The summit was sheered off and leveled with laser-like precision. It was like a giant runway in the sky over the Nazcan desert, and it afforded breathless views of some of the more famous carvings.
Conrad stood up and brushed off the dust while Mercedes relished the view. He hoped she was taking it all in, because her next vista would be from behind bars unless he figured out some way to elude the Peruvians below.
“You have to admit it, Conrad,” she said. “This summit could have been a runway.”
Conrad smiled. She was trying to get a rise out of him. Since the carvings could only be seen from the air, some of his wacky archaeologist rivals had suggested that the ancient Nazcans had machines that could fly, and that the particular mount on which he and Mercedes stood was once a landing strip for alien spaceships. He wouldn’t mind one showing up about now to take him away from Mercedes and the Peruvians. But he needed her. The show was all he had left to fund his research, and she was his only line of credit.
Conrad said, “I suppose it’s not enough for me to suggest that aliens who could travel across the stars probably didn’t need airstrips?”
“No.”
Conrad sighed. It was hard enough for him to contend with the sands of time, foreign governments, and goof-ball theories in his quest for the origins of human civilization without ancient astronauts eroding what little respect he had left in the academic community.
At one time Conrad was a groundbreaking, postmodern archaeologist. His deconstructionist philosophy was that ancient ruins weren’t nearly so important as the information they conveyed about their builders. Such a stand ran against 10
the self-righteous trend toward “preservation” in archaeology, which in Conrad’s mind was code for “tourism” and the dollars it brought. He became a maverick in the press, a source of bitter jealousy among his peers, and a thorn in the side of Near East and South American countries who laid claims to the world’s greatest archaeological treasures.
Then one day he unearthed dozens of Israelite dwellings from the thirteenth centuryB .C. near Luxor in Egypt that offered the first physical proof for the biblical account of the Exodus. But the official position of the Egyptian government was that their ancient forefathers never used Hebrew slaves to build the pyramids. Moreover, only the Egyptian government had the right to announce discoveries to the media. Conrad didn’t discuss his find with them before talking to the press, thus violating a contract that every archaeologist working in Egypt had to sign before starting a dig. The head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities called him “a stupid, lazy jerk” and banned him forever from Egypt.
Suddenly, the tables had turned, and Conrad the iconoclast had become Conrad the preservationist, demanding international protection for his “slave city.” By the time Egypt allowed camera crews to the site, however, the crumbling foundations of the Israelite dwellings had been bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a military installation. There was nothing left to preserve, only a story nobody believed and a reputation in tatters.
Now he was worse off than ever. Stripped of his stature. Strapped for cash. In the arms of Mercedes and her crazy reality TV show that peddled entertainment, not archaeology, to the masses. He couldn’t go back to Egypt, and soon the same would be said of Peru and Bolivia and a growing number of other countries. Only the hard discovery of humanity’s Mother Culture could rescue him from ancient astronauts and this purgatory of cheap documentaries and even cheaper flings.
Concern clouded Mercedes’s face. “We could blow a whole day just getting a crew up here for your stand-up,” she said, brooding for a moment before her face suddenly brightened. “Much better to stick with an aerial from the Cessna and a voice-over.”
Conrad said, “That kind of defeats the purpose, Mercedes.” She shot him a quizzical glance. “What are you talking about?”
“I see it’s time we perform a sacred ritual,” he told her, taking her hand. “One that will unleash a revelation.”
11
Conrad dropped to his knees, pulling her down next to him. Mercedes’s eyes sparkled in expectation. “Do as I do, and behold a great mystery.” Mercedes leaned next to him.
“Dig your fingers into the dirt.”
They slowly dug their fingers through the hot, black volcanic pebbles into the cool and moist yellow clay beneath.
“This in your script?” she asked. “It’s good.”
“Just rub the clay between your fingers.”
She did, and then lifted a small clump to her nostrils and smelled it, as if to experience some cosmic epiphany.
