In the distance, a single pair of headlights turned onto the main street, which wound around the vast lawn and eventually passed the library on its way to the campus admissions building. The revving of the car’s engine could be easily heard as it sped around the gradual curve and braked hard upon approach to the intersection. With a hard right turn, the small Toyota squealed around and up the driveway toward the library where it finally skidded to a stop.
Mignucci watched with curiosity as a man jumped from the driver’s seat and sprinted up the long walkway toward him.
“Good morning.” Mignucci greeted the man with a dose of sarcasm.
Juan Diaz waved briefly and bent over to catch his breath. “Morning!”
Mignucci calmly spun around and inserted his key into the lock. With a quick turn, the bolt within the steel frame dropped, allowing him to manually pull one side open. He held it open and waved Diaz in.
Juan spotted the library’s directory computer and ran to it while Mignucci turned on all of the interior lights. Juan barely noticed when the entire floor lit up behind him. Instead, he scanned the screen, found the search option and typed in “archeology and hieroglyphs.” The result listed dozens of books. He printed the list and took off again, this time up the wide carpeted stairs heading for the second floor.
Thirty-five minutes later, Diaz burst through the administration office of their team’s research lab across town, struggling under an armful of heavy books. He crossed the room and dropped them onto the long wooden table next to their digital scanner. He quickly picked up the nearest book and flipped through the pages as if pretending to speed-read. He immediately stopped when he spotted the first page of pictograms, along with their translations.
Diaz turned it over and pressed the book down flat against the scanner’s clear glass, then hit the large green “scan” button. After the machine saved the image into memory. Diaz picked the book up again and continued flipping through.
There were several open-source computer code algorithms commonly used for telling a computer how to distinguish between pictures and text on the same piece of paper. But none of them were working. Lee Kenwood growled in frustration, looking for the error in his code. After changing some syntax, he clicked the “compile” button on his screen and waited for the result. Another error.
Damn it, what am I missing? He pounded on the table and opened up his coding window again. Finding the line causing the problem, he made another change. Still no dice.
“Come on!” He slapped the metal desk next to him with his palm and the pain instantly reminded him why that was a bad idea. Lee rubbed it and leaned closer to his screen, examining the list of variables he had added. He made another change and saved it, then clicked “compile” again.
This time there were no errors.
Lee thrust a fist in the air. “Yes!” He quickly scanned the local data repository and found the hundreds of graphic files Juan had uploaded. Now done with the books, Juan had already begun adding website links to the list. All were resources that IMIS would use to find patterns and cross reference against one another and lastly against the satellite image that Will Borger had sent them.
Taking a deep breath and with fingers crossed, Lee uploaded his computer code into IMIS’ server cluster and launched it.
Alison was still sitting in front of Borger’s laptop three hours later, studying the rock shapes in the image. She glanced up when she heard rain begin to fall onto the roof of the helicopter’s cabin. It started slow, quickly increasing until it became a veritable downpour. She moved to the window but couldn’t see the men outside.
Clay, Caesare, and Borger were over a half mile away, surveying the ongoing fire as dawn broke over the distant mountains. Fortunately, the dampness of the jungle had finally won out over the raging flames. Now, rather than expanding, the ring of fire was quickly fizzling out. The rain was the final straw.
They were soaked by the time the three made it back to Alves’ giant helicopter, and the sun had already risen whole into the morning sky. DeeAnn was still asleep with one hand wrapped tenderly around Dulce’s curved back. The men passed by them quietly and surrounded the nearby table where Alison sat.
“How’s the brushing up going?” Clay whispered.
“Okay.” She leaned back and briefly rubbed her eyes. “I wish I could talk to one of my professors.”
“Find anything out?”
“The shapes definitely share some characteristics with Mayan pictograms, maybe even Olmec. But there are only three symbols, which isn’t much to go on. It would be nice if we knew how old they were.” She pointed to one of the three. “This one is most similar to a Mayan bird. And this other one is clearly a circle with inward facing arrows, but I have no idea what it means. I haven’t found anything even remotely similar. And the third shape is anyone’s guess.”
“So we don’t know if it’s Mayan or not.”
Alison didn’t answer.
“Ali?”
She looked up at them reluctantly and then exhaled. “It’s hard to say. Without knowing their age…” She paused. “The Mayan’s were amazing. They knew some things that are beyond current explanation. For example, they calculated the length of a day down to two one-thousandths of what our modern atomic clocks calculate it to be. And that was two thousand years ago. Their understanding of astronomy and mathematics were…well, inexplicable. The problem is…they didn’t come this far south.” She crossed her arms. With a look of frustration, she began to say something but stopped.
“What is it?”
“This is going to sound crazy, but if these shapes are old enough, they may not have been influenced by the Mayan or the Olmec languages at all. Instead, those languages may have been influenced by this.”
“Whoa,” said Caesare. “That’s heavy.”
