by Nick Thacker
“Uh, sorry — I’m not sure I follow you.”
Ben reached forward with his free hand and grabbed Julie’s in his. “Jules,” he said. “I thought I needed time to ‘figure things out.’ I thought I needed it in the woods, at Yellowstone, after I’d met you. I thought I needed it now, too. Time away from CSO, from you, too ‘figure things out.’ To know for sure whether I wanted this for the rest of my life.”
“And?”
“Well, I realized I didn’t need any time at all. I already knew, I just needed to actually admit it to myself. Jules, you’re the one. You’ve always been it, and I’ve just been an idiot trying to ‘find myself.’ You knew me all along, you signed up for this, and you’ve just been waiting around for me to realize it.”
“Well, it’s about damn time you realized it, hotshot.”
He laughed.
“But we have a problem.”
“What’s that?”
She pointed. “That took way longer than ten seconds.”
Ben groaned, then looked behind him. The other boat had gained on them, and three of the men were standing on the bow, aiming their rifles at them.
“Ready?” Ben asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever —”
The men opened fire, and Ben ducked. Shots rang out along the hull of the boat, and he saw one round had penetrated the side, leaving a small hole just above the waterline. He tried to hold the engine steady — they were only a few yards out from their destination — but it was difficult to stay low and drive at the same time.
He looked up to get his bearings, just as Julie slipped over the side of the boat and into the water.
39
Reggie
“We found a piece of the Book of Bones,” Reggie said. “In Egypt, in a vault beneath the Sphinx.”
Garza sat back in his chair, the front two legs lifting off the ground. He sat across from Reggie, who was seated in the basement cavern in a similar chair, five feet from The Hawk. His bodyguards stood behind him and to the side. Far enough away that Reggie would have a tough shot at running toward them, close enough that their shot wouldn’t miss.
It had taken all of his nerve not to rush the stairs when the three men had returned. He’d stood in the center of the floor, near the table on which his casket had been placed, and waited for them to arrive. One man was carrying two chairs, and he placed these facing each other in the center of the room.
Reggie wanted to kill them. He figured he might even have a chance at it, but he knew they were expecting a fight. Prepared for a fight.
He had to fight back feelings of fear. Of what had become of Sarah. When he’d called up to Garza through the door, the screaming had stopped.
But was that a good thing or a bad thing?
He decided to play along, to at least give her a chance.
“It was a journal, something Rachel Rascher’s great-grandfather had been working on during the Nazi regime.”
“Sigmund Rascher,” Garza said.
Reggie nodded. “Yeah. Sadistic son-of-a —”
“I know who he is, thank you.”
Reggie sniffed. He’d wanted to finish the sentence. Just like you, asshole. He stared at Garza, wondering how long he’d have to play along to win Sarah’s freedom.
He knew it was far too much to ask to expect that both of them would be freed, but he had to play the game for Sarah’s sake.
“Anyway, she was continuing experiments he’d started back in the ‘30s. Drowning people in ice-cold water, suffocating them to study the effects of high-altitude flying in low-oxygen conditions. Stuff like that.”
“And Die Glocke.”
“Yeah,” Reggie said. “‘The Bell.’ A Nazi experiment that they believed would allow them to ‘test’ people for some kind of purity.”
“The Aryan race, I presume.”
“Yeah, I guess. Blond hair, blue eyes. Guess those traits weren’t enough for the SS. They wanted more proof that their people were perfect, so they created a machine to prove it.” He chuckled. “But it didn’t work.”
“It didn’t?”
“Well, we think it killed people just fine. But it operated on some electrically charged chemical, one that would disperse a poison into the air and infect anyone close by. Some people survived, most didn’t.”
“And that was a failure?” Garza asked.
Reggie shrugged. “Arsenic kills people in high enough dosages. But people have different immune responses — they’re more resilient, more capable of fighting against pathogens.”
“True,” Garza said. “So maybe it had nothing to do with race, but more to do with finding the strongest of the population.”
“Right,” Reggie said. “Too bad they didn’t have giants.” He cocked an eyebrow at his ex-boss and smiled.
“What else was in the journal, Red?”
“When are you going to let Sarah go?”
“When I feel you’ve told me everything I need to know.”
Reggie sighed. That’s never going to happen. “Look,” he said. “I never read the journal. An Interpol guy took it right after we barely escaped the temple. And besides, it wasn’t the full Book of Bones, just snippets that Rascher’s grandaddy copied down.”
“What else was she working on?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know that?”
“Would you like to hear about Sarah?” Garza asked. “Do you know what battery acid does to an open wound, Red?”
Red shot out of the chair but stopped himself after only a few inches. The soldiers near Garza didn’t budge.
They’re as well-trained as I suspected, he thought. They expected a reaction, but didn’t flinch.
He sat back down. “We thought she was trying to use the serum — whatever that junk was inside The Bell — to test the entire population. A giant version of Die Glocke, if you will.”
“But she didn’t have the equipment?”
