“A breadcrumb leading the way to what Sitchin discovered in his work—reference to a tablet embedded in the earth a long time ago that would never be found, and its code never broken, until the people who had planted it came together again.”

“You’re talking reincarnation.”

“I’m talking the reincarnation of a group.”

“Have you had direct contact with this tablet? Are you part of this group, Jack?”

“You’re missing the point, Paul. You always miss the point.”

“Which is?”

“I’m the messenger. That’s all I’ve ever been. The reason you’re here is because your son and the others who survived already have had some kind of contact. They’re part of that group and are struggling to remember what to do with it. This knowledge is what got me banished all those years ago. As I was in the process to prove it, that secret defense program was dismantled, and there was no longer a place for me. But your son and that journalist, and likely Hashim and the young boy who survived, have been transformed. You had that chance once and turned away.”

The spell of denial Ledge had been under all those years had been dissolving since his son’s return. He thought being with Dean would ease his guilt for running away. Instead, it placed him right back into the belly of a complex and unshakable force.

59

59

Bruton sat in his office at the Pentagon. The meeting with Ledge earlier in the week brought back the pain of his son’s death. It also made it hard to deny the endless wars in the Middle East as anything but a waste of lives.

Bruton was aware that Dean had been convinced the tablet was in the desert, and that Dean believed it was the secret reason for America’s invasion into a land that had no hand in 9/11.

There were many things, including the otherworldly, the American military would never loosen its grip on when it came to the drive for dominance in the world theatre.

Bruton knew that soon after Saddam Hussein was elevated to power in 1979, he started construction on a sophisticated network of underground tunnels and bunkers. These elaborate constructions were said to be motivated by the threat of an Iranian missile strike, but they were designed as a way to access the tablet, when a psychic told Saddam where she believed it was. She was wrong.

Bruton remembered his dread when Dominique’s articles first began to crack open a door to the possible deeper cause for the U.S. invasion. No one outside his inner circle, not even Dominique, had any idea she was writing about the tablet.

While he was more than six thousand miles from the warehouse when the drone hit, something that day had reached out and pulled him toward images of a violent life he’d led before.