Thorne glanced at an attractive woman with sparkling green eyes and a young girl; they all seemed a bit … unsettled. “A few, I guess.”
“Well, then, I’ll get right to it. I’m an ex-Marine. After that I started my own company; I’m a chemist. Now I live in a compound out in the desert because I fear that our society is on the verge of toppling. That makes me a Survivalist.” He smiled. “How’s that for an introduction?” Willum normally would not have been so candid or blunt, but he sensed Thorne would appreciate a direct approach.
Thorne smiled. “I must say, I’ve never heard that one before.” He introduced Willum to his fiancée and the girl.
“The reason I’m interested in all this is I have reason to believe an ancient golden chest is hidden in the desert south of Tucson. I think the Templars may have brought it here.”
Thorne smiled politely. “The Templar treasure disappeared in the early 1300s and has never been found. It has to be somewhere, so why not Arizona?”
Amanda spoke, surprising Willum with her British accent. “That would be a remarkable find. And you know, it’s not just their treasure that disappeared. They were rumored to have all sorts of religious artifacts as well. Your chest may not be a treasure chest at all.” She smiled, her teeth white and even. “At least not in the conventional sense.”
Willum nodded. A golden chest filled with ancient religious artifacts would be fine with him. “I don’t expect you to just take my word for it.” He handed Thorne a photocopy of the drawing Boone’s great-grandfather made. “Some old prospector drew this in the late 1800s. Claimed they found it up in the foothills just north of the Mexican border. Said when his buddy went to open it, it zapped him with some electrical charge. Killed him. Like the thing was booby-trapped.”
Thorne and Amanda glanced at the drawing and handed it back. “You can keep it,” Willum said.
Thorne placed it in a folder, noncommittal.
Willum plowed on. “Here’s what makes me think the story might be true.” He offered Thorne a picture of the Mustang Mountain rune stone. “This stone is a grave marker for a guy named Hurech buried in a nearby cave; it also talks about some secret Hurech was buried with. I dug up the body and we did DNA testing and carbon-dating on a rib bone: It looks to be an 800-year-old European male.”
Thorne’s eyes widened. “Really? Eight hundred years old?”
“That’s a tough one to explain away,” Amanda said.
“Right,” Willum said. He exhaled. “So I was wondering if you’d like to come take a look at the rune stone and cave. It’s a bit of a hike, but this is the time of year to do it. Temperatures are cooler and the snakes are mostly hibernating.”
Thorne and Amanda exchanged looks. As they did so a door opened from the back of the auditorium. Boonie called down to them. “I’m here, boss.” He began jogging down the stairs to them, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he bounced.
Thorne and Amanda froze. They looked alarmed, even afraid. Thorne moved in front of the girl. “He’s with you?”
Willum didn’t understand. “Yes. He lives at my compound.”
Thorne’s jaw pulsated. “He’s been following us since yesterday.”
So that was it. Willum stepped back so as not to appear threatening. “Yes, he has. Not really following you, but just checking up on you. But he’s not a threat in any way.” It hadn’t been hard to find their hotel—Willum simply called the major Tucson hotels seeking to “confirm” a reservation for Cameron Thorne until he hit pay dirt. Then he sent Boonie down to wait in the lobby with a picture of Thorne that Willum had pulled off the internet.
Amanda responded. “Why would you need to check up on us?”
“Just to make sure you were who you said you were—you know, a family out here on vacation while Cameron gave a lecture.”
“Well,” she said, “we’re not fond of strangers stalking us.”
“Hold on, he wasn’t stalking you. That’s a bit paranoid.”
“Don’t tell us about paranoid,” Thorne said, his voice rising. “You’re the one who’s having us followed. And you’re the one who thinks society is on the verge of collapse.”
This was not going well. Willum held up his hands. “Fair point. Paranoid was the wrong word. And I’m sorry for having you followed. I just need to be very careful.” He turned to Boonie. “Can you wait for me in the car?” And back to Thorne. “Again, I’m sorry. But I hope you are still interested in seeing the rune stone.”
