Episode 38 The first difficulties.
Editor’s note: in this new WordPress presentation, it will take some time to repost all 52 episodes after having reread and adapted them from the 1990s to the 2020s. We prefer to put back online the episodes that were the most read from 2002 to December 2021, when our former Frontpage site was overwritten and then HTML. One of those is episode 38. The others will follow soon.
With the fall season, Pierre regained his customary isolation from the movement’s activities. Gérard, Frantz, Anke or Werner came to relaunch him on the messaging but without much success. Laurie preferred to be actively involved with Romain and Claudine. She had not reported on what they had experienced together in the clearing of the clue, much less on their procession that they thought they would do again during the celebration of the mysteries of Eleusis.
In fact, all of them were closely following the start-up of the communities, SELs and bancassurance. Sepp and his team stayed in front of their screens and noted with satisfaction that the explosion of communications on their intranets, despite the use of high-level security encryption, did not block the information system. Too quickly, exchanges were no longer confined to a local space but members tried to exchange between countries over distances of several thousand kilometers and no logistics were provided for this purpose.
On the other hand, the number of candidates to join the movement continued to grow and many senior managers over forty years of age, as well as retirees, offered to leave an economic and social environment that had become less motivating to bring their skills.
Projects to develop their movement
Team California
Arnim and Anke worked primarily to lay the groundwork for Dan and Laurie’s actions in the United States. The California team had made enough contributions to receive more formal membership status. She had opened a club similar to that of Baden-Baden and all of them met the basic conditions to be accepted knights. Dan and Laurie were planning a Christmas swearing ceremony there.
Progress in participatory local direct democracy
Barbara, Sandra, Patrick and Frantz were completing the budget estimates for the following year and the balance sheet for their business for the past year. A model was presented for the other European Communities. All these balance sheets and budgets are consolidated in the bancassurance in Basel so as to find an overall balance not valued in state currency or in euro but in their Positive Money.
The great satisfaction of the founding members was to see the breathtaking progress made in direct democracy. Point by point the provisional budget was presented, discussed, enriched, amended and voted through a workflow engine that quickly, at the end of the voting time, gave the results of the vote. This tool also made it possible to identify major trends in opinion by carrying out surveys and shadow votes.
The projects discussed were then given their weighting in votes and before a majority was frozen, the discussions and negotiations were all the richer and more detailed.
Clubs and communal houses were valuable video-conferencing facilities to support public debates, but Sepp was already considering broadcasting these debates on a private and episodic television channel by occasionally squatting on an unoccupied channel on a satellite. He knew how to do it personally.
After two months, the experiment was conclusive, but most of the financial resources of the members and the club were consumed by telecommunications equipment and connections. Everyone agreed that this was indeed an indispensable investment, but no one could hide that the real solution was to be really together and no longer on their intranets.
Gérard proposed that the Rhineland community, their founding community and for the time being by far the largest and developed, include in its budget the creation of a new local community whose purpose would be to settle in a region to develop there by supplanting the state, administrative and commercial organization. After a few years, this local experience would demonstrate once and for all the correctness and efficiency of their organization and the public authorities could only throw in the towel and admit the development of their movement.
This new community would be a training ground and a learning ground for members from all over Europe and other continents. All the driving forces, modern technologies and resources of their movement would be concentrated in the first instance to achieve first political, economic and social results.
Second, even in the case of a lawsuit brought by state authorities, there can no longer be a shadow of a doubt about success. The proposal was discussed through the forums and a debate took place. The vote was in favor. Gerard did not express his satisfaction. He had asked Sepp to check whether or not Pierre had actually taken part in the vote. The software could not give the meaning of a vote, only to say whether the member had abstained or not.
Pierre did not vote for Gérard’s plan and he opened himself angrily to Laurie. He demanded that Peter be summoned before their group in the Baden-Baden club. Laurie supported by the other founding members refused. She complained that Peter’s silence upset her. She knew that she had to use the holiday season to find the poet and take stock together, but she suspected that Pierre continued to work silently with his voice, that he was not unfaithful. She was convinced that she had to go with Dan to California because there, her future was at stake, once her human separation from Peter arrived.
The poet’s project took time,
nor is there time to say things. Laurie believed him when he kept telling him that it took him ten years before he could write what he had experienced when he first reached beyond the well of light. Ten years was nothing compared to the impenetrable silence in which countless victims of the horrors of world conflicts had become entrenched.
Neither Jasko nor Svetlana would describe in detail what they experienced as martyrs. Only the testimonies of neighbors had been able to report the cruelties they had suffered.
