by Nick Thacker
“So we’re going to Egypt, for sure,” Ben said. “It’s all too much of a coincidence. Both Sarah and her father were digging around in Atlantean history, which would eventually lead to Egypt. These guys — whoever took her — want something from them, and it’s serious enough that they’ll potentially kill to figure out what it is.”
“But where in Egypt?” Julie asked. “It’s not like we can just look for a black Sikorsky helicopter and say, ‘there it is!’”
“Actually,” Mrs. E said. “All of the air traffic in this region is heavily regulated. It is like flying anywhere near Washington, D.C.”
“So someone’s watching the skies for us?” Ben asked.
She nodded, smiled, then reached for the phone Reggie was still holding. “Yes, someone is surely watching. The question is whether or not my husband has access to those records.”
“You think he might?”
“If it’s a public flightpath, sure. If it’s a government vehicle, he will only be able to see a redacted callsign for the craft. But with a bit of narrowing things down, as well as the fact that our target is traveling quite a bit slower than most commercial jets, he should be able to give us a few good options.”
“That’s fantastic,” Ben said. “And if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to have our pilot do a flyover so we can see if one of them is our match.”
Alex looked up at them. “So what should we do until then?”
Julie stretched. “I could use some shuteye, actually. Any more detective business?”
“Not at the moment,” Ben said. “Julie’s right. Let’s all get some sleep if we can. We’ve got a couple hours or so before we start our descent, so do your best to rest.”
With that, he turned and walked back up to his row of seats, his drink sweating in his hand.
62
Sarah
SARAH HAD BEEN BLINDFOLDED ALMOST immediately after she’d been shoved into the boat, feeling her skirt riding up her legs as she was forced into the deep seat. Why did I think wearing a skirt was good idea? she thought.
One of the two men that had grabbed her, Ivan, had not joined them in the chopper, hanging back on the cliffs after their boat ride. She could only hope that the faint explosions she’d heard had been Reggie and the others fighting him off.
But she was still unable to do anything — the second, smaller man who’d kidnapped her had joined her in the back of the helicopter, keeping her hands zip tied the entire time. The pilot and copilot said nothing to her or her kidnapper during the flight.
That had been over six hours ago. Now, she was being shoved down a corridor in some facility somewhere, still blindfolded. After disembarking from the chopper she was led down a few flights of stairs, and she could feel the air turn to a cooler, more humid heaviness on her bare arms and legs. We’re underground, she thought. For some reason the thought panicked her, and she tensed up, only earning a curt response and a shove from the man pushing her along.
She felt the ground beneath her feet, uneven and cobbled. It was smooth, but felt like a single cold, hard piece of stone. The air was heavy, stuffy, as if the walls were slowly pressing in on her — and since she couldn’t see anything, she had no idea if they were or not.
She was led down a few more hallways, all of them short, and all of them feeling narrow and low-ceilinged, judging by the sounds reverberating back to her as they walked along.
At the end of the next hallway her captor paused, holding her back. He grumbled something indecipherable, and then she felt the blindfold lifting from her eyes.
Her eyes adjusted slowly in the dim light, but she could see that she was now standing in front of an open doorway set off the hallway. The interior of the room was dark, darker even than the hallway she’d just been led through, and it took her a moment to see clearly inside.
Something inside the room shifted, and Sarah jumped. Then, as the figure grew closer, she recognized the man.
“Dad?”
“S — Sarah?” the man responded.
She felt her throat catch. She stumbled forward, no longer being held back by the man who’d pushed her along into the dungeon. She embraced her father, feeling his warmth and noticing at the same time that he felt frail, nearly fragile.
How long has it been?
“Sarah,” he said again. “You’re here. You’re really here.”
She sniffed, then smiled. “I’m here, Dad. Are you okay?”
He was about to speak when she saw his eyes widen. She whirled around, seeing the door to the small chamber she and her father were now standing in swing closed. The man outside the room shut them in, and she heard the cold, metallic click of a lock turn on the outside of the door.
“Wh — where are we?” she asked. Her mind was racing already, working through the possibilities. They were six or seven hours away by helicopter flight from Santorini, so it was unlikely they could be anywhere outside the perimeter of the Mediterranean Sea. Of course, she had no idea which direction they’d been traveling — she’d been confused, scared, and angry as hell when they grabbed her, not to mention blindfolded. If they had been traveling north, or even northeast or northwest, that could put them somewhere in northern Europe, perhaps even as far away as France or Russia.
Might as well be anywhere, she thought.
Still, there was something about this place that was intimately familiar. The style of architecture — if she could even call it that — the feel of the place, it seemed like somewhere she’d been before. In all her years studying ancient history, she’d come to know the buildings, the infrastructures, the stylistic specialties of many of the most well-known ancient civilizations.
But this place, from the floors to the ceilings to the walls themselves, each chiseled out of smooth-cut stones, seemed to be a mishmash of all of them. It was a smorgasbord of design, a cornucopia of ancient traditions, as if a museum had tried — and failed — to capture and integrate the design characteristics of all known peoples into one, singular product.
