The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6) Read online

  Table of Contents

  THE GENESIS CYPHER

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  XLVIII

  XLIX

  L

  LI

  Unnamed

  THE GENESIS CYPHER

  © 2016 Dean Crawford

  Published: 13th October 2016

  ASIN:

  Publisher: Fictum Ltd

  The right of Dean Crawford to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  Dean Crawford Books

  I

  Megiddo, Canaan

  1457 BCE

  They came out of the south.

  The first hint of dawn broke across the barren plain like a river of molten metal that spilled along the horizon, banners of torn cloud tiger–striping the glowing heavens to the east above the Jezreel Valley. As Tjaneni stood in the darkness he felt the cool desert wind ripple the fabric of his loose shirt, bringing with it the scents of the distant Mediterranean Sea and the wild, untamed wilderness beyond Mount Carmel.

  Atop distant ridges rows of flickering lights illuminated the darkness like stars, the flaming torches of King Kadesh’s watching scouts. Tjaneni’s young servant, Misha, pointed to them.

  ‘Tjaneni, war is upon us!’

  ‘Calm thyself,’ Tjaneni soothed his young friend. ‘They will not strike us here on the plain, for we are many.’

  Tjaneni turned and hurried inside his tent to dress, knowing that the great King would call for him now that their enemy had been sighted. As the Pharaoh’s senior scribe, it was his duty to record and preserve everything that his master saw and to ensure that his great victories were recorded for all time.

  Pharaoh Thutmose III was already the most successful King The Black Land of the Iteru River had ever known, extending the empire in a series of daring raids against warrior clans and neighbouring kingdoms with brutal but brilliant efficiency. A revolt in Kadesh, the land of the Amurru, had resulted in the Kadeshi people’s attempt to change their vassalage and ally themselves to the Hittites. The Caananite hordes had then allied themselves to the Amurru and the Mitanni, from the region of the two rivers between the headwaters of the Orontes and the Jordan. Worse, the King of Megiddo had joined the revolt. Both cities enjoyed fortress strongholds, but in typical style Thutmose III had responded by leading his army personally to deal with the revolt. Spread across the plain outside Tjaneni’s tent were endless flickering campfires, as though the vast starry expanses above were reflected across the sprawling deserts below. Tjaneni knew from his records that the Pharaoh had amassed chariots and infantry numbering more than fifteen thousand men, while the King of Kadesh possessed a tribal force of similar number now encamped beside the waters of Taanach.

  Tjaneni knew that his master would need to know what his enemy would do next.

  ‘Gather the seers,’ he ordered Misha as they stepped back outside into the dawn light. ‘They will be at the oracle, as they always are.’

  The younger man dashed away as the huge army came to life before Tjaneni, infantry emerging from their tents and cavalry riders hurrying to prepare their mounts for the brutal battle that would soon come. Tjaneni had seen more than once the terrible sight of thousands of men clashing together amid clouds of swirling sand, the sound of metal upon metal, upon flesh and bone, the screams of fear and agony, the desert stained red with rivers of blood as the Pharaoh’s mighty army crushed all who stood before it.

  ‘Tjaneni?’

  He turned, and Misha beckoned him to follow. They walked across the side of the encampment to the great hall, a huge enclosure wherein resided the King of Kings, Thutmose III himself.

  Tjaneni entered the enclosure on his knees, his hands stretched upon the rugs before him, his shoulders pulled in and his head low, prostrating himself before the God–King. Ahead of him stood ranks of guards, lining a deep red path that ended before the throne upon which reclined Thutmose, surrounded by flaming torches that crackled and snapped on the dawn breeze rippling the walls of the great enclosure.

  ‘Rise.’

  Tjaneni slowly stood upright and saw Thutmose watching him with eyes deeply sunk into his skull. His forehead was low, giving him a permanent expression of deep concentration, and his jaw was wide and heavy. His elaborate Pharaonic Nemes headdress fell to his broad shoulders in gold and blue stripes that shimmered in the light from the flaming torches lining the interior of the hall, giving him the appearance of a squat, powerful toad.

  ‘Approach.’

  Tjaneni walked to stand before the Pharaoh and immediately got down onto his knees once more, as was the custom. Nobody, not even the greatest warrior in the Kingdom, was allowed to stand taller than the King when in his presence.

  ‘The loathed enemy of the King of Kings awaits,’ Thutmose said, his voice softer than one would imagine for such a powerful and feared Pharaoh, but Tjaneni had long ago learned not to underestimate the man–god before him. ‘What news awaits?’

  Tjaneni spoke softly, kept his head low and his eyes averted.

  ‘The seers are coming, oh King. The oracle will show us the way.’

  Behind him Tjaneni heard the entrance into the royal enclosure of the seers, the mysterious sages and mystics who resided in the Temple of Amon–Ra and the House of Life in Memphis. He feared them as all men feared them, for their knowledge was drawn from places where mortals could not tread; the ipet resyt, or southern sanctuary.

  Tjaneni moved in a low crouch to one side and turned as he watched the six robed figures, their features hidden from view by white veils and hoods, drift like ghosts to stand before the Pharaoh. Worshippers of the goddess Wadjet, or “Eye of the Moon”, they spoke of a realm beyond human sight where the past, the present and the future were as one.

