Ancient Echoes (20 page)

He made a gurgling sound, his blood spraying into the air as
he fell with the shepherd mix on top of him.

The Hammer spun around and fired at the dog, then moved
closer for a shot at the old woman.

Polly raised her shotgun and aimed at Hammill as Gretchen
and Lolo attacked. But she and her two dogs weren't a match for the mercenaries’
deadly firepower. Bullets slammed into the old woman, jerking her body, her
shotgun firing ineffectually into the air. Polly fell dead as her dying dogs
whimpered beside her.

The massacre had taken only seconds.

The Hammer never left one of his men behind. He ordered the
others to carry Bates with them. They would give him a warrior's burial.

He sent two of his men back to Salmon City to rent, buy, or
steal three double-seat ATVs, and a rig to carry them out here. He’d leave the
Suburban behind. Even though this meant a delay, four horses would be child’s
play to track, and the ATVs would easily make up the time lost.

THE STUDENTS STARED in silence.
That morning, they had crawled down the mountainside to the secluded valley,
and marched closer to the pillars.

A perfectly shaped symmetrical mound of reddish-tan dirt,
shaped like a pyramid with the top lopped off, stood over twenty feet tall and
forty feet across. At the top, two granite pillars, charcoal gray in color,
soared high into the sky. The pillars were stark, overwhelming, and
frightening.

“We did it!” Rempart’s voice was both hushed and jubilant.
“It's not exactly Ankor Wat, but as close as we'll get in Idaho.”

Melisse shook her head, her expression unreadable.

“It’s impossible,” Rachel murmured
,
her brow lined with worry.

“No way,” Devlin declared.

Something eerie and surreal hovered over the area, making
the small hairs on their arms stand on end.

“Could this be how Schliemann felt when he found Troy?”
Vince wondered, his voice hushed, nervous.

“Or Bandyopadhyay at Mohenjo-Daro,” Rachel added.

“Or what’s his name who found King Tut,” Ted said.

At the last, all went silent as they remembered “the curse
of the pharaohs,” that anyone who opened or desecrated a sacred site would die.

A cold wind whipped through the valley, chilling them.

“You can see the pillars for some distance around here,”
Rempart pronounced cheerfully, magnanimous now in victory, as the group walked
toward the pillars, slower now. Merely waving the possibility of money and
prestige had turned the students his way.

He intended to continue to use that tactic, and through it
to put Melisse back in her place. She was far too bossy, strutting around with her
hard muscles and outdoor know-how. He couldn't stand her. “We'll make camp
right beside them, and you'll always easily find your way back if you're
tempted to wander off. Frankly, I wouldn't recommend going anywhere alone.
Aside from the mountain lions and black bears you know about, wolf sightings
are not unheard of in this
area,
and rattlesnakes...”

“Just watch where you step and you'll be fine.” Melisse
snapped. She could no longer hide her irritation at Rempart. In turn, he shot
daggers at her.

No one spoke as they continued forward. Their earlier
fatigue had vanished with the possibility of fame and fortune, but it returned
now, four-fold. The air turned increasingly cold.
“A storm's
coming.”
Devlin shivered, folding his arms tight against his chest for
warmth, and peering at the darkening sky. “That's all we need! We'll have to
work to keep a fire lit.”

“At least rain water will be drinkable.” Ted licked his
pudgy, parched lips. They hadn't been near a stream or pond all day, and shared
the couple of waters bottles that hadn't been stolen.

“How do we capture it? Stand around with our mouths open?”
Vince's normally wiry, jumpy demeanor grew more frenzied with each step.

“I'm ready,” Ted replied.

A loud boom caused the group to freeze. The air felt still,
yet the monoliths seemed to quiver before their eyes the way the desert seemed
to ripple when heat rose off the ground.

“What was that?” Brandi whispered, her voice hushed and
trembling.

“Thunder?”
Rachel asked hopefully,
although it didn't quite sound like thunder.

“Just the wind,” Rempart said. “Keep going.”

