The Covenant of Genesis

The Covenant of Genesis

ANDY MCDERMOTT

Copyright © 2009 Andy McDermott

For my family and friends

Prologue

Oman

For all that the Arabian desert was traditionally supposed to be devoid of life, there was far too much of it for Mark Hyung’s liking. A cloud of flies had been hovering in wait as he left his tent just after dawn, and now, three hours later, they had seemingly called in every other bug within a ten-mile radius.

He muttered an obscenity and stopped, removing his Oakleys and swatting at his face. The flies briefly retreated, but they would resume their dive-bombing soon enough. Not for the first time, he cursed himself for volunteering to come to this awful place.

‘Got a problem there, Mr Hyung?’ said Muldoon with barely concealed contempt, pausing in his ascent of the steepening slope. The bear-like Nevadan was a thirty-year veteran of the oil exploration business, tanned and leathery and swaggering. Mark knew Muldoon saw him as just some skinny fresh-from-college Korean kid from California, and rated him little higher than the desert flies.

‘No problem at all, Mr Muldoon,’ Mark replied, replacing his sunglasses and taking out a water bottle. He took several deep swigs, then splashed some on his hand and tilted his head forward to wipe the back of his neck.

Something on the ground caught his attention, and he crouched for a better look. The object was familiar, yet so out of place it took him a moment to identify: a seashell, a fractal spiral chipped and scuffed by weather and time. ‘Have you seen this?’

‘Yeah,’ said Muldoon dismissively. ‘Find ’em all over. This used to be a beach, once. Sea was higher than it is now.’

‘Really?’ Mark was familiar with the concept of sea level changes due to climatic shift, but until now it had only been on an abstract level. ‘How long ago?’

‘I dunno; hundred thousand years ago, hundred and fifty.’ Muldoon gestured at the low bluff ahead, their destination. ‘This woulda been a nice resort spot. Cavegirls in the raw.’ He chuckled lecherously.

Mark held in a sigh. No point making his relations with the old-guard oilman any worse. Instead, he returned the bottle to his backpack. ‘Shall we go?’

Sweating in the hundred-degree heat, they trudged across the sands for another half-mile, finally stopping near the base of the bluff. Muldoon used a GPS handset to check their position, then spent a further minute confirming it with a map and compass as Mark watched impatiently. ‘The satellites are accurate to within a hundred feet, you know,’ he finally said.

‘I’ll trust my eyes and a map over any computer,’ Muldoon growled.

‘Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To prove that computers can do a better job than anybody’s eyes.’

‘Cheaper-ass job, you mean,’ Muldoon muttered, just loud enough for Mark to hear. He folded up the map. ‘This is it. We’re two thousand metres from the spike camp, just like you wanted.’

Mark looked back. Barely visible through the rippling heat haze were the tents and transmitter mast of their encampment. Two other teams had set out at the same time, also heading for points two kilometres away, to form an equilateral triangle with the camp at the centre. ‘In that case,’ he said, taking a quiet relish in his moment of authority, ‘you’d better get started, hadn’t you?’

It took Muldoon an hour to prepare the explosive charge.

‘No way this’ll be powerful enough,’ he said as he lowered the metal cylinder containing fifteen pounds of dynamite into the hole he’d dug. ‘You need a couple hundred pounds, at least. Shit, you’ll be lucky if any of the other stations even hear it.’

‘Which is the whole point of the experiment,’ Mark reminded him. He had set up his own equipment a safe distance away: a battery-powered radio transmitter/receiver, connected to a metal tube containing a microphone. ‘Proving that you don’t need a ton of explosives or a drilling rig or hundreds of geophones. All the simulations say this will be more than enough to make a detailed reflection map.’

‘Simulations?’ Muldoon almost hissed the word. ‘Ain’t no match for experience. And I’m telling you, the only results you’ll get will be fuzz.’

Mark tapped his laptop. ‘You would - without my software. But with it, four geophones’ll be enough to map the whole area. Scale it up, Braxoil’ll be able to cover the entire Arabian peninsula with just a couple of dozen men in under a year.’

That was hyperbole, and both men knew it, but Muldoon’s disgusted expression still said it all. Traditional oil surveys were massive affairs involving hundreds, even thousands, of men, laboriously traversing vast areas to set up huge grids of microphones that would pick up the faint sonar echoes of explosive soundwaves bouncing off geological features deep underground. Mark’s software, on the other hand, let the computer do the work: from just four geophones, three at the points of the triangle and the fourth in the centre, it could analyse the results to produce a 3-D subterranean map within minutes. Hence Muldoon’s displeasure: long, labour-intensive - and very well-paid - surveys would be replaced by much smaller, faster and cheaper operations. Not so good for the men who would have to find a new line of work, but great for Braxoil’s bottom line.

If it worked. As Muldoon had said, everything was based on simulations - this would be the first proper field test. There were hundreds of variables that could screw things up . . .

Muldoon carefully inserted the detonator into the cylinder, then moved back. ‘Okay, set.’

‘How far back should we stand?’ Mark asked. ‘Behind the radio?’

Muldoon let out a mocking laugh. ‘You stand there if you want, Mr Hyung - I won’t stop you. Me, I’m gonna go all the way up there!’ He indicated the top of the bluff.

Mark’s own laugh was more nervous. ‘I’ll, ah . . . defer to your experience.’

The two men climbed the hillside. The bluff wasn’t tall, but on the plain at the southern edge of the vast desert wasteland called the Rub’ al Khali - in English, the Empty Quarter - it stood out like a beacon. As they climbed, Muldoon’s walkie-talkie squawked with two messages. The other teams had also reached their destinations and planted their explosives.

Everything was ready.

After reaching the top, Mark gulped down more water, then opened his laptop. His computer was linked wirelessly to the unit at the foot of the bluff, which in turn was communicating with the main base station at the camp, and through it the other two teams. The experiment depended on all three explosive charges detonating at precisely the same moment: any lack of synchronisation would throw off the timing of the arrival of the reflected sonar waves at the four geophones, distorting the geological data or, worse, rendering it too vague for the computer to analyse. ‘Okay, then,’ he said, mouth dryer than ever. ‘We’re ready. Countdown from ten seconds begins . . . now.’

He pressed a key. A timer on the screen began to tick down.

Muldoon relayed this through his radio, then dropped to a crouch. ‘Mr Hyung,’ he said, ‘you might want to put down the computer.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cause you can’t cover both ears with only one hand!’ He clapped both palms to his head. Mark got his point and hurriedly fell to his knees, putting down the laptop and jamming his fingers into his ears.

The charge exploded, the noise overpowering even with his eardrums protected, a single bass drumbeat deep in his chest cavity. The ground beneath him jolted. He had involuntarily closed his eyes; when he opened them again, he saw a plume of smoke rising from the base of the bluff. In the distance, two more eruptions rose above the shimmering haze in seeming slow motion. After a few seconds, the thunderclaps of the other blasts reached him.

A fine rain of dust and tiny pebbles hissed down round the two men. Mark picked up the laptop again, blowing dirt off the screen. The first results were coming through, the geophones confirming that they were receiving sonar reflections. It would take a few minutes to gather all the data, then longer for the computer to process it, but things looked promising so far.

Muldoon peered down the slope. ‘Too close to the surface,’ he grumbled as he wiped sand from his face.

Mark stood beside him, examining the incoming data intently. ‘It’s working just fine.’ He flinched as another tremor passed beneath his feet. ‘What was that?’

‘Can’t be the other charges, they weren’t powerful enough . . .’ Muldoon tailed off, sounding worried. Mark looked up, concerned. The shuddering was getting worse—

The ground under his feet collapsed.

Mark didn’t even have time to cry out before the breath was knocked from him as he dropped down the slope amidst a cascade of stones and dust. All he could do was try to protect his face as he bounced off the newly exposed rocks, pummelled from all sides—

Something hard hit his head.

The first of his senses to recover, oddly, was taste. A dry, salty taste filled his mouth, something caking his tongue.

Mark coughed, then spat out a mouthful of sand. The back of his head throbbed where the stone had hit him. He tried to sit up, then decided it was probably a better idea to remain still.

A muffled sound gradually resolved itself into words, a voice calling his name. ‘Mr Hyung! Where are you? Can you hear me?’

Muldoon. He actually sounded genuinely concerned, though Mark’s faculties had already recovered enough to realise the sentiment was professional rather than personal. Muldoon’s job was to look after the specialist; an injury on his watch would reflect badly upon his record.

‘Here,’ he tried to say, but all that came out was a faint croak. He spat out more revolting dust, then tried again. ‘I’m here.’

‘Oh, thank Jesus.’ Muldoon clambered over loose stones towards him. ‘Are you hurt?’

Mark managed to wipe his eyes. He grimaced at the movement; he was going to have some real bruises tomorrow. ‘I don’t think so.’ He turned his head to see the slope down which he’d tumbled. ‘Wow. That’s new.’

Muldoon looked up, surprise on his face as he registered the change in the landscape. The landslide had exposed a large opening in the side of the bluff, a deep cave. ‘Lucky you didn’t fall straight down into it. It’d probably have killed you.’ He held up a water bottle. ‘Here. Can you move?’

Mark gratefully took the bottle, swallowing several large mouthfuls, then gingerly moved his legs. ‘I think I’m okay. What about the computer?’

Muldoon held up the screen, which in addition to being cracked was no longer attached to the rest of the machine. ‘I don’t think the warranty’ll cover it.’

‘Damn,’ Mark sighed.

Muldoon helped him up. ‘Sure you’re okay?’

‘My knee hurts, but I think I’m fine apart from that.’

‘I dunno.’ Muldoon examined the back of his head. ‘You’ve got a big cut there, and if you were knocked out you might have a concussion. We could call for the chopper to come pick you up, get you to hospital in Salalah.’

‘I’m fine,’ Mark insisted, even as he spoke wondering why he wasn’t taking Muldoon up on his offer of an immediate trip out of the desert. ‘Can you see the rest of the laptop? I might be able to recover the data on the hard drive.’

Muldoon snorted, but turned to hunt for it. Mark looked the other way, towards the cave entrance. It was hard to believe that the relatively small explosive charge could have opened up such a large hole.

Unless the gap had been there all along . . .

That thought was brushed aside as he spotted the rest of the broken laptop just inside the cave entrance. ‘Here,’ he told Muldoon, limping towards it. It looked battered, but unless the hard drive had actually been smashed open it ought to be salvageable.

