by Tom Bane
“I understand, sir, but I want to do the right thing,” Christie persisted.
“You will be.”
“But, sir, I believe I need to understand this threat to global security.”
The boss was silent for a long moment, before explaining the ancient secret that was about to be uncovered. Christie listened in stunned silence, unable to believe what she was hearing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Deep in the Arctic Tundra, twenty miles inland from the frozen sea, solitary bald eagles glided across the grey sky above the white mountains of the Wrangell volcanic range. Nestling among green sitka spruces and hemlock forests was an Alaskan swamp rising from the icy subsoil. A gridiron of wires and antennae was the only indication of human presence. Here, the highly secret concrete command center of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, (HAARP), was preparing for action.
The coordinates came through the old-fashioned way, on a grey military facsimile machine. Dr. Walker picked them up.
“This is a strong flux density,” he said, studying the paper. “What are the coordinates?”
“You can never deduce that,” Dan replied. “The coordinates are encrypted. It’s probably secret squirrel operations. You know: if I told you I’d have to kill you.”
The bespectacled Dan Woodbury, a 24-year-old MIT graduate analyst, chuckled at his own joke before punching the scrambled coordinates into the alphanumeric pad with his left hand while simultaneously clicking the computer mouse with his right. Ambidexterity was pretty much a standard requirement among DARPA geeks. The encrypted coordinates would direct the magnetic pulse.
“Look out the window.”
“Huh? What?” Dan had an IQ of 170 but he sometimes had trouble grasping the simplest instructions.
Pausing after each word, Walker repeated, “Out the window.” At Dan’s blank look, he exclaimed, “Look out the damn window!”
Dan shrugged and pulled himself from his chair, peering out. It looked like a normal, windy, cold Alaskan day to him.
“Can you see the directional satellite dish on the right?”
“Yes.”
“So, you can guess where it’s pointing to, in relation to last time.”
“Ah,” Dan beamed happily as the penny dropped. He loved learning new tricks. “OK, easy way to beat the system. Let’s see, well, the satellite dish has barely budged.”
“Marvelous,” Walker said. “Probably the Gulf of Mexico then. It’s always best to check with these black ops missions. Gives you a bit of peace of mind. Mind you, we could always phone Arlington to check. I don’t know why they don’t just own up and give us the coords unencrypted. Bloody military hacks. If we stop a hurricane from hitting Texas then surely that’s a good day. OK, fire away!”
“I guess it’s a good day,” Dan said, returning to sit in front of his screens. “It’s the day we fry the atmosphere that I worry about. That’s a bad day.”
“You’re wasted up here, Dan,” Walker said. “You should be on Letterman.”
Walker liked working with the sparky analyst; it helped to pass the long days. Anything remotely approaching humor was welcome relief in the grinding perma-dark Alaskan days.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The clouds darkened and drizzle misted up the Perspex windows as Suzy fastened her seatbelt in preparation for landing. They passed through a grey cumulus cloud, which masked the view of Villahermosa, and the plane bucked with the change in air density. Judging by the engine noise, some extra thrust was being put through them. The elderly man next to Suzy raised his eyebrows then smiled as they felt the plane lift.
“Lightning, Captain,” the co-pilot said, as the skies suddenly darkened outside the cockpit.
“Where?” Captain Rogers was puzzled. The weather had been perfect until that moment, and there had been no instructions from Air Traffic Control. Without warning, the plane lurched down and then leveled before being pulled forward. To the captain, it felt like an invisible hand was guiding them in to land, although sooner and more quickly than he expected.
Copilot Ted Summers reduced the engine thrust to slow the plane down to landing speed.
“More thrust, Ted,” the captain yelled. “Full power! Full power!”
“But we’re going too fast,” Ted shouted back, continuing to lower the thrust.
“We’ve got a microburst! Full power!” he shouted. Captain Rogers wrestled the throttle quadrant away from Ted and shoved it forward to maximum thrust.
Suzy heard the engines scream, but she didn’t feel the expected pull of the acceleration. The wings were weaving from side to side and, in the rocking cabin, Suzy steadied herself by keeping her eye aligned with the wingtip outside her window. She could see the wing was flapping like a bird and there was heavy rain beating down on the metal.
A fork of lighting passed over the top of the plane and large hailstones began battering them relentlessly, the noise against the fuselage drowning out the scream of the engines. The plane swooped, nose down, angling from side to side as if it was made of fragile balsa wood.
The elderly man next to Suzy was now gripping the seat rests tightly, his knuckles white with tension. Suzy willed herself to remain calm.
Captain Rogers steadied the aircraft at full power. They were well over the speed safe enough for landing, so he gave the plane maximum lift as they hurtled toward the ground, pulling back on the joystick, wrestling the plane back up into the sky. As he wrenched control back, the plane leveled out slightly, decelerating to 120 miles per hour.
“The Speed’s decreased Captain,” Ted Summers gasped.
“PULL UP, PULL UP, MAINTAIN ALTITUDE!”
