Temple of the Gods

2 New York City

Nina Wilde looked disconsolately out across her hometown from her office in the United Nations building. Today marked a date she had no desire to celebrate; it was exactly three months since she had last seen her husband.

With a quiet sigh, the redhead turned away from the view and returned to her desk. A framed photograph beside the phone was a reminder of far better times: herself and her partner at an infinitely less depressing anniversary, the party thrown to mark the first year of their marriage. The picture was less than two years old, but a lot had happened since then.

A lot of people had died.

One of them was the subject of the email she had just received, the grim reminder prompting her melancholy reflectiveness at the window. It was from an Interpol officer named Renée Beauchamp, in charge of investigating the death of another member of the multinational police organisation. The victim was Ankit Jindal, head of Interpol’s Cultural Property Crime Unit — and also a friend, who had worked with Nina on two of her previous archaeological expeditions.

The prime — in fact, the only — suspect was Eddie Chase. Her husband.

That would have been bad enough on its own. But things were worse: she had been a witness. And despite her unwillingness to believe it, the only conclusion she could draw, no matter how many times she replayed events in an attempt to find evidence to the contrary… was that Eddie had cold-bloodedly murdered Kit.

The memory returned, unbidden. Peru, three months ago to the day. A gas pipeline in a pumping station south of Lima had ruptured and flames spread rapidly to the rest of the facility. The catwalk on which Eddie and Kit were standing had partially collapsed, leaving the Indian dangling above a searing jet of fire. As Nina reached the scene, she saw Kit struggling to hold on, grasping for a handhold on a pipe—

And Eddie kicking Kit in the face and sending him plunging into the inferno below.

She snapped back to the present. The image was as clear and vivid as if it had just happened.

No gun.

Eddie had insisted that Kit had tried to kill him, that he had being going for a gun. But there was no gun in her memory, just Kit trying to save himself from a deadly fall. A fall that came anyway, just moments later.

Beauchamp’s email was an update on the search for the wanted man. Somehow, her murder suspect had managed to escape Peru undetected, and been sighted in England, India, South Africa and most recently Zimbabwe — but never in time for local Interpol agents to catch him. He was always a step ahead: a shadow, a ghost. It hadn’t taken long for the investigators to suspect that he was receiving help.

That didn’t surprise Nina in the least. From their first meeting, Eddie had astonished her with the sheer number of his friends and contacts around the globe, all of whom seemed willing to do him favours far beyond simply picking him up at the airport. Some would be more useful in his current situation than others: the forger, for example, an Australian ex-military colleague, could have provided him with a fake passport. But she couldn’t bring herself to pass on her suspicions to Interpol.

Eddie was still her husband. And she knew him well enough to be sure that whatever she had witnessed, he believed that Kit had a gun. Since he wasn’t prone to hallucinations or confabulation, that had provided her with the seed of doubt she needed to think that he was telling the truth. That he was innocent.

And if he was innocent, she couldn’t help his hunters track him down.

Other facts had arisen in Beauchamp’s investigation which suggested that more had been going on than anyone had realised. Kit had told Nina that he was going to the pumping station on Interpol authority to meet a representative of mercenary leader Alexander Stikes. The British former soldier had stolen archaeological treasures from the ruins of the lost city of El Dorado; according to Kit, he was willing to return them in exchange for legal immunity.

Kit had been lying. Interpol knew nothing about it.

Eddie had gone to the gas plant after him because he believed Kit and Stikes were working together — thereby directly involving Kit in the murder of Eddie’s friend and mentor, Jim ‘Mac’ McCrimmon. And Nina herself had glimpsed a man who might have been Stikes fleeing the burning station in a helicopter. Could Kit have been corrupt? It seemed unlikely — Stikes had tortured him for information after doing the same to Nina to learn more about the search for El Dorado — but now that the seed had been planted…

She leaned forward, head in her hands. Suspicions didn’t help Eddie. While he was ahead of the police for now, they were catching up. Eventually he would be caught. Charged with murder. Tried.

And based on the evidence to date, found guilty.