He crossed into the shadow of the cave and picked up the computer. Eyes adjusting to the low light, he examined the casing. It was more or less intact, dented but not actually broken. The experiment might not be a total loss after all.

Cheered slightly by the thought, Mark glanced deeper into the cave . . .

And was so surprised by what he saw that he dropped the laptop again.

Muldoon clapped Mark on the back. ‘Well, son, I had my doubts about you . . . but you’re gonna make us all very rich.’

‘Not quite how I planned, though,’ said Mark.

‘Doesn’t matter how a man gets rich, just that he does!’

Muldoon had joined him in the cave, and been equally stunned by what lay within - though he had recovered from his amazement rather more quickly, radioing the rest of the survey team to demand a rendezvous right now. One of the other men had a digital camera; once they too had overcome their astonishment and obtained photographic proof of their discovery, they returned to the camp to send the images back to Houston via satellite.

Mark couldn’t help thinking events were moving too fast for comfort. ‘I still think we should inform the Omanis.’

‘You kidding?’ said Muldoon. ‘First rule of working out here: never tell the Arabs about anything until the folks at home have okayed it. That’s why the company has all those high-powered lawyers - to make sure our claims are one hundred per cent watertight. And that’s just for oil. For this . . . Jesus, I don’t even know where to start. We’re gonna be famous, son!’ He laughed, then ducked into the tent housing the communications gear.

‘Maybe.’ Mark drank more water, not wanting to get his hopes up. For a start, he was sure that Braxoil would take full control of his discovery. The Omani government would certainly also lay claim to anything found within their borders.

But still, he couldn’t help fantasising about the potential fame and fortune . . .

He finished the water, then followed Muldoon into the tent. The survey team’s six other members were already inside, flicking through the digital photos on another laptop. Debate about exactly what they had found was still ongoing, but the overall consensus was much the same as Muldoon’s: it was going to make them all very rich.

‘Of course,’ said one of the men, a New Zealander called Lewis, ‘since it’s my camera, that means copyright on the photos is mine.’

‘Company time, company photos, fellas,’ said Muldoon.

‘Yeah, but personal camera,’ Lewis insisted.

‘Guess we’ll have to let the lawyers work that out.’

‘If anyone ever bothers getting back to us,’ said a laconic Welshman, Spence. ‘I mean, we sent the things three hours ago.’

‘What time is it in Houston?’ Mark asked.

Muldoon looked at his watch. ‘Huh. After ten in the morning. Still no reply?’

Lewis switched to the laptop’s email program. ‘Nothing yet.’

‘Check the satellite uplink,’ Mark suggested. ‘There might be a connection glitch.’

Lewis toggled to another program. ‘That explains it. No connection.’

Mark raised a puzzled eyebrow. ‘Wait, no connection? You didn’t log off, did you?’

‘You kidding? Soon as we get an answer, I want to read it!’

‘Weird. As long as we’re logged into the Braxoil network, we should be getting something. Here, let me . . .’

Lewis gave up his seat to the computer scientist. After a minute Mark leaned back, more puzzled than ever. ‘Everything’s fine at our end; we’re still transmitting. But we’re not getting anything back. Either the satellite’s down, which is pretty unlikely . . . or someone at the other end’s blocked us.’

Muldoon frowned. ‘What do you mean, blocked us?’

‘I mean, cancelled our access. Nothing we’re sending’s getting through, and nobody can send anything to us.’

‘The hell they can’t.’ Muldoon picked up the satellite phone’s handset. He entered a number, listened for several seconds, then jabbed with increasing anger at the buttons. ‘Not a goddamn thing!’

‘Try the radio,’ suggested an American, Brightstone. ‘Call Salalah. The guys there can patch us through to Houston.’

Muldoon nodded and moved to the radio, donning a pair of headphones. He switched the set on - and yanked off the headphones with a startled yelp, making everyone jump. ‘Jesus!’

‘What?’ Mark asked, worried.

‘Beats the hell out of me. Listen.’ He unplugged the headphones. An electronic squeal came from the radio’s speaker, the unearthly sound making Mark’s skin crawl.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Spence quietly. Everyone turned to him.

‘You know what it is?’ Mark asked.

‘I used to be in the Royal Signals. That’s a jammer.’

Muldoon’s eyes widened. ‘What?’

‘Electronic warfare. Someone’s cutting us off.’

That prompted a minor panic, until Muldoon shouted everyone down. ‘You’re sure about this, Spence?’

The Welshman nodded. ‘It’s airborne. The pitch is changing too fast for it to be on the ground.’

There was a sudden rush for the door, the eight men spreading out to squint into the achingly blue sky. ‘I see something!’ yelled Brightstone, pointing north. Mark saw a tiny grey speck in the far distance. ‘Is that what’s jamming us?’

‘Where are the binocs?’ Muldoon asked. ‘Someone—’

An ear-splitting roar hit them from nowhere. Mark had just enough time to see a pair of sleek, sand-brown shapes rush at him before the two aircraft shot less than a hundred feet overhead, sand whirling round the men in their barely subsonic slipstream. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the two planes had shrunk to dots, peeling off in different directions.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Muldoon yelled.

Spence stared after the retreating aircraft. ‘Tornados! Those were Saudi Tornados!’

‘But we’re forty miles from the border!’

‘I tell you, they were Saudi!’ They watched as the two fighters came about. One them appeared to be turning back towards the camp. The other . . .

Mark realised where it was heading. ‘The cave!’ he cried, pointing at the distant bluff. ‘It’s going for the cave!’

Even as he spoke, something detached from the fighter, two dark objects falling away. Then another, and another, arcing down at the bluff—

The hillside was obliterated, the explosions so closely spaced that they seemed to have been caused by a single giant bomb.

‘Jesus!’ someone shouted behind Mark as a churning black cloud swelled cancerously across the face of the bluff. The sound of the bombs hit them, shaking the ground even from over a mile away.

The Tornado banked sharply north, afterburners flaring to blast it back into Saudi airspace at Mach 2.

The second Tornado—

Mark whirled to find it.

He didn’t have to look far. It was coming straight at him, bombs falling from its wings—

The encampment vanished from the earth in a storm of fire and shrapnel.

Black smoke was still coiling from the bluff the next morning.

The four thousand-pound bombs dropped by the Saudi Tornado ADV had caused a good part of the hillside to collapse into the cave beneath it. But the opening remained, a dark hole rendered more sinister by the soot streaking the surrounding rock.

Men stood round it.

Though they were all armed and in desert battle fatigues, none wore the insignia of any military force. In fact, they wore no insignia at all. Despite the identical dress, however, there were divisions within the team. Whether by order or by instinct, the soldiers had formed into three distinct groups, touching at their edges but never quite mixing: oil and water beneath the desert sun.

The intersection point of all three groups was marked by a trio of men, all watching the sky to the south. Even without rank insignia, it was obvious they were the leaders, experience evident in every line on their faces. One was an Arab wearing a black military-style beret, a dark moustache forming a hard line above his mouth. The others were both Caucasian, but even so the differences in their backgrounds were clear at a glance. The younger, a tanned, black-haired man with a cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth, was Jewish; the oldest of the three had thinning blond hair and eyes of as intense a blue as the sky.

The blond man raised a pair of binoculars. ‘Here he comes,’ he said in English.

The Arab frowned. ‘About time. But I don’t see why we need him at all. Our airstrike destroyed the site - bury it and be done.’

‘The Triumvirate voted, two to one. Majority rules. You know that.’

The Arab’s expressive face clearly revealed his displeasure at the decision, but he nodded. The blond man turned back to watch the approaching helicopter.

It landed beside the choppers that had brought the soldiers to the site. Visible in the cockpit were two people: a man in his early forties wearing a pristine white suit, and a young woman in sunglasses.

‘What is this?’ snarled the Arab on seeing her. ‘He was supposed to come alone!’

The blond man’s face briefly betrayed exasperation at the new arrival’s indiscretion. ‘I’ll handle it,’ he said. They waited as the suited man emerged from the helicopter and strolled towards them. At least his passenger was remaining in the cockpit.

They wouldn’t have to kill her.

Once clear of the rotor blades, the pilot donned a white Panama hat, then approached the trio, smiling broadly. ‘Ah, Jonas!’ he said to the blond man. ‘Jonas di Bonaventura, as I live and breathe. Marvellous to see you again.’ Though his accent seemed at first a precise upper-class English, there was a faintly guttural undercurrent that revealed his Rhodesian origins.

‘Gabriel,’ replied di Bonaventura as they shook hands. ‘You flew here yourself ?’

‘As you know, I prefer to be in control.’

They shared a small laugh, then di Bonaventura looked pointedly towards the helicopter. ‘I see you brought a . . . guest. That was not something we were expecting.’

‘A life without surprises would be terribly dull.’ He smiled over his shoulder; the woman smiled back. ‘She’s a former student of mine. Her father hired me to take her on a tour of various African anthropological sites. We were in Sudan when I got your call for my help.’

‘You shouldn’t have brought her here,’ said the Arab, scowling.

A Cheshire cat smirk spread across the new arrival’s face. ‘Oh, I couldn’t leave her behind. She gives me much more than just money.’ It took a moment for the Arab to get his meaning; when he did, he looked disgusted. ‘So, Jonas, are you going to introduce me to your compatriots?’

‘Gabriel,’ said di Bonaventura, indicating the Arab, ‘this is Husam al Din Zamal, formerly of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate.’ He nodded at the cigar-smoking man. ‘And Uziel Hammerstein, previously of Mossad.’

The suited man raised a faintly mocking eyebrow. ‘A Saudi spy working with an Israeli spy? To say nothing of your background, Jonas. The Covenant of Genesis really does make for strange bedfellows.’

Di Bonaventura ignored the comment. ‘Husam, Uziel,’ he went on, ‘this is Professor Gabriel Ribbsley from Cambridge University in England.’

The men shook hands. ‘And don’t forget,’ added Ribbsley, chest swelling smugly, ‘the world’s leading authority in ancient languages. Whatever that amateur Philby in New York might think. And as for Tsen-Hu in Beijing . . . hah!’ He looked past Zamal and Hammerstein at the cave mouth, voice becoming more businesslike. ‘Which is why you need me here, I imagine. So, what have you found?’

Hammerstein spoke first, voice low as if to keep what he was about to say a secret even from the wind. ‘Our friends in the American NSA alerted us to a photo intercept from an oil company survey team. Their computers had performed a routine analysis of the images - and identified the language of the Ancients.’