She knew that Pierre did not require ten years to prepare for his last mission. The success of their business accelerated the ultimate deadline. Pierre would be ready, that’s all! She believed in him. Gerard had to leave him alone. Laurie promised to postpone this discussion between their group and the poet to the celebration of the third anniversary of their meeting, at the end of June.
Development of a community center for their movement
Sandra formed a team around her with Frantz, Patrick, Gérard, architects, historians, fellow builders to criss-cross the south of Burgundy and Beaujolais in search of a property, a castle to rebuild or restore.
The team was careful not to isolate themselves in the open countryside, but sought to fit in close to a middle-sized town because their community center would have to compete with shopping centers, schools, gendarmeries and public administrations.
Everyone understood Laurie’s message: the ideal solution was to rebuild Cluny, no less! But reason pushed for a more affordable compromise. By Easter, the final choice was made. The last three selected sites were presented on the intranet and after a debate, the members’ vote sealed the decision.
Once again, common sense, logic had emerged, and the decision was immediately embraced by all. In fact, the property established around the remains of a 12th century priory, was the only one to offer these historical roots on which their movement was grafted. The various community houses and communities organized themselves to gather their best human and material resources and send them to their new community center.
Frantz asked the architects to take inspiration from the buildings built by Le Corbusier for the neighboring community of L’Arbresle, but Pierre insisted that the buildings blend several styles, including the Romanesque and the Gothic. The mission of this community center was to develop spiritually on its four main paths, including the mystical path, the simplest at the outset for the largest number of members of their movement. The foundations of the cloister and chapel remained visible and reconstruction in the style of the time was possible. This marriage of architectural styles would be suitable for the marriage of cultures which is the priority temporal goal.
Their movement had to demonstrate an architectural mastery equal to that of the time of the cathedrals, perhaps not in the gigantism of the constructions but in respect of the design, the use of the compass and the square, the glass and the stone.
The poet sent them the drawing of a double living house to be built away from the main building and connected to it by an underground. He gave the functionality of every room, every door. No one understood how the poet could have come up with such a plan that the historians of Egyptian things accepted as the probable plan of a double house of life of Upper Egypt.
Laurie joined them for one night, telling them how she had scrutinized the zodiac of Dendérah and the sphinx of Tanis, her head on the poet’s shoulder, how drops of tears had spread from the poet’s eyes, how he had confessed to her that he had always had trouble writing about this time so much a very particular and faithful voice came to annoy her and mingle with her writing. Laurie took upon her the decision to build this double house of life and Pierre regained his silence.
The first operational objective was to make the existing buildings habitable for the reception of members who would build the real community center adapted to a dual function: to promote spiritual involution and to be able to defend the movement in its approach to the evolution of society.
The neighboring town hall was surprised that the work started without any deposit of a building permit. For any response, she received a message with an Internet address on which she could see in three dimensions what was going to be built, with all the coasts of the buildings. All that was missing were plans for underground and secret construction.
A few weeks later, reading the local newspaper, the group laughed when they discovered that at the last municipal council meeting, the purchase of new, more powerful computers for the city council and elementary school departments had been turned down by most artisans, who presumably relied on the money for communal work. Only the teacher voted for it.
Sandra sent a letter again with the Internet address and the matter ended there. She later invited the teacher and his school to come to the property to discover on the big screen, this construction project. Gérard suggested that they accept a few microcomputer stations equipped for multimedia and videoconferencing as well as a server to develop their own computer network without connections to the Web. He explained to them the approach of their movement to build knowledge and share it outside the Web. This allowed students to work among themselves without the possibility of going elsewhere on the web. The integration of data from the web had to be certified by the students themselves with the help of their teachers or recognized experts. Gérard did not forget to mention that this virtual space was available at home on microcomputers and not available on cell phones or mobiles. Even better, two technicians left with the children to install the equipment that same evening and the next day, everyone learned to use their highly secure Intranet and its telecommunications possibilities to broadcast their school activities and personal projects.
On the following Friday afternoon, the children invited the city council and alone, presented it with the video projector and a large screen lent by Gérard, the project of building the community. The children were amazed by the vaults, the two rose windows, the virtual walk among the pillars and the sculptures. The adults remained suspicious but communicated their curiosity. The children regularly connected on the movement’s intranets.
Setting up their first electronic warfare center
In Klaus Castle, near Pforzheim, Arnim and Anke had asked Sepp to send them an additional team of top engineers. Dan and his knights had just had a great coup: thanks to information from the secret agents network, they had intercepted a transport plane at a Middle East aerodrome. Steve and three other pilots had landed at an American base near Strasbourg and with the help of other accomplices, the equipment had been brought to Klaus Castle.
