“The 5:12:13 triangle reveals the original location of the bluestones in Wales: The Preseli Hills,” Lachlan said. “This is pretty exceptional geography for a primitive tribe. It’s so exceptional that some believe the ancients had outside help.”
“I thought you were going to prove a link between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid,” Zoe said.
Lachlan smiled. He winked to Lily. “Remember how I said it was a nice triangle?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, if you extend the hypotenuse of this wonderful triangle like this…”
“…see what it runs through.”
Lachlan turned to a map of the world and did precisely that.
“No way…” Lily said, when she saw the finished product.
The arrow passed directly through Egypt, right at the Nile Delta…at Giza.
“Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza,” Lachlan said proudly. “United at last.”
“Which brings us to the second connection,” Julius said. “The connection between all this and Titan, Saturn, and Jupiter. You see, it’s not Titan or Saturn or Jupiter that matters. It’s what lies hidden behind them that matters.”
“Behind them?” Lily asked.
Lachlan grinned. “Yes. We checked the data you sent us from Dubai, the data from Wizard’s notes about this Dark Star and its rate of approach. Seems it’s coming at us from behind Jupiter. Thus the importance of this celestial event, the rising of Saturn behind Jupiter. It is, to put it simply, beyond value, because it will allow us, for the very first time, to see this fearsome Dark Star.”
“How?” Zoe asked, turning in the driver’s seat. “I thought we couldn’t see it in our light spectrum.”
“Well, we won’t see it , we’ll see the dark space that it occupies,” Julius said. “Now, are you familiar with the concept of space-time?”
“Or more specifically the curvature of space-time,” Lachlan added.
“Yes, good clarification, brother,” Julius said.
“Thank you.”
“More or less,” Zoe said. “The gravitational pull of a planet bends the space around it. I once heard it compared to a stretched-out rubber sheet with marbles placed on it…”
“That’s right,” Lachlan said, “and each marble makes a slight depression in the rubber sheet, indicating the curvature of space-time. So if you were in a spaceship traveling past these planets, your trajectory would actually bend as you pass each planet, unless of course you applied more power.”
“Yes…”
Julius said, “Well, it’s the same with light. Light bends, too, as it passes through the gravitational fields of planets and stars.”
Lachlan: “And big planets like Jupiter bend it more than small planets like Mercury.”
“Correct,” Julius said. “So tonight, as we look out at Jupiter from Stonehenge, and see Saturn rise behind it, we will, if only for a moment, thanks to the peculiar bending of light around those two planets, get a glimpse of the section of space hiddenbehind Jupiter.”
Zoe frowned. “And if the Sa-Benben is set in place at that time—positioned atop the Ramesean stone of Stonehenge—what happens then?”
Julius looked at Lachlan.
Lachlan looked at Julius.
Then they both turned to face Zoe and shrugged together.
“That,” Julius said, “is what we’re going to find out.”
The car sped into the night.
STONEHENGE
DECEMBER5, 2007, 3:22A.M.
THEY PARKED on the gravel shoulder a few hundred yards from the henge.
The moon shone down on the wide plain like a great spotlight, illuminating the relentlessly flat landscape all the way to the horizon.
Stonehenge stood at the junction of the A303 and a smaller side road.
Two security guards stood near the great shadowy stones, silhouettes in the moonlight. They saw the Honda stop, but did not investigate: travelers from London often stopped to gaze at the stones while they stretched their legs.
Zoe stepped closer, to within fifty yards of the two guards and then quickly raised a boxy gunlike object fitted with a handgrip and trigger, aimed it at the guards, and called,“Hey!”
The guards looked over.
Zoe pulled the trigger. There was an instantaneous flash from her device accompanied by a deep sonicwhump, and immediately the two guards dropped to the ground like marionettes whose strings had been cut, out cold.
“Whatthe hell was that!” Julius asked, coming up alongside Zoe.
