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others like you before, those who upset the delicate balance and caused great grief and death.
    You've hidden well, Doctor Duncan, but you cannot hide anymore."
    "You babble," Duncan said. "You are old and need to be put down like a mad dog."
    A cruel smile curled Aspasia's Shadow's thin lips. "You try to bait me. Very good. But I have lived a long time and met enemies much greater than you and defeated them all. I am still here and they have long ago turned to dust."
    Duncan crossed her arms on top of the essen. "So
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    you think. But I'm where you want to be. Did you talk to those old enemies like you talk to me? Did they hold what you want?"
    "But will it do you any good?" Aspasia's Shadow asked. His eyes went up and down her, noting the garments. "Do you have everything you need?" Once more he didn't wait for an answer. "When you find you don't, we will talk again."
    Aspasia's Shadow turned and disappeared into the tunnel that led out of the Ark chamber. Duncan went back inside the veil and looked at the Grail. Once more she put her hand over one end. It opened and the empty depression appeared. She knew that was what Aspasia's Shadow had meant when he'd asked her if she had all she needed. The stones were needed for the Grail to work and the alien creature had known it. Did he have them? And if he did, how could she get them from him? Or were they hidden as so many other Airlia artifacts had been?
    The chamber around her seemed smaller than before, the weight of the plateau above a palpable presence. She was safe for the moment, but she now knew she was also powerless.
    Duncan stood by the veil, the four bodies her only company. She looked up to the top of the chamber, but her mind went further, through the rock, to the surface, into the sky. She knew Mike Turcotte would come for her. The thought did not give her as much comfort as it had a few days ago. She turned back toward the Grail, troubled by the words of Aspasia's Shadow.
    There was something lurking at the edge of her subconscious trying to come forward, but she couldn't draw it out. Her eyes rested on the Grail, sensing in it a key to unlock whatever it was that was hidden in her mind.

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CHAPTER 3
    AREA 51, NEVADA
    Flat brown desert floor, broken abruptly by steep, rock-strewn mountains, made for uninviting terrain in the southern center of Nevada. A hundred and twenty miles northwest of Las Vegas, nestled between seven-thousand-foot mountain ranges, lay Groom Lake. It might have once held water, but now the flat lakebed contained a seven-mile-long concrete runway, the longest in the world.
    Many had thought that Area 51 had been located at Groom Lake because of the remote and desolate nature of the surrounding countryside—a good place to hide things the government didn't want prying eyes to see.
    Actually, the opposite was true. In the early days of World War II, military reconnaissance teams found hidden in a massive cavern under Groom Mountain something so startling and foreign to the planet that the government immediately knew it had to keep the discovery secret. The alien object was so immense—over a mile long and a quarter mile at its widest—that there was no way to move the alien mothership, at least until the drive system for it was figured out.
    As more alien artifacts were discovered, the greatest being the nine bouncers, the installation at Groom Lake grew in size and secrecy. The site was labeled on the Nellis Air Base reservation map as Area 51. Until the uncovering of Majestic-12, the ruling body at Area 51 since its founding, the United States government never
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    admitted the base even existed, even though photos of the surface facilities were posted on the Internet. But today, as Mike Turcotte could see out of the side of the bouncer, secrecy seemed to be the last thing on anyone's mind.
    News vans were parked all around the edge of the Groom Lake runway. It was a far cry from the days when even climbing one of the mountains