Half of the cargo was portable Stinger air-to-ground missiles and the other half was ROEM listening, electronic surveillance and satellite communications equipment. The material was intended for Islamist fanatical groups in Central Asia as part of a large-scale diplomatic operation orchestrated by the CIA to control the region’s oil resources. The knights’ team had threatened the US intelligence services with exposure of the case and, if necessary, with the dispatch of knights’ commandos to Asia to collect the necessary evidence of CIA collaboration with Islamist terrorists.
The movement’s engineers were tasked with operationalizing this electronic equipment for the benefit of the knights’ community by using it as an undetectable entry point into the NSA’s intelligence and wiretapping system and the Echelon spy satellite network.
At the beginning of May, after a few weeks of work, the team had to face the facts. This military technology remained out of reach. It was then that Arnim and Anke received on their confidential messaging, Pierre’s invitation to go to the office of Sophia-Antipolis. The poet had a solution…
In disbelief, the two inquired of Laurie. She advised them to have faith, to have faith in the poet, and sent them back to Frantz, who gave them two plane tickets to Nice. To be certain, Sepp had given them the listing of Pierre’s recent connections: he had followed well day after day on the highly encrypted network, all the evolution of this case and the duration of his connections showed that he had had plenty of time to think about it but what did the poet still want?
The secret meeting of Sophia-Antipolis
It was Jacques who welcomed them to the airport and took them to their office in Les Bouillides. At around 7 p.m., Pierre came to join them with another man of about thirty-five years old, perhaps more. Peter introduced it.
Michel worked in his company. Finally, he had been responsible for the project on the electronic belt of Iraq installed by their company when that country was at war with Iran and that country was supported by the Western powers. The Gulf War had obviously put an end to this project and since then, Michel was looking for a new project capable of motivating him.
He rose to express his satisfaction at seeing that the Iraqi electronic belt had worked perfectly and that only the American commandos, with repeated assaults from their helicopters, had been able to overcome the various fortresses. Missiles and air force can’t do anything about it.
Jacques was the first to come out of his astonishment. He had also fought the Gulf War. Michel apologized. During this conflict, he was already in Paris in front of his television set. He had known that his company had been asked by the allies to give the plans for this equipment, but he had stood back. This war wasn’t his.
For some time, he had integrated into a department, here on the park, that worked on components for telecommunications, small pieces of ceramics capable of emitting and filtering acoustic waves compressed in a signal. This civilian application had first enabled the construction of a pulse compressor for the Topex-Poseidon satellite and the measurement of oceans. The astonishing precision of these radar altimeters, first applied to the on-board radars of fighter aircraft and the guidance of missiles, would now be declined in band filters for mobile radio, the transmission of multimedia information on portable receivers such as mobile phones, thus opening wide the diffusion of the Internet and the Web by radio waves.
In his search for a new responsibility within the company, he had become more friendly with Pierre and he was still smiling at all the maneuvers of approaches that he had conducted to reveal the activity of their movement to him. Yes, he was ready to go down the path of their chivalry. No, he didn’t know exactly why he was here tonight.
Arnim took matters into his own hands. He was looking for an expert in military electronics, listening and transmitting stations, computation and data processing to develop the electronic warfare center equipment stolen from the NSA. Michel confirmed that he was indeed an expert. His diplomas from the best French and American schools could also give credence. Arnim asked Pierre if Michel could discreetly leave their company to quickly join the Sepp team. Pierre took it upon himself to negotiate a month’s notice. Could Arnim arrange to provide a contract of employment to Michel, now in a Bavarian company more or less linked to Siemens? The screen would be perfect to then get Michel back in the Sepp team and this would blur the tracks on the French side because just like Pierre, Michel was on the lists of DGSI and DGSE. Pierre and Michel were cleared as “secret defenders.”
It would be Pierre who would signal Michel’s departure to his various superiors. Anke told Michel the conditions for entering their movement. He had to start with love school. Would his wife follow him to this school or would she or Laurie, who always liked to remember his surogate loves, propose to be his partner. Anke connected to their intranet and showed her what this school of love was about. She ended the demonstration by opening her presentation file as well as Laurie’s… as Michel could already choose in full knowledge of the facts.
Arnim shortened the discussion to connect to Sepp’s expert forum. This one, warned, was online and he was able to test Michel’s competence right away. At one point, Sepp organized a split-screen work by setting up a whiteboard. He and Michel visualized on their own workstation a common working area on which they acted simultaneously on the plans and diagrams presented. Very quickly, Michel used the whiteboard as a draft and with his mouse, he guided Sepp in his explanations.
