The Alignment Ingress Read Online Free Page B

before we get to that, let me tell you about how I found this, because it’s nearly as fascinating a story as the dig itself.”
    Hank paused. He’d scripted out an entire section on how he’d used the top-secret equipment at CERN to reverse trace the dispersion pattern of an exotic matter eruption. In a process that is just as much art as science, or instinct as intellect, he had located ancient drifting XM clusters outside the solar system, but inside the range of spysats and other devices. It wasn’t, in and of itself, classified information, but it was certainly information gained through classified means and using secret technology in an unusual way.
    Dow looked up from the camera. “Should I keep rolling?”
    “Uh, fine.”
    Now that he and the crew had arrived on site deep inside the jungle, it was only a matter of time before other parties showed up too—most of them probably armed and willing to slay any and all who got in their way to treasure. Something like 5 million people had already died over gold in the Congo, so a few more was so much spare change to militants and mercenaries. In the 19th century, he might have weeks on them. Here in the 21st century he had hours. That was why he had gone to such great lengths with this bogus TV charade to dupe the competition into thinking nothing was here.
    Except maybe monsters.
    While he could laugh at poor Garamba’s superstitions, he did harbor his own suspicions about unseen threats. Exotic matter portals—even the old, weak ones, or maybe especially the old, weak ones—not only drew artists, scientists and shamans of different stripes, but they also drew guardians, predators and vultures. As he had discovered in Afghanistan, XM portals have their own ecologies, and they are sometimes extremely dangerous.
    So far this morning he’d counted two sets of eyes in the lushly vegetated hills surrounding him, and maybe three.
    One was Rosier, the agent attached to Niantic project security who had been sent to shadow him—a little spying, a little protection. Hank could give the noob the slip any time he wanted, and the sad thing was that Rosier knew it. Hank was going to have to ditch him, but he’d make it look good. Didn’t want to hurt the kid’s career. Didn’t want to piss off the kid’s boss either. There weren’t a lot of people whom Hank feared, but Niantic’s security chief J. “call me Jay” Phillips was one of them. Phillips was steely, crisp and missing at least one screw, maybe more. Messing with Phillips could get you dead.
    His second audience consisted of a pair of local “security agents.” Friends or more likely relatives of Garamba. Hank couldn’t figure out whether they were utterly incompetent, or they wanted him to know he was being watched.
    Now there was a third audience. At least he thought there was. That’s what made him nervous. He couldn’t tell. He had to figure it out before he located any portal here.
    “Hey, throw up a scrim, Michaels!” he called out to his second assistant.
    He wanted it up there partly to block the sun, and partly to block the view from his third observer, forcing him to move to a better vantage point. He watched in a mirror. He saw something move. He’d confirmed somebody was watching, he just didn’t know who it was.
    “OK, I want to get two takes. One is for the teaser and one is for the show itself,” he said, keeping up the charade and keeping his eyes open. “Is this structure behind me part of the legendary kingdom of the Queen of Sheba, or is it the remnant of some long-lost civilization we know nothing about? And if this is the kingdom of the Queen of Sheba, why here in the Congo and not Ethiopia or Zimbabwe like so many have claimed? The curious thing about this site is that it seems to stand as alone in history as it does in the heart of Africa.”
    Hank paced around, secretly signaling his crew. Dow took his place behind the camera, pretending to adjust it. Michaels positioned