“Don’t you see?” he asked. “This ground is too soft for the landing of wheeled aircraft.” He smiled at her in triumph. “So much for your fantasies of ancient astronauts.”
He should have known his simple, scientific test wouldn’t go over well with her. Her eyes turned into steely blue slits of rage. He had seen the transformation before. That’s how she got to where she was in TV, that and her father’s money.
“The show needs you, Conrad,” she said. “You think differently than others. And you’ve got credentials. Or had them anyway. You’re a twenty-first-century astro-archaeologist, or whatever the hell you are. Don’t piss it away. I want to keep you on. But I’m under pressure to deliver ratings. So if you don’t play ball, I’ll get some toothy celebrity who plays an archaeologist on TV to take your place.”
“Meaning?”
“Give the freaks who are watching what they want.”
“Ancient astronauts?”
A serene smile broke across her baby face as she adopted a fawning, adoring gaze. He groaned inwardly.
“Professor Yeats,” she gushed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him on the mouth.
Unable to extract himself, or come up for air, he kissed her back contemptuously, feeling her body respond to his own self-hatred. Obviously what the French dramatist Moliere said about playwrights applied to archaeologists as well. He was the prostitute here. He started out doing it for himself, then for a few friends and universities. Hell, he might as well get paid for it.
Suddenly the wind picked up and Mercedes’s ponytail slapped him across the face. A gleaming metallic object hovered in the sky. He shaded his eyes and recognized the shape of a Black Hawk military chopper fitted with side-mounted machine guns.
Mercedes followed his gaze and frowned. “What is it?”
“Trouble.”
Conrad reached behind her and pulled out a Glock 9 mm automatic pistol from her backpack. Mercedes’s eyes grew wide. “You sent me through customs with that?”
“Nah, I bought it in Lima the other day.” He pulled out a loaded clip from his belt pack and rammed it into the butt of the pistol. He tucked the gun behind his belt. “I’ll do the talking.”
Mercedes, speechless, nodded.
The chopper descended, the wind from its blades kicking up red dust as it touched down. The door slid open, and six U.S. Special Forces soldiers in field uniforms stepped down onto the summit and secured the area before a lanky young officer in a blue USAF flight suit clanked down the metal steps to the ground and walked up to Conrad.
“Doctor Yeats?” the officer said.
Conrad looked him over. He appeared to be about his own age, a slim, easygoing man Conrad had seen somewhere before. He wore a single black leather glove on his left hand. “Who wants to know?”
“NASA, sir. I’m Commander Lundstrom. I work for your father, General Yeats.”
Conrad stiffened. “What does he want?”
“The general needs your opinion on a matter of vital interest to the national security.”
“I’m sure he does, Commander, but the national interest and my own are two different things.”
“Not this time, Doctor Yeats. I understand you’re persona non grata at the University of Arizona. And in case you hadn’t noticed, an armed goon squad is climbing up that cliff. You can come with me, or you could spend a few weeks in a Peruvian jail cell.”
“So you’re saying I can either see my father or go to jail? I’ll have to think about it.”
“Think about this,” Lundstrom said. “Your little friend there might not want to bail you out of jail when she discovers you’ve been using her to smuggle a stolen Egyptian artifact into the country so you can pawn it off to a wanted South American drug lord.”
“Another lie coming out of Luxor. Where did I allegedly find this artifact?”
“The Egyptians say you looted it from the National Museum of Baghdad when the city fell to invading American forces during the Iraq war. They got the Iraqis to confirm it. At least that’s what they’re telling the Peruvians, Bolivians, and anybody else who will listen.”
Conrad tried to muffle his rage at the Egyptians even as he calculated the chances of Mercedes letting him rot in prison. He concluded she’d probably let the guards have a few whacks at him before bailing him out.
“Very nice,” Conrad told Lundstrom. “But all the same, I’m going to have to pass up this wonderful opportunity.” Conrad offered his hand to wish Lundstrom a hearty good-bye.
But the commander didn’t budge. “There’s more, Doctor Yeats,” he said. “We’ve found what you’ve spent your whole life looking for.”
Conrad looked him in the eye. “My biological parents?”
“Next best thing. You’ll be briefed when we get there.”
“ ‘There’ almost got me killed last time, Commander. Look, why don’t you find somebody else?”
“We tried.” Lundstrom paused, letting the reality sink in that Conrad wasn’t at the top of anybody’s list these days. “But if her disappearance is any indication, it appears that Dr. Serghetti has already been retained by another organization to investigate this matter.”
“Serena?”
Lundstrom nodded.
Conrad’s mind raced through a number of scenarios, all of them entirely unpleasant and utterly thrilling at the same time. Just hearing her name made him come alive. And the thought that he and Serena and his father and the distinct worlds each of them inhabited would for the first time collide made him wonder if the space-time continuum could handle it or if the universe itself would explode.
“This isn’t going to end well, Commander, is it?”
“Probably not. But General Yeats is waiting.”
“Give me a minute.”
Conrad turned and walked back to Mercedes, who had been watching the exchange with a furrowed brow, and kissed her. “I’m sorry, baby. But I’m going to have to go.”
“Go?” she said. “Go where?”
“To visit a real ancient astronaut.”
Conrad reached into her pack again and took out a gold Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian statuette of Ramses II, who was pharaoh during the alleged Exodus. He had found it in the slave city, and it was the one thing left in his life that proved he wasn’t insane. He gave it to Mercedes.
“Now you never knew where this came from, just in case the nice gentlemen coming over the ledge ask you when they escort you back to Lima.”
Mercedes’s mouth dropped as Conrad and Lundstrom climbed into the Black Hawk. The door shut and the military chopper lifted up and away.
Conrad looked down at the shrinking plateau. By the time he remembered to wave good-bye to Mercedes, the militia men had reached the summit and the chopper was over the side of a mountain.
Conrad turned to Lundstrom. “So what on earth does my father want with me?”
“It’s where on earth,” said Lundstrom, throwing him a white polar “freezer” suit. “Catch.”
3
Dr. Serena Serghetti skimmed across the emerald rice fields at two hundred feet, careful to keep the chopper steady. The sun had burst through the dark clouds, but thunder rumbled across the lush mountainside, and rain threatened.
She was nearing the town of Lhokseumawe in the war-torn corner of Indonesia that used to be known as the
