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Annja stared at him. He smiled but said nothing more. She suspected he’d used up his allotment of spoken words for the day.
“Ali has a second degree in biochemistry, you see,” Pilitowski explained.
“Ah,” Annja said.
“WELL, YOU KNOW, Annja,” the young Egyptian archaeologist said as he walked with her into the huge old brick building next to the dig where the team had set up headquarters, “we make no claims concerning the veracity of the scrolls. We only recover them. And are thrilled to do it, if I may say so.”
“As well you should be,” she said. “It’s just that Atlantis is a hot button for archaeologists in the U.S., Ismail.”
Their voices echoed slightly in the enormous space. Wooden partitions had been set up to delineate work areas and offices.
“It is for all of us,” he said. “We are, after all, on a quest for the truth, are we not?”
“Oh, yes,” she agreed.
“And should we not follow the truth wherever it might lead us?”
“All right. I see where you’re headed with this, Ismail. And you’re right. If I’m going to be a serious scientist, then evidence needs to outweigh my preconceptions.”
He smiled and nodded with boyishly visible relief.
“Now,” she said, “let’s go see this evidence.”
The headquarters appeared to have spent much of its career as a warehouse, with high walls of yellowish brick, steel struts for rafters and grimy skylights admitting brownish morning light. It smelled more than slightly of fish. Annja presumed it must be their proximity to the waterfront. The smell couldn’t last decades, could it?
They walked down an aisle to an open doorway. From inside came a blast of raucous feminine laughter. Ismail’s fine features tightened briefly.
He ushered Annja into a wide room, well lit by banks of standing lights. Several people worked at a row of computers. Others examined blackened-log-like scrolls on a big table.
“You might find this interesting,” Ismail said, leading her toward a table. On it stood a curious device like a bundle of upright rods worked through one of the burned scrolls. “It’s based on a machine invented in the eighteenth century to unroll burned papyri.”
The two technicians operating it had teased out several inches of scroll. It resembled charred bark being peeled from a log. They paused to smile and nod at Annja as Ismail introduced them.
“We mostly make use of magnetic-resonance imaging to take pictures of the scrolls, layer by layer, without unrolling them,” he said. “But we explore every means of recovering their content. And over here—” he turned to a wide white table where bright white underlighting illuminated the faces of the Egyptian-looking man and European-looking woman bending over it “—we have our apparatus for photographing fragments of broken scrolls we find.”
What sounded like a great gong tolled. Everybody stiffened. The woman from the scroll unroller, whom Ismail introduced as Bogumila, exclaimed, “Aleksy, call Ali and Szczepan and Maria. Tell them to come quickly!”
One of the pair at the photo table took out a cell phone and whipped it open. He spoke quickly in Polish.
Others were beginning to arrive on the run from the other cubicles. Apparently the gong, which she guessed was a recording, was turned up high to let everyone in the converted warehouse know there was news.
Everyone crowded before a large flat-screen monitor. An image had appeared, a ragged off-white oblong, with spidery dark gray markings on it that Annja guessed might be ancient Greek. “ Da! ” somebody exclaimed.
A young woman sat perched on a stool by the photographic table, at the other end from the bulky camera itself, which was mounted on a heavy mobile stand. Now she pushed off and came sauntering over. She was strikingly pretty, with pale blond hair done in pigtails that made her round-cheeked face look even younger than it probably was. Her eyes were big and blue, if currently half-lidded as if with contemptuous disinterest. She wore a tight black-and-red top that showed off her healthy figure and an extremely short skirt with horizontal stripes in red and black. For all the horizontal stripes and harsh colors she was stunning looking; Annja fought down an inclination to hate her.
As she approached the flat-screen monitor Annja felt uneasy. China-doll perfect the young woman’s appearance may have been, but she gave a strong impression of negativity.
Excited as they were, the other team members moved back from the screen as she approached. The young woman leaned in, jaw working on a wad of gum.
“Not too close, Jadzia,” the man at the keyboard said. “You are the anticomputer geek.”
