you wanted at MIT.”
“Tyler, we were young, all right? In college I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment. You caught me at a bad time.”
Tyler looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Looks like I did it again.”
She chuckled. “You know the ironic thing?”
“What?”
“He’s a lot like you. Dashing, smart, funny, kind, reliable.”
Tyler cleared his throat. “So what’s the answer?”
“To what?”
“To the question he asked.”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“What’s stopping you from saying yes?”
She smiled. “He’s a lot like you. Stubborn, arrogant, workaholic, impatient, logical.”
He returned the grin. “So what you’re saying is, he’s flawless.”
She shook her head. “He’s a pain in the ass.”
“Sounds like my kind of guy.”
“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
Tyler paused, then said, “Jess, I was blissful with Karen, but I never stopped loving you, either.”
Jess started shivering again, but she couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or something else. She put her head against Tyler’s shoulder.
“Why couldn’t all this have happened a year ago?” she said.
Tyler didn’t answer, but he put his arm around her. She looked up at him and felt his eyes pulling her toward him.
They kissed. Lightly at first, then ravenously. She forgot all about the cold, the dampness, the hunger, the discomfort.
It would have become more but for the drone of an engine in the distance. They drew apart, checking with each other to see if they’d heard the same thing.
The sound disappeared in the wind and then came back stronger. They both shot up and looked toward the island.
A small boat cut through the ocean, distant but approaching quickly. They got up on their knees and waved frantically. The boat’s two occupants waved back.
“Looks like someone on the island had an old diesel,” Tyler said.
“We’re being rescued. You were right again.”
He looked at her with a serious expression. “You need to make up your mind.”
“I know.”
“But for now we need to get Fay back and stop Colchev.”
“I know,” Jess said again, but she felt like she didn’t know anything.
NAZCA
FORTY-TWO
The drone of the six-seat plane’s engine was so monotonous that the coffee in Tyler’s hand had been the only thing keeping him awake on the early morning flight. There wasn’t much to see as they flew over the mountainous terrain from Lima toward southern Peru, but now that the aircraft was in its final descent, he perked up, and Jess’s tension was palpable. In a few minutes they would be flying directly over the Nazca lines.
Yesterday when the scuba company owner who rescued Tyler and Jess took them straight to the island, Tyler found that all communications were out except for an old battery-powered short-wave radio. While Jess gathered their belongings from the hotel, including Fay’s medication and cash, he helped get the antique radio working by the time the LAN flight from Lima arrived just ahead of sunset. Unable to make contact with the airport, the airliner pilot had nearly turned around before they were able to reach him and convince him to land.
If there was one small piece of luck, it was that the jet didn’t need to gas up to return to the mainland. Rapa Nui had no refueling equipment to be rendered inoperable by the EMP blast. All airliners to the island had to load enough fuel to make the round trip on one tank.
Though it was the low season of winter, the tourists who were there swarmed to the airport when they realized that the power outage wasn’t going to be a short-term inconvenience. The plane had been only half-full, but none of the arriving passengers were getting off, so seats were at a premium. It was only through Jess’s fast talking and Fay’s bankroll that she and Tyler secured two of the spots on the return flight to Lima. The local police were too busy with the sudden chaos to question them about the downed cargo jet, and Tyler wasn’t going to volunteer any information that would get them confined to the island for an extended period.
By the time they arrived in Peru, they were too tired to do anything but crash for the remainder of the night in a hotel. Tyler had tried reaching Grant and Morgan, but he’d been told by Morgan’s supervisor that they were en route from Sydney to Los Angeles. He also informed her supervisor about the men killed by Colchev, the detonation of one of the two Killswitches, and the crashed C-17, though he left out the part about him being the one who destroyed it. Tyler didn’t have time for the complications that admission would bring. He’d come clean when the entire situation was resolved.
Without Morgan’s help, he and Jess were on their own in contacting the Peruvian authorities. Tyler spoke with a policeman in Nazca who could understand English and told them about Fay’s abduction and the connection to the incident at Easter Island, but he said nothing of the Killswitch or xenobium. The policeman agreed to accompany them to Cahuachi in the hopes that they could intercept Colchev there and liberate Fay. Once Morgan was available, Tyler would consult with her on how to work with the Peruvian government to secure the xenobium.
After only a few hours’ sleep, they woke up to get to the stores by the time they opened. Jess acquired more cash and new cell phones while Tyler made a couple of quick stops of his own to cobble together the hardware he needed. With their purchases in hand, they hurried to the airport and bought tickets on the next flight to Nazca.
The plane’s only occupant other than Tyler and Jess was the pilot. As they neared their destination, he pointed down, and Tyler peered out the window at the desolate plain below. The empty desert beneath him made the landscape around Alice Springs look like the Garden of Eden.
Other than the distant fields that hugged the banks of narrow rivers, there was no sign of vegetation. Rocky peaks engulfed the flat expanse of the Nazca plateau, which seemed to be a uniform rust color until he focused his eyes and saw his first glimpse of the famed white lines.
The construction of the drawings — from the miles-long straight lines to the most intricate animal symbols — was a simple process, aided by the unique geography of the region. A thin layer of red pebbles overlaid the white substrata of chalky clay underneath. All that was needed to make the lines was a pair of hands and time to painstakingly remove the red pebbles. Because the desert experienced almost no rain or wind, erosion was minimal, allowing the drawings to persist for over a thousand years.
Although the construction technique was simple, how the huge drawings were created so precisely and for what purpose had been the subject of heated debate for almost a century. Hundreds of feet long and unrecognizable for what they are at ground level, they remained undiscovered until planes began flying over the desert in the 1920s. It was only then that the lines were revealed to the world as one of the great mysteries of a forgotten people.
Now that he could see them with his own eyes, Tyler could understand why the lines captured the public imagination. The first image he could identify was a giant hummingbird winging its way across the northwestern