“The machine? That’s easy. She was in position to do it, too.” The Great Pyramid of Giza. The ultimate chemical weapon. “No, she ran out of juice. She had a team of scientists trying to work on a synthetic version of that serum, since the original stuff — stuff she found in that temple — was running low.”
“Ah,” Garza said. “But she never finished it.”
“No, thank God. But she thought there was more of the original stuff — lots more of it — hidden in the Hall of Records.”
“The Hall of Records?”
“Yeah, the hidden wealth of knowledge that the Atlantean race had collected until their demise. No one ever found it, of course, but people say the Library of Alexandria was a branch of this ancient Hall, or that it had original scrolls from the Hall of Records inside.”
“And the Book of Bones describes where this Hall is?” Garza asked.
“Who knows? Never read it. But that’s what Rachel Rascher believed, and — I suspect — your client.”
Garza gave him a strange look. “That’s correct.”
“What do they want with it? What’s the Hall of Records to them?”
“Nothing,” Garza said.
“Nothing?”
“They want nothing to do with the Hall of Records. To them, it’s a dead-end.”
Reggie frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean? They don’t want the Hall of Records? The treasure that’s inside it? The knowledge?”
“There’s nothing inside the Hall of Records, Red. It’s a farce, a fiction. One created by Plato to send explorers on a wild goose chase around the world.”
“But how do you know that? The Book of Bones is supposed to —”
“The Book of Bones has plenty of other secrets in it. Stories of the greatest antediluvian civilization on the planet, one that rivals the civilizations of today. It holds within it the power to unlock the greatest scientific discoveries of mankind. But it does not tell anyone what’s inside the Hall of Records.”
“Why not?” Reggie asked.
“Because the Great Hall of Recor
ds is just a myth. An allegory. Plato was fond of those, as you well know. He created the Hall of Records legend as a way of explaining the collected wisdom of the ancients. It’s their body of work, their knowledge. But it’s not a physical place, Red. And what he describes; where he says the Hall of Records lives is nothing but an empty shell of a temple. Just an old structure, cast aside for millennia. There’s nothing there.”
Reggie was confused. “I don’t… understand. How can you know all this?”
“Because my client has the Book of Bones. Most of it, anyway, aside from a few key chapters that they’re very intent on finding. But what they have tells us exactly where the Hall of Records — or at least what Plato calls the Hall of Records — lies.”
“And?”
“And?” Garza asked. “What do you mean, ‘and?’ That’s it — there’s nothing there. As I said, an empty shell of a temple. Forgotten to the modern world, but never more than just a blank canvas.”
“But how can you be —”
“I can be sure, Reggie, because you’re sitting in it.”
Reggie’s eyes focused on Garza, then on the walls around them. The ceiling, the floor, it was all made of stone. Whitish gray stone with an almost blue hue under direct light. Smooth, as if carved by hand and sanded down over centuries.
No, he thought. There’s no way.
But it had to be true. He recognized the space. It wasn’t the same space, but it was modeled after and designed by the same hands as the space beneath the Sphinx at Giza.
Carved not by the ancient Egyptians, but by a race far more ancient still.
You’re sitting in it, Garza had said.
“Gareth Red,” Garza said, smiling while holding his arms open to his sides. “Welcome to the Great Hall of Records.”
40
Julie
The water was colder than she’d expected, but Julie was able to hold her breath and keep her eyes closed for the initial submersion. When she felt her head sink beneath the waves, she kicked — aiming her head straight down. She needed to get deep enough.
She heard the roaring of the boat’s engine above her, and she swam downward, waiting for the second. She hoped their enemy’s boat remained focused on Ben, assuming that they’d hit her and caused her to fall overboard. But if they stopped to check…
She heard the motor only fifteen seconds later — were they too close to him already? — as she began swimming toward the shoreline.
She couldn’t hold her breath long enough to make the swim underwater, but she figured she could make it at least halfway. She’d come up for air quickly, then resume her underwater journey.
She also hoped Ben could fend off the attackers long enough for her to get into position. Their rifles were accurate, and Julie knew the mercenaries were trained well enough to use them effectively, but she hoped that Ben was a difficult enough target to hit on the open waters. Still, their boat was faster than Ben’s, and they didn’t even know if this plan would work…
Stop. She came up for air, took a massive breath, both to refill her lungs and to let out a deep sigh to help relax her, then she dared a look around.
She saw the four attackers first. The three men were still standing on the front of the boat — that was good. The driver was aiming for the smaller boat in front of them, and Julie could barely see Ben, crouched low in the back of their fishing boat and heading for the spot they’d agreed upon.
She went down for the second leg of her trip, then came up seven seconds later to see the boats just beneath the horizon line.
She reached the first buoy at the same time as Ben rounded the corner behind the ferry and disappeared onto its port side, but she didn’t have time to celebrate. The second buoy was still a good twenty feet away, and she figured Ben would reach the stern of the ferry on its port side just as she was ready.
The buoy was a three-foot-tall metal statue in the shape of a miniature lighthouse, and it had a ‘no fishing’ graphic on a sign on two of its sides, as well as a second sign on one side that had a ‘no wake’ logo. She recognized the signs and the buoy — they were ubiquitous on the lake where she’d grown up — a way to delineate the border around a swimming spot or a slow zone.
