Tim Holden took his cue and left.
“There has been a breakthrough in the studies we have all been engaged in,” Dr. Ewing continued. “Those who are comparing your previous findings with Olmec information gathered so far are becoming convinced that the languages of the Minoans, Harappans, and Olmecs are parts of a whole, interdependent upon each other. They are quite desperate for the Olmec tablets to confirm that suspicion. The whole mystery may unlock once they have more of that language to study.”
“We were on our way when a certain miracle demanded some attention,” Talia replied.
“God encourages us to focus on Him, not be blinded by the works He does. Concentrate. Get back to business,” Dr. Ewing said, turning and marching off.
Chapter Eighty-four –Reconciled
Before Keith and Talia could get a flight out, they were kept busy helping new arrivals settle in. Jayna was devastated by what had happened to her family. She cried in Talia’s arms for two nights straight. Grandmother Bradley introduced herself to Jayna’s mother and they found out all three of them were members of the same online Bible study group. The boys and their father were put to work on the revitalized dinosaur repair project and the family finally began to settle in.
More people had begun showing up at the campground, Some were former residents and others were newcomers – relatives of the jailed administrators and broken families in situations similar to the Holdens.
When they were finally able to leave, Drew Summers joined them on the plane to Mexico. He left Cara Townsend in charge of his local team at Precious Treasure in case another attack was in the offing on the homefront.
“Everyone has a story,” Talia said as they found their seats on the plane and took one last opportunity to check messages from the campground. “I remember you saying that before.” She took Keith’s hand.
A man slid into the seat next to Keith before Drew could claim it and started craning to see what they were doing with their phone and tablet.
Drew Summers came down the aisle. “Sorry, buddy, you’re in the wrong seat.”
“The stewardess said we could sit anywhere,” the man said. “The plane’s only half full.”
“Anywhere but there,” Drew said. “Move.”
“Now look,” the man said. He kept staring at Keith and Talia but they forced themselves to stay silent.
“No, you look,” Drew said. “Those two are stinkin’ famous people, and I’m their bodyguard. Go sit somewhere else on this half-empty plane.”
“Famous? Yeah? Who are they? Can I get a picture with ‘em?”
“No,” said Drew. “Get up. Move. Now.”
The man rose slowly. “I’m going to report you to the flight crew. There’s no need to be so rude.”
“The first word I said was sorry,” Drew said. “That’s as polite as I get. But I can get far less polite if you want to keep pushing it.”
The man finally shuffled away toward the back.
“No. Up there, somewhere.” Drew pointed toward the front of the plane. “Where I can keep an eye on you.”
“You cannot tell me what to do,” the man huffed.
Drew walked slowly back toward him and moved his jacket an inch or two, displaying his shoulder holster. “I can. I’ll even say please. But you will move.”
“He has a gun!” screamed the man. “A gun, on the plane!”
The flight crew descended in force. “Please calm down, sir,” the first attendant to arrive, an attractive, athletic blonde, said. “This gentleman is an air marshal. If he’s given you an order, please obey it, for the safety of everyone on board.”
“Well why didn’t he say so?” the man whined as the crew led him forward. “He said those two were famous. I just wanted to get a selfie with ’em.”
“Are you really the air marshal?” Keith asked as Drew sank into the seat the man had vacated.
“He is now,” the attendant who had spoken to the stranger said as she walked by again. “Flight crew can designate any volunteer for the position of air marshal. You volunteered, right, Drew? It’s been a long time. You look good.”
“Anne.” Drew stood up so fast he hit his head on the overhead bin. “Ow. Talia and Keith Bradley, this is … was … my wife. Anne …” he trailed off.
“Still is.” She sank onto the armrest of the seat in front of him. “I never filed the papers. But I’ve been doing some security and surveillance of my own, after being trained by the best. I wanted to see if you really had changed, and may I say, I’m impressed. Not so much as a friendly hand of cards in five years. I missed your last flight to Mexico. I’m glad I caught you this time.”
