The Atlantis Legacy - A01-A02 Read Free

it’s Doctor Yeats to you.”
    She pouted. Her ponytail swung out the back of her Diamond-backs baseball cap like an irritated thoroughbred’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 laserlike 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 mindone 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 it’s not enough for me to suggest that aliens who could travel across the stars probably didn’t need airstrips?”
    “No.”
    Conrad sighed. It was hard enough for him to contend with the sands of time, foreign governments, and goofball theories in his quest for the origins of human civilization without ancient astronauts eroding what little respect he had left in the academic community.
    At one time Conrad was a groundbreaking, postmodern archaeologist. His deconstructionist philosophy was that ancient ruins weren’t nearly so important as the information they conveyed about their builders. Such a stand ran against the self-righteous trend toward “preservation” in archaeology, which in Conrad’s mind was code for “tourism” and the dollars it brought. He became a maverick in the press, a source of bitter jealousy among his peers, and a thorn in the side of Near East and South American countries who laid claims to the world’s greatest archaeological treasures.
    Then one day he unearthed dozens of Israelite dwellings from the thirteenth century B.C. near Luxor in Egypt that offered the first physical proof for the biblical account of the Exodus. But the official position of the Egyptian government was that their ancient