She swam underwater once more, then beneath the buoy itself, reaching out with her palms open. Her left hand felt the rope holding the buoy to its anchor, and she pulled it up. There was a small amount of slack in the line, and she panicked when it went taut and she felt the anchor catch.
Come on.
She yanked again, this time resting her feet against the side of the buoy, and she felt the rope and anchor give. The anchor was a simple pyramid-shaped weight, probably no more than ten pounds, and she hauled in the line as fast as she was able.
She came up for air again and continued to drag the line with her, ignoring the beating of her heart and the gentle sear beginning to build in her lungs. She focused on her mission and reached the second buoy just as she heard the telltale sound of Ben’s tiny boat rounding the corner of the ferry’s bow.
But that wasn’t the only thing she heard.
The gunfire was nearly constant now, the men obviously realizing that Ben was taking them on a scenic tour of the Corsican port. She saw out of the corner of her eye the boats, weaving back and forth as they dodged in and around the other buoys dotting the harbor’s surface, and the gunmen traded positions on the front of their boat as they took potshots at Ben.
For what it was worth, Julie saw that the rear boat hadn’t gotten much closer to Ben’s, but it was now easily within what she would have called ‘close range.’ The fact that they hadn’t hit Ben yet was nothing short of a miracle, but she also saw that Ben stayed very low in the back of the boat.
She saw that his engine was smoking — a long line of black smoke trailed off and behind him, dissipating into the air behind the boat. She knew that was bad news, but it seemed to also have the added effect of creating a difficult barrier for the men to aim through.
Just get here, she thought. Just get here without blowing up.
He did.
She hid behind the second buoy and peeked out to see Ben pointing the boat between the two buoys she’d just swam between. The boat was coughing, and she imagined it was leaking precious fuel.
The second boat had, in fact, slowed a little. It was keeping pace with Ben’s, but it appeared to be far enough away that it could at least follow the trail of smoke safely, without getting lost in it. Still, it was traveling fast.
But Julie no longer needed to time out her attack. The smoke would conceal her machinations, and she only hoped the buoys and their lines would hold.
She crawled up higher onto the buoy’s side, wrapped the first buoy’s rope around the little lighthouse on the second one, then back over itself, then dropped the anchor.
The line went tight, and she saw the buoys, twenty feet apart, leaning toward one another. They held that way for a few seconds, then the anchor began to sink.
The line stretching between them rose out of the water about three feet, to the top of the lighthouse, and the first buoy began to move toward the second one, to ease the tension on the rope.
But the boat full of gunmen shot underneath the line as it was still hanging in the air, and it hit one man standing in the center of the boat first.
Julie watched the rope grow tight again, hold, and clothesline the man as the boat continued moving. It launched forward, but the man was still wrapped in the line, and he was quickly joined by his teammates.
The three men were smacked — hard — off the back of the boat. They piled into the water, one on top of the other two, and disappeared into the harbor. Their weapons landed nearby but sunk beneath the surface before any of them could recover.
She looked at the two boats. The driver of the second boat had slowed and was beginning to turn around, but Ben was already facing her direction and steaming toward her.
She made her move.
41
Reggie
After Garza and his men left the room, Reggie continued pacing. This time, however, he had a purpose.
Get out, get Sarah, kill Garza.
It was clear now what Garza was after. He needed his client’s payment, the money for finding the Book of Bones. But the icing on the cake for him would be information in the book itself — information that would help him finish the monstrous giants he’d somehow created.
Reggie didn’t know if they were some science experiment-gone-wrong, or if they were purpose-built based on some new technology. And they were incomplete somehow — weaker than they should have been, or fragile in some way. Reggie saw a bit of it in Alaska, when they’d stumbled into the clearing and he caught a glimpse of their seemingly melted faces.
But Garza believed that whatever was wrong with them could be fixed, perfected. And whatever it would take to perfect them he believed he would find inside the Book of Bones. Whatever Garza had done to ‘grow’ the giants was an incomplete answer. He needed something, and he believed the missing portion of the Book of Bones would have the answer. Something akin to the chemical that Rachel Rascher had found? Something with near-mystical properties, a new element? Whatever it was, Garza wanted to get his hands on it.
And the Hall of Records.
Reggie spun around, taking in the space illuminated by the single work lamp. This is the Hall of Records? he thought. The ‘Great’ Hall of Records?
It seemed difficult to believe — there was nothing here. No markings on the walls, no telltale artifacts. And Garza had implied that they’d found it like this. Totally empty. Did that mean Plato was simply telling a story? A lesson, disguised as history? He’d done it before, and many historians believed that his stories of Atlantis were merely fabricated as an argument against hubris.
But… Reggie had seen Atlantis with his own eyes. Sure, it was nothing more than an ancient, collapsed civilization that had long battled with its Mediterranean rivals, but it was real nonetheless. They’d found proof of it, and he’d found proof of their technological prowess beneath the Great Sphinx.
