S
CORPIO.
S
AGITTARIUS.
C
APRICORN.
For several hours Conrad led Yeats across the dark city, following each celestial coordinate to its terrestrial counterpart, and then moving on from one astronomically aligned monument to another. Each temple, pavilion, or landmark would in itself be the archaeological prize of the ages, but time and the buzz of choppers and searchlights overhead kept them marching forward. Finally, the heavenly treasure trail ended at the terrestrial counterpart to the constellation Aquarius, a spectacular temple dedicated to the Water Bearer.
The Sphinx-like pavilion loomed like a skull against the heavens, its silvery waterfalls glistening in the moonlight. Beyond it lurked the dark, towering peak of P4.
“That’s it,” Conrad said as he handed the nightscope to Yeats. They were crouched along the banks of the city’s largest water channel, which flowed directly from the monument. “The Temple of the Water Bearer.”
Yeats took a look. “That’s not all you found. Look again.”
Conrad scanned the Temple of the Water Bearer and suddenly saw lights around the base and promontory. “Zawas?”
“Looks like he’s turned it into his base camp.”
Conrad lowered the nightscope. “How the hell did they know?”
Yeats shrugged. “Maybe Mother Earth is helping him.”
“Or maybe they have some sort of map.”
“Doubtful,” Yeats said. “You said yourself that the map is in the
stars.” Yeats paused. “Now you’re absolutely sure you need to get in there? Because it’s both our asses if Zawas catches us.”
Conrad nodded. “Only by standing in the right place at the right time will the Shining One pinpoint the location of the Shrine of the First Sun,” he said.
Yeats narrowed his eyes. “And where exactly are we supposed to consult this ‘Shining One’?”
Conrad hesitated to break the bad news. “I suspect it’s between the waterfalls at the Temple of the Water Bearer. In the middle of Zawas’s base.”
Yeats flipped his wrist and glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. “It’s already zero four hundred hours. Almost dawn. The sun is going to be coming up. We don’t have much time.”
Conrad spent the next half hour surveying the temple from a distance while Yeats drew up a plan.
“You’ll see the promontory on the east face is about a hundred and fifty feet high,” Yeats told him. “Two narrow stairways on either side go to the base of the falls. Because of that, I doubt Zawas posts more than one guard at the bottom of each flight of steps. That and the fact he needs as many warm bodies as possible looking for the Shrine of the First Sun.”
Conrad scanned the east face down the falls to the ground. Suddenly the sentries at the north end of the east face came into sharp focus. So did an inflatable attack boat moored beneath the falls. The upturned bow and stern cones told him it was a Zodiac Futura Commando, a favorite of special forces around the world.
“I see the guards,” he said. “They’ve got a Zodiac inflatable tied up.”
“Just one?”
“The others are probably patrolling the waterways, looking for us.”
“Let me see.” Yeats took the nightscope. “Zawas rotates his guards every three hours. At least that’s the way he used to do things during U.N. peacekeeping jobs. This shift looks about done by the body language.” Yeats handed the nightscope back to Conrad. “So we simply relieve the present shift a few minutes early. Then, after I make sure you’re covered, we split.”
“And just how do we do that?”
Yeats flicked on an old cigarette lighter to illuminate the drawing he had made in the dark.
“You find this so-called Shining One who’s going to lead us to the Shrine of the First Sun,” Yeats said, tracing a line toward the promontory with his finger. “I’ll go to the summit where Zawas keeps his choppers and secure one for the getaway. You’ll have six minutes to get from the promontory to the summit. Then we fly away.”
“Just like that?” Conrad said.
“Just like that,” Yeats said. “I’ll rig the other choppers to blow so Zawas can’t tail us in the air. It will buy us the time we need to beat him to the shrine.”
Conrad stared at the lighter Yeats was using to illuminate his drawing. It was an old Zippo with a NASA emblem and an engraving to Yeats from Captain Rick Conrad, one of the crew who died in Antarctica in 1969 and the man Conrad was told was his biological father. That was back in the days when astronauts smoked. He had often snuck into Yeats’s study to play with it. Once he almost burned down the house. He had hoped Yeats would finally figure out how badly he wanted something of his father’s and just give the damn thing to him. But Yeats never did.
“I thought you quit smoking.”
“I never quit anything in my life, son.” Yeats flicked off the lighter and gave it to Conrad.