‘Oh, please,’ said Ribbsley mockingly. ‘You’re still calling them that? How tediously prosaic. I use “Veteres” myself - I’m sure Jonas can appreciate at least the Latin.’

Hammerstein drew impatiently on his cigar. ‘As soon as we realised what they had found, we arranged for a computer virus to be introduced through an NSA back door into the company’s servers to erase the photos, then locked out the survey team’s satellite link to isolate them. After that—’

‘We destroyed them and the site,’ cut in Zamal bluntly.

Ribbsley looked towards the darkened opening. ‘So, you just decided to bomb the site. I see.’ A pause, then he wheeled about on one heel, voice dripping sarcasm. ‘And what exactly did you expect me to learn from a smouldering crater?’

‘We still have copies of the survey team’s photographs,’ said di Bonaventura. He beckoned a younger man, another blond European, to approach. The soldier held up a manila envelope.

Ribbsley dismissed it. ‘Happy snaps taken by oily-thumbed roughnecks are hardly going to be helpful.’ He reached under the brim of his hat to knead his forehead with his fingertips. ‘Do you know why translating this language has been so hard? Why it took eight years for me to work out even the basics?’ He lowered his hand and glared at Zamal. ‘Because every time the Covenant finds even the tiniest scrap of anything new, they blow it up and kill everyone in the vicinity!’

‘That is the Covenant’s purpose,’ Zamal said angrily.

‘Yes, if you take the most literal, block-headed interpretation possible.’ Ribbsley let out a theatrical sigh. ‘Flies, honey, vinegar, catch . . . can anyone rearrange these words into a well-known phrase or saying?’

‘You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar?’ offered the soldier with the envelope, a Germanic accent to his clipped English.

Ribbsley clapped his hands. ‘Top marks! Jonas, who is this prodigy?’

‘Killian Vogler,’ said di Bonaventura. ‘My protégé.’ A note of challenge entered his words, as if daring Ribbsley to continue mocking him. ‘I will soon be retiring from the Covenant for a new position in Rome - Killian will take my place in the Triumvirate.’

Ribbsley backed down, slightly. ‘A new position? Still in pectore, I assume . . . Well then, I hope this young gentleman keeps the saying he just recited in mind once he takes your place.’ Vogler gave him a sardonic look. ‘The next time you make a discovery like this, Mr Vogler, perhaps you might consider allowing me to examine the site before you blow it to pieces? If I can decipher more of the language, I may be able to locate other sites - before they’re stumbled upon by random passers-by whom you then have to kill.’

‘I will bear it in mind, Mr Ribbsley,’ said Vogler with a humourless smile.

‘Professor Ribbsley, thank you very much,’ Ribbsley snapped. He snatched the envelope from Vogler’s hand and riffled through the contents. ‘Well, it seems consistent with the other sites - the remains of the other sites, that is. And the characters on the tablet in this photo do match the Veteres alphabet. But there’s nothing I haven’t already seen.’ He looked back at the cave. ‘What else is in there?’

Di Bonaventura nodded to Vogler. ‘Killian will show you. You may as well get to know each other - I’m sure you will be working together again in the future . . .’

Ribbsley emerged from the cave just ten minutes later, disappointed and angry.

‘Nothing,’ he said, shooting an accusing glare at Zamal. ‘Absolutely nothing worthwhile was left intact. Just more scraps.’ In one hand he had a clay cylinder about two inches in diameter, fine grooves encircling its length - up to the point where it ended in a jagged break. He dropped it to the ground at his feet; it shattered. ‘A complete waste of my time.’

‘For which you are being very well rewarded,’ di Bonaventura reminded him. ‘And you still have the photographs of the site.’

‘I already told you, there’s nothing new on them. I’ll be able to translate the text properly once I can check my notes, but I could read enough to know it’s nothing of interest.’ He looked at his helicopter. The young woman was still in the cockpit, clearly bored. ‘Well, since there’s nothing more for me here, I’ll be going. I do hate the desert.’ He irritably brushed some sand off his white cotton sleeve.

‘I’ll walk you to your helicopter, Gabriel,’ said di Bonaventura. Ribbsley started towards the aircraft without even looking back at the others, di Bonaventura beside him. ‘What were you thinking?’ said the soldier in a quiet growl once they were out of earshot.

‘About what?’

‘Bringing your - your girlfriend with you. Are you mad? Zamal would have shot her without a thought just for being here, and Hammerstein would not have tried to stop him.’

Ribbsley smiled. ‘Ah, but I knew you’d be in charge, Jonas.’

‘Not for much longer. Once I go back to Rome, all I can do is advise. Killian will be making the decisions in the Triumvirate. And despite my teaching, he is still young enough to see the world in absolutes. And one of those absolutes is that anyone who could reveal the secret of the Veteres to the world is a threat to be eliminated.’

‘Don’t even think about hurting her,’ said Ribbsley, a sudden hardness in his voice.

Di Bonaventura regarded him with mild surprise. ‘She’s that important to you? Interesting.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘No threat intended, Gabriel, I assure you,’ di Bonaventura said with a placatory smile. ‘She just seems younger than I expected.’ He took a closer look as they approached. ‘How old is she? Twenty-one? ’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘And you are now . . . ?’

‘Her age isn’t the important issue,’ snapped Ribbsley defensively, forcing the older man to hide his amusement. ‘What matters is her personality.’

By now di Bonaventura could see that Ribbsley’s passenger was extremely beautiful, with a toned body to put many a model to shame. ‘But of course.’

‘She’s quite incredible, actually,’ Ribbsley continued, his tone softening as he gazed at her. ‘An exceptionally cultured and refined woman. And as you know, I’m a man of very refined tastes.’

Di Bonaventura caught the scent of over-liberally applied Bulgari cologne. ‘And expensive ones.’

‘Which is why I put up with you calling me across continents at a moment’s notice. The Covenant pays far better than Cambridge!’ Both men chuckled, then shook hands as they reached the chopper. ‘Well, good luck with the new post, Jonas. Maybe I’ll pop in to see you next time I’m in the Eternal City.’

‘I look forward to it.’ Di Bonaventura stood back as Ribbsley climbed into the cockpit, quickly and expertly running through the pre-flight sequence. The rotors groaned to life, rapidly picking up speed. The soldier moved back out of the whirling sandstorm.

‘Goodbye, Cardinal!’ shouted Ribbsley, giving di Bonaventura a jaunty wave. The helicopter left the ground, wheeled about and headed south.

Di Bonaventura watched it go, then returned to the cave, looking in the direction of the ragged craters marking what had once been the survey camp. There was still clean-up work to be done; the bodies of the men at the camp, or whatever was left of them, had to be found and buried, all evidence of the camp itself removed. Anything that could expose the Covenant had to disappear. Without trace.

Without exception.

‘Why did you call him Cardinal?’ the young woman asked.

‘Private joke,’ Ribbsley told her.

‘So who were they?’

He paused before reluctantly answering. ‘They’re . . . archaeologists. Of a sort. I occasionally help them with translations of ancient texts.’

‘I had no idea Cambridge professors made house calls for translation emergencies.’

‘They’re very competitive about their work. Cut-throat, you might say.’

‘Really?’ She arched an eyebrow and smiled wolfishly. ‘I’m intrigued.’

Ribbsley huffed. ‘They’re hardly your type . . . Lady Blackwood.’

Sophia Blackwood grinned. ‘I suppose not. Can you imagine what my father would say if I spent time with some bit of rough trade? He’s suspicious enough of you as it is.’

‘Now, for what possible reason could his lordship be suspicious of a Cambridge professor?’

Sophia leaned closer, her long dark hair brushing his shoulder as she slipped her hand between his legs. ‘I don’t know. Maybe because you’re secretly fucking his daughter?’ She cupped her fingers round his groin and squeezed gently.

He made a muffled noise deep in his throat. ‘That might be one reason, yes.’

She laughed, then tightened her grip slightly. ‘So, you aren’t going to tell me any more about those people?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Ribbsley, smiling back at her.

Tighter still. ‘Really?’

The smile vanished. ‘Ngh! No. Believe me, Sophia, this is one of those very rare occasions where ignorance really is bliss. Or at least safer.’

She withdrew her hand, turning away in feigned offended disappointment. ‘I see, Professor.’

‘Oh, don’t be like that, my lady,’ said Ribbsley, playing along with her game. ‘I’m sure I can make up for it somehow.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I recall that you have a reasonable ability with languages . . .’

‘Don’t go out of your way to praise me, Gabriel,’ she said sarcastically.

‘Compared to me, I meant. But you could help me with the translation - it’d save me a lot of time if you took care of the drudge work.’

‘Oh! Thrilling.’

‘You’ll find it interesting, trust me. The language is . . .’ He smiled. ‘Unique. Then afterwards, since we’re in Oman, a meeting with the Sultan, perhaps? I’ve met him before; I’m certain I can arrange something.’

Her perfect smile returned. ‘You know, that might do the trick.’

‘I thought it might.’

Her hand slid between his legs once more. ‘Although . . . I’m still terribly hurt that you wouldn’t tell me who those men were.’

He tensed for a moment, before her touch made it clear she was joking. ‘Some things in life have to remain mysterious, Sophia.’

Attention divided between flying the helicopter and the movement of her hand, Ribbsley didn’t pick up her low words over the clamour of the cabin. ‘Not for me, Gabriel. I always get what I want. Eventually.’

1

Indonesia: Eight Years Later

‘Shark!’

At almost a hundred feet beneath the Java Sea, daylight was diffused to a dusky turquoise cast, but there was still more than enough illumination for Nina Wilde to see the predator turn towards her. ‘Shark!’ she repeated, voice rising in pitch. ‘Eddie, do something!’

Eddie Chase swept past her, using the thrusters of his deep suit to place himself between his fiancée and the shark as he brought up his speargun. He aimed the .357 Magnum cartridge forming the spear’s explosive power-head at the approaching creature . . . then lowered it again.

‘What are you doing?’ Nina asked, green eyes wide with fear. ‘It’s coming right at us!’

‘It’s only a thresher. Don’t worry, it won’t do anything.’

‘But it’s fifteen feet long!’

‘It’s not even six. I know the helmet magnifies things, but Jesus!’

The shark came closer, mouth gaping to expose ranks of sharp triangular teeth . . . then turned its head almost dismissively and powered off into the murk.

‘See?’ said Chase. ‘Nothing to worry about. Now if it’d been something like a tiger shark, you’d know about it.’

‘How?’

