Charles Weyland began to wheeze in the corridor before he even reached his stateroom. Eyes tearing, he tucked his head into his chest and choked back a cough. If he started now, Weyland doubted he could stop. So he suppressed the urge, but at a cost. He stumbled and nearly fell, the nine iron clattering onto the steel deck.
Then a powerful arm circled his waist, a deep voice rumbled in his ear. “Lean on me.”
“I’m okay, Max,” Weyland rasped.
Steadier now, he pushed Max aside and rose to his full height. “Hand me my club and open the door before anyone sees me like this.”
Using the club for a cane, Weyland hobbled to his cabin. Max quickly closed and locked the door behind them, then helped Charles Weyland slump into a padded leather chair. Max leaned the nine iron against the wall and offered his boss a clear plastic oxygen mask. Weyland took several long, deep breaths, and some color returned to his gaunt face.
“Thank you,” he said between gulps.
When his strength returned, Weyland discarded the mask and scanned the stateroom, which more resembled a hospital ward. His nose curled from the medicinal stench of the sickroom.
“The mirror, please.”
Max rolled a portable vanity table and mirror in front of Weyland’s chair and stepped away. Weyland gazed at his wan reflection for a moment, then sank into his chair and even deeper into his memories.
At twenty-one, Charles Weyland possessed a Harvard M.B.A. and a small satellite mapping company inherited from his father. Two years later he’d purchased a cable franchise in the Midwest, then a telecommunications grid in Nevada. Within a decade marked by shrewd and calculated expansion, Weyland Industries had become the largest satellite systems operation in the world, the company worth in excess of three hundred billion dollars. His financial empire secure, Charles Weyland had set out to change the world.
“Expanding the range of human endeavor” was more than the Weyland Industries catch phrase—it was the sum of Charles Weyland’s personal philosophy. His mother dead before he was two, raised by a succession of nannies under the cold eye of a harsh, agnostic father, Weyland had lacked parental love or even the comforting faith in a higher power. So he’d made progress his creed, vowing to use his wealth to advance the frontiers of human civilization.
To that end, he’d begun to lead a double life. The public Charles Weyland threw lavish parties, attended openings and charity events, bought luxury hotels in San Francisco, Paris and London. Billionaire Charles Weyland built a casino in Las Vegas and was very much a fixture of the society page, a shallow playboy who always had a beautiful woman on his arm and his signature nine iron draped over his shoulder. But like the hotels, the casino and the golf club, the women were mere props—part of an elaborate and calculated deception that enabled Charles Weyland to accomplish his real goals behind the scenes and under the radar.
While hosting the opening of the Weyland West Hotel in San Francisco, Weyland’s representatives had been secretly purchasing a nanotechnology firm in Silicon Valley. As he’d attended London’s theater season, Weyland’s lawyers had been closing the deal for a robotics plant in Pittsburgh. While he’d attended fashion week festivities in Paris, Weyland’s shell company had engineered a hostile takeover of a pharmaceutical company in Seattle and bought a genetics research firm in Kiyodo. By the time he was forty, Weyland had become the foremost financial supporter of cutting-edge scientific research on the globe.
Four years earlier, Weyland had told Max Stafford that, given forty more years on earth, the scientific research his company funded would enable Weyland Industries to open a branch in a moon base on the Sea of Tranquility. But that was before he’d been diagnosed with advanced bronchogenic carcinoma. Now, because of the cancer that was eating away his lungs, Charles Weyland no longer had forty more years. If he was lucky, he might have forty more days.
That was why the remarkable find in Antarctica and this expedition were so important. It was Charles Weyland’s last chance to make a mark on humanity. And that was why Weyland was so grateful to the one man in his organization who made this last chance possible.
“Fifteen minutes rest, and then I get back into my… costume… and go across the hall to my office.”
“Are you sure? Perhaps it would be best to retire for the night.”
“Why? I won’t sleep.” Weyland took a deep breath and forced a smile. “Over the last three months you really have become invaluable, Max. Finding the right personnel, putting this whole expedition together in days—”
“Just doing my job.”
Disgusted by his reflection, Weyland pushed the mirror aside. “I didn’t think it would happen this fast….”
