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". . .

2. And I seal up these records, after I have spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you.

3. Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down unto the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.

4. And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost

5. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things."

• Moroni 10:2-5, Book of Mormon

(Thursday, April, 1996)

The little jade-green amulet rested easily in the palm of my hand. I could see at a glance that it was probably not an ancient treasure - just a cheap soapstone imitation for tourists.

But for me it had special meaning. My handyman and long-time friend, Jim Powers had casually passed the trinket to me as a memento - and perhaps as a harbinger of things to come - when he decided to quit pounding nails and retire into the antique business. He planned to open a little one-room shop up in Minnesota where he could be close to his brother and the hunting and fishing delights of the north woods. Actually he had worked the auctions for years and already had a good feel for the quality of antiques and the prices they could bring. Working on the inside track, so to speak, he managed before leaving Iowa to collect several pickup truckloads to stock up his new store. He knew of my interest in ancient languages and civilizations and himself was a Mason, though he never told me anything about his degree or other aspects of his participation in the lodge.

He must have picked up this little rock at an auction, I mused.

The pendant was carved to represent a scarab, the sacred dung beetle, Khepera. In ancient times Egyptians commonly wore such scarab pendants over their hearts to commemorate the humble bug that captures the power of the sun god Ra in a little ball of cow manure and then inserts her fertile eggs into it. The offspring hatch in the living dung and feed on it as grubs, eventually to fly forth again as royal scarabs. This incarnation of Khepera had a half-inch diameter hole bored from mouth to anus so that a lanyard could be passed through it.

I turned the beetle over in my hand. The flat underside of the scarab formed an oval cartouche on which were crudely etched hieroglyphs. The inscription looked like a faked representation of Egyptian characters. From a desk drawer I pulled out a pad that I had used in China for stamping documents with my ivory chop. Coating the cartouche with red ink, I carefully made an impression of the inscription on a sheet of paper, intending to take a stab later at deciphering the text.

I set the impressed paper on my file cabinet to dry, wiped the stone surface clean, and set the pendant back down on the desk. Stooping close, I looked the bug right in the face. Strange! This scarab didn't look right. In fact, it wasn't a dung beetle at all! I was looking into the face of an Asian water buffalo, just as I had seen in many a rice paddy as I tramped about China! Sure enough, behind the head was a pair of horns curving back! There was no doubt about it. This odd creature had the head of a cow and the body of a scarab! What a clever integration the unknown artist had achieved of the two aspects of the dung beetle's life cycle.

[Sketch of the Khepera Amulet]

So here was a curious object, probably a power totem in ancient times, I thought to myself, fondling it once more to feel the smooth cool curve of the scarab wings and the odd crosshatched crown on the buffalo's head. Then I walked into the dining room and opened the glass display case door to my little museum of curios. I found a spot for the soapstone bug next to my collection of Quiche Mayan pottery shards with the booted Jaguar motif and my favorite clay whistles - one molded in the shape of Cacao, God of Chocolate, and the other in the image of the Magic Mushroom God meditating.

The other shelves in the case mostly displayed jades, porcelains, cloisonnes, and dainty painted eggs - all from China. The buffalo bug was the only Egyptian artifact I had.

Then I closed the glass door, walked back into my office, and totally forgot about the funny beetle. After all, I had other more important things on my mind. It was after six o'clock, and there was a stack of term papers from my seminar students waiting to be read and annotated before class the next day.

After twelve years at Harvard, seven years roaming the Far East, and five years as an entrepreneur and consultant in the fast lane of the burgeoning computer, telecommunications, and automation industries, I had decided to settle down with a change of pace into an obscure academic lifestyle. For the past eight years I had been teaching courses on aspects of the cultural anthropology of ancient China part time at the University of Iowa. Although the Asian Department there was not strong, I persuaded them to strengthen their Anthropology graduate program by allowing me to offer electives and research guidance in various topics related to East Asian civilizations. I deliberately held no more than a part-time instructor's position to avoid administrative duties and academic politics. This gave me a good deal of freedom to chart my own courses. Whenever possible I encouraged students to go deeper into the primary sources in the original language - my favorite being classical Chinese, which is by far the largest and most sophisticated pre-modern literary corpus in the world. This semester I was conducting a seminar devoted to literary works by and about the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and other eccentric Taoists who lived during the third century A.D. I was also guiding a graduate student on an interesting thesis project researching the role of the Uighur speaking people during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. Beyond these modest contributions to academic life I jealously conserved my spare time to work on a new translation of the I-jing in which I showed how the arcane imagery of the lines and trigrams systematically expressed the dynamics of creative processes.

So, as you can see, I spent most of my days in an esoteric ivory tower playing subtle intellectual games in the history, art, literature and science of ancient civilizations. I was absorbed in technical material that was unknown to all but a few savants.