“There you go,” he told her.
A look of confusion crossed her face. “That’s it?”
“Don’t you see?” he asked. “This ground is too soft for the landing of wheeled aircraft.” He smiled at her in triumph. “So much for your fantasies of ancient astronauts.”
He should have known his simple, scientific test wouldn’t go over well with her.
Her eyes turned into steely blue slits of rage. He had seen the transformation before. That’s how she got to where she was in TV, that and her father’s money.
“The show needs you, Conrad,” she said. “You think differently than others. And you’ve got credentials. Or had them anyway. You’re a twenty-first-century astro-archaeologist, or whatever the hell you are. Don’t piss it away. I want to keep you on. But I’m under pressure to deliver ratings. So if you don’t play ball, I’ll get some toothy celebrity who plays an archaeologist on TV to take your place.”
“Meaning?”
“Give the freaks who are watching what they want.”
“Ancient astronauts?”
A serene smile broke across her baby face as she adopted a fawning, adoring gaze. He groaned inwardly.
12
“Professor Yeats,” she gushed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him on the mouth.
Unable to extract himself, or come up for air, he kissed her back contemptuously, feeling her body respond to his own self-hatred. Obviously what the French dramatist Molière said about playwrights applied to archaeologists as well. He was the prostitute here. He started out doing it for himself, then for a few friends and universities. Hell, he might as well get paid for it.
Suddenly the wind picked up and Mercedes’s ponytail slapped him across the face. A gleaming metallic object hovered in the sky. He shaded his eyes and recognized the shape of a Black Hawk military chopper fitted with side-mounted machine guns.
Mercedes followed his gaze and frowned. “What is it?”
“Trouble.”
Conrad reached behind her and pulled out a Glock 9 mm automatic pistol from her backpack. Mercedes’s eyes grew wide. “You sent me through customs with that?”
“Nah, I bought it in Lima the other day.” He pulled out a loaded clip from his belt pack and rammed it into the butt of the pistol. He tucked the gun behind his belt. “I’ll do the talking.”
Mercedes, speechless, nodded.
The chopper descended, the wind from its blades kicking up red dust as it touched down. The door slid open, and six U.S. Special Forces soldiers in field uniforms stepped down onto the summit and secured the area before a lanky young officer in a blue USAF flight suit clanked down the metal steps to the ground and walked up to Conrad.
“Doctor Yeats?” the officer said.
Conrad looked him over. He appeared to be about his own age, a slim, easygoing man Conrad had seen somewhere before. He wore a single black leather glove on his left hand. “Who wants to know?”
“NASA, sir. I’m Commander Lundstrom. I work for your father, General Yeats.” Conrad stiffened. “What does he want?”
13
“The general needs your opinion on a matter of vital interest to the national security.”
“I’m sure he does, Commander, but the national interest and my own are two different things.”
“Not this time, Doctor Yeats. I understand you’re persona non grata at the University of Ari
zona. And in case you hadn’t noticed, an armed goon squad is climbing up that cliff. You can come with me, or you could spend a few weeks in a Peruvian jail cell.”
“So you’re saying I can either see my father or go to jail? I’ll have to think about it.”
“Think about this,” Lundstrom said. “Your little friend there might not want to bail you out of jail when she discovers you’ve been using her to smuggle a stolen Egyptian artifact into the country so you can pawn it off to a wanted South American drug lord.”
“Another lie coming out of Luxor. Where did I allegedly find this artifact?”
“The Egyptians say you looted it from the National Museum of Baghdad when the city fell to invading American forces during the Iraq war. They got the Iraqis to confirm it. At least that’s what they’re telling the Peruvians, Bolivians, and anybody else who will listen.”
Conrad tried to muffle his rage at the Egyptians even as he calculated the chances of Mercedes letting him rot in prison. He concluded she’d probably let the guards have a few whacks at him before bailing him out.
