Read The Alignment Ingress Online
Authors: Thomas Greanias
The Alignment Ingress (3 page)
Hank opened his eyes and studied the picture on his screen. It was probably copied from some earlier stele through contact stamping. That meant the image on the papyrus or paper was reversed. Using that orientation, the painting revealed that the two flower clusters behind the Queen of Sheba represented locations in the Congo, which Hank believed to be her gold mines. The green ferns, then, represented an elaborate network of trails to transport the gold. And blue flowers represented falls, or headwaters of the Nile, where the gold would be placed on barges.
So the gold was transported up the Nile in small amounts where it was refined and processed. This was where Conrad’s theory about the location of her palace—and lost tomb—in Meroe came into play. Arab tradition did indeed corroborate modern-day Sudan as the site of her palace. It was entirely possible that her palace was in Meroe, or at least some royal outpost, and that from there the gold was refined and smuggled up the Nile in the form of bricks or jewelry. At last it escaped Egypt by boat or caravan and arrived at the tree, which symbolized Jerusalem—all under Pharaoh’s nose.
But it started somewhere in the Congo, Hank was sure.
His XM maps told him there was something there. And Afghanistan had taught him a deep secret about ancient XM finds: they had a funny habit of happening in places where there was also great mineral wealth. He didn’t know why. Maybe exotic matter affected minerals. Maybe it affected anything. It was just a theory. But this find could conclusively prove it.
A ping from his phone broke Hank’s trance. It was ADA, Niantic’s A.I. interface with a female voice.
Leaving so soon, Hank Johnson? Where are you going? When will you return?
Just then he noticed a reflection in his window as a passenger walked by, the young face looking down in the direction of his tablet. Hank looked up in time to catch the passenger’s backside before he slipped through the sliding glass doors into the next car of the train.
Rosier. So he’s the tail.
Hank liked the kid, but he was green and clumsy. Then again, ADA probably just wanted to remind him that she was watching and that Rosier was a warm body he could use in the field.
Hank smiled and replied to her text, informing her that he would return to Niantic in a couple of weeks, give or take a few days, and would have much to report.
Standard stuff, ADA. No worries.
By the time Hank’s plane from Zurich landed at the N’Djili International Airport in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he was a new man: Loud American Reality Star. “I am NOMAD!” was his mantra, and he wanted everybody to know it upon his arrival and to spread the word.
Nothing grants access like celebrity, he had learned long ago. Every step observed and accounted for. His cover was no cover. He was Hank Johnson, soon-to-be celebrity TV host. He had his film poster and the series’ pitch document to flash at customs. He had a column from Showbiz Buzz about his series going to pilot. Most of all, he had a crew—two Americans supplemented by locals, waiting for him at the terminal.
Hank had been around long enough to know that media, especially Hollywood media, opens doors around the world. Everybody likes to get close to the red carpet, even if it’s thousands of miles away. His stated pursuit of lost cities conjured romance in the heads of starstruck state officials who were already spending potential tourism dollars. High officials invited him to dinner. Bureaucrats were helpful, and Hank had a stack of greenbacks from his mixed bag of murky sources for any skids that needed further greasing.
Right now in the airport terminal he had to deal with the country’s new director of tourism, a slim and wide-eyed man by the name of Emmanuel Garamba. The bureaucrat looked excited as they reviewed arrival times for several cargo planes that would be hauling in “ancient ruins” directly from a warehouse in Los Angeles for the shoot in the jungle.
Hank could have had his military patron General Montgomery drop the sets in by chopper, but he wanted the show. He wanted the natives to see, and to know, that the production was a fake -- Hollywood magic.
“These props will enhance my great discovery in your country, Emmanuel,” he told Garamba.
A wide smile broke out on Garamba’s face as he nodded, clearly believing Hank’s “discovery” was a complete fraud and this was all a purely commercial transaction between his country and Hollywood. Glamour without the grunt politics of real archaeology, rare earth minerals and conflict threats.