The nose was now almost horizontal. Continuing to put every ounce of strength into pulling it up further, Roger’s elbows felt like they were tearing out of their sockets as the runway loomed up toward them. Just as the plane seemed ready to crash into the ground, the nose lifted. Like a perfect chamfer, the wheels grooved in a precise and razor straight line into the tarmac; the front wheel followed a little more firmly but all the wheels were down.
Suzy looked around at the ashen faces of the other passengers. No one had any idea what had just happened, and she was not the only one to let out a long sigh as they coasted down the wet runway. Glancing out the window she could see the wings pockmarked with bullet holes from the hail.
“Apologies, ladies and gentlemen, we encountered a sudden but mild thunderstorm, but we are now taxiing to our arrivals gate and I wish you a good onward journey at Villahermosa. The weather is hot, 32 degrees Celsius, with a light breeze from the southwest.”
The captain’s voice betrayed no indication of the ordeal they had all just been through. Less than one percent of pilots ever experienced a microburst, he knew, and only one in three came out alive.
“Nice work, Captain,” Ted said, grinning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
As the plane taxied to the embarkation gate, Suzy wondered if Tom was already safely in Mexico and waiting for her. Something occurred to her that sent a chill up her spine. She stared hard out the window, willing herself to be calm and think logically.
What if it was Tom working for Horus and this was a trap? He’d suggested perhaps it was Piper she shouldn’t trust. What if he was trying to get her to focus on Piper so she wouldn’t suspect him? What if his father wasn’t actually dead? She only had his word for it, after all. Piper certainly hadn’t known anything about it when she spoke to him. Could it be an intentional deception to steer her to Mexico and away from the Middle East? And maybe that was another reason why Tom had warned her not to trust Piper with her whereabouts, because then nobody would know where she was.
How could she be so naïve? What had she gotten herself into? There would be a hundred ways in which she could be eliminated in a country like Mexico. She could be bitten by a viper in the jungle and no one would ever ask any questions. She could disappear, like Ben Sanders had, or simply become the victim of a hit-and-run drive
r. She thought back to her near miss with the sniper and she shuddered.
Her mind was now racing with conspiracies—maybe Piper and Tom were working together. The professor had tried to persuade her back in Oxford to investigate the reason why the pyramids pointed to Orion, and then Tom had promptly gone and chosen that topic as his thesis. That looked very suspicious now she thought about it. Or were she and Tom both being manipulated by Piper? She remembered the speed with which the professor had been able to get her into the Horus Corporation and how smoothly everything had gone after that. How had an old academic been able to make something like that happen?
A blast of hot, aromatic air broke Suzy’s concentration. The doors had been opened and passengers were getting to their feet. There was no turning back. She had no choice but to disembark. She just had to make sure that she kept her wits about her until she was able to work out what was going on and whom she could trust.
As Suzy waited at passport control in an endless queue, a text came through from Tom, giving her a local number to ring. She ignored it and instead called Kathy in Oxford. Right now Kathy was just about the only person Suzy felt she could trust, someone completely unconnected to the web of deceit that seemed to be tightening around her.
“Hi, my little globe-trotter!” Kathy shouted in delight when she heard her voice. “How are you? Where are you, more to the point?” God it felt so good to hear her cheery voice.
“I’m in Mexico, about to meet with Tom Brooking.”
“Ooh, you dark horse,” Kathy shrieked. “I knew you fancied him. I told you, didn’t I? Go get him, girl. And send me a romantic postcard!”
“No, Kathy, listen. I need you to do me a really important favor. You mustn’t tell a soul that I’ve asked this, but if anything happens to me you are to go the police, OK? And tell them that I came here at the invitation of Tom Brooking and that my travel has all been organized and paid for by The Horus Corporation. Tell them that I was introduced to Horus by the professor.” Suzy gave Kathy a full account of everything that had happened to her so far, as the line of passengers in front of her shrank. She was determined that, if worse came to worst, the authorities would at least know where to pick up her trail.
“Listen, babe,” Kathy said when Suzy finally stopped talking, “this is just crazy. Why don’t you just get the first flight back here to England? It sounds like you’re way out of your depth down there. Hell, no PhD thesis is worth risking your life for. Come back here and be safe. Please. I don’t want to lose my best friend. Please?”
“I can’t, Kathy. I doubt I’d actually be any safer in England. Whatever’s going on, it seems to follow me wherever I go. Nope, I’ve got to stick it out and work out what the hell’s happening. Just promise me you won’t say anything to anyone unless you hear that I have vanished or died.”
“Suzy!”
“Promise me, Kathy.” Kathy had never heard her friend sound quite so serious and scared.
“OK, I promise.”
“Thanks. Love you.” Suzy hung up and took a deep breath. She couldn’t tell her mother what was happening, she would get worried sick, telling Kathy was the only option.
Passport control let her through without any ceremony and, as she walked out into the arrivals hall, she saw Tom standing beside a man holding a cardboard sign that read, “Magical tour of the Mayan Monuments. All you can eat, 2 days a/c luxury travel to Pyramids of Palenque. Departs 10am. $200 pp, no pets.”
“Hi,” she said, surprised when he threw his arms around her.
“I’ve booked a room in town,” he said when he finally released her. “Let’s go there and work out a plan.” Suzy knew she couldn’t let anyone lure her into a situation that might be a trap. She had an idea.
