The Atlantis Scrolls

Chapter 3

Purdue’s glasses reflected the electronic schematic in front of him that illuminated the dark he was sitting in. It was quiet, the dead of night in his part of the world. He missed Wrichtishousis, he missed Edinburgh and the carefree days he spent at his mansion astonishing guests and clients alike with his inventions and unparalleled genius. The attention was so innocent, so gratuitous with his already famous and obscenely impressive fortune, but he missed it. Back then, before he stepped in deep shit with the revelations on Deep Sea One and his bad choice of business partners in the desert of Parashant, life was all interesting adventure and romantic skullduggery.

Now his wealth barely kept him alive and his shoulders were burdened with the safety of others. Try as he might, he found that it had become virtually impossible to hold everything together anymore. Nina, his beloved, recently lost ex-lover whom he intended fully to reclaim, was somewhere in Asia with the man she thinks she loves. Sam, his opponent for Nina’s affections and (let us not deny it) recent winner of such, was always there to assist Purdue in his ventures — even when unwarranted.

His own safety was spread thin, regardless of his private security, especially now that he had temporarily brought the leadership of the Black Sun to a standstill. The council, overseers of the leadership of the order, was probably watching him and for some reason holding ranks for the moment and that made Purdue exceptionally nervous — and he was by no means a nervous man. All he could do was keep a low profile until he had devised a plan to join Nina and take her somewhere safe until he had figured out what to do should the council act.

His head pounded from a heavy nosebleed he had suffered a few minutes before, but he could not stop now. There was too much at stake.

Over and over Dave Purdue redesigned the device on his holographic screen, but there was something amiss that he just could not see. His concentration was not as sharp as always, even though he had just recently come out of a nine-hour uninterrupted sleep. The headache was already present when he woke up, but that was not surprising since he all but totaled a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red by himself in front of the fire.

“For fuck’s sake!” Purdue shouted without his voice, as not to rouse any of his neighbors, as he slammed his fists down on the desk. It was completely out of character for him to lose his cool, especially at the meager challenge of a simple electronics schematic, the likes of which he had already conquered at age fourteen. His dark demeanor and his impatience were owing to the past few days and he knew that he had to admit that leaving Nina with Sam did after all scratch at him.

Normally his money and his charm could sway any quarry with ease and to top it all he had Nina for more than two years and yet he took it for granted and disappeared under the radar without the grace to let her know that he was alive. This sort of behavior was what he was used to, and most people accepted it as part of his eccentricity, but now he knew that it was the first hammer blow to their relationship. Resurfacing only upset her more, mainly because she knew then that he deliberately kept her in the dark and then, the deathblow, getting her involved in the most threatening confrontation with the powerful Black Sun to date.

Purdue took off his glasses and placed them on the small barstool by his side. Closing his eyes for a moment, he pinched the bridge of his nose lightly between his thumb and index finger and tried to massage away his tangled thoughts and bring his brain back to technical mode. The night was mild, but the wind forced the dry trees to lurch out at the window and scratch like a cat trying to come in. Something was lurking in the night outside the small bungalow where Purdue was resident indefinitely until he had planned his next move.

It was difficult to discern between the relentless tapping of the gale-stirred tree branches and the fumbling of a lock pick, or the rapping of a spark plug to cut the window glass. Purdue stopped to listen. Not generally a man of intuition at all, he now found himself at the receiving end of solid acrimony, courtesy of his own emergent instinct.

He knew better than to take a peek, so he used one of his gadgets, one not yet tested before he fled under cover of night from his mansion in Edinburgh. It was a spyglass of sorts, converted for more varied tasks than just clearing a distance to scrutinize the doings of those unaware. It contained an infrared function, complete with a red laser beam that resembled that of a task-force rifle, however this laser could slice through most surfaces within a hundred yard radius. On the flick of a switch under his thumb Purdue could set the spyglass to lock onto heat signatures, so although he could not see through walls, he would be able to detect any human body temperature on the move outside his wooden walls.

He briskly skipped the nine steps of the wide makeshift ladder to the second floor of the cabin and tiptoed to the very edge of the floor where he could look through the narrow slit where it joined the thatch roof. With his right eye on the lens he explored the terrain directly outside the structure, slowly navigating his way from corner to corner.

