Well, that explained that. “How did I get here?”
“The Egyptian army has had close ties with the Sudanese for decades, centuries really,” the officer told him. “I’ve trained many of them, just like your father the American general trained my generation of officers under a special program years ago.”
“My father?” Conrad repeated, confused.
“Yes, he wants you back in Washington. It’s funny, you know. The CIA often used this cellar for tortures and renditions. Now tell me, what has my pathetic, weak brother put you up to in Nubia?”
Suddenly Conrad got it. He was looking at Abdil Zawas’s even more ruthless brother, Colonel Ali Zawas of Egypt’s elite Republican Guard.
Why can’t I get away from these people?
“You’re the one with the special friends in Nubia, Zawas,” he said, trying to work his situation out in his head. “You mean to tell me they found nothing in the tomb?”
“Only a tale about a medallion that you found and that the Vatican’s Sister Serghetti took off with — along with one of my choppers.” Zawas talked like he actually admired her. “I swear that pretty little desert flower is one of the Dei.”
“The Dei?” Conrad asked, playing dumb. Maybe Zawas knew something he didn’t know.
“Dominium Dei — the Rule of God,” Zawas stated, as if he couldn’t imagine the great Conrad Yeats had not heard of it. “A centuries-old order from Roman times. They know more about Egypt and the Ancient Mysteries than we do. They have been hiding everything from us, keeping us in the dark, laughing at us. And now they possess the very necklace worn by the Queen of Sheba herself.”
She lied to me!
“You’re sure there was absolutely nothing else in the tomb?” he pressed. “Nothing in the burial or treasury chambers?”
“Only this, Doctor Yeats.” Zawas held up the decapitated head of the statue of Isis. “What good is this to me except to break over your skull? Will that help your memory?”
Conrad braced himself as the bust came down and a shockwave of pain exploded through his head. He saw pieces of something on the tile and was sure it was his head. But apparently his skull hadn’t cracked, because Zawas looked disappointed and tossed the head of Isis back to one of his minions.
Conrad groaned in pain. His head was pulsing.
Zawas leaned over. “The least you can do is tell me what my brother has done with my money.”
“Blown it all on booze and babes,” Conrad said. “You know Abdil.”
Zawas drew one of his Colts and pistol-whipped the pearl butt across Conrad’s face. “Tell me what I don’t know, Yeats!”
Conrad spat out blood. “He says you’re still honked off that he absconded with the family fortune to Switzerland before the Arab Spring. He’s sorry that you and your comrades here have to serve the government of the Islamic Brotherhood. But it’s your own fault because you’re a loser and deserve it.”
“The mullahs won’t last for long. Mark my words. The pharaohs will return to Egypt. We will make Egypt great again.”
“Tell me when they do, Zawas, because I don’t see any here.”
Zawas smiled. “I was warned about you, Conrad Yeats. You make everything a joke.”
“Not everything, Zawas. You did a good job on yourself.”
“We’ll see how funny you think Doctor Omar is in the morning. He’s a real doctor, not like you,” Zawas said. “He’ll get you to talk, tell me more about this medallion made out of a fiery black metal. A medallion that could lead me to the Queen of Sheba’s gold.”
“Gold?” Conrad asked. “That’s what this is all about? You’re just after money?”
“Of course I want gold. Who would take the American dollar? I would use it to blow my nose if it were more absorbent,” Zawas said. “At one time it was pegged to gold and worth something. Then President Nixon went off the gold standard. It was Henry Kissinger who, with my family’s advice, got the Saudis to peg the U.S. dollar to oil. The House of Saud and the United States have been joined at the hip since, all thanks to the petrodollar. Any country that wants to buy oil has to pay for it in U.S. dollars. The United States, meanwhile, can simply print those dollars to buy its oil.”
“And all good things must come to an end, is that it?”
