The Roswell Conspiracy

by Boyd Morrison

  “Why?”

  “Well, we know the Killswitch’s effective range goes up the higher it is when it detonates. So why set it off at ground level? I spoke to Collins before we left Pine Gap just to get a sense for what this thing could do. If Colchev had the same amount of xenobium that was at Pine Gap, he could have flown the Killswitch to 35,000 feet and taken out a huge swath of territory.”

  “How huge?”

  “In the right location it could take out everything from Washington to New York.”

  Morgan went silent for a moment as she realized the enormity of the situation.

  Grant put on his night-vision goggles and swept the street.

  “Colchev could be selling it on the black market to a terrorist network. Maybe the buy is going to happen somewhere on Wisconsin Avenue in DC.”

  She shook her head. “If he were in this for the money, he could have found a hundred easier ways to make it.”

  “And why specifically on July twenty-fifth? Why is the date so important to Colchev? Is that when he’s planning to set off a Killswitch or is that when he’s going to acquire another component he needs for his scheme?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something we’re missing.”

  “Then we need to find out what it is. Let’s hope I’m wrong about his men not showing up.” After two more sweeps, Grant said, “I wonder if we have any kung pao chicken left.”

  Without taking the goggles off, he stood and turned, then abruptly halted. He cocked his head up, slowly moving it down as if he were watching something drip from the ceiling.

  “What are you doing?” Morgan asked.

  “You need to put your goggles on.”

  For a second she thought he was joking, but she realized his voice was deadly serious for the first time today.

  She whipped the goggles off her lap and fitted them over her eyes. When she saw why Grant had told her to put them on, she whispered, “Damn it.”

  She could see red ID dust crosshairs descending, superimposed over the bedroom wall like ghostly apparitions.

  Right where the hotel’s elevator shaft was located.

  She could have kicked herself for making such a boneheaded oversight.

  Morgan’s targets had been watching for Kessler from the hotel the entire time, several stories directly above her. And because the scientist hadn’t shown up, her only links to the Killswitch were about to get away.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The light piercing the narrow crack they’d opened in front of the cave entrance did little to penetrate the gloom. Except for the thin beam of his flashlight reflecting off the basalt walls of the lava tube, Tyler could see nothing.

  Although the Moai protecting the cave had done an admirable job of concealing the entrance, apparently the seal had not been tight enough to prevent moisture from entering. The cave surface felt damp to Tyler’s touch, and the air reeked of fungal decay. If mold had grown unchecked in here, whatever they were meant to find might have been destroyed centuries ago.

  Jess guided Fay into the tight confines of the cave. Tyler instructed Polk to guard the entrance outside, but it was as much to keep him from seeing the results of their search as it was for protection. Not that he didn’t trust the guy. After all, Polk was the one with the gun. But Tyler saw the wisdom in following Morgan’s need-to-know rationale.

  “Be careful,” Tyler said, his voice reverberating into the distance. “The floor’s slippery.”

  “You watch your head,” Jess said. “Without hard hats, you could get a nasty bump.”

  “It sounds like you have some caving experience.”

  “Nana introduced me to it in New Zealand.”

  Fay took a deep breath. “Do you smell that? It’s the aroma of history.”

  She removed a state-of-the-art video camera from her knapsack and turned on its powerful floodlight. It provided as much illumination as the two flashlights put together.

  When she saw Tyler’s appreciative look, she said, “I use this to record all my trips.”

  “Paratus et validus,” Tyler said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Ready and able. It was my Army unit’s motto.” He showed Fay the Gordian camera he’d had delivered to the C-17 during the Sydney stopover. The equipment was only slightly more advanced than hers. “You would have fit in well. Especially with the way you handled that shotgun.”

  Fay grinned. “Flatterer. Come on. I want to see what’s in here.”

  She led the way into the darkness. No fear at all. Tyler was even more impressed.

