Again, so far he was hardly the first to set foot here.
Eight massive pillars carved from some kind of green alabaster divided the burial chamber into two side aisles and a central nave. It almost looked like the kind of set-up he’d expect to find around one of Hank Johnson’s multidimensional portals, as the alabaster pillars seemed to almost glow.
In the middle of the floor was a massive pile of skulls and bones. And not just human bones either. Conrad could pick out horse, camel and dog bones, as well as some other bizarre shapes from creatures he’d rather not imagine.
The Nubians, he knew, had a fine and longstanding tradition of sacrificing or ritually slaughtering humans and animals upon the death of a ruler or important personage. But this anonymous queen didn’t seem to warrant such a fine display. Unless of course the priests understood from their centuries-old religion that there was another, greater queen buried below.
Conrad kicked the bones away with his boots to find a solid granite slab.
The slab had no identifiable seal or engravings that he could see, but it looked like it could well be hiding a vertical shaft or stairway to another passageway below. The only problem was that it looked like it weighed a couple of tons. He’d never be able to pry it open by himself, and if this was indeed one of Hank’s multidimensional portals, he didn’t have the tech to turn on the so-called resonators.
He’d have to open it the old-fashioned way.
Conrad reached into his pack and pulled out a roll of primasheet explosive. He got down on his hands and knees and began to apply it to the granite, molding it into shape. Properly done, the blast would be directed in one direction — down to the passageway on the other side of the slab. Of course, if there were no passage below and only bedrock, the blast would blow up into this burial chamber and probably bury him alive.
He laid a special cardboard backing on top of the primasheet to direct the blast, stabbed a remote fuse into it and stepped behind one of the eight massive pillars. He pulled out his phone, which he used as a remote detonator, and on the virtual keypad pressed the number six button once, twice, and then paused.
Conrad Yeats, what the hell are you doing?
This was a World Heritage Archaeological Site. What he was about to do was technically and morally criminal. It would only solidify his reputation as a post-modern archaeologist whose quest for knowledge about a site was more important than the integrity of the site itself, and that once obtained the relics and ruins were basically rocks to be discarded. Serena Serghetti would have a field day with this, accusing him of being a modern-day Ferlini.
On the other hand, Ferlini and others before him had already had their way with these pyramids, leaving nothing more to be found as far as the world was concerned. For all he knew, Serena was already aware of what could be down here and had persuaded her fellow preservationists at UNESCO to list this as a World Heritage site to hide what he was about to unearth. After all, these pyramid fields had certainly yielded no tourism dollars to speak of.
He could almost hear the Queen of Sheba herself whispering from the Great Beyond into his ear with a faint hiss: Great adventurers have been doing this for centuries, Conrad. Nobody will hear the blast. It’s just you and me here. You’ll never be caught, only credited with the find of the ages. The hidden knowledge of King Solomon, lo, the secrets of the gods, can be yours for the taking. Your virgin wants to see what you find more than anybody else. She wants you to do it. You have to do it, for her….
Unable to resist, Conrad pressed the number six key one more time.
Boom!
The explosion ripped through the quaking burial chamber, spewing shards of granite like a cluster bomb and taking out chunks of the eight massive pillars. For a few seconds Conrad thought the barrel-vaulted ceiling would come crashing down on him. But the pillars held, shielding him from the worst of the blast.
Coughing from the debris, Conrad put on his night-vision goggles and covered his mouth, cursing himself for not doing so before he pressed the detonator button. Slowly he made his way around a battered pillar to the center of the nave and saw the gaping hole.
He peered through the dust into the vertical shaft and beheld stone steps descending deep into the netherworld.
It’s here. It’s real.
At the bottom of the long flight of steps was a passageway. Conrad stepped through the veil of debris, removed his goggles and switched on his headlight. The air was cool and damp, not stale as he expected.
As he started down the passageway, he aimed his light at a life-size relief on the wall. The vivid, striking mural depicted the comforting scene of a long line of bound prisoners marching into a big black hole in the earth.
Conrad could only hope he wasn’t following in their footsteps.
* * *
The passageway ended not in a hole but at a wall with an elaborate relief of the Queen of Sheba sitting on the Lion throne under the protection of a winged figure of Isis who stood behind. Carved above Isis was the star pattern for Virgo.
But it was the two obelisks on either side of the queen that took Conrad’s breath away, and he felt his knees give way in awe.
Besides the Bible, Conrad had found some of his best clues regarding the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon from the Freemasons. The Bible said that Solomon’s father, King David, loved his masons. And to modern Masons the most sacred pillars of all were the twin columns that originally stood in the porchway of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, which the twin obelisks here could well represent.
But even Solomon’s columns were but pale imitations of the original columns of Masonic lore, which even many Freemasons had never heard of. Fewer still knew that another figure in Freemasonry was associated with the Mysteries even longer than Solomon.
And that figure was Noah.
According to the Regius and Cooke manuscripts of 1390 and 1410, collectively known as the Old Charges, the four children of Lamech in the Book of Genesis made the two earliest pillars in readiness for the destruction by the Great Flood.
