The Atlantis Codex (Warner & Lopez Book 7)

by Dean Crawford

  ***

  XXXVII

  Ethan stared at Lucy in amazement as she hurried into the tiny abode and hauled off her hood as Ethan shut the door behind her.

  ‘Were you followed?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Lucy replied as she sat down on the narrow couch and warmed her hands in front of the fire. ‘The ferry only runs back and forth twice each day and I was the only passenger they had for the afternoon. About the only things following me were seagulls.’

  Ethan moved to a nearby chair and sat down.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? We’ve been chasing you for weeks.’

  ‘I know,’ Lucy said. ‘It was the only way to get you here, and I knew that if I went back to Jarvis then my cover would be blown. The only way to finish the search was to do it alone while you two took the flak from the Russians.’

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ Lopez uttered.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘You knew about the Russians?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘It’s why I went underground,’ Lucy replied. ‘They showed up in India when I was working, looking for the same things that I was but not asking nicely. The locals warned me that they were snooping around and I figured it was safer to disappear than to just run back to Doug for help. Where is he, anyway?’

  Lopez averted her gaze, and Ethan took a breath before he replied. ‘Doug was arrested in South Africa.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Our own,’ Ethan replied, ‘we haven’t heard anything from him since.’

  Lucy stared into the flames for a moment. ‘What about the others?’

  Ethan replied, keeping one eye on Lopez as he did so.

  ‘Mitchell and Lillian are still at large but out of contact, Amber and Garrett are fine but they’re not able to help us any further for fear of being identified. Hellerman… Hellerman was captured by the Russians.’

  Lucy’s face fell and she stared at them in shock. ‘Have you heard from him?!’

  Ethan stared at Lucy for a long moment, and his expression said it all. Lucy’s hand flew to her mouth and her gaze shifted to Lopez, who glowered down at her from where she stood.

  ‘It’s what happens when you disappear and let others take the flak.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Lucy protested, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I’m not a soldier or cop like you two.’

  ‘Nor was Hellerman.’

  ‘But I didn’t…’

  Lucy broke off and Ethan put a hand out to forestall Lopez. ‘Lucy didn’t kill Joseph, the Russians did, okay?’

  Lopez shot him a hot look but she turned away from the confrontation with her arms folded across her chest as Ethan turned back to Lucy.

  ‘This whole thing is about archaeology for you,’ he said, ‘but for the Russians it’s all about the money and they’ll kill anybody who stands in their way. You’re lucky to have made it this far alive.’

  Lucy nodded, wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘I was searching for the city, not trying to get people killed.’

  ‘People are getting killed,’ Lopez said from nearby, ‘so how about canning the riddles and the wild goose chase and telling us what we need to know so that we can find this damned city, draw the Russians into it and then blow them all to hell?’

  Lucy looked at Ethan in confusion.

  ‘We’re done,’ he said by way of an explanation. ‘Doug is under arrest, Garrett can’t help us and right now the three of us are fugitives and will likely be arrested or killed if we’re found. Like it or not, if you know how to find Atlantis then now would be a good time to share and tell us what we’re doing on this rain–soaked rock of an island in the middle of nowhere.’

  Lucy took a moment to compose herself and order her thoughts before she began speaking.

  ‘This rain–soaked rock of an island in the middle of nowhere represents what I believe to be one of the last strongholds of a people who once lived in the city we know of as Atlantis.’

  Ethan glanced at Lopez, who rolled her eyes but said nothing.

  ‘The people who built a flourishing and technologically advanced civilization ended up here?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘I believe that everything I’ve found in this journey, and which you have also seen, indicates that the survivors of some ancient society that suffered a cataclysmic disaster managed to voyage to other locations around the world in search of new homes and they brought some of their knowledge and technology with them. Their skills resulted in the birth of the civilizations that we regard to be the first, in ancient Sumeria and the Indus Valley.’