At one point, Michel worried about the length of their communication. It was too long and could be easily detected, especially when the NSA was constantly being discussed. Sepp, Arnim and Anke reassured him. The communication was done using high-level encryption on their own highly secure intranet with their own servers and not on the Internet open to all. They could continue to work quietly.
After two hours, Sepp felt that this first contact was enough. Before leaving, Pierre asked them to give an initial assessment of their meeting. Sepp declared that Michel was indeed the man of the situation and he invited Jacques to get in touch with Sandra to prepare the arrival of Michel and his family in Frankfurt. Michel confessed that he had never worked as fast and as well as he had in the last two hours. The technical level was much higher than he knew in his company. Sepp answered him with a smile. He, too, had never made as much progress as he had since leading this team of computer scientists and electronics engineers in their movement.
To be more convincing, still on a split screen, he opened a file to show Michel some video sequences and some work done by the other team in California. If Michel were to join them, he could work on a global electronic belt and perhaps even better than the NSA because pirating the latter!
The five left Sepp at his job and Pierre invited them to dinner by the sea. Anke took care of the bill. Pierre escorted Michel. Jacques, Arnim and Anke spent the night in Laurie’s house, then both returned to their offices in Frankfurt and then to the more discreet castle of Klaus.
Development of the Electronic Warfare Center
By mid-June, Michel’s reinforcement had enabled the Sepp team to finally make operational the listening and telecommunications equipment.
Michel, thanks to a tester he had himself made, had detected the presence of a spy chip but he could not locate it between several system cards. It was certain that the material was protected so that even if it fell into enemy hands, all communications would be well controlled by the opposing secret services.
In addition, this hardware was programmed to use Intelink, the NSA’s specific intranet. This intranet has no gateway to the Internet for security reasons. Sepp then decided to build another intranet from this hardware that was perfectly secure and without connection to the Internet. But how do we know what was going on in the opponent’s house and how do we know if that material still contained a spy chip?
Sepp, Anke, Dan and Arnim had to face the facts. The only possible evidence of non-hacking of their new intranet would come from the few correspondents within the NSA. If at Fort Meade they found evidence of the use of knights’ equipment, then only they would know that the equipment was electronically locked. Dan decided to take that chance.
Anke demanded to warn about a hundred of the best knights, to ask this group for a debate and a vote in favor, in case of a favorable opinion, of immediately militarily strengthening the security of Klaus Castle as well as starting training on the use of portable surface-to-air missiles. Arnim asked her if she was exaggerating a little. The young woman glanced at him with a glance and in his two beautiful blue eyes, the old officer understood that he had to change his period, that the ease of his youth’s time was long gone and that he had to get in tune with this enthusiasm, this implacable will to protect himself from the ruthless character of this world today.
It was Anke who now commanded in his special field and on par with Dan and in his more military field. Arnim took no offense. He had seen, heard, felt how Dan and Anke made love to each other quite regularly and could compare these embraces to his own with the same Anke. He sighed… if everything had been the same when he was a young officer, all his comrades killed in battle would still be there and like him, all would be with Anke and Dan… to make love as to organize a less violent society, the sword under the custody of the sacred.
Use of the Electronic Warfare Center
A week after the hardware was started, the first results fell from the Klaus company calculator on which the database management system derived from Promis software had been installed quite discreetly. A team of former hackers converted to the Sepp group were busy using the Internet to run some work on two European supercomputers when they were underloaded during the day or night.
The database research programs were drafted accordingly. Sepp and Anke were on the lookout for their confidential email inboxes. They were waiting for the NSA-friendly correspondents to tell them what was going on with their EW center. Less than two weeks after the equipment was set up, the message fell. Despite the changes, everything was happening in Fort Meade! The correspondents were asking for a day or two to come up with an alternative themselves.
Immediately the guard had been reinforced at the castle and Dan had distributed the bodyguards, former of Bosnia, in protection of the Sepp team and the main leaders of the movement.
Dan, on Laurie’s advice, had agreed not to have Pierre monitored by a bodyguard and Arnim had refused his guard. He was convinced that if someone tried to shoot him, he would shoot him anyway. There was no point in having a second knight killed at the same time. In fact, he was going to restrict his movements and stay close to Klaus and Anke. He felt that he was safe.
The secret-agent correspondents presented their solution: remove identical equipment from an undefended African station and dismantle it piece by piece so that it can be copied, remade without a spy chip or at least change cards and use this equipment to find out which card was involved.
Dan had a week to set up the operation and within hours of the site plans, the list of the staff and details of the habits of this staff arrived in Anke’s email. Secret agents of other powers collaborated with the troop of knights.
