by Nick Thacker
“I see.”
“And they told me that the paper was not well-received. The community at large seemed to think it lacked creativity, although it was well-researched.”
Reggie sighed, shaking his head. “Academics. Seriously. So what was the paper about?”
“Well, it was a short treatise on Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, obviously, but it was written from a particularly geologic slant.”
“That’s what they told you?” Reggie asked. “I’m not even sure what that means.”
“He is an archeologist, so it is no surprise that he looks at the problem from a physical perspective rather than a historical one.
“They are still trying to retrieve the rough copy of his paper, as it seems it was published directly from his computer and there is no backup of it on their cloud drives. They have been trying to access the professor’s files since he went missing, hoping that something on his machine would help track him down.”
“But they told you a bit about what the paper was about? About this ‘alternative explanation’ of Plato’s work?” Julie asked.
Mrs. E shook her head. “That is what I thought as well, but no. The paper is not an interpretation of Plato’s work, the dialogue itself, but an alternative proposal of the content of his dialogue.”
Reggie frowned, frustrated. “They tell you anything else?”
“They left a lot to be interpreted,” Mrs. E said. “I got the sense that they were a bit hesitant. They want to find their colleague, but they certainly did not sound like they approved of his paper.”
“So the stodgy old guys are holding back?” Reggie asked. “Hoping this takes care of some of their competition or something?”
“Perhaps,” Mrs. E said. “Or they just want to keep their name clear. A scandal like this, if true, would no doubt bring down scrutiny and unwanted press on their institution…”
“But their colleague was kidnapped!” Julie said. “Don’t they care about that?”
“…and they each have their own theory on Plato’s work, and working with us could appear as though they are in agreement with his assessment.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ben said.
“I guess the competition in the academic archeology world is fierce,” Mrs. E said. “Still, I was able to press them a bit. The paper was not well-received because it was not peer-reviewed through the same channels as usual. He hardly reached out to any known historians for their opinion.
“He claimed that was due to the sensitive nature of the material he was apparently working with, but his colleagues scoffed at that excuse, saying that he should not have published the paper in the first place if he did not want the information out there.”
“E,” Reggie said. “What information?”
“Right — so I asked them why this was so sensitive that they felt the need to pull the paper back down and remove it from their servers.”
“What did they say to that?” Julie asked.
“That is where it got weird,” Mrs. E answered. “They said they did no such thing. That he published the paper under his own name, and not that of the university, so there would have been no need to retract it.”
“So they didn’t do it…”
“No,” she said. “Either he pulled it back himself or someone hacked in and did it for him. But the college has no idea who that might be.”
“Interesting,” Ben said. “So this paper has to be related.”
“That is what Mr. E and I believe,” Mrs. E said. “I still need to confirm it with Sarah herself, but she is flying to Stockholm now, but she’ll be on the ground for fewer than three hours. She will then join us in Thera. She did mention when we spoke last that her father could have been researching something that related to Plato’s dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, leading to his excitement, the publication, and subsequent kidnapping. And, of course, we were turned on to the lead in the first place because of his quote in his letter to Sarah.”
“But Santorini?” Julie asked. “He could be anywhere.”
“He could be, and he might be. But we have to act quickly, and it’s unlikely he is outside of Europe, or that they would feel the need to move him off the continent. So if we are on the island of Thera we will be closer to him at least than we are in Alaska. We can move in if we get updated information.
“But, as you know, my husband is never one to act merely upon a hunch. If he did not believe, truly, that Professor Lindgren was in Santorini, we would not be heading there now.”
“Explain,” Reggie said.
“We have both been doing some research, and we intend to forward it on to Sarah for her input as well. We believe we have a working theory of where Dr. Lindgren was taken after he was abducted.
“As you all know, he was reportedly last seen over two days ago leaving his apartment in the city. Never came home, and his girlfriend never heard from him, either. But his abductors would not just bring him to some warehouse somewhere — they want something. Something Professor Lindgren himself was working hard to find. We believe he found it, or at least thinks he found it. His captors, therefore, also believe he has found it, but they need him to help them get to it. Dr. Lindgren is going to Stockholm to check in at his apartment and see if there are any clues the police might have missed.”
Reggie cleared his throat. “But you think his paper on Plato’s Timaeus and Critias explains what he found?”
“I do. Unlike all the other academic research papers on Plato’s writings, I believe Professor Lindgren’s paper studies the physical geographic similarities between this island —“ she pointed down at the image of Santorini — “and the island from Plato’s record. I think Professor Lindgren believes he has found the lost city of Atlantis.”
33
Sarah
STOCKHOLM WAS A BUST.
THE LOCAL police were crawling all over his apartment in Långholmen. The island neighborhood in the heart of Stockholm was apparently a high-end destination for retirees and the wealthy, and therefore a kidnapping was not a common occurrence for its residents. The Stockholm police force had barricaded the entrance and exit to the building, manning the posts day and night, allowing only residents to come and go.
