Allison peered at the man. ‘Who are you?’
‘Who I am doesn’t matter, but the people you’re getting into bed with are a whole different story.’
Allison said nothing, unwilling to provoke the man into giving her up. That he had not yet apprehended her was a surprise, but she could not fathom why he would even hint that he might intend to let her go.
‘You’re flying to Athens,’ he said finally.
‘Lovely city,’ she said, ‘the birthplace of democracy, in case you didn’t know? Democracy is where people vote leaders into power to do their bidding, unlike today, where people are given limited choices, and vote for the least bad choice, who then gains power and fails to deliver anything but corruption and lies.’
The man smiled. ‘My, we are a bitter little journalist, aren’t we?’
‘Try seeing the lies of people of power collapse your life overnight and see how you feel about it?’
‘The only people I’m interested in right now are the former DIA agents who made off with a few billions of dollars and committed treason in the process.’
‘The only people I’m interested in are the ones who stole that money in the first place and are now covering it up so that they can recover it for their own use instead of returning it.’
The man turned to look at her and his expression changed to one of intense interest.
‘You say that your life has collapsed, and you seem to blame it on us? That sounds a little unreasonable.’
‘This all began when I tried to confront Congressman Milton Keyes on the results of the congressional investigation into the Majestic Twelve scandal. Since then I’ve lost my job and been set up for a homicide charge, and all of it’s because Keyes and his people were dallying with Russian hackers! Sorry if it seems I’m being unreasonable!’
The man watched her again for a long moment and seemed to make a decision.
‘My name is Lieutenant Colonel Foxx, and I’m charged with recovering the money that we’re speaking of here. However, I can assure you that I have no intention of it going into the pockets of administration elected officials and I know nothing of congressional meetings with Russian hackers.’
Allison refused to look Foxx in the eye.
‘You would say that. Why the hell else would you start abducting people like Natalie Warner?’ Foxx’s eyes widened and Allison allowed herself a pyhrric victory. ‘Surprise, not bad for a bitter little journalist?’
Foxx sucked in a breath as he spoke softly.
‘I don’t think that you understand the bigger picture here.’
‘I understand enough to know that there is more corruption now in DC than there has ever been, which is saying something. I almost got shot forty–eight hours ago and yet now I’m in the frame for a homicide and all of my on–line data has been either seized or erased, including my footage of you and your little team arresting Natalie Warner, so congratulations, you win.’
Foxx took another breath.
‘We didn’t hack your accounts,’ he said finally. ‘I got your name from Natalie herself, and that led us to track you down. We found your cell in a cab in DC and figured you’d try to take off somewhere so we had a watch on the airports. We spotted you the moment you walked through the door and came here immediately. You’re not under arrest Allison, and you’re free to leave the country, although I can’t guarantee it will look good to the detective handling your case.’
‘If that’s so, then who the hell hacked my accounts and stole my…’
Allison understood immediately and suddenly she felt more vulnerable than ever.
‘You mentioned Russian hackers?’ Foxx pressed.
Allison nodded.
‘Congressman Keyes met with them before the elections, known hackers who were smuggling computers and equipment into the US and using street gangs to handle the goods. Keyes has something to do with it but I don’t know what yet.’
‘And who put you onto them?’
Allison was about to speak but then she silenced herself. ‘I can’t tell you that.’
Foxx watched her for a moment and then his eyes narrowed.
‘Jarvis? Or maybe Mitchell?’
Allison looked at Foxx sharply, and the government man leaned closer.
‘They’re playing you, Allison. They will use you for whatever they want and then they’ll spit you out the other end and forget that you ever existed.’
‘Funny, that’s what they said about you.’
‘They would,’ Foxx admitted. ‘Jarvis and his colleagues were once patriots who have without a doubt been failed by their country, but that does not give them the right to hightail it out of the country with billions of dollars’ worth of assets. Nor does it give them the right to associate with known killers and deem it acceptable in the pursuit of their own brand of justice, no matter how noble they might believe their cause to be.’
‘They brought down Majestic Twelve.’
‘Yes, they did, and now they’re a secretive cabal of powerful and experienced men and women with billions of stolen money to their name, avoiding justice while working with murderers and seeking to undermine and influence the power of elected officials and governments. See anything familiar there, Allison?’
She looked away from Foxx and scanned the crowds, wondering how the hell she got into this mess in the first place. Her mother would not have known whether to be proud or appalled.
‘I checked you out on the way here,’ Foxx said. ‘I can see what you’ve been trying to do with your career and that’s why we didn’t call the police about you being here.’
Allison glanced sideways at Foxx. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that I can help you, if you can help me.’
‘Jeez, not you too.’
‘This is the right thing to do, Allison,’ Foxx insisted. ‘Leaving the country to join an alliance of international fugitives doesn’t scream innocent to me and it won’t to the police or the media when they get hold of the story. You of all people should know that.’
Allison bit her lip. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want Jarvis and his crew in custody, back here in America where they can face charges for what they’ve done.’
Allison closed her eyes and slowly shook her head.
‘I don’t know who to trust any more.’