The buzzing of Clay’s phone interrupted them. He quickly fished it out of his pocket. He examined the number and handed it down at Alison. “It’s Lee.”
She accepted the call and held it to her ear. “Hi, Lee.”
“Hey, Ali,” he replied. “I think I have something for you. IMIS thinks it has translations for two of the symbols.”
“Two?”
He shrugged. “It seems to think so. Are you ready?”
Alison glanced at the three men surrounding her. “Go ahead.”
“IMIS believes the middle shape, the one that looks like a bird, means ‘large’ or ‘strong.’ The one below it, and more to the right, means ‘weak.’”
Alison jotted it down. “Large and strong…and weak. Is that it? Nothing on the third one?”
“No, nothing on the circle.”
“Any idea as to accuracy?”
“Fifty-four and fifty-eight percent. So not great.”
Alison nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Lee. Keep us posted.”
“Will do.”
“Oh, and Lee,” Alison stopped him before he hung up.
“Yeah?”
“Great work!”
He chuckled. “Thanks, Ali. We’ll see.”
She hung up and handed the phone back to Clay.
“So strong and weak?” said Borger.
“Yeah. But Lee said the accuracy is barely above fifty percent. I’m not sure how much better off we are.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
She nodded in agreement and continued staring at the screen.
“Maybe there’s some meaning in the triangle itself. Maybe it points to something.” Borger reached over Alison’s shoulder and zoomed out. “Then again, maybe not. Looks like three directions that just point away from the cliff.”
Clay stood behind Alison, transfixed on the screen. “If we assume IMIS is wrong about the shapes, then we have nothing. So let’s assume it’s right. Which gives us what?”
“A triangle, three symbols, three possible points of direction, and two words; strong and weak.”
“And,” Alison thought out loud, “if the shapes have single word definitions, then w
e’re not looking for a sentence. We’re looking for some kind of relationship between all three.”
“Maybe there’s a mathematical significance to the number three.”
“Prime number?”
“There are a lot of prime numbers. Why not two or five?”
Clay kept staring at the third shape on the screen. The circle with inward pointing arrows. Strong and weak. Strong and weak. And a circle. Circle with something traveling inward. Traveling inward. Traveling inward. Coming inward in all directions. But what? And from where?
Caesare thought about it tactically. “You said those were boulders, right?”
“Right.”
“Big boulders?”
“Yes.”
“That means if you were standing next to them and looking horizontally, you probably couldn’t tell what they were.”
“That’s right,” Borger said.
“So you could only see the shapes if you were at the top of the cliff, looking down. From high ground.”
“That is true!”
“Or from the air,” reminded Alison.
Suddenly Clay turned. “That’s it!”
“What?”
“From the air! You can see these from the air, or the sky.” He turned to Borger. “Or from space!”
“Right. But then what does the triangle mean?”
Clay’s eyes lit up. He began searching for something then spotted a piece of paper sticking out of Borger’s pack. He grabbed the paper and unfolded it, laying it on the table. “I need a pen.”
“Here.” Borger dug deeper into his bag and pulled one out.
Clay grabbed the pen and brushed the wrinkled paper out straight. He then scribbled the three symbols in the same formation: one to the left and the others to the right, with one above the other. He leaned on the table and looked at the others. “What if there is no triangle?” He paused. “What if it’s not even three?!”
“I’m not following.”
“Think about it. What are we missing?”
They looked at his paper. Alison saw it first. “The cliff. We’re missing the cliff.”
“Exactly.” Clay reached down and scrawled the cliff to the right of the three symbols. “It’s not a triangle,” he said, connecting them all with straight lines. “It’s a square!”
Borger nodded. “It’s four points, not three.”
“And four meanings.” Clay wrote the words ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ under two of the symbols. The other two, the circle and the cliff, remained blank. “Two out of four. Strong and weak!”
Borger shook his head. “Okay. So what do the other two mean?”
“Four meanings, Will. Only viewable from space!” He waited. Finally, he laughed and slapped Borger on the back. “Remember your astrophysics, Will!”
It took three seconds before the light went on. “The Four Forces!”
Alison looked back and forth between them. “What? What?!”
Borger jumped back in front of his computer. “The Four Forces of Nature! In astrophysics, four primary forces control everything. A strong force, a weak force, gravity…and electromagnetism.” He pointed to the third shape. It was the circle with four arrows pointing inward. “Gravity!”
“Which means the last one is electromagnetism,” added Caesare.
“So what does that mean?” asked Alison. “The cliff is electromagnetism?”
“I’ll tell you what it means,” Clay said, leveling his gaze at Caesare. “It means that cliff face is not a wall. It’s a door!”
70
DeeAnn awoke to the sound of something breaking. She checked Dulce, who was still out, and looked around frantically. The noise was coming from the rear of the cabin. Both Caesare and Clay were tearing a large cupboard apart.
