Allison went in hard.
‘I’ve been covering the aftermath of the scandal surrounding the rumored collapse of a cabal of industrialists known as Majestic Twelve. Since the story broke I’ve seen it swept under the carpet and buried along with the thirty or so billion dollars they held in assetts. I’ve tried to keep the story alive but hardly anybody is interested in carrying the piece because they’re all so fascinated by our president’s current scandals.’
‘And you’re telling me this why? You want me to launch a legal action against the media or the White House? We’re a small claims business and wouldn’t be able to…’
‘Then, guess what happens?’ Allison cut across her. ‘This guy comes out of nowhere, a big black dude, ex–military and abducts me in my car. He takes me to a lot over in Maryland and explains that MJ–12’s billions are still out there and that I should go looking for a Doug Jarvis, DIA. So you know, due diligence and all that, I go looking and you wouldn’t believe what I found on this guy!’
Natalie Warner tossed the notepad onto her desk. ‘What do you want?’
Allison opened a file and began reading.
‘Douglas Ian Jarvis is a decorated former United States Marine who wound up working high–level classified intelligence operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency. During the course of all that he hires another former Marine, a guy called Ethan Warner, and man does he leave trails of destruction all around him. I’ve got a diplomatic crisis in Israel which has forbidden Ethan ever to return on the threat of imprisonment, after he allegedly stole ancient artifacts from somewhere over there, police reports of explosions in New Mexico with Warner present at the scene and the same off the coast of Florida a year later. He shows up again in NYC and the Nez Pierce National Forest, then Peru, here in the continental US again in Arizona, here in DC, then in Antarctica of all places and then in Egypt, and you know what?’
Natalie raised a silent, expectant eyebrow.
‘Not only is there law enforcement hunting him down throughout it all, but he has a sister who was involved in the death of a colleague at the Government Accountability Office several years ago, who is now a lawyer at Bright & Warner and I’m thinking: How can these people cause so much carnage and not be locked up for it?’
Natalie sat for a moment in silence as Allison let the question hang between them in the air.
‘You’d have to talk to either Doug or Ethan about all of that,’ she said finally. ‘My brother’s work is none of my business, and for the record I’ve had many reporters ask me about things like this in the past and they always end up with nothing so I’d stop wasting my time if I were you.’
Allison smiled. ‘You’re not me, and I’m very interested in why it is that my mysterious informant would send me on this path that has already revealed so much. I mean, at first I thought he was a fantasist or something, but now I’m starting to think that he’s really onto something here and…’
‘Aaron Mitchell,’ Natalie said softly.
‘You know him?’
Natalie leaned her elbows on her knees and her eyes locked onto Allison’s as she spoke in soft tones.
‘He is an assassin and probably the most dangerous man I have ever met in my life. He was once assigned to kill me and it was only the intervention of Doug Jarvis and my brother that saved my life. I don’t know what you’re looking for here but I can tell you that you’re already in far more danger than you could possibly realize. These people, they don’t play games. They kill, Allison, without mercy, without hesitation, without remorse. I don’t know what he wants with you but I can guarantee that once he’s done he’ll cut your throat before you even know what’s happened.’
For the first time in a long time, Allison was speechless. Natalie’s voice reached her as though from afar.
‘By coming here with this to me, you’re putting me back on his radar. I have a family now, so please don’t take offence when I tell you that if you don’t get the hell out of my office I swear to God that sooner than put my child in jeopardy I will kill you myself right here, do you understand?’
Allison looked into Natalie’s eyes and saw a resolve there sufficient that she did not doubt that if pushed further, Natalie would probably lose control of herself. Allison stood up abrutply and made for the door, granting Natalie a breathing space before she turned to look over her shoulder.
‘The man, Mitchell. Who does he work for now?’
Natalie shook her head. ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’
Allison left the office both relieved and frustrated. Natalie Warner’s reaction to her visit had revealed all too clearly that there was a hell of a story behind whatever the administration was trying to conceal, but that same reaction had also closed a door on what should have been a deep and reliable vein of information.
Allison crossed the street to her car and opened the door. Just as she was about to drive off she noticed a tall, dark skinned man with a military bearing walking down the street toward the lawyer’s office. Something about the guy made her hesitate and slip the vehicle back into park as she watched him vanish inside the building.
*
Natalie Warner stared out of her office window and cursed silently to herself. The reporter had gotten her rattled, and not for the first time she cursed her brother Ethan for the trouble he kept getting himself into. This wasn’t the first time that Ethan’s DIA work had burst into their lives and she was damned sure that after the last time she wouldn’t let it become the danger it had been before.
Natalie picked up the phone and dialled her parents’ number. Both were elderly now and were usually to be found taking it easy at their home in the Chicago suburbs. When neither of them answered by the tenth ring, she tried first her mother’s cell and then her father’s. When she could not reach either of them the first hint of panic sparked inside her stomach.
‘Natalie Warner?’
Natalie turned to see a tall man standing in the doorway to her office. She could tell at once that he was military, or ex–military at the very least. His short cut hair, square jaw and erect posture marked him out as clearly as if he’d been wearing a uniform and not the dark suit confronting her.
