“Who’s calling?”
“This is Kelly Reynolds. I’m a freelance writer doing an article for—” Jarvis cut in. “My fee for a print interview is five hundred dollars. That gets you one hour.”
“Mr. Jarvis, I’m just trying to find—”
“Five hundred dollars, one hour. Cash or a money order. No checks. No free questions.”
Kelly paused and gathered in her emotions. “Can I see you this evening?” “The elephant bar at the Zanzibar. Be there at seven on the dot.”
“How will I recognize you?” Kelly asked.
“I’ll recognize you,” Jarvis replied. “Wear red. Something sexy. Order a slow, comfortable screw from the bartender.”
Kelly clenched her teeth. “Listen, I’m a professional and I’m coming out to Las Vegas to do a legitimate job. I don’t need—”
“Obviously,” Jarvis cut in again, “you don’t need to interview me, then. It was nice talking to you, Miss Reynolds.”
Kelly waited. He didn’t hang up; she didn’t either. Electronic Mexican standoff.
Finally Jarvis spoke. “Do you have the money? Five hundred? Cash?” “Yes.”
“All right. Just ask the bartender for me. He’ll point you in the right direction. I’ll be there at seven.”
As Kelly hung up the phone, a flicker of doubt crossed her mind. Was she overreacting to the situation?
She reached down and pulled the Nellis file out of her desk and stared at it for a few minutes while she thought.
Once before she’d been down this path. But this time was different. She wasn’t just after a story. There was Johnny, out there somewhere, hopefully still alive.
But that didn’t mean she had to walk in blind. She looked up the article on Jarvis again and checked something. Then she picked up the phone and made another call.
Peter Nabinger was also trying to answer questions, but he didn’t understand the information that was appearing on the computer screen in front of him. He was in the research section of the University of Cairo, using their database to check on Kaji’s story. He was glad he had access to such a sophisticated system as the university’s computer, because much of what he was looking for had been reported only in academic and scientific journals or out-of-print books, and the computer held hundreds of thousands of such abstracts. The system also had the advantage of holding practically every bit of information about Egypt and Cairo that had ever been recorded.
There was no record of Germans in the Great Pyramid during World War II; not that he had expected to find any.
But, sorting through bits and pieces of local newspaper articles from 1945, it did appear that access to the Great Pyramid had been restricted for several months during that year and that some strange Allied military activity had centered around the building, as Kaji had said.
Cross-referencing the word Thule with the Nazis brought a surprising result. Nabinger had been familiar with the word Thule in the traditional sense from ancient mythology: a northern, inhabited region. The Nazis, however, had perverted that concept — and many other myths and legends — for their own purposes and they had used the science of archaeology to try to support their claims.
Even nonarchaeologists knew about the Rosetta stone, found in 1799 when Napoleon’s army had invaded Egypt.
In many ways the stone had been the key that opened up study of ancient Egypt, because when Champollion finally broke the code to the traditional Egyptian hieroglyphics and deciphered it, a wealth of information was unleashed. Despite his having studied the history of archaeology in college and graduate school, the information Nabinger was now reading was new to him. What Nabinger had never been told was that in 1842 the King of Prussia had led an expedition to Egypt that had done further work on deciphering ancient Egyptian texts and markings. A German Egyptologist named Richard Lepsius had accompanied the king and remained there for three years, producing drawings and measurements of all three pyramids.
Over the years that followed, the Germans had invested quite a bit of time and energy in the study of the pyramids, hieroglyphics, and high runes. Obviously — if Kaji’s story was true — that effort had borne some fruit.
In the decade just prior to World War I various German groups had used myths and archaeology to weave a strange and convoluted web of doctrine to support their racial and anti-Semitic philosophies. The swastika, a symbol that had been used by several ancient peoples, was resurrected. List, an early influence on Hitler, used his own false deciphering of high runes to justify his beliefs.
Nabinger stopped scrolling the computer for a second and stroked his beard. Although the deciphering of the Rossetta stone had greatly increased understanding of hieroglyphics, it had been of no help in the deciphering of the high runes. Nabinger’s own feeling was that the high runes were older than hieroglyphics.
Nabinger remembered Kaji’s comments about the Germans using some sort of map with markings on it to find their way. What had the Germans uncovered? Had they discovered a way to decipher high rune text that still remained unknown to the rest of the world? Were they using some ancient document or perhaps something drawn by Lepsius in the nineteenth century? Or had they simply used a map, copied from someplace, and still been unable to read the high runes?
Nabinger had heard about the German fascination with the myth of the Holy Grail and the search for the lance supposedly used on Jesus after his crucifixion, but his instructors in school had laughed away the Nazis as amateurs in the scientific field of archaeology, more interested in propaganda than science. But perhaps, Nabinger wondered, there had been other searches with better results?
Nabinger thought of his own hypothesis connecting the high runes in South and Central America with those in the pyramid. He knew he would be laughed at also if he tried to publish his results.
Nabinger read on. At the end of World War I many of the occult groups that had been born in Germany prior to the war grew in strength, feeding off the deep and bitter dissatisfaction of the people with the defeat and peace imposed on their country. The name Thule was appropriated as a cover for these groups.
Nabinger straightened. In 1933 a book had been published in Germany called Bevor Hitler Kam (Before Hitler Came). It was apparently about the connection between Hitler’s National Socialist movement and the Thule movement. The interesting thing was that after publication, the author disappeared under mysterious circumstances and all copies of the book that could be found in Germany were collected and destroyed by the Nazis. The author of the book was named Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff.
Checking, Nabinger was surprised to see that the computer had an abstract on the book. Sebottendorff had taken the ancient myth of Atlantis and the myth of Thule and reinvented them with his own sick motivations.
According to Sebottendorff, Thule was reported to have once been the center of a great civilization, but was subsequently destroyed by a great flood. This concept was based on an earlier theory postulated by the Theosophical Society. Nabinger said a brief prayer for the computer that gave him the ability to cross-reference so quickly as he requested information on this latest piece of information.
The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 in New York City by a woman named Madame Helena Blavatsky. Her theory had the inhabitants of Atlantis — or Thule, as the Nazis had named it — representing the Fourth Race, the only true line of man, which of course, the Nazis found very convenient to use in their Aryan-race theory. According to the abstract the inhabitants of Thule looked very much like the figures carved into stone on Easter Island.
Nabinger ran a hand through his beard. How the hell had she made that connection?