The Charlemagne Pursuit

EIGHTY-FOUR

"MR. PRESIDENT," DAVIS SAID. "WOULD IT BE POSSIBLE FOR YOU TO simply explain yourself. No stories, no riddles. It's awfully late, and I don't have the energy to be patient and respectful."

"Edwin, I like you. Most of the assholes I deal with tell me either what they think I want to hear or what I don't need to know. You're different. You tell me what I have to hear. No sugarcoating, just straight up. That's why when you told me about Ramsey, I listened. Anybody else, I would have let it go in one ear and out the other. But not you. Yes, I was skeptical, but you were right."

"What have you done?" Davis asked.

She'd sensed something, too, in the president's tone.

"I simply gave him what he wanted. The appointment. Nothing rocks a man to sleep better than success. I should know-it's been used on me many times." Daniels' gaze drifted to the refrigerated compartment. "It's what's in there that fascinates me. A record of a people we've never known. They lived a long time ago. Did things. Thought things. Yet we had no idea they existed."

Daniels reached into his pocket and removed a piece of paper. "Look at this."

"It's a petroglyph from the Hathor Temple at Dendera. I saw it a few years ago. The thing's huge, with towering columns. It's fairly recent, as far as Egypt goes, first century before Christ. Those attendants are holding what looks like some kind of lamp, supported on pillars, so they must be heavy, connected to a box on the ground by a cable. Look at the top of the columns, beneath the two bulbs. Looks like a condenser, doesn't it?"

"I had no idea you were so interested in things like this," she said.

"I know. Us poor, dumb country boys can't appreciate anything."

"I didn't mean it that way. It's just that-"

"Don't sweat it, Stephanie. I keep this to myself. But I love it. All those tombs found in Egypt, and inside the pyramids-not a single chamber has smoke damage. How in the crap did they get light down into those places to work? Fire was all they had, and lamps burned smoky oil." He pointed at the drawing. "Maybe they had something else. There's an inscription found at the Hathor Temple that says it all. I wrote it down." He turned the drawing over. "The temple was built according to a plan written in ancient writing upon a goatskin scroll from the time of the Companions of Horus. Can you imagine? They're saying right there that they had help from a long time ago."

"You can't really believe Egyptians had electric lights," Davis said.

"I don't know what to believe. And who said they were electric? They could have been chemical. The military has tritium gas-phosphor lamps that shine for years without electricity. I don't know what to believe. All I know is that petroglyph is real."

Yes, it was.

"Look at it this way," the president said. "There was a time when the so-called experts thought all of the continents were fixed. No question, the land has always been where it is now, end of story. Then people started noticing how Africa and South America seem to fit together. North America, Greenland. Europe, too. Coincidence, that's what the experts said. Nothing more. Then they found fossils in England and North America that were identical. Same kind of rocks, too. Coincidence became stretched. Then plates were located beneath the oceans that move, and the so-called experts realized that the land could shift on those plates. Finally, in the 1960s, the experts were proven wrong. The continents were all once joined together and eventually drifted apart. What was once fantasy is now science."

She recalled last April and their conversation at The Hague. "I thought you told me that you didn't know beans about science."

"I don't. But that doesn't mean I don't read and pay attention."

She smiled. "You're quite a contradiction."

"I'll take that as a compliment." Daniels pointed at the table. "Does the translation program work?"

"Seems to. And you're right. This is a record of a lost civilization. One that's been around a long time and apparently interacted with people all over the globe, including, according to Malone, Europeans in the ninth century."

Daniels stood from his chair. "We think ourselves so smart. So sophisticated. We're the first at everything. Bullshit. There's a crapload out there we don't know."

"From what we've translated so far," she said, "there's apparently some technical knowledge here. Strange things. It's going to take time to understand. And some fieldwork."

"Malone may regret that he went down there," Daniels muttered.

She needed to know, "Why?"

The president's dark eyes studied her. "NR-1A used uranium for fuel, but there were several thousand gallons of oil on board for lubrication. Not a drop was ever found." Daniels went silent. "Subs leak when they sink. Then there's the logbook, like you learned from Rowland. Dry. Not a smudge. That means the sub was intact when Ramsey found it. And from what Rowland said, they were on the continent when Ramsey went into the water. Near the coast. Malone's following Dietz Oberhauser's trail, just like NR-1A did. What if the paths intersect?"

