The Lucifer Gospel

13

“I’ve been here for two weeks and there’s been nothing out of the ordinary,” said Finn. She and Hilts were in the dining room on a coffee break. For the past two weeks they’d barely exchanged a dozen words. Hilts had flown a seemingly endless series of flights charting a low-altitude grid around the dig site and Finn had made exact drawings of a seemingly endless series of pottery shards. “Maybe Adamson really is operating on the up-and-up.”

Hilts pulled a face. “I don’t have to remind you about what happened in Cairo.”

“Which might have had more to do with you than me.”

Hilts sighed. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“If Adamson was out to kill me, why would he have wanted me on the expedition staff in the first place?”

“Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, as the Godfather once said.”

Finn laughed. “I think the quote is actually Sun Tzu from The Art of War, but I get your point… only how did I get to be Adamson’s enemy?”

Hilts played with the lip of his coffee cup. “I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about that. The only thing I could think of was Mickey Hearts.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”

“Sorry… Mr. Valentine. Anyway, he’s the only thing that makes sense, the only connection.”

“How do you figure?”

“He got you the job, didn’t he?”

“I like to think my qualifications had something to do with it.”

“No offense, sweetheart, but there’s a lot of technical illustrators out there with a lot more experience than you. And how did you hear about the job in the first place?”

“My faculty advisor told me about it.”

“How did he know about it?”

“He said he had a friend who told him about it.”

“Check it out. I bet you’ll find out that the friend in question was Mickey… your Mr. Valentine.”

“Why would Michael put my life in jeopardy?”

“Did he say anything to you before you left New York?”

“I put him down as a reference for the job. I called to make sure it was okay.”

“What did he say?”

“He said fine. He seemed to know about the job already.”

“And?”

“He told me to be careful.”

“A warning?”

“I didn’t think so at the time. I thought he was talking about foreign travel, watching out for pickpockets, that kind of thing.”

“And now?” Hilts asked.

Finn paused, thinking. Hilts started tearing little chunks out of the top of his foam cup. “Now I guess I’m not so sure anymore. It could have been a warning, but that still doesn’t answer my question. Why would he knowingly send me into danger? That is, if he got me the job in the first place, which is what you seem to think.”

“I wondered about that too. I think maybe your friend thought he was doing you a favor at first, but something changed his mind.”

“Like what?”

“Like he found out something.”

“Found out something like what?”

“Like this,” said Hilts, keeping his voice low. He reached into the pocket of his worn and faded fatigue jacket and brought out a device only a little larger than a cell phone.

Finn looked at the tiny piece of electronics. “What is it?”

“A Garmin i-Que.”

“I’m not too good at the hi-tech stuff,” said Finn. “Words that an art history major can understand.”

“It’s a GPS recorder, as in Global Positioning System.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Have you been keeping track of our esteemed leader?”

“Qaddafi? No, I’m not in the dictator’s loop.”

“Ha-ha. Adamson. Particularly Adamson and his pals Kuhn and Hisnawi, our man from Museums and Antiquities.”

“I’ve been far too busy drawing little pictures of broken pieces of thousand-year-old clay pots, which are of no interest whatsoever.”

“I’m busy flying patterns with the Polish answer to powered flight most days, which is probably just about as boring as sketching old chamber pots, but it does have one advantage.”

“Which is?”

“I’m at twelve thousand feet. I get to see a lot. Mostly sand.”

“Get to the point.”

“Every day for the last week or so Adamson, Kuhn, and Hisnawi take out one of those desert Hummers and head out into the desert.”

“How do you know it’s them?” asked Finn.

Hilts reached into his pocket again and took out a crumpled piece of photo paper. “As well as regular film cameras, Adamson uses a Belgian thing called a DIMAC… Digital Modular Aerial Camera. Like most aerial cameras it’s set to take slightly oblique images… from the side, to give shadow and scale.” He smoothed out the picture on the table. It was fuzzy, but the faces were clear. “It’s Adamson, Hisnawi, and the German, no doubt about it. I downloaded the shot onto my laptop, enhanced it and blew it up.” Finn looked at the picture. All three were visible, Adamson behind the wheel, Hisnawi on the seat beside him, and Kuhn seated in the back. Something was in the truck bed, covered with a tarp.

Finn shrugged. “So what? Hisnawi, Kuhn, and Adamson go for rides in the desert, what’s the big deal?”

Hilts prodded the little GPS device. “I managed to slip this behind the spare tire of Adamson’s personal Hummer, the yellow and black one that looks like a giant bumblebee? They go to the exact same coordinates every time.”

“Where?”

“One hundred and eight miles almost due west of here.” He punched a button on the device to retrieve the numbers. “North twenty-one degrees, fifty-two minutes, and thirty seconds by east twenty-three degrees, thirty-two minutes, eighteen seconds, to be absolutely precise.”

“What’s there?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Be logical, Hilts, there has to be something there or they wouldn’t be going.”

“According to the charts it’s at the edge of a small plateau. If the sky were red you could be on Mars. Rocks and sand.”

Finn sighed. “Mars has an atmosphere. The sky is actually blue.”

“Sorry, Dr. Ryan.”

“I had to take a couple of straight science courses. One of them was astrophysics.”

“The point is, there really is nothing there. I even checked to see if it was on one of the old caravan routes. Nada. Just more rocks and sand until you get to the Algerian border.”

“What happens then?”

“You get Algerian rocks and sand instead of Libyan rocks and sand.”

“You really are a pain, you know that, don’t you?”

“It’s a gift.”

“What do you think is out there, Hilts?”

“I think they found what they were actually looking for.”

“Which is?”

“Only one way to find out.”