“Very nice,” Conrad told Lundstrom. “But all the same, I’m going to have to pass up this wonderful opportunity.” Conrad offered his hand to wish Lundstrom a hearty good-bye.
But the commander didn’t budge. “There’s more, Doctor Yeats,” he said. “We’ve found what you’ve spent your whole life looking for.” Conrad looked him in the eye. “My biological parents?”
“Next best thing. You’ll be briefed when we get there.”
“ ‘There’ almost got me killed last time, Commander. Look, why don’t you find somebody else?”
14
“We tried.” Lundstrom paused, letting the reality sink in that Conrad wasn’t at the top of anybody’s list these days. “But if her disappearance is any indication, it appears that Dr. Serghetti has already been retained by another organization to investigate this matter.”
“Serena?”
Lundstrom nodded.
Conrad’s mind raced through a number of scenarios, all of them entirely unpleasant and utterly thrilling at the same time. Just hearing her name made him come alive. And the thought that he and Serena and his father and the distinct worlds each of them inhabited would for the first time collide made him wonder if the space-time continuum could handle it or if the universe itself would explode.
“This isn’t going to end well, Commander, is it?”
“Probably not. But General Yeats is waiting.”
“Give me a minute.”
Conrad turned and walked back to Mercedes, who had been watching the exchange with a furrowed brow, and kissed her. “I’m sorry, baby. But I’m going to have to go.”
“Go?” she said. “Go where?”
“To visit a real ancient astronaut.”
Conrad reached into her pack again and took out a gold Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian statuette of Ramses II, who was pharaoh during the alleged Exodus. He had found it in the slave city, and it was the one thing left in his life that proved he wasn’t insane. He gave it to Mercedes.
“Now you never knew where this came from, just in case the nice gentlemen coming over the ledge ask you when they escort you back to Lima.” Mercedes’s mouth dropped as Conrad and Lundstrom climbed into the Black Hawk. The door shut and the military chopper lifted up and away.
Conrad looked down at the shrinking plateau. By the time he remembered to wave good-bye to Mercedes, the militia men had reached the summit and the chopper was over the side of a mountain.
15
Conrad turned to Lundstrom. “So what on earth does my father want with me?”
“It’s where on earth,” said Lundstrom, throwing him a white polar “freezer” suit.
“Catch.”
3
Discovery
Plus Twenty-Two Days
Aceh, Indonesia
Rome
DR. SERENASERGHETTI SKIMMEDacross the emerald rice fields at two hundred feet, careful to keep the chopper steady. The sun had burst through the dark clouds, but thunder rumbled across the lush mountainside, and rain threatened.
She was nearing the town of Lhokseumawe in the war-torn corner of Indonesia that used to be known as the Dutch West Indies. There were twenty thousand orphans in the province, casualties of a decades-long struggle between Acehnese separatists and the Indonesian military. Now Al Qaeda terrorists had injected themselves into the mix on the Muslim side, making the situation even more combustible. She had to do something to help these children whom the rest of the world had forgotten.
As she passed over the wetlands, she glanced down and saw the sun glint off the oil slick. A discharge from an oil well in Exxon Mobile’s Cluster II had contaminated the local paddy fields, orchards, and shrimp farms. It had happened before, but this leak looked far more threatening. The widows and orphans in the nearby villages of Pu’uk, Nibong Baroh, and Tanjung Krueng Pase would be devastated. They would have to move to another area for at least six months, maybe a year, their sustenance wiped out.
She was about to flick on the onboard remote camera when a voice spoke in her headphone in heavily accented English. “Welcome to Post Thirteen, Sister Serghetti.”
She glanced starboard and saw an Indonesian military chopper with side-mounted machine guns keeping pace with her chopper. The voice spoke again.
“You are going to land on the helipad in the center of the complex.” She banked to the right and started to climb when four bullets raked the side.
