Paladin Prophecy 2: Alliance Read Online Free PDF Page A

ordinary as a pair from a Monopoly game again. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to carry them around, so he picked them up and slipped them into his pocket.
    He heard the front door slam in the other room and moments later an urgent banging on his door. Will got up and unlocked the door. Ajay rushed in, huge eyes wide, his tiny elfin frame bursting with animated energy.
    “Great galloping ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt!” said Ajay. “Have I got something to show you.”
    Ajay swung his immense backpack onto Will’s bed, its weight pulling him with it.
    “Don’t hurt yourself,” said Will. “What’s the rush?”
    Ajay ripped open his backpack and rummaged through it, searching for something. “When all that material vanished from the Rare Book Archives about the Knights of Charlemagne, I still felt certain I could put my hands on the information we needed—where did I put it?”
    In January, Ajay had finagled a pass into the Rare Book Archive of the Center’s library, where they’d hoped to find more about the Knights of Charlemagne, but all references to the Knights had vanished from their physical and digital records. They also checked the field house locker room, where they’d earlier discovered a network of tunnels leading all the way to the island in the middle of Lake Waukoma, but access to them had been sealed off; the door that led down there now ended in a broom closet.
    “Put what?”
    “No one has even dreamt of the firewall that can keep me off a server, but finding an object that has been removed in its purely physical/analog form is a more difficult nut to crack—”
    “So what did you find, Ajay?” asked Will, moving over to join him.
    “Just before all the trouble started, Brooke had located a few articles about the Knights in the school newspaper.”
    “Ancient ones, from like the 1920s.”
    “And one from the ’30s,” said Ajay as he finally fished out the slender folder he’d been looking for. “They’ve already been plucked from the archives as well, but you’ll recall that Brooke showed a single photograph from the library to us when we were online with her, just before Lyle hacked into the call.”
    “I do remember that,” said Will. “A picture of the Knights at a dinner. With some famous politician, wasn’t it?”
    “That’s it! Henry Wallace, the United States’ secretary of the interior, who was less than four years away from becoming Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president,” said Ajay as he opened the folder and took out an 8 x 12 black-and-white photograph. “This is the image Brooke held up to the screen while we were watching.”
    “How did you find it?”
    “Well, I’m such a first-class nincompoop, a digital record of the call was backed up on my private server this entire time. When this occurred to me, I went back in, ran a quantum-level search, and found that image on the recording, but it was in appalling shape, terrible resolution, grainy and obscure, so I ran it through a few enhancement renders—”
    “Let me see it!”
    “There’s a lot more detail in my version than the one Brooke showed us,” said Ajay, laying the glossy black-and-white photograph on the table. “Someone else was at that dinner.”
    It was the same 1937 photo that Brooke had briefly shown them online, but Ajay had completely restored it: the twelve Knights of Charlemagne hosting a fancy dinner in some unidentified dining room for Interior Secretary Henry Wallace.
    “Look at it with this,” said Ajay, pulling out a magnifying glass.
    Will’s eye scanned the table until he settled on one of the young men making a toast to Wallace and smiling for the camera—a young student, one of the Knights. The same student, when Will had first seen the photo, that he thought he’d recognized but wasn’t able to identify.
    “Do you see him?” asked Ajay.
    He could now. Solid, built like a linebacker, with unmistakable piercing light blue eyes.
    It was the Bald Man, the leader