“Here we see someone discovering a circular object in the aftermath of the explosion. They carry it back to their people as a treasure. Oh, my goodness. Are those dead bodies?”
The next drawing showed a landscape scattered with what appeared to be corpses. The circle seemed to be sending out beams to each of them, striking them down.
“Whatever they found must have been deadly,” Tyler said. If the culprit was a large chunk of xenobium, the intense gamma rays emitted from it would cause anyone in close contact to become sick within days from radiation poisoning.
Fay lowered her camera and squinted at the next drawing for several minutes. Kneeling human figures sat before what appeared to be an altar with the circular object resting upon it. “Here it looks as if they’re offering the object as some kind of sacrifice. Perhaps they hoped the gods would come to retrieve it and relieve them of their burden.”
“They could have just thrown it away,” Jess said.
“They wouldn’t if they considered it the property of the gods. They would want to safeguard it in case the gods ever returned to claim it. I think that’s what the next etching describes.”
The next image showed the object being encased inside a pyramid. A line led straight from the top of the pyramid up to the ceiling where it intersected with the human figure.
Fay looked up at the ceiling. “They’re recording the event that led to the drawing of the Nazca lines.”
Jess followed her gaze. “My God, it’s a code.”
“A code?” Tyler said.
“They wanted the gods to come and get their treasure back, but since the Nazca took it from its original location — the Mandala — they thought they needed to provide instructions to the gods about where it was hidden.”
“And what better code for the gods to follow than the constellations,” Fay said.
Now Tyler understood why the Nazca lines had to be so large. They were a message to the heavens, and the Nazca people made sure no person on Earth at the time would have been able to decipher the code.
THIRTY-FOUR
They should have had Colchev’s men cornered, but an errant tire squeal blew an easy outcome.
As soon as Grant had shown Morgan the red crosshairs descending toward the first floor, he bolted out of the room with her close on her heels, shouting instructions to the Australian police into her phone.
They charged down the stairs expecting to intercept their targets in the lobby, but as they eased open the door to the lobby, a tire screeched outside just as the elevator opened. The pair of tactical team vans skidded to a halt in front of the main entrance and black-clad policemen poured out.
Then all hell broke loose.
Grant saw two men who he recognized from the Alice Springs warehouse dressed in light jackets and khakis. Both of them pulled semiautomatics and sprayed the lobby with rounds. Grant, armed with a SIG Sauer.40 caliber pistol on loan from the NSA, took aim at the men, but the screaming guests and hotel staff running for cover blocked his sightline. The tactical teams must have realized they could easily hit innocent bystanders and didn’t return fire either.
The gunmen ran; Grant and Morgan gave chase. She yelled for someone to intercept them at the rear entrance of the hotel, but it was far too late. Colchev’s men were already out the back exit.
Grant approached the glass door cautiously, sidling up next to it with his back to the concrete wall. He poked his head out to see through the door and was met with a hail of gunfire that shattered the glass.
He dropped to his knee and took five quick shots through the broken glass. The men ducked around the corner of a building, and Grant’s rounds pinged off the brick.
“Watch where you’re shooting!” Morgan shouted. “We need them alive.”
“They started it!” Grant had been a soldier. Trained to kill, not to maim, not to read someone their rights.
He and Morgan burst through the gaping doorway and sprinted after the gunmen, who were fifty yards ahead. Morgan called into her phone. “They’re heading down a diagonal street. Somebody cut them off before they head under the bridge.”
The steel span of the Harbour Bridge began just a hundred yards ahead. If the gunmen got out of sight, they could easily disappear in the wharfs on the other side. They must have had a car parked around somewhere, but the hotel’s offsite lot was in the opposite direction.
A police car came to a stop and blocked off the road ahead. The tac teams were busy setting up a perimeter in a ten-block radius around the hotel. Grant thought the Russians were cut off until he saw them shoot at a locked door and duck through.
“Where’d they go?” Morgan said.
“I don’t know.” It looked like it was in the foundation of the bridge. But as they got closer, Grant saw the sign next to the door.
BridgeClimb. The tourist entrance for the guided walk up the spine of the bridge.
The gunmen would be taking the bridge over the roadblocks set up on the streets underneath it. If they got onto the bridge’s vehicle deck, they could carjack someone and get away into the northern suburbs.
Grant and Morgan reached the door and stopped.
“You want to wait for the tac team?” Grant said.
“No,” Morgan said. “I’m not letting these bastards get away. You stay here.”
Grant shook his head. No way she was going by herself. “If you go, I go.”
She didn’t hesitate. “All right. You pull the door open. One. Two. Three.”
Grant yanked it wide, and Morgan went in crouched, ready to take the shot if she had to.
“They’re on the catwalk.” She darted through the door and up the iron stairs. Although he was fast for his size, Grant had to dig deep to keep up with her.
Once they were up to the catwalk level that ran the length of the span underneath the bridge, Grant could make out the shadows of two men pounding across the steel grating. They were too distant to take clear shots, but that didn’t stop them from blasting away. Rounds pinged off the girders.
Morgan never hesitated. She charged headlong down the walkway, not even flinching when bullets whizzed past.
Grant made sure to keep his balance as he ran. The street was now a hundred and fifty feet below. If the bullets weren’t fatal, the fall would be.
They reached a massive stone masonry pylon that served as the southern anchor for the bridge. The catwalk passed through an opening bored through the center of the pylon. Out the other side of the tunnel, Grant saw the two gunmen approach an intersecting catwalk and split up. One went straight ahead toward the northern terminus of the bridge while the other took a perpendicular path toward the opposite side of the bridge.
When Grant and Morgan reached the same point, she nodded at the man heading for the northern terminus. “You take that guy. Make sure he doesn’t get to the other end of the bridge before the police set up their roadblocks.”
“But don’t kill him.”
“Right.” She didn’t even sound out of breath.
“Easy enough,” Grant said, wondering how he’d do such a thing.
Without another word, she took off.
Though Morgan didn’t like leaving Grant on his own, she felt she’d had no choice other than to let him chase the second gunman. Given how well he’d handled himself so far, she thought it was an acceptable risk.
If she didn’t catch up with her target soon, he might be able to escape in the maze of steelwork that made
