Read The Alignment Ingress Online
Authors: Thomas Greanias
The Alignment Ingress (6 page)
As for the several hieroglyphic characters, he couldn’t make heads or tails of them and didn’t have time to. He carefully lifted the medallion and its gold chain off the statue of Isis and put it around his own neck.
He had to break through the next wall into the burial and treasury chambers. If the remains of the Queen of Sheba—and the Pillars of Creation—were anywhere, they would be there.
He didn’t bother to drill a hole and run a fiber cam through to the other side. At this point it didn’t matter. Nothing was going to stop him from blasting his way through.
Conrad reached for more primasheet and heard a footfall from behind. He spun around and saw what looked like a mummy at the other end of the antechamber. And it was moving toward him.
No, it was a figure in a burka. A woman. The Queen of Sheba come to life.
“
Whoah!” he heard himself shout, backing up against the statue of Isis and reaching for the Glock pistol tucked behind in his waistband. He whipped it out and pointed it at the woman. “Stop!”
The figure actually stopped, the headwrap came off to reveal the impossibly beautiful face of an angel, and Conrad found himself staring at none other than Serena Serghetti.
Congo
J
ungle rains put a crimp in the “Nomad” pilot shoot for weeks. It was already January 27, 2013, and no wrap was in sight for Hank Johnson. There were fewer visitors now, and fewer pings on the virtual tripwires around camp. Even tourism director Garamba’s local security guys showed up less often.
The rains, however, did offer him some breathing room. Now he could concentrate on his research. Inside his trailer, Hank listened to the drops drum on the roof and reviewed his Google+ social media streams for crowd-sourced intel about the Queen of Sheba’s mines.
His G+ leaks had paid off big time. People who thought they were playing a game in Ingress were a lot more useful than constipated academics or rung-climbing analysts who were afraid to embarrass themselves. The posts created supercharged collective thinking. One woman named “Linda B” had put everything together in a single post. She thought that the Queen of Sheba went to King Solomon for advice.
Why Solomon?
Solomon was known for his wisdom, but he was also known for his wealth. Jerusalem sat at the end of a trade route that would much later be known as the Silk Road. It was a center of trade. Solomon was the richest as well as the wisest man in the world, and in his Proverbs implied the two were related through some metaphysical alchemy.
Which could explain the mythological object known as the “Philosopher’s Stone,” which could turn lead into gold.
The philosopher’s stone wasn’t a rock. It was a ruse.
Hank instantly considered the concept of banking—what the ancients called hawala. Solomon’s “wisdom” for the Queen of Sheba was how she could “multiply” her gold by leaving it with him, like many other nations probably did. The Royal Bank of Solomon probably functioned as a safe money laundry between the Egyptian kleptocracy and the vicious Assyrians—charging interest on all the gold and being paid in gold!
What could be more magical in the Queen of Sheba’s time than multiplying gold? That had to be the business she conducted with Solomon in his Temple in Jerusalem.
And yet, Hank knew there was more to this alchemy than financial witchcraft. After all, if the Temple Mount wasn’t the mother of all XM deposits, and if the Ark wasn’t some kind of power cube device, then what on Earth wa
s
?
Exotic matter had to be behind the alchemy.
Hank now suspected that XM was the invisible link between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, the secret behind his gold and her mines.
In short, a portal. A very special portal. Right here, nearby.
The ultimate question was who or what exactly was on the other side of this portal, generating this “ordered data” in XM. Not one bone in Hank’s body believed these so-called “Shapers” were angelic beings, let alone gods. They were, however, entities with an agenda.
Whether it was for good or evil remained to be seen. But if the Shapers had wanted to destroy humanity, they could easily induce humans to destroy themselves. So far, however, he hadn’t noticed any violent intentions from the Shapers.
The only thing anybody knows is that the Shapers want something from people, and that nobody knows what it is.
Hank decided to give his G+ streams and endless speculations a rest and turn his attention to his private communications from Calvin at Niantic. Several emails in, however, he could sense between the lines that something was wrong.
