Their relationship had been a classic sort of affair: the all- American college mismatch. Race was smart, but had no money. Lauren was brilliant, and her family had money to burn. Race went to USE on a half sports scholarship. In return for playing football for them, they paid half his tuition. He'd scraped together the other half by working nights behind the bar at a local nightclub. Lauren's parents had paid all her fees in full, in one up-front payment.
They were together for two years. The footballer with decent but not spectacular grades in languages, and the tall, beautiful science major who was acing everything.
Race had loved it. Lauren was all he'd ever wanted in a companion—intelligent, outgoing, acidly funny. At football parties, she'd stand out like the sun on a cloudy day. And when she'd search the room for him and find him and smile, he'd melt.
He fell in love with her.
And then Lauren won a scholarship to study at MIT for a year, doing theoretical physics or something like that. She went. He waited. Now it was the classic long-distance rela tionship. Love over the phone. Race was faithful. He lived for their weekly phone call.
And then she came back.
He was at the airport, waiting for her. He had the ring in his pocket. He'd practised the speech a thousand times, got it just right so that he'd drop to one knee at precisely the right moment and ask her.
But when she came through the Arrivals gate that day, she already had a diamond ring on her ring finger.
'Will. I'm sorry,' she'd said. 'But… well… I've met someone else.'
Race never even got the ring out of his pocket.
And so he'd spent the rest of his time in college nose- down in the books, resolutely single and unimaginably miserable.
He'd graduated fourth in his class in ancient languages and, to his complete surprise, got an offer to teach at NYU.
With nothing else he wanted to do except maybe slashing his wrists—he took it.
And now, now he was a humble language professor working out of an old clapboard office in New York City while she was a theoretical physicist working at the cutting edge of the United States military's most esteemed high- technology weapons department. Hmmm.
Race had never expected to see her again. Nor, he thought, did I want to. But then, when Frank Nash had men tioned her name earlier that morning, something inside of him had clicked. He'd wanted to see what she had made of herself.
Well, he had seen that now and what he saw was clear— she'd made a hell of a lot more out of herself than he had.
Race blinked, snapped out of it.
He came back to the present and found that he was staring at her wedding ring.
Jesus, get a grip, he thought to himself.
'Frank said you did a good job with the manuscript,'
Lauren said.
Race coughed, clearing his throat as well as his mind. 'As much as I could do. I mean, hey, it isn't theoretical physics, but, it's.., well, it's what I do.'
'You should be proud of what you do,' she said. And then she smiled at him. 'It's good to see you again, Will.'
Race smiled back as best he could.
Then she stood and looked about herself. 'Well, anyway, I'd better be getting back. Looks like we're about to land.'
It was late in the afternoon when the Hercules landed heavily on a dusty private airstrip at the edge of the Cuzco valley.
The team disembarked the plane on board the troop truck that had made the journey to South America in the big plane's belly. The massive truck rumbled out of the rear loading ramp and immediately headed north along a badly- paved road toward the Urubamba River.
It was a bouncy ride. Race sat in the back of the truck next to his bodyguard, Sergeant Van Lewen.
The other members of the team—the three DARPA people, Nash, Lauren and the hawk-faced physicist, Copeland; Chambers, the anthropologist; and Gaby Lopez, a striking young Latin-American woman who was the team's archaeologist-all sat with their own Green Beret bodyguards.
At one point in the trip, the truck drove along a rise and Race was able to see down the length of the Cuzco valley.
On the left-hand side of the valley, situated on a grassy green hill, lay the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, the mighty fortress he had so recently read about. Its three gargantuan tiers were still discernible, but time and weather had robbed them of their majesty. What four hundred years ago had been a magnificent and imposing fortress fit for the eyes of kings was now a crumbling ruin fit only for the eyes of tourists.
To the right, Race saw a sea of terracotta roofs—the modern-day city of Cuzco, its surrounding wall having long since been removed. Beyond the rooftops lay the barren southern mountains of Peru—brown and harsh, as desolate as the snow-capped peaks of the Andes to the north were spectacular.
Ten minutes later, the truck arrived at the Urubarnba River, where it was met by a thirtysomething man dressed in a white linen suit and a cream Panama hat. His name was Nathan Sebastian and he was a lieutenant in the United States Army.
