by Nick Thacker
It wasn’t much help, knowing that, but she filed it away anyway.
Besides that, any information she had about her situation was useless — her phone had been taken hostage even before she had been, and now here hands were bound behind her back. Even if she had her phone and could access it, there would be way to get it out and send a message to the others before her captors took it.
From what she gathered, these captors weren’t fly-by-night amateurs, either. They seemed professional, cool and collected as they’d grabbed her and even had a contingency plan in case Reggie had decided to barrel out of the hotel lobby in pursuit.
As she was joined in the Atlas by the second of the men who’d kidnapped her, she noticed the driver poking at a large in-dash screen. He navigated around the built-in apps until he found the one he was looking for — guidance and navigation — then pressed a pre-programmed location.
She wasn’t able to read what the destination was, but when he pulled his hand back and began to drive out of the parking lot, she saw a quick 3D image of the map, including their current GPS-qualified location and their target destination. She saw the curvature of the main highway they were about join as well as the curvature of the long, skinny island itself.
If she had been from the area the view may have been helpful. As it was, she felt even more frustrated, scared, and lonely. She’d had an opportunity to see where they were headed and come up short.
Reggie, please, she thought, find me.
She wanted to find her father, but at the moment she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something far larger going on than just a double kidnapping. She wanted to keep her father front of mind, to remember that she had come here solely to find him, but she couldn’t help but feel the anxiety building in her chest. The warmth of panic began to take over her ability to think straight, to supersede the feeling of pain from her bound wrists and the adrenaline rush fighting against it.
She felt like the damsel in distress — her fate no longer in her own hands. She hated the fairy tales and movies, the helpless maidens who relied on big, strong princes and warriors to save them. Now, in the back of an SUV preparing to speed away from the only contact to the rest of the world she had, she couldn’t help but feel like one of those princesses, trapped in a castle awaiting her doom.
Or, if she was lucky, her rescue.
As soon as it had appeared, she pushed the thought out of her mind. Enough of that, she reasoned. You’re more than capable of handling yourself. Get a grip, take a breath, and start figuring this out.
And then, as if a second voice was now silently urging her on, she heard, it’s not like they want to kill you or they would have done it by now.
She nodded. I agree.
She leaned forward. “Where are we going?” Sarah asked, leaning forward as the driver turned into oncoming traffic.
The larger man, Ivan, simply stared out the window. The driver’s eyes flashed into the rearview mirror. “It does not concern —”
“It bloody well does concern me, asshole,” she said, suddenly surprised by her confidence. “I’m being kidnapped. If it didn’t concern me, drop me off right here. Now. I’ll take care of the zip ties myself.”
At that, Ivan chuckled. “Again, it does not concern you. You are merely a stepping stone.”
“To what?” she asked. “What the hell are you looking for?”
“You already know what we are looking for, Ms. Lindgren.”
“To guys like you, I prefer Dr. Lindgren.”
“My apologies. Now, if you don’t mind —”
“You’re looking for Atlantis?” Sarah blurted out.
The driver frowned, and Ivan looked over at him, apparently waiting for some instructions. Finding nothing in his comrade’s face, he turned slowly in his chair and looked at Sarah.
“We are not looking for Atlantis,” he started.
“Bullshit,” she said. “That’s why we’re here. That’s why you kidnapped my father. We’re all looking for that stupid old —”
“We are not looking for Atlantis because we’ve already found it.”
“You’ve… already found it?”
Ivan shrugged. “Of course. Where do you think we’ve been all this time? This island, the volcano in the center, all of it — what do you think it is?”
“This… place — is Atlantis?”
“Of course. Plato literally describes this island in his essays. He tells of an island that matches this island exactly, down to the exact unit of measure. The Cyclades Plateau, you have heard of it?”
Sarah thought about their earlier conversation in the hotel bar. “Well, yes, but —”
“Then you know the entire area is nothing but a sunken island. An ancient continent. Everything Plato describes is here — this island, Thira, or Santorini, is but the smallest of the two that made up the continent. You know this, Dr. Lindgren.”
“I don’t — I don't understand, then… why is there…”
“No sign of the great civilization?”
She nodded.
He smiled. “Atlantis, while advanced, was not what it seems. Many philosophers and scientists have tried to understand what Plato was talking about. Through the years the legend has grown, as all legends do, to a fantastical account of an unbelievably advanced civilization that is, well, unbelievable.”
“So this place… the island we’re on… it’s part of Atlantis?”
“It is. Or it was,” Ivan said. “It’s a relic, only a remnant of what once was. The people here have moved on, forgetting their own history, their own ancestry, until the legend grew larger than the truth. They built new lives, forgetting that their entire lineage was tied to a much larger, much more powerful nation just to the north. One that now lies beneath the sea.”
Sarah looked out the window as they passed through the suburbs and entered a winding, dark country road that bordered the ocean. She could see the vast blackness of the ocean, dotted with a few sparkling lights of evening life. This is Atlantis, she thought. She tried the words in her mind, playing with them to see if they fit. This is Atlantis.
