“I thought he worked for Microsoft!” Jason shouted after Lawrence. He hurried after him down the corridor to the crypt, then made a sharp left and stepped into an elevator.
“Ah, that’s how good our cover is. Reconnaissance satellites, imagery intelligence, measurement and signature intelligence. These past four years, however, Weaver’s been the leading mind in our Biotech intelligence.”
“Biotech is the next IT,” Weaver said.
Our . . . Who’s our . . . ? You’re not back with the CIA, Lawrence?” Jason stammered as he stepped out of the elevator, followed by Lawrence and then Nick.
“Not the CIA, Jason,” Lawrence said quietly. “The llluminus. Those of us from the international intelligence agencies all over the world—MI-Six, the CIA, FSB, MSS, ISI, Mossad—agents who would stop the illuminati from getting a complete stranglehold. The new world order. Their one-world government.”
“What the hell’s any of this got to do with Lily?”
Jason grasped the steel banister and followed Lawrence and Weaver down the steeply descending stairs. Nick followed at a distance.
“For the past four years, your younger brother and his cohorts have been developing a highly sophisticated human RFID system,” said Lawrence. “Continuing from Verichip, Digital Angel, and others in 2010. Their superficial aim: population control.” He turned to Jason. “Their real purpose, however, is infinitely more sinister.”
Lawrence continued his descent.
“The story goes that an employee of Applied Digital, VeriChip’s parent company, watched emergency crews on TV trying to identify victims of the terrorist attacks on September eleven, 2001.”
Jason was working hard to keep pace with the sprightly old man.
“Realized that implanting chips into humans would rapidly access an individual’s medical history and identification.” Lawrence started down a second flight of stairs. “Similarly after Hurricane Katrina.”
Weaver stopped, gasping for breath.
Lawrence continued down, then turned sharp right at the landing. Jason arrived just as Lawrence stopped outside a large set of wooden doors and placed his palm on the scanner. The doors slid open, revealing two steel doors with an iris scanner.
Weaver caught up with them, panting, and placed his eye to the scanner.
The doors opened onto five sprawling laboratories.
Lily was sitting on a surgical gurney. Her forearm was bandaged. “Hey, Dad,” she chirped.
“You okay, sweetheart?”
Lily nodded as Jason kissed her tenderly on her fore- head. “Fine. They took something out of my arm. Local anasethic’s working at the moment.”
Jason watched her pointing her feet in a ballet position. She was grinning from ear to ear. More movement.
She eased herself off the bed and held on tightly to Nick’s arm. Jason watched in wonder as she took seven steps over to the nearest chair, then sat.
She grinned. More movement every hour.
Jason’s cell phone rang.
“Yes, Purvis.” He frowned. “What do you mean, ‘there are no death certificates’? There have to be. Yes. Call me back with the results.”
He listened, then grinned and said,” By the way, Purvis, if you ever find that you’ve disappeared . . . evacuated—you know, what you clap-happys call the ‘Rapture’—please find a way to let me know.”
He clicked his phone off, then shook his head and chuckled.
“You shouldn’t, Daddy.” Lily frowned at him.
“Shouldn’t what?”
“It’s not nice to make fun of Purvis’s faith.”
Jason frowned at her. “Since when did you care?” He stopped himself. Lily had been through hell and back. She was walking, getting stronger day by day. Who was he to rain on her miracle?
“Okay, sorry, sweetheart. I’ll phone Purvis tomorrow.”
Lily shook her head at him. She walked over into his arms. “I love you, Daddy. Even if you’re a cynical, stubborn old . . . ”
“Now, that’s quite enough.” Jason grinned and kissed her on the head.
Maxim entered discreetly, a serving cloth draped over his arm. Alex walked in after him, talking on his cell phone.
“Miss Lily, your lunch is served,” Maxim declared.
“Hey, Alex, Maxim, watch!” Lily smiled brilliantly, let go of Nick’s hand, and walked unsteadily back to the wheelchair.
Maxim clapped his hands in glee.
