He turned to avoid her gaze.
“When Rodriguez asked me to help him find the Mahogany Ship I had personal reasons to go searching for it. Specifically, it was the first shipwreck that my father and I ever hunted together. My feelings were tied because I really did want to know more about the sunken Mayan pyramid.”
“But you knew that the Master Builders were involved!”
“No. Well, not at first. I reluctantly agreed to think about going with Rodriguez on his expedition. It was only when I replayed the recording I’d made of the king’s sarcophagus that I saw the image of the Mahogany Ship on the wall.”
“And then you realized that the Mahogany Ship was built by the Master Builders!”
“That’s right. And I knew I had to distance myself from the discovery as fast as possible. I hoped they would assume that if I’d discovered anything of value, then surely I wouldn’t have left the project to someone else. Giving you enough time to find some answers. Instead, now all we have are more questions.”
“I might just have one answer…”
“What about?”
“The communication device… it was made out of a stone, not too dissimilar to a diamond in chemical makeup.”
“How could you have possibly done that? Everything was destroyed?”
“Yes, but before that happened, I broke off a little.”
He examined the stone, which fit comfortably in the palm of his hand. It looked like an enormous blue diamond. Even with today’s technologies, nothing even resembling its brilliance could be synthetically manufactured.
It sparkled in his hand under the limited light of the night lamp.
“Is it a diamond?”
“No. I’ve taken it to three leading experts in geology. None of them can tell me what is, only what it isn’t.”
“And what’s that?”
“It’s not synthetically made, and it’s never been seen before.”
Sam looked at it again, wondering in the back of his mind if he’d somehow seen a similar stone, somewhere else. “Could they tell you anything about the type of stone it resembles, other than a very sparkling diamond?”
“They each identified that it has some unusual properties.”
“Such as?”
“The stone transmits light and sound more than a thousand times faster than water. And is the first naturally occurring substance harder than diamond.”
“Interesting. I suppose that explains how it was used to see other parts of the Mayan pyramid,” he said.
Billie laughed, “You and I both know that’s not true, don’t we?”
Ignoring her statement, he said, “So we lost the greatest lead for Master Builders we’ve ever had?”
“Yes.”
“And it was all for nothing, with exception of the discovery of the best fake diamond the world has ever seen?”
“No.” Billie smiled, holding her hard drive. “Because I think I just found a map to Atlantis.”
The End
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
The Mahogany Ship (Sam Reilly Book 2) Page 22