‘’Cause I’d be shouting “Shit, it’s a fucking tiger shark, aargh!” and firing off spears as fast as I could load ’em!’ The balding, broken-nosed Englishman turned so that the lights on his deep suit’s polycarbonate body lit up the redhead’s pale face through her transparent bubble helmet. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, fine,’ Nina answered, with a slightly embarrassed smile. She had undergone dive training off the coast of Long Island, near her native New York, and was still getting used to the enormously more varied marine life of Indonesia. ‘It’s just that to me, “shark” equals “severed head popping out of a boat”.’

Chase chuckled, then a hint of concern came into his voice, even through the distortion of the underwater radio system. ‘How’s your leg?’

‘It’s . . . okay.’ It wasn’t technically a lie, as the bullet wound she had received to her right thigh four months earlier, now more or less healed, wasn’t actually hurting, but it had definitely stiffened up during the dive.

‘Uh huh.’ He didn’t believe her. ‘Look, if you want to go back to the ship . . .’

‘I’m fine, Eddie,’ Nina insisted. ‘Come on, let’s carry on with the survey.’

‘If you’re sure.’ Chase managed an approximation of a shrug through the deep suit’s bulky casing.

She gripped the flexible control stalk on her suit’s chest and used the thrusters to lift herself off the sea bed, using her finned feet to bring herself to a horizontal position before zooming away, Chase behind her.

Their survey took them along a circular route, taking twenty minutes to complete. Nina was disappointed that she failed to discover anything new - but that feeling vanished as they returned to the centre of the circle.

Almost a year earlier, a local fishing boat had, by chance, dredged up a handful of wood and stone artefacts from the sea floor. The Indonesian authorities quickly realised they were very old and hence potentially extremely valuable; the lucky fishermen had received a payment to persuade them to ‘forget’ exactly where they had made their discovery, so the site could be properly examined before opportunistic treasure hunters picked it clean.

The job of exploration fell to the United Nations’ International Heritage Agency. Nina, at the time the agency’s Director of Operations, had already been engaged in a project to chart in detail humanity’s expansion across the world in pre-history; the Indonesian find had the potential to pinpoint a date with great accuracy. It had taken several months for everything to be arranged, but now they were here.

And had made a discovery.

‘Nina, look at this!’ called Marco Gozzi over the radio. He and another scientist, Gregor Bobak, were using a vacuum pump to clear away the layers of sediment and vegetation that had built up over millennia.

‘What is it?’ Nina asked. She switched off the thrusters and swam the last few metres to join them: stirring up the bottom would wipe out visibility and cost them valuable time. The deep suits could operate underwater for longer than traditional scuba gear, but still had their limits - and on an operation like this, time was money. The research vessel anchored a few hundred metres away, the Pianosa, was privately owned, other clients waiting to use it after the IHA.

Gozzi aimed a light at what had been exposed. ‘It’s a net!’ said the Italian.

‘It is,’ Nina said in awed agreement. ‘Wow, this is incredible!’

Chase, hanging back, was less impressed. ‘Ooh. A net. Just like the thing that found this lot in the first place.’

‘Eddie,’ Nina chided. ‘This isn’t exactly a nylon drift net we’re talking about here.’ She reached out with a gloved hand, gently brushing sand off the crudely knotted strands. ‘Looks like they wove it from the local rainforest plants. Palm strands, maybe?’

‘Or vines,’ said Bobak in his strong Polish accent. ‘Strangler figs, perhaps. There are many on the islands.’

Gozzi dug a finger into the grey sediment. ‘The mud must have buried it and stopped it from rotting. Could have been caused by a tsunami, or a volcanic eruption.’

‘Mark the position,’ Nina told them. ‘If it’s a fishing net, they would have kept it close to the shore.’ She checked the little display in her helmet to get their exact depth. ‘Ninety-eight feet. If I put that into GLUG, I’ll be able to work out exactly how long ago this spot was last above water.’ She saw a yellow mesh bag on the ground nearby. ‘What else have you found?’

‘Stone tools, we think,’ Gozzi told her. He pointed to a spot behind Chase. ‘We found them there.’

Chase turned in place. An orange-painted stick marked where the other divers had been working. Near it, a little mound of round-edged stones stood out above the sea floor.

He looked back at Nina, who was using a smaller version of the vacuum pump to clear silt away from the net. Quickly becoming tired of watching her work, he swam to the stones, the deep suit’s neutral buoyancy letting him hover just above them. ‘Anything under these?’

‘I don’t know, we didn’t look,’ said Gozzi.

‘Mind if I do?’

‘Wait, you want to do some actual archaeology?’ Nina asked, amused. ‘I guess my influence is finally rubbing off on you.’

‘Nah, it’s just that if you’re going to keep oohing and aahing over a bit of old net, I’ll need something to keep me occupied. It gets boring just watching out for sharks.’

Bobak spun in alarm. ‘Sharks? Where are sharks?’

‘There aren’t any sharks, Gregor,’ said Nina as Gozzi suppressed a laugh. Still, Bobak surveyed the surrounding waters with deep apprehension before finally returning his attention to the find.

‘We have catalogued there,’ Gozzi said. ‘Go ahead.’

‘If you find anything, tell us,’ Nina added.

‘If it’s just some stone knife, then yeah, I’ll tell you,’ said Chase. ‘If it’s a pirate treasure chest, I’m keeping that to myself !’ Quickly scanning for sharks or other potentially dangerous marine life - despite his earlier jokiness, part of his job was to look after the rest of the team, a responsibility he took very seriously especially where Nina was concerned - he prodded at the nearest rock with his spear gun. Satisfied that a moray eel or similarly nasty surprise wasn’t going to spring out, he pulled the stone free of the sediment.

While the exposed end had been smoothed off, the rest of it was flat-faced and hard-edged, reminding him of a large brick. Putting it aside, he aimed a light into the new hole. It was sadly lacking in pirate treasure, or even stone knives: nothing but thick sediment and the chipped corners of more blocks.

He extracted another brick, which came stickily free of its home of untold centuries like a bad tooth from a gum. A couple of colourful fish came to investigate the resulting hole, but like Chase they too were disappointed to find only more bricks.

‘No treasure chest?’ Nina asked as he rejoined her.

‘Narr, me hearty. Didn’t find anything except some old bricks.’

Nina exchanged shocked glances with the other two archaeologists, then slowly faced Chase. ‘You found what?’

The brick sat on a table in Nina’s lab aboard the Pianosa. Slightly over a foot in length and about five inches to a side in cross-section, slightly curved, there seemed little remarkable about it.

Except for the mere fact of its existence.

‘It’s a brick,’ said Chase, not for the first time since Nina, Gozzi and Bobak had raced past him to the pile of stones. ‘What’s the big deal?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Nina, turning round the Apple laptop on which she had been frenziedly working to show him. On its screen was a map of part of Indonesia and the Java Sea, Sumatra and its myriad surrounding islands on the left side. ‘This is the sea level today, right?’

‘Okay. And?’

She zoomed in on one area. ‘This is us, here. The depth of the site is ninety-eight feet below sea level. But if I wind back time to show the last time the site was above sea level . . .’

The program she was using was called GLUG, for Global Levels of Underwater Geology - its full name contrived after the developers had come up with the jokey acronym. Using the most up-to-date radar and sonar maps, the program allowed members of the IHA and its sister agencies to see the topography of the entire planet, above or below the waves, with an accuracy previously only available to the best-equipped militaries. But GLUG could do more than simply show things as they were in the present: using data gleaned from geological and ice-core surveys, it could also raise or lower the sea level on a map to match that at any point in the past . . . or, by a simple reversal of the algorithm, list all the times when the sea had been at a specified level.

Which Nina had done. ‘This is what Indonesia looked like when the sea level was ninety-eight feet lower,’ she said. As Chase watched, the map changed, new islands springing up around the coast. She pointed at a yellow marker on the edge of one of the freshly revealed land masses. ‘See? That’s the dig site, right on the coast - sixty thousand years ago.’

Chase scratched at his thinning, close-cropped hair. ‘So? I thought that’s exactly what you were trying to prove, that early humans spread along the coastlines way back when. The whole Palaeolithic migration hypothesis thing.’

Nina gave him a surprised smile. ‘You’ve been reading my research?’

‘Hey, I don’t spend all my spare time watching action movies. Okay, so sixty thousand years ago, Ig and Ook used to live here, catching fish and making bricks. Isn’t that what you expected to find?’

‘More or less - except for that.’ She lifted the brick. ‘You know when the earliest known bricks date from?’

‘A week last Tuesday?’

She smiled. ‘Not quite. The earliest known fired bricks were found in Egypt, and dated from around three thousand BC. Even plain mud bricks only date from at most eight thousand BC. Kind of a gap between that and fifty-eight thousand BC.’

‘What if it’s more recent? Maybe it fell off a ship.’

‘You saw how rounded the exposed parts of the other bricks were. That’s not centuries of erosion, that’s millennia.’ She turned the anachronistic object over in her hands. Though battered, its surface still retained the vestiges of a glaze, suggesting a relatively advanced and aesthetically concerned maker. Neither concept fitted well with a Palaeolithic origin.

She put down the brick. ‘I think we need to expand the survey parameters.’

Chase raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh, you do, do you?’

‘Hey, I’m the Director of the IHA. It’s my job to decide these things.’

‘Interim Director,’ Chase reminded her. Nina had assumed the role four months earlier, following the death of her predecessor Hector Amoros, and the UN’s decision on the permanency of her appointment was pending. But it was a lock, she was sure; not bad for someone who had only turned thirty that year.

‘Whatever. But I still think we should do it. Proving a theory is one thing, but making a discovery that could change everything we thought about early man . . .’

Chase stepped behind her and wrapped his thick arms round her waist. ‘You just want to be on the cover of Time again, don’t you?’

‘No. Yes,’ she admitted. ‘But just think about what it would mean! Current theory believes that Homo sapiens didn’t develop anything but the most basic stone tools until the upper Palaeolithic period fifty thousand years ago, but if they had kilns able to bake bricks . . .’ She tailed off as Chase’s hands made their way up to her breasts. ‘Eddie, what are you doing?’

‘You get so turned on when you’re talking about archaeology,’ he said, a gap-toothed, lecherous smirk on his square face. ‘It’s like your version of porn. Your nipples pop up like grapes.’

‘I do not have grape nipples,’ Nina told him in a faux-frosty tone.

‘Well, they’re still nice and tasty. We could just nip - fnarr, fnarr - to our cabin . . .’