  ‘Why would they come here?’ Lopez asked, reluctantly joining the conversation.

  ‘Why would they go anywhere?’ Lucy countered. ‘If their city was indeed consumed by the waves then they could have been scattered to the four corners of the globe in search of new homes. This island holds secrets that no archaeologist can explain, evidence that it was settled far earlier than even these old homes would suggest.’

  Lucy pulled from her backpack a map of St Kilda that she unfolded and lay on the floor between them as she got to her knees and began pointing out landmarks.

  ‘There are structures here called An Lag Bho’n Tuath, the Hollow in the North, some five thousand years old, the purpose of which is unknown. In Gleann Mor, to the north west of here, there are the remains of similarly aged structures that are unlike anything else seen in Britain or Europe. But the most telling evidence is that of something called the Taigh na Banaghaisgeich, or “The Amazon’s House”.’

  ‘The what now?’

  ‘A legendary female warrior who supposedly lived on this isle in the depths of recorded history,’ Lucy replied. ‘The story is also known across other isles in the region, that of a strange warrior who lived and hunted here, and who built a home in an unusual and innovative way. Its remains still stand, built from stone with no wood, earth or mortar to cement it, just like some of the world’s most famous and ancient megalithic remains. It’s pyramidal in shape, and seems to match the much older structures in other parts of the island, suggesting a common origin.’

  ‘So what?’ Lopez asked, losing interest already, ‘some spear–throwing savage showed up here thousands of years ago. It’s not the radical breakthrough we were hoping for.’

  ‘How about the Face of the North then?’ Lucy asked. ‘Would that be breakthrough enough for you?’

  Ethan sat back and shook his head.

  ‘We’ve walked up and down this isle for days searching for anything that some ancient culture might have left behind, and we’ve come up empty. It’s either no longer here or we can’t find it because it’s buried.’

  Lucy smiled as she looked at them both ‘Well, you can relax because I know precisely where it is. I passed it on the way here.’

  ‘You do, huh?’ Lopez murmured.

  Lucy got up and grabbed her coat. ‘You know, for two super–smart DIA field operatives with all your gadgets and gizmos and guns, you sure do miss the obvious sometimes.’

  She tossed Ethan and Nicola their jackets and zipped hers up.

  ‘You’re gonna tell us that we could have left here days ago, aren’t you?’ Ethan said miserably.

  ‘Yup,’ Lucy acknowledged. ‘I was waiting for you down at Gatwick. I thought that, given all that you’d solved up to now, you’d have no trouble figuring this final piece out. How wrong was I?’

  ‘I’ve gotta see this to believe it,’ Lopez said as she pulled her hood up and followed Lucy out of the house.

  The sky was darkening, the bleak hills foreboding in shadow and the ocean crashing against the cliffs nearby as the endless rollers marched in from the Atlantic, but the rain had stopped as Lucy led them at a brisk pace up the hillside once again. However, this time they travelled east, following the coastline and climbing up until Lucy stopped and gestured to the bay below them.

  ‘And there it is!’

  Ethan stared down at the bay and the headland known as Dun but he could see nothing that suggeste
d any kind of monument at all. The sunset behind them was piercing the clouds with fiery strips of molten metal that cast brief, drifting patches of light to contrast starkly with the darkening skies.

  ‘I don’t see it,’ he said in confusion.

  ‘Not down there,’ Lucy replied. ‘Out there!’

  Ethan saw her pointing not at the bay but out into the open water where a huge, jagged chunk of rock loomed from the ocean. Then, Lucy held out a photograph of the rocks taken from the opposite side of them, probably from the deck of the boat she’d arrived on. Ethan held the picture up and he almost coughed in disbelief as he saw the huge rocks forming the image of a man’s face staring out towards the south across the ocean.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Lopez uttered. ‘We passed it on the way in here.’

  The features of the face in the rock were unmistakeably ancient Greek, a long straight beard with angular eyes and even a small nose that was somewhat eroded by the passing of thousands of years.

  ‘Could it be chance?’ Lopez asked, huddling against the cold wind. ‘The rocks look volcanic.’

  ‘They are,’ Lucy replied. ‘That rock is called Stac Levenish and this entire isle is formed from the rim of an ancient volcano.’

  Ethan looked at her sharply now.

  ‘Another one?’ All of the Atlantis legends refer to islands beneath smoke and flame.’

  ‘It might be that the Atlanteans preferred outposts on volcanic islands because they’re formed of rich soils ideal for cultivation. That’s the reason that so many cultures grew up on or near volcanoes, to take advantage of those soils despite the risk from the volcanoes themselves. This area could have seemed like a home away from home to the people of Atlantis. And get this; this area was above water ten thousand years ago, which meant that…’

  ‘Stac Levenish could be reached on foot, and they would have been able to see the face from the other side,’ Ethan said as he pulled out his map and then he hesitated and looked at Lucy. ‘You’ve already done this, haven’t you?’

  Lucy nodded, her features beaming in delight at him from inside her hood.

  “The sun in azimuth, the dawn star aloft, the eyes of the north shall gaze ever toward their goddess, where a land of fire bleeds toward the underworld.”

  ‘The face looks to the south, toward their goddess, which from historical reference I concluded was the site of Atlantis. Stac Levenish is only visible when approaching the islands from the east, with the dawn star aloft, which again I concluded to mean with the sun behind you as you sail, illuminating this side of the rock face and enhancing the shadows in relief to make the face more visible. From the island of St Kilda itself, there is nothing visible at all.’

  As Ethan watched, Lucy produced a map onto which she had plotted lines that stretched all the way across the globe from Indonesia all the way to India, beyond through Egypt and into the Aegean Sea, and from there thousands of miles north to the British Isles. At Stac Levenish, a further final line ran south down across Europe and intersected all of the other lines at a single point on the map.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Lopez uttered.

  In the lonely darkness of a remote and windswept isle far from the rest of humanity, Ethan, Lopez and Lucy huddled in a tight group and looked down at the map where the lines intersected. Against the lines Lucy pressed another image, this one on transparent plastic so that the map was still visible below, that appeared to show some kind of ground–penetrating radar shot that was overlaid across the same part of the world where the lines intersected.

  Three concentric rings, with a line pointing out of the center.

  ‘On a continent the size of Asia,’ Ethan said above the howling winds.

  ‘Beyond the Pillars of Hercules,’ Lucy acknowledged.

  ‘A city of three concentric rings,’ Lopez said, shaking her head in wonder.

  Lucy folded the map and the image up to shelter them from the wind and the rain as she grinned at them.

  ‘We’ve done it,’ she said. ‘We’ve found Atlantis.’

  ***

  XXXVIII

  USS Bataan,

  Persian Gulf

  The cell was tiny, barely providing enough room for a man to sit. There was no bed, no sink, no latrine but for a small grill in the deck that probably drained into the bilge pump exhaust. The heat was intense, the cell located close to the engine room and denied any proper ventilation. The cell door was of metal bars, the locks impossible to break even if the prisoner could reach them, which he couldn’t as one wrist was permanently manacled to the deck.

  Doug Jarvis sat in silence with his back to the hot metal wall behind him and his mind somewhere a thousand miles away. The crew of the Wasp–Class amphibious assault vessel had taken his clothes and replaced them with cheap, paper thin overalls designed to make the prisoner feel as vulnerable as possible. Jarvis cared about none of this. He sat with his head hung low to feign the slump–shouldered pose of a man suffering complete and utter defeat and instead allowed his mind to wander free and unbidden into the oblivion of dreams.

