Forty-Eight X (15 page)

“You don’t think I know what my father did?”

“Well,” Stumpf replied, trying hard to maintain his credibility, “he worked in a very esoteric field and I thought you might like some background—”

“Mr. Stumpf,” she interrupted, and rapidly began to peel away his ego. “We are all members of the animal kingdom. We are of the metazoan subkingdom, chordata phylum, vertebrata subphylum, class mammalian, subclass theria, infraclass eutheria, primate order, suborder anthropoidea, superfamily hominoidea. This group includes modern and extinct humans and arthropod apes. Arthropod apes are tailless and include the gibbon, the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan. And as humans, we share up to 98.6 percent of our genetic makeup with our closest relatives, and certainly yours, the chimpanzee. Don’t tell me about my father’s work, Mr. Stumpf. I know what he did. I have a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Stanford, a master’s in genetics from Cal Tech, and I’m working on my PhD at Princeton. Just tell me why he was killed.”

Stumpf dropped his head, crossed his arms, and looked like he was trying to curl in a fetal position. “I don’t know yet,” he said, embarrassed. “Maybe it had something to do with his work.”

“Of course it had something to do with his work!” she slammed him again.

The waitress returned to refill their coffee. He needed more of a stimulant than that to get his juices flowing. Maggie watched her sleuth pull a small silver flask from his jacket pocket to spike his brew.

“It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

“I’m working on your case. Sometimes I need a little boost.” And Stumpf quickly downed the Irish coffee. “Know what I think? It’s right-wing nuts. You know those same people who think they’ve got God on their side, who bomb abortion clinics, who don’t approve of manipulating genes and bettering humanity with genetic engineering. We need to look into whether he ever got death threats from those kinds of people.”

“Think again. Those kinds of people liked my father. He worked with chimps. Not humans.”

God
, Nate Stumpf thought,
getting this fame and fortune ain’t gonna be easy
.

“My father emptied out his office just days before he died. And in the weeks and months before, he was busy interviewing people for something called the Lemuria Project. But no one in his department at Stanford knows anything about it. Why is it that many of the best researchers in his field, people that he interviewed recently, are no longer at their old jobs and their universities and have no forwarding address? There’s only one guy, tops in his field, who’s still around, and I can’t get him to take my calls. So, I don’t know, but maybe my father’s death has something to do with that.”

“What was the name of this project he was working on again?”

“The Lemuria Project?”

Maggie watched as Stumpf straightened up like an inflatable toy. Either his morning cocktail was kicking in, she thought, or blood was finally getting to his brain.

“Do you know what Lemuria is?” he asked her. This time he wasn’t going to step in it.

“I have no idea.” Maggie shrugged. The more she talked to this man, the more pleased she was that she hadn’t agreed to pay him by the hour.

With the waitress pouring another refill, Stumpf drank his coffee—straight this time. He smiled broadly. He wanted to be clearheaded when he impressed her. There were some things he did know. He knew he could hold his liquor. He knew he was great in bed. He knew he had a knack for this investigation business. And he knew mythology.

“I know
Lemuria,”
he said emphatically.

Maggie flinched as if she had been slapped in the face. Maybe the little man would surprise her after all.

“You do?”

“Yes.
Lemuria
is from mythology. And I know all about myths. I know Greek mythology, Indian mythology, Celtic and Chinese mythology, and, of course, I know about the more modern mythologies like Tolkein’s
Lord of the Rings
and C.S. Lewis’s
Narnia.”
Stumpf paused. He didn’t want to her to think he was some crazy cultist. “And,” he said, plying his finger in the air to make the point, “I knew all about them before the movies came out. I’m not one of these fad mythologists. I know about Oceanic and Pacific Island mythology. That’s how I know about
Lemuria
.

“Lemuria”—Stumpf went on to explain while preening himself a bit—“was an ancient civilization that existed ten thousand years ago, some say fifty thousand years ago, long before the Egyptian pharaohs and their pyramids. It was a continent somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean, between North America and Asia and Australia. It was supposedly a very advanced and spiritual civilization until it disappeared at the same time as Atlantis, when the Great Flood came.”