‘I’m not the one who’s fleeing the country with billions of stolen dollars.’
‘You’re forgetting that you just admitted that their hands were forced.’
‘They had a choice,’ Foxx persisted. ‘They chose badly. What are you going to do, Allison?’
She bit her lip more tightly but her mind was a fog of uncertainty and she could not figure out who was telling the truth and who was trying to bend her to their will. Foxx seemed to be in earnest but then he wasn’t up against the impossible odds that Mitchell and Lillian and the others seemed to be.
Allison’s thought of Lillian gave her an idea and she turned to him. She reached into her pocket and retrieved the vial of blood that Lillian had handed to her, but kept the photograph out of sight.
‘This will prove, one way or the other, if Jarvis and his people are lying.’
Foxx frowned as he took the vial. ‘What the hell is this?’
‘Proof of honesty,’ Allison said. ‘Run the sample and you’ll see. If the results seem impossible, then I will need your help to expose the greatest conspiracy this country has ever seen. If the results are normal, then I will need your help to bring Jarvis and his people to justice.’
Allison stood up as her flight was called to boarding. Foxx stood also, and with one hand he forced a small cell phone into hers.
‘GPS tracker,’ he said. ‘It’s active all the time. If you want to help me, just switch it on when you meet Jarvis.’
Allison took the cell phone and looked at it for a moment, then slipped it into her pocket.
‘Can I trust you to do the right thing?’ Foxx asked her.
Allison said nothing as she turned and marched away toward the boarding ramp.
***
XXX
Oia, Santorini
The PBY Catalina’s twin radial engines clattered noisily as Arnie and his wife flew the big amphibious aircraft around the north coast of the island. From his vantage point inside the rear of the aircraft Ethan could see through a bulbous, teardrop shaped Perspex blister a panoramic view of the island amid the shimmering azure Mediterranean Sea.
The sunlight swept through the aircraft as it descended, Arnie lowering the flaps as the Catalina bobbed and gyrated on the air currents rising up off the steep slopes of the island. Ethan could see the main town of Oia perched on the northern coast, the entire shape of the island formed from the edges of a massive, ancient volcanic caldera.
‘Santorini was once known as Thera,’ Amber explained as the aircraft descended toward the glittering waves, ‘and is the site of one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in history.’
Lopez peered out at the immense view afforded them by the clear plastic blisters, where once long ago there had been mounted machine guns, the Catalina a survivor from the Second World War.
‘A volcanic island,’ she said as she glanced at Ethan. ‘Jo mentioned how supposed visitors to Atlantis described it as a city beneath a volcanic cloud.’
Ethan nodded as he watched the waves rushing up to meet the fuselage beneath them and he checked his harness one more time.
‘That may explain why nobody has ever found any evidence of Atlantis. If the city was alongside a massive volcano that blew its top, there would be nothing left.’
‘You’re seeing the pattern here though, right?’ Amber said. ‘Several of the sites associated with Lucy’s research have involved ancient civilizations that thrived on the slopes of volcanoes. Although none of them yet appear to have been Atlantis, they’re sharing the same characteristics.’
Even as the aircraft was about to touch down, Ethan could see that the northern hook shape of Santorini was abruptly cut off where the huge volcano’s caldera had collapsed. To the south west another smaller island of steep cliffs and barren rock marked the southern curve of the caldera, cut off again in the south before the bottom tip of Santorini emerged from the waves.
‘The ancient city of Akrotiri was located on that southern tip,’ Amber said as she noted the direction of Ethan’s gaze. ‘That’s where we’ll find whatever the hell Lucy was looking for.’
Ethan felt and heard Arnie cut the power to the two engines and for a brief moment the big airplane seemed to hover in the air just inches above the waves flashing by her hull. Then she settled onto the water with a crescendo of vibrations that thundered through the fuselage until the aircraft slowed down and Arnie turned her toward the docks nearby, where jetties poked out of a natural harbor called Amouni Bay.
‘We’ll moor here,’ Arnie called back down the fuselage as they taxied in toward the shore. ‘If anybody comes looking for you at the island’s main airport this’ll slow them down some, but it’s only a matter of time as we had to file a flightplan to get here.’
The endless rattling of the engines mercifully coughed into silence as Arnie shut them down, and his wife threw mooring lines to a pair of helpful fishermen on the jetty alongside them. Ethan punched his harness and stood up, hauling open the Catalina’s big side door and letting in a waft of clean air that replaced the odors of metal, grease and aviation fuel.
The Catalina bobbed gently on the water as Ethan and Lopez made their way ashore, Ethan scanning the buildings of the nearby town high above them for any sign of Petrov or his goons. Perched on the cliffs that had once been the edge of the immense volcano’s caldera, the town was built entirely from brilliant white stone that shone in the sunlight with such an intensity that Ethan slipped his sunglasses on in order to survey the scene.
The doors and shutters of all the buildings were painted a deep blue that matched the cloudless sky above them as they began climbing up a series of rock–cut steps leading to the town. Behind them, Amber chatted enthusiastically.
