Molly and Jonathan had been in the village 2 weeks, and they were all sitting after lunch when Jonathan was surprised to hear a loud electronic beep. Maribel reached into the small embroidered pouch that she carried everywhere with her and pulled out a chunky wrist cell he had not seen her use before. He recognized it as a short-range device that could send instant messages.
“Looks like there’s more to this place than meets the eye!” said Jonathan. Maribel looked over to Linorio for confirmation. Linorio nodded.
“My trading alert has just triggered,” Maribel said with a smile. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
As they left the main house, there was a faint flash of lightning in the distance. She led Jonathan to a rock face behind the house, darted behind it and disappeared. She reappeared a moment later and peeped her head out. “Quick! There’s a storm coming. We may lose communications.”
Jonathan looked around the corner of the rock to see a hidden door, slightly ajar, that opened to a dimly lit room.
“Shut the door. We have to keep the humidity out.”
The small room was crammed full of equipment. Maribel was seated in front of half a dozen Screens which she tapped alive to reveal a myriad of graphs. She worked the computers with lightning speed as she tapped, clicked and checked. Jonathan sat next to her, tingling. She finally opened a small moisture-resistant box, pulled out a tattered old note book and jotted down a few figures. She sent a file out with a message on the Connect, and then made an external backup of several files. She sat back in her chair and smiled a sigh of huge relief.
“All done and backed up! I’ve waited months for those trades. Watch, these three markets will fall now. We got in at the top, and just in time!”
Jonathan looked puzzled.
“You know I trained as a strategist and economist. Well, I’ve been raising funds to expose the corruption,” she explained. “I’ve just made some trades that now give us enough credits to start the next phase. We are ready!”
Linorio and Molly appeared at the door.
“Linorio, we’ve done it. We’ve got the funds! Help me explain the plan.” Linorio nodded as he and Molly squeezed into the cramped room. Maribel flipped a Screen to display a chart.
“These charts cover about 250 years of data,” she continued. “They track the cycles. Wealth distribution, disposable income, the markets for all sorts of commodities, fluctuations in prices, shifts in monetary systems. And these charts here are some of the economic cycles, like the Kongratieff wave and the East/West cycle. In some ways, things are better today than 50 years ago, because we are at the top of the cycles. But things will change again, and we have to go with the natural flow.
“It’s the big mistake we’ve made so many times. Things are much better now. More honesty and kindness. But we are still in cycles. When we look back in history, we can see an extraordinary repetition of cycles. But most people don’t pay any attention to them. People stop looking at history, especially when things are going well.”
Jonathan remembered what the Professor has said about history repeating itself.
“Economics is energy,” she said. “Cycles are part of nature, and they have been part of our culture. Even these days, with our contact to the higher dimensions, in touch with source and our new-found connections, we are still following cycles. We still go around the sun, the moon still goes around the earth, the tides come in, the tides go out, and we pass through the seasons. And there are dark forces becoming more powerful again; they follow their cycles, too. There are people misusing the jungle for their own gain.”
“And it’s not only the jungle,” said Linorio. “There are things happening throughout the world. There are people who act from their darker side and misuse the power and trust they have been given. We are all human. It’s inevitable that some people will revert to the dark. We are starting to see a re-emergence of the urge to destroy.
“We’ve been accumulating funds to launch a massive campaign to expose the corruption and exploitation we have been monitoring, and that you’ve seen first-hand. We needed enough funds to make it big enough so that it couldn’t be squashed, like it has been before. We think we know where the information is being blocked, but there are still doubts. It looks like there are a few people who have taken control again. The forests, and the whole world, are in danger again.
“But today, thanks to Maribel, we have the funds to broadcast the information in such a way that whoever has been keeping it secret will not have a chance to block it. But we need a huge campaign, with as many channels as possible, so that it will still get through even if some of them get gagged.”
“We’ve been coordinating our contacts in preparation for the campaign,” said Maribel, as she flipped the Screen to a full map of the world and set it to display a hundred or so indicators. “Here are the contacts we have around the world, ready to release information. And we have eye witnesses, ready to say what they know. They cover everything from administration to transportation routes, from the legal system to the Connect. But we have to time everything so that all the information is released at the same time.
“The Amazon is so isolated that we also needed some people who have seen it first-hand. So, we have been bringing in people over the last months. That was why we set up the diversion for our entomologists to arrive the way you did. It was the only way an outsider could see what is happening.”
She zoomed the Screen into the area of the Amazon. “Up here, we have a young man researching his ancestry. He ‘stumbled’ across the illegal gemstone mining in this area. We have a biologist who ‘accidentally got lost’ around here. He found a racket that is poaching rare orchids from the area. We have been watching him and keeping him safe, although he went off on a wrong trail at one point. The scout team found him, and he was so startled he lost some of his equipment in the river. Thankfully all his notes and photographs were safe. We have an anthropologist researching the indigenous tribes in this area who ‘purely by chance’ discovered the gruesome poaching of iguanas for their oil. And a chemist who ‘caught the wrong boat’ and found a small but very lucrative factory of a number of chemical substances. There are about 30 such people who have seen, first hand, what is happening. We led all of them to one of the surveillance communities, and they are all safe and have been briefed about what we are doing. But they are all well-known people. You, Jonathan, are here just by chance. Or maybe not?” Maribel said, beaming with her beautiful smile.
“We have to keep all the people in the surveillance communities completely secret. None of us can go public and, anyway, most of us don’t exist, not in the official world at least.”
“We need a spokesperson,” said Linorio. “Jonathan, we would like that to be you. You are a natural. The way you found my reference to Puerto Verdad, and you instinctively take records of everything with your pictures and notes. We know you can do it. You need to be our voice, just like your parents were for so many causes. There is a vein of corruption that is deep in society, and it is hiding the truth. You’ve seen the evidence and we need someone impartial, someone without previous associations. They don’t know about you. You are our surprise to the world. You are perfect, Jonathan.” Linorio and Molly left. They wanted to give him time to think about it.
Maribel looked at Jonathan, with a look that said it all. They shut down the Screens, closed up the room and walked into the bright afternoon sun. She took his arm as they went back to the main house to announce they were ready to launch. It had started raining gently, sun rain, with a brilliant rainbow that cut across the trees. They stopped beside a small pool that had formed over the last few days, to watch the tadpoles that had recently hatched and the rain that splashed its tiny drops on the water.
“Once again, it has to be the few who start to make the changes. We are like the raindrops on water,” Maribel said. “I’ll come with you. I’ll come back to the city.”
“I’ll do it. We’ll do this together,” he replied, in a heartbeat.