Thirty miles from Mexico City, at the base of the towering Temple of the Sun, under the chiseled stone gaze of the Aztec sun god Uitzilopochtli, hundreds of men and women toiled in the sweltering heat.
Perspiring day laborers gouged the ground with picks and shovels, tossing clots of earth into sifters—large barrels with wire mesh bottoms used to separate out rocks and pebbles, bits of metal or pottery, and anything else larger than a Mexican peso. Archaeologists and graduate assistants scrabbled on their hands and knees, picking at the ground with garden shovels to unearth shards of broken pottery and blobs of lead fired from the guns of conquistadors 400 years before.
The founder of this excavation project, Professor Sebastian De Rosa, observed the controlled chaos from the fringes of the site. De Rosa was an athletically built man with a face that reflected both the olive-skinned warmth of his Sicilian mother and the chiseled, patrician angles of his Florentine father. It was to his father, a steely pilot who’d flown for Mussolini in World War II before becoming a successful businessman, that Sebastian owed his tenacity and nerve. From his mother came his remarkable composure, patience and charm—attributes admired by most of his students and many of his peers.
As the professor walked the perimeter of the site, however, an approaching limousine with a Republic of Mexico seal set Sebastian’s characteristic cool on edge. Waving off a bandana-clad site manager, the professor changed the direction of his stroll to coincide with the arrival of the vehicle.
The black limousine, grimy from the road, was heading for an area beside the main site that had been established as a staff camp. Tents were pitched, and a bank of portable plastic outhouses had been erected downwind. There was a mess hall with a kitchen and a makeshift shower made from a barrel suspended over a square of water-stained plywood planks.
Beyond the camp, a dusty clearing was overrun with battered pickup trucks, grimy Land Rovers, dented Jeeps, and three faded yellow school buses used to transport the day workers to and from the surrounding Mexican towns. Those laborers—carpenters, electricians, diggers—ranged in age from energetic teenagers to weather-beaten old men. All spoke Spanish, smoked American cigarettes, wore dusty jeans, and drank cervezas from the early afternoon until late at night.
As Sebastian passed the tents to meet the limo, he waved to a group of graduate students taking a cerveza break themselves. All were young, enthusiastic and American. They wore fashionable, name-brand gear—Banana Republic shorts, L.L. Bean boots, J. Crew vests and jackets—and as “associates” and “archaeological assistants,” they were handed the worst jobs on the site, which was, of course, the academic order of things. As one grad student had put it on a sign over his tent, in that typically blunt American fashion: “Grunt Work Is Our Fate.”
It wasn’t easy being a neophyte, and Sebastian well remembered the arduous, eternal centuries of paying his dues. But before basking in the glories of published papers, private grants, and Good Morning America appearances, this uber-educated breed had to earn its chops through painstaking study and tedious labor at archaeological digs.
Higher on the excavation’s pecking order were the specialists: computer experts, technicians, archaeologists, anthropologists and site managers, all under Sebastian’s direct supervision. As he continued moving to approach the limousine, they continually approached him with questions, demands or proposals. He slipped past them all with the serene calm and soothing apologetic words that usually salved the bruised egos of Type A professionals whose demands were either denied or ignored.
Unfortunately, Sebastian’s brand of cool charm registered zero on the efficacy scale of the slightly wrinkled government suit who climbed out of her limousine strangling a sheaf of papers in one manicured hand.
“Ms. Arenas, how delightful to see you,” Sebastian began, relieved to see that it was not her boss, Minister Juan Ramirez, who was paying a visit. He smiled with sincerity as he strained to find a few pleasant aspects of the woman’s demeanor on which to concentrate.
One of the more valuable things he’d learned growing up in the long shadow of his father, the gregarious, highly driven, and deceptively easygoing head of his own import-export business, was to concentrate on the positives during human interactions. In Ms. Arenas’s case, Sebastian settled on her lovely, somewhat intelligent eyes and admirable hygiene.
“I see you’ve received my report,” he pleasantly told the woman, glancing curiously at the choking fist she’d made around his perfectly innocent papers. “Have you had the time to read it yet?”
“This is very troubling, Dr. De Rosa. Very troubling indeed,” said Olga Arenas, the assistant minister of the interior for the Republic of Mexico. “You have been promising results for three months now, but so far we have seen nothing. This report only confirms your failure. When the minister reads this, he will be furious.”
“We’re close,” Sebastian lied smoothly. “Very close.”
The woman frowned. “You’ve been ‘close’ for a year and a half.”