“Lemuria is like Atlantis?” she asked.

“Yeah, like Atlantis.”

“The Great Flood? The one in the Bible?”

“Yeah, that one. Do you think maybe your father discovered Lemuria?”

This man’s an idiot
, Maggie thought.

How can I fuck her?
Stumpf contemplated, quite impressed with himself.

N
ate Stumpf wasn’t the only expert on mythology. General Mack Shell surpassed him in every way. He was not only familiar with ancient myths but with ancient civilizations and ancient warfare, as well. As the military director of the Lemuria Project, he had named it. He had also adopted Alexander’s battle scythe, albeit upon Colonel McGraw’s recommendation. Apparently, the weapon, as McGraw would have him believe, was favored by Ptolemy, Alexander’s general, who also studied under Aristotle. In recent months, Shell had also gained a fairly expansive knowledge of genetic engineering. He liked to think of himself as a Renaissance man and he likely was.

In the course of recruiting specialists for Lemuria, many people whose talents and expertise couldn’t simply be bought by money were given great insight into the nature of the top-secret project to entice their participation. Most accepted the extraordinary opportunity to become a part of history. A few—very few—did not. Although they had agreed to keep secrets, General Shell felt that they needed an extra incentive to remain silent. He had flown back to the States from his Pacific headquarters to inspect and approve of two young men, FBI agents in Los Angeles, who had been assigned the mission to provide that “incentive” and protect the secret of Lemuria. He wasn’t interested in personally meeting them. He’d know when he saw them if they were right for the job.

He had another reason for returning. The job of bringing Lemuria to fruition was a stressful one. He wanted to refill his spiritual tank. That’s why, after his visit to LA, he planned to head to Sedona, Arizona—to relax, meditate, and reflect on his mission. Sedona, which of late had become a tourist mecca, had always been a spiritual place. Shell had been there many times before.

From Los Angeles, he flew into Luke Air Force Base, where a car and driver waited. He was driven two hours to Sedona—to a modern but rustic house set into red rock cliffs overlooking Boynton Canyon. The house was owned by the Pentagon, who offered it to its generals as a retreat.

Standing on a redwood deck overlooking the canyon below, he watched small groups of tourists hiking into the hills with local guides. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he knew they would be speaking about the spirits and legends in this holy place. Shell learned the stories many years before from his own personal guide, Quilty.

Boynton Canyon was a sacred place for the local Yavapai-Apache Indians. The Apache legends paralleled biblical stories. Indian prophets foretold of a great flood and of a wise father who set his daughter adrift in a hollowed log boat. She was the only one of her tribe to survive when the boat came to rest on the sacred grounds of Boynton Canyon. The tribe was renewed when this last woman immaculately conceived with the help of the sun god. Although the U.S. Army had exiled the Apaches from their homes here in 1875, their descendants still returned each year to perform ceremonies to honor their First Mother and their creation. This place was their Garden of Eden.

The mountain air was cool and fresh. His only company was silence. Shell stood on the wood deck and raised his palms to the sky. “I am open,” he whispered to no one. With the coming of dusk, he gazed up at the mist-shrouded red rock cliffs. It was easy to anthropomorphize the mountain, to imagine faces in the rocks—a screaming face, a pensive face, an Egyptian sphinx, reptiles, dogs, monkeys, lovers, whole families. Walt Disney had lived in Sedona from 1958 to 1969 and brought his artists there for inspiration. It was in Sedona where they created
Fantasia
. It was for that same inspiration that the general came time and again. And then Shell felt him. He didn’t hear the door open, nor anyone call a greeting, not a footstep, nor a disturbing breeze. But Quilty had come.

Mack Shell had met Robert Quilty nearly two decades earlier on a tour of the U.S. Army Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where the most serious battle injuries were air-evac’d. Quilty was a patient. He was a lowly private, perhaps ten years Shell’s junior, who had forsaken his job as a high-school English teacher to enlist. The young man with red hair and a ruddy, freckled complexion had been wounded in a friendly fire accident during the first Persian Gulf War. His company had moved more rapidly to a forward position than anyone had anticipated, and an F-14 mistakenly dropped its bomb load on them. He had sustained severe burns and had lost his left arm, but he would survive. With half his body still wrapped in burn dressings, Quilty meandered about the ward visiting other patients. He had a wonderful smile, an infectious laugh, and though it seemed absurd, Shell believed his touch could heal.

