The Alignment Ingress (7 page)

Meroe

B
eneath the Nubian pyramids of Meroe, Conrad stared at Serena as a half-dozen armed militants poured into the antechamber behind her. From their rags and badges Conrad recognized them as local thugs. The jarring juxtaposition of the Catholic Church’s “It Girl” with Egyptian extremists gave him a start beyond the AK-47 machine guns.

“What’s a nice little Catholic girl doing in a place like this with these fanatics?” he deadpanned, but his heart skipped a beat and he didn’t know if it was from the AK-47s or his first sight of her in the flesh since South America.

“Trying to stop you from ruining the integrity of another archaeological site, Conrad Yeats.” Passion filled her soft brown eyes, but her hard Australian accent and use of his full name gave her voice an edge. “Look what you did to the relief on this wall you blew up! Gone forever! We’ll never know what was on it.”

She was pointing to the rubble on the floor, and it was indeed a jigsaw puzzle nobody could put back together, much like their relationship.

He looked up and saw a doorway beyond that wasn’t there before. How could he have missed it? It probably led to an adjoining annex chamber. But it didn’t explain how she got to that annex chamber in the first place. “Why do I have the feeling that you already know everything about this place?”

“Please,” she said with that dismissive air of the academic she employed whenever she wanted to put distance between them. “This tomb was already robbed centuries ago by workers building the adjacent pyramid. We came through the tunnel they dug from there to here. It was carefully blocked.”

Conrad called her bluff. “Who knew nuns made such great liars?”

“I’m not a nun, you wanker, I’m a sister,” she fumed, terrifying in her raging beauty. “There’s a difference.”

“Well, Sister, I think you’re protecting something.”

“Yes, I am,” Serena insisted. “I’m protecting this World Heritage Site on behalf of UNESCO, NCAM and the government of Sudan. Meroe bears a unique testimony to perhaps the greatest civilization of sub-Saharan Africa before it disappeared.”

“You should talk. It was the arrival of Christianity in the sixth century that expunged the Kushite civilization. I’m surprised these fanatics are helping you.”

“Helping me keep this tomb buried, Conrad. Modern extremists consider all that is ancient Egyptian to be pagan, pure evil. The last thing they want is for what’s down here to come back to Egypt.”

“What happens in Nubia stays in Nubia?” Conrad raised an eyebrow.

Serena sighed. “Something like that.”

“And what gives you the right to keep this buried from the world?” Conrad demanded.

“I’ve been to United Nations refugee camps all over Africa,” she told him, her voice suddenly soft. “More than five million souls have perished in the Congo alone over conflict metals. The last thing Sudan needs is some spectacular find to start more bloodshed.”

She was looking over his shoulder now, past the statue of Isis to whatever was beyond the wall.

He narrowed his eyes. “Who said anything about a spectacular find? You said nothing was left to find down here.”

She reached toward him and grasped the medallion around his neck. “Do you even know what this says? Who it really belonged to? There’s some bad stuff here.”

“Like you know,” he scoffed, secretly baiting her. If anybody knew it, it would be the Vatican’s top linguist.

“It says Adwa of Asaba.”

“Translation, please?”

“Ada the queen of Sheba,” Serena told him.

“Her name is Ada?”

“Yes, Ada,” she repeated and yanked the Isis amulet from his neck, its gold chain snapping off.

“Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap,” Conrad said as he watched her pocket the medallion. “So that’s the way the Dei does it.”

“I’m not part of Dominium Dei.” She actually looked hurt at the very suggestion. “And I’m most definitely not cheap.”

Conrad lunged for the medallion only to be confronted by the staccato bolt clacks of six AK-47 barrels in his face.

“No, you’re not.” He slowly tossed his pack into the far corner and held up his hands to show he was unarmed. “I suppose you’ll add that trinket to the Vatican’s vast collection amassed over centuries of crusades.”

He glanced at the Muslim militants and back at Serena.

“Crusades,” he repeated.

Serena smiled. “It’s not working, Conrad.”

“We'll see about that, Sister,” he shot back as the timer in his pack against the far wall went off, exploding what was left of his C4 and bringing down part of the ceiling.