The wild card of my career at this stage was consulting. At the university I picked my preferred course topics and research directions, guiding my grad students into dissertation pathways that resonated with my personal interests. My clients, on the other hand, were unpredictable. Sure they asked me to decipher inscriptions and things like that. But sometimes adventure called. I might find myself underground at an imperial tomb excavation in Xi-an, reconstructing sacrificial dolls. Another time I tested DNA samples from the Caucasian mummies of Xinjiang to find out if they matched the genetic structure of any known society, ancient or modern. On a trip to Taipei I extracted pottery shards from construction sites on aboriginal mounds before a new hotel obliterated the evidence forever.

On rare occasions my work touched on the present, as when my CIA contact, Noah Rook, asked me to background origins of ethnic strife among the mountain tribes of Dagestan, or to help INS unravel the devious pathways used for smuggling Fukienese coolie slaves into U.S. territory.

At about 6:15 p.m. on April 12 I remember picking up from my desk a seminar paper entitled "Cheng-kung Sui's Rhymeprose on the Art of Whistling." The student had translated a fairly long poem from medieval Chinese and appended detailed notes and a discussion of connections between Taoist Whistling and the ancient Chinese art of Qi-gong, or breath control. This particular student showed promise, but I could tell from his translation that he lacked the deeper insights into the language that can only come from experience living in that culture. I would recommend that he go spend a year or two in China before completing his degree.

I was just going over a passage in the paper about how the accomplished whistler can control the weather, when the telephone rang.

"Hello. Derek Walker speaking," I said matter-of-factly into the phone.

"Hi there, Professor. How are your Neo-Taoist adepts doing?" Peals of laughter.

It was Noah Rook.

"Pretty well, thanks," I answered. "I'm staring at a student's paper here about ancient Chinese whistling. Come to think of it I don't think there's anything like our musical notation, or the Labanotation used by choreographers, to describe whistling, even in our advanced culture. And from this text and other uses of the word xiao it is not precisely clear how the old Taoists did it. Sometimes it seems like they're humming or chanting, maybe even with words. Sometimes it seems they're warbling like a bird, or just whistling like we do when we work. But they apparently could control the weather with this technique. Listen to this passage I'm reading here:

"Should he

Sound the tone zhi, then severe winter becomes steaming hot;

Give free play to yu, then a sharp frost makes summer fade;

Move into shang, then an autumn drizzle falls in springtime;

Strike up the tone jiao, then a vernal breeze soughs in the bare branches."

It sounds to me like they would have to be making a loud sound to get that kind of power."

"Yeah. Maybe like catcalls, you know, guys whistling at pretty girls, or at lousy pitchers. Or even the way the Kurds call each other in the mountains of Eastern Turkey."

"Hey, I've heard of that," I responded, catching on to his shifting drift of thought. "They even have a whistling language there that they teach in the country schools. They can talk from mountain to mountain in that rough country without any phones. I haven't heard the sound, but they say it's as loud as a train whistle."

Noah agreed by disagreeing. "Yep. But maybe xiao whistling wasn't really all that loud. Maybe it's a kind of humming after all. You know in Tibet and Siberia they have ways of harmonic singing where they can resonate these really low tones, shaking whole buildings. You've heard the boom boxes on cars as they go by. The base beat dominates, and comes back to you even after they've turned the corner. Humpback whales use that low range to communicate across huge distances in the ocean, and elephants emit sounds like thunder from their foreheads that can be sensed by other elephants as much as 20 miles away. That's why the Navy reserves the ELF radio frequencies for its subs."

That hadn't occurred to me," I conceded, and then in a flash of inspiration my mind leaped. "Actually, in this text there's a lot of hints at Taoist Qi-gong technology. Taiji martial arts masters like Zhao, and Kang, and Tuan - when they want to, become like holograms. You see them - if they let you - but if you try to touch them, there's nothing there. Or else you're taking a trip to the nearest wall. If they want, they can throw you without even touching you. It could be that these so-called whistling sounds, whatever they were, activated qi energy that could move things, and even shift the environment and change the weather."

"Could be," echoed Noah, followed by more peals of convulsive laughter.

This is how talking to Noah went. He would instantly pick up whatever held your attention, blast it wide open with bizarre new viewpoints larded with insane laughter, and then let you discover for yourself a real insight. He combined an outrageous sense of humor with a wide-ranging knowledge and technical know-how, especially with regard to computers, electronics and the gentlemanly art of undercover warfare. For Noah was a spook. Not only that, he was a crypto spook. He specialized in cracking codes for the CIA. And he was a deadly spook, veteran of Project Phoenix in Vietnam, master liquidator of Cong operatives in Huey, and the man who neutralized KGB headquarters in Mexico City. My eccentric friend was truly an expert at rendering things invisible or ineffective, sometimes purely by accident. It was his natural talent.