She gave him a baleful squint and snapped her gum at him. She stuck a finger toward the screen. The guy at the keyboard seemed to wind up tighter and tighter the closer her fingertip, the nail painted black, got. She read in a bored voice:
“—had in their possession most marvelous stones, like unto gemstones, such as rubies or emeralds, but the size of goose’s eggs, wherein they stored a force as potent as the lightnings. Perhaps this blasphemy, this stealing of the very thunder of mighty Zeus, evoked his wrath and caused him to cast down that which belonged by right to Poseidon.”
She shrugged, popped her gum, straightened up with a little headflip. “That’s it for this page. The break was a physical one. Nothing to translate.”
Everybody cheered and hugged each other and exchanged high fives. Annja noticed nobody tried to embrace the pigtailed blond girl.
“Can she really just read it like that?” Annja asked the air.
She didn’t expect to be answered in the hubbub. But beside her boomed the ever-cheerful voice of Dr. Pilitowski. “Ah, yes, she can. This is the noted Jadzia Arkadczyk. She holds degrees in cryptology and linguistics. She has a remarkable gift for languages. She is, quite simply, beyond genius.”
Annja studied the young woman, who seemed content to stand looking offhandedly at the screen, soaking up the arm’s-length adulation of her comrades. Annja had her own gift for languages. It had formed a key part of her love for travel and adventure.
“I’m impressed,” she said.
Maria was speaking to the girl and nodding at Annja. Jadzia turned and looked at the visitor for the first time. Her blue eyes flew wide.
“I know you!” she exclaimed. “I have seen you on Chasing History’s Monsters .”
“Well, yes, I appear on the show from time to time,” Annja said with authentic modesty. She did not want to be known primarily for her association with the program. Especially among peers as distinguished as these.
“You are the woman they bring on when they wish to cover something up,” the girl went on, voice rising accusatorily, “and undo all the good work done by poor Kristie Chatham!”
2
“They despised everything but virtue,” Annja read, the bubbly water, still hot, gurgling to the slight motions of her body as she kept the book braced open against her drawn-up knees.
Photographic specialist Rahim al-Haj had lent her a copy of Plato’s Dialogues, well grimed and dog-eared by the team, as she took her leave of the recovery site late that afternoon. Unwinding in her hotel room after dinner in one of her favorite fashions, she was reading what Plato had written about Atlantis.
The legend claimed there had been an island outside the Pillars of Heracles, “larger than Libya and Asia put together.” Whatever Plato meant by Asia. A big island, to be sure.
The Atlanteans, the story said, made war on Europe. The Athenians, eventually standing alone, had defeated them. Then violent earthquakes had occurred, followed by floods. In a single day and night the island of Atlantis and all its people disappeared in the depths of the sea. That sounded pretty final to Annja. It did intrigue her that the Athenians apparently suffered greatly from the same catastrophe.
“You never hear that part of the myth when people talk about Atlantis,” she said aloud.
There was a lot of discussion about the founding of Athens. It intrigued Annja to read of what seemed to her to be an equality of men and women in ancient Athens, including in warfare. She was also struck by the claim that Greece had once been a wonderfully green and fertile peninsula that had suffered sorely from millennia of soil erosion. She wondered if there might be something to that part, anyway.
At last the narrative wandered around to Atlantis. It had been built by the sea god Poseidon to impress his human love, Cleito. It was a land of fertile fields, concentric circles of canals, elephants, that sort of thing. She made note of several details to take up with her hosts in the morning.
What made the biggest impression on her was the interval of nine thousand years since the supposed fall of Atlantis. She put her book up on the rim of the sink and closed her eyes and tried to wrap her mind around it.
As someone who had studied geology, and a bit of paleontology, as part of her formal education, she had little trouble coping with nine millennia. In geologic terms it was a fraction of a second.
But for a coherent account of events to survive for nine thousand years—for any kind of knowledge to be transmitted over such a yawning gulf of time—that just made her jaw sag in disbelief.
She was well aware that archeology, especially the relatively new but fruitful practice of applying modern forensic techniques to archeological evidence, was showing that as often as not the written histories bore only a passing resemblance to what could be physically demonstrated to have really happened. History was perhaps not bunk—not altogether. But to say it was inexact was like saying it snows at the North Pole.
Could any meaningful, let alone accurate, information be transmitted over nine thousand years? She doubted it.
And yet…the legend of Atlantis had persisted all that time. It had exercised a fascination on the human imagination continuously since Plato had recorded it. Does that count for something?
