After only a few hours’ sleep, they woke up to get to the stores by the time they opened. Jess acquired more cash and new cell phones while Tyler made a couple of quick stops of his own to cobble together the hardware he needed. With their purchases in hand, they hurried to the airport and bought tickets on the next flight to Nazca.
The plane’s only occupant other than Tyler and Jess was the pilot. As they neared their destination, he pointed down, and Tyler peered out the window at the desolate plain below. The empty desert beneath him made the landscape around Alice Springs look like the Garden of Eden.
Other than the distant fields that hugged the banks of narrow rivers, there was no sign of vegetation. Rocky peaks engulfed the flat expanse of the Nazca plateau, which seemed to be a uniform rust color until he focused his eyes and saw his first glimpse of the famed white lines.
The construction of the drawings — from the miles-long straight lines to the most intricate animal symbols — was a simple process, aided by the unique geography of the region. A thin layer of red pebbles overlaid the white substrata of chalky clay underneath. All that was needed to make the lines was a pair of hands and time to painstakingly remove the red pebbles. Because the desert experienced almost no rain or wind, erosion was minimal, allowing the drawings to persist for over a thousand years.
Although the construction technique was simple, how the huge drawings were created so precisely and for what purpose had been the subject of heated debate for almost a century. Hundreds of feet long and unrecognizable for what they are at ground level, they remained undiscovered until planes began flying over the desert in the 1920s. It was only then that the lines were revealed to the world as one of the great mysteries of a forgotten people.
Now that he could see them with his own eyes, Tyler could understand why the lines captured the public imagination. The first image he could identify was a giant hummingbird winging its way across the northwestern corner of the plateau. Like the other drawings, it resembled a child’s doodle, but its wings, tail, and beak were outlined in recognizable detail.
Next was a great monkey, its prehensile tail curled into a spiral. Straight lines intersected the drawings and each other in all directions. A casual observer might come to the conclusion that these majestic symbols were alien spaceship landing instructions. It defied belief that a primitive culture could not only make them, but envision a reason for doing so in the first place.
Jess waved for him to check out her side of the plane. He leaned over and saw the shape of a massive condor, and beyond that the eight legs of a tarantula.
“Nana has seen this view a dozen times,” Jess said. “She’d come here just to fly over the lines and see if she could figure out why she’d been chosen by the alien to be entrusted with its secret.”
Tyler admired Fay’s tenacity. He had never believed in aliens — at least not in ones that had visited Earth — but he understood her need to find the truth. Her experience at Roswell had obviously set all of this in motion, and until he had the answers he was ruling nothing out. He was a skeptic, but he was also a scientist. The scientific method meant doing away with preconceived notions. He would go wherever the evidence took him, no matter where it led.
Jess gazed at the desolate landscape with a haunted expression. “Do you think she’s down there somewhere?”
“Yes, and I believe we’re going to find her.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have any reason to think we won’t.”
“Sometimes I like your arrogance.”
“It comes in handy.”
Jess pointed at the astronaut drawing waving to them from the side of a hill. Tyler had to admit it did look like an otherworldly figure, two round eyes gazing from its otherwise featureless bulbous head.
“You think he’s going to lead us to Nana?” Jess asked.
Tyler nodded. “And to the xenobium.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because Colchev is sure.”
“What do you mean?”
Tyler lowered his voice. “We know that Colchev got away with two Killswitches, each one worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“And we know that they’re useless without the xenobium trigger.”
“Right. So what does he do when he finds the only xenobium that we know about?”
Jess frowned. “You mean, why did he set off one of his two Killswitches?”
“Exactly. Colchev had to be absolutely sure that there was more xenobium. And it’s possible that the specimen from the cave wasn’t big enough for whatever he has planned. The sample that Kessler destroyed in Australia was twenty times bigger than the speck we found.”
“The drawing at Easter Island did imply that the Nazca had a much bigger specimen hidden in the pyramid.”
“Kessler told us about a scientist from Russia named Dombrovski. What if Dombrovski was a Russian spy who found the xenobium but couldn’t get it out of its hiding place for some reason? That would explain why Colchev is so positive it exists.”
“He just didn’t know where to look until Nana made that appearance in the video.”
“It also means that Dombrovski found a way inside the Grand Pyramid more than sixty years ago, before anyone even started doing a thorough excavation of the site.”
“So we shouldn’t be looking for the entrance anywhere that’s been uncovered since then.”
Jess eyes lit up as if she remembered something and plunged her hands into her bag. She opened a notebook and leafed through it.
“This is Nana’s. It contains her notes for the book she’s planning to write. She left it in our room because she had scanned everything into her computer and didn’t want to risk losing it at the site of the cave. It has a detailed map of Cahuachi in it, including dates.”
Jess flipped the pages until she got to the map. Jess pointed to a spot on the northwest corner of the Grand Pyramid.
“Look! This is one of the first discoveries of the adobe bricks that led to them uncovering the pyramid.”
“Did floods bury it?” Tyler asked. “The river looks close by.”
“No, that’s the odd thing. The pyramid is more than thirty meters tall. It would have taken centuries of natural floods to cover the entire four-hundred-acre site. For some reason, the Nazca buried the whole city in mud themselves before they abandoned it.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they didn’t want anyone to ever find the xenobium.”
“So it was literally a massive cover-up, but they left one point of access into the pyramid, something only they and the gods would have known about.”
“They drew the Mandala to show how to get into the pyramid,” Jess said. “Then they drew the Nazca lines as a map to the pyramid. A map that would be decipherable only to those with the ability to see it from the sky.”
“Speaking of that, I took some time last night to compare our photos to southern hemisphere star charts. The animal constellations match up perfectly. If you follow the lines according to the sequence of constellations ordered by their position in the zodiac, they lead directly from the Mandala to the Grand Pyramid.”
As their plane touched down at the Nazca airport, Tyler could see a police car waited for them on the tarmac.
“If Colchev figures all this out,” Jess said, “he might know how to get into the pyramid.”
Tyler didn’t have to respond. They both knew the ominous outcome if Colchev had beaten them to Cahuachi. Fay would be no further use to the Russian spy once he had all the components of a weapon that could kill millions.
FORTY-THREE