‘Maybe later, Eddie,’ she said, pulling his hands away. ‘Come on, I need to talk to Captain Branch and start a sonar survey.’

Chase rolled his eyes as she strode from the room. ‘Right. Because there’s nothing sexier than a sonar survey.’

Nina leaned against the railing on the Pianosa’s deck, watching the red and white de Havilland Otter floatplane nudge up to the L-shaped floating pontoon dock extending out from the ship’s starboard side. Chase waved at her from the co-pilot’s seat.

She waved back, then headed for her lab. It had taken some time to persuade Captain Branch - a stickler for adhering to the exact letter of a contract, nothing more, nothing less - to allow the floatplane to be used for anything other than its agreed purpose of bringing in fresh food from Jakarta over the course of the ten-day expedition. But she eventually got her way . . . with the promise of some extra money from the discretionary budget going his way.

The Otter had been outfitted with a small ‘dunking’ sonar array, then spent the next few hours making short hops along a rough spiral course out from the ship. At each landing, Chase lowered the sonar into the water to scan the surrounding sea bed. In theory, if any of the results matched the reading from the dig site, there was a good chance they would find more of the mysterious bricks, perhaps even their source.

In theory. There was an equal chance that the search would uncover absolutely nothing.

Chase entered, carrying the tubular sonar array. Behind him, holding the sonar’s data recorder, was Bejo, one of the Indonesian members of the crew. He was still in his late teens, and growing up on one of the vast archipelago’s many islands meant that he had spent almost as much of his life in boats as on land.

‘How was the trip?’ Nina asked as Chase returned the sonar to its large metal box.

‘Pretty good. Hervé even let me hold the controls. For about a minute.’

‘I thought I heard terrified screams,’ Nina joked as Bejo put the recorder on a table. ‘Thanks, Bejo.’

‘No problem, Mrs Nina,’ Bejo said cheerily.

‘Please, I told you,’ she said as she connected the recorder to one of the lab’s computers, ‘I’m not “Mrs” anything. Not until next May, anyway.’

‘Ah! I see, then you will be Mrs Eddie?’

‘No, nonono.’ Nina wagged a finger. ‘Then he’ll be Mr Nina.’

Bejo erupted with laughter. ‘Mr Nina!’ he cried, pointing at Chase. ‘I like that, that is funny.’

‘Yeah, hilarious,’ Chase rumbled. He joined Nina at the computer. ‘See you later, Bejo.’

‘And you . . . Mr Nina!’ Bejo left the lab, his laughter echoing down the corridor.

‘Cheers for that,’ said Chase, batting Nina lightly on the back of her head. ‘Now I’m going to be “Mr Nina” for the rest of the bloody trip.’

‘Ah, you don’t mind really. Because you lurve me.’ She nudged him playfully with her hip.

‘Yeah, I need to get my head checked sometime. So what’ve we got?’

Nina was already working. ‘Let’s see, shall we? Okay, this is the dig site.’ An image appeared on the screen, blobs in various shades of grey against a black background. ‘It’s a composite of four readings - only objects that stay stationary in all four show up, so we don’t have to worry about fish confusing things.’ She zoomed in and indicated one particular group of objects. ‘These are the bricks you found.’

‘We didn’t dig up that many,’ Chase noted. ‘How deep can the sonar read?’

‘Up to two feet - it depends what’s on the sea bed. If it’s just sediment, any more bricks should show up clearly. Okay, let’s see what you found.’

The first composite image came up. Nina examined it, zooming in on everything that gave a strong sonar return, but found nothing resembling the regular forms of the bricks. By the time she had finished, more images had been processed, ready for inspection. She opened each up in turn.

‘Oh, oh,’ she said excitedly as the eighth reading appeared. ‘This looks promising.’ A jumbled swathe of sonar reflections showed up strongly, like a handful of tiny diamonds cast across black velvet. ‘Wow, it looks like some of the readings we got from Atlantis, remember? Like buildings buried under the silt.’ She zoomed in. While the objects were scattered, many of them revealed regular, clearly artificial shapes. ‘The place looks trashed, though. It’d take a massive earthquake or a tsunami to scatter everything that widely.’

‘Or people.’ They exchanged looks. ‘How deep is it?’

‘It’s at . . . whoa, a hundred and fifty feet. So it’s not from the same period as the original site.’ Nina brought up the GLUG program on her laptop, entering figures. The map changed, sea level falling still further. ‘Definitely not the same period. If this is right, then . . . about one hundred and thirty-five thousand years ago.’ She turned to face Chase, eyes wide. ‘Jesus, that would completely re-write everything we think we know about pre-history. According to current theories, humans didn’t even leave Africa until at most seventy thousand years ago.’

‘Maybe it’s not humans,’ Chase said with a grin. ‘Maybe aliens built it.’

Nina frowned. ‘It’s not aliens, Eddie.’

‘Yeah, you say that now, but when we find a crystal skull . . .’

‘Can we be serious, please?’ She magnified the sonar image still further. The image pixellated, but individual objects were still discernible, strewn across the sea floor. ‘We have to check this out. As soon as we can.’

‘It’s about five miles away,’ said Chase, comparing the image’s GPS co-ordinates to a chart. ‘Bit of a trudge to get the boats there and back.’

‘We’ll move the ship.’

‘I don’t think Branch’ll like that. You had a hard enough job getting him to let us use the plane.’

Nina gave him a determined grin. ‘I dunno. I’m feeling pretty persuasive today.’

With very poor grace, even after the promise of another payment to cover the unplanned use of fuel, Captain Branch did eventually agree to move the Pianosa to the new site. It took a couple of hours to bring the pontoons back aboard and get the vessel under way, but after that it didn’t take long to reach its destination. Once anchored, the crew reassembled the floating dock while the IHA team prepared for the dive. Nina had used the transit time to explain why she had changed the mission so drastically; both Gozzi and Bobak were startled by what she thought she had discovered, but quickly became caught up in her enthusiasm.

Chase was more pragmatic. ‘We can’t stay down there too long,’ he said as the team went through the involved process of donning their deep suits. ‘There’s only a couple of hours before sunset. It’ll be darker anyway because we’re deeper, but any daylight’s still better than none.’

‘This’ll just be a preliminary dive,’ Nina assured him. ‘I just want to be sure there really is something down there. If there is, we’ll dive again tomorrow morning, and if there isn’t . . . well, we’ll go back to the original site.’

‘Bet you won’t find a bit of old net as interesting now, will you? Okay, arms out.’

Nina raised her arms. Like the other divers, she was wearing a modified drysuit, metal sealing rings encircling her shoulders and upper thighs. The ones round her legs had already been connected to the lower body of the deep suit, which Bejo was supporting from behind. She shifted uncomfortably as Chase mated the watertight rings on her arms to their companions in the heavy suit’s shoulder openings, then closed its polycarbonate front section around her and shut the latches one by one.

‘Oh, I hate this bit,’ she muttered as Chase picked up the helmet.

‘Be glad you never wore the old model,’ he said. ‘The helmet was even smaller.’ He had used the first version of the deep suit three years earlier; it had been designed as a way for divers to reach depths impractical for working in traditional scuba equipment, while hugely reducing the risk of the bends. The suit’s hard body let them breathe air at normal surface pressure, while still leaving their limbs relatively free to move. This updated design also allowed its wearer to turn and bend, if only slightly, at the waist, an improvement on the earlier rigid shell, but it was still a cumbersome piece of equipment, especially above the water.

‘I’m always worried about getting something in my eye while I’m underwater,’ said Nina, making sure her ponytail was safely clear of the suit’s neck. ‘Or sneezing inside the helmet. That’d be truly gross.’

‘Or if you fart in the suit.’

‘I don’t fart, Eddie,’ Nina insisted as he lowered the helmet over her head and locked it into place.

‘She does, she just never owns up to it,’ Chase said in a stage whisper to Bejo, who laughed.

‘What was that?’ Nina asked suspiciously, voice muffled and hollow through the helmet.

‘Nothing, dear. Okay, check your systems.’ Chase examined the gauges on the suit’s bulbous back, where the air tanks and recycling systems were contained, while Nina peered at the repeater display inside the helmet. ‘Seal is good, pressure is good, mix is normal, battery is at full. You’re all set.’

Nina waddled to the ladder on the dock’s edge. Gozzi stood beside it making the final check of his suit’s systems, while Bobak was already bobbing in the lapping waves. He waved at her, inviting her in. For a moment Nina considered jumping in, then took the more prudent course of climbing down the ladder, the fins on her feet flapping against each rung.

Chase donned his own deep suit with Bejo’s help, then fastened the belt holding his knife and other gear round his waist. ‘All set, Mr Nina,’ said the Indonesian. Chase gave him a look. ‘Mr Eddie,’ he quickly corrected.

By now, Gozzi had also entered the water. Chase dropped into the sea beside him with a huge splash. ‘Show-off,’ said Nina as Bejo tossed him the speargun.

Chase cocked the weapon, then looked at the others. ‘Everyone set?’

‘I certainly am,’ Nina replied. ‘Let’s see what’s down there.’

2

Though only fifty feet deeper than the original site, the new location was far darker, shrouded in perpetual dusk. All four divers had their suit lights on at full power, but even that failed to make much impact on the gloom.

Nina held a laminated sheet up to her lights - a printout of the sonar image of the area. ‘This is it. Anyone see anything?’

Gozzi swung one flippered foot at a rounded stone. ‘This might be another of those bricks.’

‘Eddie, give him a hand.’

Chase joined the Italian, and together they pulled it up. Beneath the sediment, protected from erosion, was indeed another of the crisply edged, slightly curved bricks. ‘Looks like the right place.’

‘We’ll do a survey,’ Nina decided. ‘We’ll each take a quadrant, starting from here, out to . . . fifty metres. Anyone finds anything promising, make a note and we’ll collate everything when we meet back up.’

‘Make sure we stay in sight of each other,’ Chase added.

They moved apart. Nina swam rather than using the thrusters, examining the sea floor as she moved slowly over it. A half-buried rock turned out to be another brick, larger than the others she’d seen. She made a note of the block’s position, then thought about the nature of the bricks as she moved on. The mere fact that they were curved would limit their utility; the earliest example of that kind of architectural thinking she knew of was that of the Atlanteans, whose empire had risen - and fallen - about eleven thousand years earlier.

Quite a gap between eleven thousand and a hundred and thirty-five thousand. Could there possibly have been a civilisation that pre-dated even Atlantis?

