by Rob Jones
“We’re gaining on them!” Hunter said.
“Not for long.”
He watched as a black figure began to climb out of the rear window. When his entire upper body was sticking out in the rain, he raised a compact machine pistol in the air. Hunter recognized it at once as a Heckler & Koch MP7. When the orange muzzle flash lit the night, he had already grabbed the wheel and forced the car off the path.
Jodie gasped, a rare display of fear, and then the right-hand corner of the hood struck a plane tree and ended the pursuit. The Fiat spun around one-eighty degrees and came to a rest just off one of the footpaths, main-beams lighting the rainfall and steam pouring out of a hole in the radiator.
“We have to get out of here,” Hunter said, fumbling with his belt.
Seconds after they pushed open their doors and staggered out of the wreck, they knew it was over. Blue lights flashed and then the yellow main-beams of half a dozen police cars lit them up like two convicts trying to escape from Alcatraz. Doors opened and men yelled and leapt from the cars.
“Don’t move!” one of the policemen screamed. He was gripping a pistol in both hands and using the top of his car door to stabilize the aim.
“Damn it, he knows who we are,” Hunter said.
“How do you know?” Jodie looked at him. “Got it – he spoke in English. He shouldn’t know we speak English.”
“Which means he got Amy and the rest of the team.”
“Put your hands up!”
The man walked over to him and cuffed his hands behind his back. “Dr Hunter, I am arresting you for the murder of Julian Walters. You have the right to notify the British consul and to call an attorney and…”
“Murder? What the hell? He’s been kidnapped! We were trying to rescue him!”
“I would recommend you say nothing, Dr Hunter. You are in a lot of trouble.”
As the cuffs bit into his wrists, the words melted into a blur. To his left he saw two policemen pushing Jodie into the second car. Her hair was soaked with rain and sticking to her face but she was calm and unmoved. She looked vulnerable yet somehow even harder, with a steely look in her eyes, and then she was gone.
“You too, Dr Hunter.”
He felt the policeman’s hand on his head as he guided him down into the back seat of the police car. Somewhere in the Paris night, the Creed had Julian and their hunt for Atlantis was moving forward faster than ever.
His, he thought glumly, had just come to an end.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Hunter was expecting to be taken to one of the city’s many police stations for a lengthy and difficult interrogation, so he was surprised when the police car drove back to the Louvre and parked up in front of the pyramid. When the second car carrying Jodie pulled up beside them, a policeman got out of the car and opened his door.
“Get out, please.”
He obeyed the order and climbed out into the night. The rain had lessened to a lighter drizzle, but the air was still warm. Jodie was also ordered out of the other car and then the police flanked them as they transferred them inside the palace. In a solemn procession, they marched them upstairs, right past Walters’s smashed office and into the Department of Egyptian Antiquities.
Having made their way past the final police cordon, he now followed the officers down a corridor. Hands in cuffs and shoes clicking on the polished parquet flooring of the antiquities wing, he was too shocked even to glance at the exquisite artifacts and artwork flanking him as he made his way toward the giant Ramesses II statue.
“Wait here,” the policeman said. “Both of you.”
Hunter watched him walk across the room to a man in a serious trench coat. They spoke for a few moments and then the man in the coat wandered over to them.
“I am Inspector Fabius of the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police.”
“Why have you charged us with murder?” Hunter struggled to keep his voice low.
“Just calm down, Dr Hunter.”
“Calm down?” Hunter said. “And where the hell are the rest of our friends?”
“Your friends are being questioned in another room in the palace. Tell me what happened here tonight.”
Hunter calmed himself. Taking a look at Jodie, he saw she had already done just that. She was standing quietly with her hands cuffed behind her back and staring at the wall. He guessed she had experience of this part of the chase, too.
“We met with Professor Walters earlier today and handed him some important archaeological findings we wanted his help deciphering. He accepted our request and asked to meet us here at midnight.”
Fabius raised an eyebrow. “A little unorthodox.”
“Only if you don’t know Julian.”
The inspector dipped his head, accepting this was possible. “Continue.”
“When we got here tonight we never had a chance to see him. His office was trashed and then we heard him scream for help. When we got to him, a group of men were dragging him out of the museum. They piled him into a black car and took off. We gave chase.”
“In a stolen car.”
“Yes, in a stolen car, but we lost them. Now we don’t know where he is and your men have charged us with murder. What makes you think he was murdered?”
“We had our reasons.”
Hunter felt tension building in his neck. “That’s what I know. What do you know?”
“Not much, just that someone broke into the museum a half hour ago and took him. We think maybe the kidnappers found him in his office, but he escaped and tried to get away. They eventually caught up with him here in the Egyptian Antiquities section and after a fight they may have harmed him or even killed him and moved the body. We found blood on the floor and wall and even some splattered up the Ramesses statue. Look here.”
Hunter looked where he was pointing and saw the blood. Squinting, he took another step forward.
“That’s far enough,” said Fabius, raising his hand to stop him going any farther. “We cannot let you contaminate the scene of the crime.”
“I understand,” he said. “But Julian wasn’t murdered. He fought with the men when they were taking him and punched one of them in the face. It’s his blood, not Julian’s.”
“Of course, we will run tests.”
Hunter sighed. “If you check the museum’s security cameras, you’ll see we’re telling the truth about when we arrived. There must be evidence of the black car on the tapes somewhere.”
“We have already checked it. The black car arrived here an hour ago. Where were you an hour ago?”
“In an apartment on the Left Bank with the rest of my team. I’m sorry if that ruins your little theory about who snatched my friend.”
Fabius smiled. “I have no theories yet, Monsieur Hunter. I got here less than thirty minutes ago and have not even begun my investigation. It is not every day a man is murdered in the Louvre, at least not outside of the pages of an adventure novel.”
“For the last time, he wasn’t murdered, but his life is in danger. You have to issue an all ports warning.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
Hunter nodded, but his mind was wandering. How had the Apostle tracked down Julian so fast after their first meeting? Amy hadn’t posed as Kirsten and reported into the Rorschach Foundation to tell them they were going to meet him, and he had told only Juliette at UNESCO. For the first time, he started to question the integrity of the other team members.
More detectives and police officers walked into the room, followed by Amy and the rest of the team. When he saw her face, he felt a strange sense of relief he hadn’t expected. “Are you okay?”
“I think so. I gather they got away?”
“We did our best,” he said. “Jodie drives like a rally champion.”
“I know.”
“I can’t believe he’s been snatched,” Hunter said. “And it’s all my fault.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?
If I hadn’t dragged him into this nightmare, he wouldn’t have been working on my crackpot theories.”
The team were tired and stressed, and it only got worse. Fabius made them wait hours until he had checked their story. When he reappeared in the antiquities department and walked over to them, they were ready to drop.
“You are free to go,” he said.
Amy stood. “All of us?”
“Oui.” He ordered a policeman to remove their cuffs. “We checked the tapes and we are content that Professor Walters is still alive and that you are not responsible for his kidnapping. But Dr Hunter and Special Agent Priest will be charged separately with car theft.”
Hunter accepted the downgrading of the charges happily. “I suppose I should count myself lucky.”
Fabius gave a suspicious smile. “Yes, you really should. Do not leave the European Union.”
They wandered out into the drizzle, lost, dazed and confused. Somewhere to the east, the sun was breaking through some clouds above the city’s eastern skyline. After a long silence, Quinn spoke first. “Is that the end of this thing then?”
Amy frowned. “You think I'm giving up just like that?”
The goth shrugged. “The cops copied my laptop’s hard drive before they gave it back to me, so I hope you realize everything we know, they know. For now, at least.”
Hunter looked at her. “What does that mean?”
“It means when we get somewhere dry and with a damn power outlet I can get back online and delete it all from their records.”
Blanco met Hunter’s look of astonishment. “She can do that.”
“I guess that’s a good thing.”
“Hey, hacking’s one rung up the ladder from car thief,” Quinn said.
“You got me there.”
“And as far as I know right now,” she said. “We still have not one damn clue about what to do next.”
“No,” Amy said. “That’s the sad but true part – but we’re not giving in.”
They wandered away from the museum and Hunter slipped his hands into his pockets as he stared up at the giant glass pyramid. Standing there in the morning light with the drizzle slick on his forehead, something changed inside him.
“My God…”
“Max?” Amy asked.
He felt his heart pounding in his chest. “How could I have been so stupid! It’s been staring me in the face all along.”
“What?”
“The Mozart horn concerto,” Hunter said. “It’s the last thing Julian said to me when those thugs were dragging him out of the door. He said the next time I listen to the Mozart horn concerto, Köchel 18, I should think of him and the old days. I forgot about it in the excitement of the car chase.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Jodie said.
He shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “I never listen to classical music and Julian knows that. He must have been telling us something he didn’t want them to know, but what the hell is Köchel 18?”
“The Köchel catalogue,” Amy said. “Mozart wrote well over six hundred pieces of music so it helps if they’re numbered. That’s what the Köchel catalogue is. Every Mozart composition has a Köchel number, but they’re sometimes abbreviated to K numbers.”
“K18?” Hunter said.
Amy frowned. “Which is odd, because none of the horn concertos are K18.”
Hunter looked at her. “How do you know all this?”
“Mom was principal violinist for the Boston Philharmonic for many years.”
“Like I said,” Quinn said. “Blue bloods helping each other up the greasy pole.”
“For the record, none of my instructors at the FBI ever knew who I was. My father made damn sure of it. He wanted me to cut my own way through the ice and that’s what I did.”
“Fine, and this is starting to give me a damn headache,” Jodie said. “Think I’ll stick to breaking into cars and apartments.”
Amy turned to Hunter. “The Mozart horn concerto was K447, not K18.”
“I doubt Julian would have made a mistake like that,” Hunter said. “He loves classical music. He’s a pianist.”
Amy pondered for a moment. “Or KV, they’re also called KV numbers, making it KV18.”
Hunter gawped at her. “KV18?”
“Sure – why?”
Hunter grinned. “KV18 just happens to be the designation of Ramesses X’s tomb.”