“The DRC welcomes you and your team, Doctor Johnson, and offers you our full cooperation in your production.”
“The pleasure is ours,” Hank said, handing Garamba a thick envelope stuffed with American dollars. “Thank you for the permits. By the way, I’d love to get you on camera for a quick interview before we wrap.”
Garamba practically glowed, like in his head he was already handing out government jobs for wardrobe, hair and make-up to his relatives. “It will be my pleasure.”
“Great. Now here is where I’ll need those props delivered.” He handed Garamba a carefully marked map.
The smile dropped from Garamba’s face.
Hank hoped it was for all the right reasons. “Something wrong, my friend?”
“There is a reason locals have not exploited this area,” Garamba began. “And it is not because it is a disputed tribal region. There is an ancient legend about this particular part of the jungle. There are said to be monsters.”
“Monsters?” Hank smirked.
Garamba chose his words carefully, as if wanting to avoid any association with the uneducated class. “Locals don’t talk about it much. But they say that it is a place of ‘bad death.’ Medieval Muslims wrote of it as the haunt of the Jinn, and Christian missionaries have reported hearing tales of demons in the region. Local officials cannot confirm the tales of people going into this jungle and never coming out.”
The only fear Garamba betrayed was that he might have scared this rich American production away.
“I love it!” Hank assured him, slapping the man’s slight shoulder. “This will be perfect for the show.”
For where there be bogus monsters, Hank Johnson believed, there be real treasures too.
NIANTIC LINKS
Tycho poster #3 of 5 - Afghanistan
Activating Rosier-Internal Niantic Communication
Meroe, Sudan
T
he sands of time had erased any trace of the lost palace of the Queen of Sheba. But the stars above revealed an illuminated path for Conrad Yeats to follow in his open jeep across the desert of Sudan to the Nubian pyramids of Meroe.
Every now and then he’d glance up to check the location of the three “wise men”—the alpha stars Arcturus, Spica and Regulus—which formed a triangle framing the constellation Virgo. The “Virgin in the Sky” was a celestial map of the ancient pyramid fields on the ground, which Conrad believed were built to hide the even earlier ruins of the Queen of Sheba’s palace. And where there was once her palace, surely he’d find her tomb below, and inside her tomb the answers he had been searching for his whole life.
For all his achievements as a “post-modern” archaeologist in academia —Conrad believed that the information ancient ruins revealed about their builders was more valuable than the ruins themselves—he was still considered something of a smash-and-grab artist in the field.
This rap disturbed him. Especially as what he was about to do in Meroe would only confirm the worst suspicions about him.
He pulled off the road for a minute, stuffed his pack with the Glock pistol and C4 under his seat, and then drove on.
It was true he often went into a site alone, without a full field crew, to avoid drawing attention and to go for the kill in a single dig. That meant he wasn’t digging holes all over the world like the rest of them. Measure twice, dig once was his motto. So, in effect, he was preserving Planet Earth, if only environmentalists like Serena Serghetti would notice.
And, yes, it was true that once he had “smashed” a find and “grabbed” all its information, he split. He didn’t take artifacts with him, and he wasn’t concerned about “credit” for a find like the university suck-ups. He certainly wasn’t up for sticking around the ruins like they were shrines, or engaging in the endless, self-justifying work of cataloging his discovery for years afterward, publishing paper after paper for research dollars. Or, worst of all, condemning grad students to his digs like chain gangs to bolster his legend.
But what bothered him most was how the irony of it all was lost on his critics: They would have nothing to complain about without the archaeological treasures he left behind for them.
This area of the Nile valley known as Nubia was home to three Kushite kingdoms during antiquity, the last of which was centered in the “Island of Meroe.” It was debatable as to whether or not it actually was an island in the Nile at some point, or whether it appeared that way due to its unique position between the Nile and two other rivers. It had been a thriving city of 25,000 with a great Temple of Isis, a rich gold and iron trade with India and China, and enough wealth and power to rival its northern neighbor Egypt in the ancient world.