Perspiring, Ms. Arenas tugged at the lapels of her slightly wrinkled business suit and squinted up at the hot afternoon sun. Sensing her anger, Sebastian thought it best to put the woman’s negative energy to better use. Hoping his “motion spends emotion” lecture to his students worked equally well in application, he began a brisk walk right through the debris-strewn center of the busy site. Ms. Arenas trailed him, stumbling unsteadily on high heels as she crossed the broken ground.
“Archaeology is not an exact science,” Sebastian told her.
Ms. Arenas opened her mouth to speak, but her reply was drowned out by the sudden roar of a gasoline-powered motor, followed by loud cheers.
Dr. De Rosa waved his encouragement to the men who’d managed to get the generator started—two electrical engineers and a retired electronics expert from the United States Navy. They had set up an experimental sonar device that was—theoretically—capable of detecting underground buildings, tombs, ruins or other solid structures buried by the passing of centuries. But testing their device had been impossible because the gasoline-powered electric generator had been broken for days.
As the generator’s juice now flowed to the sonar device, the navy man threw a switch, and the sonar screen sprang to life. The triumph was short-lived, however. In a shower of sparks and a blast of black smoke, the generator exploded. Tongues of fire leaped into the sky until a quick-thinking bystander doused the machine with an extinguisher.
At this sight, Sebastian frowned. And Ms. Arenas scowled.
“I don’t see any science here at all, Professor,” said the woman, her lovely eyes hard, her hot tone apparently unwilling to be put on ice.
Most unfortunate, thought Sebastian.
Concluding that the woman would not be charmed, he resorted to one last trick. Turning quickly, the professor attempted to flee from the bureaucratic barracuda. But his escape route was blocked by a bank of sifting barrels, and Ms. Arenas pounced.
“You’re holding up the development of this land for tourism at great cost to the Mexican government,” she barked. “The Ministry of the Interior gave you a permit to dig for eighteen months. Your time is up, Professor.”
“Now wait a minute—”
But it was Olga Arenas who stalked away this time. “Results by the end of the week or we pull the plug!” she called over her shoulder.
Sebastian De Rosa squinted in the burning sun as the woman climbed back into her limousine and sped off. Cursing, he kicked a rock into the bush, then sagged against a tree. He and his team had been working like tireless mules for eighteen months and had found nothing. How was he going to make a significant discovery in only five days, let alone prove his theory about the origin of Mesoamerican culture and civilization? Impossible.
He cursed himself for not working harder on the politics. Only recently, Sebastian had learned that a rival archaeologist had been working behind his back to gain the ear of Mexico’s minister of cultural affairs, the influential and no doubt corrupt Juan Ramirez. The unknown rival had undermined Sebastian, speaking out against his project, his theories, and against him.
Such predatory behavior was nothing new in the academic world, and nothing new to Sebastian. After all, he’d grown up admiring his father’s ability to best men who would smile in his face while thrusting a self-serving dagger in his gut. But what Sebastian hadn’t expected was the campaign of personal and professional destruction that had been waged against him ever since he’d broken with the herd to question a few of the cherished “facts” of modern archaeology—a scientific discipline he had naively assumed was in pursuit of the truth.
The controversy had begun when Sebastian had published his doctoral dissertation challenging the notion that the Egyptian pharaoh Cheops had built the Great Pyramid. When irate Egyptologists had demanded that he prove his “absurd” theory, Sebastian had published a second paper—his own translation of the inscriptions found on the mysterious “Inventory Stela” discovered in the ruins of the Temple of Isis in the 1850s. A record of the pharaoh Cheops’s reign carved in limestone, the inscriptions clearly indicate that both the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx were already on the Giza plateau long before Cheops was even born.
This second paper was the academic equivalent of setting a hornet’s nest on fire. The implications of Sebastian’s theory, if proven, were staggering and would change recorded human history. And Sebastian had gone even further. He’d declared that the Great Pyramid and Sphinx were both far older than the Egyptian civilization that had sprung up in their shadows, and both were likely the remnants of an older and still unknown civilization.
Dr. Sebastian’s reputation had suffered after the mainstream press had misrepresented this theory. Upon obtaining a copy of his dissertation, a Boston tabloid reporter had twisted his ideas. Hence the unfortunate headline: “Archaeologist Claims People from Atlantis Built the Pyramid.”
Other tabloids had picked up on this misrepresentation, and the resulting wave of speculation among the Roswell, UFO, X-Files crowd had done little to uplift Dr. De Rosa’s reputation among his peers.