  Thutmose leaned forward in his throne, his voice the only sound above the crackling flames of the torches.

  ‘Speak of the morrow.’

  Tjaneni concealed a flush of dread as he saw the figures kneel before the Pharaoh and slender arms reach up to remove their veils. In the flickering firelight they stared up at the Pharaoh, all of them young girls with their hair tightly braided, their skin smooth as buttermilk, their lips sculptured. Tjaneni swallowed as he looked at their unseeing eyes, pale white orbs that seemed to glow in the firelight, the girls blind from birth. All of them were pure born, their virginity unsullied by menfolk.

  ‘The enemy awaits,’ the youngest of the girls said. ‘They have seen us and they believe they know our path.’

  Thutmose frowned deeply, his dark eyes staring without fear at the young girls. The Pharaoh was one of the
few men who could do so knowing that he himself was half man and half deity.

  ‘What do they believe us to do upon the dawn?’ he demanded. ‘There are three routes into Megiddo.’

  ‘Kadesh believes that we shall advance by way of Dothaim and Yehem, and cross into the Jezreel Valley by Zefti or Taanach,’ came the reply from another of the girls.

  Thutmose smiled thoughtfully. ‘They believe we will take an easy path around the mountains.’

  Tjaneni watched as the Pharaoh’s senior military commander nodded. ‘It is the only way, my King. The route directly through the mountains at Aruna is a ravine only wide enough for four men. If we take that route, the enemy will cut us down with ease as we enter the valley.’

  Thutmose nodded, still deep in thought, and then he looked at the oracles before him.

  ‘How do we know which route will be best?’ he asked them.

  The youngest girl again spoke, for she was the purest of all the oracles and thus the one with the clearest vision.

  ‘When the stars fall from the sky,’ she whispered in reply, her sightless eyes staring into oblivion, ‘you shall know that Aruna is the path to victory.’

  Tjaneni heard the military commanders sigh and scoff in dismay at the girl’s bizarre prophecy. Tjaneni himself knew that stars crossing the sky were a rare and much feared event, omens of doom that often heralded great suffering among the ordinary people. But the stars never actually fell from the sky. The chances of such a thing happening here on the plain in the next few hours were almost unthinkably small and…

  ‘The Canaanites are here!’

  The cry went up from outside the great hall and Tjaneni saw the Pharaoh stand from his throne and stride without fear past the seers toward the entrance, his military commanders filing in behind him.

  Tjaneni followed them out of tent and almost immediately he saw a band of shimmering lights spreading across the horizon to the south, brilliant against the deep blue horizon and far brighter than those of the Kadeshi scouts still lining the hills. Tjaneni had never before encountered the Caananites in the flesh, and the fear that he felt as they appeared bolted shamefully through his belly to weaken his legs with the poison of dread.

  ‘Tjaneni!’

  He turned and saw a cleric who had mentored him for so many years shuffle to his side. Ahmen was an old man now, his gait weary and awkward, his eyes rheumy and unfocused, but in the instant the old man saw the lights his expression collapsed first into uncertainty and then into apprehension.

  ‘The Caananites are here,’ Tjaneni informed him. ‘This is where the battle will be fought, on this very plain.’

  Ahmen shook his head slowly, his knuckles white as he clasped tightly the cane on which he supported his aged frame.

  ‘No, Tjaneni,’ he replied softly, ‘those are not Caananites.’

  Tjaneni frowned and turned back to point at the lights and argue that they could not possible be anything other than the army of the enemy hordes, but his words stopped short of his tongue and his eyes widened as he stared at the lights. To his amazement they were no longer arrayed across the horizon like the torches of countless enemy soldiers, forging across the plain with murder in their minds and rage in their hearts. Now, the lights were up in the sky.

  ‘Ahmen,’ was all that he could whisper, his throat tight and his voice hoarse. ‘What is this? Sorcery?’

  Cries of alarm went up across the Pharaoh’s encampment, and then the alert horns sounded a mournful chorus that swept across the plain on the growing winds as the fearsome orb of the sun rose as if to do battle with the lights to the south. Veils of sand gusted across the plain as the Pharaoh surveyed the lights that soared upward into the heavens, jerking up and down, flickering and pulsing with vibrant colors that rivalled the glorious sunrise searing the sky to the east.

  ‘What are they?’ Tjaneni asked again, barely able to speak.

  Ahmen moved to stand alongside his young apprentice. ‘The watchers are coming,’ he replied simply as he held his cane with both hands and watched the lights climbing into the night sky, ‘and they have been here before.’

  ‘You’ve seen The Watchers before?’ Tjaneni asked in amazement, his voice falling to a superstitious whisper. ‘Why did you not tell me of this?’

  ‘Would you have believed me?’ Ahmen countered.

  Shouts from the soldiers emerging from their tents in their hundreds cut the conversation off as Tjaneni turned again, and now true fear wrenched at his heart. The glowing lights were more than thirty in number and were growing in size. They were surrounded by a halo of light that seemed to pulse as though alive, one moment green, the next blue or orange or a fiery yellow that competed with the brilliance of the sun itself.

