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perched on a thin nose.
    "My friends," Yakov began.
    Turcotte didn't particularly want to hear whatever it was the Russian had to say. He was watching Duncan, who seemed to be slowly coming to her senses.
    "My friends," Yakov repeated as he turned to the others at the table. "We must look at the larger threats."
    "And what can we do about them?" Turcotte snapped. He was bone-tired. Since uncovering the secret of Area 51 he had been fighting the aliens and their minions almost nonstop. For every step forward, every victory gained, there seemed to be two steps back and more secrets uncovered and more defeats. They had learned much but Turcotte felt there was a level of all of this that they had yet to penetrate. They didn't know why the civil war among the Airlia had started millennia before, nor what each side's true agenda

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    was, although there was little doubt neither side cared how many humans died in the course of their battles. Beyond that, they didn't even know why the Airlia had come to Earth so many years earlier or what the civil war had been about.
    Mualama steepled his fingers. "We have been approaching this incorrectly. This is a war. And war is all about power."
    Turcotte, who had been practicing the art of war his entire adult life, stared at the archaeologist. "And?"
    "We must search for the source of our enemies' power," Mualama said.
    "And that is?" Turcotte prompted.
    "We must find and control the Master Guardian," Mualama said. "If we do that, we can control the Easter Island—and most likely the Qian-Ling—guardians. Maybe even the guardian at Cydonia on Mars."
    Turcotte rubbed his eyes for a second. "Now you say we need the Master Guardian but yesterday you said we needed the Grail."
    "We did need the Grail," Mualama said. "But we don't have it. Aspasia's Shadow has it and it is now under the shield at Easter Island. The Grail is indeed powerful, as it holds the secret of eternal life. However, most of Aspasia's Shadow's power comes out of the Easter Island guardian. The guardian controls the shield wall and the nanovirus he has infected his forces with. It is also the way he communicates with his forces. It is the key to his power."
    "We don't have the Master Guardian either," Turcotte said. "We don't even know where it is."
    "Burton's manuscript described Watcher records saying it was removed from the top of the Great Pyramid thousands of years ago," Mualama said.
    "And taken where?" Turcotte asked.

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    "The Watchers—" Mualama began, then paused.
    "Go on," Yakov urged him.

    "Yes," Turcotte said, spinning in his seat toward the African archaeologist.
    "Tell us what else you've been lying to us about."
    "Not lying," Mualama said. "It just did not come up."
    "So we have to ask you specific questions to get you to help us?" Turcotte asked. He slowly got to his feet and approached the archaeologist. He leaned close to Mualama. "Where is the Master Guardian?"

    "It is with the mothership," Mualama said.
    "The mothership was destroyed," Turcotte said, turning back to his chair and dismissing Mualama. "It's floating dead in orbit."
    "Aspasia's mothership is floating dead in orbit. How do you think Artad came to this planet?" Mualama asked in a level tone.
    That caused Turcotte to pause for a moment. "There's another mothership?"
    Lisa Duncan spoke up. "It makes sense. Remember we found the power sphere for an interstellar drive hidden in a cavern in Ethiopia, yet the mothership here had one already in place."
    Turcotte slowly sat down and nodded. "The sphere we found came from China."
    "And Artad is in China," Duncan said.
    "But we didn't see a mothership in Qian-Ling," Che Lu said.
    "It might be in the lowest level," Turcotte said, but he doubted it even as he spoke. The mothership was simply too large to be hidden there, even given how big the mountain tomb of Qian-Ling was.
    Quinn spoke up. "The Nazi records you recovered from the Soviet archives indicated that they were searching for