Max crossed the room and rested his massive hand on Weyland’s shoulder. The man’s touch was surprisingly gentle. “You exerting yourself like this only accelerates the cancer….” He hesitated, reluctant to bring up the same arguments, though he felt he must. “Perhaps you should reconsider accompanying us. You could stay here. Monitor our progress on the radio—”
With the wariness of a trapped animal, Weyland eyed the hospital bed, the oxygen tanks, the medicines, and he shook his head.
“I’m dying, Max. And I’ll be damned if I do it here.”
Sebastian De Rosa followed the executive officer’s directions and located his cabin. He unlocked the door and stepped inside, delighted to discover that his quarters more resembled a stateroom on a luxury liner than a cabin on an icebreaker. For a moment Sebastian wondered if he’d been handed the wrong key, until he noticed that his luggage—what there was of it—had been deposited in the center of the room.
Sebastian opened his battered suitcase and removed an armful of clothes. When he opened the closet door, he was surprised to find clothing already hanging there—casual wear that fit his rather unexacting taste, along with cold-weather gear and even some equipment. He found waterproof pants and jackets, woolen sweaters and socks, thermal underwear, ski-style gloves, boots, woolen hats, and several bright-yellow Polartec pullovers stamped with the ubiquitous Weyland logo. A quick inspection revealed that everything was sized to fit.
“Mr. Charles Weyland, where have you been all my life?” he chuckled.
Sebastian was still feeling the high he’d gotten from Charles Weyland’s briefing. At last he had a chance to prove to the archaeological community that the history of the world as currently written by scholars and academics was nothing more than a string of assumptions, conjectures, half-truths and outright lies. The discovery of a temple complex in Antarctica shattered every preconception of modern archaeology, which was why so-called objective scientists resisted the truth—even when confronted by evidence. This was a phenomenon Sebastian had experienced firsthand, early in his career.
While still a graduate student, Sebastian had gained access to the Library of Congress collection of portolans—maps used by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century seamen to travel from port to port. One of the maps he’d examined had been created in 1531 by Oronteus Finaeus. It displayed an accurate depiction of the entire continent of Antarctica as modern science now allowed it to be seen from outer space. Every bay, every inlet, every river, every mountain—all of the land hidden under tons of ice had been accurately reproduced on the Finaeus Portolan almost five hundred years before.
But how? Sebastian had wondered.
He’d learned from cartographers that most portolans used in the Age of Exploration had actually been copies of far older maps created by the ancient Romans and Egyptians. But even when the Egyptians had flourished, as far back as four thousand years, the South Pole had been completely covered by pack ice up to three thousand feet thick. Even if the Egyptians had sailed to Antarctica—which was absurd, because they hadn’t had a navy until Cheops’s father created one in 2000 B.C.—the ancient sailors would have found nothing but ice. It wasn’t until the latter half of the twentieth century that modern scientists discovered the actual topography of the hidden continent under the ice, and they had used deep-sounding sonar techniques to do it.
So who had mapped the territorial features of Antarctica in ancient times, and how?
Sebastian had concluded that only two theories were possible. The first was put forth in 1967 by Erich Von Daniken in his book Chariots of the Gods? Von Daniken concluded that space aliens had visited earth thousands of years ago and had helped primitive man create maps, build the pyramids, formulate calendars and construct ritual sites, where humans and aliens had interacted.
Sebastian’s theory was far less outrageous. He believed that the original map Finaeus copied had probably been made at a time when Antarctica had been warm and habitable, and home to a now-forgotten civilization. The existence of the Finaeus Portolan, along with the Piri Re’s map discovered in Istanbul, were solid evidence that Sebastian’s theory was correct.
Yet when he’d presented his findings to his fellow archaeologists, his work had been rejected out of hand, despite the fact that physical evidence to prove his conjectures existed at the Library of Congress for anyone to examine.
After this sobering incident, Sebastian had been forced to conclude that either his fellow archaeologists hadn’t bothered to read his paper, or they’d refused to face the truth. Either way, the pyramid complex Weyland had discovered in Antarctica—if indeed it was a pyramid complex—would slam the door on rigid, conventional thinkers in the academic crowd.