She shook her head. Weariness was getting the better of her. She’d been going pretty hard of late, to say the least. She stood up with a slog of water and a cascade of soapy foam down her long smooth body and legs, and drew the curtain around the tub to shower off before heading to bed.
IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT. Annja had spent the day down in the excavation itself, painstakingly helping to extract burned scrolls from the rubble of the burned cabinets. She was exhausted and felt sticky from sweat, although here in the main lab inside the old warehouse it was quite cool. Apparently the Supreme Council on Antiquities was willing to spring for air-conditioning. Or maybe the television network was springing for it—she was grateful to whomever.
She noticed Jadzia lurking off to one side. The girl was fanning herself with a sheaf of fanfolded paper and trying to chat up a handsome young Egyptian technician working on a computer near her. Either he was shy or deliberately ignoring her. She caught Annja’s attention, glared and looked away.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Annja said, propping her rump on a table. “Wasn’t the Minoan civilization destroyed by a great big volcanic eruption around 1500 B.C.?”
“Yes,” Pilitowski said. “The catastrophic eruption of Thera. It is now estimated to have been at least ten times as powerful as Krakatau in 1883.”
“Although geologists tend to date the eruption from about 1600 B.C.,” Aleksy Fabiszak, the team’s geology specialist, said. “That volume of ejecta would be the same magnitude as the terrible Tambora eruption of 1815, the most violent of recorded history.”
“One point on the volcanic explosivity scale beneath supervolcano,” Maria said.
“So it would have made a royal mess of much of the Aegean,” Annja said. “I mean, the way the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis is supposed to have?”
“Well, if what you’re getting at is that perhaps Atlantis and the Minoan culture of Crete were the same,” Pilitowski said, “a lot of people have come to suspect that.”
Jadzia snapped her gum loudly. “ Somebody should tell her,” she said brassily, as if Annja were not in the room, “that we have found many references on the scrolls that make it impossible the writer was talking about the Minoans.”
Burly, good-natured Dr. Pilitowski looked to the slight, dark Maria, who shrugged. Annja got the impression she wasn’t the only one who found the brilliant language expert a problem child.
“From contextual evidence in what we have translated of these Atlantis scrolls,” Maria said, “it is clear they were written about half a century after Solon. That would make them a century older than Plato’s writing.”
“So far we are not finding any reference to Solon at all,” Naser said. He was a plump, pallid man in his thirties with a neat beard, who spoke with a Lower East Side New York accent. “We suspect that somewhere along the line different end-of-the-world stories got mixed together.”
“Hmm,” Annja said. She was still having trouble dealing with serious archaeologists taking Atlantis seriously. Although she had to admit none of them actually seemed to be vested in the truth of the scrolls, even if they did call them the Atlantis scrolls. But there was no mistaking the excitement that ran through the site whenever the gong went off to announce that they had images of more restored fragments.
“One thing I’m puzzled by,” she said, “is that reading Plato, I didn’t really see any talk about advanced technology. Not like what people always talk about, with flying machines and artificial light and all that.”
“That actually seems to have first appeared in a book called A Dweller on Two Planets, which came out late in the nineteenth century,” Pilitowski said. “Its author claimed to have received the information in dreams.”
Annja raised an eyebrow.
“Well, channeled it, actually.” He shrugged. “What can I say? He was from California.”
“Somebody ought to tell her the new scrolls substantiate much of what Frederick Oliver wrote in that book,” Jadzia said hotly.
Annja looked to Pilitowski, who shrugged. “I do not know that I would go so far as to say ‘substantiate,’” he said. “Nonetheless, we must admit we find certain correspondences.”
“We began to wonder if some alternate account of Atlantis might have surfaced sporadically throughout history,” Naser said, “without impinging on academic scholarship. And that Oliver got hold of it somehow.”
“With all respect,” Annja said, “that seems to be reaching a bit far.”
“Not so far as believing in channeling,” Naser said.
“True,” Annja said with a laugh.
Annja looked sidelong at Jadzia. The young woman—she just acts like a girl, Annja thought—posed a conundrum. For one thing, Annja wasn’t used to evoking knee-jerk hostility in people she hadn’t met. It bothered her. She led an isolated enough existence that she felt threatened when somebody reacted to her with such vehement negativity, as if perhaps she had at last been found out as invalid and unworthy for human companionship.