Something big has gone south at Niantic
, he thought
. Something Calvin’s not telling me. But maybe the kid will.
Hank put on his rain poncho and stepped out of his production van into the downpour of the jungle. He slogged through the mud to a nearby tree and looked up to see a soaked-to-the-skin Rosier hiding inside a camouflaged UNI Tent.
“Hey, Rosier, wanna come in from the rain?”
A few minutes later his hugely embarrassed “tail,” wrapped in a blanket and cupping a hot mug of coffee in his hands, sat shivering in the trailer.
“We don’t have to tell Niantic you blew the tail,” Hank told him warmly. “We could just say you decided to make yourself useful.”
“Thanks, I’ll think about it,” Rosier replied with a cough. “Have you picked up any more about those mysterious watchers?”
Hank paused for a moment to get his story straight. He liked to keep his work with the military in Afghanistan and his work with Niantic in Switzerland separate. General Montgomery knew about Niantic and about XM, because Hank owed him that much. But Montgomery didn’t know everything, because Hank owed Calvin and Niantic his silence. He knew he was serving two masters, and they both knew it too, but nobody talked about it. And anything to do with IQTech was a tangled web indeed.
This story was for Niantic.
Hank said, “Only some Slavic and Chinese chatter. No physical evidence. I’m thinking they’re mercenaries now, not nationals. Hard to say. The infrared satellite images I got on the mystery man in the jungle are smudged. Maybe it was the night, but I suspect it was XM interference. All the indicators here are the same as in Afghanistan-- smudged shots, GPS anomalies, distortions, guardians and, yes, metals, if that’s what you want to know for ADA, Calvin and gang.”
Rosier nodded, sipping his coffee. The kid was coming around and seemed grateful that Hank had entrusted him with this latest info to relay back to Niantic.
Now Hank was waiting to see if the kid would return the favor.
“There’s something you should know,” Rosier finally said. “Something bad happened at the Niantic Project Facility a few days after you—after we—left.”
Hank said, “Doctor Lynton-Wolfe’s Power Cube experiment?”
Rosier nodded.
“How bad?”
“They told me everything kind of blew up. There was a massive XM event and things went weird. The CERN facility was put on lockdown. You know Devra Bogdanovich and Roland Jarvis?”
Of course he knew them. “What happened?”
“Jarvis was killed and Bogdanovich took off on the same train you did—we did—from Geneva.”
“And?”
“She got whacked on arrival at the train station in Zurich. Well, at least we thought Bogdanovich got whacked. Turned out to be somebody else dressed like her.”
“So she’s still alive?”
“We think so.”
The whole story was a leaky bag to Hank. “Women don’t just dress themselves up to look like Devra Bogdanovich only to be knocked off at train stations by hit men, Rosier. Somebody set that up.”
“The obvious suspect is Bogdanovich herself, but even then she couldn’t have acted alone,” Rosier said. “Those security agents didn’t ace two people because they felt like it. They must have had kill orders. Those orders came from up high. Who could issue them?”
“Not Phillips,” Hank said, starting with his mental list of Niantic suspects back in Geneva. “And probably not Calvin, whom I suppose you’ve been conversing with all these days from your little treehouse.”
“No, sir! Of course not. It couldn’t be Calvin. Could it?”
Poor kid. “Relax, Rosier. Can’t say for sure, but it’s not his style. The kill orders had to come from somewhere else upstairs at the NIA.”
“Like Ni?” Rosier asked, offering up another name.
“Who the hell knows?”
That left another suspect that Hank didn’t want to discuss with Rosier, if only because she could be listening in somehow.
ADA: A Detection Algorithm. Artificial Intelligence so good that she had passed the Turing test. If you were to talk to her on the phone, you would not have known she wasn’t human.
She has the wherewithal to initiate a kill order, but does she have the will?
Hank remembered a high-end geek conversation at Niantic about ADA’s rules of engagement. She had been coded to protect the Niantic Project and, certainly in some of the infrastructural security protocols, had the ability to make life-or-death decisions.
Had ADA issued the order?