Just let them try to dismiss this!
As he shaved and dressed for dinner, Sebastian whistled tunelessly. He could not help but think that now, after years of controversy, scorn and neglect, all of his work would soon be vindicated, all of his theories proved.
Lex closed her eyes and felt the hot water wash over her. After two weeks in the wilderness, followed by a day of travel, the shower felt almost like a religious experience.
Searching the stall for a bar of soap, she found a packet of Savon de Marseille, an expensive handmade olive oil soap from the south of France. She sniffed, then frowned. Probably the same soap Charles Weyland offered to the fancy set at his Parisian hotel. She wasn’t surprised. Like the high-end clothes and expensive gear she’d found in her closet and these ridiculously opulent accommodations, everything Weyland had provided was top of the line. But Lex still didn’t like to be bought—a gilded cage was still a cage. And she much preferred a pitched tent 15,000 feet up Everest’s North Face.
On the other hand, she did need to get clean. Ripping open the packet and squeezing the soap into her hand, Lex considered her opinion of Weyland, now that she’d actually met him. All evidence so far pointed to one conclusion: another billionaire eccentric. And this expensive expedition: a singular waste of time, and a dangerous one that would probably get most—if not all—of them killed.
She’d seen Weyland’s type before—too rich, too bored, too full of themselves. Dilettantes who become temporarily fascinated by a subject, only to flit like a magpie to the next bright, shiny idea that flashed across CNN. Lex resented their ilk, not because she was jealous but because men like Weyland possessed money and power, and wasted both. They drifted through life without accomplishing anything beyond building a Godzilla-sized stock portfolio, while scientists and researchers who dedicated their entire careers and reputations to a cause were forced to bow and scrape for the crumbs they’d toss as an afterthought or a tax deduction.
As Lex rubbed the pricey soap into a thick lather and applied it to her taut body, she could almost hear the voice of Gabe Kaplan, the foundation’s fund-raising director, ringing in her head with all the charm of a never-ending Nike commercial: “C’mon, Lex, get with the program. Bowing and scraping costs us nothing and gains the foundation everything. Just do it.”
Lex accepted the money Weyland promised to help the Foundation of Environmental Scientists, but she refused to be a party to the expedition’s collective suicide.
At best, Lex figured Weyland and company would sail to Bouvetoya Island; Quinn and his cronies—walking environmental disasters to the last man—would poke a hole in the ice; and all those archaeologists talking about a pyramid would find a huge pile of quartz, or shaped ice, or volcanic fissures or one of a dozen other natural formations that somehow mimicked the appearance of a temple complex.
The worst scenario was too horrible to contemplate.
Lex well recalled her climbs to the summit of Everest. Air so thin she felt like she was breathing through a half-collapsed straw. Temperatures at 40 below, winds at 100 miles per hour. The excruciating pain of moving her body up 3,000 feet in a day and trying to breathe, let alone eat or drink, at the 29,000-foot mark.
That was a picnic compared to what Weyland and his expedition would face if something went wrong.
Without Lex, they didn’t stand a chance. As she rinsed the luxurious suds off her cocoa-hued skin, Lex tried to convince herself that their odds wouldn’t be much better if she did go with them. She lingered a moment longer under the warm water. The shower may have washed her free of any hypocrisy she felt having contemplated Weyland’s offer, but it didn’t wash her free of the guilt she was feeling leaving this team behind.
Lex dressed in a pair of Levi’s and a sweater from the stocked closet and left the rest of the clothes untouched. She didn’t have any clean clothes of her own, or she wouldn’t have taken anything.
As she was packing up her meager belongings, there was a knock at the stateroom door.
“I spoke with Mr. Weyland,” Max Stafford told her. “The money has been wired to the foundation’s account. The helicopter is refueling to fly you back home.”
Max turned to leave.
“Who did you get?”
He paused in the doorway but did not turn.
“Gerald Murdoch,” he said, closing the door.
Fifteen minutes later, Lex pounded on the door of Charles Weyland’s shipboard office.
“Come—”
Lex burst through.
“—in.”
