Atlantis

Chapter 2

“What the hell is that thing?” Patrick’s words, whispered in a reverential tone, gave voice to Sofia’s own thoughts.

“Everybody stay out until I call for you.” She wanted to make a complete photographic record before anyone else entered the chamber. But more than that, she wanted to experience it by herself, to get the feel of the space and let her intuition speak to her. It was something she’d always done — her way of communing with the past.

She circled the odd contraption wondering just what in the world it was. She’d never seen its like in an ancient world site, but here it was, inside a temple that had spent the last few millennia buried under twenty feet of silt. She took a few minutes to photograph the chamber before turning to a tiny doorway in the back wall. She ducked through and found herself in a small room that was, surprisingly, faintly lit by sunlight. She identified its source as a shaft high in the opposite wall above a stone shelf that might have been a priest’s bed. Moving closer, she looked up and saw a square of sky at the far end. This was the shaft her crew had uncovered. Patrick was right. It looked like a larger version of a pyramid’s air shaft.

“Sofia.” Patrick called, soft but urgent, from the cella. “Mister Bishop’s here and he’s brought armed men with him.”

“What?” She whirled around. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would they need to be armed?”

“I don’t know. A few of them are Guardia Civil, and others look like Americans.”

Just then, gunfire erupted somewhere outside, reverberating through the stone chamber like thunderclaps. A final scream pierced the air, cut off in an instant by a single shot.

“You’ve got to get out of here!” Patrick hurried up to her. “The shaft. I’ll give you a boost.”

Before she could argue, Patrick scooped her up and lifted her toward the opening. She struggled to find handholds in the smooth stone, but Patrick kept pushing. He was stronger than she’d imagined. A few more shots rang out just as Patrick got his hands under her feet and shoved her the rest of the way in.

“What about you?” She felt like a coward, fleeing this way.

“I’ll be fine. He likes me.” His words rang hollow. “You just climb as fast as you can. I’ll stall him.”

Fighting back tears, she scrabbled up the shaft, her feet finding purchase on the sides and forcing her upward. Why had Mister Bishop done this? Behind her, she heard Patrick’s voice.

“Mister Bishop, what happened out there?” His voice quaked with every word.

“Nothing you need concern yourself with.” Bishop’s deep voice echoed in the shaft. “Where is Doctor Perez?”

His words chilled Sofia to the bone. She had no doubt he planned on killing her and Patrick once he’d extracted whatever information he sought. She didn’t know why he wanted to find Atlantis, but now that she’d discovered it, she, and her people, were expendable.

“She’s out on the dig site. Inspecting one of the outer canals on the south side, I think.”

“There are two sets of footprints.” His voice was cold.

“One of the assistants took some pictures and then I sent her back out.”

If she hadn’t been deathly afraid for her life, Sofia would have admired Patrick’s ability to invent on the fly. The fear was gone from his voice. She wished he could have escaped along with her but, should the worst happen, she was determined not to let his sacrifice be in vain. She continued her climb, now almost halfway to the top.

An unfamiliar voice, rough like sandpaper, spoke up. “What’s that opening behind you?”

“We think it’s an air shaft like the ones in the Great Pyramids.” Patrick reply came out fast and unnatural. Sofia could hear it, and she was sure Bishop and his cronies could too. “We got lucky. It was capped up at the top. Otherwise, it and this whole chamber would have filled with silt. We’d have had a heck of a time uncovering this thing, not that we know what it is.” He was clearly trying to divert their attention to the strange contraption.

“Oh, we know exactly what it is.” Bishop cleared his throat. “To be more precise, we know what it does.”

Don’t say anything else, Patrick. The more you know, the worse it is for you. Just run away.

Perhaps if Sofia were a telepath, Patrick would have heard her plea and clammed up. Instead, he rambled on. “Really? What does it do? It looks like…”

A gunshot rang out and Sofia muffled a cry of grief and fear. She looked up at the square of light at the end of the shaft. It was no more than ten meters away, but at the rate she was going it might as well be a thousand. If Mister Bishop, or one of his men, looked into the shaft, she was dead. She tried to quicken her pace, reaching out as far as she could, and her hand closed on cold metal.

“Pack up the machine.” Bishop was all business. His voice carried no hint that he had just witnessed the slaughter of innocent people. “Carefully, now, and be certain to crate it up before you take it out.”

“Yes, Bishop,” the man with the rough voice replied.

“I wonder.” Mister Bishop now sounded thoughtful. “Could a person fit inside that shaft?”

Sofia’s pulse roared in her ears, and panic dulled her senses. She realized she was gripping a metal handle of some sort. She scooted closer and saw two brass handles embedded in a block of stone. It was a plug like the one archaeologists found in the Great Pyramid! She grabbed hold of them and yanked with all her might.

It didn’t budge.

“I’ll check it out, Bishop.”

With renewed strength born of abject terror, she heaved at the plug, and it came free in a cloud of dust and stale air. There was a chamber there! It was pitch black, but instincts honed from years of experience told her there was a large, open space inside. She slithered through the opening and took the plug along with her. Moments later, she heard the rattle of gunfire. Bullets pinged up the shaft, inches from where she squatted.

“Did you see someone?” Mister Bishop asked.

“Just being thorough. It’s not like there’s anyone left out there for me to hit.” The man’s guttural laugh echoed through the chamber.

“Doctor Perez is still unaccounted for. Find and dispatch her with all due haste. I’ll meet you back on the ship.”