‘Yes?’
‘I have to ask you to come with me, ma’am.’
‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Lieutenant Colonel Foxx.’
Natalie’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ll tell you on the way,’ the man promised.
‘On the way to where?’
Foxx gently pulled one lapel of his suit jacket back to reveal a shoulder holster and a pistol tucked within.
‘This isn’t a request, ma’am.’
Natalie considered turning and hurling her office chair through the window before following it through, but Foxx sensed her sudden fight–or–flight reaction and he stepped lithely forward, too close for her to hope to escape.
‘This can be easy or it can be hard,’ he said simply, his dark eyes emotionless and determined. ‘It’s your call.’
*
Allison saw the man emerge from the lawyer’s office minutes later, Natalie Warner with him as two large black SUVs appeared as if from nowhere and slid in alongside the sidewalk. Allison, her cell phone resting on the dash, filmed it all as within moments Natalie and the mysterious man got into the vehicles and they drove away from the office, headed north towards the city.
Allison slipped her car into drive once again and set off in pursuit, following a discreet distance behind the two vehicles and hoping against hope that she would not be spotted or identified.
***
XI
Dwarkadhish Temple, India
Nicola Lopez looked up a steep flight of stairs that led to one of the most bizarre looking temples that she had ever seen. Bathed in the warm light of the sun rising over the nearby Arabian Sea, the temple towered over the narrow alleys and streets below, where toiled the local residents of one of the most ancient towns in India.
> ‘The temple is known to the local people as Jagat Mandir,’ Raz said as he guided them toward the building, all three of them wearing traditional native dress of long shawls supplied by Raz to help disguise them from any concealed Russian observers. ‘It is dedicated to the god Krishna, the original inspiration for the Christian myths of Christ, and is well over two thousand years old.’
As they began to ascend the steps, Ethan was starting to realize just how much most modern religions owed to much older traditions.
‘This Krishna seems to show up over and over again.’
‘That’s because it represents some of the earliest known references to legends that we consider assigned to so many other religions. We humans have a habit of assuming that what we hear from our elders and teachers must be the truth, and as children we rarely question that authority. That is why so many religions wish to control the education of young children but rarely bother themselves with taking over high schools: it is easier to indoctrinate the young, but by their teenage years’ children are too smart to be easily indoctrinated. However, our interest here is in the building itself, which it is said that Krishna built on a piece of land that was reclaimed from the sea.’
‘Unlike Atlantis,’ Lopez said, ‘which was consumed by the sea.’
‘Dwarka has a history that goes back far further than most mainstream archaeologists and historians are prepared to admit,’ Raz said as he huffed and puffed his way to the top of the steps and paused to look up at the temple before them.
Three shikharas dominated the building like spires, one higher than the other two and each constructed of limestone with intricate sculpturing created by the countless ruling dynasties in the region. The structure was five storeys high and stood upon seventy–two pillars called the vimana mandapa and the natya mandapa. Ethan was standing in front of the south entrance known as the Swarga Dwara, the Gate to Heaven, with the Gomati River now visible sprawling behind them. The crowded bazaar was far below at the bottom of the steps leading up to a decorative torana arch topped with stone garlands and snake motifs. On the highest of the shikhara spires was a huge silk flag, the Dhwaja, fifty–two yards long and stained with seven primary colors that rippled in the hot, humid dawn breeze.
‘You said that this temple is two thousand years old,’ Lopez said.
‘It is,’ Raz agreed, ‘but the age of the temple is not as important as the number of pillars upon which it was built.’
‘Why?’ Ethan asked.
‘There are seventy–two pillars, and that number has special significance for all of the very oldest civilizations on earth,’ Raz explained. ‘The number appears in many modern religions; there are seventy–two Divine Names in Jewish mythology’s Kabbalah, said to be used as codes in creation, seventy–two languages spoken at the Tower of Babylon; the degrees of the Jacob’s Ladder and the disciples of Confuscius numbered seventy–two and the Egyptian God Thoth used seventy–two portions of a day to make the intercalary day.’
‘The hell does that all mean?’ Lopez asked.
‘The ancients worshipped not gods but the sun, and all worship of all religions is ultimately derived from that one foundation. The seventy–two pillars of the temple relate to the one degree of motion of the sun’s precession against the background of star constellations associated with the twelve signs of the Zodiac.’
‘So?’ Ethan asked, feeling slightly dizzy from all of the revelations.
‘The ancient Babylonians developed the sexigesimal method of counting much as the ancient Indians did; sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, three hundred sixty degrees in a circle. Multiplying the divine number with the degrees in a circle yields a figure of twenty–five thousand, nine hundred twenty: the precise number of years in the procession of the equinoxes through the twelve Zodiac ages.’
Raz gestured to the entrance of the temple.
‘Lucy came here to try to discover whether there was a connection here between the ancient Hindu traditions of astronomy and astrology, the originators of all religions, and an older civilization from which they might have inherited their knowledge.’
Ethan remembered what Raz had said the day before. ‘A location, something she could back track to from existing relics.’
