“Free will?” Aspasia’s Shadow shook his head, indicating what he thought of that concept. “You are very ignorant and naive and know nothing of what you speak. You talking about free will is rather ironic if you are what I think you are.”
“What do you mean?”
Aspasia’s Shadow shook his head. “You will either discover what you are looking for or you won’t; it is not my concern. There are larger issues than the things you think you are concerned with.”
That made no sense to Duncan, and she wondered if he was trying to confuse her. “How did this all start?” she asked.
“How it started isn’t important,” Aspasia’s Shadow said. “The end is all that counts. And that is coming very soon.”
“Why did the Airlia come here?”
“That is not important.”
“Why are you here? Why is the Grail so important?”
“You have no idea what you have,” Aspasia’s Shadow said. “If you—”
“I know more than you think,” Duncan cut him off, tired of his threats and his declarations of her ignorance.
“You are not who you’ve pretended to be,” Aspasia’s Shadow said. “I should have known of you, the one who uncovered Area 51, who stopped Majestic-12. Your Captain Turcotte killed Aspasia and stopped the fleet, but you were the one who started it all, who put Turcotte in place to do those things. Does he know he is being used? Does he know who you really are? Do you know who you really are?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “There have been others like you before, those who upset the delicate balance and caused great grief and death. You’ve hidden well, Doctor Duncan, but you cannot hide anymore.”
“You babble,” Duncan said. “You are old and need to be put down like a mad dog.”
A cruel smile curled Aspasia’s Shadow’s thin lips. “You try to bait me. Very good. But I have lived a long time and met enemies much greater than you and defeated them all. I am still here and they have long ago turned to dust.”
Duncan crossed her arms on top of the essen. “So you think. But I’m where you want to be. Did you talk to those old enemies like you talk to me? Did they hold what you want?”
“But will it do you any good?” Aspasia’s Shadow asked. His eyes went up and down her, noting the garments. “Do you have everything you need?” Once more he didn’t wait for an answer. “When you find you don’t, we will talk again.”
Aspasia’s Shadow turned and disappeared into the tunnel that led out of the Ark chamber. Duncan went back inside the veil and looked at the Grail. Once more she put her hand over one end. It opened and the empty depression appeared. She knew that was what Aspasia’s Shadow had meant when he’d asked her if she had all she needed. The stones were needed for the Grail to work and the alien creature had known it. Did he have them? And if he did, how could she get them from him? Or were they hidden as so many other Airlia artifacts had been?
The chamber around her seemed smaller than before, the weight of the plateau above a palpable presence. She was safe for the moment, but she now knew she was also powerless.
Duncan stood by the veil, the four bodies her only company. She looked up to the top of the chamber, but her mind went further, through the rock, to the surface, into the sky. She knew Mike Turcotte would come for her. The thought did not give her as much comfort as it had a few days ago. She turned back toward the Grail, troubled by the words of Aspasia’s Shadow.
There was something lurking at the edge of her subconscious trying to come forward, but she couldn’t draw it out. Her eyes rested on the Grail, sensing in it a key to unlock whatever it was that was hidden in her mind.
CHAPTER 3
Flat brown desert floor, broken abruptly by steep, rock-strewn mountains, made for uninviting terrain in the southern center of Nevada. A hundred and twenty miles northwest of Las Vegas, nestled between seven-thousand-foot mountain ranges, lay Groom Lake. It might have once held water, but now the flat lakebed contained a seven-mile-long concrete runway, the longest in the world. Many had thought that Area 51 had been located at Groom Lake because of the remote and desolate nature of the surrounding countryside — a good place to hide things the government didn’t want prying eyes to see.
Actually, the opposite was true. In the early days of World War II, military reconnaissance teams found hidden in a massive cavern under Groom Mountain something so startling and foreign to the planet that the government immediately knew it had to keep the discovery secret. The alien object was so immense — over a mile long and a quarter mile at its widest — that there was no way to move the alien mothership, at least until the drive system for it was figured out.
As more alien artifacts were discovered, the greatest being the nine bouncers, the installation at Groom Lake grew in size and secrecy. The site was labeled on the Nellis Air Base reservation map as Area 51. Until the uncovering of Majestic-12, the ruling body at Area 51 since its founding, the United States government never admitted the base even existed, even though photos of the surface facilities were posted on the Internet. But today, as Mike Turcotte could see out of the side of the bouncer, secrecy seemed to be the last thing on anyone’s mind.
News vans were parked all around the edge of the Groom Lake runway. It was a far cry from the days when even climbing one of the mountains surrounding the Area 51 complex could land a person in jail or much worse if they were picked up by Landscape, the inner security force of Majestic-12. Despite the presence of the media at the previously highly classified facility, Mike Turcotte felt that they were as far from the “truth” as they had ever been.
The bouncer floated down the side of Groom Mountain, the large hangar doors sliding open. As soon as it touched down, Turcotte was first out of the hatch, followed by Yakov, Che Lu, and the rest of the A-Team. Mualama’s sight had slowly returned to him during the flight, and he followed the old Chinese woman off.
As Turcotte appeared, reporters and cameramen flowed through the open doors, surrounding the bouncer. Sliding down the side of the bouncer, Turcotte was met with a thicket of microphone booms. He knifed his way through, trying to reach Major Quinn, who was standing behind the reporters clamoring for information about what was going on with the Airlia, the Guides, The Ones Who Wait, The Mission, the nuclear explosion in China, and Lisa Duncan’s location.
“Get these people out of here!” Turcotte yelled to Quinn.
The Major raised his hands and pointed at the two military police officers who were trying to control twenty times their number. “That’s all I have.” Turcotte spun about. Captain Billam was exiting the bouncer with his team behind him. Master Sergeant Boltz, the team sergeant wounded in Moscow, was being hauled out on a stretcher. Che Lu was almost hidden among the hulking team members.
“Clear this hangar,” Turcotte ordered Billam.
Seeing the hesitation in Billam’s face, Turcotte pulled his 9mm pistol from its holster. That gained him a couple of feet of space as the closest reporters and cameramen pressed back away from him.
Turcotte fired twice into the air, aiming out of the hangar toward the desert. A moment of silence descended on the crowd, followed by the curses of the media representatives, threatening lawsuits. Turcotte lowered the pistol and aimed it at the closest reporter. “You have thirty seconds to get out of this hangar.”
The reporter opened her mouth to say something, then noted the look in Turcotte’s eyes and how steady his hand was. She turned and pushed her way out of the circle. The others followed. As soon as the last one was out of the hangar, the large doors slid shut.
“What the hell is going on?” Turcotte demanded of Quinn. “Where is security?”