Lopez was smiling once again as she processed what Raz was telling her.
‘So you’re saying that the worship of the icon of the holy grail is in fact the worship of Atlantis?’
‘Partly,’ Raz replied, ‘in that it is the meaning of the symbol in its original form. The icon is most often found in ancient artifacts associated with sun worship, a common theme in most ancient societies. The sun was the giver of life without which it was believed no life could exist, the only truly holy grail. Atlantis, if it existed as described by Plato during the time of Solon and had been present for several thousand years already, must have been built long before any of the commonly accepted earliest cities of mankind, and its construction was repeatedly described by many sources as being a natural harbor with a narrow channel leading to three rings of land in an inland water way, the layout of the icon itself.’
‘What about the disc?’ Ethan pressed. ‘You said that you know what it says?’
‘Yes,’ Raz said, ‘in as much as I was willing to look beyond Crete in my search for an understanding of the ideograms upon it, which are quite distinct from the local Cretan writing of the time. There are over two hundred forty symbols found on both sides of the disc, depicting everything from people, birds, plants, insects and all manner of cryptic images arranged in a manner that suggests either a list or something that should be read following a counter clockwise spiral pattern. What’s most interesting about the disc is that it contains inscripted signs that match inscriptions found as far north as the Baltic Sea and as far west as Brazil, where identical carvings have been found dated to prehistoric times.’
‘Seriously?’ Lopez asked.
‘There are also carvings of the constellations of the Pleiades, Pisces and Serpens on the surface, and that led me to deduce that their positions on the disc suggested a date of origin some ten thousand years old, when those constellations would have occupied the regions in the sky as denoted by the disc when held aloft during the summer solstice and matched to the sky.’
‘That’s much older than human civilization,’ Ethan said.
‘Far older,’ Raz agreed. ‘The fact that this icon was found in the palace of the Minoan civilization, which was consumed by the sea after a major volcanic event, further sheds light on how such legends could have arisen around the fate of any supposed Atlantis.’
Raz pointed at the disc.
‘The symbols are syllabic, rather than letters, and they speak as follows; “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.”
Lopez blinked. “Clear as day.’
‘Not to us,’ Ethan said, ‘but perhaps to Lucy?’
‘If she understood something of this,’ Raz said, ‘then she did not speak of it to me for fear of the Russians trying to harm me for information. I can understand the sun’s azimuth and the dawn star references as they enabled me to orientate the disc and discover its age, but beyond that I am at a loss.’
‘Could the land of fire be another reference to volcanism?’ Ethan asked.
‘Perhaps,’ Raz conceded, ‘but it could also be simply a poetic verse describing a sunset too, that Atlantis is behind the viewer when the disc is held aloft. I have been unable to verify a location based on that so it must mean something else.’
‘Did Lucy leave any clue at all to where she might be going?’ Ethan asked.
Raz leaned back in his seat once more as he replied.
‘Her mission was simple. The icon or symbol for the holy grail has changed over millennia, and by following its evolution back through time as inscribed upon the rocks of ever older ancient historical sites, Lucy was hoping to be able to study the civilizations that built the sites and obtain clues and references to the existence and location of Atlantis.’
‘The picture of the stellae that Hellerman sent us,’ Lopez said.
Ethan nodded. ‘We have an image of an artifact that Lucy sent before she disappeared.’
‘Again,’ Lopez interjected as she directed an innocent smile at Ethan.
‘Hellerman suggested that the site she visited was dated to over eleven thousand years ago. Is that even possible?’
Raz watched them both for a long time before he replied, and the smile was no longer on his face as he did so.
‘The beliefs of man were once merely our attempts to place meaning and understanding on the world around us. There is incontrovertible evidence that our ancestors, even back to the Neanderthals of tens of thousands of years ago, buried their dead alongside garlands of flowers, that they showed grief for those who had died. They had no religions, no gods, their beliefs are things we can only imagine at, but those beliefs if they existed were without bias or conflict, merely their attempts to humanize the uncaring world around them. But for the past two thousand years the beliefs of mankind have become first weapons and now big business. The fear that the falsehoods of the world’s major religions might be laid bare for all to see is what drives violence against blasphemy in the Middle East, the paranoid secrecy of the Catholic Church and the attempts by the religious right in the west to infiltrate governments and schools to push their agenda and take control of children’s minds.’ Raz sighed softly. ‘Our society is comfortable in its mythical gods. To prove beyond all reasonable doubt that religion is a myth and that all of their legends stem from a singular society far older than anything previously thought possible is something that the discovery of Atlantis would achieve. If we were building cities ten thousand years ago, then there is a huge part of the human story that has been wiped clean from our history books.’
Lopez looked at Ethan. ‘But why would the Russians be chasing after this also?’
‘Because they’re one of the strongholds of atheism in the world,’ Ethan replied, ‘and the discovery of a religion shattering city that unifies all of the world’s religions would also be an indirect validation of a Communist regime which championed atheism.’
