The Alignment Ingress Read Online Free

wardrobe, hair and make-up to his relatives. “It will be my pleasure.”
    “Great. Now here is where I’ll need those props delivered.” He handed Garamba a carefully marked map.
    The smile dropped from Garamba’s face.
    Hank hoped it was for all the right reasons. “Something wrong, my friend?”
    “There is a reason locals have not exploited this area,” Garamba began. “And it is not because it is a disputed tribal region. There is an ancient legend about this particular part of the jungle. There are said to be monsters.”
    “Monsters?” Hank smirked.
    Garamba chose his words carefully, as if wanting to avoid any association with the uneducated class. “Locals don’t talk about it much. But they say that it is a place of ‘bad death.’ Medieval Muslims wrote of it as the haunt of the Jinn, and Christian missionaries have reported hearing tales of demons in the region. Local officials cannot confirm the tales of people going into this jungle and never coming out.”
    The only fear Garamba betrayed was that he might have scared this rich American production away.
    “I love it!” Hank assured him, slapping the man’s slight shoulder. “This will be perfect for the show.”
    For where there be bogus monsters, Hank Johnson believed, there be real treasures too.
    NIANTIC LINKS
    Tycho poster #3 of 5 - Afghanistan
    The Viator Transcripts #1
    The Viator Transcripts #2
    The Viator Transcripts #3
    The Viator Transcripts #4
    The Viator Transcripts #5
    Activating Rosier-Internal Niantic Communication

CHAPTER 3
    Meroe, Sudan
    T he sands of time had erased any trace of the lost palace of the Queen of Sheba. But the stars above revealed an illuminated path for Conrad Yeats to follow in his open jeep across the desert of Sudan to the Nubian pyramids of Meroe.
    Every now and then he’d glance up to check the location of the three “wise men”—the alpha stars Arcturus, Spica and Regulus—which formed a triangle framing the constellation Virgo. The “Virgin in the Sky” was a celestial map of the ancient pyramid fields on the ground, which Conrad believed were built to hide the even earlier ruins of the Queen of Sheba’s palace. And where there was once her palace, surely he’d find her tomb below, and inside her tomb the answers he had been searching for his whole life.
    For all his achievements as a “post-modern” archaeologist in academia —Conrad believed that the information ancient ruins revealed about their builders was more valuable than the ruins themselves—he was still considered something of a smash-and-grab artist in the field.
    This rap disturbed him. Especially as what he was about to do in Meroe would only confirm the worst suspicions about him.
    He pulled off the road for a minute, stuffed his pack with the Glock pistol and C4 under his seat, and then drove on.
    It was true he often went into a site alone, without a full field crew, to avoid drawing attention and to go for the kill in a single dig. That meant he wasn’t digging holes all over the world like the rest of them. Measure twice, dig once was his motto. So, in effect, he was preserving Planet Earth, if only environmentalists like Serena Serghetti would notice.
    And, yes, it was true that once he had “smashed” a find and “grabbed” all its information, he split. He didn’t take artifacts with him, and he wasn’t concerned about “credit” for a find like the university suck-ups. He certainly wasn’t up for sticking around the ruins like they were shrines, or engaging in the endless, self-justifying work of cataloging his discovery for years afterward, publishing paper after paper for research dollars. Or, worst of all, condemning grad students to his digs like chain gangs to bolster his legend.
    But what bothered him most was how the irony of it all was lost on his critics: They would have nothing to complain about without the archaeological treasures he left behind for them.
    This area of the Nile valley known as