Steve and his regular crew were given a mission order to fly an empty cargo plane to the African airfield. The correspondents were effective, especially since the plane was going to pass through Ramstein. They apologized: they could not get closer and make it pass through Lahr, a matter of settlement… By the end of June, the second equipment had arrived at Klaus Castle.
The Beginning of Electronic Warfare
The next day, the correspondents became anxious and worried. The group of knights had been identified and located by the opposing secret services but no decision had been taken against them.
Policymakers weighed the pros and cons of eliminating knights altogether. The latter knew full well that members of their teams and at a very high level, were now collaborating with the knights, preferring their eminently humanitarian causes to the rather obscure service rendered to an unknown and extremist group which possessed in their country the de facto power over the elected representatives of the people.These decision-makers knew by heart the role of the sect of Anglo-Saxon Puritans in American political life and in Anglo-Saxon high finance. Their dogma of elected leaders’ choice certainly stemmed from the German and Swiss Protestant movement, but that sectarian group did indeed seize control of a wealthy world government. A vengeance by them as a warning was certainly in the air, and knights had to take it seriously.
In the months that followed, the knights and their adversaries each led the development of their own EW centers. In September, Islamist terrorists in Central Asia attacked the American people with unprecedented suicide bombing. The Knights’ correspondents at the NSA muted their collaboration with the movement to dedicate themselves fully to this new war on terror.
Anke received a proposal for collaboration from her mysterious agency correspondent who was supposed to be, the evidence became clearer, the agency’s own director. Anke is convening a videoconference among the founding members to discuss this proposal before submitting it to the rest of their movement, if necessary.
Pierre maintained a firm position: the knights did not have to cooperate with the NSA and the US military in this fight against terrorism because the American strategy was the opposite of the values of their movement. Peter recalled them briefly: to dismantle the capitalist industrial system in order to set up a network organization based on the two sources of knowledge, to achieve the alliance of opposites and not the domination of a single culture, however secular and freedom-loving it may be, not to use weapons on a massive scale against a people but to use these weapons with the forces of the upper and double worlds to defeat the groups of criminals, to remove the weapons from their hands and to place these weapons under the custody of the sacred.
Without repeating a history lesson, Peter indicated that this position was identical to that of the Templar rulers in the Middle Ages, when they understood that most frank and European warlords were transforming the new Kingdom of Jerusalem not as a platform for cultural innovation to realize socially the marriage of cultures begun at Cluny, Cîteaux, Clairvaux, but as a mere copy of their European kingdoms based on the feudal system of power, with all the power struggles that this system generated.
Bernard de Clairvaux had forbidden the Knights Templar to participate in the new crusades, and the Order of the Temple had long refused to finance the loan to buy the freedom of King Saint-Louis, who was detained in Tunis, because the Templars did not have to erase the inconsequences of a King of France who had refused to listen to the wise counsel of their order. Admittedly, this refusal had served as a pretext for Philippe le Bel to avenge the memory of his grandfather.
But today, for Pierre, history repeats itself in a way. Leaders in this struggle against global terrorism had a choice: they could do as they please, or they could change their ways, get out of their systems of power and undertake the marriage of cultures, the marriage of opposites based on global knowledge that combined the two sources of knowledge. Pierre insisted that Anke respond formally to the agency’s director, articulating this position.
The poet added that, if no bullets were likely to pass through the air in this region, he would be happy, alone or with Laurie, Romain and Claudine, to organize a first part of the celebrations of Eleusis or Dendérah in the cave serving as a shelter for the leaders of these terrorist groups. With a smile, the poet confirmed that he guaranteed the immediate exit of these people from their cave and probably their conversion to a God other than the one for whom they killed human beings…. Bah! Celtic Druids must have tried to disturb Julius Caesar’s sleep and tranquility.
What the insider was able to do would not be enough to convert the other side… there are still impenetrable spirits left behind, however, to all forms of light, including spiritual ones.
The knights did not take part in any operation during the rest of this war, but they worked more and more on the development of their means of military protection. Their movement had been ostracized by the Allied intelligence services. The agency’s director, in the spring of the following year, sent Anke a long message of outrage and anger. While his office was actively involved in the success of the global war on terrorism, he could no longer bear to see the increased frequency and importance of the knights-pirating of his electronic warfare centers. He was, frankly, fed up with regularly reading in his private mailbox Anke’s answer, always the same, that he was wrong and had wrong objectives and means, that he had to follow the knights’ position, change swords, and change battles.
The Knights’ First Military Fight
Two days after Anke received this long message, an opposing friend reported that a mission order had just been sent to a far-right action group in Germany.
