The Roswell Conspiracy (31 page)

“Anything?” Colchev said.

Zotkin shook his head. “Just a tiny amount of elevated background radiation.”

The Mandala was positioned at the summit of a flat-topped mountain twenty miles northwest of Nazca. After arriving in Santiago without incident, Colchev had the jet refueled and immediately flew on to the town of Ica, Peru, which was the closest airport to the Mandala. It had been a short drive to the turnoff from the Pan-American Highway, then another mile to the path that led them up to the plateau.

The trek up the mountain hadn’t been an especially hard one on anyone except for Fay, who stood off to the side panting from exertion as she watched their search. There was no need to closely guard her. If she ran, Kiselow, the only man Colchev and Zotkin had left, would chase her down.

From this ground-level vantage point, the massive drawing just looked like a random collection of lines strung together. Holes in the dirt punctuated the intersections of lines in several places, but they served no discernable purpose and hid nothing.

They had concentrated their initial search on the center white space that radiated lines in multiple directions. Unless the xenobium was buried deep beneath the surface, the radiation meter would detect a pronounced signal, but nothing significant registered on the device.

Zotkin shook his head. “I’ve been over every inch of this drawing. The xenobium might have been here at one time, but it’s gone now.”

“We never had a chance to find it here,” Colchev said. “Did we, Mrs. Turia?”

Zotkin and Kiselow turned to Fay, who smirked.

“You really are stupid if you thought I would tell you anything.”

Colchev nodded appreciatively. “Very good act. Convincing, although I gave it a fifty-fifty chance that you were lying.”

Fay laughed. “I’m sure.”

“It doesn’t matter. I would have chosen this location to visit first anyway. More isolated and easier to get the xenobium if it really was here.”

Zotkin took Colchev aside. “Do you want me to kill her?”

Colchev sighed. “Eventually.”

“Now.”

“Not yet. The news from Rapa Nui this morning said that all power was out, but there were no mass casualties.”

“What if Kessler was wrong about the gamma rays?”

“No. The experiments they did with the Australian sample proved that gamma ray emissions from the weapon would be deadly at that range. Somehow they got it off the island.”

“Do you think Locke survived?”

“If he did, we may need Fay as a bargaining chip. But when we do find the xenobium, we will kill her. Satisfactory?”

Zotkin looked as if he were about to protest again, but held his tongue.

Colchev turned around. “All right. Back to the car.” He checked his watch. “We should be at Cahuachi in forty-five minutes.”

* * *

Girdled by adobe brick walls, the terraced Grand Pyramid loomed over the sprawling Cahuachi complex. In the days when the city served as the religious center of the Nazca culture, its citizens would ritualistically climb the myriad stairs in a procession that snaked around the forty structures built to house the civilization’s heritage and treasures.

Today the city was uninhabited, awaiting the arrival of the first tourist buses.

Jess was surprised that Tyler had been able to convince the police to provide six officers for the search at Cahuachi, but the show of force had been for naught. Jess shouted Fay’s name repeatedly. Silence was the only response. There was no sign of her or Colchev.

“Do you think they’ve come and gone?” she said to Tyler.

“I doubt it. They wouldn’t have made it before nightfall yesterday, and searching in the dark would have been difficult.”

After a thorough inspection of the grounds, the lead officer called his men back to the main plaza, where he approached Jess and Tyler with a combination of regret and annoyance.

“Señor Locke,” he said. “She is not here.”

“Are you sure they couldn’t be hiding somewhere?” Jess said.

The policeman shrugged. “Señor, this place very big, but we look everywhere. Nobody here.”

“Officer,” Tyler said, “I think the best option is to leave some of your men here and take us to the Mandala. They could be there instead.”

The policeman frowned. Jess had never gotten the feeling that he believed their story. “I’m sorry, señor,” the officer said. “We go now.”

“We’re staying for a while to look around.”

“We are?” Jess asked. “What about the Mandala?”

Tyler nodded slightly to show her that he had a plan.

The policeman shrugged. “Okay. If you see these people, call us and we come back.”

The officers returned to their cars and drove off, leaving the rental as the only car in the lot.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Jess said.

