Trifariam, The Lost Codex (2012) (58 page)

“Tell me more.”

“Well, the extraterrestrials allegedly didn’t keep to the agreement, which led to the army engaging in arduous aerial combat with the extraterrestrial spacecraft. This confirmed the superiority of the latter so they were allowed to go on breaching the treaties until we managed to improve our weaponry. That is how the projects Joshua and Excalibur came about.”

“Joshua and Excalibur?” he asked, intrigued.

“Yes, the first one was a weapon seized from the Germans which used low frequency sound waves to bore through four-inch thick armor plating. The second was a weapon capable of penetrating into the ground up to a depth of around three thousand feet. The following sections talk about the widespread fear that the planet would self-destruct due to overpopulation and the exploitation of the Earth. They suggested three alternatives for finding a solution. ‘Alternative 1’ would be to create holes in the stratosphere through which heat and pollution could escape into space, and we would then have to change our way of life to avoid pollution and exploitation. ‘Alternative 2’ involved building a network of underground cities where a cross-section of society would be able to survive. ‘Alternative 3’ option was to allow a small group of people to leave the planet and start up colonies elsewhere in the universe. The rest of the chapters talk about the extraterrestrials and their evil plans for the human race. It even hints at a comparison which would make even the most hardened skeptic unsure, reminding us that the Jews calmly made their way to the ovens without possibly imagining what tragedy lay in store for them.”

“So according to his theories, the extraterrestrials want to annihilate and enslave us.”

“Something like that.”

James sighed, he could hardly believe a word. “My daughter must have seen those initials somewhere. From what you said, it is a secret government which lurks behind the scenes and pulls the strings of power. But between that information and the name my daughter gave me, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Name? What name?”

James remembered that he had forgotten to tell him due to nerves. “Before the kidnapper cut us off, Lily whispered a name to me. It was Michael Ranley.”

Richard took a deep breath and his eyes shone brighter than before, something that James noticed immediately.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, it’s just that…”

“Tell me! I don’t know what to do!”

“It’s probably nonsense, but I heard about a ridiculous theory a while back. An author from New Zealand had come to the conclusion that the members of Majority 12 used double identities for their own security. They even claimed to have discovered the name of a member and his real identity. After studying the two names, they found that it was an anagram.”

“What? So the code name, the one they use in that committee, is an anagram of their real name?”

“Exactly. Don’t ask me why, I guess it must be for reasons of secrecy.”

James became nervous. He was getting closer to discovering who was behind all this and he knew where he would find the definitive answer. He ran towards the door.

Richard followed him, but James sharply prevented him from going any further.

“Wait here for me. I’ll be right back.”

The paleographer was taken aback but he didn’t want to argue with him.

A few seconds later and after checking that coast was clear, he stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. Even though the corridor was deserted, the surveillance cameras which lined the ceiling at four-yard intervals did not grant him the anonymity he would have liked.

As soon as he stepped into the corridor he turned right, towards the Director of Area 51’s office. He was the only person who could help right now. There was obviously a mole inside in the complex, or how else would they have known that Richard was heading for the Bermuda Triangle? Alpha 2 tried to kill him, somebody must have told him where he was. Plus the kidnapper had used a voice synthesizer during their last phone conversation. Maybe they had wanted to avoid being recognized? He almost ran the first four hundred yards until he was shocked to hear an unintelligible murmuring coming from one of the doors at the side. Even though he couldn’t make out what they were saying, he immediately knew who that voice belonged to. He had heard it on television hundreds of times and he could pick it out among a million other voices - it was the President of the United States.

He continued on his way without paying much more attention. He assumed that the Site Director would have full access to all the staff who worked at the complex. He could get hold of a list with all their names and check for himself who was the mole.

No sooner had he turned the corner than he felt his cellphone vibrating in his pocket, just as he could make out the Director’s office at the end of the corridor.
Number withheld
. “Yes!” he said in a serious and loud voice, almost shouting. Nobody spoke. “Who the fuck are you?! What do you want from me?!”

“Mr. Oldrich, are you feeling alright?”

It wasn’t the voice James had expected to hear. The scientist Justin O’Brien was speaking to him instead.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m just a little tired. Work things,” he lied.

“Where are you? The Director is calling for you to go the meeting room.”

Shit, Charly is in the meeting!
he said to himself when he eventually reached the office door. “I was just on my way to his office to talk to him. I have something very important to tell him and I need to do so right away.”

“With all due respect sir, the Director is currently locked in a meeting with the most important figures in the country, even the President himself is there. I don’t think it is appropriate to keep them waiting.”

James had a hunch. He took out a pen and piece of paper from one of the pockets in his pants. “I’m just a little nervous. Could you tell me who else is in the meeting?”

James set about noting down the names as quickly as his pen would allow and in the order Justin read them aloud.

“Don’t move from there, I’ll send an officer to come and get you. Do you hear me?” insisted the scientist. “I’ll call the Director to tell him that we’ve found you. Please don’t delay.”

James hadn’t even heard the last few words. For the last few seconds he had been concentrating on studying the piece of paper filled with names.

He carefully analyzed all the names on the list for over ten minutes, trying to compose each of them using the letters from the name of the mole. It was hopeless. None of the nine names matched.

If only a name or surname fitted… nothing… fuck!

When he had given in, he looked up and something dramatically caught his eye. It was a golden plate nailed to the outside of the office door. He got closer until he could read it clearly.

