I, Judas the 5th Gospel (2 page)

Across the table from Judas were the two men and the woman. Their clothes were dirty and tattered. Their skin bore the scrapes and bruises of a hard journey. The barrel of the pistol the man on the left held shook, his muscles exhausted from his recent ordeal. The other man’s hand was as steady as a rock. The stunning words Judas had just uttered seemed to have little effect on any of them.

Judas spread his hands flat on the top of the table. “We both have stories of journeys. Mine has been millennia in the making. The three of you
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a normal lifetime. But the last two days have been rather exceptional for all of you. There were six who started out, and now it appears only three have made it this far. So you have your own tale to tell.”

Before any of the three could answer, figures clad in loincloths appeared like wraiths out of the jungle. Dozens of natives, the men with bows in their hands, arrows at the ready, the women and children behind them. The men kept the gun pointed at Jesus as their gaze swept over the tribe. None of them made a threatening move, but the number of notched arrows was much greater than the bullets in both guns’ magazines.

Judas indicated the newcomers. “These are some of the very last on the planet not to hear the word of God—those whom your Brotherhood is seeking to reach. The Great Commission according to Matthew, correct? Or at least how some have interpreted what Matthew wrote. Or to be even more precise, how some have interpreted the translations of what Matthew wrote. He was actually a rather boring fellow.”

The woman gently placed a hand on each man’s forearm. It didn’t take much pressure to get the man on her left to lower the gun to the wood; his hand letting go of it as if dropping a great weight that had been carried too long. The man on her right resisted for a while longer, a muscle twitching in his jaw.

“Please, let us at least learn something,” the woman pleaded.

Reluctantly, he too lowered the gun.

Judas nodded and the corners of his mouth twitched upward. His face was creased, and it was evident he smiled often, which seemed to disconcert the three even more than his words.

He indicated the natives once again. “You’re lucky. These are the peaceful ones. Others, ancient ones who live by the old ways in the remote valleys of the Andes, have been coming out of the mountains. They’ve sensed something. They worship me in their own way. They would have welcomed you quite differently, and your heads would have ended up on pikes.”

“We saw that,” one of the men said. “On the river.”

Judas nodded. “They are not under my control. However, you made it here. Most of you. We have a little bit of time before Wormwood, as your Brotherhood calls it, or the Intruder, as the Illuminati have labeled it, arrives.” The smile on Judas’s face deepened as if he were privy to something that the two were unaware of. “Many believe the Second Coming will begin then, others that the world will end. This is something about which I also know the truth.” He looked up at the sky. A great burning orb, larger than the sun, could be seen even in the bright daytime sky.

“As I said, there is still time before what many fear–and many others hope for— arrives. I will tell you my story and some information you need if you give me a little bit of that time. I assure you my story is worth listening to. Would you like to know the truth of what Jesus taught? For I was there. And I learned much more about what went on before Jesus’s time, things that are recorded in the Old Testament. The truth is not exactly as you believe, but it is also not exactly as your opponents believe. Both are right and both are wrong. The truth lies in the great middle, where it almost always does.” As he said the last sentence, he touched his chest over his heart and then his temple.

Judas spread his hands over the table. “Won’t you join me for supper?”

Terminal Impact In 69 To 48 Hours

Three Days Earlier

Joint Defense Space Research Facility, Pine Gap, Australia

Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest of the seven continents, equal in size to the continental United States. Scientists’ best guess is that the native people, the Aborigines, have been there for over thirty thousand years, completely isolated from the rest of the world until the coming of the white man. The ancient Egyptian Empires, Greece, Rome, the birth of Christianity and Islam, Chinese Dynasties, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Age, all of what we in the Western World know as recorded history—came and went, but the Aborigines remained the same and unaffected by the outside world until a relatively short time ago.

When the first Aborigines arrived in Australia over thirty millennia ago, it was not as it is now. The center of the continent was fertile, containing lush jungles and swamps. The present Red Centre was born approximately ten to twenty thousand years ago when the world's climate changed and the land dried up. As many plant and animal species died and were blown away by the harsh weather and terrain, the Aborigines adapted and survived.

The white man was an extreme latecomer to Australia when Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay in 1770. It took another hundred years before the first white men managed to cross the Red Centre, going from Adelaide in the south, to Darwin in the north. In the process of accomplishing this feat, many lost their lives, wandering through the deserts in desperate search of water and relief from the brutal sun. The white man did not adapt to the Red Centre, but sought to conquer it, with limited success.

The overland telegraph line was built in the late 19th century from Darwin to Adelaide, and midway across the continent the town of Alice Springs was born to serve as a telegraph relay station on that line. A thousand miles from the nearest seacoast, Alice Springs is perhaps the most isolated town in the world. Because of that isolation, in the late 1950s, the United States, in cooperation with the Australian government, established the Joint Defense Space Research Facility at Pine Gap, sixty miles outside Alice Springs. The lack of interference from other radio emitters common in the civilized world made it an ideal spot to place the large receivers, and gave the United States coverage of the opposite side of the world both in latitude and longitude.

Over the decades that followed, there were many rumors among the locals about what exactly went on in the facility. Some called it Australia’s Area 51. Strange objects were reported in the night sky. In the sixties, demonstrations were held by Australians along the compound’s perimeter, protesting whatever role they suspected it was playing in the Cold War, and simply the US Military’s presence given what was going on in Vietnam.