  Ten yards in, the path turned, and the echo effect increased. Tyler was shocked that he could now see light coming from the far end of the tunnel.

  He exchanged glances with Jess. She was as surprised as he was. They continued on until they emerged into a massive chamber, its thirty-foot-high ceiling domed like a planetarium. Sunlight streamed through a one-foot-diameter hole in the ceiling, providing a weak supplement to the illumination cast by their flashlights. The tall grass must have hidden the hole from view when they were topside.

  They all stopped, slack-jawed, as they laid eyes on what the Rapa Nui people had been hiding for more than a thousand years.

  The ceiling was covered with images that were exact copies of the Nazca lines. Tyler took out his smart phone and brought up the map of the lines that he’d stored on it. Not only were the symbols identical to the geoglyphs on the Peruvian plain, but they were arranged in exactly the same locations and orientations. Each of the symbols was stippled with dots that didn’t appear on the Nazca plain. Straight lines connecting the symbols matched straight lines in Peru, but there were far fewer of them on the ceiling.

  “My God,” Fay whispered as she focused the camera on the drawings.

  “This is spectacular,” Jess said.

  Tyler made his own recording as he gawked.

  Jess took his phone and looked back and forth between it and the ceiling. “Some of them are missing.”

  “What?”

  “The ceiling isn’t a complete representation of the drawings in Peru. See? The whale is missing. And these two that look like flower pots aren’t here either.”

  Fay and Tyler crowded around the phone and saw that she was right.

  “What do you make of that, Fay?” Tyler said. After all, she was the expert here.

  “Based on how the drawings were made and arranged, archaeologists theorize that some of them came much later. Perhaps hundreds of years.”

  “Which ones are here?”

  Jess counted them off. “The monkey, condor, dog, hummingbird, pelican, spider, lizard, parrot, tree, flower, iguana, and human.”

  Tyler watched her as she tapped her fingers for each one. Twelve in all. Then he realized the significance of the dots.

  “Twelve drawings,” he said. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

  Jess immediately got it. “One drawing for each lunar cycle in a year.”

  Fay gaped at the ceiling. “Then the dots are—”

  Jess nodded. “Stars. These are constellations. How come no one has ever figured that out before?”

  “With all of the extraneous drawings added to the Nazca plain over the years since the original twelve were drawn, it was impossible to know that they represented constellations.”

  “If those dots correspond to visible stars,” Jess said, “we should be able to figure out which parts of the sky they appear in.”

  “What’s that?” Tyler asked, pointing at an image located away from the others and connected to the monkey drawing by a single line. Instead of a crude animal symbol, this image was a complex geometric pattern. A circle encompassed two perpendicular overlapping rectangles with a bright white starburst in the center. Girding the circle were two squares offset like the triangles in a Star of David.

  Fay got closer. “That’s the Mandala. The drawing is on a high plateau north of the Nazca plain. No one knows what it means.”

  Tyler made sure to get a good sho
t of each symbol, then photographed the path of each line connecting them. When he was done, he looked around to see if there were any other exits from the chamber.

  That’s when he noticed the other drawings. He’d been so focused on craning his neck at the ceiling that he hadn’t seen the wealth of stone carvings decorating the walls.

  “Guys,” he said, “take a look at these.”

  The intricate artwork encircled the entire chamber. Primitive paint filled the grooves so that the lines glowed white under the beams of their flashlights. Rather than drawings of animals, each etching seemed to illustrate a scene. Tyler started taking pictures beginning with the first one to his left.

  The first image showed a streak coming down from the sky, trailing fire in its wake. In the next drawing was a starburst matching the one inside the Mandala figure. Above the starburst rose the unmistakable profile of a mushroom cloud.

  Whoever drew this had either witnessed a gigantic explosion or had been told what one looked like. The same as at Tunguska. And as with the event in Western Australia, there would have been no downed trees to record the blast in the arid Peruvian plateau.

  “This tells a story,” Jess said.

