Irrefutable Proof: Mars Origin "I" Series Book II (26 page)

Chapter
Fifty-Three

After our disastrous experience with the Sentinelese, I
thought about what Addie had said about finding our Mowgli. Simon didn’t seem
to be that person anymore. I didn’t know what was going on with him.

Seemed like he had a death wish.

But I couldn’t worry about him. I needed to concentrate on
what I had come there to do. I had a new plan. The Jarawa. I thought that maybe
they might be our Mowgli.

The Jarawa had “came out,” as it were, and were now in regular
contact with the outside world through settlements on the fringes of their reserve.
They even had daily contact with outsiders along the Andaman Trunk Road and at
jetties, marketplaces and hospitals near the road. I had read about them and
thought they might be a good choice. They had been an uncontacted people for
thousands of years, until just recently, and their island home in the
archipelago was close to where the Sentinelese lived.

Simon didn’t like the idea. He just wanted to go to Brazil. Forget the Andaman Islands. “We’d do better in South America,” he had said. “And
send your brother home.” No matter what I said, he couldn’t be moved. So, me
and Greg went. I’d talk to Simon and smooth things over with him after we got
back.

We took a bus down the truck road sponsored by one of the
tourism companies that had sprung up to bring tourists close to the Jarawa’s
secluded areas. As soon as we drove up, the people on the bus with us starting
yelling to the natives. The natives were mostly women and children, and just a
few men clumped together in groups by the side of the road. The women’s breasts
were exposed, and many of the adults wore only flimsy loin cloths, their
buttocks completely exposed. And some, as were the children, were completely
naked. Their skin was dull dark brown and they were covered in the brown dust
of the land. Then a policeman started shouting at them, apparently encouraging the
natives to dance for us so that we’d give them food.

“Throw them food,” he yelled to the people on our bus. “Watch
them dance.” He grinned at us, and then started yelling at the Jarawa in a
language only they understood. Many of them started singing and dancing, their
body parts’ jiggling as food was thrown at them. A few, however, didn’t dance.
Didn’t sing. They stood there, covering themselves with their hands, and on
their faces, a look of bewilderment.

“Stop,” I cried out. “Leave them alone. Are you people crazy?”
I turned and looked at the people on the bus.

I had no idea stuff like this would be going on. “This is
horrible, Greg,” I said, turning to my brother. Maybe that was why Simon didn’t
want to come. But he should have warned me.

“I want to go,” I said to Greg.  “Make the bus driver leave
from here. Tell him something.” I pushed Greg to get up out of his seat.

Of course Greg couldn’t make him leave it was a scheduled tour
that people, including us, had paid money to take. And, of course, I cried all
the way back to the bed and breakfast where we were staying.

I crawled into my bed in my room and cried some more. I heard
Greg yelling at Simon. Then I heard a door slam.

What was I doing? Is this what this has come down to?
Exploiting people to find the answers? Humiliating them all for the sake of
science? This was not me. I prayed, “God, please forgive me.”

I woke the next day, not remembering much except a phone call
from Simon in the middle of the night, saying that he and my brother had had a
falling out. And, reiterating that perhaps just he and I should go to Brazil.
I tried to tell him I didn’t want to go, not after what happened. But he insisted.
Said that I needed it for my treasure hunt, that he would take care of me, and
he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I finally relented and told him okay. And
that I agreed Greg shouldn’t come.

Lying in the bed with the sunlight peeping through, I knew I
had to get up and get ready for my flight to Brazil. And, I had to tell Greg he
couldn’t come.

How would I do that?

Then Greg burst into my room.

“Get your stuff together, Justin, we’re going home.”

“I can’t Greg. I have to go to Brazil with Simon. And maybe
you shouldn’t go.”

“Now I know for sure you’re crazy,” he said, voice booming. “You’re
not going anywhere with that twit. You’re going home. I had your husband cancel
your flight from here to Brazil and I booked us a flight home.”

“No. Greg. Listen.”

“I am not listening to you. I know you’re not thinking about
going somewhere with that guy and he set you up to be killed by those savages
yesterday.

“They are not savages.”

“And, on top that,” he said, without acknowledging me. “All
that balling you did yesterday, crying like a sick little kid, I would think
that you’d know for sure that you just need to stick with dead people and their
stuff. We’re not going. You’re not going.”

I really didn’t want to go.

I just didn’t like Greg telling me I couldn’t go.

“And,” he said, “I talked to Mase. You’ll have him to deal
with if you try doing anything but going home from here. He’ll go to Brazil
if he has to and get you from there.”