Surprised, Conrad felt the old, familiar weight of the Zippo in his hand for a moment and then flicked it on and off.
“What about Serena?” Conrad asked. “What about the obelisk?”
“If Zawas finds either one missing before you find the location of the Shrine of the First Sun, he’ll be on to us and our mission is over,” Yeats said. “And after we take off without the obelisk or the sister, he’ll figure we failed. By the time he figures out we got what we really wanted, we’ll already be inside the Shrine of the First Sun, have taken what we needed, and set a trap for him. Zawas will then bring us both the obelisk and Serena.”
“If he doesn’t kill her first.”
“Will you listen to me for once,” Yeats said angrily. “She’s the one who’s going to lead him to us. Trust me, Zawas is counting on her. He’s not going to kill her until she’s lost her usefulness.”
“That’s reassuring.” Conrad offered the lighter back to Yeats, but to his amazement Yeats refused. “Let’s go.”
There were lights up above, the roar of churning water drifting from the falls all around. As he turned the final corner, Conrad could see the black cutout of a sentry at the base of the steps, and beyond him the Zodiac attack boat bobbing in the water. The Egyptian was smoking a cigarette. Conrad was about to step forward when his boot scraped the stone.
The sentry spun around. “Yasser?”
Conrad nodded and tapped his watch.
The sentry spat out a rebuke in Arabic and turned and left.
Conrad watched him march up the steps and took a quick look around. It would only be a few minutes before the sentry went back and found the real Yasser. Satisfied nobody was near, Conrad ascended the stone steps to the promontory.
The steps were narrow and water-slicked from the falls, but he reached the top quickly. Stepping onto the promontory, Conrad looked across to see another figure walk toward him.
“Yeats, is that you?” he whispered into his radio.
“I’m making a circle with my hand,” Yeats said.
Conrad could barely hear him over the roar of the falls. But he could see the figure on the other side making a circle. “OK,” Conrad said.
“Get to work,” Yeats said. “And no matter what happens, stick to the plan and rendezvous in six minutes.” Then he disappeared into the darkness.
Conrad walked up to the edge of the promontory between the falls and positioned himself. The tremendous vibrations of the falls rumbled beneath his feet, and he had to steady himself.
He gazed out and found what he was looking for. There, in the predawn of the spring equinox, the constellation of Aquarius was rising in the east. It was a perfect lock with the monument he was standing on. The Water Bearer on earth was staring at the Water Bearer in heaven. And the predawn sun—the Shining One—marked the spot.
He quickly pulled out the digital surveyor Yeats had packed for
him and made his calculations. From what he could make out, the Shrine of the First Sun was buried ninety degrees to the south. That placed the X directly under the river, at a depth he guessed to be about a thousand feet. He scanned the horizon with his digital camera to mark it.
Conrad looked again at the skies. The first stain of dawn was glimmering. Soon Aquarius would be fully risen, a water bearer in the sky with its jar resting on the horizon. At the same moment, the sun—marking the vernal point—would lie somewhere beneath the last star pouring out from the jar.
Conrad glanced at his watch. It was almost 5
A.M.
He had to move quickly, he thought, when he turned to see an Egyptian emerge from the temple and walk toward him.
“Why aren’t you at your post, Yasser?” he barked.
“Why aren’t you at yours?” Conrad grumbled back in passable Arabic. His Arabic was a jumble of odds and ends he had picked up over the years.
The man calmed down. “Taking a break,” he said, or at least that’s what Conrad thought he said. “These nuns, they do not break easily. They are trained to be martyrs. I have to be careful where I hurt this one. She can still be of use to me after she’s dead.”
Conrad noticed something in his hand. It was a fistful of hair. Serena’s hair. Conrad wanted to kill him then and there and rescue Serena. But he knew he couldn’t let the soldier see his face. So he simply laughed at his sick joke and turned around and looked ahead over the falls. Then he felt the barrel of an AK-47 digging into his back.
“So you’ve found the shrine, Doctor Yeats?”
He turned to him and looked into his smoldering eyes.
He smiled in triumph. “No need for the nun now,” he said. “Where is it?”
“Over there,” Conrad said, playing along. “See the constellation of Aquarius?”
He pointed with his left hand and the soldier couldn’t help but follow. In that instant Conrad’s right hand swept across his neck with the bone-handled knife he had lifted from the Russian back at P4 and had held in his sleeve. The blade left a thin red line.