The Search for Intelligence on Their Enemy
Dan decided to bring two Huey for a few weeks to Klaus Castle. The knights rearmed them as they did during the expedition from Bosnia. The weak point was the computer at the Klaus factory. He was too slow to digest the mass of recordings. Sepp asked the California team to find a solution on a super computer at an American university near Palo Alto or Mountain View.
The next day, the recordings of the leadership of the far-right movement showed that it had received very accurate information about the real identities of Arnim and Klaus, about their management of the Nazi secret funds and about the probable existence of a substantial remnant of this war treasure. This last piece of information was quickly validated: it was a carrot waved so that this far-right movement would act against Arnim and Klaus.
The address of the castle soon appeared among the news. The attempt to discredit their movement through a confrontation that was later presented as a score-line between far-right and neo-Nazi groups became apparent. All the resources of the electronic warfare center, all the intelligence means ROEM, the full load of the computer were monopolized by the hunt for communications of this direction of the neo-Nazi group.
It took thirty-six hours to process the relevant information and to know the date and place where one of his commandos was going to prepare an action against the castle. However, it appeared that the sponsors, certainly Americans and far right too, had not seen fit to mention that the castle was home to an electronic warfare center and was well defended. Dan, Anke, and Arnim concluded that the opposing intelligence services were using the extreme right-wing groups of both countries to achieve their ends, but without disclosing the presence of this intelligence material, which could be turned against them fairly quickly.
The three knights instantly agreed. The logic was that they would immediately exploit the information that came out of this huge electronic and computer work. Through this information capture alone, they had the confirmation of the need to develop a knight order to protect their movement.
The whole question was how long they would have to counter the opponent so that their movement would develop, mainly on the third level of work: the political, economic and social organization based on a networked organization from the two sources of knowledge and which recognizes the primary place of the human being.
The Knights’ Commando Response
A commando of knights was to attack the neo-Nazi commando when the latter was assembled and this fight should make the opponent think long before the latter prepares other attacks.
Arnim was the only one who knew the location and identity of some of the leaders of this neo-Nazi group. This information was known to him through his activity as a secret agent in the service of the CIA. It was up to him to lead the attack.
Anke was naturally exempt from this because for security reasons, the two special action leaders could not be together on the ground. Dan wanted to command second in command. Arnim asked him to lead a reserve commando. The old officer organized his group around his friends from the Gebirgsjäger. His nephew taking command second. Arnim justified this composition as a matter of internal German concern and asked to be able to carry the cross of the knights of the Holy Roman Empire below the Temple Cross. Frantz gave permission in principle.
Dan didn’t agree to let the commando go like this. He demanded the presence of a witness of non-German nationality and asked Arnim to take Jacques with him. He was now also head of the group responsible for protecting the club near Baden-Baden. Dan brought him in at once.
The mechanics of the Hueys arrived with another aircraft from their Dutch airfield. Around two in the morning, about twenty knights got into the aircraft. Steve drove the Huey leader. This was the first time that operations would be transmitted to the EW Center using high-level encrypted transmissions from the battlefield. This was another success of the Sepp team.
An hour later, the knights’ commando was on the scene. Arnim led the establishment of his team around an old stone quarry that served as a shooting range. Neo-Nazis clustered in the neighboring property would come here early in the morning to settle their weapons. Several knights, elders of the Bosnian expedition, asked Arnim if they should take prisoners so that they could later convert them to their movement. Arnim replied that this work of conversion is only possible for a spiritual master, that in the absence of such a master, they would not make any prisoners.
Arnim’s Death in Fight
Around eight o’clock, several ATVs arrived in the quarry. Arnim didn’t give them time to settle their guns. He walked down the path to shout the name of the neo-Nazi leader. The latter, amazed, in turn advanced towards Arnim, whom he had recognized despite his mountain troops.
But a neo-Nazi had an unforeseen reaction. Out of fear or a blind, murderous instinct, he threw himself to the ground in the ditch by the side of the road and immediately opened fire on Arnim who collapsed. The neo-Nazi leader ran to check on Arnim’s condition. When he saw that he had died, he returned to the one who had opened fire and with his gun shot him cold.
The others gathered near the vehicles to quickly pull out the rest of their weapons as long as they understood that Arnim had not come alone and that they had fallen into a lookout.
Jacques came out of hiding and ordered the fire. The knights jumped up and down without stopping firing. When they arrived at the cars, no opponents were alive. Jacques inspected the vehicles, took bags with documents and then set them on fire.
The two Hueys arrived. Several knights rushed on the first to take out a stretcher on which they placed Arnim’s body. Less than an hour later, the knights’ commando was back at the castle. Laurie was on her way from Baden-Baden. The news of Arnim’s death had been spread without further explanation on intranets and the Internet.