A change in the terrain: the ground ahead dropped away quite steeply. She was just able to make out where it rose again through the murk. If the rest of the area had once been a hilly coastline, this had perhaps been a small gully, marking the point where a stream or minor river reached the sea.

Which would make it a good place to search for more traces of the mysterious brick-builders. To any primitive society, a supply of fresh water was a key factor in the location of a settlement.

She swam into the gully. Chase would probably yell at her for going out of his sight, but she could handle that. Bringing up her torch, she shone its powerful beam over the sea floor.

There was something there, a row of stone stumps rising above the silt and gently swaying plants. A regular row - too much so to be natural. She looked at the laminated sheet again. A line of five similarly sized blobs there, matching the five real-life objects here . . .

And more, stronger, sonar reflections just a short distance further up the gully. Her heart jumped with the rush of discovery. Something more intact - a building that hadn’t been completely destroyed?

She swam towards the spot, aiming the light ahead. There was something there. As she got closer, she saw that while it wasn’t intact, the curving wall broken up into shark-tooth shapes, nor had it been reduced to scattered rubble. Somehow, it had survived whatever had laid waste to the settlement, the deluge as the seas rose, the ravages of time.

‘Guys,’ she said excitedly, ‘I think I’ve found something. It looks like the remains of a building.’

‘Where are you?’ Chase asked. ‘I don’t see your lights.’

‘I’m in a little dip.’

‘You are a little dip,’ he snapped. ‘I told you to stay in sight!’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Now almost at the ruined wall, she slowed, tracing its shape with her flashlight beam. Whatever the structure had once been, it had apparently been circular.

The more she looked, the odder it became. Although the tallest remaining point was only a few feet above the sediment, it was enough to tell that it sloped inwards as it rose. It wasn’t a result of damage, either; the bricks had been crafted and arranged quite deliberately to produce just such a shape. Extending the arc would produce . . .

A dome.

She tried to picture it. A brick igloo, fifteen feet high, maybe more. Domes weren’t unknown in ancient civilisations . . . but this ancient?

She swam over the top of the wall and looked down. Slightly off-centre of the circle was a pile of rubble, fronds of seaweed wafting languidly from it. A small shoal of fish glinted through her torch beam, edging closer to the plants before flitting away as one.

The fallen bricks were probably part of the collapsed roof. If so, then whatever the building had housed could still be beneath them. Nina dropped to the sea floor and squatted as best she could in the cumbersome deep suit to investigate. ‘We’re definitely going to need the pump,’ she said, brushing seaweed strands aside. ‘If we clear out the sediment, we might be able to find—’

Something erupted from a hole between the bricks.

Nina shrieked and jerked back reflexively, losing her balance and falling on to her butt. A hideous face lunged at her, a huge mottled moray eel with its spike-toothed mouth agape.

Its long body twisted, fangs snapping at her outstretched hand—

Something shot past Nina in a trail of bubbles. There was a deafening bang. The next thing she knew, a swirling pink-tinged cloud of froth and shredded flesh was spreading through the water. The front half of the moray, mouth still open in what now looked like frozen surprise, bumped lifelessly against her before sinking to the sea floor.

‘What did I bloody tell you?’ Chase’s voice said in her ringing ears. ‘Don’t go off on your own!’

‘Jesus, Eddie!’ said Nina, caught somewhere between fear, relief and anger. ‘Are you trying to kill me? You almost blew out my eardrums!’

‘You’d rather that thing’d bitten a hole in your suit?’ He swam past her, the speargun in one hand. ‘Big bugger, though. Must be twelve feet long, easily. Although a power-head was probably overkill.’ He loaded another explosive-tipped spear, then tugged the severed tail end of the eel from the hole.

Nina breathed deeply in an attempt to calm herself. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting rid of this thing. Don’t want floating shark-bait right where you’re working.’ He clipped the gun to his suit’s belt, then picked up the moray’s other half. ‘Seen this?’ he asked, waggling its head in Nina’s face. ‘It’s got two sets of jaws, one inside the other. Like the Alien.’

‘Just get rid of it!’ said Nina, cringing in revulsion.

‘So much for the search for knowledge,’ Chase said, turning the eel to face him and moving its mouth like some awful ventriloquist’s dummy as he spoke. ‘And she calls herself a scientist!’ The two pieces of the moray trailing from his hands, he swam off into the gloom.

‘Are you okay, Nina?’ asked Gozzi as he arrived, Bobak behind him.

‘Super fine,’ Nina growled.

‘At least it was not a shark, yes?’ Bobak said hopefully.

‘Yes, thank God. Although I have a horrible feeling I’m going to have to put up with a load of stupid eel jokes when we get back to the ship.’

‘I’d never do that,’ Chase said from somewhere out of sight. ‘Besides, I’ve got a DVD I want to watch tonight.’

‘What is it?’ Nina sighed, bracing herself for the punchline.

‘An Eel-ing comedy!’

If Nina could have put a hand to her forehead, she would have. Instead, she groaned, then composed herself before turning back to the job in hand.

After she photographed the ruin, the team carefully lifted the fallen bricks. It was a slow process, Chase offering increasingly frequent reminders about the dwindling amount of daylight remaining.

But it paid off.

‘Look at that!’ Nina exclaimed. The collapsed roof removed and some of the sediment cleared away with the small vacuum pump, new treasures were revealed. ‘We’ve definitely struck gold.’

‘That’s not gold,’ said Chase. ‘Looks like copper to me.’

‘Metaphorical gold, I mean.’ She lifted the first object. It was a sheet of copper about ten inches long, almost as wide at one end but much narrower at the other. It had obviously been crushed when the roof fell, but she guessed it had originally been conical in shape. She turned it over. ‘It looks like a funnel.’

‘Wow, kitchen utensils? That’s even more exciting than a net,’ said Chase.

Nina snorted and handed it to him to put into a sample bag, then looked at the item Bobak was holding. ‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was a clay cylinder - or rather part of one, one end roughly broken off. The other had a hole roughly the width of Nina’s little finger at its centre. The cylinder was marked with narrow, closely spaced grooves running round its length. Bobak poked at the little hole, tipping sand out of it. ‘To hold a candle?’

Gozzi guided the pump’s nozzle along what appeared to be a stout wooden pole. ‘Look here!’ he cried. More of the pole was exposed as he moved, revealing it to be six feet long, ten, twelve . . . ‘I think this is a mast!’

‘It can’t be,’ said Bobak. ‘The site is too old. Maybe the boat sank more recently.’

‘So how did it end up inside a building that’s been underwater for over a hundred thousand years?’ Nina asked. No suggestions were forthcoming. She ran her fingertips through the sediment, finding the flat face of a plank. Probing further, she felt its edge. She followed it, trying to work out the length of the buried vessel.

Something moved when she touched it.

‘Found something?’ Chase asked. ‘Not another eel, is it?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Nina pulled her new find free of the muck. It was a clay tablet, roughly the size of a slim hardback novel. One corner had been broken off, but apart from some chipping and blotches of microbial growths the rest of it was intact. Several lines of text had been inscribed into its surface, but the elegantly curved script was completely unknown to her. ‘Gregor, Marco, look at this. Do either of you recognise the language?’ Neither did.

‘Tick tock,’ said Chase, pointing towards the surface. The level of illumination had visibly fallen. ‘We need to get back upstairs.’

Reluctantly, Nina put the tablet into the sample bag. ‘Mark the spot,’ she told Gozzi. ‘We’re definitely coming back here tomorrow.’

Chase entered the lab. ‘You coming for dinner? It’s after eight, and I’m starving!’

‘Shush,’ said Nina, flapping a hand. ‘I’m on the phone.’

‘Is that Eddie?’ asked an Australian voice from the speakerphone on Nina’s workbench. ‘How are you, mate?’

‘Hey, Matt,’ Chase replied, recognising their friend and colleague Matt Trulli. ‘I’m fine. How about you? I thought you were going to the South Pole or something.’

‘Yeah, in a week. Just got a few last-minute glitches to fix on my new sub; I’m waiting for the spare parts to arrive. Good job I caught the problem now - it’d be a bugger to fix in the Antarctic!’

‘I thought I’d take advantage of our tame nautical expert,’ Nina explained to Chase. ‘I was just asking him about the boat we found.’

‘Well, I looked at that photo you sent, and it’s definitely a lateen rig,’ said Trulli. ‘Triangular sail, invented by the Arabs. Something like the sixth century.’

‘BC or AD?’ Nina asked.

‘AD. Why, how old’s the site where you found it?’

‘Older.’

Trulli made an appreciative noise. ‘Another world-shattering discovery by Dr Nina Wilde, is it?’

‘Could be,’ said Nina, smiling. ‘Thanks for your help, Matt - I appreciate it.’

‘No worries - I’ll look in on you in New York when I get back. Oh, and consider this my RSVP to the wedding, okay?’

‘Will do.’

‘See you,’ said Chase as Trulli disconnected. ‘So, dinner?’

‘In a minute,’ Nina said, returning to her work. She held the clay tablet under a large illuminated magnifying lens, using a metal pick to remove the algae that a wash in distilled water had failed to shift. One particularly recalcitrant piece resisted even the pick; she used a spray can of compressed air to blast it with a fine astringent powder before switching back to her original tool. This time, the offending lump came free. ‘What’re they cooking?’

‘Eels.’ Nina shot him a dirty look. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Pretty well. I’ve almost got it cleaned up.’ She indicated the expensive digital SLR camera beside the waterproof camera she had used on the dive, a cable connecting it to her laptop. ‘I already sent some underwater pictures back to New York by satellite, but I thought it’d be easier for someone to identify the language if it wasn’t covered with crap.’

‘So you really don’t know? Guess you’d better withdraw that application to be the full-time boss of the IHA.’

‘It might be easier if I did.’

‘Really?’ Chase put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hey, I was only joking. I thought you wanted the job.’

‘I do. But there’s just been so much bureaucratic and political garbage, especially over the last couple of months. It’s like everybody’s decided to gang up on me at once. Assholes.’ She let out a sigh.

‘I know what you mean. Every time I go through US customs now, I get the third degree from the immigration officers. Doesn’t matter that I’ve got a Green Card and a UN work permit - they treat me like the bloody shoe bomber!’

‘Yeah, you’d think they’d be more grateful, considering we saved the world.’ Nina took several photos of the tablet. ‘Maybe I should remind everyone of that, take up that offer to write my autobiography.’