Her phone rang, an internal call. With another sigh, she picked it up. ‘Yes?’

‘Nina?’ Lola Gianetti, her personal assistant. ‘Matt asked me to tell you that they’re waiting for you in the conference room.’

She looked at her watch. Damn! There was an important meeting scheduled on the hour, and it was now ten past. ‘I’ll be right there.’

One good thing about being the director of the International Heritage Agency, she mused as she hurried from her office, was that meetings had to wait for her rather than the other way round. All the same, she tried to hide her embarrassment as she entered the conference room. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘No worries,’ said Matt Trulli. Of the group, the tubby, unkempt Australian, on secondment from the UN’s Oceanic Survey Organisation, knew her best, and was well aware of the stress she had been under.

Another man was decidedly less sympathetic, his impatience clear. ‘Thank you for coming,’ said Dr Lewis Hayter with barely restrained sarcasm as Nina took her seat. ‘So, if we’re all ready?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Nina. ‘Anything to do with these excavations always gets my full attention. Once I’ve dealt with my other IHA responsibilities,’ she added, a little poke to remind the thin-faced archaeologist that she was his boss. ‘So, you’ve found something exciting?’

‘We’ve found something very exciting.’ Hayter picked up a remote control and switched on a projector. A screen displayed a map of a number of buildings. Even in simplified cartographic form it was clear that they were ruins, the illustration showing where parts of the structures had collapsed and strewn debris nearby.

These were no ordinary ruins, though. Even through her gloom, Nina felt her heart quicken with a thrill of expectation. The map was of the very heart of the lost civilisation of Atlantis — the sunken capital she had discovered five years before.

Her work at the IHA had since taken her down other historical roads, leading to more incredible archaeological discoveries. But there was something special about Atlantis. It had vindicated her theories, catapulted her to international fame… and allowed her to finish the journey her late parents had begun.

Simply locating the city was far from the end of the work, though. Atlantis had more secrets yet to be uncovered — even if she now had to rely on others to discover them vicariously. Hayter indicated one of the ruined buildings with a laser pointer. ‘We used the new high-resolution sonar to look through the sediment at the palace’s western wing. We found the entrance to what we think is a royal burial chamber. My recommendation is that this is our next primary objective.’

Nina checked her notes. ‘What about the Temple of the Gods? I thought you were planning a full excavation of that.’ The small ruin, close to the palace, had so far been explored only to a limited extent.

‘It was an option,’ Hayter said sniffily, ‘but to be honest, I doubt it’ll be worth the effort. It’s much more badly damaged than most of the other buildings, and the initial survey didn’t turn up anything particularly unusual.’

‘You don’t consider a single structure dedicated to every single god in the pantheon, even the ones who already have temples of their own, unusual?’

‘I’d call it a minor mystery, nothing more. The burial chamber is a much bigger prize, certainly for this leg of the expedition.’

Nina considered his words, then reluctantly nodded. ‘I’ll want to see the list of alternatives, but okay, yes, the burial chamber it is.’ With the archaeological dig taking place eight hundred feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic, most of the work had to be done from submersibles; ensuring that the expensive-to-run machines made the best possible use of their time was crucial. ‘Matt, will your subs need any extra equipment to get in there?’

‘Nah, we’ll be able to handle it,’ said the maritime engineer. ‘Sharkdozer II should be able to clear most of the rubble, and even if it’s too tight for divers in deep suits, Gypsy’s still got the two ROVs. We’ll find your crowns and sceptres, or whatever they hid down there.’

‘Great. What timescale are we looking at?’

‘I think we’ll have got as much as is practical from the Temple of Poseidon in another few days,’ said Hayter. The red dot of his pointer moved to another, larger structure, one with something considerably younger than the 11,000-year-old ruins overlaid upon it: the wreck of a ship. ‘Which brings me on to this.’

