Incarnate: Mars Origin I Series Book III Read online

  That was his cue.

  Castor stuffed the last of the doughnut in his mouth. He threw his binoculars on the card table, grabbed a napkin from the other table, and brushed it over his mouth and down the front of his grey-colored, sleeveless T-shirt where flecks of the white powder had landed. He fell back into his seat in front of the rifle. Shutting his eyes tightly, he drew in a breath and opened his eyes back up. He bent his head to see underneath the rifle and placed his finger near the trigger pressing a red button. Righting his head and keeping both eyes opened, he leaned forward and looked through the scope. He moved the rifle back and forth, scanning the room. There she was. He zoomed in on her sitting at her desk and adjusted her in the crosshair of the scope. With her in his site he pulled his head back and glanced over at the computer screen on the laptop to make sure the feed from his sniper scope was being picked up.

  Chapter Two

  Giza, Egypt

  Aaron Coulter held the burner phone to his ear with his shoulder as he maneuvered his car from in front of the Mensa House Hotel at 6 Pyramids Road into the ubiquitous traffic of the Egyptian streets. He had taken the drive to the Plateau daily since arriving in Giza. His nerves would overwhelm him if by two o’clock he hadn’t gone out to check on any damage caused by the looters that seemed to overrun the site since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. It was almost three. And even though he had booked a room at the hotel that gave him a stunning view of the pyramids, he felt a stabbing need to be up close and personal. He needed reassurance that no one was interfering with his success.

  “What is she doing now?” He had to practically shout into the phone to be heard over the revving engines and honking horns coming from the street.

  “Sitting at her desk, working.”

  The man on the other end didn’t seem to have enough grit in his voice this morning for Aaron. Today was the day he needed to make sure things went as he planned. Today Aaron needed his highly paid assassin to be alert, to be on task – his finger on the trigger – literally. “Look I’m doing whatever it takes,” Aaron said rolling up the window so he could make sure his words were heard clearly. Reaching over to turn on the air conditioning, he made his tone firm. “If he doesn’t cooperate or get me what I need, kill her.”

  “Kill her.” Castor Armeni’s response was more of a confirmation than a question.

  “I want this,” he said into the phone. “You understand?” Aaron sitting behind the wheel of his Tamar Blue Land Rover LR4 didn’t feel as confident about today as he wanted and that bothered him. He pressed on the horn and let out a long screeching blast at the car that just tried to cut in front of him.

  To make it through today I might just have to kill someone myself.

  He hit the horn again and weaved in front of the car, pressing down on the gas pedal.

  He needed to get an answer today. He needed the permits today. The inability to get permission to excavate the site through simple methods and all of this waiting was grating on his resolve. This was not like him and he just wanted to get past this hurdle and get started on what he was meant to do.

  “I want to be the one that discovers this find.” Aaron, speaking more to himself than to the man on the other end, switched the phone to his other ear. “I want to be the one that goes down in history. My name in all the books. And if it takes such a sacrifice on my part -”

  “Sacrifice? On your part?” Castor interjected, his voice seemed to emit some amusement.

  “Yeah. Yeah. On my part. Or,” Aaron said with emphasis, “the sacrifice of the life of someone else, then so be it.”

  “You’re not sacrificing yourself by killing the girl, at least not in the sense you speak of. What you’re doing is evolving from an archaeologist to a criminal. You know that her father is not the one that gives the okay. He’s not the one that can give you the clearance to dig there. That’s not his position.”

  “He’s close enough to the one who does have the authority. He should be able to persuade the right people to let me dig there. And he only has until today to do that.”

  “If he doesn’t, then what?”

  “Then you kill her,” Aaron said, shouting. “What do you mean ‘then what’? Isn’t that why you’re there? If he doesn’t do it then you kill her and he gets to watch her die.”

  “No. I got that. Kill her. No problem. I mean ‘then what’ about your dig? What do you do about getting permission to excavate the site? It just seems to me, not that I care mind you, that diplomacy would be better than terrorism.”

  “I’ve tried that. Didn’t work.”

  Castor chuckled. “Then why didn’t you just threaten the one who can give the green light on the project?”

  “He would never agree.”

  “Not even if you threaten to kill his daughter.”

  “He doesn’t have a daughter.”

  Castor grunted on the other end.

  “I didn’t hire you to agree with me or tell me how to go about this. I hired you to kill the girl or whoever else I think might need killing to get me what I want. I just need you to follow through on what I need to be done.”

  “It’s not that I agree or disagree. It’s that I can’t make sense of what you’re doing.”

  “Well, then I didn’t hire you to ‘make sense’ of what I’m doing.”

  “Just kill the girl,” Castor repeated Aaron’s mantra.

  “Yep. Kill the girl.”

  “Kill her now -”

  Aaron interrupted Castor before he could finish his sentence. “If I don’t get what I want. Then you kill her. If I have to be disappointed, so does everyone else.”

  “You’re just a flex of my trigger finger away from your disappointment trickling down on everyone else.”