“We should go back to civilization and get equipment,
supplies, and more people so we can do a proper study of the pillars and a
search of the area,” Melisse suggested. “There must be a deserted settlement
nearby, a place where the pillars were made. I can’t imagine anyone creating
them elsewhere and then carrying them here in the middle of nowhere.”

Vince tapped the face of his watch. The second hand had
stopped moving. He shook his wrist and checked his watch again.

Devlin saw him, and checked his own watch. “My second hand
isn’t moving,” he said softly.

“Mine’s the same,” Melisse said, wriggling her wrist. Then
she looked at the sky. “I wonder if the pillars are emitting some sort of
electro-magnetic charge.”

“Electro-magnetic?”
Rempart
whispered. “That isn’t good. Not good at all.” He started toward the mound,
then
stopped, staring at the ground. Out of nowhere,
lightning flashed above them, and then a sound like the rolling of thunder.

 “That was no wind,” Ted said nervously. “What was it?”

“I don’t know,” Rempart said, backing away.

“Not only is there the question of how those pillars got
here,” Rachel said, “but what do they mean? Nothing like them exists in the
native populations. Who would have built them?”

Nervous excitement caused more speculation.
Stonehenge.
The giant heads of Easter Island.
The Nazca Lines of Peru.

 “We need to go up there,” Devlin said. He
shivered,
arms tight against his chest. “Inspect them. Take
samples.
Soil, scrapings, air.
Plus whatever it is
that made our batteries stop.”

No one answered. Rempart took a step toward the pillars and
stopped again. “The ground…it flickered!” he called out. At the students'
startled, confused expression, he asked, “Didn't you see it?”

The students shook their heads.

“Must have been an optical illusion, a glint from the sun,”
he said as he walked to the mound. “I think there’s some kind of carving at the
top of each pillar! I can’t make it out from this distance. I’ve got to get
closer. This is miraculous!”

Another bolt of lightning lit the sky and thunder clapped,
longer and louder this time as Rempart began to climb.

“Professor,” Melisse called. “Do you want us to join you?”

He seemed not to hear.

“What’s wrong with him?” Ted asked nervously. He sat on the
ground, exhausted, his feet and legs aching from the long trek.

“I want to see what’s up there,” Melisse said.

All except Ted followed, ignoring another flash of light and
boom of thunder. The students had to use their hands to make their way up the
tightly packed, slippery earth. They quickly caught up to the slow moving
professor.

Dark clouds gathered overhead, but it didn’t rain.
Only lightning and the raucous, near continuous claps of thunder.

When the group reached the top of the mound, oddly,
irrationally, the thunder and lightning stopped.

“Be careful, guys!” Ted
called,
his
voice sharp and edged with fear. “Hurry back down!”

 The group moved toward the pillars, which were over
thirty feet tall and stood about fifteen feet apart. No one said a word.

 
“Guys!”
Ted yelled as loud as
he could, trying to get their attention. Something was very wrong. He got up
and hobbled closer to the mound. “Guys, what're you doing? Do you see anything
up there? Why aren’t any of you talking about it? Hey...
GUYS!!”

Then, as he watched, the most incredible thing happened.
They walked between the pillars.

And vanished.

Washington D.C.

JIANJUN SAT WITH his back resting
against multiple plush pillows on a king-size bed in a luxurious room at the
St. Regis Hotel north of Lafayette Square and two blocks from the White House.
He couldn’t believe the time. He had slept sixteen hours straight. Although
past noon, he ordered eggs Benedict from room service, ate breakfast in bed,
and now settled in to work in bed. After roughing it in a
ger
in
Mongolia, and then traveling non-stop half-way around the world to get here, he
owed it to himself. Ah, the good life, he thought as he patted the comfortable,
lump-free, luxurious Egyptian sheet-covered mattress.

His gaze turned to the thumb drive holding files from Lionel
Rempart’s computer. Maybe “the good life” wasn’t exactly the right term for
this. He poured some tea from room service into the cup on the nightstand, set
the laptop on his thighs and plugged in the drive.

