"The Atlantis Prophecy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greanias Thomas)

3

CONRAD BOUNDED UP the front steps to Brooke's brownstone in two strides and unlocked the front door. She had given him the key to her place months before he agreed to move in with her, a decision made only after he had finally accepted that he would never get another chance with Serena Serghetti.

Inside the foyer, he threw his coat on the bench and began to disarm the alarm. His mind was already on the book that awaited him in the study, and he absently punched the wrong numeric code on the keypad.

As he cleared the alarm and put in the correct code, he wondered what kind of other surveillance besides the SUV outside the SecDef had on him. Probably audio but no video, he concluded, and even that from directional microphones in the SUV and not from any bugs in the house. Packard wouldn't risk the ire of Brooke's father, Senator Joseph Scarborough, who oversaw half of Packard's black ops appropriations from his seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Then again, Senator Scarborough had an even lower opinion of the man his daughter was living with than the Secretary of Defense. "Never did any woman see so much in a man with so little," the Senator once mused. He wouldn't overlook any opportunity to terminate their relationship.

Conrad walked into Brooke's study and placed the flag from the funeral on the fireplace mantle. He pulled out an old, brown cloth hardcover book from the third shelf.

The title was gilt stamped on the book's spine-The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. His father had given it to him when he was ten. It was the only thing his father had ever given him except pain and grief.

Conrad grabbed a pen and a pad of stationery that read Brooke Scarborough / The Fox on Fox Sports and dropped them with Tom Sawyer on the coffee table in the living room. He then went to the kitchen to heat up some leftover pasta from Cafй Milano before he sat down on the living room sofa with his bowl of carbs, bottle of Sam Adams, and Tom Sawyer.

He tore off three sheets from Brooke's notepad.

On the first sheet he wrote the number from the back of his father's tombstone: 763. He was clueless as to its meaning for now.

On the second sheet he wrote out the names of the constellations he had seen on the east face of the obelisk:

Boцtes

Leo

Virgo Next to each constellation, he wrote down the name of its anchor or "alpha star," which was usually the brightest to the naked eye as seen from Earth:

In theory, each alpha star had a terrestrial counterpart or landmark. In places like Giza or Teotihuacбn, the ancients placed their pyramids or ziggurats to point to key stars in the heavens. The effect was an astronomically aligned city that mirrored the heavens on the ground. Symbolically, it was intended to achieve some kind of cosmic harmony between man and the gods. Practically, it created a secret "treasure map" to the city known only to its founders.

He quickly drew the alpha stars in relation to each other from memory and came up with a triangle:

That makes no sense at all.

The way it worked in places like the pyramids in Egypt and the Way of the Dead in South America, each landmark linked to a star would lead to another landmark and then another. In theory, you could follow the star map written across the heavens on the ground until you reached a fixed destination. Usually it was a monument or shrine of some kind whose true meaning and purpose would finally be revealed-along with whatever treasure or secret knowledge it contained.

Unfortunately, this triangle of stars was no map at all. It had no direction. In effect, it was an endless loop, going in circles. This, too, would take time to crack.

Finally, on the third sheet, he quickly scribbled out the numeric code-a sequence of five numerical strings-he had memorized: