‘He will maintain a low profile over the coming weeks and wait for it all to blow over, which it will because the White House will divert attention away from it with more conventional scandals designed to keep the press occupied with sensationalist stories instead of the really important ones.’
Allison’s eyes widened with every word that Mitchell said.
‘You could just be a very clever man but a fantasist none the less. I’m going to need more than this.’
‘And you’ll get it, but right now your job is to stop talking about Majestic Twelve. Let them think they’ve silenced you, that you’ve given up.’
‘What, let them get away with it?!’
‘Let them think they have,’ Mitchell corrected her. ‘Then, when they forget about you, I will hit them where it hurts and you’re going to help me.’
Allison’s eyes narrowed.
‘A cynic might suggest that this is all a ruse to get me out of the public eye so that you can kill me and nobody will notice.’
Mitchell nodded.
‘And now you’re thinking straight again,’ he said. ‘These people, the things that you’re digging into, they’re extremely dangerous and you’re right that if they think you’re getting too close to the truths they’re trying to hide, they’ll seek to destroy you, literally. What will happen next is that you’ll be discredited, probably ousted from your job and your reputation tarnished so that anything you do say will be ignored even if people do somehow get to hear about it.’
‘This isn’t some cable drama.’
Mitchell turned to look directly at her. ‘How many washed–up conspiracy theorists have you heard blabbing about free energy devices or UFO encounters?’
‘Tons, but…’
‘Have you ever taken any of them seriously?’
‘Well, no, but…’
‘That’s why you need to stop shouting about all this until you have something so concrete that they cannot consider taking you out, as to do so would only draw even more suspicion upon themselves.’
Allison stared at Mitchell for a long beat, but she sensed no evidence of deception.
‘Are you serious?’
‘What I’m saying is that you can’t finish this job if you’re at risk of being discredited or killed half way through it. If you’re in, you’re in to the end.’
Allison sensed the finality in Mitchell’s tones, but she nodded once. ‘I’m in.’
‘Good,’ Mitchell said. ‘My apologies to your cameraman, who you may say nothing about this to. You were carjacked and your money and purse stolen before being left here. I will contact you soon with instructions and more evidence to support my claims and reveal what Majestic Twelve were really about. Right now, research what I’ve given you and one further person of great importance.’
‘Who?’
‘Douglas Jarvis.’
Before Allison could write the name down the car keys landed in her lap and Mitchell was out of the car and gone.
***
VIII
Kutiyana, Porbandar District,
India
Ethan could not recall a time when his senses had been so assaulted by such a variety of noises, sights and smells that swirled in a heady aroma through the streets of one of the oldest cities on the face of the planet.
Located near the Indian coast and the Arabian Sea, the district of Kutiyana was synonymous with an abandoned ancient temple building hundreds of years old, known as the Kutiyana Madresa for whom there were no builder’s records or ownership paperwork. Inhabited for thousands of years, the city was a dazzling mixture of shanty towns, monumental temples and hordes of animals sharing the land with the people.
‘Ethan, there’s a goat in the street.’
Lopez gestured to where a small, horned goat was wandering along a narrow alley nibbling at fruits perched precariously on the edge of a market stall outside a small shop. Ethan saw the animal, and others like it, cyclists and pedestrians passing them by with barely a glance as they walked down the dusty street beneath the burning sun. Small tuk–tuk rickshaws with clattering engines rattled by in clouds of exhaust fumes that billowed on the hot air, the drivers’ sounding their horns in an ever–present chorus to clear cyclists, goats and other animals from their path.
‘It’s this way,’ Ethan said as he consulted a small map and led Lopez toward a narrow alley where the odors seemed intensified by the confined walls.
They eased their way down the alley, passing an old woman sitting on a doorstep who watched them silently as they passed, her eyes rheumy and most of her teeth missing, and then a man smoking a hookah who appeared to barely notice their presence.
Ethan spotted a battered old sign dangling above a doorframe of peeled paint and matched it to the directions he had been given.
‘Apparently, that’s the home of the specialist Lucy was talking to.’
Lopez regarded the tiny entrance with disdain as they approached, the door barely hanging from its hinges and the walls of the abode probably as ancient as the city itself.
‘You really think that some guy living in an alley in southern India is the key to finding the city of Atlantis?’
Ethan shrugged as they walked inside. ‘Lucy obviously did, and she’s the scientist.’
The interior of the building smelled of dust and oil seeds and the sickly scent of a hookah that stood upon a nearby counter. The walls were smothered in painted images, some of them lithographs from what Ethan figured was the eighteenth century, the drawings featuring British infantry bearing long barrelled muskets guarding docks filled with the vessels of the Dutch East India Company.
‘Man, this place has been here a while,’ Lopez whispered.
Ethan had not been taught the history of the rest of the world while at school in Chicago, but he had later learned that India had been a thriving country thousands of years before the founding fathers had even set foot upon American soil, and that the British had later controlled an Empire that spanned half the globe, larger than any other in the history of mankind.