“Yes, especially now the Russians and Chinese have moved to price oil in currencies other than dollars. If that should actually happen, if the U.S. dollar is no longer backed by the price of oil, then it becomes what we all know it already is — worthless. And all of Uncle Sam’s billions in aid to Egypt’s armed forces, outside of hardware, evaporates.”
“And you think some gold mine is going to save you?”
“No. I think the alchemy that creates gold is going to save me. And Doctor Omar is going to get it out of you.”
CHAPTER 10
Congo
With the discovery of the ancient resonators in the jungle on everybody’s radar now, Hank could assume that Chen, the psycho tech geek from Strategic Explorations, would be trying to claim the portal, just as Hank was. SE was out there somewhere. Hank knew he had to max the portal to level eight, shield it and get the keys to Calvin. Niantic could sit on remote recharge until they could get somebody out here to watch this place.
A few hours and only a few hundred meters away from where he had dodged the drone attack, Hank peered into his Ingress scanner. The faint outline of an unclaimed portal suggested a central “altar” surrounded by eight tantalum, inlaid neolithic resonators in Ingress formation.
He could only marvel at the brilliance of the ancients. By what process had they figured out that tantalum reacted to an invisible transdimensional substance? How had they figured out the octagonal resonation pattern? Niantic’s chief scientist Lynton-Wolfe had nearly crashed the Niantic servers calculating it. Was it lost science or primitive sensitive instinct?
The immediate question, however, was how these ancient resonators were about to interface with 21st-century technology. If it was anything like the time he tried to marry his father’s 1950’s stereo with his modern portable music player, the outcome might not be so pretty.
But it was now or never.
Hank selected a resonator from the Ingress software interface and hit the button.
Deploy.
Everything suddenly crackled green around him. The scenery before his eyes changed. Even the sky seemed to shift color. He felt a rush in his inner ear, and then…
Hank was back at Cahokia Mounds, his first real dig two decades ago, young and naive, excited about discovery.
* * *
At that very moment, half a world away, the operative known as 802 for Niantic Labs had just arrived at the Cahokia Mounds in southern Illinois.
It was the dead of winter, already dark at 4:59 CST on January 27, with icy winds whipping across the American Plains.
Now, after a bumpy plane flight and stolen rental car, 802 was freezing his butt off with sixty other Ingress players in some little town just outside St. Louis amid the closest things the USA has to ancient pyramids, in the ruins of a city that in 1256 was as large as London.
Niantic Project investigators had received an “emergent anomaly indicator” that there was going to be an “event” at the portal at Cahokia Mounds involving what they referred to as the Exotic Essence of Henry Holland “Hank” Johnson, a researcher on the Niantic Project who was believed to be in the Congo at this very moment.
802 had asked one of the higher-ups what Exotic Essence was, and he got a convoluted answer about quantum entanglement of a person and an XM-rich site through repeated and intense exposure. 802 was one of the few on the team without a PhD, but having hung around the eggheads long enough, he’d gotten good at parsing what they were saying. “You mean, they left a piece of their soul at the portal.”
“We do not use the term soul,” the attractive Asian scientist had said. “Soul is in the realm of theology, we are in the realm of physics. The state of particles and energy patterns in sensi
tives can become entangled with the state of matter at certain sites. In a sense, part of the sensitive stays at the site. They can be influenced by it throughout their lives.”
“You use the term ghost?”
“No. We try not to delve into the realm of popular culture either. And as Mr. Johnson is, by all appearances, still alive, it would not be an appropriate term.” She was having fun with him. That was OK, he was having fun with her. After a lifetime as a “cleaner” at various three-letter agencies, it was a fun job.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Just be there. Report what you see. It will be of great interest to us to see whether the Enlightened or the Resistance control the portal at 5 p.m.”
His watched signaled 5 o’clock had arrived. He peered into his Ingress app. A shout went up. It was green. The Enlightened had won. 802 would be buying beers. No part of him believed that this was going to have any effect on a Niantic scientist several thousand miles away sweltering in a jungle.