Tyler started walking toward the Grand Pyramid. “Without some muscle, we’ll never be able to take Colchev. We don’t even have any guns. If Colchev
is
at the Mandala, he’s in the wrong place.”

“Which means he’ll come here.”

“Right. And if the xenobium really is here, we need to find it before he does.”

Jess suddenly understood. “Then we’ll have something to bargain with!”

“If we find it, that is. We’ll do better to search on our own. Since this is probably a Peruvian national monument, the police wouldn’t look too kindly on us breaking in and stealing an artifact from it.”

“That kind of thing didn’t seem to bother Indiana Jones.”

“Yeah, but they never show you the actual sequel to his tomb raiding: Indiana Jones and the Museum’s Repatriation Lawsuit.”

“You’re not going to trade the xenobium for Nana,” Jess said. “Are you?”

Tyler’s jaw clenched. “We can’t. I’m sorry. It would be too dangerous for Colchev to get his hands on it.”

“I’m getting her back!” Jess cried out. “I don’t care about the damn xenobium!”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “We will get Fay back. We can use the xenobium as a lure.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll think about how that will work later. Let’s get the xenobium first.”

Jess grunted and shrugged his hands away, but she didn’t argue further.

Tyler and Jess checked the interior chambers that had been excavated, including the large tunnel that seemed to be the main entrance inside, but it ended at a brick wall and there was no indication of a way further into the pyramid. They climbed to the top of the exterior so they could get a better lay of the land. A maze of walls, trenches, and stairs had been unearthed around it, revealing the smaller mounds that seemed like pale imitations. Beyond that were sere hills and pocked terrain that could have served as a backdrop for a film set on the moon. The blue of the clear sky was the only reminder that she wasn’t looking at a sepia-toned photo.

“Where do we start?” she said.

Tyler consulted his camera, then pointed to the northwest corner of the pyramid. “According to Easter Island, that’s where we’re supposed to look.”

They clambered down the steps until they reached the spot that corresponded to the photo of the drawing on the cave ceiling.

“I bet if we did a survey of the actual Nazca lines, they would eventually intersect right here,” Jess said.

Tyler nodded. “Dombrovski had a lot more time to analyze them than we’ve had. But now that the pyramid is completely uncovered, the entrance should be much easier to find.”

“One question: if we do find the xenobium, it’ll be radioactive. How are we going to carry it?”

Tyler tapped the backpack he’d taken from their rental trunk. “This morning I stopped at a medical supply store and bought one of those protective vests used for patients getting x-rayed. I also picked up a couple of lanterns and a short crowbar.”

Jess was agog. “You knew this might happen.”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Next time, give it to me straight. I can take it.”

“Will do.”

The wall at this corner, like the others, was built out of adobe brick, fabricated by mixing mud and straw. The pieces fitted together in a zigzag pattern, mimicking the stair-step construction of the pyramid itself.

Tyler knelt next to the bricks, running his hands over the rough surface.

“It wouldn’t be an obvious opening,” Tyler said, “or someone would have found it long ago merely by accident.”

“Do you see any symbols?” Jess asked.

“Nothing.”

“If this is a secret entrance, why would the Nazca make it so you had to tear the bricks apart to get in?”

“They wouldn’t. Dombrovski entered through here somehow. If he’d hammered the bricks away to get in, there’d be evidence, and these bricks are intact. We just have to figure out how to open it.”

“Maybe it has something to do with the Mandala image,” Jess said. “That would fit the pattern of the drawings, that the Nazca were providing a set of instructions to the gods.”

Tyler nodded. “Makes sense. It has a square overlaid with another square that’s turned at a forty-five degree angle. Which implies that something needs to be turned to set it to the proper alignment.” He studied the picture from the cave, then an aerial photo of the Mandala itself. “But what has to turn?”

Then Jess saw the difference between the drawing and the photo. She snatched the camera from his hand. “Look at this line in the drawing. It’s faint, but you can see that it bisects only the northwest corner of the larger square.”

Tyler’s eyes widened. “It’s as if that corner is supposed to divide in two.”