‘The island was occupied for thousands of years by the Minoan civilization, which is considered to be the very oldest and first European civilization to ever have existed. They preceded the ancient Greeks by some margin and yet the source of their knowledge and their technology is unknown. The Minoans effectively sprung up out of nowhere with a fully–fledged society, city building technology and a script that was fully developed and yet is undeciphered to this day. It also has no known origin. Literally everything that came afterward in human history owes its existence to Minoan culture.’
Lopez looked back over the bay as she climbed and gestured out to the nearby island of Thirasia behind them.
‘Look at the size of this thing,’ she said. ‘The volcano must have been five miles across.’
‘At least,’ Amber agreed. ‘The blast that sent this civilization into the history books created a tsunami that hit the island of Crete to the south and entirely obliterated the volcanic caldera itself, just leaving the rim that we see now. It hurled fourteen cubic miles of debris into the atmosphere when it erupted five thousand years ago and buried the Minoan city of Akrotiri in dense ash. The remains of the city are being excavated as we speak.’
Ethan knew that any excavations conducted at the site by official archaeology would be a painstakingly slow and careful process, taking time that they could ill afford to spend here on the island with the Russians equally keen to take the lead in the race to the city and find the key to Atlantis. However, Lucy had possessed the advantage of being a scientist herself and might have been able to access the site using her credentials.
‘Do we have any idea if Lucy was here?’ he asked Amber.
Amber shook her head.
‘I don’t know how she was doing it but Lucy has been travelling incognito for weeks. I couldn’t find any evidence of travel by land, sea or air.’
Ethan frowned uncertainly. Lucy would have had Garrett’s fleet of vehicles, aircraft and vessels at her command should she have needed them, so why would she have chosen to vanish off the radar unless…
‘She might have realized the Russians were a threat,’ he said as he climbed the steps.
‘You think that Petrov and his people approached her?’ Lopez asked.
‘He came to you offering you a deal,’ Ethan said. ‘Maybe they tried Lucy first and somehow she saw the danger and went underground. She might have been concerned that the Russians could connect her to us if she went back to Jarvis or Garrett.’
Lopez nodded.
‘That means only the people working the site at Akrotiri would know if she came through here. If the Russians come here then they’re going to have the same idea.’
‘They don’t know what we know though, right?’ Amber said.
‘They know enough,’ Ethan replied. ‘They’ll figure out the rest soon and that will lead them here. The less time we spend figuring out our next move, the better off we are. Can we be sure that the topographical data from India is a match for ancient Akrotiri?’
‘It’s as close as anything we’ve got and I’ve run the same data four times now. It keeps coming back to the same location, and this island is by far the closest match to Plato’s description of the city of Atlantis as anything we’ve ever heard of.’
Atop the hill, a car awaited them, a travel representative booked in advance by Jarvis handing them the keys to the vehicle. Amber kept talking as they got into the car and Ethan drove out of the parking lot.
‘Discoveries at Knossos on Crete and here at Akrotiri have revealed that the Minoans possessed very advanced engineering technology, capable of building multi–storey buildings with complex water piping, air flow management and wood and masonry highly resistant to earthquakes, all of which was far ahead of contemporary Greek technology. Plato’s description of Atlantis as being a circular city surrounded by three rings of sea water and two earth rings connected by a canal matches a fresco
found in the ruins of Akrotiri that was believed to be a landscape of the city before its destruction. The city is in the center of the caldera’s lagoon with a narrow entrance from outside the caldera that would match the layout precisely.’
‘So you think that this is it?’ Ethan asked as the vehicle travelled south toward Akrotiri. ‘This is the source of the legend?’
‘Well, it was destroyed by a major environmental catastrophe, much of it has now sunk beneath the waves and there’s no better place to hide the remains of a city than beneath a few metres of ash and pumice that’s nearly three thousand years old…’
‘But?’ Lopez added a word to Amber’s sentence.
‘Well, if Atlantis really is here then where’s Lucy?’
Ethan did not have a reply for her as they drove for twenty minutes across the island toward the site of ancient Akrotiri, which was preserved from the elements by a series of large structures that completely contained the site. Ethan slowed and pulled into a parking lot opposite the entrance and Ethan climbed out and surveyed the area as Lopez and Amber joined him.
The site was open to the public and therefore tourists were milling about in the parking lot, which Ethan figured would go some way to preventing the Russians from launching any kind of major surprise attack against them. That said, they had not been afraid to draw their weapons in Dwarka, so their time would be limited here.
‘Did Lucy have any contacts here?’ Ethan asked Amber.
Amber shook her head. ‘Nothing that I could find, but she was doing some research into one Greek artefact that might have had something to do with the search for Atlantis, something called the Antikythera Device.’
‘The what now?’ Ethan asked.
Lopez replied as they walked toward the main entrance.
‘It’s an ancient computer found on the island of Antikythera, just over a hundred miles west of Akrotiri, which was constructed in Corinth, near Athens, over two thousand years ago. It is widely recognized as the world’s first analogue computer.’
The Atlantis Codex (Warner & Lopez Book 7) Page 20