Crisis management following the destruction of the neo-Nazi commando on German soil.
With the threat removed, Dan ordered the two commandos to disband and send the Hueys back to their cantonment base. He decided to join Anke in the computer center of the Klaus factory in Karlsruhe so that he could react as soon as the information was read.
The neo-Nazi group’s leadership did not learn about the massacre at noon. She did not understand what had happened and ordered her movement to silence. Already the police, alerted by the neighborhood was there to investigate and take away the dead. At about 4 p.m., Dan read the report to the prosecutor. What was embarrassing was the discovery of the traces of helicopters. Investigators opted for a neo-Nazi score-settling arrangement, but the presence of at least one helicopter indicated that the attackers were heavily armed and equipped. The bullets recovered proved the use of machine guns and not hunting weapons.
Dan and Anke activated their network of agent-secret correspondents. At around 7pm, a message fell directly on their high-level encrypted messaging. It was a congratulatory message. The correspondent regretted that the knights left behind the bodies of their enemies and traces of their Hueys but he said that the knights would do better next time. He questioned the appropriateness of this new practice of not taking prisoners when they had already made admirable conversions in Bosnia and he signed an unknown code name.
Anke authenticated the origin of the message. He came straight from Fort Meade. Annoyed, she immediately sent him back to one of the NSA’s sympathetic correspondents to find out who had done it. In the calma. The correspondent had been able to judge the quality of the reaction of the knights and as a professional of special actions, he could only rejoice in the success of the knights and the loss of the neo-Nazi commando. The correspondent seemed to rejoice in discovering himself partners of play at his height, he who was to be bored in the solitude of his sovereign power over the world of intelligence to the point of obscuring the theft twice, of sensitive material and secret defense.
But Dan had to admit that an NSA leader had discovered that sympathetic correspondents were in his house. Was a tacit agreement possible between professionals for the success of such humanitarian operations launched by the new knights? Anke decided to close their email and close this special operation.
Laurie watches over Arnim’s body
At about 10 p.m., Dan and Anke returned to the castle to find Laurie and watch Arnim’s remains overnight. The group of elders in the afternoon had reformed.
The women remembered the many gestures they had made in their youth and had taken care of the old officer’s body to wash, bandage and remove the traces of the fatal wounds.
Laurie, too febrile, had been ousted from this group of women. She had tried to reach Pierre at his place of work. She had even had Pierre’s secretary on the phone, but he was in Paris, on a business trip and Laurie had only the address of the hotel where Pierre was staying for the night.
Stone for taste as if for security reasons did not use any mobile phone like most members of their movement. She left a message at this hotel but she knew that Pierre would not be back there until very late. She could try to call him directly at the workplace that the secretary had told her, but Laurie finally changed her mind. Why did she need Peter’s help? Couldn’t she act alone?
She went to the chapel of the castle, spread her knight’s cloak on the tiles and lay face down on it. She folded the edges on her back as if to wrap herself in the cloak and give a little warmth to this carnal envelope when she left it. Facing the ground, she tried to decorate herself, took several paths to reach it and then, calmer, she found the right one.
She stayed at the back of the choir, a short distance from her fleshly body. She hesitated about what she should do. She felt that she did not have her usual powers so she wanted to cross the skylight to reach the higher world but nothing happened. No one came. She expressed a desire to know where Arnim had gone. No answer came.
She saw her body lying in front of her. She knew that she had come a long way, that she had left. Laurie was aware of her decay but she understood that trying to find out what had become of Arnim’s spirit and soul was not enough reason to remake the journey.
His faith was enough. But she preferred to sit there and wait. Moments seemed endless lengths to him. She thinks that just after all this time, Arnim would have settled in his home, that he could return to the world double find her. But as she went along, Laurie realized that an oppressive silence was setting in. She didn’t want to go back to her body. She preferred to stand still as the space around her became more opaque, cold and still.
She finally felt a presence approaching outside, in front of the door of the chapel. She saw how this presence went through the heavy closed door and she was not shocked. It was a presence like her of the double world. Laurie had never met this kind of presence, silent but moving unfazed towards her. She gathered her mind together and remembered Peter’s anecdote when he told her about her encounter with the Envoy of Darkness. That was it! He was in the middle of the central aisle and she preferred that he not go any further because he was much closer than she, to her carnal body. She sought within herself to dialog with her soul as Peter had told her and immediately the voice came into her to tell her that she could return without fear to her carnal body.
Laurie immediately got up, deeply troubled by what she had just experienced. It wasn’t just the journey through the skylight. The Envoy of Darkness did exist. He had not frightened her, but without his own decision, he would have taken her into the dark world of silence.