* * *
Hank’s mind snapped back to the present. As the resonator came online, the portal began to glow green and bright for the first time in probably millennia. Lights flashed in the jungle. Some kind of energy surged within him. He didn’t know it yet, but he was enlightened.
Power coursed through his body as Hank deployed seven more resonators. On screen Hank saw the last resonator drop into one of the pre-defined octant slots, the perfect point in space where string theory meets Euclidean geometry.
And then suddenly it was all over. The ancient portal was now pulsing bright green, radiating with stable and elucidating energy.
Hank had never felt more alive.
* * *
Back inside the production van not far away, Rosier watched what was happening to Hank from the monitors while Michaels could see it with his own eyes from behind the bulletproof windows.
Hank was standing at the edge of a portal, the ancient stone resonators flashing all around him. The portal suddenly lit up like a bonfire of green XM. Sparks flew everywhere.
The skyline was green with XM. XM clusters erupted. And for a few moments, it was all visible to the naked eye.
It was spectacular, at least to the spectators.
Rosier zoomed in on Hank, who was just standing there, holding his scanner like Benjamin Franklin controlling his kite in a thunderstorm. He was motionless, bathed in cosmic fireworks.
Rosier had turned on the comms and was flooded with mercenary voices shouting in different languages. He picked up enough to know that the locals had broken and were on the run.
The curse, for them, was true.
Then Rosier heard retreat orders from the outside mercenaries, who didn’t believe in curses but weren’t going to stick around to find out if they were wrong. They were getting paid to fight, not die.
As quickly as the explosion of sights and sounds had erupted, it was over outside. Hank stood out there alone as stiff and silent as one of the stone resonators that had suddenly gone cold. The sky faded from green to black. Rosier exchanged glances with a stunned Michaels. The only thing he could hear now were a few raindrops on the roof.
CHAPTER 11
Egypt
Another day, another hosing down in the cellar beneath the Zawas villa for Conrad Yeats. Today, however, the Egyptian guards unlocked his irons and tossed him a white cotton galabeya to slip on for his soiree with the mysterious Doctor Omar. The Egyptian guards escorted him up some stone steps and out into the blinding light of day.
As they crossed a lush courtyard, he could hear the sound of babbling water and smell almond trees. They passed through an iron gate into the villa’s library.
Well, this is certainly better than I expected.
Then again, his left forearm was sore. He began to rub it and looked down to see a needle track where they had injected him with something while he slept. Hopefully it was something relatively benign like the truth serum sodium pentothal and not some ancient nasty scorpion poison or something.
The good doctor was seated in the far corner of the library under an impressive wall of ancient books and scrolls. Next to Omar was an Egyptian funerary table with an old book on it and a silver tea set.
The tea was karkade, brewed dark from dried hibiscus flowers and steaming. Omar had poured himself some and offered a cup to Conrad in a crisp British accent. “Tea?”
“I’m OK,” Conrad said, waving it off. “Colonel Zawas has quite some collection of books and artifacts here.”
Omar nodded as he sipped his tea through a sugar cube between his teeth. “The Zawas family has built up an extraordinary library over the past two centuries. A number of books are on display at the British Museum. A few scrolls may even be traced to the Library of Alexandria.”
So they obviously want me to look at something. Something connected to the Queen of Sheba’s tomb. The more I tell them, though, the less likely I’ll survive.
Conrad took a closer look at the funerary table depicting the jackal-headed god Anubis and the goddess Isis. “Magnificent.”
“Dug up in 1790 not far from your own dig in Meroe.”
The table was inscribed with Meroetic writing. Conrad asked, “I don’t suppose you know what these hieroglyphs say?”
“Nobody outside the Vatican has cracked the meaning of Meroetic writing,” Omar said with a clearer voice now that his sugar cube had melted. “You know that.”
“Yeah, I do,” Conrad said. “So what does it say?”
“We sent a photo to the Vatican some time ago, and Sister Serghetti sent us this.” Omar handed him a papyrus-like note with the Vatican seal on it.