  One by one, the brilliant lights accelerated across the vault of the heavens, and Tjaneni heard what sounded like the rumble of distant thunder that reverberated through his chest like beating war drums. He realized that he was breathing fast, his fists clenched so tightly by his sides that his fingernails dug into his palms.

  ‘They glow with such beauty,’ he said in awe.

  ‘And they strike fear into the hearts of brave men,’ Ahmen pointed out.

  The lights jerked across the sky, changing direction violently as they zig–zagged, their glow flickering among the high clouds scattered across the heavens. Tjaneni saw the Kadeshi scouts’ torches vanish from the distant hills as the enemy fled into the distance toward Megiddo, and then suddenly the lights soaring above them emitted tongues of vivid orange flame as they descended and rushed overhead. Tjaneni heard the horses panic and bolt, heard cries of shock and alarm from among the men as he smelled a foul odor that stung his eyes as the lights thundered by overhead.

  Ahmen watched in silence as a large, orange light descended toward a hillside a few miles to the east and disappeared. Tjaneni saw the light vanish behind the hills, and then the remaining lights flew away and with bright flares of white light they rocketed up into the heavens and vanished like dying stars as a deafening crack of thunder split the skies. Tjaneni ducked down, the inside of his ears aching with the infernal noise as he cowered in fear. The lights vanished and the dreadful thunder echoed away into the night on one side and the dawn on the other, as if merely the remnant of some terrible nightmare.

  The plain returned to silence as the horses calmed and the terrified infantry slowly stood tall once more, thousands of eyes staring up in vain into the sky amid the slowly fading stars.

  Ahmen glanced at the Pharaoh’s aides. ‘This is a great portent, and one of doom.’

  Tjaneni shook his head. ‘Pharaoh does not think so, look.’

  Thutmose looked down upon the enormous army before him as he raised his flail and his ankh, his voice suddenly deep and melodious as he roared his command across the plain as though defying the universe itself.

  ‘We march for Aruna, for the stars have fallen upon the site of our victory!’

  Across the plain the army thundered its response, tens of thousands of men stamping their bare feet upon the ancient earth and thrusting their weapons into the dawn sky. Tjaneni turned toward his tent to gather his parchments, for he knew that Pharaoh would wish it all to be recorded for the End of Days.

  Ahmen stayed him with one hand.

  ‘Gather the horses,’ the old man said as he looked at the distant hills where the bright light had descended. ‘We must travel east.’

  Tjaneni felt his legs quiver with fear and awe. ‘We cannot. The King shall do battle this dawn, and the realm of The Watchers is no place for men.’

  Ahmen smiled.

  ‘But I am old, Tjaneni, and I have little to lose. Would you not wish to learn the will of The Watchers from their own mouths, and not the riddles of the seers?’

  Tjaneni looked to the east, the hills now bathed in brilliant sunlight, and he turned to Misha.

  ‘Fetch three horses, as fast as you can.’

  ***

  II

  Black Dragon Canyon, Utah
/>   Present day

  ‘Listen up!’

  A row of vehicles with flashing hazard lights were packed tight around the entrance to a deep ravine, a rugged fissure that split the canyon wash and rose up toward the dawn sky above. Sergeant Robbie Dixon could see the first rays of sunlight striking the tops of the mesas high above with brilliant golden light as he joined his fellow officers. A dozen of Uintah County Sheriff’s Department’s finest men were standing around the hood of a patrol car, all of them having driven across the desert in the pre–dawn light from the nearby city of Vernal.

  Their commander, Lieutenant Franklyn Bolt, was a towering figure of a man, barrel chested and with a white moustache that drooped either side of his mouth like mare’s tails as he spoke.

  ‘We all know who’s waiting for us in there, and we all know what they’ve been doing. They’re armed and they’re convinced that the end of the world is upon us, so they won’t hesitate to shoot once we come through their door. These are not nice people and we know that there are children inside. Your task is to apprehend, and to shoot only if there is no other option.’ Bolt took a deep breath, as though his message of restraint to his men was a step too far even for him. ‘I want the women and children out alive and unharmed, but if this happens to be the End of Days for Abraham Messian then I won’t be shedding a tear tonight.’

  A ripple of agreement fluttered like a dark thought among the twelve heavily armed officers and was shared by Robbie Dixon. He had two young daughters at home, aged three and six. Like the rest of the Armed Response Team he had heard the rumors about what had been going on up here in this lonely canyon, miles from Vernon where the apocalyptically minded Abraham Messian had set up his Messiah’s Advent cult headquarters four years previously.

  Although state law prohibited the founding of cults, there was nothing in the legislation to prevent people from building new dwellings out in the Utah wilderness, a fact that held true for most all American states. Modern cults were smart enough to ensure that they complied with the law in order to draw as little attention to themselves as possible, thus allowing their less palatable pursuits to flourish behind closed doors. Out here, deep inside Black Dragon Canyon where an abandoned mining settlement was the local “ghost town” and renowned for supposed hauntings, Messian had created the perfect environment for both seclusion and suspicion.