Actually I was more scared of Greg.

“And I will be there to help him.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“Justin,” he said, seemingly fed up with me. “You can walk
onto that plane home of your own accord, or you can go slung over my shoulder
after I choke the living daylights out of you. Your choice.” Then he turned
around, walked out, and then turned back around, heading into the room again,
and shouted, “Get your stuff packed. Now! We’re getting out this place just a
fast as a cab can get us to the airport.”

“What about Simon?”

“What about him?”

“He’ll think . . . I probably should tell him . . .”

“So, I’ma have to tell you what I found out. Wasn’t going to
tell you until we got home. But that little twit, Simon - ”

“Stop calling him a twit. He’s my friend.”

“That little twit, Simon, didn’t tell you that the Sentinelese
killed two fishermen a few months back, did he? Two fishermen that
accidently
floated into their waters, drunk, asleep, not causing any problems. It was an
unprovoked attack by the Sentinelese. And, I know he didn’t tell you that the
Indian government is writing up legislation so that there won’t be any more of
these “contact expeditions” because they are too dangerous and these people
need to be left alone. He didn’t tell you that either, did he? And did he tell
you that those visits
do not
work, never have worked, and that the
Sentinelese are
not
responding well to their efforts?”

My eyes, I’m sure, showed him I didn’t know any of that. I
knew it might would have been difficult but Simon told me that it wouldn’t be
dangerous. That he had worked with the government there and all was well.

Did I need to put Simon on my list of people to watch? What
kind of nefarious things did he have afoot?

“So, what time does our plane leave,” I asked Greg, pulling
the covers off of me and swinging my legs over the side of the bed.

Chapter
Fifty-Four

Dr. Sabir had been wrong.
I had been wrong.

There was no revelation in the Book of Enoch. Not in the Latin/Hebrew/Aramaic
copy. Not in the Ge’ez one.

And, there were no people that I could think of that could
read the Voynich Manuscript.

Nothing good had come out of any of what I had gleaned from Dr.
Sabir. Nothing at all. I’d been spinning my wheels. And nothing came from me
having a copy of the Voynich Manuscript. I should have written
The Dead Sea
Fish
and left it at that. I was never going to find proof of anything.

I
needed Dr. Sabir to have left me something concrete. Something other than suggestions.
Innuendos. Guesses.

Or,
I needed better help than the crew I was currently hooked up with had to offer.

I’ve
heard Greg complain so many times that his clients think that the law is like
they see it on television. People get divorce papers in the mail, they sign
them, mail them back,
voila
they’re divorced. Not true. Or that a lawyer
could come in the middle of the night and get you out of jail. He says that’s
not true either, and it makes his job so much harder trying to convince his
clients that TV is the not the real world. And now I got myself caught up in
the fantasy. Finding clues, deciphering their meanings, it was not as easy as
what it looked like in the movies. Especially when you have people trying to
kill you.

Oh
wait, that is like in the movies.

And
it’s especially bad when the clues lead you down a dead end street.

But
with Hannah Abelson dead, and the dark blue Taurus not seen recently outside my
house, I felt a little better about things.

I
looked over at my copy of the Voynich Manuscript. Was the answer really in
there? Just looking at it made me feel like crying. I really felt that gloom
that always comes before a major bout with depression. I couldn’t let it go. I
just felt like I wanted to lock myself up in a room and mope. I was kind of
glad that
The Dead Sea Fish
hadn’t been published because then I would’ve
had millions of eyes looking at me, waiting for me to show proof, instead of
the two, four, six, eight . . . I counted in my head, yeah, eight. The eight
eyes belonging to Mase, Claire, Greg and Addie.

But
. . .

If
I was going to stick to this newly found bravado I’d adopted while in Connecticut, this CNN courage mantra, I’d been reciting, or this unselfish, unstoppable
quest to save the world, there was only one thing to do. The only thing I could
think of to do, the only thing left to do.

I
had to decipher the Voynich Manuscript.

Oh,
I forgot to say, “Cue the organ music.”

I
pulled the copy I had over to me and turned the pages. All the plants depicted,
all in glorious Technicolor. Some even filled with tens of smaller depictions
of plants. If there wasn’t anything real in this book, someone had a very vivid
imagination. Or, could they really be plants brought down by the Ancients?

I
contacted a botanist and had a long conversation about the pictures in the
book. He wasn’t familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, but suggested that I
might try to identify some of them by looking at manuscripts and books of
plants that were written near or around the time the book was thought to be
written.

Plants
from 1430. Hmmm . . .

