“I left a message for a Professor Nabinger.” Von Seeckt held up the crumpled piece of paper he had in his hand. “I believe he may hold the key to understanding the mothership.”
“Who is Nabinger?” Kelly asked.
“An archaeologist with the Brooklyn Museum.”
“Okay, time out,” Turcotte said. “I thought I was halfway up to speed with all this, but now you’ve lost me.”
“When they discovered the mothership,” Von Seeckt said, “they also found tablets with what are called high runes on them. We have never been able to decipher the tablets, but it appears that Professor Nabinger might be able to.” Von Seeckt’s fingers ran over the head of his cane. “The only problem is that we have to get access to the tablets to show them to the professor.”
“We are not going back into Area 51,” Turcotte said flatly. “Gullick will have our heads if we go back in there. And they’ll find us here soon enough too.”
“The tablets aren’t there,” Von Seeckt said. “They’re being held at the Majic-12 facility in Dulce, New Mexico. That is why I said we must go there.”
Turcotte sat down in an easy chair and rubbed his forehead. “So you’re agreeing with Kelly and say that we should go to Dulce. I assume whatever facility is there is highly classified also. So we’re just going to break in, rescue this reporter Johnny Simmons, get these tablets, decipher them, and then what?” “We make public the threat,” Von Seeckt said. He looked at Kelly. “That’s your job.”
“Oh, I’ve been hired?” Kelly asked.
“No, sounds to me like you volunteered like I did,” Turcotte said with a sarcastic laugh. “Sort of like people used to volunteer to charge across no-man’s-land in World War I. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to pick up hitchhikers?”
Von Seeckt’s voice was grim. “None of us in this room has any choice. We either expose what they are planning to do at Area 51 in four days and stop it or we — and many others — die.”
“I’m not sure I buy into the danger this mothership holds,” Turcotte said.
Von Seeckt shook the piece of paper with the message from Nabinger on it. “This confirms my suspicions!”
Turcotte glanced at Kelly and she returned the look. For all they knew Von Seeckt could be a total crackpot. The only reason Turcotte even began to believe the old man was the fact that Cruise had tried to kill him. That meant someone took him seriously enough to want to get rid of him. Of course, they might want to kill him because he was a crackpot, but Turcotte thought it best to keep that thought to himself. He didn’t feel on very firm ground; after all, his phone call had been to a number that was disconnected, so his story didn’t hold up much better than those of the other two people in the room.
Von Seeckt had told him about Duncan being in the Cube. She might be legitimate, she might not. Turcotte’s training told him that when he didn’t have enough information he had to make the best possible choice. Going to Dulce seemed like a good way to at least accumulate more information from both Von Seeckt and Kelly on the way there.
“All right,” Turcotte said. “Let’s stop yacking and get going.”
Less than a hundred miles east of Miami, the islands that made up Bimini were scattered across the ocean like small green dots. It was in the sparkling blue water around those dots that massive stone blocks had been found that had fueled speculation that Atlantis had once been there.
Peter Nabinger didn’t have the time to dive to see the blocks. Besides, he’d already seen pictures of them. He was here to see the woman who had taken the pictures and then stayed to study them further.
As he walked the short distance from the tiny dirt-strip airport to the village where Slater lived, Nabinger reflected on the only other time he’d seen the woman. It had been at an archaeological convention in Charleston, South Carolina. Slater had presented a paper on the stones in the shallow waters off her island home. It had not been received well. Not because her groundwork and research had been faulty, but because some of the conclusions she had proposed had gone against the prevailing winds of the world of academic archaeology. What had fascinated Nabinger was that a few of Slater’s slides showed forms of high runes etched into the underwater stonework. He’d gotten copies of the slides and they’d helped him decipher a few more high rune symbols.
However, the chilly, in fact hostile, reception her presentation had received had convinced Nabinger to keep his own studies quiet.
Nabinger wiped the sweat from his brow and adjusted his backpack. At the conference Slater had not seemed particularly perturbed at the attacks on her theories. She had smiled, packed her bags, and gone back to her island.
Her attitude had seemed to suggest that they could take it or leave it. Until someone came up with some better ideas and supported them, she was sticking to hers. Nabinger had been impressed with that self-confident attitude. Of course, she didn’t have a museum board of directors or an academic review board for tenure looking over her shoulder, either, so she could afford to be aloof.
He looked down at the card she had given him at the conference — a small map photocopied on the back pointed the way to her house. She’d given it to him when he’d asked for copies of the slides. “We don’t have street names on my island,” she had told him. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t get there. But don’t worry, you can walk everywhere from the airfield or the dock.”
Nabinger spotted a shock of white hair above a garden of green surrounding a small cottage. As the woman turned around, he recognized Slater. She put a hand over her eyes and watched him approach. Slater was in her late sixties and had come to archaeology late in life, after retiring from a career as a mineral- and geologic-rights lawyer representing various environmental groups — the reason she could afford to go her own way and another reason she irritated the archaeological old guard.
“Good day, young man,” she called out as he turned into her drive. “Ms. Slater, I’m—”
“Peter Nabinger, Brooklyn Museum,” she said. “I may be old and getting a little long in the tooth, but I still have my mind. Did you take a wrong turn on the Nile? If I remember rightly, that was your area of expertise.”
“I just flew in here from Cairo, via the puddle jumper from Miami,” Nabinger said.
“Iced tea?” Slater asked, extending her hand toward the door and leading him in.
“Thank you.”
They walked into the cool shadows of the house. It was a small bungalow, nicely furnished, with books and papers piled everywhere. She cleared a stack of papers from a folding chair. “Sit down, please.”
Nabinger settled down and accepted the glass she gave him. Slater sat down on the floor, leaning her back against a couch covered with photographs. “So what brings you here, Mr. Egypt? Do you want more photos of the markings on the stones?”
“I was thinking about the paper you presented in Charleston last year,” Nabinger began, not quite sure how to get to what he wanted to know.
“That was eleven months and six days ago,” Slater said. “I would like to think your brain works a little quicker than that, or we might have a long day here. Please, Mr. Nabinger, you are here for a reason. I am not your professor at school. You can ask questions even if they seem silly. I’ve asked many silly questions in my life and I never regretted a one, but I have some regrets about the times I kept my mouth shut when I should have spoken up.”