by Nick Thacker
A coffin.
No, that couldn’t be right. He wasn’t dead. And why would Garza go through all the trouble to kill me like this? Why not just shoot me in the back, like…
He tried to remember what had happened. And how long ago?
He saw Sarah, saw himself, standing with Garza in the woods of Alaska. They were scared. Terrified. He remembered looking around, seeing…
Them.
The… giants. Is that what they really are?
He wondered if Garza had been playing tricks on their minds, somehow forcing them to see something that wasn’t really there. He’d done that thing before; the man had plenty of tricks up his sleeve and Reggie didn’t for a minute think he wouldn’t have the capabilities — some new drug, perhaps — to pull it off.
He’d seen what Garza had done to Julie. To their friend Joshua. It had torn them all apart, and it was only because Julie seemed to have no recollection of the event that they all could move on.
He focused back on his current predicament. He was in a box, judging by the hollow, dead sound of the walls and ceiling around him. It was cold, but not miserable. The air did, in fact, feel thin, but it was breathable.
He focused on the facts, of the objective truth about his environment around him.
Just like I’ve been taught.
They had trained him to handle these situations, but he’d never in his life thought he’d find himself face-to-face with literal giants — men who stood nearly twice his height. They had to be at least nine feet tall. He tried to picture the tallest person he’d ever seen. A basketball player? How tall are they? Eight feet?
As if he’d been struck over the head, he remembered Garza’s words. Do it. Sarah had fallen, hit by the round the giant had blasted into her back.
Sarah.
He struggled again, fought again, and fell still again.
There was no way to know if she were dead. No way to do anything about it if she weren’t. He wondered if she was being kept in a small box like this one.
And why?
He couldn’t figure out what Garza was planning for them. He had giants — at least, the beginnings of them. Reggie recalled vividly the disgusting, twisted faces of the huge men. Is that the problem? The soldiers aren’t ‘finished’ yet? Garza might want them for his army, to bolster his troops.
It certainly would be a deadly force, if Garza could pull it off.
But no — Garza didn’t need Reggie for that. Why would he? He already had the giants, and Reggie knew the man had nearly unlimited resources through his network, so he wouldn’t need Reggie’s help with anything.
Garza had taken him — was taking him — somewhere. He’d told them he needed them to find the Book of Bones, Plato’s lost dialogue on Atlantis and the city’s ancient secrets. It was the same book Rachel Rascher had referenced in Egypt, and…
That was it.
Reggie tried to sit up, but he slammed his head against the top of the box. Pain shot through his forehead and down, but he shook it away. Rachel was working for someone. Rascher, the late Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt, had been working to perfect a Nazi-era science experiment called Die Glocke, which she believed would allow her to ‘test’ the purity of living subjects — essentially discovering if they were of the ‘master race’ or not.
According to Reggie, she was a whack job who’d deserved what she got. Her science experiment had killed many people, and might have killed thousands more if she’d been able to enact the next phase of it.
But even at the end of their mission in Egypt, Reggie’s team had realized the sinister truth:
No one person could have pulled this off.
Garza, Reggie now knew, was working for the same person Rascher had been. Her resources, like Garza’s, seemed endless, and that meant there was likely a group or organization on the other side of the checkbook that didn’t mind draining a bank account to achieve their goal.
He didn’t know what that goal was, but he didn’t need to.
He needed to stop Garza, find Sarah, and get out this box.
Not necessarily in that order.
He almost smiled. He felt better. He’d trained himself over the years to react to situations with logic and rational thinking rather than emotion. He’d learned from years spent working through his own past that the tools he already had available to him — tools he would always have available to him, no matter what — were all he needed to cope.
He now had a goal — it wasn’t a plan, but it was enough to create one. He knew the antagonist, their desire, their strengths. He knew himself, his own weaknesses.
Garza wasn’t invincible, nor was his army of giants. Garza was a man, and so were the huge soldiers. He didn’t understand them completely, nor did he know what it was Garza was truly after, but he knew enough.
Garza wanted Reggie as collateral. He needed him as collateral, because he needed Ben and Julie and Mrs. E to find the Book of Bones.
But he didn’t need the book himself. Garza needed it for his client. He needed to get paid.
Reggie almost wondered if the giants — the mutated men — were part of this payment. That the client might allow Garza to keep them, to perfect them, if he delivered his end of the bargain. Or that they would give him enough money to continue researching them.
So if Garza hadn’t killed him yet, it was because he needed him alive, either to entice Ben and Julie to find the Book of Bones, or because Garza wasn’t sure if Reggie would be helpful in some other way.