A click of the remote, and the map vanished, replaced by an underwater photograph. A stone chamber, badly damaged, huge slabs from the semi-collapsed ceiling jutting down into the space. Nina knew it immediately: the altar room within the enormous Temple of Poseidon. She had never been inside it personally, something that still bugged her, but had seen live video footage of it shot by Eddie before its partial destruction. The ship that had crashed on to the structure was the research vessel Evenor, from which the first underwater expedition had been launched. It had taken over four years before other explorers managed to clear away enough of the wreckage to find that some sections of the smashed temple had survived.

Atlantean artefacts and treasures had been recovered from the altar room by the IHA, but by far the most valuable of its contents was still in place. Parts of the walls gleamed in the diver’s spotlights. The chamber had been lined with sheets of precious metal, a gold alloy known to its builders as orichalcum, but even they paled in worth against the words inscribed upon them. The room recorded the entire history of Atlantis, from its earliest beginnings right up to its fall — and one of the hopes for Hayter’s expedition was that it would find those last words and solve the final mystery of one of humanity’s greatest legends.

Why Atlantis sank.

The pointer jittered over crumpled metal protruding from beneath a fallen block. ‘As you can see,’ Hayter went on, ‘a lot of the panels have been lost. More than half of them are completely buried, and short of taking apart the temple stone by stone it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to recover them.’

‘Sharkdozer could do it,’ Matt chipped in. ‘The heavy lifting arms can easily shift that lot. It’s just a matter of time.’

‘And money,’ Hayter said patronisingly. ‘Now, around two-thirds of the accessible panels are damaged to some extent.’ The laser spot danced over gashes and twists in the orichalcum. ‘Fortunately, one of the larger ceiling slabs only collapsed at one end, and as you can see here —’ he indicated a rubble-choked gap beneath a long block of stone lying at an angle — ‘it protected the texts beneath it to a degree. Once we cleared the debris, we were able to view them.’

Another click. The new picture was closer in on the now accessible space. More orichalcum sheets gleamed, words in a long-dead language discernible upon them. The chronicles of the Atlantean empire ran around the room, added day by day, line by line.

‘Our translation team started work on this section as soon as the divers returned to the surface,’ said Hayter. ‘Most of it’s similar to the other texts in the temple — accounts of the actions of the king and queen and other political leaders, military activity, and so on. Talonor’s expeditions are mentioned several times.’ The Atlantean explorer’s unearthed records had led Nina to discover an ancient — and spectacular — Hindu vault high in the Himalayas the previous year. ‘But the part I think you’ll be most interested in is this.’

He used the remote to display a close-up of one particular section of the scribed texts. Nina examined it thoughtfully. ‘I recognise some words,’ she said. ‘Something about… keys? The keys of… strength, it looks like. No, of power.’

Hayter seemed put out that she could understand any of it without his help. ‘I’ll save you some time,’ he said, highlighting a line. ‘Beginning here: “Nantalas, high priestess of the Temple of the Gods and keeper of the sky stone, showed the magic of the keys of power to the royal court. In the hands of others they were nothing more than simple statues, but in hers they blazed with heavenly light.”’

Nina stiffened, immediately realising the significance of the words. Matt cocked an eyebrow at her reaction, but said nothing as Hayter continued: ‘“Nantalas told the king that the keys had given her a vision of the sky stone —” we’re not sure whether that’s referring to an actual meteorite or something more metaphorical, by the way — “with its power unleashed, a power to destroy the enemies of Atlantis.”’

‘These keys,’ Nina asked. ‘Is there a description of them?’

‘Yes, here.’ Hayter indicated another part of the text. ‘“Three figures of purple stone, in height less than one foot. When apart, the touch of the priestess lights one to point the way to the others.” There was probably more, but the sheet was damaged.’

Nina ignored him. She had already heard enough to confirm her suspicions.

The artefacts Alexander Stikes had taken were three small purple statues. The first had been found inside the buried Pyramid of Osiris in Egypt; the second hidden with other stolen historical treasures in a secret bunker owned by the insane billionaires Pramesh and Vanita Khoil. The third, split into two halves, she had discovered in the lost cities of Paititi and El Dorado in South America, where the Incas hid the riches of their toppling empire from the rapacious Spanish. A trio of crudely carved, seemingly innocuous figures.