“God,” Drew whispered, sitting down again.
“Yeah, I think He had a little something to do with it.” Anne smiled. “This is the cute adventurer couple? The archaeologist-school teacher-scientists? Is that a baby bump I see? Congratulations!”
“Yeah,” Drew said. “Man, when they used to say ‘fly the friendly skies,’ who would have thought …?”
“We’ll talk later.” Anne patted Drew on the knee. “It was nice to meet you two. Enjoy your flight.” She waved at Keith and Talia, got up, and disappeared up the aisle. Drew’s eyes never left her until the curtain closed behind her.
“Earth to Drew,” Keith said with a grin.
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m on my knees in front of God’s throne, saying Thank You. Back in a minute.”
“So, is it okay that I took an emergency ten-day vacation?” Anne asked Drew as they debarked in Veracruz. “Will you take me with you on your adventure, and we’ll see how this reunion thing goes?”
“Well … the last thing I need is a distraction this big,” Drew admitted. “This bunch, they need pretty close watching. People keep trying to kill them, and I’ve already messed up a few times.”
“Kill them?” Anne repeated. “Why would anybody want to kill a couple of Bible teachers?”
“So many reasons, you’ll never believe it,” Drew replied.
“Well, Marshal, you could deputize me,” Anne replied. “I’ve kept up with my firearms qualifications, can still do a mean Ninja imitation, and I’ve practiced watching you for the last eight years.”
Drew grinned. “I’ve had a lot less qualified trainees,” he said with a glance at Keith.
“Hey, in my defense,” Keith protested, “I was just a temp. Calvin Hobbes. I didn’t even have a serious alias.”
“That’s a very cool alias, though,” Anne laughed. “Come on, Drew. I want a cool alias. Pick one out for me.”
“Uhh …” he said.
“Fine,” Anne said. “I’ll pick my own. I want to be Miss Kitty. That’ll be easy to remember, won’t it, Marshal Dillon?”
Drew swallowed hard. “Don’t tell me you still have the outfit?”
“Right down to the bustle,” Anne replied.
“You’re hired,” Drew said.
Sophie, Naddy, and Eva met them inside the terminal. Talia went straight to Eva and hugged her.
“That’s so you can get on with forgiving yourself,” she said to the astonished woman.
“I could have killed your baby. I could have gotten you all killed,” Eva said, bursting into tears. “Since I confessed what I did to protect him, my son has told me a hundred times that I should have just told the truth. ‘Mine was just one life, mama,’ he said to me. You risked too many.’
“He cannot come out so openly, but you will meet him, and you will not believe what he was like the first time I saw him. He was transformed, and through him so have I been. I have always kept a part of my heart dark and cold, wanting revenge, wanting to hold my son in my arms, and blaming God for all that darkness.”
“Come. Everyone is waiting,” Naddy said. “There will be time for talk as we go.”
“They didn’t even notice,” Talia marveled.
“Oh, of course,” Sophie said, turning around and holding out a hand. “It is so good to see you, Anne. Drew looks like a schoolboy
with his first crush.”
Both Drew and Anne blushed.
“You remember me, after all this time?” Anne asked.
“We remember the past far better than the present at our age,” Naddy confided. He patted her arm. “Come. Come.”
Jiggly sat in the Rover’s driver’s seat. Cindy sat beside him, wearing a purple satin pirate patch with glittery stars on it. “Hey you guys,” she said. “You look good, Mama Bradley.”
“You do too, Cap’n Cindee,” Talia said, leaning in to hug her.
“Ooh, watch the machinery,” Cindee cautioned, moving a folding tablet/keyboard combination out of harm’s way. “Jiggly and I have been running code to transfer the latest finds to the Guardian crew for their translation work.”
“It’s stinkin’ hard to type with this mind-of-its-own hand,” Jiggly grumbled, folding away his own tablet.
“Are you kidding?” Cindee said. “You almost beat me on sending the images that time.”
“I always beat you before,” Jiggly said.