‘This doesn’t look like a museum,’ Lopez said. ‘It’s more like a trinket shop they forgot to dust for a couple of decades.’
The sound of shuffling feet attracted their attention and an old man hobbled into the front of the building to meet them with his hands pressed together beneath his chin as he bowed slightly at the waist.
‘Greetings,’ he said in perfectly pronounced English. ‘I am Professor Raz Singh, can I help you?’
Ethan stepped forward. ‘We’re looking for a mutual friend, Doctor Lucy Morgan.’
‘Ah yes,’ Raz said, ‘you must be Ethan and Nicola, yes?’
‘She mentioned us?’ Lopez asked.
‘She told me to speak only to a tall American and a little Mexican,’ Raz replied matter–of–factly. ‘She said that where I would find one, the other would appear as if by magic.’
Ethan smiled wryly. ‘She knows us too well. Do you know where she is?’
‘I do not,’ Raz replied, ‘I know only where she has gone.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Lopez said.
‘Come,’ Raz insisted, ‘there is much that Lucy wished you to know.’
Ethan exchanged glances with Lopez, who shrugged and followed the old man through a battered old muslin sheet that concealed an entrance to a narrow passage that wound its way through the building. Ethan’s shoulders brushed the walls as he followed Raz out into a tiny courtyard entirely concealed by the four walls of the surrounding buildings. Above, a square of hard blue sky looked down upon a single tree inside the courtyard, upon which chirped a flock of tiny, exciteable birds.
Raz walked across to an old reclining chair beside a table and eased his tired frame into it as he gestured to two more chairs nearby. Ethan and Lopez sat down as the old man leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he spoke softly.
‘Welcome to my museum.’
Lopez raised an eyebrow. ‘The museum? We’re in the courtyard.
’
Raz reached up with one hand and tapped his temples. ‘The greatest of all museums is the one we carry with us, Nicola. It holds all that we know, and all that we would wish others not to know.’
‘Lucy came here looking for information on the whereabouts of Atlantis,’ Ethan said. ‘We haven’t heard from her in a long time and we’re concerned for her safety.’
Raz nodded as he spoke. ‘Lucy is not in any danger, for where she walks is far from where the Russians will be looking for her.’
‘The Russians?’ Lopez uttered. ‘They’re here?’
‘They came here two days ago,’ Raz replied with a calm smile. ‘They were looking for Lucy and they were looking for both of you, too.’
Ethan leaned forward. ‘Did they say why?’
‘No. I sent them packing with a cover story about Lucy looking for information on the Indus civilizations and such like, but I didn’t specify.’
‘They didn’t harm or threaten you?’ Ethan asked, concern in his eyes now.
‘No,’ Raz said with a faint smile. ‘They saw me as a weak old man with little to hide and no stomach to do so. It’s why I don’t keep any evidence of my work on Atlantis out there in plain sight, and instead keep it all up here in my mind.’
‘What happens if you lose your mind?’ Lopez asked. ‘It happens to Ethan all the time.’
‘That’s where researchers like Lucy come in, able to learn from me and continue my work, and that is what I must relate to you now. Lucy was being followed while she worked here, and for that reason she decided to do her best to disappear.’
‘We’re all ears,’ Ethan said.
‘Most people are familiar with the basic tale of Atlantis, taken as it is from Plato’s Critias.’ Raz’s eyes blurred as he recounted Plato’s writings from two and a half thousand years ago: “For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic Ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, ‘the Pillars of Heracles,’ there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. For all that we have here, lying within the mouth of which we speak, is evidently a haven having a narrow entrance; but that yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.”‘
‘So far, so abnormal,’ Lopez said. ‘I understood that it has long since been proven beyond any doubt that there is no such missing continent anywhere.’
‘Correct,’ Raz agreed with her, slapping one thigh in delight. ‘There is no such continent and there never was. Plato’s reference to the city of Atlantis is the first recorded instance of its mention, and the name suggests of course that it was located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the name the ancient Greeks gave to what we now call the Straits of Gibraltar.’
‘And I sense that you have a different take on all of that?’ Ethan guessed.
Raz shook his head.
‘No, not really. Most scholars who take the existence of an Atlantis seriously assume that Plato was somehow mistaken in his description of the city and its location. But Plato is quite precise in his description of the city itself, not just in terms of its appearance of three concentric rings but also its dimensions. No, I don’t think that Plato got it wrong.’
‘Well, what do you think then?’ Lopez asked.
‘I think that Plato was faithfully describing what he had heard about,’ Raz said, ‘and that it is modern scholars who have been making a mistake in assuming that Plato’s reference is the very first time that the city is mentioned in the historical record.’
‘Earlier references,’ Ethan said. ‘A researcher friend of ours called Hellerman told us of references to a city from which all men originated that was swallowed by the ocean.’