Ethan wasted no more time and walked into the interior of the temple, removing his shoes and cell phone as was the custom before advancing inside. The price of admittance was only a few lakhs, and the interior was crowded even at this early hour as locals practiced the first Aarti of the day, having first bathed in the nearby Gomati River.
The halls were open spaces, a huge carved tiered roof supported by carved stone pillars. The entire temple was covered with ornate inscriptions and the walls and pillars adorned with sculptures in floral and geometric motifs, countless images of gods and goddesses and decorative patterns.
The sanctum and vestibule led to a rectangular hall with porches on three sides and was surprisingly simple compared to the exquisite carvings of the exterior. Ethan looked about them, the hall echoing with the chantings of Hindus as they worshipped the elaborate shrine of Dwarkadhish at one end of the hall, a hive of color and incense and hymns of devotion.
‘Krishna as the king is a majestic figure,’ Raz whispered. ‘The image is made of a dark stone and has four arms holding the discus sudarshana chakra, the mace Kaumodiki gada, the conch panchajanya and a lotus flower, padma.’
‘Lovely, but what are we looking for?’ Lopez asked.
Ethan scanned the room and sought something that he might recognize.
‘The seal of Atlantis,’ Raz answered, ‘or anything that suggests this temple was orignally built to worship something other than Krishna.’
Ethan eased his way forwards through the throng of worshippers, heading instinctively for the shrine. The walls were covered with colorful decorations that concealed the bare walls of the hall, and Ethan wondered what Lucy might have seen that could have sent her out on her own in pursuit of Atlantis.
He was half way to the shrine when he saw a bulky figure through one of the open porches, a tall man with cropped blond hair and a muscular form beneath the clothes of a western tourist.
‘We’ve got company,’ he whispered as they moved, and pulled the veil of his shawl across his face to help shield it from view. ‘The Russians must have picked up our trail.’
Raz moved to the shrine, within which was a small idol of polished black stone or metal, the Krishna holding various implements. Ethan stared at it for a long moment, the idol dressed in garish colors inside a square shrine walled with ornate red hanging blankets as Hindus prayed in dense ranks inside the small hall.
Ethan was about to turn away when he looked up at the ceiling and saw something among the inscriptions carved into the stone. There, faint with age, was an intricately carved image of the rising sun and the setting moon, and beyond the shore of some unknown beach was a sort of building with rays bursting forth from it.
‘What’s that?’ he asked Raz.
The historian looked up at the image and shrugged. ‘It’s the old city of Dwarka that was lost to the sea due to coastal erosion. The carving commemorates the old city with the rebuilding of the temple on new land.’
‘Where is this city?’ Ethan asked.
‘It’s off shore somewhere,’ Raz explained, ‘beneath about a hundred feet of water. A few teams have searched for it in the past but there’s no easy way out there and the tides and conditions are considered treacherous. I would have searched for the site myself back in my youth but I’m much too old to… You don’t think that Lucy would have gone down there?’
‘Knowing her as I do, yes,’ Ethan replied as he looked again at the carvings above their heads. ‘You say that this temple was rebuilt, that it is not the original construction?’
‘Yes,’ Raz agreed, glancing cautiously at the Russians now gathering outside the temple arches and scrutinizing each and every person who was leaving the building. ‘The temple itself was enlarged a fe
w hundred years ago, but the shrine is two thousand or more years old and so are the pillars built to support it.’
Ethan thought for a moment. The temple itself would likely not have any direct connection with a city of far greater antiquity beyond the inscriptions, but if it were in fact a replica of something that had once stood further out to sea then the carvings could have simply also been replicas…
‘The three shikharas,’ he said as he looked at the shrine.
‘What about them?’ Raz asked.
‘There are three of them but they’re different sizes and shapes. What’s the significance of that?’
Raz appeared thoughtful for a moment.
‘They signify the sun and the moon, and of Krishna’s power over the heavens and earth.’
‘And this temple, it is built on the foundations of something much older?’
‘Yes, legends tell that a temple has stood here for thousands of years, but that even the oldest segments of this temple are built on the ruins of much older structures.’
Ethan thought of the intricate carvings on the exterior of the shikharas and of the far greater antiquity of the pillars that supported the temple and he realized what Lucy must have done.
‘She didn’t enter the temple,’ he said. ‘What she found isn’t on the inside at all, it’s on the outside, hidden in plain sight. It must tell her where the older temple stands, the one swallowed by the sea.’
Lopez looked over her shoulder at the Russians awaiting them.
‘Yeah, and outside is one place we can’t go yet.’
As Ethan watched so more Russians appeared and began filtering into the temple, closing off the exits one by one as they began hunting Ethan, Lopez and Raz down.
‘There is nowhere to hide,’ Raz said nervously.
Ethan turned and made his decision.
‘Then let’s not hide at all.’
***
XII
Ethan stepped through the throng inside the temple and headed directly for the nearest of the Russian agents lingering near the arches. He was taller and younger than Ethan, with broad shoulders and a bull neck. Ethan often found it amusing that the Russians, who openly showed their contempt for American forces, then emulated their Hollywood versions in so many ways, wearing designer sunglasses and projecting angry glares at anybody who ventured too close.
The Atlantis Codex (Warner & Lopez Book 7) Page 8