When Shell finally caught sight of Quilty approaching him from across the room, he smiled in pleased anticipation. His skin became warm and his body seemed to tingle as if being touched by a gentle hand.

Shell recalled their first meeting. He had sat next to the young man on a park bench at the hospital, and the conversation turned to how Quilty came to have such apparent inner strength and compassion. Shell listened as Quilty explained the legend of Lemuria.

“There was once a beautiful tropical paradise, a Garden of Eden if you will,” he began. “This paradise was called Lemuria. Millions of people lived there tens of thousands of years ago, before any of the written history with which we are now familiar. Their civilization lived in peace, and harmony, and prosperity. There were no nations then, no borders, no language barriers, no religions.”

Mack Shell listened politely at first but indifferently. Quilty, recognizing Shell’s apathy, became quiet. He gently took Shell’s hand and turned it palm up. He ran his fingers above Shell’s hand. Startled, Shell pulled his hand away. He had felt Quilty’s touchless touch and seemed to hear his unspoken words.
I know you will find it hard to believe, but do you want to believe?

Shell heard himself answer aloud, “Yes.” He was now prepared to listen.

“The Lemurians,” Quilty continued his tale, “had no disease and lived to be hundreds of years old. They believed in the oneness of man and nature, and after centuries of evolution, they developed the ability to commune with each other and with nature by telepathy. They also had the ability of astral travel, that is, they could move beyond their bodies. They had no need for vehicles.

“The Lemurians sensed that a great cataclysm was coming—a great flood. While they hoped that some of them would survive to preserve their culture, they took precautions to preserve their knowledge and talents by burying sacred crystals throughout the world that could emanate the power of their knowledge to those prepared to receive it. Believers, like myself, describe these places as having a unique energy, a power from Mother Earth that enhances one’s inner spirit. The Lemurians placed this extraordinary energy in special places—Stonehenge in England, Ayers Rock in Australia, Nazca in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and among these sacred red rocks in Sedona.

“We are all descendants of Lemuria,” Quilty taught him. “Their powers remain within our very cells, in our genes—powers we call ESP, telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis. During the Lemurian civilization, these were all human attributes. They now remain dormant in our subconscious, but, with the right stimulus, they can be reawakened.”

General Shell had renewed his spirituality alongside Quilty many times over the years. Each time, they would meet in Sedona overlooking the Apache holy places in Boynton Canyon.

“Boynton Canyon in Sedona,” Quilty explained, “is one of the unique power spots on the planet, a giant conductor of psychic energy. Such energy is neither good nor bad. It just amplifies the space you’re in. If you come here feeling anger, then you’ll become angrier. If it’s a creative seed you carry, it will sprout. If you feel love, it will make you feel more deeply in love.

“Today when people seek to find God or something loftier within themselves, they enter cathedrals, or temples, or mosques. The ancients built pyramids and stone temples to try to reach a higher plane. Some, like Native American Indians, sought out grand settings like this to commune with their creator, regal places that have unusual energy to bring them closer to God.”

“Do you feel the energy?” Quilty would ask.

And each time he met him, Shell felt it even stronger.

To Mack Shell, Sedona became a spiritual mecca, a place for inspiration, soul searching, and soul nourishing, a place where there was harmony between man and nature. For a man who made war his life’s work, this was his place of peace.

While Quilty described many places in the world where one could find remnants of Lemuria’s spiritual energy, they were all trampled by tourists and real or fraudulent soul searchers. There was but one spiritual place that remained virtually untouched. It was the original land of Lemuria. It was Quilty who encouraged General Shell to choose Diego Garcia as the site for his greatest achievement, because millennia ago the island had been the tip of Lemuria’s highest peak. Diego Garcia, Quilty taught, was the last vestige of the lost continent.