one’s the best? What’s your favorite pistol? Why is it your favorite? And on and on all day!”

“And Rigs answered them all?”

“Not a one, not one answer. Didn’t stop Kyle asking though, all day long.”

“Poor Rigs
. He is a strange one though, sometimes I think I’m getting somewhere and then it’s back to the intimidating guy at the back of the room.”

“He’ll get better, it’s a slow process.”

“For you too?”

“A little different
. The environment was different and we were both coming from places we could relate to.”

“Let’s not go there,” said Sophie, knowing where Cash had come from. He had been with her up until
the day he had met Rigs.

“Probably best,”
said Cash. “So why’d you stop me joining them?”

“He’s playing with you, and I wasn’t going to let him.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’d have rushed, got changed,
got all excited about the day and then he’d have ignored you as he has the previous two days.”

“No
, he’s not like that.”

“He’s a teenager, the
y’re all like that. You’ve barely known him four days, trust me. And anyway, I do need your help.” She led him through to her workspace. The kitchen table had become out of bounds to everyone and it was the first Cash was getting to see what she had spent almost forty-eight solid hours on.

Papers were scattered across the table and the surrounding floor,
all covered in calculations. One large sheet lay in the middle of the table, with a few notes and symbols scribbled across it, otherwise it was mainly blank.

“Going well then?”

“It is actually, but as I said, we might need to visit some other locations at some point. I’ve got enough to keep me busy right now.”

“So where do I come in?”

“I need you to listen and tell me how crazy this sounds,” she said. “Take a seat.”

Cash sat
down and waited while Sophie gathered her thoughts.

“
Okay, most of this is from your father’s research. The measurements I take are to calculate the timeline for the events. The timeline isn’t yet complete. I’m struggling with a couple of the calculations, we’re talking unbelievably complex calculations here, that even the laptop is struggling with.”

Cash
edged forward on his seat.

“Your father spent years analyzing every detail across the sites he’s highlighted in his research notes, literally thousands of locations where similar structures or artifacts have been uncovered or found. Pumapunka, Tiwanaku, Machu Picchu, Saksaywaman, Nazca and Palpa are particularly special because of how they were built and point to your father’s belief that there was a far more advanced race of humans in our past than we
’re aware of.”

“The ones you think are the guardians of the secret?”

“Two secrets, one being that there is a history we’re unaware of but secondly, and this is where the research comes in, a secret about our future and more importantly the timeline of when that will be.”

“So we
might be resolving one of them?”

“
No, both of them,” she said, pleased with herself. “Well, at least I think so.”

Cash said nothing, willing her to continue.

“I believe the second secret foretells the end of the world.”

“Oh,” said Cash.

“Don’t worry, I think it’s a long way off,” she laughed. “It certainly appears to be from my calculations so far, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of years.”

“And the
y’re killing people to protect that?”

“I hadn’t really put the science and practice together,”
said Sophie. “It does seem a little extreme.”

“Are you sure there’s not something else?” asked Cash
, looking down at her work.

“Unless I’m missing something really basic
…”

She began to wade through her own work, checking and double
-checking against Professor Harris’ notes.

“Look
, see, this place?” she pointed at a printout of an overhead satellite image.

“Impressive,” nodded Cash.

“Teotihuacan, built over two thousand years ago, pyramids on a similar scale to those at Giza in Egypt, although nowhere near as grand, but watch.”

Sophie took an image that had been printed on tracing paper and laid it on top.

“The buildings match,” said Cash, “they sit on top of one another.”

“These are the pyramids at Giza, built over six thousand years ago.”

Sophie pulled out another sheet, again another printout, and overlaid it onto the two previous ones.

“They match again,” said Cash.