  He had known, of course, that this time would come. All that he could hope was that he had given Ethan and Nicola and the others enough time to escape and continue the search for Atlantis and whatever might await them there. They had come so far, seen so much now that it seemed impossibly cruel that they would be crushed when within a hairs’ breadth of the ultimate goal: an explanation of everything, of an answer to the many anomalous discoveries they had made over the years. Jarvis cared not for the money that the Russians and the administration were so obsessed with. Instead, Jarvis was possessed by an overpowering need to know, to understand what they had been dealing with all these long years. Ultimately, all paths led back to Atlantis or the legend thereof.

  The sound of approaching boots alerted him and he slumped a little lower, his chin almost touching his chest. He knew what would happen next. Contrary to popular belief there would be no horrendous torture or “enhanced interrogation” although such methods had been used in the past by previous administrations. Jarvis was an old hand at this game and nearing the end of his life. His heart would struggle to survive any such physical traumas and it was likely his interrogators would know already that Jarvis would not easily give up any information this late in the game.

  No, they would find another angle, something subtle and yet all the more effective for it. The boots reached the cell doors, which opened as Jarvis watched from the corner of his eye. The manacles were removed and then rebound behind his back as Jarvis was hauled to his feet and guided out of the cell.

  The USS Bataan had become known in the US Navy as “Cell Block Five”, a reference to her operating number and the fact that she had been used as a mobile black prison numerous times since she had been commissioned in 1996. Jarvis himself had ordered suspected Daesh fighters and other terrorists to be sent to her decks to be detained when due process was something that needed to be ignored, although he would never have believed that he too would one day be confined aboard her.

  He was marched to an interrogation room, the ship’s decks silent, indicating that the crew were being kept away from him at all times. Both of the men escorting him bore the insignia of officers, men trustworthy enough to maintain their silence. Jarvis was sat down and manacled to a table inside the room, and then the officers left and another man entered the room.

  Jarvis did not recognize the man, but although he was wearing the standard disruptive pattern material uniform typical of the American soldier and there were stars on his collar denoting his rank as a Lieutenant Colonel, there were no unit insignia or patches identifying which part of the American military machine he was currently working for. Tall, with dark skin and an erect bearing, he closed the door to the room and took a seat in front of Jarvis, folding his hands before him with an appraising look in his eye.

  ‘My name is Lieutenant Colonel Foxx, and you’re a hard man to find, Mister Jarvis.’

  ‘I’d like it to have st
ayed that way.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Foxx replied as he opened a folder and examined the contents, ‘but the State Department and the Pentagon all felt that the world would be a safer place with you tucked behind bars.’

  ‘They have a warped sense of right and wrong, more now than ever.’

  ‘Let’s not play games,’ Foxx replied. ‘You may see yourself as a modern day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to fight crime in your valiant little fantasy world, but when thirty billion dollars is spirited away into the night by an employee of our own Defense Intelligence Agency, I don’t care if you’re the lovechild of Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa. The moment you absconded with those funds you became a criminal and nothing more.’

  Jarvis said nothing as Foxx laid out a series of images before him on the table. Jarvis peered at the pictures, presumably shot by investigators on Foxx’s team shortly before they had swooped and arrested him. He could see photographs of Rhys Garrett’s yacht, of the man himself on the deck. Nearby was another image, this time of his granddaughter, Lucy Morgan.

  ‘Now,’ Foxx began, ‘thirty billion dollars takes some serious laundering, and although I suspect that the cabal known as Majestic Twelve was already likely to have done so, you would still need new accounts and ways of hiding such vast sums of money in places that it would be difficult for my people to find. I would imagine that the owner of a major corporation with assets already in the billions would be a good place to start, agreed?’

  Jarvis shook his head.

  ‘Rhys Garrett is a benefactor, not a bank, and he knows nothing about any of this. You know that his father was murdered by Majestic Twelve?’

  ‘I do,’ Foxx acknowledged, ‘a powerful motivator for him to join forces with you against what you see as corporate and political corruption.’

  ‘What do you see it as?’