Painfully she came out of the chapel to reach her room. She nailed herself on a chair in front of the table of her room and with a furious will, she imposed her hands to demand that the spirit of Svetlana manifest itself. It wasn’t as simple as that, but with an unaccustomed outpouring of effort, the medium managed to connect to his mind. Svetlana came to confirm that she, along with other loved ones, had come to meet Arnim’s soul to help him cross the well of light. Yes, she could confirm that Arnim’s human identity was well melted with the divine plot but Laurie did not have to worry.
Why didn’t Svetlana come to help Laurie in a state of decay? It was simple: who was the medium? So? Svetlana advised her psychic to save her strength or their relationship would break down. Laurie told him about her meeting with the Envoy of Darkness, how she remembered Peter’s words.
Svetlana was mischievous. Laurie had to question her lover more closely because he had made a lot of progress in his negotiations with this Envoy of the Darkness. Yes, Peter was in the process of returning to the path of priestly initiation towards the highest social and political functions, the functions of high priests and the functions of pharaoh since this intrepid and unclassifiable poet had chosen for his irrational works the civilization of Upper Egypt as a frame of reference.
Svetlana assured him that neither she nor Peter would need to call him to play evil spirits during the celebration of the mysteries of Eleusis. Pierre would manage on his own, like a great one! For the moment she advised Laurie to leave Pierre alone in her research. Didn’t they love each other? Could she doubt for a moment that she would not be the first with whom he would share the fruits of his research? Svetlana wanted to break off this affair and Laurie had to accept.
She lay on her bed and tried to imagine what her loving poet devil could do. The story was accelerating and she knew that Dan would not be able to completely replace Arnim. But what could Pierre still do?
She searched. Together they had gone around the upper world and it seemed impossible to go further on this level without definitively abandoning an earthly existence. Were there things to look for in the double world? …To become a high priest or pharaoh of the most ancient of Egypt?
She laughed all by herself while superimposing before her the image of the poet in turn or simultaneously as high priest and pharaoh. With a gesture of deep tenderness, she kissed the finger with which she had spread the drops that had escaped from the poet’s gaze in front of the sphinx of Tanis and the zodiac of Denderah, in the crypt of the Louvre. Her olfactory memory reminded her of the taste of these tears… she pulled the duvet high on her shoulders to get warm during her sleep. She continued to smile with her eyes closed… her loving poet continued to advance on the path of their evolution, she could fall asleep… happy, despite everything deeply happy waiting for the next sharing, there in the only loop that the great river makes. She fell asleep at the water’s edge. She did not have the strength to inquire whether the neighboring presence was a great spiritual master living there or whether it was a boatman spending his life understanding the captivating forces of the river.
Arnim’s funeral
Dan searched for his wife among the forty people present. Next to the group of elders, the group of founders only missed Pierre and Françoise. Martha had just completed a prayer ceremony. Anke invited them to the library.
Briefly, she drew the lessons of this special operation and submitted her and Dan’s message of congratulations to their knight order. Everyone knew that Arnim was only the first knight to die in battle, that there would be more…
Dan then asked who had seen Laurie. It’s been hours since anyone’s seen her. This absence cast a more worrisome cloud over the audience. Sandra decided to go and see if she wasn’t just in her room. The fourteen went up. Anke came in first followed by Dan. She saw that Laurie was asleep. She signaled to others not to make any noise and each one of them came quickly to observe the radiant face with which their Laurie slept deeply.
They all remembered the same expressions of Peter and Laurie when these two were preparing to use their mysterious powers. They understood that Laurie knew that Arnim was saved, that he was at home in the higher world with his loved ones and his wife. Anke took them out and asked Dan to wake her gently. Laurie kissed her husband lovingly and stretched out on the bed while asking him to stay glued to her and then she invited Anke to come and share her love embraces too, but Anke, all about her duty, apologized and asked her friend to come and join them in the library. Laurie promised.
She got up to send Dan to look for a knight’s sword while she dressed herself in the dress of their Templar order. It was the sword stretched out firmly in front of her that she entered the library to ask them to go and wear their order and go to the chapel. She wanted Arnim’s body to rest there. She invited Martha to celebrate with her a Eucharistic communion and she asked Dominique to bring her the text of the words that Peter had spoken during their first celebration, their first weekend in Baden-Baden.
They admired Laurie’s serenity, her somewhat mischievous smile, but they did not blame her. Alone, she freed her desire to proclaim her joy. Of course, it was obvious, in the loop of the great river, Peter would choose the functions of pharaoh… it would be she who would perform the functions of high priest… she would not wait for her imbalance of poet! From this evening, she took up her duties and as for him, please don’t hang out too much, huh?