Past the baths, Ackerman headed down a narrow passage whose walls

had been smoothed and adorned with geometric designs etched into the

rock and dyed red and yellow and green. Ahead was an opening framed

by carefully selected decorative stones.

32 CLIVE CUSSLER

Ackerman walked through the opening into a large chamber.

From what he could see the walls were round and smooth. The floor

of the chamber was fitted with flat rocks to form an almost perfectly

level floor. Geodes and crystals hung from the ceiling like chandeliers.

Ackerman reached down and adjusted his flashlight. Then he stood up,

raised the light over his head and gasped in awe.

Flowing up from the center of the room was a platform where a gray

orb sat on display.

The geodes and crystals hanging from the ceiling scattered light from

the flashlight into thousands of rainbows that spilled around the room

like a spinning disco ball. Ackerman exhaled and the sound was magnified.

Stepping

up to the chest-high platform, he stared at the orb.

"Meteorite," he said aloud.

Then he removed the digital camera and began to document the

scene.

After climbing back down the ladder, he retrieved a Geiger counter

and a book on metal analysis and tried to determine the orb's composition.

He soon figured it out.

AN HOUR LATER, back down from the upper cave, Ackerman assembled

the digital images and readings from the Geiger counter into an email

package. After spending another hour composing a glowing press

release about himself and including that in the message, he sent the email

to his benefactor for approval.

Then he sat back to bask in his glory and await a reply.

AT THE ECHELON monitoring station outside London near Chatham,

most of the world's communications were recorded. A joint EnglishUnited

States operation, Echelon had received a fair share of scrutiny

from the press on both sides of the pond. Quite simply Echelon was

nothing more or less than a massive eavesdropping apparatus that

SACRED STONE 33

snagged worldwide communications and ran them through a computer

for review. Certain words were flagged so that if they appeared, it triggered

the message to be spit out for review by a human. Then the

flagged message passed up a chain of command until it was forwarded

to the proper intelligence service or ignored as unimportant.

Ackerman's e-mail from Greenland passed up to a satellite before

being relayed back to the United States. On its way back to earth, Echelon

snagged the message and ran it through its computer. There was a word

in the message that triggered a review.

In time the message would pass along the chain of command from England

across the ocean on a secure line to the National Security Agency in

Maryland, then on to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

But there was a traitor inside Echelon, so the review went to more

than one location.

Inside the cave on Mount Forel, John Ackerman was living a fantasy