I
was able to get my hands on one. And plants from South America seemed to
resemble a few of those in the book. Of course Addie thought the plants came
from Madagascar. Couldn’t test that hypothesis though, couldn’t find any plant
pictures from the early fifteenth century from there.

So maybe the book didn’t have anything to
do with ancient languages from Europe. Or with Asia.
Maybe it was South American.

Yeah,
that really narrowed that down.

Did
the Book of Enoch just write the story of things that happened as a consequence
of the migration and not
how
they accomplished it? That’s what Nikhil
had said. Is that why I couldn’t find the answers in it?

And
then there were the dancing, naked women?

Mothers
to the Nephilim?

I
turned the page. There was a whole page of that convoluted writing. Sometimes
the writing looked to me like it was Arabic. Then other times I saw Sanskrit
lettering and some Ge’ez, I thought. I turned the book upside down. There were
some places that looked Chinese, Persian and Taiwanese. But never enough so
that I could make out a word of it.

I
had gone over Professor Abelson’s translation notes, again. I must have gone
over those notes a thousand times. Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration, but I’d
gone over them at least fifty times. Probably more. She seemed to be able to
make some sense of it. She said that it wasn’t the language just written out,
she said it was encoded.

Encoded.

Why
not? Everything else I had learned about the Ancients had been encoded. Why not
encode a language that no one knew?

Sure,
I’ll tell you my secrets, but first you have to figure out the language I’m
written in, and then you’ll have to decode me
.

Or
was it the other way around . . .

God,
I wish I knew.

Chapter
Fifty-Five

“Maybe it’s a secret society, like the Priory of Sion or the
Illuminati,” Addie said.

Addie came up for the weekend. She was beginning to be a
regular at my house. I think she would have preferred to stay with Greg. Every
time she came, she either wanted to go over Greg’s or made sure I called him
and had him over my house. He and Mase got such a kick out of her school girl
crush. But I made her stay with Claire, since she insisted on bringing her dog
with her.

She was in town now because I’d decided we still needed to
look for Martians. Nikhil said that the people that knew about it weren’t in a
secret society, but he was a known liar. Yeah, okay, I believed he knew of
other people who knew the secret (so, I guess, I thought of him as not a total
liar), but I didn’t believe that I couldn’t find them and that they wouldn’t
help me if I did.

So moving past the uncontacted people, I forged ahead. Secret
Societies.

Greg concurred. He had said, with a wink of his eye, that it
was better than looking to sixty thousand year old people who couldn’t read.

We were out back on my patio, searching the Internet on our
laptops, and eating barbeque ribs and potato salad. We were brainstorming.

“A secret society that has been around for a long time might
just be how all the Martians – the Ancients – stayed together,” I had announced
when we had headed out back to get the grill going.

  “I really think that it could be the Priory of Sion. Listen
to this - ” Addie said, reading off her laptop.

“Wait,” Greg said. “Didn’t somebody already write that in a
book?”

“Yeah. And I don’t think that it’s a real society,” Mase
added.

“Yes it is,” Addie said. “Just listen. The Priory of Sion
started in 1099 AD. That’s Ancient, right, Justin?” Before I could answer she
kept reading. “Members of this secret society include Isaac Newton and Leonardo
da Vinci. That could be why they were ahead of their time as scientists.” Addie
looked at me.

“They claim to be royal descendants of Jesus,” she read. “But
what’s really important, other than their members consisting of prominent
scientists, is that they wanted to become the next “hyper-power,” just like the
Holy Roman Empire.”

 “I don’t know what website you’re reading from, Addie, but
I’ve just found ten websites, including a US News and World Report article that
says the society is a hoax,” Mase said. “The founder was a real guy and he had
a little club, or whatever, but that’s about it. Not enough proof for that being
our Martians.”

Addie sucked her tongue. I agreed with Mase. We kept looking.

Addie read out loud the bio of every secret society that she
ran across that was older than dirt.

“Hey, what about this one,” Mase said. “The Bilderberg Group.
Listen to this.”

But I didn’t hear a word he said because that name seemed
awfully familiar to me. Where had I seen it before? Then it hit me. Nikhil
Chandra.

I got up and headed in the house and into the foyer.

“Hey, where you going, Justin,” Greg called after me.

“I’ll be right back,” I said over my shoulder.

I pulled open the drawer to the foyer table. There it was. The
business card. I slowly picked it up. Nikhil Chandra, Consultant. I flipped the
card over.

The Bilderberg Group
.

Right there in black and white. Right in my foyer table
drawer.