But for now, he was alive. And he had a feeling he would stay that way.
24
Victoria
Victoria’s eyes pored over the text in front of her, half-reading, half-rehearsing the words she’d seen so many times.
“For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were…”
The text was from Plato’s dialogue Critias, and it described who the ancient Atlanteans were and how they fell from the grace of their ‘god,’ Poseidon. About 9,000 years prior to Plato’s writings, the race of Atlantis attacked and conquered countries and states including Libya and areas within Egypt, and only Athens could ‘stay the course of a mighty host.’
Victoria had read the dialogues plenty of times; for her, reading anything more than once meant it was essentially committed to memory. She’d been able to regurgitate long strings of the texts to her classes and having immediate access to Plato’s writings had proven useful more than once in her career.
Today, however, she was reading with a purpose: she had a new piece of her puzzle. Her ‘never-ending quilt’ had a new patch, and she now just needed a place to put it. She wanted to find where to put it as well — what other pieces of history linked up to Plato’s accounts of Atlantis? What other portions of history described these people? She had found, over the course of her career, that human history never exists within a vacuum. Everything was connected to everything else. Everything was related to everything else.
She continued reading, this time with a purpose, with a question posed toward Plato himself: What are you trying to tell me? What are you warning me of?
Victoria skipped to the end of the Critias text, reading the final known written account of Atlantis:
“By such reflections and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, the qualities which we have described grew and increased among them; but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.”
When the divine portion began to fade away… Victoria had read the words before, but this
time she closed her eyes and tried meditating on the line that jumped out at her the most. Divine portion. Became diluted too often.
She knew that the mythology of Atlantis claims the god, Poseidon, as its deity. Poseidon bore children with a human woman, Cleito, and together they had five sets of twins.
Sons of god, daughters of men.
They named the eldest of these demigods Atlas, the son who was given the island Atlantis, and for whom the ocean was named after.
Sons of god, daughters of men…
That phrase played itself repeatedly in her mind, but its meaning was still subconscious. She wasn’t sure where it had come from, where she had read it. She allowed it to exist in tandem with her active thoughts about Plato’s text, trusting her instinct and intuition that her subconscious would provide her with the details when she needed them.
When the divine portion began to fade away. She pondered this line once again, knowing that the tugging feeling in the back of her mind was a sign that she was close to some breakthrough, some new understanding of the text. She had always assumed that this ‘divine portion’ was the lineage that linked the Atlanteans to their deity, Poseidon. Lineage had always been a powerful tool in ancient times, a tool that chose kings and monarchs and created an oligarchical society based on familial ties.
The stronger the ties, the more powerful the person.
But then what about becoming ‘diluted too often?’ Could Plato be describing something other than the dilution of a lineage because of extra-familial relations? Could Plato be talking about a physical, literal dilution?
Victoria considered what Archibald Quinones had told her, of the woman in Egypt who had been experimenting with information she’d claimed she had found in the Book of Bones. The woman had been working with… some chemical? Some sort of change agent? The Nazi bell experiment, Die Glocke, was also said to have been some sort of weapon of chemical warfare, but the Allies had never uncovered it after the war.
Could the ‘divine portion’ and ‘dilution’ have something to do with a reduced dosage of some chemical? In that sense, the Atlantean race — the source of their power — would have been ‘diluted’ enough that they eventually lost their power. Their fall would have been inevitable.
She focused once again on the text in front of her.
“Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honorable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the center of the world, beholds all created things. And when he had called them together, he spake as follows-”
And that was it. Plato’s work, Critias, ended mid-sentence. Either the rest had been lost to time, or Plato had never finished it.
Archibald Quinones had claimed that it was the latter — that Plato had simply moved on to a different, more pressing, dialogue. The Hermocrates, the final book of Plato’s Atlantis trilogy, was also lost to time.
The final paragraph of Critias held no new answers for her, though there were some intriguing phrases. ‘Collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the center of the world…’
Was the ‘center of the world’ Atlantis? To the Atlanteans, sure. Possibly. But from Plato’s perspective? Where would he place the ‘center of the world?’
These were the questions she was wrestling with when the office phone sitting on her desk began to ring.
25
Garza
Vicente Garza leaned toward the pilot as he spoke into his headset. “ETA?”
The pilot, leaving one hand on the stick, checked his watch. “About seventeen hours. We have four refueling stops scheduled, but they should take less than an hour each.”
“Very good,” Garza said. He turned to his phone, which had a connection to the onboard satellite link, allowing his phone internet and cellular access. He opened his encrypted messaging app and typed out a question.
> Status?
He only had to wait a few seconds for a reply after the message had been sent.