Still, something bothered her. Even if this place was the remains of the great lost civilization, she still didn’t understand what all the fuss was. These men had kidnapped her — kidnapped her father — and were going to demand something from her. They wanted ‘an answer,’ as they had written. Whatever the answer was, they were willing to go to any lengths to retrieve it.
And that begged the question:
“You’re not looking for Atlantis, then?” Sarah asked.
Ivan shook his head, grinning. “No. As I said, we already know where Atlantis is. We’re looking for something else entirely.”
43
Julie
THE PAST HOUR HAD DONE nothing to lift Reggie’s spirits, and Julie was growing more and more depressed by the minute. When Reggie and Ben had rushed up to the hotel room Julie and Ben were staying in, they’d shared what had happened with Sarah, summoning Mrs. E from her room across the hall.
Reggie had no information besides the general color and style of the getaway vehicle and the license plate number, as well as the appearance of the captors. He was quiet, reserved, and — in Julie’s opinion — very different from the man she knew. He was anxious, rocking gently back and forth on the couch against the wall. He hadn’t moved from that spot since they’d entered the room.
And he hadn’t been the last person to enter the room, either. Etienne Sharpe of Interpol had joined them about ten minutes ago, hoping to visit with Sarah Lindgren. He had narrowly missed the kidnapping incident, but informed them that he was already working to bring the local police up to speed.
“How were you already here, again?” Julie asked him. “You’re not based in Santorini. Or Greece, for that matter.”
Sharpe stood near the door, his back to the wall. His thick French accent was apparent but his English was otherwise impeccable. He shook his head. “No, I am not. I was trying to
meet up with Dr. Lindgren, and I knew from her flight that she would be here. I would have called ahead, but these matters… well, they tend to be a bit delicate.”
Julie saw Ben frown, then she turned to address Sharpe. “What do you mean by ‘delicate?’”
“More importantly,” Ben asked, “you knew about her flight? Are you tracking her somehow?”
Sharpe cleared his throat. He was tall, thin, and handsome. His longish brown hair was not styled, but it fell naturally to one side, similar to Ben’s. His eyes were deep, brooding, and Julie could tell he wasn’t just a desk jockey. His physique, even if hidden under a government-issue gray suit, was well-kept. If she wasn’t mistaken, she’d have guessed that he had spent some time as a soldier in his recent past.
He first addressed Ben. “Yes,” he said. “We are. Whenever an incident like this goes without resolution for more than 24 hours we begin to track the movements of close friends and family. Her ticket was purchased by your organization, but she needed to be cleared by your government’s travel security.”
He turned his gaze to Julie. “I apologize for not alerting you all sooner,” he said. “But Professor Graham Lindgren has been under close observation for some time now, in both his home country and at our field offices. That is part of the reason we were aware of his abduction so early in the process.”
“Why were you watching him?” Ben asked.
“He has done nothing wrong, rest assured,” Sharpe said. “At least, we have no reason to believe that he has. But over the course of the past six months, there have been an increased amount of pings to his online presence from suspect IP addresses. We’ve been watching it for about a month, to gain more information and to formulate a plausible explanation. These types of pings, individually, are typically of no concern, as it is usually impossible to tell where the origin point of a server request is.”
“Right,” Julie said. “Just because you got a hit from an IP address from somewhere in Iran doesn’t mean that the person doing the search was in Iran.”
Sharpe nodded. “Precisely. The public internet is a vast, ever-changing algorithm, and even with purposeful DNS rerouting and IP masking, client requests are sent through quite a few nodes on the way to the server, and different ones on the way back.
“But even without such a specialized relocation protocol in place, there are ways to see, on average, the number of requests jumping through a known node that is a bit less-than-reputable. For example, many of the black-market arms dealers we know of use a handful of the same services for encrypting their connections through their devices. It makes it impossible to tell where they are, but we know, at the very least, when they made the connection and what data centers they were routed through.”
“Wait a minute,” Ben said. “So you guys are watching this stuff all the time? Like the NSA or something?”
Sharpe smiled. “Not really. This is not ‘snooping’ as much as it is just a computer program that filters out anomalous hits to a given online resource and generates a report of ‘likely points of interest.’ The truth is that even the bad people out there also use the web for completely normal, legal, day-to-day transactions, like online shopping and entertainment. Normally that fact makes it difficult to wade through the data, but when there are numerous hits on a resource that all seem to be coming from known criminal sources, we take a closer look at the resource.”
Reggie nodded once. “Professor Lindgren’s paper,” he said.
“Yes,” Sharpe said. “You have seen it?”
“No, but we saw a reference to it. Timeaus and Critias — An Alternative Interpretation. It’s been taken down.”
“By Graham himself,” Sharpe said. “It seems he retracted the article and deleted what references to it he could find.”
“What did it say?” Mrs. E asked.
