Raising Atlantis Read Free Page A

ice shards crashed down upon him.
    2
    Discovery
    Plus Twenty-One Days
    Nazca, Peru
    CONRADYEATS SCALED THE SIDEof the plateau under the blazing Peruvian sun and looked across the plains of Nazca.
    The empty, endless desert spread out hundreds of feet below him. He could pick out the gigantic figures of the Condor, Monkey, and Spider etched on the baked expanse that resembled the surface of Mars. The famous Nazca Lines, miles long and thousands of years old, were so enormous that they could be seen only from the air. So could the tiny dust cloud swirling in the distance along the Pan-American Highway. It settled near the van he had parked off to the side. Conrad pulled out his binoculars and focused below. Two military jeeps pulled up to the van and eight armed Peruvian soldiers jumped out to inspect it.
    Damn, he thought, how did they know where to find me?
    The woman on the opposite line adjusted her backpack and said in a flat French accent, “Trouble, Conrad?”
    Conrad glanced at her cynical blue eyes framed by a twenty-four-year-old baby-smooth face. Mercedes, the daughter of a French TV mogul, was his producer onAncient Riddles of the Universe and helped him scout locations.
    “Not yet.” He put the binoculars away. “And it’s Doctor Yeats to you.”
    She pouted. Her ponytail swung out the back of her Diamondbacks baseball cap like an irritated thorough-bred’s tail flicking flies. “Doctor Conrad Yeats, world’s greatest expert on megalithic architecture,” she intoned like the B-actor announcer for their show. “Discarded by academia for his brilliant but unorthodox theories about the origins of human civilization.” She paused. “Adored by women the world over.”
    “Just the lunatics,” he told her.
    Conrad eyed the last ledge beneath the plateau summit. He was stripped to the waist. Strong and muscular, his body had been toughened and tanned from tackling the hills of the world’s geographical and political hot spots. His dark hair was too long, and he had it tied back with a strip of leather. His lean thirty-nine-year-old frame and chiseled features made him look tired and hungry, and he was. Tired of life’s journey, hungry for answers.
    It was his quest for the origins of human civilization—the “Mother Culture” which had birthed the world’s most ancient societies—that drove him to the earth’s remote corners. His obsession, a nun once told him, was really his quest for the biological parents who had vanished after his birth. Perhaps, he thought, but at least the ancient Nazcans left him more clues.
    Conrad grabbed the ledge overhead and gracefully pulled himself onto the summit of the flat plateau. He reached down, took hold of Mercedes’s dusty hand and pulled her up to the ledge. She fell on top of him, deliberately, and he sprawled on his back. Her playful eyes lingered on his for a moment before she looked over his shoulder and gasped.
    The summit was sheered off and leveled with laser-like precision. It was like a giant runway in the sky over the Nazcan desert, and it afforded breathless views of some of the more famous carvings.
    Conrad stood up and brushed off the dust while Mercedes relished the view. He hoped she was taking it all in, because her next vista would be from behind bars unless he figured out some way to elude the Peruvians below.
    “You have to admit it, Conrad,” she said. “This summit could have been a runway.”
    Conrad smiled. She was trying to get a rise out of him.
    Since the carvings could only be seen from the air, some of his wacky archaeologist rivals had suggested that the ancient Nazcans had machines that could fly, and that the particular mount on which he and Mercedes stood was once a landing strip for alien spaceships. He wouldn’t mind one showing up about now to take him away from Mercedes and the Peruvians. But he needed her. The show was all he had left to fund his research, and she was his only line of credit.
    Conrad said, “I suppose