The Alignment Ingress Read Free Page A

was the very reason he was so valuable to his different employers. Despite their distinct and at times competing agendas, each master knew what they were getting in Hank Johnson. His primary challenge then was keeping his stories straight with his respective master and not crossing his lines of communications.
    He settled back in his seat and looked out the window at the gleaming caps of the Swiss Alps as the train slid through the wintry wonderland. The Congo promised an entirely different backdrop for his pilot, he thought as he pulled out his tablet from his pack and studied the coded image of the Queen of Sheba reclining in her garden.
    The Queen of Sheba was just Hank’s kind of girl: straightforward on the surface, but more mysterious the deeper you go.
    In very similar accounts, the books of First Kings and Second Chronicles in the Bible simply state that the Queen of Sheba, who has no name and comes from an otherwise unknown land, heard of the great wisdom of King Solomon of Israel and “his relations to the name of the LORD.”
    So she appeared before Solomon in his spectacular Temple, bearing gifts of spices, gold and precious stones. She also tested him with questions. The accounts don’t record her questions, only that Solomon answered every one of them. In return for his wisdom, she paid Solomon with gold—more than four tons of it.
    Straightforward story, except it didn’t make much sense. Why bring gold to somebody as rich as Solomon? What wisdom could be worth that much? Why hide the Queen of Sheba’s true home? The Bible, so specific with so many locations, is silent on this one. Did Solomon not know? Did he conceal it for a reason?
    Ever since biblical times, guesses have been made as to the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines, ranging from Atlantis to Australia and even the Solomon Islands. But Hank always felt the pre-Islamic tradition was the most plausible, based on his research into ancient Arab trade routes in Africa. That tradition spoke of what was now Zimbabwe. But Hank doubted the Arab traders would have given up the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines any more easily than the Incas would have given up El Dorado.
    It was Hank’s obsession with these early Arab trading routes —and the notion that key mines and points of distribution would be kept secret—that ultimately led him to the coded Queen of Sheba painting.
    Now, together with Conrad’s star charts, this painting was pointing him to the Congo as the location of the Queen of Sheba’s mines.
    Hank leaned back, closed his eyes and thought about her predicament for a moment. If she came from sub-Saharan Africa, she had to pass through mighty Egypt without having her treasure confiscated or taxed and without encouraging a greedy Pharaoh to torture her for the source of the gold and take the mines for himself. So she had to conceal the location of the mines, hence a circuitous route.
    Hank opened his eyes and studied the picture on his screen. It was probably copied from some earlier stele through contact stamping. That meant the image on the papyrus or paper was reversed. Using that orientation, the painting revealed that the two flower clusters behind the Queen of Sheba represented locations in the Congo, which Hank believed to be her gold mines. The green ferns, then, represented an elaborate network of trails to transport the gold. And blue flowers represented falls, or headwaters of the Nile, where the gold would be placed on barges.
    So the gold was transported up the Nile in small amounts where it was refined and processed. This was where Conrad’s theory about the location of her palace—and lost tomb—in Meroe came into play. Arab tradition did indeed corroborate modern-day Sudan as the site of her palace. It was entirely possible that her palace was in Meroe, or at least some royal outpost, and that from there the gold was refined and smuggled up the Nile in the form of bricks or jewelry. At last it escaped Egypt