He didn’t have to utter the same conclusion that they had both reached. The bricks would have to swing away in either direction to reveal the secret opening.

Tyler’s finger followed the path of the stair-step seam created by the bricks. Then he stuck the tip of the crowbar between the bricks. The dirt fell away.

“The mortar’s crumbling,” Jess said.

“It’s not mortar. It’s dirt that’s worked its way into the crack. That explains why no one has noticed the gap.”

He jammed the crowbar farther in and pried at the bricks. At first they didn’t move, but Tyler pulled again, and Jess heard the bricks scrape against each other.

“It’s working!”

Tyler put his back into it, and the bricks separated far enough for Jess to get her fingers in. While Tyler pulled, Jess pushed from her side. The more room they got, the easier it became to swing it aside until the adobe segment was flush against the pyramid wall.

They repeated the process for the other side. With the other half of the corner out of the way, this one was no problem to move. Only three feet across, this hole was even less inviting than the one on Easter Island.

It didn’t matter. If this was the way to get Fay back, Jess wanted to get started as quickly as possible.

She held out her hand. “Give me a damn lantern.”

FORTY-FIVE

The passageway into the pyramid was not much wider than Tyler’s shoulders, so he had to adjust the backpack to keep it from scraping the walls. Jess led the way, holding her electric lantern high enough to illuminate the tunnel sixty feet ahead.

Tyler could make out soot on the ceiling from the torches that must have been carried through here over fifteen hundred years ago. The sunlight quickly receded behind him, and at the first turn in the passage, it was completely gone.

They crept forward another forty feet where they reached an opening on the left. The tunnel continued straight ahead.

“Which way?” Jess said.

“Let’s see what’s in this room.”

She turned and stopped so suddenly upon entering that Tyler almost ran into her.

He didn’t have to ask why. The room was filled with debris, a haphazard pile of bricks that stretched halfway to the ceiling thirty feet above.

“What the hell happened here?” Jess said. “Sure is a weird way to store bricks.”

Tyler raised his lantern to get a better look at the ceiling. Around the edges he could see a few bricks still teetering atop the inner wall that made up part of the room.

“It looks like they built an outer room around the inner room and the inner ceiling and walls collapsed.”

“Or they built the outer room over it after the old one caved in. But why would they do either one?”

“You’ve got me,” Tyler said. Even if there was another outlet on the other side of the room, it would be a dangerous trek to get to it. “Let’s keep going down the tunnel.”

They exited and this time Tyler took the lead.

After another forty feet, the tunnel opened into a vast space, this one so large that their lanterns barely illuminated the opposite side. Tyler estimated the ceiling was sixty feet high, and the circular space was big enough to hold a couple hundred people.

They had to be in the pyramid’s primary chamber.

Jess walked to the other side of the room and shined her lantern into a large opening.

“This must be the main entrance,” she said.

“Is it walled off?”

“Not that I can see from here.”

In the center of the room was an enormous pillar holding up the domed ceiling. Stepped risers surrounded the brick tower and led up to its mid-point. Something about the layout seemed familiar …

He whipped out the camera and checked the aerial image of the Mandala.

The layout of this room was exactly the same as the shape of inner part of the Mandala—a circle inside a square with rectangular steps surrounding a starburst image in the middle. The starburst had to represent the xenobium locked inside the pillar.

The Nazca designers had drawn an overhead plan of the pyramid for their gods.

“This is it!” Tyler said.

Jess ran over to him. “The xenobium?”

“It has to be in the center pillar.” He took out the radiation meter and pointed it at the brick structure.

The reading was in the middle of the scale. He climbed to the second level of steps, and the reading increased.

“It’s up here on the pillar.” He removed the lead apron from his pack and draped it over his front, dangling from his neck. Even with it on, he didn’t want to remain there any longer than he had to.

He climbed the next step. The reading reached the top of the scale.

He looked at the pillar to see if he could spot the xenobium. Halfway up the pillar, the bricks were supplanted by a stack of twelve thin circular stone disks that partially supported the thick vertical wooden beams. The top disk was pierced at irregular intervals by slots that were the same diameter as the beams. The dry desert air had preserved the yard-long segments of lumber.