Alex grinned broadly. “Fantastic!” he said. “By the way, Lils, I’m joining you for lunch. Polly just phoned. She’s surviving the New York traffic! Sends you her love.”
Lawrence watched as Lily wheeled herself deftly through the doors, followed by Maxim and Alex.
Father Innocentus waited till the laboratory doors closed, then walked toward Lawrence, holding out a minute glowing chip in his gloved hand. “The tracking device was operational, Professor. I deactivated it.”
Lawrence nodded at Father Innocentus. He handed the chip to Weaver, who grasped it delicately, walked briskly over to a row of digital microscopes, and placed it underneath the largest. Nick and Jason watched in silence.
“This is strange,” Weaver mumbled. He zoomed in on the digital image on the monitor. “Guber was the architect of an ultrasophisticated version of an ink bar code based on the primitive Somark version for livestock back in 2009—basically, a ‘live’ version of the Auschwitz tattoo.”
He looked up from the screen. “But this isn’t a bar code. It’s definitely a chip. It’s lodged inside the actual paint of the tattoo.”
He waved his hand, and instantly a large virtual screen descended from overhead.
“There, you can see the tracking device.” The new RFID chips have a hundred-twenty-eight-bit ROM for storing a unique thirty-eight-digit number, like their predecessor,” Weaver muttered.
He moved the digital camera slightly to the left.
“Lily’s entire medical history over 120 pages.” He scanned through the data.
Her passport details, every passport she’s had. Banking accounts . . . ”
Nick and Jason stared, incredulous, at the overhead monitor.
“But this . . . ” Weaver zoomed in. “This is where it gets peculiar—in fact, I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. Embedded is a highly sophisticated computer program.”
“But is it the Mark?” asked Nick.
“I can’t be certain, but whatever it is, it’s only partially operative. It looks like there needs to be a second trigger to activate the more sophisticated level of code.”
“The forehead.” Pierre’s soft voice came from directly behind him.
He held up a hard drive.
“From the Core. A copy of Guber’s blueprints. I, uh, obtained it before I left Mont St. Michel. An invisible bar code is branded in the bearer’s forehead. It’s the trigger. It activates a second program. The program’s name is Pale Horse.”
“So the bar code is the activator of the code.” Weaver took the drive from Pierre, pushed it into his computer, then scrolled down the documents until he stopped at a section titled “ACTIVATION CODES.”
He zoomed in, riveted to the screen.
“Pierre’s right,” Weaver said softly. “The chip, when activated, triggers a highly advanced computer program.” He slammed the table with his plump fingers. “But what does the computer program do? I need more time.”
Lawrence looked grimly at Nick. “You don’t have time, Dylan. We’ve received disturbing information. Over a hundred frozen Nephilim bodies were airlifted from below the southern polar entrance by Guber and his military, seventy-two hours ago. They are now housed in the secret bioterror operations base below Mont St. Michel, over a mile beneath the Atlantic.”
Dylan gulped. “You’re not serious!”
“I’m afraid I am. Find it. Find out what the program does.” Lawrence heaved a sigh. “You have less than an hour.”
He turned to Nick. “We take Jason to the archaeological crypt
s. Dylan, you know where to find us.”
“C’mon, Jas.” Nick gestured for Jason to follow them back through the glass doors. “This will blow your pragmatic De Vere mind.”
Jason followed Lawrence and Nick reluctantly down the corridor. “Haven’t you both got better things to do than show me religious artifacts?” he said, looking nervously over his shoulder. “Seeing as how Adrian’s SS are about to arrive.”
“Oh, we’ve been expecting them, dear boy,” Lawrence said matter-of-factly. “Today, next week, next month—they were bound to show up. We’ve been evacuating the monastery since last July. General Assaf and the Jordanian Royal Guard have everything in hand. Moreover, we have assistance from . . . ” He smiled. “ . . . other quarters.”
He and Nick exchanged a glance.
Two elevator doors opened in front of them. Lawrence beckoned Jason to follow him inside, then pressed a flashing amber button.
As soon as the elevator stopped five floors down, Lawrence stepped out into a flagstoned corridor flanked by six steel doors. Jason followed just as a squad of soldiers marched through the corridors.