>> As scheduled. Beginning phase four-trials this afternoon.
> Fine. Alert me to any anomalies.
>> Affirmative.
A pause, and then:
>> How did the phase-five trial specimens hold up?
Garza thought a moment, trying to decide how to answer the question. There was no need to get into details; the man on the other end of the line was a scientist. He would want details, but only those pertaining to the specimens’ adrenaline, heart rate, muscle wear, and so on. Garza didn’t have any of that information. This test had been a real-world, live-fire test, and while there hadn’t been any live fire, he had a good sense for the giants’ abilities.
> Difficult to assess. No casualties, but also no direct engagement. I expect significant exhaustion, possible damage to bone structure.
He didn’t need to wait for his scientist’s response to know that the man still thought it was a bad idea to bring the giants into the field this early. The flights alone — packing the massive humans into the back of a cargo plane and flying them across the world — had been an ordeal for everyone involved, not the least of which the giant soldiers themselves.
The scientists and researchers Garza had employed had warned him about the issues he could expect if he took the science experiments into the field: long-term loss of bone density, muscle failure, even death. The subjects were not ready, they’d told him. They would likely begin to physically break down, figuratively and perhaps literally. They weren’t ready — they weren’t yet strong enough.
But he wanted to know for sure. His team had done an incredible job building these soldiers. For years they had worked in laboratories around the world, each completing a small piece of a puzzle that none but Garza could see in its entirety. They had performed their duties, studied their problems, issued solutions… and he had his best scientists put it all together for him.
That process began years ago. Today, he was close. He wanted to turn over his research and receive his final payment. But he needed proof that what he was after was legitimate. He needed to know that it was real.
Seeing the soldiers earlier in the forest was real. He had to force himself to remain unmoved by the display, unfazed by the monsters walking out of the woods. He’d seen them in the lab, seen their images and files and reports, but seeing in real life — seeing them actually operate — that was what had convinced him.
He had been working toward this goal for most of his career. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but this was his ultimate prize. He had spent his entire career building an army. A group of men so well-trained and disconnected from their own desires that he could fully control every one of them. They were autonomous in the sense that he could point them in a direction and they would march, not stopping until they received further orders. They would destroy — and had destroyed — anything and anyone in their way.
Best of all, his army, Ravenshadow, was for sale. He worked for money. Nothing else could break down language barriers, cross continents and oceans, and silence even most dissenting opinion like money.
And now, he had the opportunity to build and sell the next generation of super soldier. These men were the future, and now he had the proof of concept. They hadn’t actively engaged an enemy, but they had achieved his goal perfectly.
He thought back to Reggie’s face when he’d seen them. Slack-jawed, for once in his life completely dumbstruck. Garza had felt the same — most of the men were over nine feet tall, and their sinewy musculature rippled across their massive frames like vines around a tree trunk. He had watched Reggie’s face register disbelief, then awe, then sheer terror.
And that was his brand. That was his product. Garza needed Ravenshadow to invoke fear and awe in his enemies and his supporters — that was how he would achieve his goals.
But there was a
final piece to the puzzle, one that he had been tasked with finding. His latest client needed the soldiers as much as he did, and they were willing to pay an incredible amount to obtain them. But they, like he, needed a finished product, not a half-baked schematic. They needed the complete soldier, and to Garza and his team of scientists, the complete soldier was still just a dream.
His client had informed him that there was an answer to his dilemma, and he was close. They had instructed him to track the final resting place of a mystery they had been after for centuries. That place would offer the final piece to his puzzle, and then his mission would be complete.
26
Ben
The captain had logged their flight plan and had taken off — to Rome, Italy — over an hour ago, while they waited for Archibald Quinones to get back to them.
Which was why Ben was upset to hear Archie’s first sentence when the call connected.
“What you are attempting to do is impossible,” Archie’s voice said through the phone’s small speaker.
Ben looked up at Julie across the aisle, a concerned look on his face. No matter what he thought his face looked like, he knew that what he was feeling was even deeper.
“So, we’re heading to Rome. To Vatican City. Should we have the pilot turn around?” he asked.
“No,” Archie said. “But let me fill you in on where I am with the research. The Vatican Archives are the private archives of the Pope,” Archie said. “Passed from one Pope to the other, they are literally the notes, collections, and scrolls of countless generations, saved and protected by those who work inside the Archives.”
Ben waited for Archibald Quinones to get to his point.
“I have been researching a few options here at the university library. There are maps, books, and a few scholarly papers describing the Archives. I had a few ideas, but it seems… at least if these publications are to be believed, there is nothing we can do to get inside.”