“We don’t know,” Sharpe said. “Our database flagged it as a candidate for human follow-up. By the time we saw it two weeks ago it had been taken offline for whatever reason. But our working theory is that someone made a threat to Professor Lindgren, something that scared him enough that he tried to hide any association with them. Anything that might lead them to the professor.”
Julie took in a deep breath. “How did you get involved, Agent Sharpe? I was under the impression that Interpol didn’t have regular ‘field agents?’”
“That is almost correct,” Sharpe said. “We don’t have many, and those we do have are usually just for liaison purposes between international governments. Information in our databases was requested by the local authorities at the university, who were alerted by the IT staff there. It only escalated to our attention due to a clause in the nation’s education policy that suspect matters such as this be immediately and unquestionably brought to the attention of an international policing agency. We had the records available, and things quickly began to look suspicious, so here we are.”
“Lucky you were able to help, then,” Ben said.
“I only wish I was lucky enough to get here in time,” Sharpe said. “And for that matter, I wish we were more equipped to provide on-the-ground support. As it is, Interpol is merely a resourcing service for local, regional, and international law enforcement. We can push local law enforcement to help us out, but we do not have the resources in-house to run investigations such as this.”
His eyes shifted as he looked at each of them in turn, and in that moment Julie understood why he was here. She also looked around the room, at the others gathered there, her friends and teammates she’d been through hell and back with.
They’re not going to like this part, she thought.
She stood up and walked a few paces to the other side of the room, putting physical distance between herself and agent Sharpe. She looked out the small window of the mid-range hotel room, out at the streets and city of Santorini. In the distance she could see the vast expanse of the Mediterranean, still illuminated by the waning cerulean of the evening sun. “You’re not here to ask us for our help, are you?”
Sharpe smiled again, but this time it hung a bit on one side. He seemed genuinely concerned, as if delivering this news was his sole purpose for being here and yet it still pained him to do so. “No, Juliette. I am not.”
She nodded.
“I have been following your group’s success, believe it or not,” he continued. “To me you are the epitome of what citizens should be, regardless of their country of origin — capable, informed, aware, and able to take matters into your own hands, should the situation force that. You are patriots, to your country as well as countries like the ones I represent that need everyday heroes.
“But at the end of the day, you are still citizens. Civilians. You have no governmental authority, at least not in any way recognizable by Interpol or any European Union or United Nations treaty.”
He was correct, of course. The beauty of the Civilian Special Operations was also its curse. To the United States — and any other government — they didn’t officially exist. The leaders of all nations had complete plausible deniability when it came to the ragtag group of privately funded self-declared police officers. The branches of the US military had seats on the board, and had a small say in their operations, but they all knew that the CSO had no real stake in the international espionage game.
Sharpe’s statement didn’t surprise her in the least, but it still stung.
You are not recognized, he was saying. It was a professional truth but it stung personally.
“You’re telling us to stand down,” Ben said. It wasn’t a question. Julie heard the heightened tension in his voice.
“I am,” Sharpe said. “I was here on a goodwill mission to help Dr. Lindgren wade through the legal battle concerning her father’s abduction, should it come to that… but I am also here to inform you that your presence in an ongoing international investigation is not going to be acknowledged.”
“What’s that really mean, boss?” Reggie said, suddenly snapping to attention. He sniffed, then wiggled
his nose a bit, as if trying to force it not to run. Julie may have been briefly worried about Ben’s temper, but she was now concerned more for Reggie’s. She’d seen what happened when he got too worked up about something, and these guys kidnapping Sarah was just the sort of thing…
“It means we are politely requesting your assistance in the matters of finding Dr. and Professor Lindgren, by —”
“By having us on the sidelines?”
“…by allowing our offices and law enforcement to work unimpeded.”
“We wouldn’t dare impede,” Reggie said, the tinge of sarcasm in his voice barely masking the anger Julie knew was welling up inside him.
“Your reputation suggests otherwise,” Sharpe said, just as quick to the draw.
“Our reputation is actually impeccable, I believe,” Ben said. “In fact, we —”
“Not now, Ben,” Julie said.
Ben glared at her, defiantly, but he didn’t speak.
She felt actual heat in the room now. Sharpe stood against his wall, on his side, her people stood scattered around their side. Reggie was emotionally compromised, and if his words weren’t indicative of that his reddish nose and bloodshot, tear-filled eyes were.
Ben was seething, and she felt like taking a step away from him. He would never do harm to her, but he was also a bit like a bull in a china shop when he was upset. He was prone to rash behavior, according to the initial CSO dossier.
“Agent Sharpe,” she said, keeping her voice calm and even. “Thank you for coming personally. I know that was a heck of a trip. You must understand that we are also tired, having just disembarked from a forty-eight hour trip. We’re exhausted, we’re angry about Professor Lindgren, and now we’re reeling from hearing about his daughter. She’s our friend.”
Sharpe nodded, then coughed into his fist. “Yes, I know,” he said. “Again, I apologize. If there was any way I could change this, I would. Truly. But my superiors are not at all interested in help from your group at this point. Please believe me when I tell you: if that changes, I will be there to deliver the news to you personally.”
