Zawas laughed. “That curse is me, Yeats,” he said, leaning close. “I would have picked up your friend Mr. Johnson, but then he has a habit of attracting trouble.”
The word was barely out of Zawas’ mouth when suddenly a thunderous explosion lit up the harbor and rocked the yacht.
There were whoops and cheers from the tavern high in the cliffs. Zawas and his men ran to the other side of the deck to watch the Sea Academy light up the night.
Thank you, Hank Johnson.
Crew members from the harborside bars scrambled to get to the sinking ship. But rather than offer aid, their aim from what Conrad could see was to strip the ship of any and all valuables.
“Johnson!” Abdil cried out.
Then came a second, deafening explosion, sending Abdil ducking into a cabin as glowing debris rained down.
“Toldya there’s a curse,” Conrad called out.
Zawas came out from hiding, dazed and furious, waving the whip as he marched straight at him. “Show me the idol, Yeats!” he yelled like some movie villain. “Or I show you the whip!”
But a third explosion hit, rocking the deck and sending Zawas down on all fours. By now Conrad had freed himself. He climbed over the rail and jumped ship into the waters, leaving behind a tangle of empty ropes and a raging Zawas cursing after him into the night.
CHAPTER 2
Hank Johnson’s quest for the Queen of Sheba’s mines had begun in Geneva even before he met with Conrad Yeats in Cape Verde. On the morning of November 23, 2012, Hank slipped away from the Niantic project facility based at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics known as CERN to board a train to Zurich. He left with only his familiar backpack stuffed with maps and satellite overheads of a remote site in Africa.
The site, he hoped, of the legendary Queen of Sheba’s lost mines.
Hank’s official explanation for his sudden departure was that he had found something on an intel map and was off shooting the pilot for his new “Nomad” TV series.
The real story, however, was that he had traced “exotic matter” or XM patterns with a Reverse Big Bang Algorithm to the site — evidence of a significant portal. Portals were transdimensional anomalies through which ordered data was transmitted via XM. Nobody knew what was contained in this data, only that it was sequenced and thus engineered by some intelligence.
All of which begged the question of who or what was on the other side of these portals? Again, nobody knew. For the time being, whatever they were had been coined with the term “Shapers,” because it appeared that this ordered data in exotic matter had for centuries been shaping human thought and influencing human civilization. The existence of the world’s ancient shrines, monuments and cities around XM portals made the link indisputable.
A portal this big and this old in the jungles of Africa promised ancient ruins. For whatever reason, deposits of exotic matter seemed to be linked to religious shrines and cultural landmarks around the world, as well as rare earth minerals.
Those ruins, in turn, were probably hiding the famous gold mines.
If his hunch proved correct in Africa, Hank would call in Conrad to help him explore what was buried below. Conrad was about the only specialist from the outside he trusted for this sort of operation, even if Conrad dismissed exotic matter as a marker of ancient ruins in favor of his astronomical alignments.
Probably the same difference at the end of the day, and cosmically linked in some way.
Everything is.
On the train to Zurich, Hank texted his colleagues Calvin and Devra back at Niantic that he was sorry he hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye before setting off for his TV pilot. Especially since he had planted the idea in their heads that he wouldn’t be leaving until a few days later on the 26th. This way he’d have a jump on any tail they put on him.
Hank had many masters — Niantic, IQTech and others— but in many ways that made him the master. His cross-agency work gave him a unique drone’s-eye view of global intelligence and geopolitics.
It was a far cry from the narrow silos most operatives existed in, never sharing “their” intel with other agencies. How many inter-agency task force meetings had he attended where he was fully aware of the vital intel each agency knew but that none felt the others “needed” to know?
From his perch at least he could connect the dots that others missed. Ironically, this was the very reason he was so valuable to his different employers. Despite their distinct and at times competing agendas, each master knew what they were getting in Hank Johnson. His primary challenge then was keeping his stories straight with his respective master and not crossing his lines of communications.
He settled back in his seat and looked out the window at the gleaming caps of the Swiss Alps as the train slid through the wintry wonderland. The Congo promised an entirely different backdrop for his pilot, he thought as he pulled out his tablet from his pack and studied the coded image of the Queen of Sheba reclining in her garden.
The Queen of Sheba was just Hank’s kind of girclass="underline" straightforward on the surface, but more mysterious the deeper you go.
In very similar accounts, the books of First Kings and Second Chronicles in the Bible simply state that the Queen of Sheba, who has no name and comes from an otherwise unknown land, heard of the great wisdom of King Solomon of Israel and “his relations to the name of the LORD.”
So she appeared before Solomon in his spectacular Temple, bearing gifts of spices, gold and precious stones. She also tested him with questions. The accounts don’t record her questions, only that Solomon answered every one of them. In return for his wisdom, she paid Solomon with gold — more than four tons of it.
Straightforward story, except it didn’t make much sense. Why bring gold to somebody as rich as Solomon? What wisdom could be worth that much? Why hide the Queen of Sheba’s true home? The Bible, so specific with so many locations, is silent on this one. Did Solomon not know? Did he conceal it for a reason?
Ever since biblical times, guesses have been made as to the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines, ranging from Atlantis to Australia and even the Solomon Islands. But Hank always felt the pre-Islamic tradition was the most plausible, based on his research into ancient Arab trade routes in Africa. That tradition spoke of what was now Zimbabwe. But Hank doubted the Arab traders would have given up the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines any more easily than the Incas would have given up El Dorado.
It was Hank’s obsession with these early Arab trading routes — and the notion that key mines and points of distribution would be kept secret — that ultimately led him to the coded Queen of Sheba painting.
Now, together with Conrad’s star charts, this painting was pointing him to the Congo as the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines.
Hank leaned back, closed his eyes and thought about her predicament for a moment. If she came from sub-Saharan Africa, she had to pass through mighty Egypt without having her treasure confiscated or taxed and without encouraging a greedy Pharaoh to torture her for the source of the gold and take the mines for himself. So she had to conceal the location of the mines, hence a circuitous route.
Hank opened his eyes and studied the picture on his screen. It was probably copied from some earlier stele through contact stamping. That meant the image on the papyrus or paper was reversed. Using that orientation, the painting revealed that the two flower clusters behind the Queen of Sheba represented locations in the Congo, which Hank believed to be her gold mines. The green ferns, then, represented an elaborate network of trails to transport the gold. And blue flowers represented falls, or headwaters of the Nile, where the gold would be placed on barges.