Knowing that God would destroy the world because of the sins of the people, and being desirous of preserving their knowledge for future generations, Lamech’s children erected a pillar of “marble” and a pillar of “brick,” although Conrad suspected the materials were symbols of some other elements. Indeed, marble was symbolic of a god-given or natural element, and brick was symbolic of a man-made or artificial element.
Both pillars were said to be indestructible in order to survive the Great Flood and inscribed with the priceless knowledge of the crafts and sciences founded since Creation.
Science possibly more advanced than ours today.
One of the pillars was allegedly found after the Flood by a great-grandson of Noah and its inscribed knowledge allegedly imparted to mankind. But the other one appeared to be lost forever.
A major reason Conrad suspected that either the “found” or “lost” pillar lay buried in the tomb of the Queen of Sheba here in Meroe was the mystery of Meroetic language itself. It was indecipherable. The Meroetic alphabet consisted of twenty-three letters derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. But no one knows for sure what their language sounded like or what their writing represented.
What if it was the language inscribed on the lost Pillars of Creation?
Conrad took a closer look at the obelisks in the painting, but the squiggles that represented engravings on them were intentionally illegible.
Solomon’s pillars, Conrad long believed, were commemorative of the original pillars, and ceremoniously appropriate for the “wisest” king who ever ruled. Which suddenly made the nature of Solomon’s discussions with the Queen of Sheba and her presents of gold all the more interesting.
Was it possible that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba knew the resting places of the Pillars of Creation? Were the pillars the actual source of Solomon’s and the Queen of Sheba’s wisdom, wealth and power? Did he show her his, and she showed him hers? And what “lost science,”
exactly, was carved upon these two pillars — or obelisks?
Answering these questions was what drove him here to Meroe and the lost tomb of the Queen of Sheba, and not to the mines Hank was after. Because if there was any place on Earth that Conrad might find one of the two Pillars of Creation, and all the hidden knowledge they represented, then surely it was right here, right now, behind this wall.
If he blew this wall open, however, he’d destroy any relief on the opposite side of the one he was staring at, possibly obliterating the very information he might need to unlock the rest of the tomb.
He reached into his pack again, pulled out his phone and slid into a slot what looked like a special memory card. A thermal-like image of red and yellow splotches filled a green screen. This was his pocket imaging radar originally developed by DARPA and modified by MIT researchers for Special Forces to locate underground cave hideouts for terrorists or weapons of mass destruction.
He aimed the radar at the Queen of Sheba on the wall, and a moment later he heard a ping. The imaging indeed revealed another chamber on the other side, rectangular in size. He could feel his heart pounding now. He was so close. But he had to have a look before he blew the wall.
Once again he reached into his pack, this time taking out his pocket microwave drill. Developed by the Israelis, the needle-thin drill bit emitted intense microwaves that Conrad now used to bore a small hole through the wall. The microwaves softened the rock enough for the glowing bit to push all the way through.
Conrad then snaked a fiber-optic line through the hole and watched the screen on his phone. The hair-thin cable emitted its own light and gave him a view inside the chamber on the other side.
What he saw looked like the antechamber of a true Egyptian tomb like King Tut’s, something that would predate by centuries anything else here built by the Nubians. There was an alabaster statuette of the goddess Isis to the far right of the room. She was wearing some kind of black amulet around her green neck and was most likely guarding the burial and treasure chambers beyond the antechamber.
So close and yet so far.
Conrad pulled out his fiber-optic camera and paused before the great wall relief in front of him, staring at the Queen of Sheba on her throne, standing in his way.
Sorry, babe.
He snapped a few pictures of the relief while it was still in one piece, then slapped on some primasheet. He stuck in a ten-second timer, held his breath and blew the wall open.
He waited only a few seconds for the dust to settle before making his way into the antechamber.
The rectangular room was bigger than he expected, as was the statue of Isis at the far end. The fiery-black medallion around her neck seemed to glow as he approached. He discovered the effect came from several cutouts in the mysterious metal that were filled with gemstones. He felt a tingling in his fingers as he rubbed them against the surface of the metal. It was almost…electric.
The engraved symbol was of an Egyptian pyramid with sun rays shooting out. In some ways it resembled a few of the Masonic symbols and the reverse seal of the United States, although it obviously predated them all.
As for the several hieroglyphic characters, he couldn’t make heads or tails of them and didn’t have time to. He carefully lifted the medallion and its gold chain off the statue of Isis and put it around his own neck.
He had to break through the next wall into the burial and treasury chambers. If the remains of the Queen of Sheba — and the Pillars of Creation — were anywhere, they would be there.
He didn’t bother to drill a hole and run a fiber cam through to the other side. At this point it didn’t matter. Nothing was going to stop him from blasting his way through.
Conrad reached for more primasheet and heard a footfall from behind. He spun around and saw what looked like a mummy at the other end of the antechamber. And it was moving toward him.
No, it was a figure in a burka. A woman. The Queen of Sheba come to life.
“Whoah!” he heard himself shout, backing up against the statue of Isis and reaching for the Glock pistol tucked behind in his waistband. He whipped it out and pointed it at the woman. “Stop!”