“We’re in Egypt, Sarah,” her father said, his voice low and gravelly. “Cairo, actually.”
“Cairo? As in Giza? The pyramids?”
He nodded. “We’re underground, obviously,” he said. “I confirmed our location with our host, a woman named Rachel Rascher. And yes, I’m okay, believe it or not. They have actually taken quite good care of me, considering.”
Sarah’s head spun. “Rachel… Rascher?”
Where had she heard that name?
“And we’re underground… under what, exactly?” she looked around, spinning a complete circle as she examined as best she could the dimly lit room. She knew the Great Pyramid and its two smaller counterparts, which together with the tinier pyramids and the surrounding buildings made up the entire Giza Complex, was situated on a grandiose, massive, 5 kilometer-wide plateau of carved limestone. It was a solid foundation, and modern technology still couldn’t produce as flat a surface as the one the Great Pyramid of Khufu sat on.
The foundation, a sprawling expanse of limestone that covered more than six football fields of space, had been shaped and carved with exacting detail: less than an inch of height difference from one side to the other. It was an absolute marvel of architectural prowess, a Wonder of the World for good reason, and something she and her colleagues had spent hours discussing during her undergraduate term.
But the point was that the foundation of the pyramid was literally rock-solid, and deep. The limestone mass of rock was not impenetrable by modern technology, but it would be impossible to excavate and construct anything beneath its surface that was more elaborate than a rough, round hole in the ground.
“My hypothesis is that we are standing beneath the surface of the Giza Complex, but not beneath one of the pyramids.”
She frowned. “One of the ancient temples, then? Or —“ she stopped, suddenly realizing. “The Great Sphinx?”
He nodded. “I believe so. The Sphinx, as you know, is still quite the enigma, even to e
gyptologists. Its age and reason for existence is at best a mystery, and its purpose is even more of an unknown.”
“It’s a sentinel,” Sarah said, “built to stand guard over the Great Pyramid.”
“Of course,” her father said, smiling. “A sentinel, yes. But not to stand guard over the pyramids.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “According to the Kolbrin, the ancient Egyptian texts that reference some of the same events found in the Old Testament, the men of Zaidor built the Sphinx, long before the pyramids were constructed.”
“Zaidor?” Sarah asked.
“Some think it’s the word Poseidior — the Men of Poseidon, in that case. They were great astronomers and came from their land which also had been recently destroyed. They came and built the ‘Great Guardian,’ or ‘Rakima,’ which we believe to be the Sphinx. Only later did Egyptologists ascribe the Sphinx to a protectorate role over the pyramids.
“But you must ask yourself why? Why would it need protecting? There are a thousand tons of rock separating the outside world from whatever tomb may have been inside the pyramid. Why build another structure in front of it?”
“And there was no tomb,” Sarah said, recalling pieces of the discussions and lectures she had attended over the years. “There were never any remnants of a tomb found, nor were there any records of there being a tomb inside the Great Pyramid.”
“I know, Sarah,” Lindgren said. “Which means it is that much more unlikely that a race such as the Egyptians would have a need for a secondary protector. It would have been a colossal waste, protecting a finished pyramid that was to remain completely devoid of any life — or death — for millennia.”
“So… what is the Sphinx for, then?”
His smile shifted into one that was almost mischievous. “My thoughts — and I’ve had ample time to think about it — are that the Sphinx is still a temple of protection. A warning to outsiders, and a reminder to its builders of the great secrets it is guarding.”
“What kind of secrets?”
“All secrets, my dear,” he said, the mischievous smiling. “The Sphinx is guarding all secrets. Everything its builders knew and discovered. Everything they wanted hidden for all time, for whatever reason. They wanted something that would warn outsiders that to enter its presence meant death, unless they were worthy of receiving its welcome call.”
“Receiving its welcome — Dad,” Sarah said. “You’re being ridiculous. We’re standing in a jail cell under a ton of rock, somewhere in Egypt, and you’re working up a long-winded lecture to explain to me that the Sphinx is just another ancient temple?”
His smile faded, but only slightly. “First, I’ve had ample time to ‘work up’ a lecture, so you are hardly hearing a rough draft. Second, I’m not talking about ‘just another ancient temple.’ I’m telling you that I believe the Sphinx is the guard of the greatest treasure ever found in human history. I’m telling you that the Sphinx is guarding the treasure — and the story — of human history.”
Sarah was unconvinced, but her father was no amateur. If he had reason to suspect they were at the cusp of something miraculous, she wanted to know the details.
“The Sphinx, my dear Sarah, is guarding the Hall of Records.”
“The Hall of — wait, really?”
He smiled again, the mischievousness no longer present on his face. “Yes, Sarah. The Hall of Records, the same Hall of Records that has been mythologized for ages, undocumented and merely the subject of verbal lore. The Hall of Records that serves as the single, sole repository for the complete and condensed knowledge of the first of the Great Civilizations.”
“The first of the Great Civilizations?” Sarah asked. “Dad, you’re talking about —“
“Yes, Sarah,” Professor Lindgren replied. “I’m referring to the Hall of Records that was built, filled, and protected by the race of Atlantis.”
