Page 46 of False Flag

He clicked his mouse, and the screen went blank, then raised a shoulder in a half shrug. “Just messing around.”

She cocked her head and waited.

Finally, he turned and gave her a half-smile. “Just playing with a theory I want to run by Gerard.”

He looked shy. And sweet. And she had to admit, he was handsome. The Burns genes were solid, she’d give them that.

“What’s your theory?”

“I’ve been looking at mapping data from NOAA. Out past the Cascadia Subduction Zone. It’s gotta be that fault zone that took out Mu, you know?”

Her heart sank. For a moment there, she’d had a flicker of hope he wasn’t all in. But of course he was. He was an apostle and a key member of the team. She had no reason to believe his brother was any different, which was where that spark of hope had come from.

“Losing a whole continent…that’s sort of a lot. And not how tectonic plates work.”

“I don’t think it was as big as the legends suggest. But you know how there’s always a kernel of truth to a myth?”

She refrained from pointing out that Mu wasn’t a traditional myth. Nor was Atlantis—which the Mu story was based on. Atlantis had been an allegory by Plato, a warning against the hubris of nations. It wasn’t based on any real religion or mythology.

But she kept her mouth shut and listened. To debunk a theory, one had to understand and consider it.

“So I’m thinking, there was something, and here we are, right on the Ring of Fire—so much tectonic activity. So much destruction. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Volcanoes. You name it. Add in an asteroid strike, and a large land mass could disappear. It could wipe out a civilization. Just like it wiped out the dinosaurs.”

“So you think it was an asteroid that took out Mu or Atlantis—or whatever Gerard decides to call it. But that doesn’t explain why life survived elsewhere. A meteor strike the size to take out a continent—or a very large island—wouldn’t limit the damage to a small area. The meteor that killed the dinosaurs was catastrophic worldwide.”

“Which is why some believe there was some kind of biological weapon that took out the survivors,” Lloyd said. “The extinction event was specific. But what if…what if it was a small meteor strike that hit just the right spot in the Cascadia Subduction Zone? Add that to area-specific tsunamis and earthquakes. It destroyed Mu and the eastern Pacific from Alaska to Northern California. There could have been a whole agricultural society on Mu that was wiped away.”

“A society of white people who then settled in the Pacific Northwest after the Missoula floods at the end of the last ice age?” She kept disbelief out of her voice.

“I don’t know what color their skin was, but yeah. They were different from the tribes that came later. They were farmers, not hunter-gatherers.”

“There is no archaeological evidence for this.”

“Because you haven’t looked.”

“Of course we’ve looked. Excavations in the Pacific Northwest go down to the sterile glacial till in areas where it’s present. We know when the glaciers retreated. And we can see tsunamis in the geologic record. Look at reports by Brian Atwater from the USGS. He’s studied prehistoric tsunamis for decades all over the Pacific Northwest.”

“You can’t trust anyone who works for the government.”

Staci swallowed bile. There really was no reasoning with people who were ready to grab on to any conspiracy to maintain their unsubstantiated beliefs.

She nodded to the computer screen. “The base layer of your map was made by USGS. Are you saying we can’t trust them?”

“They can’t lie on the maps because we can physically check them.”

She gritted her teeth. She’d signed up for this. “Show me what you’ve got.”

He brought up a map of the city of Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island—where the private jet had landed last night. “You know about the Hepburn Stone?”

She nodded. “It was found in 1925 on the right bank of the Nanaimo River. A Nativist group called the Native Sons of British Columbia declared that the Hepburn Stone, a small boulder carved with what appears to be a face with sharp teeth, was evidence that a ‘highly intelligent race’—which therefore excluded Indigenous people, according to the Native Sons—must have carved it. The Native Sons declared the carvers were refugees from Mu based on the deep lines carved at the top that represented, again, according to the Native Sons, volcanic flames and intense fire.”

“Just because you don’t like their interpretation doesn’t mean they weren’t correct.”

“And just because you do like it doesn’t make it right either. And I’ve got actual archaeology on my side, not the desperate imagination of a group of white supremacists intent on claiming Indigenous and/or Chinese people were not the first to settle Vancouver Island. They wanted to make that claim for white settlers like themselves because they wanted to assert their superiority. Hence their name, Native Sons of British Columbia.”

She had yet to confirm Osborne’s family had been members, but she suspected they were.

“I’ve never claimed anyone was white. I don’t care if they were white, black, or purple.”