“Keep talking.”
“Like your Mozart compositions, there are so many tombs in the Valley of the Kings they’re designated numbers.”
“The Valley of the Kings?” Jodie said. “What’s that?”
“It’s a vast necropolis,” Hunter said. “A city of the dead, and we’ll be dead too if we don’t watch out.”
“I still don’t get the KV thing,” Quinn said.
“KV stands for Kings’ Valley. KV1 is the tomb of Ramesses VII, for example. It’s in the East Valley. KV18 is the tomb of Ramesses X, which was cut for him in the southwest wadi. It was left unfinished and if it’s the same as last time I visited, it’s still full of debris. The Pharaoh’s body wasn’t found there, or anywhere else, either. There’s nothing there, believe me – it’s no more than a narrow entranceway and two narrow passages.”
“Epic,” Quinn said sarcastically.
“So how does this help us?” Blanco asked.
“Julian said the horn concerto was KV18,” Hunter said. “The whole reason the Egyptians chose that location for the necropolis was because of the mountain to the west of it – El-Qurn, it means the Horn in Arabic. Julian was telling us that the real tomb of Ramesses X is to the west of the mountain, on the Horn.”
“Whoa,” Lewis said. “That’s some deductive reasoning right there, Max.”
“It sure is,” Amy said, beaming.
Hunter grinned. “I know where it is, Amy! I know where Ramesses X is buried… where the tomb is! Where the so-called gift from the gods came from! There’s only one part of the mountain that conceals an entrance – a truncated spur on the northern face just above a boulder field. I know it well. We need to get to Egypt in a hurry.”
“But Fabius wants to lock us up for car theft,” Jodie said, smirking. “We’re not allowed to leave the EU.”
“Yeah, right,” Quinn laughed.
Amy was already on her phone, talking into the tiny speaker. “Get me Director Gates, right now. This is a Code Red emergency.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
As the plane flew to Luxor, Hunter reflected on how he seemed to spend more time in the air than on the ground these days. Glancing around the corporate jet’s small cabin, he saw that Amy and her FBI team looked as tired as he felt. He couldn’t blame them. Blanco and Lewis had military experience but the rest were all civilians.
More pressing was the abduction of his mentor. How the old man had thought so fast on his feet and given them the clue about the Valley of the Kings, he didn’t know. He stretched his long, aching legs out in front of him and closed his eyes, but then he felt someone crash down in the chair beside him,
“Tell me about Atlantis,” Amy said.
Opening his eyes, he turned, holding back a smile. “You’re a believer now?”
She shrugged. “I think maybe I might be.”
“The first thing to know is that we know almost nothing about the place. Apart from the description Plato left in his Critias dialogue we knew no more until I discovered the Diocles dialogue in Athens a few months ago. Even then, the new material was scant in its description of Atlantis itself, but it did offer me the vital clue about the three winged angel statues and the possible location of one of them in Nineveh. That was when all of this kicked off with a vengeance.”
Her lips broke into a stunning smile. “So you’re to blame, huh?”
“Sorry.”
“If it was so real, then what the hell happened to the place?”
The question came from Blanco. He had been listening to their conversation from across the cabin while pre
tending to sleep. Now, he opened his eyes and swung his legs off the long seat and looked at Hunter earnestly.
“Yeah,” Jodie said. “What happened to the place? If it was as real as Plato said, it couldn’t just disappear.”
Hunter leaned around his seat’s headrest and saw his young partner in crime trying not to look overly interested in the subject, but staring at him with a question on her face all the same. He hardly knew where to begin.
“There are many theories and they have all been well-documented in literally thousands of publications. If we accept there was once a great civilization called Atlantis and it no longer exists, then clearly there was a catastrophic event which wiped it out. Among current theories are a massive electrical output from the sun, triggering massive flooding, or the perennial favorite, the comet.”
“I read about that,” Blanco said. “Is it possible a simple comet strike could wipe out an entire island?”
“It didn’t have to wipe out all traces of the island of Atlantis itself, only all signs of civilization on it. There are ways that could happen.”
“Like what?” Jodie asked.
“Anyone hear of the Younger Dryas?”
Blank faces and silence.
“The Younger Dryas was an event that occurred around twelve thousand years ago, where we had a return to glacial climate conditions following what climatologists call the Late Glacial Interstadial.”
Jodie closed her eyes. “Wake me when we get to the interesting part.”
Hunter ignored her, knowing she was still listening. “The interstadial was a period of warming after the Last Glacial Maximum, or Ice Age. In other words, after the Ice Age things started to warm up again until the Younger Dryas, when there was very rapid cooling and a strong decline in northern hemisphere temperatures.”
“What caused it?” Amy asked.
“There are several theories, but my money’s on a comet – or more precisely a series of comets as our planet orbited through the Taurid Meteor Shower, which it does every June and November. During this time, comet strikes increase sharply. There are various hypotheses claiming that twelve thousand years ago this planet flew through the Taurid meteors and got unlucky. Large comets crashed into the northern hemisphere and caused massive flooding which wiped out Atlantis.”