63
Graham
PROFESSOR GRAHAM LINDGREN STOOD in the cell, watching his daughter’s reaction. She was brilliant, far smarter than he could ever hope to be. Her entire life had been a series of surprises, from her discovery of her near-eidetic memory during her childhood years to her excellence in nearly every academic pursuit during her grade school years.
But during her last years of high school — the ‘terrible teenage’ years that he and Sarah’s mother had long feared — Sarah’s personality had blossomed and changed. Where she had once been studious, hard-working, and interested, she was now sarcastic, aloof, and arrogant. She used her intelligence to smart-off in class, earning plenty of detentions and the wrath of more than one high-school teacher.
She was still excelling academically, racking up numerous promises for scholarships by the time she was a junior, but Graham and her mother were beside themselves to figure out how to understand — and parent — their only daughter. They tried family retreats, counseling, and disciplinary actions, all to no avail.
Finally, and reaching the end of his patience, Graham tried sitting his daughter down for a heart-to-heart talk. One academic to another, he’d explained. He had asked her why she wasn’t focusing on her studies, on getting into a great school and getting a solid education? After all, didn’t she want to become a well-respected scholar like her old man?
She’d replied with a statement that made him at once more angry with and more proud of her than he’d ever been: ‘I don’t want to research the same crap everyone else is studying. There’s more to this world hidden around it, and I want to find it.’
Her career in the sciences, he’d determined, had begun.
It had been more than a decade since that talk, and the sarcastic, asinine girl was now a beautiful, intense, strong-willed young woman, and he couldn’t have been more proud. She was everything he’d wanted in a daughter, and then some. She was on her way to surpassing his own achievements, and there was nothing more on this earth that a father could want.
But he had seen in her eyes the resentment. The momentary flash of grief that she’d shown when he’d explained his theory. She wasn’t just incredulous, she was sad.
He knew she was upset that he had wasted the last few years of his life chasing something that was completely ridiculous. She wouldn’t accept that his research had, in fact, led him — and her — to this very spot. She couldn’t accept it. She had no reason to believe that some ancient legend, the fabric of which had been spun by Plato and then quilted into something new by countless historians, dreamers, and conspiracy theorists since.
There was an inherent dismissal of the perceived facts when it came to items such as this, Graham knew. He had been trained to discard hyperbole, to ignore the pressing concerns that capitulated toward a necessary truth.
In other words, as an historian, he had been cautioned and conditioned to be wary of all things that implied a different outcome than that which the ‘resident authority’ — in history’s case, ‘collected wisdom,’ accepted.
“Ockham’s Razor,” he said, softly.
The door behind him clicked open.
Sarah swung around and Graham watched as Rachel Rascher herself walked through the door.
“Welcome, Dr. Lindgren,” Rachel said. “My name is Rachel Rascher, and I am in charge of the Prehistories Division of the Ministry of Antiquities for the Egyptian Government. I’m glad you’re finally here. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce you to the greatest-kept secret the world has ever known.” She waved her arm up and around with a flourish.
“A dark, dank chamber?” Sarah asked. “We’ve got those back home, but you usually have to be dead to get inside one.”
Rachel smiled, but Graham could see the burning desire to snuff out Sarah’s sarcasm in her eyes. “Clever, but no. I’m referring to the larger compound — not this room.”
“And what is this compound?” Sarah asked.
“Well, I believe your father was just starting to explain it,” she replied. “Professor?”
Sarah turned to face her fat
her. He felt his arms and shoulders sag, the weight of knowing what was in front of him finally beginning to wear him down. And not just the explanation of what this place was — that was the easy part.
He was worried about what it all meant, if it were true.
“I was just talking about Ockham’s Razor,” he said.
“And I am equally intrigued to know why Ockham’s Razor is relevant to our situation, Professor?”
Graham looked at the two women, both watching him. One doubting him, the other mocking him.
“I — It’s just…” for the first time in a long time, he was speechless. He hadn’t prepared a lecture, written a lesson plan, or even read the chapter. There was no chapter. “It’s just that I believe this whole discovery, Atlantis, the Hall of Records, it’s all well explained by the concept of Ockham’s Razor. ‘The simplest answer is most likely the truth,’ and all that.”
“So the simplest answer is that Atlantis is real?” Sarah asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “But before we even get into that, Ockham’s Razor, as you know, isn’t exactly what I just explained. That’s the simplified version. Essentially, William of Ockham was really saying that he believed that we should not add additional layers of confusion, or opinions, on top of easily deciphered facts. We should not ‘multiply entities’ when calculating a solution.”
“So Plato was right? Everything he wrote?”
Graham looked at his daughter. “No, of course not. Not if we are determining what is fact and what is allegory. But if we structure the problem that way, the confusion dissolves away. Any decent translation of Plato’s own words can then be examined, and any reasonable, rational mind can determine that which Plato means to be part of his overall story and that which is historic fact.
“He is writing at once a history of his known world, as told to him by — at the time — credible sources, as well as telling a story — an allegorical device used for teaching purposes — of that same world. But with a reasonable approach, and an assumption that Plato is not trying to mislead us, his words are easy to understand.”