Raz inclined his head in accquiessence.
‘In a nutshell,’ he replied. ‘Russia is looking for reasons to return to the good old days and there would be nothing better than the discovery of the city of Atlantis by Russian teams to break the hold of Islamic terrorism and Catholic dogma over many countries otherwise allied to the Russian Federation.’
Ethan knew well that as well as the Russian’s own patriotic reasons for locating the city for themselves there was a larger geopolitical force at work. The US administration had long been suspected of colluding with the Russians even before the current president had taken office, with the Russian president suspected of deliberately orchestrating a campaign to alter the outcome of the election in favor of a candidate with close ties to Russian business interests. Despite the bizarre nature of the revelations, it was conceivable that the current US President would be willing to orchestrate Russian assistance in hunting down those responsible for walking away from the country with the lost billions of dollars that had been hoarded by Majestic Twelve.
‘You’re thinking what I’m thinking,’ Lopez said as she watched him.
‘If the administration is heading the way we think it is, then it’s not being run so much as a country and more like a business. Profit, free from government interference and all of the laws designed to protect consumers from the greed of multinational corporations, is all that concerns them.’
‘And thirty billion dollars is a lot of money to have seen disappear,’ Lopez agreed.
‘The president can’t shout about it as being a failure of the opposition in power at the time as doing so might also expose links to the Russians or whomever else they’ve come into contact with over the years,’ Ethan went on. ‘That means that any action made to recoup the lost billions would have to be done under the radar, out of the media eye.’
‘And out of the eye of any congressional oversight,’ Lopez said, her features now pinched with concern. ‘They couldn’t risk a whistleblower dropping details of any
operation into the laps of the media, they can’t afford another scandal.’
‘So you’d outsource,’ Ethan said, ‘to trusted second parties, people who stood to benefit from you achieving your goal.’
They both reached the same conclusion together. ‘Russia.’
Ethan looked sharply at Raz. ‘How long ago were the Russians here?’
‘Yesterday, they questioned me for about a half hour and then they just left.’
Suddenly the flock of small birds nestled in the nearby tree burst into motion and flocked upward in a dramatic cloud of beating wings and chirps as they flew up into the hard blue sky and vanished over the nearby rooftops.
Ethan looked up at the walls around them and somehow he knew in his gut that they’d been played. They were sitting in a tiny building in an obscure corner of India, far from civilization. If they were killed here, nobody would ever hear about it.’
‘We need to move,’ he said.
Lopez was already on her feet and heading for the courtyard door that led back into Raz’s little museum when she saw shadows moving before her. She whirled and pointed to Ethan, signalled a warning. Ethan turned and looked around them at the courtyard but instantly he knew that they were cornered, no other exits in the sandstone walls surrounding them.
*
‘Spread out.’
Valentin Kurov strode into the musty little building and removed his sunglasses as his men spread rapidly through the building. Valentin was tall enough that he had to stoop and twist to get into the building, his muscular physique too wide for the entrance and his cropped blond hair brushing the door frame as he moved through. By his side, cowering on his knees and with blood trickling from his nose, an aged and wiry Indian man pointed frantically deeper into the building.
Valentin showed him again the images he had carried with him from Russia, one shot each of the American man and woman he and his team had been told to look out for. The little man nodded vigorously and pointed again into the building.
Valentin shoved the man aside with his boot, hard enough that he crashed into a wall and collapsed, whimpering as Valentin hurried through a narrow passageway. He shoved an old muslin sheet aside and saw his men vanishing into a courtyard just ahead of them.
He walked out into the courtyard to see an old man sitting smoking from a hookah and watching them with an interested but unafraid gaze. Valentin looked up at the surrounding walls of the courtyard and then peered down at the old man as he held out the images with one hand while with the other he pulled a heavy pistol from a holster beneath his loose shirt.
‘Where are they?’
The old man shrugged and smiled.
‘They ran as soon as you arrived, up and away.’
Valentin looked up at the walls and saw instantly the ledges and window sills. His eye traced the possible routes up the pair could have taken and he whirled to his men.
‘Get out there now, track them down before they get too far!’
The men, all dressed as tourists but barely able to conceal the weapons secreted upon their bodies, hurried out of the building as Valentin leaned in close to the old man and peered into his eyes.
‘If you are lying to me Raz, know that I will come back for you.’
Raz regarded him for a long moment before he replied.
‘Had I needed to lie to you, I would not have sat here waiting for you.’
Valentin frowned briefly and then he whirled away and stormed from the courtyard.
Raz sat for a few moments, quietly smoking the hookah as he listened to the sound of the Russian men as they searched the rooftops. Slowly, the voices trailed away into the distance and after a few minutes more he heard the soft flutter of wings as the birds returned to the tree in the courtyard.
Slowly, Raz got to his feet and pulled the chairs to one side.
‘You can come out now.’
An old drainage grill in the stones at his feet rattled and was pushed aside as Ethan hauled himself out with Lopez right behind him.