She wasn’t dangerous, supposedly. At least that’s what Bowles, head of non-human security at the Niantic Project, said that his colleague Loeb had concluded. Still, a security agent on the other end of a communication with her, believing she was human, would accept her directives.
But why would ADA issue kill orders for two Niantic scientists? Her directive was to protect the project.
Hank could see a cyber entity over-enforcing its directive, but the situation Rosier had described took some genuine plotting: ADA would have had to hire the woman who was killed in Bogdanovich’s place. She would have had to tell the woman how Bogdanovich was dressed and what time she was arriving.
Maybe ADA and Bogdanovich were collaborating.
Rosier, who had been watching him think, opened his mouth to say something, but what Hank heard instead was another death scream from out in the jungle.
Hank was out the door in a flash, followed closely behind by Rosier. It didn’t take long to find the source of the scream. Once again, there was no body to be found, not even shreds of fabric, only metal bits and bone fragments.
“I don’t think a lion did this,” Rosier offered up nervously.
Of course no lion did this
.
No creature known to man did this. This was a horror flick in real time, but without the popcorn.
Hank scanned the jungle but got nothing.
Time to check in with Montgomery, see if he extracted any intel from that phone from the jungle.
Though the sat phones were encrypted to military standards, Hank didn’t trust them. Neither did Montgomery. IQTech had spent way too much white hat hacking encryption for the intelligence community to believe that the other side wouldn’t be able to crack them. But he had to report this latest development immediately. He’d get his message out fast.
Montgomery’s voice answered on the third ring. “I was just about to call you.”
“That’s what they all say,” Hank responded.
“Finally got into that phone far enough to know that it belonged to a Chinese mineralogist attached to Strategic Explorations, which of course has close ties to Hulong Minerals, which of course is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hulong Transglobal which is owned by either the Tongs or the government; analysts debate that point.” Montgomery’s voice had that weary tone that he always seemed to adopt when a lot of explaining was involved.
“Yeah, I know about Strategic Explorations. They’re the sharp edge of the blade that China is using to carve up Africa.”
“They’re dangerous, Hank.”
“Yeah, well, they may have met their match. Because we think we just heard another one in the jungle bite the dust.”
There was a pause on the other end. “Do what you came to do, Hank, and exfiltrate immediately.”
“Got it.” Hank hung up and addressed his crew. “OK boys, we’re about to step up the pace. When we get a break in the rain, we get this done.”
“If whatever is out there wanted to kill us, it probably would have killed us already,” offered Dow. “What’s the hurry?”
“Strategic Explorations is in the area,” Hank explained. “The guys who were killed were probably with them. If they’re missing people, they’re going to come looking. SE is filled with vicious bastards—mercs. They specialize in pitting tribes against each other and then helping whoever is losing until the two sides wipe each other out. Wet ops are run by a guy named Antoine Smith.”
“Antoine?” Dow repeated. “How vicious can a guy named Antoine be?”
“Murderer, sadist. Combines the worst aspects of Charles Manson and Reinhard Heydrich,” Rosier added.
Hank smiled. “Let’s break out the drones.”
Sometimes you put your line in the water and get a bite right away. While Michaels was piloting Establishing Shot high over the jungle where he couldn’t crash into anything, and Rosier was flying Long Shot just above treetop height, Hank slipped Close Up through the jungle. Half an hour into the flight he caught the shiny glint of metal in an overgrowth.
Shiny ancient metal.
He pulled closer. Imaging told him that it was a rock obelisk inlaid with metal patterns. Silver, gold and black.
Black is tantalum.
“Boys, we just found ourselves a man-made resonator. Stone, gold, tin and tantalum.”
“How in the hell did the ancients know how to make resonators?” Michaels asked, pulling a toothpick out of his mouth.
“Don’t know that, but I do know what the Queen of Sheba was talking to Solomon about,” Hank said. “And based on Lynton-Wolfe’s circular eight-pattern, now that we’ve found one resonator we’re bound to find seven more. Tonight we’re going to light this place up.”
NIANTIC LINKS