Free The Lucifer Gospel by Paul Christopher Page A

it.”
    “Have you been keeping track of our esteemed leader?”
    “Qaddafi? No, I’m not in the dictator’s loop.”
    “Ha-ha. Adamson. Particularly Adamson and his pals Kuhn and Hisnawi, our man from Museums and Antiquities.”
    “I’ve been far too busy drawing little pictures of broken pieces of thousand-year-old clay pots, which are of no interest whatsoever.”
    “I’m busy flying patterns with the Polish answer to powered flight most days, which is probably just about as boring as sketching old chamber pots, but it does have one advantage.”
    “Which is?”
    “I’m at twelve thousand feet. I get to see a lot. Mostly sand.”
    “Get to the point.”
    “Every day for the last week or so Adamson, Kuhn, and Hisnawi take out one of those desert Hummers and head out into the desert.”
    “How do you know it’s them?” asked Finn.
    Hilts reached into his pocket again and took out a crumpled piece of photo paper. “As well as regular film cameras, Adamson uses a Belgian thing called a DIMAC… Digital Modular Aerial Camera. Like most aerial cameras it’s set to take slightly oblique images… from the side, to give shadow and scale.” He smoothed out the picture on the table. It was fuzzy, but the faces were clear. “It’s Adamson, Hisnawi, and the German, no doubt about it. I downloaded the shot onto my laptop, enhanced it and blew it up.” Finn looked at the picture. All three were visible, Adamson behind the wheel, Hisnawi on the seat beside him, and Kuhn seated in the back. Something was in the truck bed, covered with a tarp.
    Finn shrugged. “So what? Hisnawi, Kuhn, and Adamson go for rides in the desert, what’s the big deal?”
    Hilts prodded the little GPS device. “I managed to slip this behind the spare tire of Adamson’s personal Hummer, the yellow and black one that looks like a giant bumblebee? They go to the exact same coordinates every time.”
    “Where?”
    “One hundred and eight miles almost due west of here.” He punched a button on the device to retrieve the numbers. “North twenty-one degrees, fifty-two minutes, and thirty seconds by east twenty-three degrees, thirty-two minutes, eighteen seconds, to be absolutely precise.”
    “What’s there?”
    “Absolutely nothing.”
    “Be logical, Hilts, there has to be something there or they wouldn’t be going.”
    “According to the charts it’s at the edge of a small plateau. If the sky were red you could be on Mars. Rocks and sand.”
    Finn sighed. “Mars has an atmosphere. The sky is actually blue.”
    “Sorry, Dr. Ryan.”
    “I had to take a couple of straight science courses. One of them was astrophysics.”
    “The point is, there really is nothing there. I even checked to see if it was on one of the old caravan routes. Nada. Just more rocks and sand until you get to the Algerian border.”
    “What happens then?”
    “You get Algerian rocks and sand instead of Libyan rocks and sand.”
    “You really are a pain, you know that, don’t you?”
    “It’s a gift.”
    “What do you
think
is out there, Hilts?”
    “I think they found what they were actually looking for.”
    “Which is?”
    “Only one way to find out.”
     
     
     

14
     
     
    They flew over the endless desert, heading west, seeing nothing. The cockpit of the little high-winged aircraft was cramped and the rear two seats had been replaced with a variety of bulky camera equipment and a long-range fuel tank to give the pilot the extra in-flight hours needed to fly large-scale grid series.
    Finn stared out through the large side window. “You were right,” she said. “Absolutely nothing. More rocks than sand, I’d say.”
    “It’s more hamada than erg.”
    “Easy for you to say,” Finn said and laughed.
    “Hamada is a rocky desert, an erg is one made up of dunes. Out here the hamada usually is a function of altitude. The higher the elevation the stonier the ground. Mind you, it hasn’t always been this way.”
    “It looks like it’s been