“Somebody needs a memory jog,” Cindee said, poking her elbow into his artificial one as he wrapped his hand around the steering wheel.
“Who’s the dame, Flatfoot?” Jiggly asked Drew.
“My wife, Anne,” Drew replied.
“No way!” Cindee screamed. “I’m Cindee. We’ve heard so much about you.”
“We have not,” Jiggly insisted. “Just whining about her absence, if that counts.”
Drew reached in and slapped the back of Jiggly’s head. “Don’t make me shoot you,” he said.
“That must be Jiggly,” Anne said.
“Cyborg Jiggly,” if you please.” Jiggly used his mechanical hand to doff his baseball cap. “And don’t think you can scare me with threats of gun violence, Big Guy. I happen to know getting shot’s not that big of a deal.”
Anne stared in wonder at his fluid handling of the prosthetic arm. “Drew, this is worth it, just to meet somebody your gun doesn’t scare.”
They all squeezed into the Rover and Jiggly set off. “It’s kinda like autopilot,” Jiggly said. “The arm communicates directly with the steering. I just point and go.”
“But you will keep your eyes on the road, for the sake of my heart condition?” Naddy asked.
“Did Eva tell you yet?” Cindee asked Keith and Talia. “Or Sophie? Or anybody?” She bounced up and down on the seat.
“Tell us what?” Talia asked.
“We’ve got Araña’s Web working almost completely,” Cindee said. “It’s incredible. Bunches of mirror eyes are replaced in the statues. Turns out they had covered some of them over with baked clay to hide them. They’re ‘open’ now, and we can see all the places in range of the heads. The Olmecs and other daughters-in-law of Noah also hid corundum artifacts that are like satellite dishes. Seeing through the heads showed them to us.
“The insulated orichalcum and dragon skin cables – people have been placing them all around the world, on cell towers and other things like Keith suggested. We have gotten messages from Guardians who were cut off from the others and didn’t know anyone else was still alive. They found us through the mirror pyramid’s ‘broadcast.’ There’s another throne in Mohenjo-Daro – can you believe we were so close, and didn’t even go there? – and a third one somewhere on Crete. No one’s even sure about that one yet, but there are definite rumblings.”
“Eva, tell us how you came to be sitting on Araña’s throne,” Talia insisted, grabbing her hand.
“She’s the only one it would work for,” Jiggly said. “I’m telling you, everybody tried to sit on that thing, even Sharon and Naddy. That was funny, when Naddy made it creak and groan and …”
“Never mind,” Naddy grumbled.
“But I want to know how you came back to us,” Talia said to Eva.
“Oh, that,” Eva said. “Poor Cara. She’s all right, isn’t she?”
“Keeping it together better than some people might,” Drew grunted. “I’d love to hear this explanation, too.”
“I couldn’t leave my son behind again,” Eva said. “I finally found him, about a week later, and I begged him to come with me and get free of the cartel.
Eva wiped her eyes. “He said had risked everything to come to meet me that first time, and to warn me about the danger to all of you. This time he accused me if being no better than the people he grew up with. He said I was selfish, a liar, a thief, maybe a murderer, for all I knew, if Cindee did not survive.
“He knew about everything I had done – how I had drugged Talia and attacked Cara. He recited my crimes to me and he walked away and disappeared into a crowd. I tried for another week to find him. You had all left the country and scattered. You believed I would betray you and might even want to destroy your mission. Once again, I wanted to end my life.
“That was when my Olmec contacts found me. They didn’t understand why we had suddenly stopped communicating, just when they had showed us the pyramid. I confessed to them what I had done, and that since I had betrayed your trust, you didn’t know if they could trust my contacts, either.
“They reminded me that I had tried to teach them that God forgives sins, and wanted to know why I hadn’t asked Him to forgive mine. We try so hard to teach this, that Christ forgives anything through His blood, but it never occurred to me to ask Him to forgive me for all this.
“I laughed and I cried and I did ask God to forgive me. I have spent the time since then living and working among them, giving you time to see that I had not compromised you, and letting belief in God’s forgiveness seep into my heart.