The sun cooks the desert around Alice Springs, the heat causing light to waver and bend, making it difficult to accurately judge distances. Ayers Rock, what some call the heart of Australia, is not far away. The Rock is a place revered by the Aborigines as part of their own form of religion. The rock was named for the former Premier of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayers. The Aborigine still call it what they have for ages: Uluru. In a sign of compromise but not surrender, it is now officially known as Uluru/Ayers Rock.

It is the world’s largest monolith, rising three hundred and eighteen meters above the desert floor with a circumference of over eight kilometers. The Aborigine believe that there is a hollow below the rock and it gives off an energy they call Tjukurpa—the ‘dream time.’ They believe the area is inhabited by ancestral beings that helped form the world. Unlike most religions, the Aborigines do not have a creation myth—they believe the world has always existed. However, they do believe that these great ancestral beings, resembling humans, plants and animals, rose up from the formless Earth ages ago and shaped the land and all that walk upon it. These beings wandered aimlessly and carried out various tasks—many of which the Aborigine still do, such as camping, making fire, digging for water,
etc.
When these beings became tired, the ‘dream time’ ended.

However, they left their mark everywhere, and thus the current Aborigine constantly have contact with the past and the formation. It shapes their way of life. At least it did until the coming of the white man.

In the center of the Joint Defense Space Research Facility is a control building with eight large dishes evenly spaced around it. They were pointed toward the sky at various altitudes and directions. One of the dishes was linked to the Hubble Space Telescope on a continuous basis, monitoring every image the Hubble picked up. This fact was unknown to the Flight Operations Team (FOT) at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which controlled the Hubble. In effect, this dish was spying on fellow Americans from the other side of the world.

Inside the air-conditioned comfort of the control building, a United States Air Force Colonel watched his monitors with the bored gaze of a civilized man who'd been in the desert much too long, and didn’t see any beauty or spirituality in it. Besides the Hubble data, he was also forwarding intercepted data from the Australian airwaves to the National Security Agency Headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was illegal, not to mention impolite, for the guest Americans to be spying on their Australian hosts, but such was the reality of the world. Not that there was much of any worth to be picked up. Nor was Australia considered a likely threat to the United States, so the overall status of his mission was a relatively low priority in the big scheme of the American intelligence community, especially given the focus on the War on Terror.

That was all going to change very shortly.

A series of images on a live downlink from the Hubble began to pop up on the screen. The colonel checked the small data box on the bottom and saw that the Hubble was currently running a tasking for NASA, taking images of a specified section of the sky. The colonel stared as one image stayed on screen, and then zoomed, meaning that the scientist controlling Hubble had found something of interest.

There was a small point of light in the center of the image. Not a star. The colonel knew that right away from having seen tens of thousands of Hubble images. It was too large and too bright. The colonel checked the direction that Hubble was pointed. Whatever it was taking pictures of was not one of the outer planets, removing the next obvious reason for the light.

The colonel tapped some commands into the keyboard, accessing the computer in Maryland that the scientist was using, without the scientist being aware that he was being monitored.

Time delay imagery. The colonel nodded. The scientist was trying to see if the object in the photographs was moving. Photos just minutes apart were being super-imposed over each other, and the computer was checking if there was the slightest difference in position.

The colonel bolted upright as the answer came back. The object was indeed moving. Fast. Fast enough that a difference could be noted at such a great distance in just a few minutes, not hours.

The computer was also analyzing the time lapse against the background of stars trying to get an estimate on range to the object. The quick deduction by the machine placed the object at a distance from Earth that put it relatively close, and above the course of Earth’s ellipse around the sun.

The Colonel shook his head. That was impossible. He checked the computer. That section of sky had been scanned just two days ago, and there had been nothing noted. How could this thing have appeared literally out of nowhere? He moved up the timeline. It had not been there two hours ago, the last time that section had been checked.

A red light on the console blinked; the scientist in Baltimore was doing something else. The colonel checked. The scientist was having the computer estimate the object’s trajectory. A red line shot forward from the object’s latest image, cutting down through the Solar System.

“Damn,” the Colonel whispered as he saw that the red trace came very close to Earth’s location.

Not just very close. The Colonel blinked as a green orbital line was extended from the small blue dot representing Earth. The scientist was extending the planet’s orbit. It intersected exactly with the red line. At the same time. Where the two met, the point began to blink.

The Colonel spun about in his chair and ran to another console. It was lined with dozens of locked metal covers. He fumbled with the chain around his neck and retrieved a key. He slid it into the metal cover labeled FOT HUBBLE. He unlocked the cover and slammed his palm down on the red button inside.

Atlanta, Georgia

Two of the men wore finely tailored business suits. The rest were in the garb of the clergy of their various denominations. They were the Central Council of the Brotherhood whose lives were dedicated to their faith. The Head of the Brotherhood wore a black cassock, unadorned with sign of office or particular religious affiliation. His head was bare, his fingers unadorned with jewelry.

There was a low murmur in the room, all wondering why they had been summoned with no notice at the highest priority. It was an hour after midnight in Atlanta, and the building below them was empty of all workers except for a rather significant amount of security personnel. There were twelve men in the room, and some had served for over five decades, the newest member for only eleven years. They were seated around an oval table. The chatter ceased as the Head stood. The room they were gathered in was on the top floor of a modern office building that housed the Brotherhood’s headquarters. The walls were thick, and the room had just been swept to make sure it was clear of listening devices. There were no windows, and the only light came from deep-set halogens that illuminated everything in an even, low glow. The building was located less than five miles from Atlanta International Airport, and several of the men gathered in the room had just flown in on private jets.