  Fay nodded. “The migrants from Nazca must have recorded their history in this cave so it wouldn’t be forgotten.”

  “It’s funny that no one has ever found a drawing like this before,” Tyler said.

  “Not at all,” Fay said. “Remember that for five thousand years no one could translate hieroglyphics. Then the Rosetta stone was discovered and revolutionized our understanding of the Egyptian language. A single artifact changed everything. This cave could be a pre-Columbian Rosetta stone for the Nazca culture.”

  “Why haven’t they found drawings like this in Peru?”

  “They might yet. An ancient city called Cahuachi lay hidden south of the Nazca plain until it was discovered in the 1950s. Only when further excavations started in the 1980s did archaeologists realize it was a ceremonial pilgrimage site for the Nazca people.”

  “Would it be possible for something like this to be hidden there?”

  “Of course. The site is huge. One and a half square kilometers. The largest pyramid is thirty meters high, a stepped structure built of adobe bricks. Somewhere in the complex, there might be an exact duplicate of this story, originally protected by the religious order that lived there and now buried in the city.”

  They continued on with the story, with Fay interpreting the scenes.

  “Here we see someone discovering a circular object in the aftermath of the explosion. They carry it back to their people as a treasure. Oh, my goodness. Are those dead bodies?”

  The next drawing showed a landscape scattered with what appeared to be corpses. The circle seemed to be sending out beams to each of them, striking them down.

  “Whatever they found must have been deadly,” Tyler said. If the culprit was a large chunk of xenobium, the intense gamma rays emitted from it would cause anyone in close contact to become sick within days from radiation poisoning.

  Fay lowered her camera and squinted at the next drawing for several minutes. Kneeling human figures sat before what appeared to be an altar with the circular object resting upon it. “Here it looks as if they’re offering the object as some kind of sacrifice. Perhaps they hoped the gods would come to retrieve it and relieve them of their burden.”

  “They could have just thrown it away,” Jess said.

  “They wouldn’t if they considered it the property of the gods. They would want to safeguard it in case the gods ever returned to claim it. I think that’s what the next etching describes.”

  The next image showed the object being encased inside a pyramid. A line led straight from the top of the pyramid up to the ceiling where it intersected with the human figure.

  Fay looked up at the ceiling. “They’re recording the event that led to the drawing of the Nazca lines.”

  Jess followed her gaze. “My God, it’s a code.”

  “A code?” Tyler said.

  “They wanted the gods to come and get their treasure back, but since the Nazca took it from its original location—the Mandala—they thought they needed to provide instructions to the gods about where it was hidden.”

  “And what better code for the gods to follow than the constellations,” Fay said.

  Now Tyler understood why the Nazca lines had to be so large. They were a message to the heavens, and the Nazca people made sure no person on Earth at the time would have been able to decipher the code.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  They should have had Colchev’s men cornered, but an errant tire squeal blew an easy outcome.

  As soon as Grant had shown Morgan the red crosshairs descending toward the first floor, he bolted out of the room with her close on her heels, shouting instructions to the Australian police into her phone.

  They charged down the stairs expecting to intercept their targets in the lobby, but as they eased open the door to the lobby, a tire screeched outside just as the elevator opened. The pair of tactical team vans skidded to a halt in front of the main entrance and black-clad policemen poured out.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  Grant saw two men who he recognized from the Alice Springs warehouse dressed in light jackets and khakis. Both of them pulled semiautomatics and sprayed the lobby with rounds. Grant, armed with a SIG Sauer .40 caliber pistol on loan from the NSA, took aim at the men, but the screaming guests and hotel staff running for cover blocked his sightline. The tactical teams must have realized they could easily hit innocent bystanders and didn’t return fire either.

  The gunmen ran; Grant and Morgan gave chase. She yelled for someone to intercept them at the rear entrance of the hotel, but it was far too late. Colchev’s men were already out the back exit.