Amanda spoke before Thorne had a chance. “Not bloody likely.”
CHAPTER 3
Unable to sleep after the lecture and the disappointing encounter with Cameron Thorne afterward, Willum had done some preliminary work on the soil sample last night in his lab. Today he woke up at eight, which was early for him, anxious to dive in and solve the mystery of the vaporizing desert soil.
One of the unintended benefits of life at the compound was that it gave Willum the chance to return to his first love—chemistry. Without the demands of running a company, he was able to spend many hours a day experimenting like a kid with his first chemistry set. He had converted the basement of his saucer into a sophisticated laboratory and reinforced it to survive an attack; the only access to it was from his saucer.
After eating a quick breakfast, he locked the saucer door from the inside, took the plastic bag of soil samples he had collected with Clarisse the day before and lifted a skylight-like hatch protruding above the concrete floor in a corner of the saucer. He flicked a light switch and descended a metal ladder—it reminded him of a submarine companionway—into a well-lit concrete-walled passageway. Willum was used to underground spaces like this being dank and musty, but other than an occasional scorpion, which seemed to fear him as much as he did them, the dry air of the desert kept the passage almost sterile.
Willum followed the passageway past a utility room and into his lab. The area was a U-shaped span of flat surfaces, cabinets, shelves, a sink and a refrigerator. Were it not for the microscopes, vacuum hood, and other pieces of instrumentation sitting atop many of the work areas, the space would have looked like a kitchen in a school cafeteria. The lab was one of the few things he had kept from his previous life, salvaging the equipment when he had liquidated his company.
Sitting on a raised lab stool, he first examined the soil under a microscope. Nothing out of the ordinary—just basic dirt. He then dragged the stool to a machine called an Arc Emission Spectrometer. The machine looked like an office photocopier, except for the polished metal podium protruding from the front. Willum put on goggles, placed the soil sample on the flat surface of the podium and flicked a switch. An electric spark shot through the sample, heating it to a high temperature to excite the atoms within. Excited atoms emit light at characteristic wavelengths that can be detected and identified—in this case the instrumentation showed that the soil sample was comprised of iron, silica and aluminum. Pretty typical for inland desert sand. But something wasn’t right.
The entire test was supposed to last no more than fifteen seconds, during which time the sample would burn away. With this soil, however, after fifteen seconds a glowing white bead comprising most of the sample’s original mass remained on the podium. Yet the spectrometer indicated that all of the components of the sample had burned away—there was nothing left to read. Willum’s eyes told him the substance remained largely intact, yet the instruments told him all of the elements had burned away. How could this be? What was this strange soil which, with the addition of sulfuric acid, both burst into flame when heated by the dessert sun and seemed to defy scientific analysis?
After repeating the test and getting the same results, Willum wrestled with the seemingly scientific impossibility for the rest of the morning, scouring his old reference books and searching the internet for clues. Finally he read about a device the Soviets had invented which used the same technology but extended the test time from fifteen seconds to five minutes. Apparently certain hard metals only began to register in the lab
tests after many minutes of its atoms being excited. Overriding the fifteen second timer on his spectrometer, Willum took a fresh soil sample and zapped it for the full three hundred seconds. Sure enough, after a few minutes the sample revealed its secret—the glowing white bead, which eventually crumbled into a pile of white powder during the process, was comprised of the platinum group metals—palladium, platinum, ruthenium, rhodium, iridium and osmium.
Platinum? From normal soil and sulfuric acid? Willum rubbed his hand over his face. Was Clarisse playing some kind of elaborate practical joke on him? These metals were invaluable to the industrial sector, some of them worth more than gold.