‘You need to ask for more money,’ Chase told her. ‘Tell ’em you want one meellion dollars.’ He raised his little finger to the corner of his mouth.

‘It’s definitely tempting.’ She turned to him, then flinched as she put weight on her right leg. ‘Ow!’

‘I kept telling you not to push it, didn’t I? You never bloody listen.’

‘It’s fine, it’s fine . . . no, it’s not fine, ow, oww, son of a bitch!’ Nina hobbled to a nearby chair, rubbing her thigh. ‘Oh, dammit, it’s cramped up. I must have been standing on it for too long.’

‘That and, you know, swimming for hours,’ Chase said, with not nearly as much sympathy as Nina had hoped. ‘What if that’d happened a hundred feet down? That settles it. There’s no way you’re going in the water tomorrow.’

‘I could still use the suit’s thrusters,’ Nina suggested plaintively, but she could tell from Chase’s expression that he wasn’t going to give way on this occasion. ‘Crap. I hate watching through the remote feed. Nobody ever points the camera at what I want to look at.’

‘We do eventually. After you moan at us for five minutes.’ He held out a hand. Nina took it and tentatively stood up, trying to straighten her right leg. ‘Does it still hurt?’

‘No,’ she squeaked untruthfully.

‘Come on, hold on to me. I’ll take you down to the mess.’

‘Just a sec - let me send these pictures to the IHA.’ She hopped to the table and tapped at her laptop. ‘Okay, done.’

‘You’re pushing yourself too hard,’ said Chase, putting an arm round her waist to support her. ‘I know this is what you do and that it’s really important to you, but if you’re not careful you might get hurt. Like with that bloody eel. How far are you willing to go for this stuff ?’

‘Far as it takes.’ She smiled at him. ‘Okay, let’s go eat.’

Half a world away, banks of supercomputers analysed the photographs Nina had just emailed, breaking down the digital images and scanning them for patterns matching any of a vast range of criteria in just a fraction of a second.

No human had been involved in the process, yet: the machines of the National Security Agency in Maryland routinely examined every piece of electronic communication that passed through the networks of the United States, hunting for anything that might potentially be connected to crime, espionage or terrorism. All but the tiniest fraction of the constant deluge of data was deemed to be harmless. Of the remainder, most were passed on to human NSA analysts to make a proper determination.

But there were some search criteria that were kept secret even from the NSA itself, only a handful of people in the entire country - the entire world - being aware of them.

Nina’s pictures matched one of those criteria.

The supercomputers processed the images, picked out the strange characters, compared them against a database - and raised an alarm. Within minutes, three men in different countries had been informed of the discovery.

The Covenant of Genesis had a new mission.

A new target.

3

‘Good morning, Captain Branch!’ said Nina brightly as she limped on to the Pianosa’s bridge.

Branch, an angular, tight-faced American, acknowledged her with a sullen nod. ‘You know the currents are stronger here than at the original site?’ he began, not wasting any valuable complaining time with pleasantries. ‘I’ll have to run the thrusters to hold position. That means I’ll be using more fuel than I expected.’

She forced a polite smile. ‘The IHA will cover any overages, Captain.’

‘It better. And I’d like that in writing sometime today, Dr Wilde.’

‘It’s at the top of my to-do list,’ said Nina, making a mocking face at him as he turned away. The other crew member in the room grinned. ‘How about you, Mr Lincoln?’ she asked him. ‘What’s the weather forecast for today?’

‘Well,’ said Lincoln, a handsome young black man from California, ‘it’s gonna be a very pretty morning, with about a five-knot easterly wind and a thirty per cent chance of rain in the afternoon. Although I foresee a one hundred per cent chance that our guests from the IHA are gonna get wet.’ He gestured down at the pontoon dock, where the day’s diving preparations were under way.

‘Not me today,’ Nina said. ‘Got to sit this one out.’

‘Damn, that’s a shame. Still, if you need something to do, may I invite you to take advantage of the Pianosa’s extensive range of leisure activities? By which I mean a deck of cards with the aces marked, a box of dominoes and the PlayStation in my quarters. I got Madden!’

‘That’s enough clowning around, Mr Lincoln,’ Branch snapped. ‘Go make yourself useful and check the galley inventory. I’m sure somebody’s been helping themselves to the canned fruit.’

‘Yes, sir !’ said Lincoln, giving Branch an exaggeratedly crisp salute and winking at Nina as he exited. She smiled back at him, then looked through the windows. The ship was about six miles from the nearest island, a low shape at the head of a chain stretching off into the distant haze. The sea was calm, the only other vessel in sight a white dot rounding the island. Away from the shipping lanes, the Pianosa’s only company over the course of the expedition so far had been the occasional passing yacht or fishing boat.

Although it meant negotiating several steep sets of stairs and ladders, she decided to head down to the dock; anything was better than hanging around with Branch. Compared to other survey vessels Nina had been aboard in the past, the Pianosa was relatively small, a 160-foot piece of rust-streaked steel that was a good decade older than she was. But while Branch was far from the most charming ship’s master she had ever met, he knew his job, and his ship was up to the tasks the IHA needed of it, even if it lacked creature comforts.

‘How’s the leg?’ the drysuited Chase called as she reached the bottom of the steep gangway running down the ship’s side to the dock. Only one of the Pianosa’s boats was in the water today, the other hanging from its crane on the deck above.

‘Oh, just fine. Y’know, I think I feel up to diving after all.’

He eyed her right foot, on which she was conspicuously not putting her weight. ‘Sure you do.’

‘Oh, all right, it still hurts like hell. It sucks when you’re right.’

‘But I’m always right!’ Chase said smugly. ‘Your life must just be one crap thing after another.’

She gave him a sly smile. ‘You really want me to go down that road?’

‘Maybe not, then. Did you get the weather?’

‘Yeah. Looks like it’s going to be fine - maybe some rain later, but nothing serious.’

‘Suits me. Oh, here we go.’ Bobak and Bejo made their way down the gangway, carrying a plastic case between them. They put it down and opened it to reveal a bright yellow pod the size of a large pumpkin, a spotlight and a bulbous lens cover giving it a lop-sided ‘face’. Bobak connected one end of a long cable to it. ‘At least you’ll be able to watch.’

‘If you aim the thing at anything worth seeing.’ The remote camera unit had no manoeuvring abilities of its own, and was reliant on the divers to move it around. ‘We should have got Matt to make us one of his little robot subs. At least that way I could control it myself.’

‘Yeah, it’s not like you buzzing an ROV round my head would get annoying.’

Gozzi lumbered down the gangway carrying the larger of the two vacuum pumps. ‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Have we got everything?’

Chase nodded at the equipment lined up along the pontoon. ‘Yup. All the suits are charged and gassed up.’

‘Okay,’ said Nina. ‘I’ll get back to the lab and set up the remote. Now . . . you will remember to take it with you, won’t you?’

‘Ah, get moving, Hopalong,’ said Chase, waving her away. Nina grinned, then started back up the gangway as Bejo and two other crew members began helping the IHA team into their suits.

She paused on the main deck, surveying the ocean. As Lincoln had promised, it did indeed look as though it would be a beautiful day. The sun was steadily rising into a deep blue sky, and the only hints of cloud were mere wisps above the island chain. The white boat she had noticed earlier was now out in open water and seemed to be heading in their general direction, but apart from that everything was quiet. Perfect for a day of potentially world-shaking archaeological exploration . . . even if she would have to experience it second-hand.

Taking a last look at the glittering sea, she entered the ship.

‘What do you see?’ Chase asked a few minutes later.

‘I see . . . some English guy with a funny face,’ Nina replied into her headset. On her monitor screen in the lab, Chase was holding up the remote with the camera pointed at him, the fish-eye lens ballooning his features.

‘Can’t be me, then. I’m devilishly handsome.’

‘Devilish I can agree with.’

He made an amused noise, then put down the remote on the dock, pointing out to sea. The horizon tilted at an angle.

Two dots were visible against the blue water, small boats heading side by side towards the Pianosa. But Nina, setting up the rest of her equipment, barely registered them.

On the bridge, Branch had noticed the two boats, and another one besides. The pair off the starboard bow, he saw through binoculars, had five or six people in each, but they were too far off for him to make out any details.

The other, larger vessel, off to port, was a motor yacht, an expensive-looking white and blue cruiser. He had spotted it earlier, but paid it little attention until now. Someone was standing on the forward deck, leaning against something covered in a colourful sheet of fluttering cloth, and he caught a glimpse of others moving about in the raised bridge.

It only took him a moment to realise that all three boats were on approach courses. He looked back along their wakes. They were travelling in subtle zig-zags, tacking to disguise their movements, but were definitely converging on his ship.

His immediate thought was: pirates! But that didn’t make sense. Even before the Indonesian, Singaporean and Malaysian governments had cracked down on the menace, most attacks had taken place in the Strait of Malacca between the three nations, hundreds of miles away. And a forty-year-old tub like the Pianosa was hardly a prime target.

He glanced at the radio, for a moment considering alerting the Coast Guard, but decided that was paranoia. They were still a mile away, and their appearance at the same time could be mere coincidence.

But he kept watching them, just in case.

Chase rocked uncomfortably, trying to shift the deep suit’s weight. Out of the water, the casing was supported almost entirely on his shoulders. It wasn’t unbearably heavy, even for someone of Nina’s modest build, but it was cumbersome enough to be annoying.

Bobak climbed into the water. Gozzi was having difficulty with his helmet, so Bejo had gone to help secure the heavy bubble, leaving Chase waiting to don his own headpiece. He looked out to sea past the moored floatplane, which its pilot Hervé Ranauld was refuelling, to see two boats heading in their general direction. One was a speedboat, the other a larger RIB - a Rigid Inflatable Boat, a staple transport of his time in the Special Air Service.

‘There!’ said Bejo as Gozzi’s helmet finally locked into place. ‘I can help you now, Mr Eddie.’ He padded back across the dock to Chase and picked up his helmet.

‘Great. My ears were starting to get sunburnt.’ The boats had changed course, Chase noticed, and were now definitely heading for the Pianosa. ‘Who’re this lot?’

The cruiser was turning towards the Pianosa, Branch saw through the binoculars. A man clambered down to the foredeck, carrying what looked like a golf bag.

He panned back to the two powerboats, trying to get a clearer look at their occupants. No nets or poles, so they weren’t out fishing—

Fear clenched at his heart. One man had just raised a gun, the unmistakable shape of an AK-47 silhouetted against the blue water.

His companions did the same.