The night before, he thought he was in big trouble when he
heard a key in the door of Rempart’s town house. It turned out to be a
management service Rempart had hired to keep an eye on the place. He showed the
guy his student body card and a copy of the e-mail from Rempart’s server giving
him authority to find some documents Rempart needed in Idaho. The property
manager bought it, to Jianjun’s surprise. Taking his thumb drive, and telling
the manager that someone had failed to lock the deadbolt or to arm the alarm
system, Jianjun quickly escaped.

After a buying a burrito and chalupas from Taco Bell, which
he’d
learned to love while living in Seattle, he’d returned
to his hotel room and crashed.

Now, he began to go through Rempart’s files. He learned that
Rempart’s interest in Idaho and
The Book of Abraham the Jew
began over a
year ago. Rempart apparently had met someone he called “JV” and liked what he
heard. Two weeks after that meeting, he began writing down notes of their
conversations. He didn’t annotate the initial meeting, only referred to it in
later entries.

Rempart’s interest peaked when JV told him about a group of
explorers who had secretly followed the Lewis and Clark expedition westward.
Two young foreign students, Chou An-ming from China and Niels Jorgansen from
Denmark, discovered their story many years ago as they worked together on a
term paper for an anthropology class taught by Professor Thurmon Teasdale.

Rempart was fascinated by the explorers and the Indian band
they found living in what was hitherto believed to be an uninhabited area in
Central Idaho. Finding new anthropological groups was Rempart’s
bread-and-butter.

As JV continued to feed Rempart new information, however, a
change came over Michael’s brother.
The Book of Abraham the Jew
, which
he had initially ignored, became more and more fascinating to him. JV talked
about a man named Calvin Phaylor as having been the source of much of her
information about all this. It sounded as if Phaylor was deceased, however.
The
Book
of Abraham the Jew
had caused Rempart to ask Michael to
track down Chou An-ming in China while he flew off to France and Israel to
learn more.

Jianjun paused to think about all this. He clearly
remembered meeting Dr. Chou’s daughter, who insisted Chou knew nothing about
alchemy, nor would he have wanted to.

 The way Rempart’s notes expressed few thoughts and no
explanation of why he suddenly started running around the world frustrated
Jianjun.

Finally, the kicker: the mysterious “JV” offered Rempart the
sum of one million dollars if he would spend a year of his life searching in
Central Idaho for
The Book of Abraham the Jew.
Here, Lionel did explain
some of his thinking, wondering what harm it would do to take the money. If he
found anything, he’d be praised by his peers; if he didn’t, he’d still be a
million dollars ahead. To be sure he didn’t lose in any way, he arranged for a
visiting professorship to Boise State University so he could use the school’s
money and students to fund his little field trip, along with paying his salary.

Cheap bastard, Jianjun thought.

Rempart’s notes about all this ended in the middle of him
getting ready to move to Idaho for the school year.

Jianjun ran some searches to find out more about the
mysterious people behind Rempart’s activities. Calvin Phaylor, he learned,
wasn’t deceased at all, merely retired. He founded Phaylor-Laine
Pharmaceuticals forty years earlier. When the company grew into one of the
major pharmaceutical businesses in the world, Phaylor had it go public, and the
hand-selected board kept him on as Chief Executive Officer until thirteen years
ago, when they gave him a vote of “no confidence.” Three years later, the
position went to Jennifer Vandenburg.

Ah ha!
The mysterious JV.

Jianjun did more investigating, and soon sent Michael a long
text message filled with information about the discoveries on Lionel’s hard
drive, from the secret expedition to Lionel’s payment for searching for
The
Book of Abraham the Jew.
He also let Michael know that, so far, he didn’t
have a chance to do a deep investigation on Charlotte Reed or Simon Quade.

Hacking into the federal government’s personnel files, he
found nothing about Charlotte Reed except that she had worked for ICE for over
twelve years, and was now a GS-13. He could not find anything whatsoever on
Simon Quade as yet. Also, there were no news accounts of a group of men going
missing in Idaho in the past twenty years. Whatever happened was kept under
wraps or wasn’t newsworthy.

Jianjun had lots more Lionel Rempart files to go through,
but simply skimming the file names made him doubt he would find anything of
interest.