Nick smiled in amusement.
“No need for alarm—they’re ours,” Lawrence said.
Nick nodded. “They’re Jordanian special forces. The old guard, loyal to the old king, Jotapa’s father. I leave in under an hour to rescue Jotapa and her younger brother, the crown prince.”
He walked toward a set of old mahogany doors and placed his palm on the reader. Immediately, steel doors slid open onto a state-of-the-art archaeological laboratory.
Jason stared in disbelief. The chamber was filled with dozens of monks huddled over computers, archiving and studying various images.
“Archaeologists,” Lawrence said, walking briskly through the room. “Mathematicians, computer scientists, highly trained specialists. Come with me.”
He led the way through a longer corridor, toward a second set of doors guarded by four special services soldiers, who saluted him.
“We call this the Archaeological Crypts.”
Jason eyed the eight special forces soldiers holding submachine guns. “What do you keep in here—the Ark of the Covenant?”
Lawrence put his eye to the iris scanner, and the doors slid open. In front of them was a long, dimly lit tunnel. Jason followed him along the passageway, which narrowed to about five feet in width.
About twenty yards from the entrance, the passage spread out into a vast vault. Lawrence walked into the center of the vault, where two monks sat at an instrument panel some thirty feet in diameter and reaching almost to the ceiling.
Nick turned to Jason and said, “We keep things at a constant relative humidity of forty to fifty-five percent, temperature ten to fifteen degrees Celsius.”
Twenty-two glass chambers were laid out around the central chamber, reminding Jason of a monstrous wheel with spokes running at a sharp angle from the central vault.
Each of the chambers had colossal steel doors. They looked like giant state-of-the-art operating chambers.
Jason looked around in fascination.
“Number twenty-two is still here?” Lawrence asked.
The monk nodded. He handed Lawrence a steel icon.
“Still don’t believe in the supernatural, Jason?” Nick asked.
Jason looked at him skeptically. “Nope.”
Nick studied him soberly. “The world as you know it is about to change.”
Jason followed Nick and Lawrence past chamber after chamber, peering inside the huge glass-walled rooms as they passed. Each one was empty.
Finally, they stopped, and Lawrence waved the icon over a flashing green light.
The foot–thick steel door slid open. Lawrence waved Jason inside, and the door slid closed immediately.
On what looked like a huge stainless steel operating table lay a monstrous humanoid figure. It appeared to be mummified.
Jason’s mouth dropped open.
“Eighteen feet three inches,” Lawrence declared. “And no, it’s not a fake, not a replica.”
Nick took a pair of sterile transparent gloves from a dispenser at his left. “Gabriele Alessandro and I discovered them thirteen months ago, in Iraq. Babel.”
Nick waved Jason closer.
“All our work was carried out in a ‘clean’ laboratory. Mitochondrial DNA was extracted; diagnostic sites in the coding region were PCR amplified, cloned, and sequenced. No indication of contamination. At first, we thought they were mummified. Then, overnight, things . . . ” He exchanged a glance with Lawrence. “ . . . changed.”
Nick pulled the gloves over his hands.
“What was discovered in Iraq and brought here to the monastery,” Lawrence continued, “were the remains of twenty-two giants—no more than skeletons. They were bound hand and foot with thick copper bands.”
“It was when we removed the bands,” Nick said, taking a deep breath, “that things became unusual. After the first forty-eight hours in our controlled chambers, far from deteriorating, the bodies started to modify, literally before our eyes, into what you see before you.”
Jason stared in amazement at the eighteen-foot form before him.
Lawrence nodded. “It looks as if it had been exhumed after only a week in the ground, doesn’t it? But its DNA, according to our radiocarbon dating, puts it at over four thousand years old.”
Jason walked slowly around the steel table, his brain racing, his thoughts scrambling to make sense of what he was seeing. The creature’s head was three times the size of a human’s, but the features were definitely human, except for the staring eyes. The iris was a strange pale lilac. Strong chin. Orange hair. The creature looked almost alive. Six fingers on each hand, six toes on each foot. A white muslin material lay covering the form’s shoulders.