Unlikely as it may seem, he was also a Christian Scientist and a Bee Master. Among his numerous inventions was a special hexagonal container for transporting queens in airplanes. (For some reason that I forget, there were some problems involved with transporting queens on planes that he had solved.) Nowadays he seemed to be living in retired seclusion with his mother on a little farm near Bellevue, Nebraska, an outskirt of Omaha - and of course not far from Offutt Air Force Base. He produced some of the best honey in the Midwest.

Apparently the CIA had put him into early retirement after one of his really spooky experiments went a bit too far out even for them. He conceived the notion of programming a neural net computer with an assortment of specially rigged versions of the ancient Chinese oracle-bone characters. These hoary symbols acted as a core decoding device. Then he armed the neural net with highly classified super snoop hacking routines that can break into the operating system of any communication network and take over by mimicking the system commands. Once he had his prototype up and running, he decided to test it on the DARPA military satellite communications network - the predecessor of the now (semi) declassified Internet. In less than an hour his oracle-bone skeleton key broke in and took control of the entire system, which promptly crashed. Although nobody but Noah and (belatedly) the Pentagon knew it, America was momentarily without defense. Naked before her enemies she stood disabled by a jumbled bunch of 3000-year-old fortune-telling scratches and a slightly deranged follower of Mary Baker Eddy and Nikola Tesla.

It wasn't many minutes before the counter-spooks arrived. By that time, however, Rook had deactivated his runaway virus and deleted all the files. So they never figured out how he did it. But they sequestered him with his bees, so he told me, to keep him out of trouble.

Since then, between hefting hives and consulting for commercial computer operations, he continued quietly exploring, on the prowl for better core decoders. He went to the University of Northern Iowa in Decorah to evaluate the aUI symbols devised by Herr Doktor Professor John Weilgart, who believed that he had received a universal communication system from a race of carrot-like aliens. Still unsatisfied, Rook turned to the Semantography Blissymbolics invented by the eccentric German Jewish Chemist, Herr Doktor Professor Charles Blitz. (After the War Blitz changed his name.)

Bliss was horrified by the way Europeans abused each other with language barriers and propaganda. When the war began, the Nazis interned him in Auschwitz. Somehow, through his talent with music, he managed to charm his way out of the death camp, and after many wanderings, rendezvoused with his beloved wife, Clara, in Shanghai, where the Japanese promptly interned them for the duration of the War.

During his internment Bliss learned Chinese and was impressed by the way that Chinese people were verbally isolated by dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects, but could always communicate through their writing system. He also felt that to teach Westerners Chinese characters as a core language was too difficult a task. So after the War he settled down in Australia to pursue a career as a chemist. But in his spare time he became obsessed with a project to develop a set of simplified Chinese-like symbols that could serve as a planetary core language. This led to his creation of Blissymbols. However, the down-under Buckminster Fuller of universal languages finally died in 1987. He had been disheartened that his vision of global understanding had not materialized, but to the end remained hopeful. At least a few members of the special education community had noticed that severely handicapped children who were unable to learn "natural" languages could easily learn to communicate with his "artificial" Blissymbols and were carrying the torch forward, albeit on a small scale.

Well, Noah got excited when he discovered the existence of Blissymbols, and when he found out that I was next door in Iowa and knew a lot about that language, he called me up and introduced himself. Since then we talked from time to time, and consulted each other on little projects here and there. His dream was to build an optical neural net computer with a Blissymbolic core language that could translate any natural language or computer language or crypto code in the world - the ultimate cyber spook, a sort of C3PO and R2D2 wrapped into one. However, it would have commercial applications only, and would be rigged for only "positive" thought forms, according to Azimov's Laws of Robotics. I was to be a part of the team that adapted the symbols into the core system. Unfortunately, the project startup date kept sliding because finances remained too limited, and other things kept coming up.

"We have a problem," Rook finally confided, our phatic informalities concluded. "I suppose you read about the explosion in Oklahoma City in 1995. Then there was the Trade Center blast in New York, and the Unabomber. The newspapers all report that in each case the culprits have been caught and justice is being done. But underneath the surface view that these are isolated incidents, the domestic tranquillity is starting to feel a bit disturbed. Little by little the country's starting to wake up to the unpleasant reality that international terrorism has finally reached our shores."

"I know what you mean. But what do you think we can do about it?" I countered. "If we keep on going for tighter security in airports and post offices, and strict gun controls, pretty soon we'll have traded in the freedoms of everyone for a massive, but ultimately ineffective police state 'protection' from a few illusive fanatics. For all we know, such 'weirdos' may be covertly supported by establishment interests to push public opinion in favor of giving up our rights to Big Brother."