Yet they had been found in places separated by continents, by millennia. There was no known connection between the empires of the Incas and the pre-dynastic Egyptians. But both had hidden their statues in their most secure locations.

And now it seemed that the link was… Atlantis. A great empire that eleven thousand years ago had spread from a now submerged island as far east as Tibet, as far west as Brazil. They had apparently created the statues, then dispersed them to the farthest reaches of their dominion, to be passed down from one successive civilisation to the next.

The question was: why?

She fixed Hayter with an intense, all-business look. ‘Have you dated this section? How long before the fall of Atlantis was it written?’

Hayter was caught off-guard by her abrupt change of attitude. ‘It, ah, let me see…’ He flicked through his documents. ‘Based on your original report from five years ago, this section is, ah, around six feet along the wall from where the texts stopped. So it would have been written less than a year before Atlantis sank.’

‘And that section hasn’t been excavated?’ Her tone was almost accusing.

‘You can see for yourself how big the slab blocking it is,’ said Hayter defensively. ‘It must weigh tons. And there’s more debris on top of it.’

‘Sharkdozer could have cleared it if you’d let me try,’ said Matt.

‘It would have taken too long, and the effort would be far out of proportion to the value of the find. I had to prioritise. The more time we spend bulldozing, the less there is for actual archaeology, and we could do more digging for less effort in other parts of the temple—’

‘I want it cleared,’ said Nina firmly.

Hayter gawped at her. ‘W-what?’ he finally spluttered. ‘But if we do that, we won’t be able to explore the burial chamber. The support ship can only stay on station for another two weeks before it has to return to port, and if we waste time—’

‘This is my decision as director of the IHA,’ Nina said, standing. ‘I want all resources dedicated to clearing the rest of that area so I can see the final texts.’ She turned to Matt. ‘How long?’

‘I dunno,’ said the Australian, as surprised as Hayter by the turn of events. ‘A week, maybe more? There’s a fair old pile of stones that needs to be shifted.’

‘Then shift them. This is top priority.’ She turned to leave.

Hayter jumped up. ‘This — this is absolutely insane! You can’t reprioritise an ongoing dig on some personal whim. I know the description of these statues matches the two that Donald Bellfriar examined for the IHA, but that doesn’t mean they’re really the key to godlike powers!’

‘If you won’t do it, Lewis, I’ll replace you with somebody who will. The IHA is about more than just archaeology, remember? It’s also got a global security mandate, and like it or not, the second of those trumps the first. I need to see those last texts. Are you with me?’ Hayter could only respond with silent shock. ‘Good.’ She opened the door.

‘I’m — I’ll take this higher.’

‘You do that. But in the meantime, you’d better get back to the site. There’s a lot of work to do, and I want it done fast.’ She left the room, the team staring after her in stunned bewilderment.

An hour later, Nina’s phone rang. She jabbed at the speaker button. ‘I told you not to disturb me.’

‘Sorry, Nina,’ said Lola, ‘but Mr Penrose is here. He says he needs to see you urgently.’

Nina frowned. While Sebastian Penrose worked for the United Nations, not the IHA, his position as liaison between the UN and its cultural protection agency gave him a certain degree of authority. ‘Okay,’ she said reluctantly, ‘send him in.’

The prim, bespectacled Englishman entered. ‘Afternoon, Nina.’

‘Sebastian. I can guess why you’re here.’

‘I imagine everyone in the Secretariat Building heard Lewis Hayter throwing a wobbly. But as soon as he said you claimed it was a security issue, I told him to shut up until I’d had a chance to look into it. Not quite that bluntly, of course.’ He sat facing her. ‘So what’s going on?’

Nina turned her laptop so he could see the screen. She had already accessed all of Hayter’s research data on the ongoing excavations, and was reading the full translation of the uncovered texts. ‘The three statues. They’re Atlantean.’