The only heat he could detect was that of the engine of his Jeep. Other than that there was no sign of any immediate threat. Perplexed, he sat there for a moment, contemplating his newfound sixth sense. He was never wrong about these things. Especially after his latest brushes with deadly enemies, he had learned to recognize impending threat.

As Purdue made his way back down to the first floor of the cabin, he closed the hatch that led to the room above him and jumped over the last three steps. He landed hard on his feet. When he looked up a figure was sitting in his chair. Instantly he knew who it was and his heart stopped. Where did she come from?

Her big blue eyes looked ethereal in the glare of the colorful hologram, but she looked through the diagram, straight at him. The rest of her melted away into the shadows.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” he said, failing at hiding his honest surprise.

“Of course, you didn’t, David. I wager that you rather wished the same, instead of counting on its actual gravity,” she said. That familiar voice felt so odd to Purdue’s ears after all this time.

He moved closer to her, but the shadows prevailed and hid her from him. Her eyes flicked downward and combed the lines of his design.

“Your cyclical quadrilateral is incorrect here, did you know?” she mentioned matter-of-factly. Her eyes stayed fixed on Purdue’s mistake and she made herself mute, regardless of his barrage of questions on other topics, such as her presence there, until he came to correct the fault she had spotted.

That was just typical of Agatha Purdue.

A genius with compulsive idiosyncrasies that left her twin brother looking utterly mundane, Agatha’s personality was an acquired taste. If one did not know that she had a stupefying intelligence quotient, she might well have been perceived as a lunatic of some sort. Unlike her brother’s suave application of his smarts, Agatha was borderline certifiable when she locked on to a problem that needed solving.

And this was where the twins differed vastly. Purdue had successfully utilized his aptitude for science and technology to acquire a fortune and a reputation the likes of ancient kings among his academic peers. But Agatha was no less than a pauper compared to her brother. With her unappealing introversion to the point of being reduced to a staring freak, men just found her weird and intimidating. Her self-esteem was largely based on correcting the mistakes she found effortlessly in the work of others and this was what mainly dealt her potential a solid blow every time she tried to work in the competitive fields of physics or science.

Eventually Agatha became a librarian, but not just any librarian, forgotten among towers of literature and the dusky light of archival chambers. She did show some ambition in becoming more than what her antisocial psychology dictated. Agatha had a side career as a consultant for various wealthy clients, mainly those invested in arcane books and the inevitable occult pursuits that came with the gruesome trappings of antique literature.

To people like them the latter was a novelty, nothing more than a prize to an esoteric pissing contest. None of her clients ever showed genuine appreciation for the Old World or the scribes that recorded the events that new eyes would never see. It pissed her off, but she could not refuse the occasional six-figure remuneration. That would just be idiocy, no matter how she yearned to stay true to the historical significance of the books and locations she so freely led them to.

Dave Purdue looked at the problem his annoying sister had pointed out.

How the hell did I miss that? And why the hell did she have to be here to show me? he thought as he fixed the paradigm, surreptitiously checking her response with every redirection he implemented on the hologram. Her expression was empty and her eyes hardly moved as he completed the circuit. That was a good sign. If she had sighed, shrugged, or even blinked he would know that she disproved of what he was doing — in other words — it meant that she would be sanctimoniously patronizing him in her own special way.

“Happy?” he dared ask, just waiting for her to find another error, but she simply nodded. Finally her eyes moved like a normal person’s and Purdue could feel the strain abate.

“Now, to what do I owe this intrusion?” he asked as he went to pull another bottle of liquor from his travel bag.

“Ah, polite as always,” she sighed. “My intrusion is very well-founded, I assure you, David.”

He poured himself a glass of whisky and held up the bottle to her.

“Yes, thanks. I’ll have some,” she replied and sat forward, pushing her palms together and slipping them between her thighs. “I need your help with something.”

Her words fell like shattered glass in his ears. By the crackle of the fire Purdue turned to face his sister, ashen with disbelief.

“Oh, come now, with the melodrama,” she said impatiently. “Is it that inconceivable that I might need your assistance?”

“No, not at all,” Purdue answered as he gave her a glass of liquid trouble. “It is inconceivable that you would deign to ask.”