Of course, Dr. De Rosa had never uttered the word “Atlantis,” and he publicly objected to the simplistic characterization of his research. But the damage had already been done, and all his protestations only threw more fuel on the fire.
Since the publication of those first erroneous reports, Dr. Sebastian De Rosa’s work had been both praised and condemned in the archaeological community—but mostly the latter. Sebastian generally ignored his critics and doggedly pressed on with his quest to find the connection between the pyramid-building civilizations of the Nile Valley and those in Central and South America. Two years ago, that quest had landed him in Mexico, where he’d been granted a rare opportunity to examine a unique and inexplicable artifact.
In the 1960s, a peasant farmer was digging around at the base of the Temple of the Sun when he unearthed a burial chamber filled with priceless Mesoamerican artifacts. The farmer later claimed to have discovered vessels, implements of gold, and other finds his untrained mind could not recognize. Most of the stuff was sold on the black market and vanished, but one object fell into the hands of a Mexican archaeologist curious enough about its origins to pursue the matter back to the farmer himself.
It was a metal object roughly the size and shape of a U.S. mint silver dollar. The artifact was inscribed with characters that resembled the earliest form of hieroglyphics used by the Egyptians. Potassium-argon dating techniques that accurately measure when a metallic ore was last heated to a temperature above 227 degrees Fahrenheit subsequently revealed that the artifact was made around 3000 B.C.—about the time the Egyptians first developed their pictographic writing system.
But how, Dr. De Rosa asked himself, could such an object appear in Mesoamerica, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean from the cradle of Egyptian civilization in the Nile Valley—long before any known human culture existed in the rain forests of Central America? The tenets of traditional archaeology could not answer that question, so the object was declared a forgery by the prevailing experts and locked away in a vault at the Universidad de Mexico until Dr. De Rosa received permission to study it three decades later.
After a careful examination, Sebastian concluded that the artifact was genuine and that it represented the first physical link between Egyptian and Mesoamerican civilizations ever unearthed. But he also knew that the only way he could convince other archaeologists that the object was real was to somehow “repeat the experiment.” In other words, unearth a similar object buried at around the same time at the same site—probably over a burial chamber similar to the one the farmer discovered forty years before. So when Sebastian De Rosa learned that the Mexican government was preparing to build on the land around the Temple of the Sun, he appealed to the president of Mexico for the time and the funds to search for just such an artifact.
For a year and a half Sebastian De Rosa and his team had been hunting and had come up empty-handed. Now their time had run out.
“Professor! Professor!”
Sebastian looked up, glad for the distraction. Marco, a worker hired locally, was waving a long sheet of computer paper over his head. Marco’s job was to scan the ground with a metal detector mounted on a long pole. The data collected by that device was fed to a laptop computer manned by Thomas, an archaeologist Sebastian had trained himself and a digital imaging specialist whose job it was to interpret the vague, shifting forms that appeared on his monitor.
“Over here!” Sebastian called to Marco.
Breathless, Marco crossed the excavation site, and, with a Cheshire cat grin, he thrust the computer printout into the archaeologist’s hand.
“We found it!” Marco declared as Sebastian examined the image on the printout.
“Where?”
Around the Temple of the Sun a series of deep, long trenches had been excavated by Sebastian’s team. The main trench was close to six feet deep. Marco pointed in the direction of that main trench, and Sebastian took off in a run, legs and arms pumping.
By the time Sebastian arrived, the diggers had already abandoned the pit and stood on the edge watching, curious to see what all the excitement was about. Only Thomas remained at the bottom of the deep trench, waiting for Dr. De Rosa to arrive. Sebastian leaped into the middle of the pit and paused to study the digital image on the computer sheet once again. The printout indicated that a solid object—round and possibly metal—was buried just beneath the earth under his feet.
Dropping to his knees, Sebastian fingered the rich, black soil. Marco leaped into the trench to kneel next to the archaeologist. Around them, work ceased as rumors of a major find raced through the site.
“It’s right here,” Marco said, patting the ground with the flat of his hand. “Thomas says it could be metal of some kind.”
Sebastian looked up at Thomas. The computer expert leaned against the wall of the trench, arms folded, his open laptop perched on a wooden crate.
“What do you think?”
Thomas pondered the question. “It’s too small to be the chamber.”
Sebastian waved the comment away. “Of course it’s not the chamber,” he cried. “It’s a burial offering. The Teotihuacans would bury a hundred or so gifts around the burial chamber. Obsidian blades, pyrite mirrors, shells… we must be right on top of it.”