“Land immediately,” the voice said, “or we’ll blow you out of the sky.” 16
She gripped the joystick tightly and dropped lower toward the helipad. She lightly touched down on the platform as soldiers in field greens surrounded her chopper, fingers gripping their M-16s.
They were Kopassus units—Indonesian special forces—based at nearby Camp Rancong, she realized as she stepped out of the chopper with her hands up.
Camp Rancong, the site of many reported tortures, was owned by PT Arun, the Indonesian oil giant, which was itself partially owned by Exxon Mobile, which facilitated Post Thirteen.
The wall of Kopassus forces parted as a jeep drove up. It braked to a halt and an officer, a colonel judging by his shoulder boards, stepped out and sauntered over. He was a slim young man in his twenties. Behind him straggled an older, bloated Caucasian civilian, whom by his lethargic and nervous demeanor Serena guessed to be the site’s token American oil executive.
“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded.
“The infamous Sister Serghetti,” the colonel said in English. “You speak Acehnese like a native but certainly do not look like one. Your pictures in the media don’t do your beauty justice. Nor hint of your skills as a pilot.”
“I learned on the job, Colonel,” she said dryly in her native Australian accent.
“And which job would that be? You seem to have so many of them.”
“Dropping food and medical supplies to the poorest of the poor in Africa and Asia because their governments are so corrupt that U.N. shipments rarely make it to their intended villages,” she said. “They either disappear or rot on the docks because the roads are impossible to drive.”
“Then you’re in the wrong place, ma’am,” said the American in a southern drawl. “I’m Lou Hackett, the chief executive for this here operation. You should be in East Timor helping the Catholics stand up to Muslims. What the hell are you doing here in a pure Muslim province like Aceh?”
“Documenting human rights abuses, Mr. Hackett,” she said. “God loves Muslims and Acehnese separatists too. Maybe even as much as American businessmen.”
“Rights abuses? Not here,” Mr. Hackett said. He was keenly watching her chopper, now being stripped by a crew of Kopassus technicians.
17
Serena looked him in the eye. “You mean that’s not your oil slick out there soaking the local shrimp farms, Mr. Hackett?”
“I would hardly call an innocent accident a human rights violation.” Mr. Ha
ckett wiped the sweat from his brow with an old, worn handkerchief. She noted a logo on it. It was the seal of the president of the United States. A trinket, no doubt, from some campaign fund-raiser.
“So your company didn’t build the military barracks here at Post Thirteen where victims of human rights abuses claim to have been interrogated?” she went on, glancing at the Indonesian colonel. “Or provide heavy equipment so the military could dig mass graves for its victims at Sentang Hill and Tengkorak Hill?” Mr. Hackett looked at her as if she were the problem and not his oil discharge.
“What do you want, Sister Serghetti?”
The Indonesian colonel answered for her. “She wants to do to Exxon Mobile and PT Arun what she did to Denok Coffee in East Timor.”
“You mean break the grip of a cartel controlled by the Indonesian military and let the people sell their goods at market prices?” she asked. “Hmm, now that’s a thought.”
Hackett had clearly had enough. “Hell, if the East Timorese want to be slaves for Starbucks, that’s their business, Sister. But when you threw the military out of the coffee business, they took a special interest in mine.”
“Here’s another thought, Sister Serghetti,” the colonel said, handing her a sheet of paper. It was a fax. “Leave.”
She looked the fax over twice. It was from Bishop Carlos in Jakarta, winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize. It said she was urgently needed in Rome. “The pope wants to see me?”
“The pope, the pontiff, the Holy See, whatever the hell you call him,” said Mr.
Hackett. “I’m a Baptist myself. Just call yourself lucky to walk out of here.” She turned toward her chopper in time to see several soldiers carry away the dismantled cameras from its belly.
“And the people of Aceh?” she pressed Mr. Hackett as the colonel nudged her toward his jeep. He was apparently keeping her chopper. “You can’t pretend this isn’t happening.”
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