His heart started to beat faster than ever. He held up the paper he had in his hands to the sign on the door and he was unable to stop himself from cursing as he took a couple of steps back. He was completely filled with dismay. Up until that moment, he had been totally unaware that the name of the Director of Area 51 matched up with the letters exactly. Charly Mailene was a perfect anagram of Michael Ranley. Perhaps the Director of Area 51 was the one who had kidnapped his daughter? He took another couple of steps back without taking his eyes off the nameplate. He was still stunned. Eventually, his head hit something cold and hard.

What is going on?
When he looked around, the world seemed to freeze. A gun was pointing straight at his head. Behind it, a familiar face towered over him in the loneliness of the corridor.

“Mr. Oldrich. Please, step into the office.”

T
he inside of the office was slightly different from last time. The desk was cluttered, and several documents had slipped out of their folders and were lying on the floor. The two padded wooden chairs, specially designed for guests of the Director of Area 51, were now missing. A quick glance around the room was enough to know that some kind of struggle had taken place there. The glass table had shattered into a thousand pieces, which lay scattered on the thick carpet of the room. Some small splashes of already-congealed blood could be seen on the embossed leather sofas, and their cushions had been tossed all over the room.

“What have you done with my little girl?! Is she alive?!”

James stopped just in front of the desk, the nape of his neck glued to the loaded weapon which was ready to blow him to bits if necessary. With great courage and determination, he turned around slowly so as not to make his attacker feel on edge, stopping when he could look him straight in the eye. Never in a million years would he have guessed that the current Director of Area 51, Charly Humphrey, was behind all this.

“When Justin told me that you had gone to see me in my office, I realized that you were closer than ever to finding me out,” he said in a show of intuition. “I left the meeting and as soon as I saw you looking at the nameplate on the door, I put two and two together. Your daughter was very clever to give you my details without me realizing, but I would never have guessed that you would be able to solve it.”

“Where is my daughter?!” James asked again, this time yelling.

“Calm down Oldrich, this office is soundproof. If I shot you right now between the eyes, nobody would hear it. Your daughter is alive but she has been bad. Very bad.”

“What do you want from me?! Who are you people?!”

Charly just smiled. He was about to reveal everything to him. “As you found out for yourself, I am a member of MJ-12 or Majority 12. It is a secret committee, an organization whose members currently occupy the highest positions of power in governments and world economy. Our power is immense, only matched by our desire to own it. In 2002, I received an old manuscript which told how an ancestral order had destroyed a monastery in Florence over five hundred years ago, their aim being to take control of a weapon of unimaginable power. It was said to be able to destroy the world in the blink of an eye or, put another way, have the power to make its founder incredibly rich, supplying them with endless quantities of clean energy. We had spent almost ten years searching for it, but we got lucky when we found the book by chance.”

James remembered the story Mary had told him on top of the Pyramid of the Moon and his stomach immediately began to churn. “I already know the story. Your daughter told me before the helicopter killed her!”

“My daughter is still alive, you fool! You know that perfectly well.”

James had been expecting that response, but he wanted confirmation.

“The way humans think is changing. People are starting to wake up to the fact that climate change is a reality and not fiction, and as a major shareholder in one of the largest oil companies in the world, that doesn’t please us at all. We’ve kept ourselves afloat for decades, whether by buying off or blackmailing all those who patented alternative methods of obtaining energy. Our influence over governments has saved us on more than one occasion, but now things are different. The public is putting us under enormous pressure, demanding change. We have worked very hard to find renewable energy sources that would not pollute and yet allow us to maintain our rightful world dominance, but it has become incredibly difficult over the last few years. Every day we come up against companies which are competing against us to be the world’s prime energy supplier, and many of these private companies have overtaken us. This source can secure our presence on the highest rungs of power.”

Oh God! They’re slowing down human progress until they are the ones who will give us the push we need to evolve mentally! Exopolitics!

He had heard that term on several occasions and all them had been while watching documentaries on conspiracies, something that must be quite popular nowadays when you consider that eighty-five percent of the population believe that the U.S. Government is hiding information. Supporters of Exopolitics claim that there are already methods of producing unlimited clean energy through zero-point, magnetic and antigravity fields. However, they will not be implemented for the general population until the financial companies in power can be sure that they will have the same status after the change, thus avoiding the emergence of new leaders.

For a moment, James’ thoughts wandered away from the room and took him back to Chicago. It was ten in the morning and James was attending a public meeting with Al Gore, the former Vice President of the United States, to hear him talk about global warming. James had turned into an ardent ecologist over the years and had reluctantly attended the meeting after hearing about the latest information to come to light and which questioned the real, hidden motives of the former Vice President. Even so, he wanted to hear his theories and suggestions for himself. The meeting was called:
GLOBAL WARMING: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
. The room was full of hundreds of people from all over the world, all of them waiting for the powerful scene from the documentary, where Al Gore walks triumphantly onstage to a backdrop of a photograph of the Earth.

Several things had sunk into the young professor’s mind, not least the magnificent explanation given by Gore about global warming. According to him, radiation from the Sun was coming through the atmosphere in the form of light waves which heat up the Earth. Part of this radiation is later returned to space as infrared radiation, but much of it cannot penetrate back through the atmosphere and so the heat remains trapped between its layers and the Earth. This is a good thing in some respects because it allows the planet to remain at a constant temperature, which is conducive to prolonging life. The problem is that pollution has caused the atmosphere to become thicker and it is therefore more difficult for infrared radiation to escape. This in turn means that a greater amount of radiation is trapped and builds up between the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, causing the planet to heat up excessively and produce what is famously known as global warming.