Raising Atlantis

28

Inside the Temple of the Water bearer,starlight seeped into the chamber where Serena stood tied to a post. It was her punishment for refusing to help Colonel Zawas translate his map of Atlantis. To help Zawas locate the Shrine of the First Sun would be to betray Conrad, she reasoned, having concluded that Conrad, for all his faults, was still her best hope in stopping a global cataclysm. But even if Conrad could reach the shrine first, Zawas still had the scepter. Somehow she had to hold on long enough to figure out a way to steal it.

She could hear voices outside, and three dark silhouettes filled the doorway, blotting out the heavens. It was Jamil, flanked by two Egyptians. Serena stiffened as he unfurled a towel with assorted knives and needles across a small table.

“Colonel Zawas was disappointed he couldn’t persuade you to cooperate, Doctor Serghetti,” he said. “Now it’s my turn.”

“So I see,” she said, staring at the cruel instruments on the table. “Isn’t this a bit over the top? I already told Zawas that I don’t know where the shrine is. Honest. If I did, I’d tell you.”

“A brave front, Doctor Serghetti, really.” Jamil looked over his wares, stocked mostly with syringes, knives of various shapes, and shock rods. “Ah, the tricks your Inquisition taught us.”

He picked up a two-foot-long black club. Suddenly it came to life like lightning. It was an electric shock baton.

“This is my favorite,” he said, waving it in front of her. A bolt of blue electricity sizzled between two metal prongs. “Each jolt delivers seventy-five thousand volts. A few pokes would leave you unconscious. A few more, dead.”

“Is this what you intended your life to become, Jamil?”

Jamil cursed and tried to force her jaw open. She turned away. But he shoved the baton into her mouth. She choked on the metal rod as he dug it deeper.

“The Chinese like to shove this down a prisoner’s throat and charge it up,” he said as she gagged. “The current that races through your body will leave you crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood and excrement and in extreme pain.”

She could feel the hot metal prongs at the back of her throat and moaned. But Jamil pulled it away and pushed the button again so she could see the blue electric charges flash between the prongs.

“There are other places I could ram this,” he told her, and she unconsciously squeezed her thighs together. “Good,” he said with a smile and set the shock rod down on the table. “I see you understand.” He then picked up a syringe and with the back of his finger flicked the hypodermic needle. A yellowish fluid spurt out. “Now we can begin.”

A few hours later, Serena regained consciousness and found herself in the dark, staring at a makeshift lantern Jamil had hung from the ceiling-his shock rod swinging on a rope, making grotesque zapping sounds as it flashed. She tried closing her eyes, but the zap-zap of the shock rod only seemed to grow louder. Or maybe it was the drugs injected into her bloodstream that made her feel so sloshed.

Somehow she sensed another presence in the chamber and opened her eyes to see a long shadow on the wall. Her eyes drifted to the doorway, where a fuzzy figure stepped inside.

“Conrad?” she said.

“It’s nice to have dreams, Doctor Serghetti.”

It was Zawas. Serena hung her head again as he walked over to the small table where Jamil had left his tools of torture.

“I’m told you haven’t been terribly cooperative,” Zawas said, examining Jamil’s toys. “It was all I could do to keep Jamil from permanently erasing your memory with those chemicals of his. But he is an animal. He gives Arabs everywhere a bad name. You know that most of us are not at all like him. You must understand this. Your Church has priests who molest children. Yet you aren’t about to abandon your mission. Neither am I.”

She said nothing as he looked around the chamber. Her pack on the floor caught his eye. He circled round it and watched her face. Then he lifted it to the table and unzipped it. He began to rifle through its contents, examining her personal belongings-water purification tablets, hot water bottles, a flare, and the like.

Then he came to her green thermos. Her chest constricted as he began to unscrew the top. She prayed he wouldn’t find the blueprint inside the secret shell. For all she knew, that blueprint contained enough information for him to find or deploy this unlimited power source he was searching for in the Shrine of the First Sun.