‘That’s right,’ Raz enthused. ‘Plato was merely recounting a legend that had already been circulating for centuries, perhaps even millennia, and he then put his own spin on it with Athen’s victory over the city which was then submerged beneath the waves by vengeful gods and so on.’
‘Hellerman also mentioned that many referred to the city as being beneath clouds of smoke, that it was considered a land of the dead, Hades even,’ Lopez added.
‘This is perhaps true,’ Raz replied, ‘or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it was true at the time. We cannot say much about geological activity around a site that we have not yet located, but we can rely upon some of the iconography associated with the city’s legend to inform us of its existence deep in humanity’s past. You are familiar with the symbol of the great city, which has existed since ancient times as three concentric rings with a cross in the center?’
‘Yeah, Hellerman showed us that,’ Lopez agreed.
‘The symbol has long been associated with Atlantis, long before Plato ever mentioned its existence and it entered the common conscience. The rings appear on carved stones dated as old as ten thousand years, and were a feature of many supposedly pre–historic tribes.’
Raz leaned down to one of the aged stone flags at his feet, the cut stones worn smooth by the passage of feet over countless centuries, perhaps millennia. With his fingers he carefully prized one of the stones up and from beneath it he lifted a disc–shaped object that was wrapped in cloth, nestled alongside the edge of a storm drain beneath the table. Raz set the object on the table before them and then unfolded the cloth to reveal a circular, terracotta tablet about eight inches in diameter.
‘This, is the Phaistos Disk,’ Raz said grandly.
Ethan stared down at the disk, which was roughly shaped and inscribed with three concentic rings, each of which contained heiroglyphic characters of some kind that looked somewhat Egyptian but also reminded him of the pictographic writing he had witnessed at many other ancient sites over the years.
‘Where did it come from?’ Lopez asked.
‘Well, that is the great question. It was found in 1908 by an Italian archaeologist excavating the ancient ruins of the Minoan Palace of Phaistos, on the island of Crete. The script upon it is unknown and has never been deciphered, which leads most scholars to come to two possible conclusions: either the ancient Greeks had a form of writing of which we have never known, which is unlikely as the Minoan culture is well known to historians, or alternatively the disc did not come from Crete at all but was taken there for some reason.’
Ethan frowned.
‘How does this tie in with Lucy?’
‘I was able to gain an understanding of what is written on this disc, and from it she has begun the search that I was unable to complete. Lucy is on the hunt for Atlantis, and the very shape and form of this disk is what guides her.’
‘What does it say?’ Lopez asked, intrigued.
Raz smiled. ‘It’s not actually so much what it says as what it represents. The three concentric rings are present once more, and with the single line extending from the center. This icon has long been associated with Atlantis but was much later appropriated by other belief systems across the world, its true meaning lost amid the warring factions of countless religions. The same symbol is also called a Rosi–Crucis, the Dew Cup, and is the symbol for what is now referred to in popular culture as the Holy Grail.’
Ethan blinked. ‘As in the cup of Christ?’
Raz nodded.
‘Lucy isn’t yet searching for the city: she is following a trail that I am now too old to follow myself. She is following the grail, the symbols carved into the rocks of the
world’s oldest cities that prove they were aware of its existence, in the hope that they will lead her to its location. The holy grail has nothing to do with Christianity: it speaks of the true location of Atlantis itself.’
***
IX
‘That’s insane,’ Ethan said. ‘If you announced that on live television in America you’d be hounded out of the country.’
‘Such is the anger of the religious right,’ Raz agreed, ‘but there is no escaping the historical record. This icon, that of the holy grail, existed long before the cults that comprise modern religions. We have been taught that they are the one truth, the beginning of faith, but in reality they are all just the re–hashing of far older myths and legends, and no amount of shouting to the contrary can change that.’
‘I’ve seen the movies and read the books,’ Lopez pointed out, ‘and they all state that the grail is a Christian relic of some kind, whether a chalice or a person.’
‘Some would believe so,’ Raz said, ‘but in truth the fledgling Christian cult appropriated many legends for its own use. The story of Christ’s birth, life and death was stolen from the Mithraic tradition of sun–worship that preceded it, which was in turn taken from the Hindu legend of Krishna two thousand years before that. Easter was originally Eostara, a Roman celebration of the arrival of Spring and the resurrection of life as crops began to grow and a new generation of animals born after the cold and darkness of winter. All of the stories of course owed their existence not to gods but to the sun, the passage of which across the sky each year marks the path of the seasons. The sun’s descent toward the horizon and midwinter, where it “died” and resided for three days at its lowest from December 21st before being reborn or “ressurected” three days later and ascending to the heavens a little more each day in the march toward spring is the foundation of all the world’s religions, no matter how much they try to hide it behind violence or legends to the contrary.’
The Atlantis Codex Page 6
