The Milestone Protocol by Ernest Dempsey (reading in the dark txt) 📗

Emily offered them a consoling grin. “I think I can call someone to take care of it. I work for the president, remember?”

The television switched to sports and a different anchor talking about an upcoming soccer match in Oslo.

People walked by the café on the sidewalk outside, carrying bags brimming with gifts for the holiday season.

Sean raised a glass and offered a toast. “Merry Christmas, everyone.”

Everyone else raised a glass to meet his. “Merry Christmas,” they echoed.

Thank You

First of all, I want to thank you for reading this story. I had a great time creating it, and I hope you enjoyed every minute.

There are millions of books you could have chosen to spend your time and money on, and you chose mine. So I appreciate that.

Thank you so much.

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Also, be sure to check out the author’s notes on the next page if you want to know a little more about this story.

Ernest

Fact Vs Fiction

Hello again, reader friend. Welcome to the part of the story where we distill the truth from the imagined.

As always in fiction, liberties are taken, places, people, and events are altered or concocted. I know I always like to learn what was real and what wasn’t in a book like this, and I hope you find it enlightening as well.

Let’s start at the beginning, where Jani Beg Khan is met by a mysterious intruder. While the great Khan of the Golden Horde was real, as were the siege and subsequent assault on Kaffa, the assassin sent by the Cult of Thoth was my invention. It is certainly possible that such an interloper visited the great leader and advised him, though there is no substantial evidence to prove it happened.

Jani Beg did, in fact, launch his dead soldiers over the walls of Kaffa, which accelerated the spread of the plague when the Genoese merchants fled in their ships back to Europe. We all know what happened after that.

If you want to visit Kaffa today, it goes by the name Feodosia, and still contains many historical landmarks to explore.

One of the legends I mention in the story refers to mysterious robed figures people reported seeing outside of towns and villages a few days before the plague struck. These reaper stories are fairly common in regards to not only the Black Death, but also other tragic events that take place throughout history. While I cannot validate eyewitness accounts or urban legends, I can tell you that these details exist as, at least, a form of evidence. So, was the assassin in my story one of these reapers? Could they have visited Jani Beg to jump start what the order knew would be a mass extinction? I leave that up to you.

The mysterious cities of Sarai are a fascinating study. No one is sure where they were located, and archaeologists continue to search for evidence that could shed light on the subject. The fact that these cities were some of the largest population centers in the known world makes their disappearance all the more mysterious.

We do know that the cities were located in the vicinity of the city now known as Volgograd, near the river, and that to this day, the Golden Horde is still considered a scourge by many locals.

Plovdiv is a beautiful city in Bulgaria, and everything I mentioned in the story is as accurate as I could make it. The ancient town, or old town as some call it, is one of the best kept historical secrets I’ve encountered. Visiting Bulgaria has been on my list for some time, but I didn’t know much about it or Plovdiv until I started writing this story.

Another fascinating place in the story is Svalbard, the Island of Spitsbergen, and the town of Longyearbyen. This remote location offers snow swept mountains and a variety of unique wildlife, along with the international seed vault I mentioned in the story. That’s right. The seed vault is very real, placed on Spitsbergen in case of a cataclysmic event. The bunkers containing the seeds are huge, and I truly enjoyed learning about how the location was determined, along with how it is shared and maintained.

The pyramid on Spitsbergen was concocted by me, as far as I know. But it seems that more and more pyramids, or structures like them, are being found around the world. I’ve detailed a few of these, both real and true to life, in some of the other stories in the Sean Wyatt series.

Of course, that was the plan all along. And it only took twenty stories to get there. (Insert a mischievous smile here).

But I wanted to build something that spanned the globe, and human history, connecting dots along the way until it culminated in an epic showdown with an all-powerful evil organization.

Regarding the shadow caste, or what some call the deep state, I cannot say if it is real or not. The Hermetic Cult of Thoth was real, and it’s possible the order is still around, manipulating global events. The Ahnenerbe and the Thule Society were real enough, and it’s widely known that Heinrich Himmler was an active member. Everything I mentioned in the story about the cult’s history is as accurate as possible, though the hierarchy featuring Odin and other umbrella secret societies is purely from my conspiratorial imagination.

That said, I find it difficult to not believe in a shadow caste such as