“You remind me of Pharaoh, Zawas,” Serena said. “You know, from the Bible.”

He seemed amused and put the thermos down on the table. “Then you know my authority comes from the gods themselves and you must answer to me.”

“The gods of Egypt were defeated once before,” she said. “They can be defeated again.”

“History is about to be rewritten, Doctor Serghetti. But first I must find the Shrine of the First Sun. So far, its location has eluded me. As has Doctor Yeats. Oh, yes, he’s alive. I know this because several of my men are missing,” he said. “He killed them, just like he’s killed so many others in Atlantis thus far in his selfish quest for the origins of human civilization. I know all about this man. He cares little for the consequences of his actions on governments, people, even the very sites he excavates. It’s a good thing I saved you and the Scepter of Osiris from him.”

Serena said nothing, because there was no defense against Zawas’s accusations. They were true.

“Unlike the reckless Doctor Yeats, however,” Zawas went on, “I appreciate and want to preserve natural beauty in all its forms, especially the feminine. I would hate to see a monster like Jamil mar you in any way.”

That was a lie, she knew. “So you’re a gentleman among the barbarians.”

He looked at her carefully. “I see we understand each other well. It’s not as if the Catholic Church hasn’t wrapped itself up in nobility and social mercy only to make pacts with the devil at convenient points in history.”

“Then you’re a hero, really,” she told him. “You just happen to be on the wrong side of history.”

“Exactly,” Zawas said. “Like Pharaoh during the Exodus. It was his bad luck that the eruption of the volcano at Thira in the Mediterranean should produce the plagues you eagerly attribute to the God of Moses. There was no parting of the Red Sea. The Israelites crossed at the Sea of Reeds in only six inches of water. But it was enough to bog down the wheels of Pharaoh’s chariots.”

“Then it was a greater miracle than I thought,” Serena said. “That all of Pharaoh’s soldiers and horses should drown in six inches of water.”

Zawas was not amused by her argument, she could see, and his face grew more stern in the flashing light. “History is written by the victor,” he told her. “How else can you explain Judeo-Christian exaltation of an allegedly merciful and loving God who goes around killing the firstborn of the ancient Egyptians?”

“He could have killed them all,” she said.

Zawas was put out. “So it was Pharaoh’s fault?”

She tried to focus. Even in her somewhat shaky state she recognized this could be a pivotal moment in persuading Zawas. “You know that at certain points of history, everything rests on one man or one woman,” she told him. “Noah and the ark. Pharaoh and the Israelites. God offered Pharaoh the divine opportunity to be the greatest emancipator in history. But his heart was stubborn and arrogant. Now is such a time. You may be such a man.”

“Or you that woman,” he said. “Where is the Shrine of the First Sun?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Then I honestly must give you to Jamil to finish the job,” he said. “It’s out of my control now. I wash my hands clean of this.”

“Says Pontius Pilate.”

“And I thought I was Pharaoh.” He shook his head and threw up his hands. “Am I to be compared to every villain in your Scriptures? Have you ever considered the possibility that these leaders are history’s true heroes and your saints the revisionist authors of fiction?”

He was about to turn and leave when his eyes once again drifted to the coffee thermos on the table.

“Why are you still carrying around your thermos?”

Serena said nothing, pretending not to hear.

But he was already untwisting the outer shell. He smelled the coffee and made a face. “I prefer tea myself.”

He emptied the coffee onto the stone floor and then tried to screw the lid back on. As he did, the blueprint fell to the floor.

Serena caught her breath.

Zawas picked up the blueprint and let out a hearty laugh. Then he showed it to her and said, “Do you know what these schematics are?”

She hung her shoulders in defeat. “The blueprint to the Scepter of Osiris.”

“No,” he told her. “This is the blueprint to the Shrine of the First Sun.”

She just stared at him, head rushing with dizziness.

“Yes,” Zawas said. “Now I have three things Doctor Yeats wants. And if he won’t lead me to the Shrine of the First Sun, then you will. I’ll tell Jamil he has more work to do.”