He tried to call out but could only gurgle in shock as he staggered
back over the promontory edge and disappeared into darkness. Conrad watched the body take two bounces off the monument and splash into the river.
Conrad turned to find the steps leading to the upper promontory and the flight deck, where he was supposed to rendezvous with Yeats. But then another Egyptian emerged from inside the temple and started walking toward him, and Conrad froze. The way the man carried himself told Conrad it was Colonel Zawas. And this time, he knew, there would be no escape.
I
T WAS A FEW MINUTES
past five in the morning when Zawas stepped out of his chambers to have a smoke on the promontory and take another look at the blueprints of the Shrine of the First Sun he had obtained from Serena. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he only needed to know where to look.
Sucking on his unlit Havana under the stars, he noticed the skies were lightening. Soon the sun would be up and his window of opportunity to find the Shrine of the First Sun gone. He then saw one of his guards—it looked like Yasser—by one of the falls and walked over. Yasser stiffened to attention in the dim light as he approached.
“At ease, Lieutenant,” Zawas said, and Yasser relaxed. “We don’t see a sunrise like that often, do we?”
Yasser grumbled something that Zawas took to be a no. He realized most of his men were showing the effects of exhaustion and stress.
Zawas sighed and patted his pockets in search of some matches when Yasser’s hand came up with an old-fashioned Zippo lighter. Zawas touched the tip of his Cuban cigar to the flame and inhaled. It felt wonderful.
“Carry on,” Zawas said and walked back to his command quarters.
Halfway back, however, he realized there was something familiar about his hand-rolled cigar. No, it wasn’t the cigar. It was the old silver Zippo lighter Yasser flashed. It was just like the one his
grandfather had. Only Zawas wasn’t aware of Yasser or any of his other men possessing such an artifact. He would have to ask Yasser where he found it.
But when Zawas turned to find Yasser, the guard was missing from his post. Zawas swore softly to himself and walked back to the promontory. Peering over the ledge down the falls, he could see nothing. It was as if Yasser had disappeared into thin air. Could he have actually fallen? Yasser was no such fool.
Zawas grabbed his radio from his belt. “Jamil!” he barked. “Round up your men. Conrad is here!”
But Jamil wasn’t answering.
“Jamil,” Zawas repeated when he heard a blast behind him.
Debris rained down, and Zawas looked up to see flashes of light from the top of the step-pyramid. Suddenly the flaming shell of a Z-9A chopper came tumbling down the east face, steel scraping against stone in an ear-splitting scream. Zawas dove back inside as it crashed onto the promontory and exploded in a ball of fire.
“The scepter!” he cursed.
He ran inside to the chamber where the obelisk was kept under guard. But the two guards were on the floor, dead, and the scepter was gone.
Conrad hit the water at the base of the Temple of the Water Bearer with such force that he thought he died. But a minute later he surfaced for air with a gasp and realized his splash from space went unnoticed by the guards below, thanks to the roar of the falls.
He swam over through the dark to the Zodiac inflatable, cut it loose, climbed on board and hit the motor. By the time the guards saw what was happening and started shooting, he was a hundred yards down the channel and racing away.
He glanced back over his shoulder to see the distant explosions coming from the top of the Temple of the Water Bearer. He also saw a big shadow coming down on him fast—one of Zawas’s choppers. Its lights were out and it was flying low, practically on top of him, blocking out the stars. Conrad kicked the onboard motor into high gear but couldn’t shake it.
The chopper then moved overhead and passed him by, landing a few hundred yards ahead on the banks of the water channel. As Conrad neared the bank, he could see a figure waving him down.
It was Yeats. And in his hand was the Scepter of Osiris.
“How did you get here?” Conrad asked as he pulled up to the bank.
“Followed the gunfire,” Yeats said, stepping into the Zodiac. “You find the location of the shrine?”
Conrad looked in amazement at the helicopter. “Whatever happened to slipping in and out undetected?”
“I had to create a diversion and leave Zawas a clue at the same time.”
Conrad felt the familiar pang of betrayal from his childhood. “You took the scepter and left Serena behind?”
“I didn’t have much of a choice once I saw you and that goon, son,” Yeats said matter-of-factly, in clipped military speed. “I knew the plan was blown. I grabbed what I could and took off. Now did you find the shrine or not? Zawas is pissed as hell and coming after us.”