“When everyone came back to the dig site, I made my confession. We discovered that I could operate the throne, and since then we have been busy setting up the communications. My son contacted me just a week ago. He said he finally knew that I had learned what unselfish love was, and he was ready to come to me.”
Chapter Eighty-five – Where Are Their Parents?
“I could watch this all day,” Keith said as he leaned against the wall inside the mirrored earth pyramid. Eva, Sophie, and Naddy worked on the communication system. He laced his fingers into Talia’s, who sat on a camp stool beside him.
“Are you sure I can’t sit on the throne?” Talia pouted.
“We don’t really know how this power source works yet,” Keith said. “There could be some kind of danger to the baby. No sense taking chances when Eva can do it.”
“So maybe we shouldn’t even be in here,” Talia said. “We still have to find the tablets. It’s been a week, now, and we have no clues. Without the final pieces of the puzzle, the guardians still don’t have all the information they need to make the translations. ”
“Yeah.” Keith helped her up. “No point in having a communication system without the message you want to communicate. Anybody ever learn anything about those people who lured us out of camp?”
“We assumed they meant simply to harm us – to destroy the mission,” Sophie replied. “What benefit would there be in trying to find out about them?”
“Maybe none,” Keith admitted. “Maybe they thought we were close. I know that the other two tablet caches were someplace else besides where the people’s main city was.”
Talia and Keith left the pyramid and found Cindee and Jiggly in the “office” tent studying charts and maps of where the communication system was being built up and enhanced.
“Nobody ever explained how you knew we were going to get an EMP attack back in the States,” Talia recalled. “And I never asked you why you could protect us but not yourself,” she added to Keith.
Keith and Jiggly both started to talk at the same time. Cindee waved her hands. “Me first,” she said. Both men shrugged.
“We had finally figured out how to make the chair work again,” Cindee said. “Jiggly told you everybody tried sitting in it. Finally Eva came back and we realized she had to be the one to sit up there. Sophie was too light, and I was too tall, but Eva was Goldilocks – just right. Everything started up
just like it did for Talia, but there was no real range, and she could see some things but not hear at all.”
Jiggly took up the tale. “That was when we started replacing the eyes in the sculptures. They’re more than eyes – they make the audio work too, by some kind of electromagnetic whatsits.
“The guardian techs we have contact with suggested we might be able to use that insulated cable Keith made at the tech conference to boost signal. We tried that and it worked crazy fantastic.”
“That was when we started finding guardians we didn’t know existed,” Cindee said. “They all had ideas for improvements, and most knew about pyramids and corundum dishes somewhere. We’ve been uncovering, re-aligning and tweaking, all around the world.
“One day it hit everybody, kind of like a wave of enlightenment, that Jiggly had those little pieces of corundum from Oulos when he met up with Keith in Turkey, and Britomartis’s ax honed in on them, plus that’s how you found Sophie and Naddy in Syria.”
Jiggly broke in. “So we started handing chips out, and it was so cool, that Eva could talk to people through the throne without even having a cell phone. Ham radios, CBs – anything that sends or receives a signal can work with a corundum chip, or any good-quality ruby. But it freaked Eva out, that day she heard a voice saying –”
“‘I’m paying you to make sure none of those people leave the state prison alive,’” Cindee interrupted, shivering. “That’s what the voice said. We all heard it. ‘You have the EMP generator on board the helicopter. Make sure you’re over the prison to send out the pulse one half hour after I feed you the exact time. Shut down the vehicle, find them, and kill everyone in the van.’”
Talia grabbed Keith’s hand and held it tight. “How did you know who it was, or where, or when it would happen?”
“We only knew Keith was going to the prison to see his dad,” Cindee answered. “We had to assume they were driving a van, and that they were the target. We didn’t know anything about the transfer, or Drew getting custody of the administrators. We just thought maybe they were going to try to kill Keith. We didn’t even know what time the pulse would come.”
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