Conrad used the diversion to shove one militant into another and grabbed the latter’s AK-47 to ram a third militant in the neck. The gun sprayed a burst of bullets across the chamber, raining down debris and causing chaos.

When Conrad blinked his eyes open, Serena was gone—out the annex escape. He turned and bolted back into the long entrance passageway from whence he had come. He could hear loud cracks behind him and saw sparks as bullets ricocheted off the stone relief of bound mutants being marched into an abyss.

See ya, guys.

He emerged outside under the stars in the pyramid fields and chased after Serena. She had kicked off her sandals and was sprinting barefoot like a cheetah toward two military choppers near the quarries. His boots, meanwhile, kept catching on the iron slags in the sand, slowing him down. Either she could walk on water—or a bed of nails—or she was shredding her soles on the rocks as she ran.

He could hear the rotors of one of the choppers whirring as he approached. By the time he reached the choppers, he saw two pilots on the ground, a trail of blood from Serena’s feet and one chopper lifting up with a roar.

A pillar of blinding light fell on him from the sky, a tornado of wind kicking up rocks and dust around him. Conrad covered his face.

A moment later he was alone in the dark, looking up at Serena’s chopper as it floated away against the constellation Virgo. With rage and resentment, he realized she had stolen more from him than some medallion. She had stolen his heart. Again.

There was a shout, and he looked back to see the angry militants bearing down on him. Their apparent leader, still nursing a swollen jaw where Conrad had struck him with the AK-47, cracked his own across Conrad’s skull, and the last thing Conrad saw was a flash of light before he blacked out.

Congo

T
hat night Hank moved stealthily through the eerily quiet jungle. Something must have spooked the animals. Maybe they had sensed alpha predators and had taken off. Suddenly he felt “the tingle” and came to an abrupt stop. The portal was close. He hoped his guardian was too. If it was a guardian.

Operating more on instinct than knowledge, Hank pulled out his Ingress scanner. That’s how he was told to refer to it, despite the fact that it looked just like a Nexus 4 smartphone. The Ingress app popped up on the screen. The app was the same one that every Ingress player downloaded from the Google Play store. But this one was modified with a few extra Lynton-Wolfe “custom buffs” that Hank wasn’t enthusiastic about trying out given what had happened at Niantic. Things hadn’t gone so well with the power cube during Lynton-Wolfe’s test at CERN.

He hoped he had enough XM to get everything done. He hadn’t harvested XM since he was at CERN. His battery was good though.

The app opened. He heard ADA’s recorded voice and realized that she was going to know exactly where he was, because the portal was going to show up on the Ingress dashboard.

For that matter, the whole world was going to know about it.

The field was updating on his screen when he caught something out of the corner of his eye. A hunter drone, homing in on him. It wasn’t his. Had to be from Strategic Explorations.

He jumped as it fired.

A winged dart shot through the air and shattered the branch in front of him. If the wind were blowing the other way, the dart would have hit him. The drone hovered in the air, and Hank could see the camera rotate in its gimbal to retarget him.

It can’t miss now
.

Then
bam!
It exploded into a cloud of shrapnel and plastic. Rosier’s drone blew through the debris.

“Good job, Rosier,” Hank said into his headset.

“Yeah, they’ve got some pretty neat stuff,” Rosier’s voice replied.

Until now, Strategic Explorations was only a theoretical presence. Now their remote tech had reached deep into the jungle and nearly stabbed Hank. He also knew another thing: their drone tech was on par with his. And where there were drones, there would soon be troops. Faceless, nameless mercs led by Antoine Smith. Wouldn’t surprise Hank if he knew some of them, but he could expect no special regard. He’d just be another heat signature in an infrared scope to them.

He considered his options. There was no hope for reinforcements from Montgomery. He couldn’t stand and fight with only three men. So the decision was either withdraw now or resonate the portal and then withdraw. The latter was the more dangerous option, and the former wasn’t an option. Hank was going deep in.

This was as good a night for dying as any.

“It’ll be slow going to the site,” he radioed Rosier, who was probably just as nervous back inside the trailer. “If I go down, do not attempt a rescue. Evac immediately. Assume they are aware of your position.”

Rosier’s voice said, “Copy that.”

“Cover me,” Hank said with grim resolve. “I’m going in.”