Conrad wiped a wet flop of hair from his forehead. “I found it. It’s just ahead.”
“That’s my boy,” Yeats said with an approving nod. “Let’s go.”
They followed the waterway into a tunnel. Conrad’s GPS marker took them to a small dark corridor that branched off the subterranean waterway. At the end of it was some kind of stone grating.
“That’s the door to the Shrine of the First Sun,” Conrad said. “It’s down there. About a thousand feet.”
They ditched the Zodiac, sending it on its way down the tunnel as a decoy.
Conrad watched the boat disappear into the dark and then checked his GPS watch. They were running out of time. It was almost 5:15
A.M.
, and the first faint hint of dawn was falling across the city above.
They dug out the grating to find a manhole-size shaft. They slid down into another labyrinth of subterranean corridors, going deeper and deeper into the earth. A half hour later they reached a long dark tunnel that ended in a blue light.
“That’s it,” Conrad said.
Yeats pulled out his flashlight. Its beam revealed a door. As soon as they passed under the blue light, the door slid open, and they stepped inside a dark cavern. This chamber felt like the largest they had stood in yet.
“I’m sending out a flare,” Yeats said. “Thirty-second delay.”
Conrad shielded his eyes as Yeats flung the little cylinder into the chamber. He counted down to two seconds when everything exploded with light. For an instant he saw the unbelievable spectacle of a towering obelisk much like the one from P4. Only this one was cradled in some fantastic cylinder and stood at least five hundred feet tall. And at its base was some sort of great rotunda that had to be its entrance.
All around them, the terraced slopes of the cylinder rose up until they merged into a domelike ceiling. And Conrad realized they stood only halfway down this cavity by the time the light went out.
“Incredible!” he said, his voice echoing loudly.
They descended the steps that spiraled alongside the interior of the cylinder to the bottom and stood at the base of the giant obelisk and looked up. He could see no more than twenty feet overhead, except the blinking of red lights around the cylinder—the remote switches to the C-4 bricks Yeats had set on the way down.
“What the hell are you doing?” Conrad said.
“Setting a trap for Zawas,” Yeats said.
“Who’s got Serena, remember?”
“Don’t worry, they’re not on timers. I’ve got the detonator right here.”
If that was supposed to comfort Conrad, it didn’t. But he was too engrossed with their discovery to be distracted by an argument he couldn’t win. Instead he followed Yeats through the rotunda to what appeared to be a doorway at the base of the giant obelisk.
Conrad wondered if it was even possible to enter at this point. Then he noticed a square shaft next to the door. It looked about the size of the base of the Scepter of Osiris.
“We might need the scepter to open this.”
“Here you go, son,” Yeats said, handing it over.
Conrad inserted the scepter into the square display and felt a
small vibration. The door opened, and they stepped inside the giant obelisk.
Zawas clenched his jaw as he surveyed the wreckage outside. He cursed the name of Conrad Yeats, a man whose face he’d never even seen but who had managed to steal the Scepter of Osiris from under his nose.
Zawas shook his head as he looked down the waterfall to the burned-out shell of the Z-9A jammed into the basin, breaking off into bits as the water carried it down the river. With the other one gone too, he now had only one bird left to fly.
Zawas followed a chunk of windshield as it floated down the canal out toward the horizon, where the first rays of dawn were breaking as the stars began to fade. Something about the pattern of those stars caught his eye. And then he jumped back as he found himself staring at the constellation of Aquarius. Suddenly everything about the map made sense.
He ran into his quarters and looked at the Sonchis map. He stared at the Temple of the Water Bearer, his present location. Then he looked at the “key” symbols in the corner—the constellations of Aquarius, Capricorn, and Sagittarius. He was sweating slightly as he picked up the Sonchis map with shaking hands and stared at it as if for the first time.
He then rushed over to Serena’s chamber and began to untie her.
“Things going awry, Zawas?”
“Au contraire,
Doctor Serghetti,” he said and pushed her outside to the promontory.
As they neared the ledge, she resisted, fearing he would throw her over. But instead he told her to follow the water canal with her eyes to the horizon with its first glint of dawn. And then she found herself staring face-to-face with the constellation of Aquarius.
“I’ve found the Shrine of the First Sun,” he told her, “and that means I’ve found Conrad Yeats.”