Weyland was seated in a leather chair behind a large oak desk. Though not opulent, the office was large and well appointed. Before Lex arrived, the industrialist had been reviewing personnel records. Ironically, it was her file he was reading.
“Gerry Murdoch has two seasons of ice time. He’s not ready.”
Weyland looked away. “Don’t worry about it.”
Lex leaned across his desk. “What about Paul Woodman or Andrew Keeler?”
“Called them.”
“And?”
“They gave the same bullshit answer that you did,” said Max Stafford as he came through the door.
“Mr. Weyland. What I told you in there wasn’t bullshit. If you rush this, people will get hurt, maybe die.”
Weyland faced her again, his eyes angry. “Ms. Woods, I don’t understand your objections. We’re not going to Everest. We need you to take us from the ship to the pyramid and then back to the ship. That’s all.”
“What about inside the pyramid?”
“You don’t have to worry about that. Once we’re at the site we have the best equipment, technology and experts that money can buy.”
Lex met his anger with her own. “You do not understand. When I lead a team I don’t ever leave my team.”
Weyland slapped his palm down on the desk. “I admire your passion as much as your skills. I wish you were coming with us.”
But Lex just shook her head.
“You’re making a mistake,” she told him.
Weyland tapped the weather report on his desk. “The wind sheer is dangerous right now. Captain Leighton assures me that we’re moving out of the worst of it, but he thinks you should postpone your helicopter ride for a couple of hours.” He rose and stepped around his desk. He reached out and touched her arm.
“Think about my offer. Join the others for dinner, and if you don’t change your mind, I’ll have the helicopter fly you back in a couple of hours.”
“He wasn’t kidding about the food,” a wide-eyed Miller exclaimed between bites of succulent crabmeat.
“More wine? Chateau Lafite ’77, an excellent year.”
Miller nodded and Sebastian poured. Then the archaeologist raised his glass. “A fine vintage, for a French. And, for the record, it tastes even better out of plastic.”
Sebastian’s first meal aboard the Piper Maru was a study in contrasts. Fine food and superb wine served up, cafeteria style, on battered standard-issue metal trays and plastic glasses. The noise level inside the mess hall reminded him of college.
It didn’t look as if Mr. Weyland would be dining with them tonight, or that fellow Stafford. Fortunately, Sebastian’s dinner companions more than made up for any disappointment.
“That fellow dishing up the chow. I think I saw him on The Food Channel,” said Miller.
“Watch a lot of television?” Sebastian asked.
“Not much else to do in Cleveland…. Not since my divorce.”
“So you’re from Cleveland?” said Thomas.
“That’s right. I was born in Cleveland. Bought my first chemical set in Cleveland. Blew up my parents’ garage there, too. After I got my degree I found a job in Cleveland and got married there and I live there now.”
“Don’t get around much, do you, Miller?” Lex teased.
“No, no! Not true… I left Cleveland to go to college.”
“You studied overseas?”
“Columbus.”
Lex noticed Sebastian wince, then rub his knee.
“Are you okay?”
“Busted my knee a few years ago. I have a metal pin holding it together. Hurts like hell in this cold weather.”
“You get that in some dashing archaeological adventure?”
Thomas snickered, then took a sip of wine.
“I got it in Sierre Madre.”
Lex was surprised. “The mountain range?”
“The Tex-Mex bar in the United States. Denver. I was lecturing there. Drank one tequila too many and fell off the mechanical bull.”
Lex leaned back in her seat and laughed. So did Sebastian.
Across the mess hall, sitting among the workers, Quinn spied Lex sitting at a table with a few Beakers.
Connors, his partner, paused, a forkful of dripping steak inches from his toothy mouth. “Do you think she’s here to shut us down?”
Quinn sneered. “She can’t shut us down. Weyland is our employer. Ms. Woods and her farm team of environmentalist Beakers don’t have the clout to stop Weyland.”
“Well she sure did shut us down in Alaska. Her and that foundation of hers…”
Quinn ignored his partner and continued to stare across the room.
“I think I’ve run through all my damn unemployment insurance,” Connors continued. “I’m on welfare if this job falls through.”
“Blow it out your ass, Connors.”