Penrose’s eyes widened. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. They’re described here… along with a display of something that can only be earth energy.’ She gave him a précis of what was written on the temple wall and how it related to the strange, not yet fully explained lines of power coursing through the planet, the effects of which she had experienced — and barely survived — on some of her previous adventures.

Now his eyes were almost larger than the lenses of his glasses. ‘Well. I see why you made it a security issue.’

‘Damn right. We know that earth energy can be incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands — and it looks like the Atlanteans knew about it eleven thousand years ago. Considering what we know about them now, that they were a race of ruthless conquerors, I don’t consider their hands particularly safe.’

Penrose rubbed his chin, thinking. ‘So how do you want to proceed?’

‘For now, I want to do exactly what I told Lewis. We need to excavate the rest of the altar room and find out what’s written in the final texts — the last records of Atlantis before it sank. If there is an earth energy connection, then we have to find the statues. They’re too dangerous to be left in the open — especially in Stikes’s hands.’

‘You think he might find a way to use them?’

‘I’m more worried that he might sell them to someone who can. We know the Russians have the ability to build an earth energy weapon — and so does the US, for that matter.’ Both nations had developed systems that could collect and focus the natural power — and unleash it upon a faraway target with the force of an atomic blast. ‘It won’t work without a natural superconductor to channel the energy, but I have a horrible feeling that the statues might be exactly what they need.’

‘But the superconductor won’t work on its own. They would also need a person who can activate the effect.’

Nina knew exactly what he was suggesting. ‘Yeah. Someone like me.’

‘You know, that might…’ He stopped.

‘What?’

He hesitated before answering. ‘If someone did build another earth energy system, to make it work they would need the statues — and you. And if another party wanted to stop them from developing it, well…’

‘They might try to kill me?’ said Nina, suddenly feeling very cold even in the warm room.

‘I’m just saying that this could be dangerous on a personal level, not simply as a global security issue. You’re the only person in the entire world who is known to be able to channel earth energy. That makes you potentially extremely valuable to some people… and possibly a great threat to others. You need to be careful. Very careful.’

‘Careful?’ Nina said. ‘After everything I’ve been through, it’s lucky I’m not completely paranoid! But judging from what’s written in the temple texts, I’m not the only person who’s ever been able to channel earth energy. There was a priestess, Nantalas, who could apparently do the same thing. I guess that proves Kristian and Kari Frost were right — I really am a descendant of the Atlanteans.’

‘Personally, I wouldn’t place much stock in the beliefs of a pair of genocidal lunatics,’ said Penrose. The IHA had been created in the wake of an attempt to use ‘pure’ recovered Atlantean DNA to genetically engineer a virus that would be lethal to anyone not of that descent. The agency’s task since then had been to ensure that nobody else exploited Atlantis — or any other archaeological discoveries — for similar gain. ‘But the idea that Atlantis could hold the key to using earth energy… you’re right, it’s definitely a concern. And I absolutely agree with your decision to make it a security matter. If there is any more information in that temple, it needs to be found.’

‘We need to find the statues too. And Stikes.’

‘I’ll speak to the UN intelligence committee and try to prod its members into stepping up the search. And I’ll talk to the State Department as well, make sure the CIA and National Security Agency get a reminder.’ He shook his head. ‘All those thousands of agents, billions of dollars, computers, satellites… and they can’t find one man.’

More than one, thought Nina, glancing at the photo of herself and Eddie.

She gave Penrose what additional facts she had, then the Englishman departed, leaving her alone with her thoughts. She continued reading Hayter’s files, but anything further the Atlanteans had recorded about the statues remained hidden in the Temple of Poseidon…

The phone rang. Lola again. ‘Nina, there’s a phone call for you.’

‘“Do not disturb” is still in effect, Lola,’ Nina replied testily.

‘I know, but I think this could be important.’

Something in Lola’s tone made Nina’s heart pound. Eddie! Was it someone with news about him? Or even her husband himself, finally making contact? ‘Put it through!’

She waited in tense anticipation for the call to be transferred. A click of the line… then a voice.

It belonged to a man called Chase. But not the one she had hoped to hear.

Larry Chase, Eddie’s father.