  Grant approached the glass door cautiously, sidling up next to it with his back to the concrete wall. He poked his head out to see through the door and was met with a hail of gunfire that shattered the glass.

  He dropped to his knee and took five quick shots through the broken glass. The men ducked around the corner of a building, and Grant’s rounds pinged off the brick.

  “Watch where you’re shooting!” Morgan shouted. “We need them alive.”

  “They started it!” Grant had been a soldier. Trained to kill, not to maim, not to read someone their rights.

  He and Morgan burst through the gaping doorway and sprinted after the gunmen, who were fifty yards ahead. Morgan called into her phone. “They’re heading down a diagonal street. Somebody cut them off before they head under the bridge.”

  The steel span of the Harbour Bridge began just a hundred yards ahead. If the gunmen got out of sight, they could easily disappear in the wharfs on the other side. They must have had a car parked around somewhere, but the hotel’s offsite lot was in the opposite direction.

  A police car came to a stop and blocked off the road ahead. The tac teams were busy setting up a perimeter in a ten-block radius around the hotel. Grant thought the Russians were cut off until he saw them shoot at a locked door and duck through.

  “Where’d they go?” Morgan said.

  “I don’t know.” It looked like it was in the foundation of the bridge. But as they got closer, Grant saw the sign next to the door.

  BridgeClimb. The tourist entrance for the guided walk up the spine of the bridge.

  The gunmen would be taking the bridge over the roadblocks set up on the streets underneath it. If they got onto the bridge’s vehicle deck, they could carjack someone and get away into the northern suburbs.

  Grant and Morgan reached the door and stopped.

  “You want to wait for the tac team?” Grant said.

  “No,” Morgan said. “I’m not letting these bastards get away. You stay here.”

  Grant shook his head. No way she was going by herself. “If you go, I go.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “All right. You pull the door open. One. Two. Three.”

  Grant yanked it
wide, and Morgan went in crouched, ready to take the shot if she had to.

  “They’re on the catwalk.” She darted through the door and up the iron stairs. Although he was fast for his size, Grant had to dig deep to keep up with her.

  Once they were up to the catwalk level that ran the length of the span underneath the bridge, Grant could make out the shadows of two men pounding across the steel grating. They were too distant to take clear shots, but that didn’t stop them from blasting away. Rounds pinged off the girders.

  Not very effective, Grant thought, but they might get lucky just by sheer quantity.

  Morgan never hesitated. She charged headlong down the walkway, not even flinching when bullets whizzed past.

  Grant made sure to keep his balance as he ran. The street was now a hundred and fifty feet below. If the bullets weren’t fatal, the fall would be.

  They reached a massive stone masonry pylon that served as the southern anchor for the bridge. The catwalk passed through an opening bored through the center of the pylon. Out the other side of the tunnel, Grant saw the two gunmen approach an intersecting catwalk and split up. One went straight ahead toward the northern terminus of the bridge while the other took a perpendicular path toward the opposite side of the bridge.

  When Grant and Morgan reached the same point, she nodded at the man heading for the northern terminus. “You take that guy. Make sure he doesn’t get to the other end of the bridge before the police set up their roadblocks.”

  “But don’t kill him.”

  “Right.” She didn’t even sound out of breath.

  “Easy enough,” Grant said, wondering how he’d do such a thing.

  Without another word, she took off.

  * * *

  Though Morgan didn’t like leaving Grant on his own, she felt she’d had no choice other than to let him chase the second gunman. Given how well he’d handled himself so far, she thought it was an acceptable risk.

  If she didn’t catch up with her target soon, he might be able to escape in the maze of steelwork that made up the bulk of the bridge. Built as an arched span of girders between the masonry pylons, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was the main connection linking north Sydney and the business district. Eight lanes of street traffic and two rail lines made it one of the busiest stretches of road in the city. If he got to the vehicle deck, the gunman would have multiple options for his getaway.