Connors chuckled and poured wine into Quinn’s glass. “I think you need another drink, boss.”
Quinn slammed the flat of his hands on the table.
“Damn right I do,” he roared. “But no more of this fancy French grape juice. Get on down to the hold and grab us a case of Coronas. Hell, make it two. Let’s all get whup-ass drunk.”
“Who is that guy?” Sebastian asked, noticing the open glare being sent in their general direction.
Lex sipped her wine before answering.
“I ran into Quinn in Alaska. He and his boys were pushing for more oil exploration. Had a lot of Alaska natives on his side, too. But we shut him down—the environmental group I work for. Guess he carried a grudge.”
“I would,” said Miller. “If someone put me out of a job, I mean.”
“This pyramid,” said Lex, changing the subject. “You really think it could be under the ice?”
“I would like to think so,” Sebastian replied. “It would be the discovery of the century. In fact, it would validate some of my own theories. I believe that four thousand years ago…”
Sebastian’s voice trailed off. Lex was no longer paying attention to him. Instead, she was gazing at something over his shoulder.
“Am I boring you?”
Lex pushed her chair away from the table and touched Miller’s and Sebastian’s arms. “Come outside… all of you. You too, Thomas.”
“What is it?”
But she was already up and out the door. Sebastian rose and followed, Thomas on his heels. Miller swallowed the last bit of his filet, washed it down with Chateau Lafite ’77, and hurried to catch up to them.
Lex led the others through a thick waterproof bulkhead, then onto the deck. A stab of icy wind cut through them, stealing their warmth. But any discomfort was forgotten when they saw the spectacle in the firmament.
“My God!” Thomas exclaimed.
The entire night had become a waterfall of shimmering radiance. Vertical ribbons of light snaked across the southern sky, a colored profusion of visual chaos. Successive bands of brighter colors flamed while darker patches pulsated rhythmically. The vast curtain of reds, greens and blues seemed to move as though ruffled by an interstellar wind.
Lex threw her arms wide, as if embracing the panorama. “It’s an X-class flare accompanied by a halo coronal mass ejection. Otherwise known as aurora australis… the southern lights.”
Sebastian was transfixed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful.”
Miller adjusted his glasses, then pulled the digital camera out of his jacket pocket.
“It’s in the upper atmosphere,” he explained. “Streams of protons and electrons from the sun are being deflected by the earth’s magnetic field, causing a solar radiation storm.”
“Whatever…. It’s beautiful,” Sebastian replied, “even the way you describe it, Doctor.”
“Thanks,” Miller replied. Then he snapped a picture. “And I agree.”
Lex leaned on the rail and gazed up at the sky. “Shackleton called Antarctica the ‘last great journey left to man.’ It’s the one place left in the world that no one owns, that’s completely free…” Then she grinned. “Me? I’m kind of partial to the penguins.”
“I wish you’d reconsider coming with us,” said Miller.
Lex looked at him and smiled. But she shook her head.
“Not for me. Obviously,” said Miller. “But I think a lot of the other guys really need you.” He poked her arm. “C’mon, don’t make me pull out pictures of my kids again.”
“Your kids aren’t that cute.”
Sebastian chimed in. “What if we got pictures of other people’s kids? Would that do it?”
Lex looked at them both. “Want my advice? Stay on the boat.”
It was Sebastian who bristled. “We’re not staying on the boat.”
“Guys, the first rule of this job is to not take people to places they’re not ready to go.”
“Listen,” Sebastian replied. “I was on the next plane to Mexico. My team’s waiting. But if Weyland’s even half right, this find could change history.”
“Weyland is more concerned with making another billion than with anything else,” Lex replied. “Including your safety.”
Sebastian stepped up to her. “Let me ask you something. You’re here. You know this place. Do we stand a better chance of surviving with you than with the number two choice?”
Lex did not reply, but her face gave the answer away.
“Because if we do and you don’t go with us, and something goes wrong, are you going to be able to live with that?”
Lex opened her mouth to reply, but no answer came. Suddenly a tall, blond woman strode onto the deck.
“Ms. Woods? Your helicopter is refueled and ready. They’re waiting for you.”