The figure actually stopped, the headwrap came off to reveal the impossibly beautiful face of an angel, and Conrad found himself staring at none other than Serena Serghetti.
CHAPTER 6
Congo
Jungle rains put a crimp in the “Nomad” pilot shoot for weeks. It was already January 27, 2013, and no wrap was in sight for Hank Johnson. There were fewer visitors now, and fewer pings on the virtual tripwires around camp. Even tourism director Garamba’s local security guys showed up less often.
The rains, however, did offer him some breathing room. Now he could concentrate on his research. Inside his trailer, Hank listened to the drops drum on the roof and reviewed his Google+ social media streams for crowd-sourced intel about the Queen of Sheba’s mines.
His G+ leaks had paid off big time. People who thought they were playing a game in Ingress were a lot more useful than constipated academics or rung-climbing analysts who were afraid to embarrass themselves. The posts created supercharged collective thinking. One woman named “Linda B” had put everything together in a single post. She thought that the Queen of Sheba went to King Solomon for advice.
Why Solomon?
Solomon was known for his wisdom, but he was also known for his wealth. Jerusalem sat at the end of a trade route that would much later be known as the Silk Road. It was a center of trade. Solomon was the richest as well as the wisest man in the world, and in his Proverbs implied the two were related through some metaphysical alchemy.
Which could explain the mythological object known as the “Philosopher’s Stone,” which could turn lead into gold.
The philosopher’s stone wasn’t a rock. It was a ruse.
Hank instantly considered the concept of banking — what the ancients called hawala. Solomon’s “wisdom” for the Queen of Sheba was how she could “multiply” her gold by leaving it with him, like many other nations probably did. The Royal Bank of Solomon probably functioned as a safe money laundry between the Egyptian kleptocracy and the vicious Assyrians — charging interest on all the gold and being paid in gold!
What could be more magical in the Queen of Sheba’s time than multiplying gold? That had to be the business she conducted with Solomon in his Temple in Jerusalem.
And yet, Hank knew there was more to this alchemy than financial witchcraft. After all, if the Temple Mount wasn’t the mother of all XM deposits, and if the Ark wasn’t some kind of power cube device, then what on Earth was?
Exotic matter had to be behind the alchemy.
Hank now suspected that XM was the invisible link between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, the secret behind his gold and her mines.
In short, a portal. A very special portal. Right here, nearby.
The ultimate question was who or what exactly was on the other side of this portal, generating this “ordered data” in XM. Not one bone in Hank’s body believed these so-called “Shapers” were angelic beings, let alone gods. They were, however, entities with an agenda.
Whether it was for good or evil remained to be seen. But if the Shapers had wanted to destroy humanity, they could easily induce humans to destroy themselves. So far, however, he hadn’t noticed any violent intentions from the Shapers.
The only thing anybody knows is that the Shapers want something from people, and that nobody knows what it is.
Hank decided to give his G+ streams and endless speculations a rest and turn his attention to his private communications from Calvin at Niantic. Several emails in, however, he could sense between the lines that something was wrong.
Something big has gone south at Niantic, he thought. Something Calvin’s not telling me. But maybe the kid will.
Hank put on his rain poncho and stepped out of his production van into the downpour of the jungle. He slogged through the mud to a nearby tree and looked up to see a soaked-to-th
e-skin Rosier hiding inside a camouflaged UNI Tent.
“Hey, Rosier, wanna come in from the rain?”
A few minutes later his hugely embarrassed “tail,” wrapped in a blanket and cupping a hot mug of coffee in his hands, sat shivering in the trailer.
“We don’t have to tell Niantic you blew the tail,” Hank told him warmly. “We could just say you decided to make yourself useful.”
“Thanks, I’ll think about it,” Rosier replied with a cough. “Have you picked up any more about those mysterious watchers?”
Hank paused for a moment to get his story straight. He liked to keep his work with the military in Afghanistan and his work with Niantic in Switzerland separate. General Montgomery knew about Niantic and about XM, because Hank owed him that much. But Montgomery didn’t know everything, because Hank owed Calvin and Niantic his silence. He knew he was serving two masters, and they both knew it too, but nobody talked about it. And anything to do with IQTech was a tangled web indeed.
This story was for Niantic.
Hank said, “Only some Slavic and Chinese chatter. No physical evidence. I’m thinking they’re mercenaries now, not nationals. Hard to say. The infrared satellite images I got on the mystery man in the jungle are smudged. Maybe it was the night, but I suspect it was XM interference. All the indicators here are the same as in Afghanistan- smudged shots, GPS anomalies, distortions, guardians and, yes, metals, if that’s what you want to know for ADA, Calvin and gang.”
Rosier nodded, sipping his coffee. The kid was coming around and seemed grateful that Hank had entrusted him with this latest info to relay back to Niantic.
Now Hank was waiting to see if the kid would return the favor.
“There’s something you should know,” Rosier finally said. “Something bad happened at the Niantic Project Facility a few days after you — after we — left.”
Hank said, “Doctor Lynton-Wolfe’s Power Cube experiment?”
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