  Aaron smiled. That’s all he needed to hear. “I’ll get back with you when I find out if we all get to be happy, or if we all get to be disappointed.”

  Aaron pulled the burner phone down from his ear, and looked at it. The line cleared, the screen went black and he threw it on the passenger seat. Putting both hands on the wheel and peering out over the road, he thought about his “plan.”

  The plan that would make him happy. . .

  Castor Armeni was an unfortunate part of that plan. An integral part of the plan no doubt now that he’d been unable to get permission to excavate through the usual channels. And maybe this way wasn’t the best way to get the permits, but right now it was the only way.

  Aaron banged the palm of his hand on the steering wheel of the car. “God dammit.” He pulled the car over to the side of the road, slowed down and then stopped. He was almost to the plateau, he could see it from where he sat. He stared over at the pyramids.

  On the Giza Plateau. Directly under the paw. That’s where Aaron wanted to be. That’s what would make him happy. That was the plan – the only plan - to excavate there. He could visualize it. One hundred degree heat. Dunes of excavated sand piled high and orange-colored tine rope sectioning off the area. Working inside his air conditioned trailer on the edge of the buzz of activity where straw hat, and bandana clad people dug their way underground until they hit on that first corridor leading into what he knew . . .

  He shook his head and threw those thoughts out. He didn’t want to get too excited for what might turn out to be a bloody nightmare. Castor was right. After he killed the girl, then what? How would he get in to dig then?

  He believed what he’d read, years ago as a child, when he first discovered his love for archaeology. His first fascination had come with his discovery of the myth of Atlantis. Researching everything a twelve year old boy could get his hands on; he’d ran across the dubious psychic Edgar Cayce. And what he read made his heart leap.

  In a more than likely drug-induced fugue state, Cayce had claimed that underneath the Sphinx lay a storehouse of ancient records. And although Aaron held no credence to the clairvoyant abilities of the man, who as a famous speaker to the dead had never contacted anyone living after his own demise, he had come
to believe one idea that Cayce espoused.

  Holding on tightly to the steering wheel he closed his eyes momentarily and drew in a breath, remembering his excitement at reading the account he smiled. According to Cayce there was so much more in the underbelly of the Giza Plateau than mummies, sarcophaguses and golden rods and stools. Much more than even the Vedas or Christian Bible could tell. There, laying hidden for hundreds, maybe thousands of millennia, per Mr. Cayce was the history of all humanity. Beneath the paws of the six thousand year old half man, half lion stone structure, and within the dusty confines of complex catacombs that traveled for miles was the Hall of Records.

  The Sphinx was the doorway to the secrets of the meaning of life and of Man’s true origin.

  Chapter Three

  Cleveland Heights, Ohio

  “I can’t tell you how I know.”

  Her voice was shaky and hesitant. She spoke in whispers and I could hardly hear her. Even so, I took to whispering, too.

  “Why did you tell me you needed to talk to me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You came running out of the building. As my husband and I were driving off. You put your fingers up to your mouth and ear. The sign for ‘I’ll call you.’ Right?”

  “Uhhh . . .” She started breathing heavily.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I really shouldn’t do this,” she said. Her voice wavering.

  “You haven’t done anything. Yet. And if you don’t want to tell me, then don’t. But you called me.” I remembered her well because she’d worn a 1950s-style pencil skirt the last – only time I’d seen her. It was after my meeting with the Bilderberg Group. I remembered I had thought her behavior strange. She was acting even more strange now than she did then.

  “I have to tell you. I’d feel bad if something . . . I need to tell you. ”

  “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I said, ‘I have to tell you.’ I need to tell you . . .”

  The line went silent.

  “Hello?” I said. I couldn’t take this. She was making me nervous. I didn’t know if this woman was looney or if I needed to be truly fearful of something.

  Why doesn’t she just spit it out?

  “Hello,” I said again, a little too forcefully.

  “Yes.” she said. “I’m still here.”

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  “I . . . I don’t think he would ever hurt you,” she said. “But there are people in his group. They all have an agenda.”

  “Which group?”

  “The one he met with you about. I can’t really talk.” Her whispering got even lower. I put my finger in my ear.

  “Okay,” I said hurriedly, straining to hear. “Just tell me what you can.”

  “I heard them talking,” she said. “They had been watching you. You and the Father . . .”

  “You can’t go farther? What? I can’t understand you.” I looked at my cell phone. Was my reception bad? I went and stood in front of my French doors.

  “Father. The Father,” her voice was a strained whisper. “Father Chandra I think is his name.”

  “Oh. Nikhil. Yes. Father Chandra. What about him?”

  “They know about him. And that’s how they found out about you. Like I said, I don’t think he would hurt you. But I’m not so sure anymore. I am sure that they would. They would hurt you. Ask the Father about it.”

  “Ask the Father?”

  “Yes. Just tell him my name.” I heard static and then, “I have to go.”

  “Wait. Who is ‘they’?”

  “I have to go.”

  “What’s your name?” Nothing. “Hello?”