Caesare cut the power to several power plugs and proceeded to kick holes along the bottom of an interior wall. He checked to make sure there was no charge before reaching in and yanking out the electrical wiring. When it got to the end, he gripped the wire tight and gave a giant pull, snapping the other end off inside the wall.
Behind him, Clay removed part of Alves’ specially modified interior power system. He disconnected a set of thick cables from one of the cabin’s many twelve-volt batteries. Clay then lifted it out from the bottom of the storage area.
Caesare stepped past him, his eyes fixated on the long-necked sink faucet. He instantly wrapped his big hand around the top and jerked, snapping it off at the base.
Alison and Borger stood quietly, waiting at the door.
“What’s going on?” DeeAnn asked.
“We’re going back out,” Caesare answered, brushing past her. “Take care of Dulce. We’ll be right back.”
She blinked, watching them file out of the door, one by one, into the pouring rain. “Be careful!”
Together, they hiked back uphill to the cliff. Its entire face was now covered in a sheen of water, cascading down from the heavy rainfall. They approached the area in the rock where the two subtle grooves, almost ten feet apart, traveled together straight up.
Clay dropped the battery and held out the metal faucet pipe from Caesare. In one hand, Caesare gripped the pipe and one end of the wire together. With straining muscles, he then wrapped the thick wire around the pipe one pass at a time. In a few minutes, he had coiled most of the wire around the pipe. He grabbed the dangling ends, shaping them into hooks. With that, Caesare reached down and picked up the large battery, hooking the wire ends to the positive and negative battery terminals.
Alison brushed several soaked strands of hair from her eyes. “What’s that?”
Clay winked. “An electromagnet.” He looked at Caesare who nodded, then held the coiled rod up and pressed it against the rock.
Nothing happened.
Clay moved the rod to another place against the rock. Still nothing. Section by section, he moved the magnet across the cliff face and touched it to the hard surface.
Clay and Caesare suddenly looked at each other when they heard a heavy “clunk.” A moment later, the rock began to shake and loose pieces fell away from the vertical grooves above. With a low, deep rumble, the face began to push outward from between the grooves.
It continued sliding forward until a large black entrance appeared. All four stood together in the rain…speechless.
Alison shook her head. “This is definitely not Mayan.”
Clay dropped the magnet and glanced over his shoulder. He carefully approached the dark entrance. When he was close enough, he took a single step inside and looked around.
“Whoa!”
71
The other three followed Clay in as a rush of stale air blew past, forced outside by the light breeze behind them. Inside, the room was large, reaching well above their heads. Its depth and width quickly disappeared into the darkness. But they barely noticed the room’s size. It was the contents that stunned them, leaving their mouths agape.
The room was radiating a bright green glow. The color looked almost fluorescent. Yet the most startling of all…were the tubes: rows and rows of thick clear tubes, standing nearly ten feet high. Hundreds of tubes. And each was filled with what appeared to be a bright glowing green liquid.
Side by side, all four of them stood in awe, slowly scanning the room.
“Okay,” Caesare murmured. “This is pretty much the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”
“What in the world is this?” whispered Borger.
They stepped further inside, approaching the closest tube. Inside, they could see the glowing liquid, swirling around ever so gently.
Clay looked at the smooth stone floor, appearing green from the hue of the tubes. He brought his right boot forward and gently placed it onto the floor in front of him. He then raised it up again revealing a deep footprint beneath.
Alison peered down and did the same thing, creating a smaller print in the thick layer of dust. “This place,” whispered Alison, “is really old.”
“What are these things?”
Clay shook his head at Borger’s question, dumbfounded.
The green ambient glow revealed a stone ceiling several feet above the top of the tubes. Their clear casing appeared to be thick glass. When Borger reached out to touch one, a ripple of light burst from the glass, and he drew his hand back quickly. “Ouch!”
“Is it hot?”
“No, it’s ice cold.”
Clay moved forward and closed in, just a few inches away. The green glowing fluid was clearly moving. But there was something inside that the fluid was swirling around.
“There’s something in the middle of this tube.”
The others joined him and peered inside. “They look like bubbles,” Alison said. Her voice echoed softly against the thick walls.
“Or tiny spheres.” Caesare raised his head, following the spiraling strands of spheres to the top of the tube. “There’s thousands of them.”
Borger stepped away and examined the next closest tube. “They all have them.” He looked closer. “Wait a minute, there’s something inside of the spheres. It looks like little dots.”
“And different sizes.” Clay slowly circled around the first column and peered at the strands from the other side. “Very different sizes.”
Borger looked more closely, staring intently through his eyeglasses. “You’re right. Some of these are bigger.”
“What do you think they are?”
Borger looked back at Clay. “I think they’re seeds.”
The four moved deeper toward the back of the room. Every tube appeared to have strings of spheres wrapped inside, twisting in a way that reminded Clay of a double helix shape. Although these contained ten or more strands each. “There are no machines in here,” he remarked to the others.
“I don’t see any either. Unless they’re behind the walls.”
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