"That sub can't still exist," she said.

"Why not? It's the Antarctic." Daniels paused. "I was told half an hour ago that Malone and his entourage are now at Halvorsen Base."

She saw that Daniels genuinely cared about what was happening, both here and to the south.

"Okay, here it is," Daniels said. "From what I've learned, Ramsey employed a hired killer who goes by the name Charles C. Smith Jr."

Davis sat still in his chair.

"I had CIA check Ramsey thoroughly and they identified this Smith character. Don't ask me how, but they did it. He apparently uses a lot of names and Ramsey has doled out a ton of money to him. He's probably the one who killed Sylvian, Alexander, and Scofield, and he thinks he killed Herbert Rowland-"

"And Millicent," Davis said.

Daniels nodded.

"You found Smith?" she asked, recalling what Daniels had originally said.

"In a manner of speaking." The president hesitated. "I came to see all this. I truly wanted to know. But I also came to tell you exactly how I think we can end this circus."

MALONE STARED OUT THE HELICOPTER'S WINDOW, THE CHURN OF the rotors pulsating in his ears. They were flying west. Brilliant sunshine streamed in through the tinted goggles that shielded his eyes. They girdled the shore, seals lounging on the ice like giant slugs, killer whales breaking the water, patrolling the ice edges for unwary prey. Rising from the coast, mountains poked upward like tombstones over an endless white cemetery, their darkness in stark contrast with the bright snow.

The aircraft veered south.

"We're entering the restricted area," Taperell said through the flight helmets.

The Aussie sat in the chopper's forward right seat while a Norwegian piloted. Everyone else was huddled in an unheated rear compartment. They'd been delayed three hours by mechanical problems with the Huey. No one had stayed behind. They all seemed eager to know what was out there. Even Dorothea and Christl had calmed, though they sat as far away from each other as possible. Christl now wore a different-colored parka, her bloodied one from the plane replaced at the base.

They found the frozen horseshoe-shaped bay from the map, a fence of icebergs guarding its entrance. Blinding light reflected off the bergs' blue ice.

The chopper crossed a mountain ridge with peaks too sheer for snow to cling to. Visibility was excellent and winds were weak, only a few wispy cirrus clouds loafing around in a bright blue sky.

Ahead he spotted something different.

Little surface snow. Instead, the ground and rock walls were colored with irregular lashings of black dolerite, gray granite, brown shale, and white limestone. Granite boulders littered the landscape in all shapes and sizes.

"A dry valley," Taperell said. "No rain for two million years. Back then mountains rose faster than glaciers could cut their way through, so the ice was trapped on the other side. Winds sweep down off the plateau from the south and keep the ground nearly ice-and snow-free. Lots of these in the southern portion of the continent. Not as many up this way."

"Has this one been explored?" Malone asked.

"We have fossil hunters who visit. The place is a treasure trove of them. Meteorites, too. But the visits are limited by the treaty."

The cabin appeared, a strange apparition lying at the base of a forbidding, trackless peak.

The chopper swept over the pristine rocky terrain, then wheeled back over a landing site and descended onto gravelly sand.

Everyone clambered out, Malone last, the sleds with equipment handed to him. Taperell gave him a wink as he passed Malone his pack, signaling that he'd done as requested. Noisy rotors and blasts of freezing air assaulted him.

Two radios were included in the bundles. Malone had already arranged for a check-in six hours from now. Taperell had told them that the cabin would offer shelter, if need be. But the weather looked good for the next ten to twelve hours. Daylight wasn't a problem since the sun wouldn't set again until March.

Malone gave a thumbs-up and the chopper lifted away. The rhythmic thwack of rotor blades receded as it disappeared over the ridgeline.

Silence engulfed them.

Each of his breaths cracked and pinged, the air as dry as a Sahara wind. But no sense of peace mixed with the tranquility.

The cabin stood fifty yards away.

"What do we do now?" Dorothea asked.

He started off. "I say we begin with the obvious."