The Nemesis Origin

XXIV

‘The flight plan was filed from Cambodia to Cairo.’

Yuri Polkov looked at the paperwork that his son Vladimir handed to him as their private Learjet soared through billowing banks of cloud illuminated a deep gold and orange by the rising sun. The file showed the registration number of a privately owned aircraft, a PBY Catalina, that was based in the Phillipines.

‘What have we been able to figure out from what happened in Cambodia?’

Vladimir sat in the seat opposite his father and glanced idly out of the window at the brilliant sunrise. The glow cast his face half into shadow, and for a moment Yuri was struck by the way the light contrasted Vladimir in much the same way as his personality did. He was his father’s son, and the darkness consumed them both far more easily than did the light.

‘They were looking for something deep in the jungles north of Angkor Wat,’ Vladimir replied. ‘I managed to get some men up there but they didn’t find much, at least nothing that we can make sense of.’

‘Show me,’ Yuri demanded.

Vladimir shrugged and tossed half a dozen small photographs onto the table top between them. ‘As near as we can make out, their interest was in an engraving at the top of a pyramid. Some sort of capstone.’

Yuri placed the photographs into a line before him on the table and scrutinized them carefully. The pictures were poorly taken, shot by imbeciles on their cell phones with crude flashes to illuminate the gloomy jungle. It was only by chance that one of the shots had been taken at an awkward angle that cast into sharp relief the engraving on the side of the capstone.

Yuri peered closely at the icon and nodded to himself with a hum of satisfaction.

‘What do you see?’ Vladimir asked.

Yuri reached into a folder beside him and from it produced an image taken by a diver at the Yonaguni monument in Japan. He positioned the images beside each other and turned them to face Vladimir. ‘What do you see?’ He challenged.

Vladimir glanced at the photos without interest. ‘Nothing but engraved rocks.’

‘Engraved rocks two thousand miles apart, created by civilizations that lived at different times and yet producing the precisely the same icon. Don’t you think that this image meant something to these people?’

‘These people painted faces on rocks and worshipped them,’ Vladimir replied with a disinterested smile.

Yuri shook his head and leaned back in his seat as he examined the images. ‘This icon, that of the disc of the sun with radiating beams of light emanating from it, has been a feature of ancient civilizations across the globe for thousands of years. That in itself is not surprising, considering that most ancient civilizations worshipped the sun and the life that it brings to our planet, and that worship forms the basis of every major religion to this day. Every religion owes its creation to our ancient ancestor’s worship of the sun.’

‘Fascinating,’ Vladimir murmured. ‘But it doesn’t bring them any closer to us. We still don’t know where Lucy Morgan and Ethan Warner have gone.’

‘No,’ Yuri agreed, ‘but these particular images give me a very good idea of where they might be thinking of going.’

Vladimir peered at his father, his interest suddenly peaked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘These icons,’ Yuri gestured to the photographs. ‘I might expect them to appear in widely separated civilizations from different eras of human development. What I would not expect is for them to be utterly identical in every feature, including the precise length of each of the beams of light radiating from them.’

Vladimir looked again at the images and noted that each of the beams was indeed the same length in each of the images, as though they had been carved by the same artist drawing from the same template.

‘Coincidence?’

‘I do not deal in coincidence, my son,’ Yuri rumbled as he tapped the image of the icon from Cambodia. ‘These icons actually mean something. They contain a message, something to be followed and understood.’

Vladimir shrugged again but said nothing. Yuri felt a desperate tug of melancholy for his son’s lack of understanding, his inability to comprehend the magnitude of what it was they were actually doing and the knowledge that they sought.

‘Every single ancient civilization worshipped the sun because it brought light and life to our planet. They understood that without the sun, there would be no life.’

‘It doesn’t take inherent genius to figure that out, father,’ Vladimir replied.

‘No, but it does require a respectable degree of intelligence to understand what that means for the present-day worship of gods of so many names by so many nations.’

‘They don’t worship suns, they worship deities.’

‘And how did those deities come to be worshipped in the first place?’ Yuri challenged. ‘The world’s holy books would have it that their words were transcribed from the voice of those very gods themselves, but they are so full of errors and inconsistencies that we know that cannot be true. Think about the words used to describe the gods themselves: that they are the light of the world, that they come upon clouds. Think about the legends and stories associated with them. The birth stories of the messiahs of so many religious icons match the dates and times of winter and summer solstices, the resurrection legends matching the dates of the coming of spring. Successive religions changed the names of the icons being worshipped in order to eradicate the memory of proceeding religions, condemning them as heresy and dogma. How do you think it is that the legend of Christ’s resurrection comes at Easter, which was originally the Roman festival Eostara and had nothing to do with resurrections at all but with the coming of spring? Or that his birth is celebrated at Christmas, which was originally a celebration of the end of the winter where the sun was at its lowest point for three days before being miraculously resurrected three days later as it rose earlier day by day in the eastern sky?’

Vladimir shrugged. ‘It’s all fascinating I agree, but it doesn’t solve this problem.’

Yuri shoulders sagged. ‘It does if you know where to look.’

Yuri took out a map of the Earth upon which he had transcribed two lines intersecting from Japan and Cambodia, matching the relevant lines from the engravings at the relevant sites. The lines met on the coast of South America, deep in Peru.

‘When the images on the icons at these two monuments are aligned with each other according to their orientation upon the monuments themselves, the longest of each of the sun beams points directly to this location in Peru. While I’m sure that this is significant, I am not sure that it’s the entire story.’