Nick pressed a remote control, and the giant’s mouth opened.
Jason stepped back.
“Two parallel rows of teeth,” Nick murmured. “Note the incisors.”
“What is it?”
“A Nephilim,” Lawrence said softly.
“Okay, so what’s a Nephilim, Lawrence—some fancy archaeological term for ‘giant’?”
“No,” said Nick. “We humans have a double helix; the Nephilim all exhibit a triple helix. A Nephilim is a hybrid race, a combination of human and angelic DNA.”
Jason rolled his eyes. “You don’t expect me to believe . . . ”
Nick carefully removed the muslin cloth, and Jason paled.
Jutting from the form’s shoulders were the skeletal remains of two monstrous wings.
Jason pushed his hand through his cropped hair. Impossible.
Lawrence pulled a switch, and the form slowly turned, moving a full 180 degrees to a prone position.
“Look.” Lawrence pulled a second set of gloves and handed them to Jason. “You’re a confirmed skeptic. Judge for yourself.”
As Jason pulled on the gloves, Lawrence laid his hand where the wing protruded from the shoulder.
Jason ran his fingers over the skeleton of the massive wings.
“If you look closely,” Nick said, “the joint axes of the skeleton supporting the creature’s wing are set perpendicular, enabling it to extend and flex.”
Lawrence watched as Jason tugged gently at the wing bones jutting out from the shoulder. “They really are fused together, dear boy. The wings are part of the skeleton.”
“What is . . . ?” With some difficulty, Jason tore his gaze away from the giant before him. He looked straight at Lawrence. “What was it?”
“There were Nephilim,” Lawrence said softly. “Giants in the earth, in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. Genesis six: four. I quote directly.
“The Hebrew term ‘Nephilim,’ correctly translated, Jason, actually does not mean ‘giants.’ The correct Hebrew translation is ‘fallen.’” He hesitated. “The fallen on
es.
“In canonical scripture, it is widely accepted that Lucifer, of the seraphim, rebelled against the Most High. A third of his angelic host rebelled with him. They were banished. Known as the Fallen. Call it legend; call it myth. Whatever you want, but the research of a multitude of ancient scholars before us leads us to the conclusion that some of these fallen angels, alluded to in the apocryphal book of Enoch as ‘the Watchers,’ to put it quite simply, had intercourse with the daughters of men.”
“Sex, Jason.” Nick grinned. “Some of the fallen angels had sex with some earthly women.”
“The product of this cohabitation was a unique hybrid species,” Lawrence continued. “A mixture of the seed of the fallen angels and the human women—the Nephilim.”
“The women had babies, Jas,” Nick said. “Abnormally large infants. Monsters that tore them apart in childbirth. Neither human nor angel. A mixture of DNA. A new species: Nephilim.”
Jason’s eyes narrowed. “You’re saying that this creature is one of them.”
Nick nodded. “The presence of a wing skeleton only confirms the fact. The vast majority of Nephilim did not possess wings. These seem to be of a different constitution—of a more sophisticated angelic DNA than the norm.”
“Royalty,” Lawrence murmured. “Fallen royalty. All our investigation points to the fact that these twenty-two were actually princes of the Fallen.”
Nick studied Jason. “Remember Sunday school, Jas. Mother made us go. You dressed up as Daniel in the year-end play. Adrian played the archangel Gabriel.”
“Ironic,” said Jason.
“Listen with new ears. Daniel ten, the archangel Gabriel talking to Daniel: ‘Fear not Daniel,’ et cetera, et cetera, but then, in verse thirteen, the King James version states . . . ”
Nick turned to Lawrence. “Lawrence, you know it by heart.”
Lawrence cleared his throat. “‘But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me.’ Biblical scholars concur that the prince of the kingdom of Persia represents a fallen angelic prince whose territorial governance extends over what was known as the Persian Empire—today’s Iran. But the point is, Angelic princes existed. Both good—Michael the Archangel, a chief prince —and the Fallen, such as the prince of Persia. Daniel also references a fallen prince of Grecia.