“Yes, Bishop. We’ll have the machine out of here in ten.”

Sofia bit her lip, thinking hard. If they were looking for her, it would be too dangerous to try and climb out right now. She’d have to wait them out. She hefted the plug and pushed it back in the hole, handles facing inward, and then took out her small LED flashlight and flicked it on. Through a curtain of dust that tickled her nose and made her eyes burn, she followed its beam.

The space was no more than three meters square, its walls smooth and unadorned. She directed her light down onto the floor and her heart skipped a beat as it fell on a skeleton. It lay on its side in a pool of dust that might have once been clothing or a blanket. Near its hand lay a thin wooden rod with a pointed end — a stylus, and a jumble of rectangular tablets not much bigger than index cards. She knelt down for a closer look and saw they were all covered in tiny hieroglyphs. Many she recognized as identical to their Egyptian counterparts, but most were either slight variations on the Egyptian writing, or were unfamiliar.

“A codex.” Depending on what was written here, this could be the single most important find of the dig. After first checking to make sure the opening to the chamber was sealed, she photographed each one, moving them about as if handling a newborn baby. They were made of clay, and she feared they would crumble at her touch, but they held together. When she’d made a photographic record, she took another set of pictures with her phone, vowing to text them to… she didn’t know… someone she could trust, the moment she got out of this temple and into cell phone range. If she and the tablets should fall into Bishop’s hands, she didn’t want the secret to die with her.

The absurdity of her thoughts struck her in a flash. Here she was, hiding from men who had apparently just murdered her crew, and now were after her, and her paramount concern was preserving a codex. She would have laughed, had the situation not been so dire. This was her life’s work, and she wasn’t going to let a crazy man stop her. With great caution, she stacked the tablets and wrapped and bound them in a bandanna. It was the best she could do for now.

She checked her watch. Nearly twenty minutes had passed since she first entered the adyton. Were the men gone? As carefully and quietly as she could, she shifted the plug aside and strained to listen.

“We can’t find Doctor Perez, Bishop. If we’d kept Patrick alive we might have extracted her whereabouts from him.”

“The Guardia Civil will put her on our list.” The speaker’s voice was deep with a Spanish accent.

“Thank you,” Mister Bishop said. “Are we certain she is not among the dead?”

“I can’t be sure. My men like to aim for the head. It’s good for target practice but bad for identification purposes.”

Bishop let out a long, slow breath. “In that case, she is most likely dead. If not, it won’t matter for long. We will cleanse the site, as planned.”

She froze. What did he mean by that? She knew what it meant for her — she had better find a way out of here sooner rather than later. She listened for more sounds, but Bishop and the others seemed to have gone. She performed some quick mental calculations, and decided she should wait ten minutes to make certain the men were well clear of the temple before she climbed out. She watched the minutes pass by with agonizing slowness until, finally, it was time.

She tucked the codex into her shirt, listened again for a few seconds, and heard nothing. Heart pounding and dizzy from fear, she took a deep breath and clambered out into the shaft. The ascent seemed to take hours. Every second she expected to hear the gunshot that would end her life. Her breath came in ragged gasps and cold sweat soaked her clothes, but labored on until she reached the top.

She peeked her head out and scanned up and down the trench her workers had dug in order to reach this part of the temple. The trench was empty and all was quiet, save the rush of distant waves. Of course, she had no idea who might be waiting up above. It didn’t matter. Her gut told her she needed to get as far away from here as possible, and fast. She hurried to a nearby ladder, ascended in silence, and paused at the top to peer over the edge.

A small whimper escaped her lips as her eyes fell on the bodies of two crew members. Bullets to the head rendered them unrecognizable, but she grieved for them all the same. She wondered again at the reason for this senseless slaughter. Furthermore, how had Bishop gotten the local authorities on his side? Money, she supposed. There would be time enough to figure that out once she’d gotten clear of the dig.

She heard the faint roar of an engine in the distance and looked to the south to see a van driving across the flats, escorted by two pickup trucks, their beds packed with men. She couldn’t quite make them out, but the light glinted off of what she presumed to be firearms. Bishop was leaving, which meant it was a good time for her to go, too.

Not wasting time, she scrambled out onto level ground and sprinted in the opposite direction. It was not until she’d run for an hour, the stabbing pain in her lungs and leaden feeling in her legs reminding her how long it had been since her last 10K road race, that she felt safe enough to stop in the shelter of the tall grass in one of the few remaining marshlands.

She took out her phone and first used it to pinpoint her location. She would need it when she made her next call. But would he want to hear from her? It didn’t matter. She didn’t have many connections in Spain, and certainly no one else who would be okay taking in a fugitive from the Guardia Civil, perhaps Spain’s most corrupt branch of law enforcement. And then there was the matter of the codex, her taking of which violated all kinds of laws. Of course, he couldn’t possibly take the moral high ground on that score. Besides, he owed her after the way he’d left her in Peru. She punched up the number and held her breath. He picked up on the first ring.

“Sofia, is that you?”

So he hadn’t deleted her number from his phone. That made her smile.

“Hey, Arnau. Long time, no speak.”

“Oh my God, it is you! Are you all right?” The genuine concern in his voice moved her, but then a different thought chased the good feeling away.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Had word of the killings already leaked out?

“You don’t know?” He sounded befuddled. “Where have you been? There was a tidal wave or something down on the salt flats. Your whole dig is gone.”