Sarah had considered her options, wondering if it might work to claim she lived there. She did have a key, after all. But trying to explain who she was to the police, then trying to convince them to just let her in for an hour while she looked around — after they’d clearly already deemed the flat a crime scene — was not the sort of thing she felt confident doing.
If anything, she figured, it would only get her a date in the back room of a station, two officers playing good-cop, bad-cop with her, wasting her time.
So she’d made her decision: Stockholm was a waste of time. She headed back to the same block she’d had the Uber driver drop her off, hailed another driver pick her up, and paid them to take her back to the airport.
That had been over five hours ago.
Now, she was waiting in the airport in Santorini after catching another four-hour flight from Stockholm to the Greek island of Thera. She’d thought the destination was strange, but she’d remembered Mrs. E’s comment from two days prior. ‘We will fill you in when we arrive. Rest assured, we have good reason to suspect we know where your father is.’
She remembered feeling a bit concerned that she was putting her fate — and potentially her father’s — in the hands of a woman she’d barely met, and an organization she was only remotely affiliated with.
But it was Reggie who’d talked her into it. He’d assured her that he fully trusted Mr. and Mrs. E’s recommendation, and that the only reason for not bringing everyone up to speed before they left was due to a lack of time. They needed to handle the logistics of sending a handful of civilians across the world in a hurry.
She took a deep breath, sat down in one of the old, thin chairs along the wall, then stood back up again.
It had been months since she’d last seen h
im, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
She started pacing back and forth outside the baggage claim area. Reggie was going to be walking through the doors that led in from the tarmac after what would have been a forty-eight hour transcontinental flight, looking for her.
How do I look? she wondered. It was involuntary, a thought she had no control over. Had she felt in control of her thoughts in this moment, she would have reminded herself that she didn’t care how she looked, because caring about that meant that she also cared about what that man thought.
She didn’t care. She couldn’t care. She hadn’t allowed herself to care, ever since…
What? What happened between us? Sarah found herself wondering. They had had their little fling, both enjoying it thoroughly, then they’d split up, Sarah heading back to the field, back to the academics and publications and everything else she ran into in her line of work, and Reggie ran back to whatever it was an ex-Army sniper who now worked for a brand-new civilian organization did.
She touched her hair, feeling a few strands that weren’t sitting correctly and running through them with two fingers. She hated that she’d spent an extra ten minutes in her bathroom getting ready. Mrs. E had told her to pack for warm weather, but Sarah hated that she’d worn a skirt, one that had been doing nothing but gathering dust in the tiny closet in her Michigan apartment for months, because she knew it made her legs look awesome.
She hated that she’d done it all for him.
She didn’t hate Reggie, of course — he had done nothing wrong. Or at least she kept reminding herself of that. Neither of us thought it would work, she told herself. Neither of us wanted to make it work.
They had dated a bit, mostly just spending time together to help them cope with and come down off the high of surviving a nightmarish situation. It was guilt, grieving, and camaraderie, all wrapped into one shared emotion. It didn’t hurt that they were wildly attracted to each other, but Sarah had known right from the start — from the first time she’d spent the night in his hotel room — that they were going to be a fling. Nothing more, nothing less.
Five minutes. The clock on the wall had declared the jet’s arrival time five minutes ago, and it usually took ten minutes total to get off the plane and into the desolate airport. Much quicker than a typical commercial flight, but to Sarah it felt like an excruciatingly long time.
She poked her hair once again, then pressed her palms down and over her skirt, flattening it around her legs. Her shirt was a buttoned blue long-sleeved thing, but she’d rolled the sleeves way up and around her upper arms and left it untucked, so it looked sort of like the way she’d dress if she had been invited to dinner at a restaurant she wasn’t sure was very casual or semi-formal.
She checked her phone. No messages, no texts. It seemed like the entire world had come to a stop, yet her heart was quickening with every pulse. Get yourself together, she thought. This is ridiculous.
She thought of Alexander, the attractive, if not a bit too clingy, student assistant she’d left back in Michigan and wondered why it was always the men in close proximity to her that made her feel this way. It was always the taboo ones — the ones that would only lead to trouble — that she had a thing for. She could look at a chiseled superhero on the big screen and feel nothing, yet a reasonably attractive specimen of the opposite sex working alongside her made her lose her mind.
Perhaps she was attracted to the work? That some men shared an interest in the things she was most passionate about? But no, she’d worked alongside plenty of guys in her time and there were quite a few she couldn’t stand.
She sighed. She wished she could just shut her brain off. Standing there, waiting for the door to open and reveal the tall, darkly silhouetted figure of Gareth Red, she felt like a girl on prom night.
Not that she’d gone to prom — she’d spent most of the last year of high school traveling the world with her semi-famous father, running the speaking circuit with him and getting some experience in the field. She’d been begging to go with him for years, and he and her mother had decided that by her senior year of high school she was old enough.