‘Great,’ Lopez uttered as she dusted herself off. ‘Four hours in this country was all it took to wind up in a sewer.’
Ethan replaced the drain cover and pulled the chairs back over it.
‘I would have preferred to take to the roofs,’ he said as he looked at Raz.
‘They would have expected that and captured you,’ Raz replied. ‘The storm drains here are large because of the monsoon rains that pass over every year, and they’re big enough to hide in. I gambled that the Russians would not think of that but now you must go, for they might eventually realize the deception.’
‘We still don’t know where Lucy is,’ Lopez pointed out.
‘She is already far ahead of you,’ Raz replied, ‘and right now that is the safest place for her.’
Ethan understood immediately. The Russians would only be able to track Lucy down by following Ethan and Lopez, and while that allowed her to work freely it also meant that Lucy was out on her own without back up.
‘She will be fine,’ Raz said as he saw the concern in Ethan’s eyes. ‘As long as the Russians have you to focus on, they will not search for Lucy and she will be free to continue her work.’
Ethan walked to the front door of the building and carefully checked the street for any sign of their Russian pursuers, but apart from the old woman sitting nearby on the doorstep there was no sign of them.
‘Go, now,’ Raz urged Ethan as he pressed the Phaistos Disk into his hand. ‘Meet me at the Dwarkandish Temple at dawn, it is the last place that Lucy went before she disappeared.’
Ethan stepped into the alley and hurried away with Lopez to the south as Raz headed north.
‘I don’t like this,’ Lopez said. ‘Lucy’s a great scientist but she’s no field agent. If the Russians catch a lucky break she’ll be forced to lead them straight to the prize, and I can’t believe for a moment that the Russians would honor any agreement with our administration.’
‘Nor do I,’ Ethan agreed. ‘This whole thing is based around money for the White House and nationalistic pride for the Russians and neither of them will be willing to abandon their prize when it’s within their grasp. You can bet your bottom dollar that their little arrangement will go south and before you know it Russia and America will be at each other’s throats.’
‘You think it’ll go that far?’
‘You think the president’s thin skin will cope with Russia taking the money and the city of Atlantis without putting up some kind of belligerent military responabouse? You and I both know that he’s the kind of guy who’d blow the world up just to feel better about himself. Either we get to that city before they do or this whole thing will explode, and there’s only one way we can avoid it.’
‘How?’
‘By giving both sides what they want,’ Ethan said. ‘This is where it ends, Nicola. We have to find a way to give the money stolen from Majestic Twelve back to the government and we need to find Atlantis before the Russians do.’
Lopez stopped in the hot and dusty street. ‘Wait one, if we go charging in there we don’t know what will happen. We could end up creating as big a problem as we have already.’
‘And if we stand back and do nothing?’
Lopez rolled her eyes, and Ethan pressed his advantage.
‘We have the fact that Lucy visited a place here, Dwarkadhish Temple, and that something about the place sent her on this new course. All we have to do is figure out what that something was.’
***
X
Washington DC
Allison Pierce sat in silence in the office of the Bright & Warner law firm on the city’s east side, and waited for a meeting that she had booked the previous evening under the pretence of wanting to hire an attorney to preside over a divorce.
The law firm was only two years old, having been founded by experienced attorney Lucinda Bright and her partner in the business, Natalie Warner. Allison had learned in the limited time available that the law firm had bui
lt a small but loyal client base handling mostly small claims but also larger cases on occasion from contacts over at the Capitol. Those contacts had led Allison here, and it was Natalie she was interested in talking to.
The door to a nearby office opened and a tall, smartly suited woman of perhaps thirty years of age walked out. She had long wavy light brown hair and an easy smile beneath green eyes, a wide jaw and a firm handshake.
‘Mrs Pierce, I’m so sorry to not be meeting under happier circumstances. Please, come in.’
Allison detected none of the thin and uncaring veneer normally associated with lawyers, Natalie guiding her into the office and closing the door behind them.
‘Coffee?’ she offered, a maker installed in the office.
‘No, thanks,’ Allison replied, maintaining some distance from Natalie as she suspected any grieving would–be divorcee might.
Natalie sat down with her but not on the opposite side of her desk as Allison had expected. Instead she pulled up a chair and her notepad and sat close by.
‘Okay, so, obviously separation and divorce is a difficult thing to go through so I want you to understand that there’s no pressure here and no need to rush things through, even if maybe you feel that you want to. Getting it right is, at least for now, more important than getting it over with.’
Allison nodded. ‘I do want to get it right.’
‘Good,’ Natalie said. ‘Can I take the name of your husband?’
Allison nodded. ‘Yes, he’s a government employee named Douglas Ian Jarvis and he’s been missing for several months after disappearing from his place of work at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Would you happen to know anything about that?’
Natalie had started writing in her notepad but now those sharp eyes flicked up to meet hers, still clear and green but now with a steely edge to them.
‘This some kind of joke?’
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.’
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