The real mystery was where the people of Meroe came from, and why they vanished from history.
Nobody knew.
All that remained of the once-great civilization were the 200-plus Nubian pyramids Conrad could now see rising along the east banks of the Nile like black heaps of rubble against the starry night.
The sandstone block pyramids were much smaller and more sharply angled than those built in Egypt 800 years earlier. Many stood at only half their height thanks to the notorious 19th-century Italian explorer Giuseppe Ferlini who smashed the tops off 40 of them in a quest to find treasure. Despite a haul of some notable jewelry from one of the queen pyramids, however, Ferlini discovered that the graves had already been plundered in ancient times and left to the elements.
Conrad had set off from Sudan’s capital of Khartoum as soon as his plane landed, not stopping to pick up a visitors permit for the pyramids from the Antiquities Service, but drove the whole day, the road following the railway line along the Nile, until he reached the town of Shendi, where he had turned off toward the pyramid fields.
Now at last he arrived at the gate with only his bogus ID from the German Archaeological Institute.
“Entrance fee,” he told the gatekeeper in German, flashing some euros.
The gatekeeper took the money and said, “No cafes, no toilets.”
Conrad nodded. The infrastructure was poor because tourists were in short supply here in Sudan compared to the big pyramids in Egypt. Visitors rarely topped 30 a day, if anyone bothered to show up at all.
Which was exactly what he was counting on tonight.
“I have my own food and drink, and plastic bags,” Conrad told him in Arabic with a made-up German accent.
“You should have the place to yourself,” the gatekeeper said and waved him through.
Congo
A
fter a few days of collecting crew and gear at the site, the City of Sheba set was almost finished. It looked just the way it was supposed to: convincing and interesting to the average viewer and absolutely bogus to the scholar and analyst. Hank Johnson had learned years before that the best way to conceal any truth was to make it appear fake. The ancients were masters of deceit.
Hank glanced over the script again in his trailer. It was exactly what he wanted. Pure reality show fare. The beginning was him presenting a theory. The middle was him “looking for the site”—drone shots mostly, along with some machete stuff through bushes. Some dark caves. A couple brushes with death. Shots of any weird creatures he’d found. Then, at the end of the first act, he would “discover” something. And no recaps. He hated the reality show recaps.
Hank stepped out of his trailer and onto the set and smiled.
Everything was in place. Now, to find the holy grail of adventure archaeology since H. Rider Haggard speculated on it in his novel
King Solomon’s Mines:
The legendary mines of the Queen of Sheba.
“We’re 500 miles from any other known stone structures of similar size and intricacy, yet there does not seem to be any evidence of a nearby civilization.”
As he spoke Hank looked into the lens of a Sony PDW 530 news broadcast video camera. His camera assistant Dow Scott posed in front of some overgrown, fiberglass “stone” ruins. The red light of the camera signaled they were recording.
“In short, somebody came out here in the middle of nowhere, built a wonder of the world and then vanished. Why? But before we get to that, let me tell you about how I found this, because it’s nearly as fascinating a story as the dig itself.”
Hank paused. He’d scripted out an entire section on how he’d used the top-secret equipment at CERN to reverse trace the dispersion pattern of an exotic matter eruption. In a process that is just as much art as science, or instinct as intellect, he had located ancient drifting XM clusters outside the solar system, but inside the range of spysats and other devices. It wasn’t, in and of itself, classified information, but it was certainly information gained through classified means and using secret technology in an unusual way.
Dow looked up from the camera. “Should I keep rolling?”
“Uh, fine.”
Now that he and the crew had arrived on site deep inside the jungle, it was only a matter of time before other parties showed up too—most of them probably armed and willing to slay any and all who got in their way to treasure. Something like 5 million people had already died over gold in the Congo, so a few more was so much spare change to militants and mercenaries. In the 19th century, he might have weeks on them. Here in the 21st century he had hours. That was why he had gone to such great lengths with this bogus TV charade to dupe the competition into thinking nothing was here.