For all her rigorous training in cryptology, which Annja knew was no soft science, involving some of the most abstruse and demanding maths around, Jadzia clung to the role of true believer in Atlantis mysteries and doubtless a thousand other conspiracy theories. She wasn’t the first person Annja had bumped up against who harbored both serious scientific credentials and crackpot beliefs. She sometimes suspected that really high-level scientists could only be expected to be sane and knowledgeable in their own field of expertise, and anything else was fair game.
So maybe Jadzia’s hostility arose from antipathy toward the role Annja played, authentically enough, of house skeptic and counterpoint to Kristie Chatham, who believed in everything.
Annja had certainly suffered many flame attacks from such antifans before she quit visiting the show’s message boards, despite the insistent entreaties of her producer, Doug Morrell, that she do so. But that virulence didn’t spill out of cyberspace into her lap.
She suddenly remembered something odd said in passing the day before. “Why do they call Jadzia the anticomputer geek?” she asked Maria. Very softly, she thought.
But apparently among Jadzia’s attributes was a very keen sense of hearing. “I kill computers,” she announced proudly, her voice sharp edged.
“How?” Annja asked. “With a sledgehammer?”
She hadn’t meant to say that—really. But instead of flaring up at the comment, or the laughter it evoked from the eight or so other team members in the large room, Jadzia laughed louder and more brazenly than the others.
“Just by touching,” she said proudly.
Annja cocked an eyebrow at Pilitowski, who shrugged a big sloped shoulder. “It is true,” he said. “We cannot let her handle anything electronic. In seconds—” he snapped his fingers “—pfft!”
“It has to do with my personal magnetic field,” Jadzia said. She wore schoolgirl blue and white, with knee-high white stockings instead of the thigh-highs she’d had on the day before. Her skirt wasn’t any longer. “It disrupts electronic devices.”
“I don’t buy that,” Annja said. “Things like that don’t happen in the real world.”
“Lend me your cell phone?” the blond woman purred.
The gong sounded so loudly Annja jumped.
ONLY TWO OF THE team members were on duty down in the current excavation—a short, stocky Polish man named Tadeusz and a willowy Egyptian woman a head taller named Haditha, who wore what looked like a ruby in her pierced left nostril. The pair had trouble communicating verbally, since neither’s English was the strongest. Haditha spoke beautiful French. Tadeusz was a bit hard of hearing into the bargain. Yet they worked well together, seeming to have evolved some brand of nonverbal communication.
Everyone tacitly assumed they were sleeping together, although they never seemed to seek each other out off-hours. The consensus held that this was a cunning pose. Annja, knowing what a hotbed of intrigue and gossip the best-ordered dig could turn into after only a couple of weeks, reserved judgment. Like everyone else archaeologists loved a good story, and were reluctant to let facts spoil it—outside their chosen area of expertise, of course.
They came out of the bubble tent on the run. A few bright lights shone randomly from the nearby buildings, casting jagged patterns of light and shadow across the demolition rubble. As they went in the door of the former warehouse, Haditha heard a peculiar double cough from behind. The noises had an edge, reminiscent of knuckles on hardwood.
Tadeusz pitched forward on his face on the floor beside her. She stared at him in astonishment. The back of his pale head was stained dark and wet.
3
A sound behind Haditha made her turn. She gasped at a black insectile figure looming over her.
The man in the night-vision goggles and blackout gear stuck the thick muzzle of his sound-suppressed machine pistol against her sternum and fired the same precise 2-round burst his partner had used on the Polish archaeologist an instant before. Haditha recoiled, then simply collapsed, her dark almond eyes rolling up in her head.
From high above and in front of the black-clad pair came small muffled crashes, themselves hardly louder than coughs. Shards of glass descended from above, swooping like falling leaves, breaking to smaller pieces on the black rubber runner that ran along the central aisle. More black-clad figures rappelled from the broken skylights.
WITH A FROWN Annja snapped her head up from where she leaned close to the big flat-screen monitor. “What was that noise?”
Most of the team members ignored her. A number of new images were coming in from scrolls shipped intact to the jet propulsion laboratory, where layered MRI scans were used to extract the writing from within the rolled papyri.