"Actually," replied Noah quietly, "we now have concrete evidence that not only these events, but many others, are connected. It is a worldwide phenomenon. And you, specifically, can do something about it, if you are willing and ready."

"What kind of evidence? And what does it have to do with me?" I said cautiously.

"Do you remember," he continued, "back in Vietnam, how the Viet Cong used to set all kinds of booby traps? They planted pongee sticks, gerry-rigged grenades, and various kinds of mines all over the place. They not only terrorized our troops, they terrorized the local populace. A farmer is working in his field and whomp his legs are gone. A little girl is carrying fruit to the market and pow, she's a bloody rag doll.

"Now this civilian side effect was a deliberate intention on the part of the Cong. And as the conflict continued, more and more of the devices were no longer homemade, but turned out to be ordnance delivered from the North. By the final stages of the War we found that increasingly these booby traps were a sophisticated type of mine developed in Mainland China. They were not like the old Claymores that were designed for tanks and other armored vehicles. That doesn't work in jungle warfare. They modified the trigger device so that it went off with the weight of a pedestrian. The Vietnam War ended, but they are still finding those mines, some by mine detectors, some by the innocent bodies of farmers and children."

"Are you saying," I cut in, once again jumping to conclusions, "that those mines from Vietnam are showing up here?"

"In a way yes, but not directly. Look at Vietnam on the globe there in your office."

"OK," I said, pulling my desk globe over in front of me. "I've got it."

Noah continued. "Now look just to the left. That's Cambodia. Guess what the Khmer Rouge salted the Killing Fields with in the '70's. Meanwhile China was consolidating its hold on Tibet. The Dalai Lama's partisans have confirmed that in addition to building roads to facilitate their troops moving in, the People's Liberation Army planted these same kinds of mines along the Nepalese border wherever there were footpaths, to keep the Tibetans from escaping.

"Then came Russia's little 'Vietnam' adventure in Afghanistan. Although the conflict ended as the Soviet empire disintegrated, Afghanistan is now laced with mine fields from Pakistan to the Amu Darya, in all the sorts of improbable locations that guerilla warfare dreams up. We're talking about millions of mines. And at this point in the evolution we found a shift to a newer design - all nonmetal, using plastic explosives, that are impervious to ordinary mine detectors. Also the triggers use sensitive piezoelectric tape, like the stuff used in miniature guitar pickups. These mines are cheap to manufacture, very powerful, finely sensitive, and almost impossible to detect. We now know that the new design also came from the same source in China. . . . 

"But it continues. There was the Iran-Iraq seven-year conflict, which we ignored, because that was just two non-friendlies beating each other up. And our inside men found those same deadly seeds sown there. Remember, during Operation Desert Storm how Saddam put mines all around the oil fields of Kuwait, and even as far as Basra? They were all variations of the same ordnance. And there it is again among the Kurds along the borders between Turkey and Iraq. And again it shows up in Yugoslavia, a handy tool for the Serbs to use in their ethnic cleansing program. Scotland Yard tells us that they are also getting some of these devices showing up in IRA events." 

"And you're about to tell me that some of this stuff is now showing up right here, in our own back yard, so to speak." I reiterated my conclusion. 

"Yep."

"So you have a special type of mine that is being produced somewhere in China, and you want me to help. I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about explosives. That's your department," I said feeling considerable resistance.

"Sure, I know that. We already traced where the stuff is being made. But to take that out does no good. It's like the Colombian cocaine brotherhood, or Saddam's roving missile launchers. Take out one and they'll just move to another location. If they can smuggle tons of cocaine in, they can smuggle in tons of plastic. They can even make it here, so it's easier than cocaine. 

"We want to get at whatever is motivating them. There is more to this than just a Communist conspiracy. That much we know. But you are the expert on foundational beliefs of cultures and civilizations. You also know a lot about the Chinese underground society in this country, the Chinese Mafia networks and smuggling operations."

"Well," I said, taking a deep breath. "Where do you want me to begin?"

"It's up to you," Rook replied. "We trust your judgment and your contacts, and you'll have whatever you need in funding. Our resources are not subject to inspection by Congress or the GAO. Just let me know how much, and I'll transfer it into your account, - within reason, of course."

"I thought you were a beekeeper, not a bookkeeper, you spook," I joked. 

"Aye, that I am," he admitted with a fake Sean Connery accent and an ambiguous grin I could see over the phone.

"OK, Rook. Let me finish commenting on my seminar papers and "I'll see what I can come up with. And don't worry. I'm an ivory tower think tank type. I doubt if I'll tax your budget too much." 

"Right. Talk to you later, Walker. And you have a good evening."

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