Egypt

A
douse of acrid liquid from an urn brought Conrad back from the dead. He blinked his wet eyes open. He was inside a dark cellar, battered and bruised and sore all over. A shaft of moonlight filtered through the iron grill of a round window onto the black and white tiles of the floor. He was sitting in a wrought-iron chair, his feet clapped in leg irons and his hands in chains. He could stand up if he wanted to, but he wouldn’t get far.

“Welcome to the afterlife, Doctor Yeats,” said a voice with a thick Egyptian accent.

Conrad looked up to see a stranger in an Egyptian military uniform tower over him, his hands on his two pearl-handled Colt six-shooters. But there was something familiar about his voice.

“Where am I?” he demanded.

“Outside Cairo,” the Egyptian said. “My family villa. We’ve had the land since the 25th Dynasty, long before the wheelbarrow taught your ancestors how to stand on their hind legs.”

Conrad looked around the cellar. Behind the officer stood two soldiers. They were leaning against the stark white wall. He wondered how long he had been in this place, and why the proverbial U.S. Marines hadn’t arrived yet. A remote server was programmed to emit a distress call if his phone failed to sync every four hours, and it had certainly been more than four hours from the time of his capture in Meroe.

The officer seemed to read his mind. “Your phone, by the way, is on its way to Timbuktu at this moment, Yeats. Unfortunately, you won’t be there to be rescued.”

Well, that explained that. “How did I get here?”

“The Egyptian army has had close ties with the Sudanese for decades, centuries really,” the officer told him. “I’ve trained many of them, just like your father the American general trained my generation of officers under a special program years ago.”

“My father?” Conrad repeated, confused.

“Yes, he wants you back in Washington. It’s funny, you know. The CIA often used this cellar for tortures and renditions. Now tell me, what has my pathetic, weak brother put you up to in Nubia?”

Suddenly Conrad got it. He was looking at Abdil Zawas’s even more ruthless brother, Colonel Ali Zawas of Egypt’s elite Republican Guard.

Why can’t I get away from these people?

“You’re the one with the special friends in Nubia, Zawas,” he said, trying to work his situation out in his head. “You mean to tell me they found nothing in the tomb?”

“Only a tale about a medallion that you found and that the Vatican’s Sister Serghetti took off with—along with one of my choppers.” Zawas talked like he actually admired her. “I swear that pretty little desert flower is one of the Dei.”

“The Dei?” Conrad asked, playing dumb. Maybe Zawas knew something he didn’t know.

“Dominium Dei—the Rule of God,” Zawas stated, as if he couldn’t imagine the great Conrad Yeats had not heard of it. “A centuries-old order from Roman times. They know more about Egypt and the Ancient Mysteries than we do. They have been hiding everything from us, keeping us in the dark, laughing at us. And now they possess the very necklace worn by the Queen of Sheba herself.”

She lied to me!

“You’re sure there was absolutely nothing else in the tomb?” he pressed. “Nothing in the burial or treasury chambers?”

“Only this, Doctor Yeats.” Zawas held up the decapitated head of the statue of Isis. “What good is this to me except to break over your skull? Will that help your memory?”

Conrad braced himself as the bust came down and a shockwave of pain exploded through his head. He saw pieces of something on the tile and was sure it was his head. But apparently his skull hadn’t cracked, because Zawas looked disappointed and tossed the head of Isis back to one of his minions.

Conrad groaned in pain. His head was pulsing.

Zawas leaned over. “The least you can do is tell me what my brother has done with my money.”

“Blown it all on booze and babes,” Conrad said. “You know Abdil.”

Zawas drew one of his Colts and pistol-whipped the pearl butt across Conrad’s face. “Tell me what I don’t know, Yeats!”

Conrad spat out blood. “He says you’re still honked off that he absconded with the family fortune to Switzerland before the Arab Spring. He’s sorry that you and your comrades here have to serve the government of the Islamic Brotherhood. But it’s your own fault because you’re a loser and deserve it.”

“The mullahs won’t last for long. Mark my words. The pharaohs will return to Egypt. We will make Egypt great again.”

“Tell me when they do, Zawas, because I don’t see any here.”

Zawas smiled. “I was warned about you, Conrad Yeats. You make everything a joke.”