As Sebastian crouched over the spot where the object was buried, Thomas placed a small brush and an archaeological probe into his hands.
“You do the honors,” Thomas said, stepping back.
As a crowd gathered around the pit, chattering in Spanish, English and French, a tall, mustached man in a dark suit moved unnoticed to the front of the group, where he watched Dr. De Rosa.
Sebastian began by carefully pushing the dirt aside with his bare hands. Then he positioned the archaeological probe and gently thrust its sharp tip into the soil, slowly piercing the crust until the long metal spike was nearly buried. Dr. De Rosa felt nothing on the first attempt, so he drew the probe out and tried again.
It wasn’t until his fourth attempt that Sebastian struck pay dirt. Almost as soon as the tip disappeared in the soil, it touched something hard. The artifact was buried less than an inch below the surface. Dr. De Rosa immediately withdrew the probe and set it aside.
“He’s found something,” someone in the crowd whispered.
Sebastian cautiously pushed the dirt away with the brush until he could just make out the rough outline of the object. It was small, about the size of a coin. And round like a coin, too.
“What is it?” Marco asked.
Dr. De Rosa did not reply. Instead, he dug his fingers deep into the soil around the object until his fingers closed on the thing. Sebastian held his breath as he lifted the artifact out of the ground.
“Professor?” Thomas whispered breathlessly.
Finally, soil fell away and the object was revealed. Sebastian let out the breath no one knew he was holding. Eyes strained, but Dr. De Rosa still crouched over the artifact, shielding the thing he had unearthed. When he looked up, Dr. De Rosa found a host of eager, expectant faces surrounding him. He stood, still concealing the mystery in his hand.
Finally, without fanfare, Dr. De Rosa presented the artifact to his audience.
They saw a glint of blue, and a familiar white swirl, and some characters etched onto a circular, rusted surface. There were murmurs. Then gasps of surprise. Finally, Sebastian held the object high enough so that everyone could get a look at the only significant discovery his expedition had made during eighteen months of grueling, backbreaking work—
A rusty metal cap from a cola bottle.
“Vintage nineteen-fifties, I’d say,” a slightly accented voice announced.
Sebastian looked up to see Mexico’s minister of the interior, Juan Ramirez, staring down at him.
“Minister, I—”
But the bureaucrat cut Sebastian off. “According to you, the Teotihuacans’ final gift to their dead king was a Pepsi?”
“Give me one more month,” Sebastian said, still clutching the bottle cap.
Frowning, Minister Ramirez shook his head.
“Can’t do it, Sebastian. Department of the Interior needed results six months ago. We’re putting in another team.”
As the sun set, the Mexican afternoon grew slightly cooler, down from 107 degrees to a pleasant 99. Sebastian De Rosa was in his tent, packing, when Thomas arrived.
“How bad?”
“We lost half the crew,” Thomas said, frowning.
“Bobby leave?”
“Yeah. And Joe. And Caroline. Nick. Jerry and all of Jerry’s crew.”
Sebastian took the news hard. He slumped down on his cot, his shoulders sagging. “Thomas, the burial chamber is here. I know it.” His fingers made a fist. “We’re going to find it—and a link to the Egyptian culture.”
“I know it, too,” the younger man replied, pushing the blond hair from his face. “But without a crew and a new permit to dig, we’re out of business.”
Sebastian stared at Thomas a moment, then got back on his feet. With renewed determination, he threw more things into his pack.
“Hold the rest of the team together for two days. I’ll go to Mexico City… talk to the suits. I’ll get our dig back.”
“I might be able to help you accomplish that, Professor.”
The voice was a stranger’s, deep and with a precise British accent. Sebastian and Thomas turned to find a tall black man standing at the door to the tent. De Rosa estimated the man to be well over six and a half feet tall, and the perfectly tailored London business suit did little to hide his broad chest and thick-muscled arms. Despite his size the man moved with polished grace.
“Do I know you?” Sebastian asked.
“My name is Maxwell Stafford,” the man replied. Then he stepped forward and handed Sebastian a bone-white stationery envelope that bore the embossed monogram of Weyland Industries.
Sebastian tore it open and stared at the piece of paper inside—a personal check from Charles Weyland made out to Dr. Sebastian De Rosa. The number on that check was followed by more zeroes than a carbon-dating estimate. Sebastian looked up at the stranger.
“In exchange for a little of your time,” Maxwell Stafford explained.