Written in her own hand, Serena had translated what appeared to be a poem or a song:
Oh Isis! Oh Osiris!
It is Ada.
Make her drink plentiful blood.
Make her eat plentiful flesh.
Make her be served a good meal.
Make her leave only bones behind.
“I’m detecting a theme here,” Conrad said, unconsciously rubbing his sore arm again. “Death. That book there on the funerary table. I suppose that’s a copy of the Book of the Dead for me?”
“Actually, it’s the journal of a Scotsman by the name of James Bruce during his passage through your pyramid field in 1772.”
Ah, so this was what this whole charade of a meeting was all about.
Conrad knew about Bruce. The Scotsman was also a Mason during the time of the American Revolution. Washington and the other Founding Fathers who were Masons took a keen interest in Bruce’s travels through Egypt and Nubia. Suddenly the link between the Masons, Solomon, Ada and the rest made sense.
“Bruce was the first person in the modern era to connect the pyramid fields to ancient Meroe,” Omar went on. “He’s the reason you even know it as Meroe.”
Conrad muffled his reaction to this amateur know-it-all and picked up the book with genuine excitement. He began to flip through its pages. The journal was rich with descriptions in the first person as Bruce described the “heaps of broken pedestals and pieces of obelisks.” Conrad turned to the back and read the conclusion: “It is impossible to avoid risking a guess that this is the ancient city of Meroe.” Previously, the earliest record of that assessment was in a book Bruce published 18 years later in 1790.
Omar said, “It’s the drawing on page 57 that has intrigued the colonel for some time.”
Conrad thumbed his way to page 57 and found Bruce’s diagram of a great hole of some sort, an abyss. There appeared to be a zigzagging bridge over the abyss that ended not quite in the center. “Strange,” he said.
Omar echoed, “Isn’t it?”
Conrad flipped back a page and saw a drawing of the passageway mural from the Queen of Sheba’s tomb in Meroe. It was spread across two pages and showed the march of bound prisoners toward a black hole, where they disappeared into some abyss. The circle on the next page was obviously a more detailed depiction of that hole — or portal.
“
I can see why Zawas is interested in this, if he thinks it's the entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s mines.” Conrad closed the book and set it down. “What’s your angle? I thought you were a medical doctor.”
“Not in the traditional sense.” Omar smiled. “I specialize in a particular field of alternative medicine.”
“Really? What kind?”
“Ancient biotoxins.”
“Interesting.” Conrad unconsciously rubbed his arm again. Perhaps this whole ruse this morning was simply an observation of the effects of whatever concoction they had pumped into his bloodstream. “What kind of biotoxins?”
“The kind that comes from metallurgy, and how elements can shape us in ways we are only beginning to comprehend,” Omar said, as two guards suddenly appeared beside Conrad to drag him back to the cellar. “I believe Colonel Zawas has a few blunt objects he’d like to try out on you.”
CHAPTER 12
Congo
After all his Sturm und Drang with the resonation of the ancient portal here in the heart of the African jungle, Hank Johnson should have been feeling on top of the world. He had found stone resonators and proof the ancients understood transdimensional portals. Still, he couldn’t fight the sting of anticlimax and frustration as he had yet to find any sign of the Queen of Sheba’s lost mines.
Hank looked down and saw his own footprints in the mud, prints he’d made more than five hours earlier. Yes, he’d been here before. This was his third pass through the area. Other than a quarry site for the stones that made up the resonators, there was no hint of civilization here.
What am I missing?
He returned to the production van and reviewed Rosier’s footage of himself at the stone resonators. The drone video replay of his heroics deploying the power cube looked pretty cool in a sci-fi movie kind of a way. And Michaels caught some nice bonus footage of local militants fleeing in terror while the hardened mercs from Strategic Explorations retreated from the fireworks, mowing down the locals as they left. It was Antoine Smith’s doctrine. When there was a big find, dead men tell no tales.
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