“The mullahs won’t last for long. Mark my words. The pharaohs will return to Egypt. We will make Egypt great again.”
“Tell me when they do, Zawas, because I don’t see any here.”
Zawas smiled. “I was warned about you, Conrad Yeats. You make everything a joke.”
“Not everything, Zawas. You did a good job on yourself.”
“We’ll see how funny you think Doctor Omar is in the morning. He’s a real doctor, not like you,” Zawas said. “He’ll get you to talk, tell me more about this medallion made out of a fiery black metal. A medallion that could lead me to the Queen of Sheba’s gold.”
“Gold?” Conrad asked. “That’s what this is all about? You’re just after money?”
“Of course I want gold. Who would take the American dollar? I would use it to blow my nose if it were more absorbent,” Zawas said. “At one time it was pegged to gold and worth something. Then President Nixon went off the gold standard. It was Henry Kissinger who, with my family’s advice, got the Saudis to peg the U.S. dollar to oil. The House of Saud and the United States have been joined at the hip since, all thanks to the petrodollar. Any country that wants to buy oil has to pay for it in U.S. dollars. The United States, meanwhile, can simply print those dollars to buy its oil.”
“And all good things must come to an end, is that it?”
“Yes, especially now the Russians and Chinese have moved to price oil in currencies other than dollars. If that should actually happen, if the U.S. dollar is no longer backed by the price of oil, then it becomes what we all know it already is — worthless. And all of Uncle Sam’s billions in aid to Egypt’s armed forces, outside of hardware, evaporates.”
“And you think some gold mine is going to save you?”
“No. I think the alchemy that creates gold is going to save me. And Doctor Omar is going to get it out of you.”
CHAPTER 10
With the discovery of the ancient resonators in the jungle on everybody’s radar now, Hank could assume that Chen, the psycho tech geek from Strategic Explorations, would be trying to claim the portal, just as Hank was. SE was out there somewhere. Hank knew he had to max the portal to level eight, shield it and get the keys to Calvin. Niantic could sit on remote recharge until they could get somebody out here to watch this place.
A few hours and only a few hundred meters away from where he had dodged the drone attack, Hank peered into his Ingress scanner. The faint outline of an unclaimed portal suggested a central “altar” surrounded by eight tantalum, inlaid neolithic resonators in Ingress formation.
He could only marvel at the brilliance of the ancients. By what process had they figured out that tantalum reacted to an invisible transdimensional substance? How had they figured out the octagonal resonation pattern? Niantic’s chief scientist Lynton-Wolfe had nearly crashed the Niantic servers calculating it. Was it lost science or primitive sensitive instinct?
The immediate question, however, was how these ancient resonators were about to interface with 21st-century technology. If it was anything like the time he tried to marry his father’s 1950’s stereo with his modern portable music player, the outcome might not be so pretty.
But it was now or never.
Hank selected a resonator from the Ingress software interface and hit the button.
Deploy.
Everything suddenly crackled green around him. The scenery before his eyes changed. Even the sky seemed to shift color. He felt a rush in his inner ear, and then…
Hank was back at Cahokia Mounds, his first real dig two decades ago, young and naive, excited about discovery.
At that very moment, half a world away, the operative known as 802 for Niantic Labs had just arrived at the Cahokia Mounds in southern Illinois.
It was the dead of winter, already dark at 4:59 CST on January 27, with icy winds whipping across the American Plains.
Now, after a bumpy plane flight and stolen rental car, 802 was freezing his butt off with sixty other Ingress players in some little town just outside St. Louis amid the closest things the USA has to ancient pyramids, in the ruins of a city that in 1256 was as large as London.
Niantic Project investigators had received an “emergent anomaly indicator” that there was going to be an “event” at the portal at Cahokia Mounds involving what they referred to as the Exotic Essence of Henry Holland “Hank” Johnson, a researcher on the Niantic Project who was believed to be in the Congo at this very moment.
802 had asked one of the higher-ups what Exotic Essence was, and he got a convoluted answer about quantum entanglement of a person and an XM-rich site through repeated and intense exposure. 802 was one of the few on the team without a PhD, but having hung around the eggheads long enough, he’d gotten good at parsing what they were saying. “You mean, they left a piece of their soul at the portal.”
“We do not use the term soul,” the attractive Asian scientist had said. “Soul is in the realm of theology, we are in the realm of physics. The state of particles and energy patterns in sensitives can become entangled with the state of matter at certain sites. In a sense, part of the sensitive stays at the site. They can be influenced by it throughout their lives.”
“You use the term ghost?”
“No. We try not to delve into the realm of popular culture either. And as Mr. Johnson is, by all appearances, still alive, it would not be an appropriate term.” She was having fun with him. That was OK, he was having fun with her. After a lifetime as a “cleaner” at various three-letter agencies, it was a fun job.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Just be there. Report what you see. It will be of great interest to us to see whether the Enlightened or the Resistance control the portal at 5 p.m.”
His watched signaled 5 o’clock had arrived. He peered into his Ingress app. A shout went up. It was green. The Enlightened had won. 802 would be buying beers. No part of him believed that this was going to have any effect on a Niantic scientist several thousand miles away sweltering in a jungle.
Hank’s mind snapped back to the present. As the resonator came online, the portal began to glow green and bright for the first time in probably millennia. Lights flashed in the jungle. Some kind of energy surged within him. He didn’t know it yet, but he was enlightened.
Power coursed through his body as Hank deployed seven more resonators. On screen Hank saw the last resonator drop into one of the pre-defined octant slots, the perfect point in space where string theory meets Euclidean geometry.
And then suddenly it was all over. The ancient portal was now pulsing bright green, radiating with stable and elucidating energy.
Hank had never felt more alive.
Back inside the production van not far away, Rosier watched what was happening to Hank from the monitors while Michaels could see it with his own eyes from behind the bulletproof windows.
Hank was standing at the edge of a portal, the ancient stone resonators flashing all around him. The portal suddenly lit up like a bonfire of green XM. Sparks flew everywhere.
The skyline was green with XM. XM clusters erupted. And for a few moments, it was all visible to the naked eye.
It was spectacular, at least to the spectators.
Rosier zoomed in on Hank, who was just standing there, holding his scanner like Benjamin Franklin controlling his kite in a thunderstorm. He was motionless, bathed in cosmic fireworks.