According to Billie’s grandfather, the entrance shined golden red just once a year on the morning of the winter solstice. Billie’s eyes returned to the monastery’s stone fortification. Jeremy Follet carefully climbed the wooden ladder, carrying a lit monk’s candle.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Morning,” she replied. “You couldn’t sleep, either?”
“No. I didn’t trust my alarm with something like this.” He smiled at her, as though he understood what she was thinking. “We’re getting close to reaching it, aren’t we?”
She smiled, and nodded. “Closer than I’ve ever been.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re confident you have the right temple, this time?”
“Yes.” She watched him smile. Deep creases formed in his face, giving him an older, but rugged handsomeness. He had intelligent dark brown eyes. They were kindly, and full of love and admiration. He was her father’s best friend and her Godfather. He had a shallow cleft chin that some women found attractive. She imagined he would have been considered quite a handsome man in his youth. She looked up at him. “What is it?”
Jeremy said, “It’s an amazing achievement to get this close. Your father would have been so proud.”
“No. My father would have been furious with me for taking the risk.”
“Your grandfather lost his life following that dream.”
She turned her head so that he couldn’t meet her eyes, “You know as well as I do that it’s real, don’t you?”
He nodded in silence.
“Grandpa found it, didn’t he?”
Jeremy looked at her face, but she could tell he was envisioning a time long past. He nodded. “And it’s what got him killed, too. Some secrets weren’t ever supposed to be discovered.”
“Maybe. But soon I intend to find out exactly what those secrets were.”
Jeremy sat down on a small stone alcove. “I was afraid that’s what you were going to say.”
They both sat there in silence, until the sun penetrated the horizon. She measured the precise distance from the sun, to the horizon. The bright light reflected on a location, two thirds of the way up the ancient volcano dome of Ararat Greater.
She took out a small gadget that appeared to be nothing more than a hand held GPS with a telescopic lens. She focused it on the exact spot where the mountain turned red. It was fixed to a tripod, and she quickly ran her finger along the touch screen surface. She clicked the capture button once. Miles above Mount Ararat, eleven separate satellites triangulated the exact location where the light was set.
The expedition had been backed by big money. Professor Jeremy Follett had refused to disclose to her who his backer had been, but the money flowed well, and that was all she cared about. She’d never even thought why someone would spend so much money to provide the means to discover the location of the ancient civilization in the clouds.
Jeremy asked, “Do you know yet?”
She grinned. “I’ve got it, but it’s going to be one hell of a climb to reach.”
The Armenia-Turkey border was less than a mile away from Khor Virap. Billie Swan could clearly see the border’s fence and lookout towers from the monastery. She was close to where she needed to go, but the border was closed to everyone. The only way to reach Mount Ararat was to go through Georgia and then fly back to Turkey.
She left Khor Virap immediately. From Armenia they drove to Georgia and then flew into Istanbul, where the rest of the climbing team were preparing the heavier archeological equipment for transport. An old Bell Jet Ranger helicopter was hired to take them to the base of Mount Ararat with a small team of local guides. Once there, they spent three days acclimatizing on the lower outskirts of Mount Ararat and one day climbing the small nearby peak of Mount Hasan to an altitude of 10,672 feet before making the final ascent.
They hiked north on the Anatolia trail toward the sacred mountain. Leaving behind the juniper trees and fields of grass, often used for breeding sheep, she began her ascent. The remains of a monastery and village constructed on the mountain could be seen high above, where an avalanche in 1840 had destroyed all but a handful of small buildings, which had since been rebuilt.
The party stopped for a short rest at a Kurdish stone hamlet positioned at a little over six thousand feet. Nearby, a small boy tended to four goats without making eye-contact with any of the party. Billie stared up at the mountain peaks ahead. A deep, thick fog was setting in, burying their peaks in obscurity. She’d been warned not to climb during the height of winter, but what she needed to find couldn’t wait until summer and the safer climbing months. As the twin peaks of Mount Ararat disappeared, she turned her gaze to where they’d come from. She took in the sweeping views of the plains of Anatolia, which stretched all the way to the Black Sea. Her mind followed the landscape, drifting with it, all the way back to Istanbul and her recent discovery there.
When her late father died, she had received a digital key and number to a locked box for a Bank of Turkey located in Istanbul. It had been left there by her grandfather with a single note — If I don’t come back, it is imperative that you take this key and finish my research. The note had been for her father, and not for her. It was only when she was going over some of her father’s things with her mother that she found the key. Her mother had warned her that it was likely to be something her grandfather had been involved in and it was best to leave some things alone. Billie had nodded with graceful understanding. She swiftly took the key and flew to Istanbul — to find answers.
Instead, she found more questions. The locked box contained hundreds of handwritten notes on an ancient race, who had been genetically and physically superior to other people of their time. She had spent nearly three months sifting through them before she found what she was after.
This was the first positive lead she’d found in nearly two years of searching for her grandfather. It was the first time she’d discovered confirmation of where he’d been looking for the temple before he died — if he was even dead? She recalled his note, which had made her heart race.
The golden gates of the Temple of Illumination, high up on Mount Ararat, will only be revealed to those who are present at Khor Virap during the sunrise of the winter’s solstice.
From there, everything had moved quickly. Her window of opportunity was about to close. It hadn’t left her with a lot of time to prepare, and if she missed it she would have to wait another year to pick up the lost trail — a thought entirely abhorrent to her.
The next day, Jeremy Follett, one of her closest allies in the world of archeology and lifelong friend of her late father, arrived with funding for the expedition. Guides needed to be hired, equipment sourced, bribes made, and passes obtained to climb the mountain. She hired Ahmet. He had a surly disposition, and sense of superiority to women that made her instantly disdain the man, but he’d been guiding in the region for the better part of twenty-five years, and had an excellent reputation. More importantly, he could leave immediately. Five local men were taken on to help carry the heavy equipment. She had left Ahmet in Istanbul while she and Jeremy had traveled to Khor Virap to witness the sunrise of winter’s solstice.
They left the Kurdish hamlet. The slope toward Mount Ararat steepened and Billie returned her attention to the task at hand. She maintained a constant speed, at first matching the rate of the local guides, and then surpassing it to set her own pace. She was tall and lithesome. She moved with the assertive gait of an athlete. Even in shapeless mountaineering clothes, she had a willowy elegance about her as she climbed.