She was certainly intelligent enough, able to pass many of her classes in spite of her poor attendance, and test out of the rest. Thanks to her field experience and grades, she was able to land a full-time scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where she’d completed her undergraduate degree summa cum laude.
She saw a crack of daylight stream up onto the ceiling across the room from her, brighter even than the fluorescents above her. The door opened and she was momentarily blinded. A shadow appeared, blocking the entrance, and then it stepped forward into the room.
Ben.
Harvey Bennett stood over six feet tall, wide-shouldered and broad, in a muscular way. His brownish hair fell over his forehead, thick and almost long enough to cover his eyebrow. It wasn’t styled but held a sort of purposeful appearance, as if he’d swiped his hand sideways over his bangs and it just stuck that way, and it made him look like a member of The Beatles that had gone too long without a haircut.
A Beatle that had gained an additional hundred pounds.
He was large, bearlike. To her knowledge he’d never set foot inside a gym, yet he held himself like a professional bodybuilder would, turning at the hips, his neck unmoving as he walked toward her.
He grinned and waved. She smiled back, but silently willed him to step sideways a bit so she could see the doorway behind him.
Juliette Richardson walked in next, followed immediately by Mrs. E. Sarah had never met the woman in person, but she had been on conference calls and video chats a few times with her and her husband over the past month. In person, Mrs. E was even more intimidating than Ben. Her short-cropped, military-style hair was blond, opposite Julie’s dark, long hair that fell gracefully over her shoulders. Julie came maybe up to Mrs. E’s shoulder, and the larger woman walked with authority, as if she always had somewhere to go and was late getting there.
Reggie had told her that Mrs. E had accompanied them to Antarctica during their excursion there, and she had been an extremely valuable member of the team, knowledgable in intelligence, communications, and trained in hand-to-hand combat.
They both waved, and she smiled and waved back.
Reggie walked in.
She felt her breath catch for a moment, then a blush started to appear just beneath the surface. She fought it off just as Ben reached her, wrapping her up in a bear hug.
“H — hi, Ben,” she muttered, her feet lifting completely off the ground. “Great to see you again.”
He laughed. “I’m telling you, you need to get in on this CSO thing. It’s a pretty sweet life, minus the flying everywhere.”
She grinned up at him. “I happen to like flying, you know.”
They’d been talking about the Civilian Special Operations with her ever since they’d met in The Bahamas, telling her that she’d be a perfect fit for the group. They’d already worked together, and she’d already proven her worth.
The CSO needed people trained in specific areas of expertise that would be beneficial to the CSO’s charge: solving mysteries that were either unimportant to the United States military or didn’t offer them enough plausible deniability.
She was hesitant, and not just because she enjoyed her career as it was. Joining the CSO would imply that she had taken someone else’s spot on the roster, someone the group had lost half a year ago. They were big shoes to fill, and she wasn’t about to put herself in a position where she might start comparing herself to the legacy of a dead man.
“Like I said, it’s a sweet gig.”
“I’m happy here, Ben,” she said. “Academia’s nice too, you know. We have Keurigs in all the break rooms now, and they even let us pay a discounted rate in the student dining halls.”
Ben chuckled, and Julie and Mrs. E stepped forward. Julie gave her a quick hug while Mrs. E extended her hand, continuing the ‘admiral on a mission’ impression, and Sar
ah’s eyes flipped back to the doorway.
Reggie was nearly caught up to the rest of them now, and he was grinning in that stupid, too-large-for-his-face sort of way she’d grown to love. He was carrying a rucksack over his shoulder, holding his phone in his free hand. He came up behind Mrs. E, the only one in the group tall enough to look him in the eye, and he stopped. The smile stayed the same, but the one in his eyes shifted, grew more serious.
“Hey, Sarah,” he said.
She felt that fluttering thing in her chest, that thing she’d told herself she wouldn’t do, and she tried to ignore it.
“Hey Reggie,” she said back. “Great to see you again.”
34
Graham
GRAHAM’S FACE HURT. HE HADN’T expected the large, brutish man to actually hit him. He sniffed, shifted his jaw left and right, and used his tongue to feel around the inside of his mouth.
Everything’s still in place. For now.
“You done?” Graham asked the man. The man was not the same man who had come to Graham’s apartment in Stockholm, but the two looked like they could be brothers. Whereas the man at his apartment — the one who had accompanied him to the airport and then to wherever they were now — was tall and thin, this man was tall and huge. Muscular, hardly any neck to speak of, and a permanent scowl on his face. He was younger than Graham by about twenty years, by the looks of it, and Graham wondered if his sole purpose in life so far was to beat up on helpless old guys like him.
Sure seems to have a knack for it, he thought. He winced. Apparently there was going to be a bruise.
The man glared down at him. “Where’s the powder?”
The what?
Graham filed the information away for later. They’re looking for a powder…
“That’s enough, Igor,” Rachel Rascher said from over the man’s shoulder. She had been standing in the back of Graham’s cell, questioning Graham while the man intimidated him. “No need for that.”
