Yakov, Che Lu, and Mualama were in the hallway. The Russian stepped in front of him. “My friend—”
“I am not your friend,” Turcotte snapped. He poked a finger in the Russian’s chest when the man refused to move. “Your ‘friend’ Katyenka betrayed us in Moscow. You came back here with a bug on you. You shot her—” He jerked a thumb at the door behind him. “What do you know that you haven’t told me?” He spun toward Che Lu. “And you? Why did you suddenly decide to go into Qian-Ling? Convenient timing there. Right after Majestic was compromised.” Then he turned on Mualama. “And following Burton? Lying to us about being a Watcher. Telling us about his manuscript in bits and pieces and only the parts you want to.” He shoved Yakov out of the way. “I’m done with all of you.”
Turcotte made a beeline for the outer door and walked into the bright Nevada sunshine. He blinked, his eyes smarting. At first he thought it was the light, but when he put his sunglasses on they still hurt. He realized he was crying. Turcotte walked away from Area 51 toward the desert.
The Silk Road was the first connection between East and West in the ancient world. It stretched over four thousand miles from Xian in the northwest of China, across the north China Plain, through the Pamirs and the Karakoram Range to the walled city of Samarkand, across the great desert to Damascus and on to the Mediterranean ports of Alexandria and Antioch. From there ships could sail on to Greece and Rome and traders could travel the land routes inside those kingdoms.
It was the route that Marco Polo traveled for three years to become the first Westerner to see the Inner Kingdom of China, but that was long after the road had been established. The Silk Road was also the path that the Black Death had taken in the opposite direction hundreds of years later in the fourteenth century. Historians had traced the deadly track of the bubonic plague from China, along the Silk Road, to Mediterranean ports and on to the rest of Europe. In five years it killed over twenty-five million people, reducing the human population of the planet by one-third. Percentagewise it was the most devastating event ever to strike mankind, far eclipsing the devastation of the world wars centuries later.
And it had started right there in Qian-Ling — an attempt by Artad’s followers to strike at the Mission’s growing power in Europe and the Middle East and level the playing field. And the Mission had just recently tried the same thing in South America in an attempt to wipe out mankind and pave the way for Aspasia’s arrival from Mars — an attempt that was stopped at the last minute by Mike Turcotte.
When China was young, the balance of power was in the West, and Xian was the capital city. The first true ruler of China, the Yellow Emperor Shi Huangdi, held sway there during his reign. In reality, Shi Huangdi had been a Shadow of Artad. According to legend, when he died, he was buried in a massive tomb, larger than even the Great Pyramid of Giza. This tomb was called Qian-Ling. A man-made mountain, over three thousand feet high, Qian-Ling, like Area 51 and the Great Pyramid, was more than it appeared to be. In reality the Shadow had simply returned to the place where he had been “born,” and his memories absorbed.
Deep inside was an Airlia base, complete with a guardian computer. It was also the site where Artad, leader of one side of the Airlia, had gone into hibernation along with his followers. The outside of the mountain was now blackened soil, the foliage stripped bare by the Chinese government’s detonation of a nuclear weapon in a vain attempt to destroy the alien base. However, the same type of shield wall that protected Easter Island had limited the effect of the blast to the charring of the surface around the shield.
Inside the alien base, Lexina, the leader of the Ones Who Wait, had managed to gain entry to the lowest level of Qian-Ling and resurrect Artad and his followers. Now they were ignored as Artad accessed the guardian, assessing the situation in the outside world.
Artad was Airlia, standing almost seven feet tall and looking almost exactly like the Horus statue that had once guarded the entrance between the paws of the Great Sphinx. Red hair, red elongated eyes, six fingers, disproportional body — all indicated his alien heritage.
Artad rapidly processed information concerning the ten thousand years since he had gone into deep sleep, until he was current on the present situation: Aspasia’s Shadow was moving, using the power of the humans. He cloaked his forces with a shield that rendered them practically impervious to the weapons of the humans. Infecting those humans his forces contacted with a nanovirus to control them.
Artad did a search of the guardian’s database and frowned when he didn’t get the answer he was looking for. He stepped away from the guardian and went out of the chamber. His Kortad, Airlia who had come to Earth with him so long ago, were lined up, awaiting his orders.
“Excalibur?” he asked Ts’ang Chieh, the human court adviser from the days when his Shadow ruled as the Emperor Shi Huangdi, commander of all the known world. While he had been working the guardian, Ts’ang Chieh had been outside the chamber questioning Lexina.
“The key to the Master Guardian?” “Yes.”
“The humans — the Watchers, or those who had been Watchers — hid it long ago. So long ago that it is only a myth now.”
A strange look crossed Artad’s face, what in a human might have been considered a smile. “Foolish.” He crossed the chamber to a control panel. He waved his hands over it and a series of hexagons were backlit with runes written on them. Artad tapped out a code on the hexagons.
Near the top of the highest point on the planet three dead bodies lay on a narrow ledge in front of a frozen chamber that was little more than a four-foot- deep indentation at the top of an almost sheer cliff face. They were suddenly bathed in a red light as the sheath in which Excalibur’s blade was encased powered up. The glow was refracted by the ice around the crystal and pulsed out into the atmosphere.
A red hexagon in the upper right-hand corner of the panel came alive. Artad nodded ever so slightly, then tapped in a new code. The wall in front of him shimmered and went white. A circular image appeared, coming into focus until it was obvious it was the planet as if seen from space. Artad tapped the red hexagon and the planet quickly rotated, then froze in position with a red flashing dot on the surface. He tapped the red hexagon again and the image grew larger. The location was on the border between Nepal and Tibet, in the midst of the Himalayas.
Artad nodded — it made sense they would hide it there. While Excalibur was in the sheath no mechanical transportation could come within several miles of it, a safeguard built into the system so that he — or anyone else — couldn’t send a craft to swoop in and pick it up. The Watchers had placed it in the most inaccessible location on the face of the planet. There was only one way to retrieve the key. Artad turned to Ts’ang Chieh. “Where are the Ones Who Wait?”
“They are outside, my lord.”
“Bring them in.”
Lexina led her companions Elek and Coridan into the guardian chamber, bowing low, fearing to look up and meet the red eyes of the one they had waited to serve for millennia.
“Is there a way to communicate with those who now rule this land?” Artad asked. Lexina nodded, still keeping her head down. “Yes, my lord. We have radios. And their forces surround this area.”
“Good. I have a message I wish to send them.” His red eyes looked over the three Airlia-Human clones. “And I have a mission for you. Look up.”