  “Elaina,” she whispered. “Tell the Father.”

  “Okay. Hello? . . . Hello? . . .” I looked down at the face of my cell phone again. It was on the Home screen. She had hung up.

  Chapter Four

  “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Churchill could have easily been describing Nikhil Chandra when he made that statement.

  I called Nikhil as soon as I got off the phone with Elaina. I refused to call him Father because I wasn’t sure if he was one. And he refused to talk to me about the phone call until he saw me in person.

  “Don’t say a word, Justin. I’ll come to you. We can talk about it then,” he had said in a voice almost as low and strained as Elaina’s.

  I hadn’t the faintest idea where he lived. When I first met him he kept popping up every time I turned around. But after I told him about Elaina’s call, it took him three days to make it to my house.

  To this day I still don’t know if he is who he says or if he just told me that to get his foot through my door. That’s the way secret societies do things, which he swears he is not part of, still I often find myself believing that he is not only part of one, but maybe the head person in charge.

  I was sitting at my desk in my study. It was dark out now and I had turned on the flood lights outside the French doors that led out to my flower garden. I thought about when I first met Nikhil.

  He just walked into my life one day. Knocked at my door, said he was a Jesuit priest from John Carroll University. Then, without a second thought invited me to go to Italy as part of a committee to work on the Voynich Manuscript translation. I hadn’t even ever heard of the manuscript before he told me about it. I told him I didn’t want to go, nor did I care about the manuscript and to please leave my house. He smiled, that knowing smile he has, and left.

  And of course as soon as he left I Googled him. Isn’t that what everyone does these days? And good thing I did. I found out that John Carroll University had never heard of him, nor had the Cleveland Diocese. A lying priest?

  Now this lying priest was the key to finding out about the “they” who would hurt me. The “they” that Elaina could barely talk about.

  I may not ever find out who Nikhil Chandra really was, but he knew things and he knew people. And he could get things done. And he always seemed to pop up at the right time.

  He got me to Italy and on that translation committee for the Voynich Manuscript - a six-hundred year old codex written in an unknown language. The language turned out to be the language of the “Ancients” – the name I had given to our otherworldly ancestors.

  Not that he ever gave me any inclination, or showed me in any way, that he could, I just felt like Nikhil could protect me if the need arose. And not out of character for him, once he got to my house and I told him every little sordid detail about the phone call, he promised me that he would. “From anyone and anything,” he had said. Which was good because I was definitely worried after that phone call about the possibility of something happening to me.

  Chapter Five

  The collar tab in his black clerical shirt felt tight around his neck. He hadn’t worn it in a while. He tugged at it, brushed off his black jacket and adjusted his sleeves while he waited to be let in.

  “This is unexpected, Father.” The man spoke to him from across the sparsely lit room. He was looking out of the window. “What can I do for you?”

  “I came to find out what you’ve been up to. It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken. In fact, I think too long.”

  “Or perhaps, not long enough.” The man chuckled. “I do dread our visits.”

  “Today you should dread my visit.” The Father crossed the room and stood next to the man. “How long has it been since your last confession, my son?”

  “Haha. Father. This is certainly not the place for a confession. And I don’t think a Hail Mary would absolve my sins, no matter how many I was made to recite.”

  “It’s never too late to be absolved of your sins.” The Father stood with his hands behind his back, not straying his gaze from the window he spoke slowly and softy.

  “What is it that you want, Father Chandra?”

  Nikhil Chandra felt the presence of someone else in the room, but he didn’t acknowledge them. He lowered his head. “It appears to me that y
ou’ve changed sides.”

  “Did you come here to try and get me to change back?”

  “No.”

  “Good, Father, because you couldn’t. And if you tried to persuade me, I think that you’d be outnumbered.” The man looked at the two men that had entered the room. “Wouldn’t be a fair fight.”

  The man’s goons were both dressed in suits. One in brown, one in rust. The one clad in rust stood at the door. The other moved in closer, standing between the man at the door and the Father.

  “They look dressed and ready for church.” Nikhil laughed. “They don’t look scary at all.”

  “You wouldn’t want to face them, Father. Anywhere. They’d show no mercy. Not even on church grounds.”

  “You were put in charge. Put in place at the Bilderberg Group to listen out for any noise about what they knew about our secret.” Nikhil’s voice stayed even and calm. “Not share it. But quell it. Not perpetuate it. But put an end to it. You failed.”

  “How do you know what I’ve done or said?”

  “Seems like you been saying things that are scaring the people that work for the Senator. Someone named Elaina called a friend of mine. Then I spoke with her directly a few minutes ago. Just to verify.”

  “Well she won’t be telling any more secrets.”

  “You’re the one that seems to have a problem with keeping secrets as of late.”

  “Our kind has been keeping secrets too long. It’s time something is done about it.”

  “And the money was right.”

  “Yeah. And the money was right.” The man took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, and pulled one out. He held the pack out. “Want one, Father?”

  “I don’t smoke. It’s bad for your health.”