Willum repeated the experiment using a different soil sample, his hand unsteady as he removed the soil from the bag. He worked a wad of chewing gum, keeping time with the digital clock’s flashing countdown from three hundred. Again, one by one, the spectrometer identified platinum group metals. Again, Willum rubbed his face. Had he stumbled upon a simple way to extract precious metals from desert sand? A decade ago the businessman in him would have turned the discovery into a small fortune. Or maybe a large one. Yet money would soon be meaningless and these types of precious metals would be of little use in an unindustrialized, post-collapse society. Still, the sheer mystery of this discovery enthralled him. What was going on here?
He checked his watch. One in the afternoon. Normally he would break for lunch, but a wave of nausea washed away any desire for food. He sipped a Diet Coke, hoping the bubbles would settle his stomach. Steadying himself with his free hand, he pulled out another soil sample from the sealed plastic bag. This time he alternately heated and cooled the samples, weighing and analyzing them as he did so. “What the…” he whispered. He checked his figures again. Somehow the weight of the sample seemed to rise and fall as he heated and cooled it. This made no sense whatsoever.
Still fighting the queasiness, Willum walked over to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. He removed another soil sample and again repeated his experiment. This time he heated the soil more gradually, carefully weighing the sample at close, regular intervals. There. At the moment the sample changed from its original dullness to a bright white bead and subsequent powder, its weight fell to 56% of the original. The other 44% had disappeared.
How could something change weight just from being heated? This was scientifically impossible, except under one condition: when being suspended within some kind of magnetic field. But there were no magnets around.
He paced the lab again, this time stopping to fill a shot glass with Jack Daniels. To hell with the nausea. He downed the whiskey quickly, stared at the empty glass, took a second shot and spoke to the walls. “Okay then. They told me this place was haunted when I bought it.”
He tottered back to the Spectrometer, plopped onto his stool and stared at the white powder. Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Willum couldn’t see it with the naked eye, but his experiments led to only a single rational explanation: Somehow the white powder was partially levitating.
Cam knew Amanda was happy to be leaving Tucson. The guy with the Expos cap creeped her out. As had the Willum fellow with all his paranoia. Even though both men turned out to be harmless, this was not the way she wanted to be spending their vacation. The trip was supposed to be their time to bond with Astarte, to continue the process of becoming a family. And what better American family vacation than the Grand Canyon?
They packed up their rented Ford Explorer and began the five-hour drive north across the state of Arizona. The desert of the south slowly gave way first to foothills and then to piney, snow-covered mountains of Flagstaff. The temperature dropped as well, though it was still a balmy (by Massachusetts standards) 45 degrees when they checked into their Flagstaff hotel mid-afternoon.
“Can we go swimming again?” Astarte asked.
“I’d fancy a swim, Astarte. How about you, Cam?”
“I’d actually like to head over to the town library. If there really were Europeans in the area in prehistoric times, chances are they would have found their way to the Grand Canyon. I mean, it’s a hard thing to ignore.”
Cam found a helpful reference librarian, a mousy, older woman who seemed to share his love of history. “So, any legends of Europeans visiting the area before the Spaniards arrived in the 1500s?” he asked.
“Not unless you consider Egyptians to be European.”
She smiled at his surprise. “Egyptians?” he asked.
“Take a look at this.” She clicked on her computer keyboard and turned the monitor toward him, displaying a blurry image of a hundred-year-old newspaper clipping.
ARIZONA GAZETTE, APRIL 15, 1909, FRONT PAGE
Cam scanned the article from the front page of the Arizona Gazette in 1909. The article recounted how a Smithsonian archeologist stumbled upon a massive cave system full of Egyptian artifacts and hieroglyphs in the Grand Canyon. The Egyptians regularly employed Phoenician navigators and sea-captains to lead their sea voyages, and as Astarte had pointed out there was strong evidence that the ancient Phoenicians had explored North America, so the idea of Egyptians in Arizona was certainly a possibility.
“Other than the article, nothing has ever been reported,” the librarian said.
“Well, what does the Smithsonian say about it?”
She smiled. “I actually sent an inquiry. The Smithsonian denies any knowledge.”