“No,” Suzy insisted. “Let’s get on the road. There isn’t much time. We’ll take this tourist tour. No one will be expecting us to do that.”
“A tourist bus?” he hissed. “Are you mad? We need to keep a low profile.”
“My mum always told me the best way to disappear was to hide in plain sight. We’ll be much safer in a crowd of tourists than on our own.”
“I don’t think the guys who are after us would think twice about blowing up a tourist bus.” Suzy ignored him and purchased two tickets. She strode toward the bus. Tom had no option but to follow, surrounded by a bevy of American and Japanese tourists.
“You should see this,” he said, handing her a local newspaper once they were in their seats. “They found Ben Sanders.”
Suzy opened the paper and saw a headline about a dismembered body being discovered. She winced at the gruesome pictures of a slashed chest and an unrecognizable face covered in blood. There was no doubt about this being some kind of ritual execution.
“I wonder if these guys used a military knife on Ben. My father was murdered with a knife like that,” Suzy said. Tom gave her a startled look.
“When I went to the morgue, they told me they found a knife in my father’s throat. It was a military issue knife.” His voice trailed off.
“You still think it was just a burglary that went horribly wrong?” whispered Suzy. She still wasn’t sure if she could trust him.
“I told you, not a single thing was taken. The coroner is convinced it was an execution. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. But it’s not just the knife—I also found e-mails from Ben Sanders mentioning a numerical code hidden in the pyramids, saying he needed help from my father to solve it. Some police officers came to question him about Ben Sanders—remember what I told you? And yet, when I found the policeman’s card and called the number on it, it didn’t work.” Tom rubbed his face with his hands. “This is beginning to look like more than just a coincidence.”
“Well,” Suzy hesitated, “maybe you should go back to the US and grieve for your father properly. I can—”
“No,” he interjected. “Right now the best way to honor my father’s memory is by getting to the bottom of this. I’m convinced he died for a reason, and I want to find out what it was.” Suzy opened her mouth to argue but Tom turned and stared out the window. When he turned his gaze back to her, he said, “Look Suzy, I really need some help right now. My father wrote in his notebook that he had the pyramid of Pacal and the Mayan long count aligned. That was his life’s work. If you can help me crack it, then that would be a great tribute to him.”
“How can we hope to crack it if your father worked on it for decades and still never solved it?”
“But he did solve it, Suzy, he did solve it. That’s the whole point.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure. I just feel it. We have to finish what he found.”
The engine coughed into life and the bus moved slowly forward, gradually picking up speed as it got onto the road to Palenque. They sat in silence for a while, both lost in their thoughts. Eventually Suzy broke the silence.
“I’m not sure who’s following us,” she said, “but, if it’s the Horus Corporation, then those guys will kill us at the drop of a hat. They’ve killed before.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone tried to assassinate me in Israel. At least I thought they did, but maybe they simply wanted to show me they could kill me easily if they wanted to. Perhaps they just wanted to warn me off. I don’t know, but either way it’s scary—and they always seem to know where I am.”
“And do you really think it’s the Horus Corporation? I thought you said that Piper knows where you are all the time.”
“Yes, I know. Tom, I’m not sure about him either. In fact I’m not a hundred percent certain about any of it. It’s weird. I feel like someone is following me but at the same time protecting me. And it was the same at the pyramids.”
“Why, what happened at the pyramids?”
She suddenly felt uneasy, thinking she had relaxed too much, letting something slip that she hadn’t meant to. Were her instincts telling her to trust this man?
“I didn’t tell you this before, but they killed two guides in
the Great Pyramid while I was inside. I only just managed to get away from the assassin.” Tom looked horrified.
“And you think Horus were responsible?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I witnessed two murders … I think. To be honest I’m not sure about anything any more.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”
“I couldn’t find the right moment. And then I was attacked in Luxor as well.” Now it was all spilling out. “A guy followed me in the Temple of Karnak at night. First he tried to strangle me. He’s the one who cut my neck.”
“If it was an assassin and he had a knife, why didn’t he simply stab you? Why go to the trouble of trying to strangle you first?”
“Exactly. That’s why I’m having trouble working out any of it.”
They kept talking through the trip, going over and over the facts as they knew them, trying to see how they fit together.
“OK,” Tom said, “so, what do we know for certain, or almost certain?” He sounded more like he was giving another academic lecture. “We know that Ben Sanders is dead and that he was trying to unlock a puzzle of the pyramids or some type of hidden ancient number code. We know he had been communicating, very cryptically, with my father, and that my father is also dead.”
“I wonder if Ben was talking to Piper as well?”
“My father had this picture of the scarab brooch with a message from Ben. He has written the number 360 on the picture with the words ‘I have aligned the long count and King Pacal’s Pyramid.’”
Tom pulled the crumpled picture from his pocket and passed it to her. She stared at it hard, hoping it would speak to her. She couldn’t see anything about it that might relate to the Mayan long count, any more than she could with the vase and mirror that had been left for her on The Mount of Olives. If these were all clues, they were unyielding as stone, defying any sensible interpretation.
