corner of the plateau. Like the other drawings, it resembled a child’s doodle, but its wings, tail, and beak were outlined in recognizable detail.
Next was a great monkey, its prehensile tail curled into a spiral. Straight lines intersected the drawings and each other in all directions. A casual observer might come to the conclusion that these majestic symbols were alien spaceship landing instructions. It defied belief that a primitive culture could not only make them, but envision a reason for doing so in the first place.
Jess waved for him to check out her side of the plane. He leaned over and saw the shape of a massive condor, and beyond that the eight legs of a tarantula.
“Nana has seen this view a dozen times,” Jess said. “She’d come here just to fly over the lines and see if she could figure out why she’d been chosen by the alien to be entrusted with its secret.”
Tyler admired Fay’s tenacity. He had never believed in aliens — at least not in ones that had visited Earth — but he understood her need to find the truth. Her experience at Roswell had obviously set all of this in motion, and until he had the answers he was ruling nothing out. He was a skeptic, but he was also a scientist. The scientific method meant doing away with preconceived notions. He would go wherever the evidence took him, no matter where it led.
Jess gazed at the desolate landscape with a haunted expression. “Do you think she’s down there somewhere?”
“Yes, and I believe we’re going to find her.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have any reason to think we won’t.”
“Sometimes I like your arrogance.”
“It comes in handy.”
Jess pointed at the astronaut drawing waving to them from the side of a hill. Tyler had to admit it did look like an otherworldly figure, two round eyes gazing from its otherwise featureless bulbous head.
“You think he’s going to lead us to Nana?” Jess asked.
Tyler nodded. “And to the xenobium.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because Colchev is sure.”
“What do you mean?”
Tyler lowered his voice. “We know that Colchev got away with two Killswitches, each one worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“And we know that they’re useless without the xenobium trigger.”
“Right. So what does he do when he finds the only xenobium that we know about?”
Jess frowned. “You mean, why did he set off one of his two Killswitches?”
“Exactly. Colchev had to be absolutely sure that there was more xenobium. And it’s possible that the specimen from the cave wasn’t big enough for whatever he has planned. The sample that Kessler destroyed in Australia was twenty times bigger than the speck we found.”
“The drawing at Easter Island did imply that the Nazca had a much bigger specimen hidden in the pyramid.”
“Kessler told us about a scientist from Russia named Dombrovski. What if Dombrovski was a Russian spy who found the xenobium but couldn’t get it out of its hiding place for some reason? That would explain why Colchev is so positive it exists.”
“He just didn’t know where to look until Nana made that appearance in the video.”
“It also means that Dombrovski found a way inside the Grand Pyramid more than sixty years ago, before anyone even started doing a thorough excavation of the site.”
“So we shouldn’t be looking for the entrance anywhere that’s been uncovered since then.”
Jess eyes lit up as if she remembered something and plunged her hands into her bag. She opened a notebook and leafed through it.
“This is Nana’s. It contains her notes for the book she’s planning to write. She left it in our room because she had scanned everything into her computer and didn’t want to risk losing it at the site of the cave. It has a detailed map of Cahuachi in it, including dates.”
Jess flipped the pages until she got to the map. Jess pointed to a spot on the northwest corner of the Grand Pyramid.
“Look! This is one of the first discoveries of the adobe bricks that led to them uncovering the pyramid.”
“Did floods bury it?” Tyler asked. “The river looks close by.”
“No, that’s the odd thing. The pyramid is more than thirty meters tall. It would have taken centuries of natural floods to cover the entire four-hundred-acre site. For some reason, the Nazca buried the whole city in mud themselves before they abandoned it.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they didn’t want anyone to ever find the xenobium.”
“So it was literally a massive cover-up, but they left one point of access into the pyramid, something only they and the gods would have known about.”
“They drew the Mandala to show how to get into the pyramid,” Jess said. “Then they drew the Nazca lines as a map to the pyramid. A map that would be decipherable only to those with the ability to see it from the sky.”
“Speaking of that, I took some time last night to compare our photos to southern hemisphere star charts. The animal constellations match up perfectly. If you follow the lines according to the sequence of constellations ordered by their position in the zodiac, they lead directly from the Mandala to the Grand Pyramid.”
As their plane touched down at the Nazca airport, Tyler could see a police car waited for them on the tarmac.
“If Colchev figures all this out,” Jess said, “he might know how to get into the pyramid.”
Tyler didn’t have to respond. They both knew the ominous outcome if Colchev had beaten them to Cahuachi. Fay would be no further use to the Russian spy once he had all the components of a weapon that could kill millions.
FORTY-THREE
Morgan noted that getting out of the US was much easier than getting in. Even at the break of dawn, the line of cars at the Highway 905 US — Mexico border crossing stretched half a mile — on the Mexican side. On the US side it was a clear road to the immigration checkpoint. Morgan flashed her credentials at the officer, and he directed her to the customs building.
She elbowed Grant, who dozed in the passenger seat, still sleeping off the effects of the Ambien he took for the flight back to LA. He had awakened just long enough to make the transfer to the helicopter that took them to the San Diego airport, and then again when they got in the car.
His eyes flew open. “What?”
“Wake up. We’re here.”
“I’m awake.”
“Next time, just take one pill.”
“For someone
“You took enough to down a bull elephant.”
“Well, I’m up now,” Grant said, yawning. “Remind me. Who are we meeting?”
“Captain Filipe Benitez of the Mexican Federales.”
“
“You speak Spanish?”
“
“You have the hottest hits?”
“It’s from a radio station I listened to when I was at Fort Hood.”