Using the club for a cane, Weyland hobbled to his cabin. Max quickly closed and locked the door behind them, then helped Charles Weyland slump into a padded leather chair. Max leaned the nine iron against the wall and offered his boss a clear plastic oxygen mask. Weyland took several long, deep breaths, and some color returned to his gaunt face.
“Thank you,” he said between gulps.
When his strength returned, Weyland discarded the mask and scanned the stateroom, which more resembled a hospital ward. His nose curled from the medicinal stench of the sickroom.
“The mirror, please.”
Max rolled a portable vanity table and mirror in front of Weyland’s chair and stepped away. Weyland gazed at his wan reflection for a moment, then sank into his chair and even deeper into his memories.
At twenty-one, Charles Weyland possessed a Harvard M.B.A. and a small satellite mapping company inherited from his father. Two years later he’d purchased a cable franchise in the Midwest, then a telecommunications grid in Nevada. Within a decade marked by shrewd and calculated expansion, Weyland Industries had become the largest satellite systems operation in the world, the company worth in excess of three hundred billion dollars. His financial empire secure, Charles Weyland had set out to change the world.
“Expanding the range of human endeavor” was more than the Weyland Industries catch phrase—it was the sum of Charles Weyland’s personal philosophy. His mother dead before he was two, raised by a succession of nannies under the cold eye of a harsh, agnostic father, Weyland had lacked parental love or even the comforting faith in a higher power. So he’d made progress his creed, vowing to use his wealth to advance the frontiers of human civilization.
To that end, he’d begun to lead a double life. The public Charles Weyland threw lavish parties, attended openings and charity events, bought luxury hotels in San Francisco, Paris and London. Billionaire Charles Weyland built a casino in Las Vegas and was very much a fixture of the society page, a shallow playboy who always had a beautiful woman on his arm and his signature nine iron draped over his shoulder. But like the hotels, the casino and the golf club, the women were mere props—part of an elaborate and calculated deception that enabled Charles Weyland to accomplish his real goals behind the scenes and under the radar.
While hosting the opening of the Weyland West Hotel in San Francisco, Weyland’s representatives had been secretly purchasing a nanotechnology firm in Silicon Valley. As he’d attended London’s theater season, Weyland’s lawyers had been closing the deal for a robotics plant in Pittsburgh. While he’d attended fashion week festivities in Paris, Weyland’s shell company had engineered a hostile takeover of a pharmaceutical company in Seattle and bought a genetics research firm in Kiyodo. By the time he was forty, Weyland had become the foremost financial supporter of cutting-edge scientific research on the globe.
Four years earlier, Weyland had told Max Stafford that, given forty more years on earth, the scientific research his company funded would enable Weyland Industries to open a branch in a moon base on the Sea of Tranquility. But that was before he’d been diagnosed with advanced bronchogenic carcinoma. Now, because of the cancer that was eating away his lungs, Charles Weyland no longer had forty more years. If he was lucky, he might have forty more days.
That was why the remarkable find in Antarctica and this expedition were so important. It was Charles Weyland’s last chance to make a mark on humanity. And that was why Weyland was so grateful to the one man in his organization who made this last chance possible.
“Fifteen minutes rest, and then I get back into my… costume… and go across the hall to my office.”
“Are you sure? Perhaps it would be best to retire for the night.”
“Why? I won’t sleep.” Weyland took a deep breath and forced a smile. “Over the last three months you really have become invaluable, Max. Finding the right personnel, putting this whole expedition together in days—”
“Just doing my job.”
Disgusted by his reflection, Weyland pushed the mirror aside. “I didn’t think it would happen this fast….”
Max crossed the room and rested his massive hand on Weyland’s shoulder. The man’s touch was surprisingly gentle. “You exerting yourself like this only accelerates the cancer….” He hesitated, reluctant to bring up the same arguments, though he felt he must. “Perhaps you should reconsider accompanying us. You could stay here. Monitor our progress on the radio—”
With the wariness of a trapped animal, Weyland eyed the hospital bed, the oxygen tanks, the medicines, and he shook his head.
“I’m dying, Max. And I’ll be damned if I do it here.”
Sebastian De Rosa followed the executive officer’s directions and located his cabin. He unlocked the door and stepped inside, delighted to discover that his quarters more resembled a stateroom on a luxury liner than a cabin on an icebreaker. For a moment Sebastian wondered if he’d been handed the wrong key, until he noticed that his luggage—what there was of it—had been deposited in the center of the room.
Sebastian opened his battered suitcase and removed an armful of clothes. When he opened the closet door, he was surprised to find clothing already hanging there—casual wear that fit his rather unexacting taste, along with cold-weather gear and even some equipment. He found waterproof pants and jackets, woolen sweaters and socks, thermal underwear, ski-style gloves, boots, woolen hats, and several bright-yellow Polartec pullovers stamped with the ubiquitous Weyland logo. A quick inspection revealed that everything was sized to fit.
“Mr. Charles Weyland, where have you been all my life?” he chuckled.
Sebastian was still feeling the high he’d gotten from Charles Weyland’s briefing. At last he had a chance to prove to the archaeological community that the history of the world as currently written by scholars and academics was nothing more than a string of assumptions, conjectures, half-truths and outright lies. The discovery of a temple complex in Antarctica shattered every preconception of modern archaeology, which was why so-called objective scientists resisted the truth—even when confronted by evidence. This was a phenomenon Sebastian had experienced firsthand, early in his career.
While still a graduate student, Sebastian had gained access to the Library of Congress collection of portolans—maps used by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century seamen to travel from port to port. One of the maps he’d examined had been created in 1531 by Oronteus Finaeus. It displayed an accurate depiction of the entire continent of Antarctica as modern science now allowed it to be seen from outer space. Every bay, every inlet, every river, every mountain—all of the land hidden under tons of ice had been accurately reproduced on the Finaeus Portolan almost five hundred years before.
But how? Sebastian had wondered.
He’d learned from cartographers that most portolans used in the Age of Exploration had actually been copies of far older maps created by the ancient Romans and Egyptians. But even when the Egyptians had flourished, as far back as four thousand years, the South Pole had been completely covered by pack ice up to three thousand feet thick. Even if the Egyptians had sailed to Antarctica—which was absurd, because they hadn’t had a navy until Cheops’s father created one in 2000 B.C.—the ancient sailors would have found nothing but ice. It wasn’t until the latter half of the twentieth century that modern scientists discovered the actual topography of the hidden continent under the ice, and they had used deep-sounding sonar techniques to do it.
So who had mapped the territorial features of Antarctica in ancient times, and how?
Sebastian had concluded that only two theories were possible. The first was put forth in 1967 by Erich Von Daniken in his book
Sebastian’s theory was far less outrageous. He believed that the original map Finaeus copied had probably been made at a time when Antarctica had been warm and habitable, and home to a now-forgotten civilization. The existence of the Finaeus Portolan, along with the Piri Re’s map discovered in Istanbul, were solid evidence that Sebastian’s theory was correct.
Yet when he’d presented his findings to his fellow archaeologists, his work had been rejected out of hand, despite the fact that physical evidence to prove his conjectures existed at the Library of Congress for anyone to examine.
After this sobering incident, Sebastian had been forced to conclude that either his fellow archaeologists hadn’t bothered to read his paper, or they’d refused to face the truth. Either way, the pyramid complex Weyland had discovered in Antarctica—if indeed it