“The two sets of buildings are laid out exactly in the way Orion’s belt sits in the sky above us. And that’s only one tiny example but massive in its own right. I mean, look,” she said, pulling out picture after picture, pyramid after pyramid. “They were building them everywhere. But why pyramids? They weren’t easy to build, they weren’t practical. And we’re talking about a time people lived in wood huts, didn’t have proper tools, paper to plan things on, an understanding of mechanics, the list goes on. Still, they were somehow able to build these enormous structures and on top of it all, managed to align them to stars in the sky!”

“But why?” asked Cash.

“Nobody fucking knows!” she said exasperated.

“Sophie!”
scolded her mother having walked in at exactly that moment. “Sophie,” said her mother again, without the ‘tone’.

“Mom
, not now, we’re in the middle—”

“But...”

Sophie ignored her mother and grabbed the images of the Great pyramid. “Let’s take this as an example. It’s the most perfect pyramid ever built. It’s probably one of the most perfect
buildings
ever built. Do you know it was the tallest building in the world for millennia, and if you exclude church spires, probably until the 1800s? And it remains the heaviest!”

“Pyramid?” asked Cash.

“No, the heaviest building in the world. Almost six million tons. The list goes on and on, perfectly aligned to true North, its sides are ever so slightly concave and match the radius of the earth and only visible on the spring and autumn equinoxes from the air. Its cornerstone foundations have been designed to cope with heat and earthquakes. The mortar used has been analyzed but can’t be replicated. It was encased in limestone. Its sides would have been perfectly smooth and when the sunlight hit would have been dazzling for miles around. Mathematically, it’s pretty much perfect and all this without any plans!”

“It does sound implausible.”

“Not as implausible as the Egyptologists’ version of how it was built in twenty years.”

“That does seem quite a long time.”

Sophie shook her head. “There are over 2.3 million blocks, each weighing over two tons and some up to seventy. Let’s assume they did it in twenty years. Now bear in mind, the stones were cut and fit together perfectly. Those stones were quarried four hundred miles away. So we need to cut the stones perfectly, transport them across land to the river, sail them four hundred miles, transport them across land before positioning them perfectly up to four hundred and fifty feet high. All of this is over 6,000 years ago, when we don’t have any mechanical devices to do any of this.”

“
Okay,” said Cash, not daring to question anything she was saying.

“That they
were able to cut these blocks so precisely, move them over four hundred miles and lay them at a rate of one every five minutes, day and night for twenty years, is implausible. If you take it down to only daytime, it would be double that. Every two and a half minutes for twenty years, without any plans.”

“So how did they do it
?”

“We don’t know, and you know why?”

“Because they didn’t tell us?”

“Exactly
. The Egyptians, who loved their hieroglyphs, just so happened to not leave anything about their single most incredible feat. And you know why?”

Cash nodded, understanding
. “They didn’t build them!”

“Well
, that’s what your father believed, and I can’t say I disagree.”

“But how does that relate to the secret about the end of the world?” asked Cash.

“Yes, sorry, I got off point a bit there…” she said. “Where was I before I got into pyramids?”

“Aligning with the stars
I think.”

“Yes, that was it
. There are examples from around the world of pyramid building by the ancients but why?”

“Are you asking me?”

“No, I’m asking myself. I’m going back to the basics and the basics are that this is worldwide, not just where we’ve been.”

“The guardians travelled the
Earth in the past?”

“
Yes, but although I agree there was an advanced race, are you talking about flight? Because I’m not sure we’re talking that advanced!”

“The Nazca
Lines?”

“Visible from a thousand feet up, they may have been able to make a rudimentary balloon of some sort, or perhaps a glider
. But travel across the oceans? I don’t think so. That’s technology way beyond the ancients.”

“But not aliens?” said Cash.

“You’re going off track even more now, this is potentially about the end of the world,” she said.

The kitchen door burst open.
“End of the world? What world?” asked Senator Bertie Noble with a smile, as he waltzed into the kitchen, trailing Travis Davies in his wake.

Sophie’s mom looked at her
. “I tried to tell you I heard a plane but you weren’t listening to me.”

Sophie didn’t say a word
. She scurried back to her papers. Something had just triggered another thought.