Cam was not a conspiracy theorist, but the Smithsonian had a reputation for “misplacing” or “misfiling” objects and information that its caretakers believed should be hidden from the public. This practice had its roots in the 19th Century, when the country was spreading westward in what later was labeled as Manifest Destiny—the belief that white European settlers had been ordained by God to discover and then populate the North American continent. Well, that argument fell on its face if the reality was that the continent had already been “discovered,” hundreds or even thousands of years earlier. “So,” Cam asked, “has anyone found this cave?”
She clicked to another image. “This is believed to be the cave entrance.”
GRAND CANYON CAVE ENTRANCE
“So has anyone gone in there?”
She smiled again. “That area of the Grand Canyon is now off-limits. Even park rangers are not allowed there.”
“How convenient.” Cam thanked her and began to turn away.
“Oh,” she said, “and a curious mind might want to take a look at a map of the Grand Canyon.”
Cam stopped and furrowed his brow. “Sorry, a map?”
She nodded and waited until he met her glance. “Isis Temple. Osiris Temple. Tower of Ra. Tower of Set. The rock formations near the off-limits area have some pretty remarkable names, if you ask me.”
Clarisse clinked her Corona against Willum’s. He had spent the past thirty-six hours in his lab—two days and a night—wrestling with the white powder and its mysteries. Clarisse had not interrupted, but when she saw the lights on in his saucer Thursday evening she came over with a six-pack. According to what she had told him, when she had left her husband, the Mormon Church refused to grant her a formal divorce until she had lassoed herself a new husband. So she left the Church as well. And then discovered alcohol. A win-win.
“Hey, what’s that on your face?”
He looked up. “What?”
“It looks like some kind of rash.”
“I don’t know. I’ve been feeling sick the past couple of days. Like I have the flu or something.” Even the beer didn’t agree with him.
“So you kept working.”
“It’s not like I was running a marathon.”
She shrugged. “So talk to me. What’s happening with this mysterious white powder?” She smiled. “After I didn’t see you yesterday, I thought maybe it was cocaine.”
He had conducted a number of experiments, and consulted as many reference books and online sources as he could find. And he seemed to have finally figured it out.
In simple terms, heating and cooling the platinum metals in the soil sample converted them to a monatomic altered state. It not only worked for the platinum metals, but for gold and silver also. For all these so-called “heavy” metals, the alteration of the chemical state yielded the same levitating, white powder substance. Other researchers had stumbled upon the phenomenon also—they had labeled the substance ‘white powder of gold.’
He explained this to Clarisse. But he was not sure she grasped it. In fact, he was not sure even he grasped it. “The irony of all this is that this white powder is the secret to making the perfect fuel cell. Which is what the Department of Defense was trying to get me to do for them six years ago.” He tried to keep it simple for her. “Do you know what a superconductor is?”
“Um, not really.”
“Basically it’s an energy source that, once it’s activated, it never shuts down.”
“Okay.”
“And within a superconductor, all magnetic fields are excluded. So things around the superconductor can levitate. That is what is happening with the white powder of gold.”
“I think I’m following you.” She smiled. “But maybe I shouldn’t have had that beer.”
“Look. The science doesn’t really matter. What matters is, like I said, this powder can be used to create the perfect fuel cell. Once you start it up, it never stops. No waste, no pollution, no need for a power source to keep it going. The fighter jet takes off and never needs refueling.”
“All that from desert sand and sulfuric acid.”
He waved toward the door. “Our desert sand, at least.”
“So, what, you’d just put sand in your gas tank? Every three hundred miles, just fill ’er up?”
“It’s even better than that. Once you start the engine, it runs forever. No need to fill up, at least hypothetically. And if it does need more fuel for some reason, like you said we just throw more sand in.” He paused. “This is exactly what the Department of Defense wanted me to help them create. Now I seem to have stumbled upon the perfect solution to the problem. And it doesn’t really matter any more.”
Powdered Gold: Templars and the American Ark of the Covenant (Templars in America Series Book 3) Page 6
