The Secret of the Stones (21 page)

“Yeah,”
Sean said without a smile.
 
He
holstered his gun back inside his jacket.

Allyson
stood calmly, looking down the mountainside at the wreckage.
 

Joe
was still very confused.
 
“I think
you have some explainin’ to do, young lady.”

Sean
turned and looked at her as well, “Yeah,” he agreed, “exactly who are you
working for?”

“I
work for the same agency you used to work for, Sean,” her demeanor had changed
dramatically from vulnerable to stalwart.

“You
work for Axis?”
 
Sean was
skeptical, one eyebrow raised.

“Yeah.
 
Sorry I had to lie to you.
 
It was necessary.”

“I’m
used to women lying to me,” he replied sarcastically.

“I
was just following orders.
 
They
gave me permission to fill you in if and when necessary.”
 

“I
had those two handled,” Sean motioned to what was left of the sedan in the
ravine below.

She
smiled and cocked her head to the side, “Just thought you could use a little
help.
 
No need to thank me.”

He
snorted a few laughs and shook his head.
 
“Wow.
 
It’s like that, huh?”

“I
don’t mean to interrupt,” Joe cut into the interaction between them, “but we
should probably get out of here.”

The
two acknowledged his assessment and headed back toward the car.
 
Joe looked back one last time at the
gaping hole where the gray metal barrier had stood.
 
Then he got in the cab and revved the engine to life.

Sean
closed the back door then asked, “So is your real name Allyson Webster?”

She
looked back at him playfully with a wicked grin, “Maybe.”

Chapter
33

Blue
Ridge Mountains

Normally,
Tommy didn’t sleep well in cars.
 
In fact, traveling in airplanes, buses, and even the occasional train
made it difficult for him to get any kind of real rest.
 
For the last hour, however, he’d slept
like a log in the back seat of the Hummer.
 
Unfortunately, the nap was over.

“Wake
up, we’re here.”
 
The accented
voice startled Tommy.

During
the duration of his unconsciousness, he’d hoped that the man called Ulrich had
just been a figment of some nightmare.
 
With waking came the realization that he wasn’t.
 
“Where is ‘here?’”
 
He asked still half-asleep.

“Track
Rock,” Ulrich reminded him from the front passenger’s seat.
 
Apparently, the guy running the show
preferred to be driven when possible.
 
Or maybe he just wanted to keep an eye on the prisoner, not fully
trusting the guard in the back with Tommy.

“Oh,
yeah.
 
Right,” he feigned forgetfulness.
 
“So, is there a Waffle House around
here?
 
I could use some scattered,
smothered, and covered hash browns right about now.”

The
response he got was a cereal bar hitting him in the chest from the front of the
vehicle.
 

“Thanks,”
Tommy replied sarcastically with an upward nod.

Outside
the truck, the sun was bright in the early morning sky, coming up over the
mountains.
 
He was glad the windows
were at least tinted.
 

The
hired gun driving the SUV pulled into a parking spot near an open field that
led uphill and into a forest that stretched another thousand feet higher.
 

Ulrich
spoke up again as he opened the back door, “Move.”

Tommy
opened his own door, stepping into a vastly different world than he’d left in
the city.
 
All around them, the hills
of the Blue Ridge Mountains were patched with the vibrant colors of
Autumn.
 
No other cars were in the
parking lot at this time of day, save for the white and green truck of whatever
ranger was on duty.
 
A light breeze
brushed over the group making the air cooler than normal.
 
The elevation also dropped the
temperature several degrees.
 
Tommy
was glad he had put on his jacket the morning he’d been kidnapped.
 

A
solitary cloud wisped through the sky high above them as the entourage walked
from the parking area through the grass.
 
Short Guard was carrying a black book bag on one shoulder.
 
“What’s with the bag?”
 
Tommy asked.

The
stocky man in the black trench coat did not answer.
 
He just kept walking with his eyes focused forward.

Up
ahead, perhaps only a hundred feet from the parking lot, four large cages sat
at the trailhead of the woods.
 
The
iron bars had been fastened around the rocks to keep graffiti artists and
vandals from disturbing the integrity of the site.
 

Tommy
thought back to the research from the night before and shook his head,
realizing that the number four appeared again with these four boulders.
 
Apparently the number four had
something to do with the solution.
 
Maybe it was a coincidence.
 
There was no way to know for sure at that moment.
 
He just hoped there was something to
find at that site, anything.
 
If he
was wrong about the boulders having an answer to the riddle, there was little
doubt what these killers would do.
 

As
the small group arrived at the cluster of caged stones, Ulrich said something
in Russian to the guy with the backpack who nodded and set the bag down at
Tommy’s feet.
 
He turned and
skulked his way back toward the car, head down.

“Where’s
he going?”
 
Tommy asked, curiously.

“To
watch the car,” the answer was short.
 
“Now tell me, Thomas, how are these stones going to show us anything?”

That
was a question that had puzzled historians and tourists alike for
centuries.
   
What their
eyes stared at was like nothing else they had ever seen in any history book.
 
Every boulder had snakelike lines drawn
on them.
 
Along with the linear
designs were circles and ovals in what looked like random placement all over
the soft soapstone surfaces.
 
There
were also different types of animal tracks and even human feet drawn on the rocks
in between the other designs.

The
native Cherokee had called it “Degayelunha” meaning “painted place.”
 
Amazingly, the mysterious Petra glyphs
had resisted translation for thousands of years.
   

Tommy
took it all in.
 
He’d been here about
a year ago before.
 
The view from
the top of the mountain top was absolutely breathtaking.
 
A visitor’s center was open there from
Memorial Day until October.
 
With a
summit elevation of 4,784 above sea level, it became one of the colder spots in
the Southeast during winter.
 

