The Roswell Conspiracy (24 page)

“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 shot 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.

Morgan’s target headed for the set of stairs used by the BridgeClimb tourists as they descended from the main arch. Because the last tour group had come down hours ago, at least she didn’t have to contend with bystanders getting in her way.

The Russian climbed the stairs leading up to the vehicle deck two at a time. The steps were so steep that it was nearly a ladder, with switchback platforms every five yards.

Morgan reached the stairs, holstered her pistol, and began climbing after him. She could see that her quarry had made the mistake of trying to climb without holstering his weapon, so he was hampered enough for her to be able to make up the distance.

She was just one platform below him when he turned to fire. He got off two shots that caromed off metal before the slide locked back, indicating he was out of ammo.

She had him.

He hurled the pistol at her, catching her in the shoulder, but she ignored the blast of pain.

As he reached the vehicle deck, which still bustled with cars and trucks, she lunged for his feet. He kicked, barely missing her hand, and kept going.

On the next platform, she could take the shot that would disable him. Then it would be an easy task to haul him in.

At the vehicle deck, the stairs were wrapped with a ten-foot-high steel mesh cage to keep the BridgeClimb hikers from exiting onto the sidewalk. Instead of continuing up, the Russian grabbed the top of the cage, intending to vault over it and onto the sidewalk. If he did that, he might get into a car before Morgan could stop him.

She leaped up, but she didn’t try to latch onto him. She pushed the exposed soles of his feet, toppling him over the side of the cage before he was ready.