Vladimir leaned forward on the table and peered at the two lines. ‘If the lines point to Peru, than what is Morgan doing in Cairo?’

‘Precisely my question,’ Yuri agreed, for once delighted that his son was following the same train of thought. ‘If the lines themselves were the only story then they would have proceeded directly to Peru. It would seem certain that the Catalina transported them out of Cambodia and brought them to Egypt. But I notice on the flight plan that the only occupants of the aircraft recorded on the plan were the pilot and co-pilot, and that the customs report shows them as indeed being the only occupants aboard the aircraft when it landed and was inspected by officials in Cairo.’

Vladimir looked down at the flight plan, attached to which was a photograph of the Catalina.

‘It’s a seaplane,’ he noted. ‘It’s possible they may have been able to get out of the aircraft prior to it landing in Cairo.’

‘Yes,’ Yuri agreed. ‘But why? Why would they get out in Cairo? What could possibly be here that could connect everything that has happened so far?’

‘Do you think there’s another icon in Egypt that might be of use to them?’

‘Possibly,’ Yuri agreed, ‘and I don’t doubt that we would find one if we looked hard enough. I also don’t doubt that it would simply point in the same direction as the previous two, further confirming the importance of Peru to the search but adding nothing to our knowledge base. Lucy Morgan is smart enough to know where to go next, and she must have had some kind of breakthrough in order to be in Cairo at all.’

‘I can send people in,’ Vladimir said. ‘We could have them within hours.’

‘We don’t need to have them,’ Yuri assured him. ‘What we need to do is ensure that Lucy Morgan finds what she is looking for.’

‘You want to help her?’ Vladimir asked, aghast.

‘We need to follow them,’ Yuri assured his son. ‘Let them do the work for us.’

‘That’s not enough,’ Vladimir replied. ‘You know what happened to them in Cambodia. We found bullet marks all around that temple, fresh bullet marks. They were under fire, and further down the mountain side there were reports of gunfire and the crashing of a helicopter. We went down there and all we found was mangled metal. Every single body had been recovered from the site, and the helicopter itself had no registration or flight plan.’

Yuri nodded slowly. ‘We knew we would not be alone in the search, and we knew that our rivals would be willing to use any means possible to obtain what Lucy Morgan possesses.’

‘And that means they will clearly kill,’ Vladimir insisted, his dark eyes burning into his father’s. ‘This is one crusade too far, father.’

‘This is the most important crusade of all,’ Yuri retaliated, and then he gestured out of the window of the Learjet that the brilliant sunrise blazing across the horizon. ‘Did you know that the original crusades, led by the Catholic Church, were not about regaining the Holy Lands for god at all? Their purpose was from where we get the expression “the riches of the East”. Under religious rule, learning was forbidden and so Europe collapsed into a remedial state of understanding, exactly what the churches wanted: a populace too stupid to understand the world around them. That’s why we call it now the Dark Ages. But in the Middle East, Islam allowed and even encouraged learning. They had astronomers and scientists that made fools of the people of Europe and their bigoted faith leaders, and so did the Vatican become jealous of their success. They instigated the Crusades and let millions of peasants spill their blood to swell the coffers of the Catholic Church.’

‘I don’t imagine the Pope will elaborate on that,’ Vladimir pointed out.

‘Much as they don’t reveal why they enforce celibacy on their priests and Cardinals,’ Yuri said. ‘It’s not about emulating Jesus. It was brought into force long before Rome fell, so that members of the church did not pass their wealth onto families but instead onto the church. That greed too swelled the wealth of the Vatican over many centuries, until it has become the bloated monster that it is today, having gorged for so long on the wealth of others.’

‘I’m not arguing with you papa,’ Vladimir said, ‘but none of this will ever reach the ears of the people. Nobody will stand up and say such things, no matter how true they might be.’

‘Which is why it is so important that we press on with this,’ Yuri urged. ‘We are the light, my son, and it is against the forces of darkness that we rally, the evil and the cruelty of religion. I would travel to the ends of the earth and wilfully surrender every last rouble that I possess and have possessed in my entire life for the chance to hold this discovery in my hands and say that I did the right thing, the right thing.’ Yuri looked his son in the eye. ‘This discovery, Lucy’s discovery, our discovery will bring an end to religious myth and conflict for all time, and bring us a fortune beyond avarice. It will be ours to bring unto the world, not Lucy Morgan’s. America’s enforced respect for religions that deserve nothing but contempt will pressure them to maintain a veil of secrecy over everything that Lucy does. We cannot allow that to happen, to deny mankind his second enlightenment.’ Yuri sighed, and a cold grin curled from his lips. ‘Nor should we deny ourselves the right to earn a handsome fee for displaying such wondrous remains and sharing their contents with the world.’

Vladimir stared into his father’s eyes for a long moment and then he nodded slowly.

‘I understand,’ he said softly. ‘What would you have me do?’

‘Place your men at Cairo airport and have them maintain a permanent watch on the Catalina. I want to be absolutely sure that if Lucy Morgan and Ethan Warner attempt to escape Cairo, they do not do so aboard that aircraft. Start searching for them, but if you make contact do not approach or attempt to apprehend them. We will be far better served by following them to their destination and allowing Lucy Morgan to complete her work on our behalf. As soon as you locate them, find out where they’re going and this time we’ll make sure we’re ahead of them.’

The Learjet banked over and the seatbelt lights illuminated above their heads as the aircraft prepared to land. As the Learjet’s graceful wing blocked the sunlight, Yuri saw his son’s face consumed once more by deep shadows.