When
he’d first heard the idea that ancient Indians had drawn constellations and
meteoric occurrences on the hefty rocks, he’d been skeptical.
 
Surely, a primitive people like the
original Native Americans were unable to document such an elaborate celestial
map.
 
Yet, when Schultz arrived on
site during his previous visit, his mind had changed.
 

He
had spent hours scouring over the detail of the drawings, analyzing them and
taking photographs.
 
After
returning to his office in Atlanta, he spent days trying to compare the site to
other ancient carvings and paintings all over the world.
 
Nothing could be found that was even
remotely similar.
 

Of
course, Tommy had intended to return to the location to study the stones
further.
 
He’d even hoped that
there was a link between the area and his ongoing search for the lost
chambers.
 
Caught up in a whirlwind
of other discoveries that took precedence, he’d been unable to come back.
 
Now, he stood on the ancient site
again, wondering what it all meant and how everything connected.
 

“Do
you have a camera?”
 
He finally
asked, shaking loose his thoughts.

Ulrich
nodded toward the black bag that was sitting at Schultz’s feet.
 
“Everything you need is in there.”

Tommy
acknowledged the answer by squatting down and unzipping the backpack.
 
Inside, he found a small digital
camera, a notepad, and a laptop with an internet card lying next to it.
 
“Wow, were you guys boy scouts?”
 

Both
the guard and Ulrich gave him puzzled look, apparently not appreciating the
sarcasm.
 

“Never
mind,” he mumbled back.
 

Tommy
grabbed the camera and fiddled with a few of the buttons to get the settings
the way he wanted them.
 
Ten
minutes later he was finishing up taking pictures of the last boulder.
 
Ulrich and the remaining guard had
walked around the area with him keeping a careful eye on his every move.
 
At one point, the Jens had asked, “Why
do you need so many pictures?”

Tommy
sighed.
 
“Are you going to let me
do what I do or not?”

He
replied by moving his jacket to the side to expose the pistol underneath.
 

Uninspired,
he continued speaking at his two captors, “Look, hundreds of experts over
thousands of years haven’t been able to figure out what these glyphs mean from
looking at them.
 
How will I do it
with just a few pictures?
 
We have
a much better chance of succeeding if we use technology to our advantage.
 
Taking shots from every possible angle
should help.”

Ulrich
let his jacket fall back to where it had been covering the gun, apparently
satisfied with the response.

“Did
you guys happen to bring a USB line for this camera?”
 
They’d thought of everything else up until this point.

“It’s
in the bag,” the guard said, speaking for the first time since leaving the
mansion.

With
that, Tommy moved quickly back over to where he’d left the backpack on the
ground.
 
First, he took the laptop
out and laid it on top of the nearest stone with a flat area. He then dug
around in the inner pockets of the bag until he found the cord he was looking
for. A few minutes later he was busy transferring the photographs over to the
computer.

“Now
what are you doing?”
 
Ulrich
demanded as he watched over Schultz’s shoulder.

Tommy
answered directly, “I am putting all of these pictures on one screen.
 
If I can look at them all at once,
maybe I can make more sense of the entire layout than if we just look at them
individually.”

“Do
it.”
 
Ulrich approved.

Nodding,
Tommy finished setting up the pictures so he could see all of them on the
screen.
 
“This may take a while,”
he remarked while giving them an annoyed glance.
 
Then he started shuffling the pictures around with the
mouse.

Doubt
crept into his mind, as he meticulously scanned the drawings on the
screen.
 
What if they were in the
wrong place?
 
It was entirely
possible that the glyphs on the boulders were not drawings of constellations at
all.
 
No, this had to be the
place.
 
There was nowhere else that
would fit the clue’s description.
 

Minutes
went by with zero recognition of anything even vaguely familiar.
 
Tommy was about to go back over to the
steel cages for another look when something on the screen finally caught his
eye.
 
His pause caught the
attention of his watchers.
 

“What
is it?”
 
Ulrich prodded.

“Give
me a second,” he answered, maneuvering a few more pictures around.
 
Then, “Wow.
 
Now, that’s interesting.”

“What?”
 
Ulrich was impatient.
 
“What do you see?”

“I
really don’t understand how so many people could have missed this before,
including myself.
 
I suppose it was
because of randomness of the patterns.”

“Missed
what?” The blonde man was beginning to remind Sean of a five-year-old.

“Okay,”
Tommy began, “the Cherokee nation was built on a political system similar to
what we have today.
 
Their leaders
became the heads of the tribe and nation a little differently, but they ran
their tribal council much like a parliament or a congressional meeting.”
 

The
blank looks from his audience told Schultz they were not sure what this had to
do with anything, so he sped up his explanation.
 
“However, there were some major differences.
 
In ancient Egypt, and several other
cultures, even today, the people of the country were/are divided up into a
caste system.
 
Groups like rich and
poor, priests and governors, royalty and peasants.”
 
Their eyes were still narrowly watching while he talked.
 
“Essentially, the Cherokee in this area
adopted the same system, most likely because they were from Egypt themselves!”

“So,
what does any of this have to do with what we are looking for?”
 

“Everything!”
 
Tommy was brimming with
excitement.
 
“The animal, bird, and
human tracks on these rocks represent the different casts in all the clans of
the Cherokee Nation.
 
It’s pretty
friggin’ cool.”

“I
still don’t understand what all of this means,” Ulrich was growing more
impatient as the minutes went on.

Sighing,
Tommy pointed at the screen again.
 
“It’s so simple.
 
Look
here.
 
The key to the whole thing
is finding the middle first, which is the opposite of the normal way to put a
puzzle together.”

“So
what is the middle?”
 
Jens asked.

“It’s
right here.”
 
The image his finger
touched on was a drawing that looked like a double circle or a circle within a
circle.