Branch whipped round, looking back at the cruiser. One of the men on the foredeck pulled the coloured sheet away to reveal a machine gun on a stand. The other had taken a tubular object from the bag and was hefting it over his shoulder as he kneeled, aiming it directly at the watching American.

A rocket launcher.

Flame and white smoke burst from its muzzle.

Branch hit the button to sound the ship’s alarm, then grabbed the radio handset—

Too late.

The missile, an Iranian-made copy of the American M47 Dragon guided anti-tank missile, slammed into the Pianosa. Its warhead, over five kilograms of high explosive, obliterated the bridge, Captain Branch . . . and the ship’s radio masts, which toppled like blazing trees into the water.

The shock pounded through the ship, knocking Nina from her chair in the lab.

‘Jesus!’ she gasped as she pulled herself up. A loud alarm wailed. What had caused the explosion? And had anyone been hurt?

She looked at the monitor. The remote’s camera still showed the view from the dock. Bobak was in the water, burning debris raining around him. Beyond him, two boats were roaring towards the ship.

She stabbed at one of the camera controls, zooming in. The men in the boats were all holding guns, aiming them at the dock—

Encumbered by the bulky deep suit, all Chase could do was throw himself to the deck behind a stack of equipment cases as the pirates opened fire, the flat thudding of AK-47s rolling across the water. Some of their shots fell short, little geysers kicking up from the waves.

Others found targets.

The inside of Gozzi’s bubble helmet was suddenly painted with a gruesome splash of red as a bullet pierced the transparent polycarbonate. Darker, thicker chunks of bone and brain oozed down the inner surface, then the dead Italian keeled into the ocean.

Bejo landed beside Chase, yelling in fear as more shots punched into the boxes beside them. Chase looked along the dock. Ranauld threw down the fuel hose and jumped into the Otter’s cockpit. A scream, closer - one of the crewmen had been hit. Through a gap in his minimal cover, Chase saw Bobak in the water, flailing a hand at something burning on his suit.

Dive, you idiot, get under the water—

A line of angry waterspouts snaked towards the Pole. Found him. Shattered fragments of the deep suit’s casing spat into the air. Bobak stiffened, then slowly dropped beneath the surface in an expanding circle of red.

The firing continued as the boats closed in. The pirates were barely aiming, Chase realised - just hosing the dock with machine-gun fire, relying on sheer weight of lead to hit their targets. They weren’t professional soldiers, but amateurs intoxicated by the rare chance to rock ’n’ roll with automatic weapons. In one way, that was good - they lacked training and tactics, which might give him an opening to fight back.

In every other way, it was bad . . . because it meant they were here to kill every single person on the Pianosa.

The video feed from the remote jolted, then went black. The camera pod had been hit.

‘Dr Wilde!’ Nina looked round as Lincoln opened the lab door. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, but they’re shooting at the people on the dock! We’ve got to help them!’

‘We don’t have any weapons aboard,’ he told her grimly. ‘Come on, I’ve got to get you out of here.’

‘To where?’

Lincoln didn’t have an answer as he pulled her to the exit.

The Otter’s engine spluttered, the propeller blurring into motion. Chase saw Ranauld leaning from the cockpit door, desperately fumbling to untie the mooring rope. Bejo rose to a crouch, about to make a run for the aircraft.

A hissing roar from one of the boats, horribly familiar to Chase . . .

He shoved Bejo back down. ‘Duck!’

The Otter’s left wing exploded, hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Shrapnel tore through the plane’s aluminium skin. What few of the windows remained intact were splattered with Ranauld’s blood.

Chase opened his eyes. The Otter’s engine was still running, but fire was licking up its ravaged port side.

Another engine started up, an outboard. The other crewman on the pontoon dock had leapt into the Pianosa’s boat. He revved it to full power, turning as hard as he could to swing round the burning plane—

He barely got twenty feet. Another RPG lanced from the speedboat and hit his craft square in the side, flipping it over and reducing him to a red haze amidst a storm of splinters.

More bullets smashed into the boxes. Chase fumbled for the catches of his deep suit. ‘Get me out of this thing!’

The cruiser closed in, dropping another speedboat from its stern hoist into the water with a frothing smack. It leapt away from its parent vessel, heading round the survey ship’s stern.

The pirate manning the heavy machine gun on the cruiser’s bow took aim at the Pianosa’s superstructure, pulled the trigger—

Lincoln led Nina along a passageway, seeing another crewman ahead wielding a fire extinguisher. Black smoke billowed round him. ‘Shit!’ Lincoln said. ‘We’ll have to go back around—’

The crewman’s chest exploded in a spray of gore as a .50-calibre round tore through him.

The passageway echoed with a rapid-fire metallic bam-bam-bam as more thumb-sized bullets punched a line of holes straight through the hull and inner walls, searing across the corridor and ripping out again through the other side.

The holes got closer, advancing with frightening speed—

Nina dived to the deck. She tried to pull Lincoln down with her, but too late. A bullet hit his upper arm - and blew it off below the shoulder.

Chase and Bejo had managed to unlock the deep suit’s shoulder fastenings and some of the clips on its side when the sound of the machine gun reached them. Chase recognised the distinctive chugging booms immediately - a Browning M2, a weapon in service all over the world, practically unchanged for almost eighty years . . . because it was exceptionally good at ripping apart anything unlucky enough to appear in its sights.

‘Shit!’ he gasped as ragged holes burst open in the Pianosa’s superstructure. He clawed at the remaining clips on his suit - then looked round sharply at a sound from behind.

Another speedboat, rounding the ship’s stern. More pirates aboard it.

They saw him.

Nina screamed as splintered metal and scabbed paint showered her. More bullets slammed overhead . . . then stopped. The machine gun’s rattle paused, then resumed, now aimed at a different part of the ship.

She sat up, horrified by the sight before her. What was left of the dead man at the end of the corridor was mercifully obscured by smoke, but Lincoln was slumped against the wall at her feet. The white wall above him was stained with red, a lopsided hole at its centre where the bullet had continued on after inflicting its carnage. Nothing remained of his upper arm but a sickening stump of torn meat, streams of dark blood running down on to the deck.

‘Oh, Jesus . . .’ Ignoring the pain in her leg, she crouched beside him and checked his pulse. It was weak, irregular. ‘Can you hear me?’

Lincoln’s eyes fluttered open, struggling to focus. ‘What happened?’ he mumbled, trying to sit up.

Nina gently pushed him back. ‘Keep still. You’ve been shot. Don’t move.’

‘My arm hurts . . .’

She choked back a sob. He hadn’t yet realised what damage had been inflicted upon him. ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, unsure what to do. There was a first aid kit in the lab, but she had no idea if it would be any use on a wound of this magnitude.

But it was his only chance of survival. ‘Don’t move,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘Move!’ Chase shouted. ‘Get out of here!’

Bejo didn’t need further prompting. Arms outstretched, he dived from the dock.

The driver turned the speedboat, swinging broadside-on to Chase so all four of its passengers could aim their AKs at him. Still trapped inside his bulky deep suit, a bright yellow target lying helplessly on the edge of the dock, there was nowhere he could go . . .

Except down.

With a yell, he rolled into the sea.

He hit the water on his side, facing the pontoon. The air tanks in the suit’s back might give him some protection - unless the gunmen aimed at his head.

Water gushed in through the open collar, filling the casing. He started to sink.

Not fast enough.

The Kalashnikovs chattered. Bullets cracked off the dock above him, splashed into the sea behind. These pirates were as bad shots as their comrades in the other boats - but only one bullet needed to find its target.

He took a deep breath just before his head was pulled under the water. The suit was getting heavier by the moment, a weight dragging him down . . .

A bullet hit the back of the casing - and he was slammed against the float supporting the pontoon as the air tank ruptured, its pressurised contents spewing out in a churning rush. More bullets thwacked into the water around him.

He pushed himself away from the float. The escaping air forced him downwards, bubbles belching out of the collar past his face as he brought himself into a more upright position.

The pirates were still shooting, but now were just wasting ammo. Even a small depth of water was enough to stop a bullet. Spent rounds spiralled slowly downwards around him.

He reached for the last catches on the suit’s side. Once he got the body open, he could work the quick-releases for the sealing rings around his limbs. Then he could swim under the dock, get his breath back, and work out a plan of action.

The first catch clacked open. One more to go. He tried to hook his gloved finger under it.

He couldn’t.

Chase tried again, clawing harder at the catch. It felt as though it was bent. But he could prise it open with his diving knife . . .

It wasn’t there.

All his gear was still on the surface.

He forced back panic, pushing his fingertip harder against the catch. Still unable to get any purchase, he sank further into the depths.

4

Another fusillade of gunfire tore through the ship as Nina limped towards the lab. She shrieked, dropping flat beside a storeroom door as more holes exploded in the walls. Electrical sparks crackled angrily from a severed cable overhead.

The firing ceased. Nina held her breath, expecting it to resume at any moment, but nothing happened. The gunner had swept the length of each of the Pianosa’s decks. Either he thought he’d killed everybody aboard . . .

Or the next phase of the attack was about to begin.

Chase still couldn’t get any purchase on the damaged clip. Caught unprepared, with no time to get any extra oxygen into his system, his body was rapidly burning through the limited amount of air in his lungs.

The punctured tank ran dry. He kicked, trying to slow his descent, but without air to provide buoyancy the deep suit was nothing but dead weight.

His leg muscles were cramping, lactic acid building up as the oxygen in his blood dwindled. He spasmed, the involuntary movement forcing air from his lungs.

He was about to drown—

Something thumped against him. He looked round - and saw Bejo. His hand scrabbled against the side of the suit, fingernails pushing under the damaged metal . . .

The clip opened.

The deep suit’s front unlatched, the last pockets of air inside it gushing upwards. Chase immediately tugged at the release for the seal on his left shoulder as Bejo did the same on the right. He desperately shrugged his arms free as the young Indonesian pulled at the rings round his thighs to unlock them. The deep suit was still hauling him down like an anchor.

One leg loose.

Fire searing his lungs, head pounding . . .

The other seal was released. Bejo grabbed him and kicked upwards as the suit dropped away, tearing off one of Chase’s flippers.

He was clear - but he still had to reach the surface.

Where the pirates were waiting.

Holes had been blown through the lab’s walls, the metal peeled back like the skin of a half-eaten orange. Some of Nina’s equipment had been destroyed, the magnifying lens over the clay tablet shattered. But she ignored it, instead searching for the first aid kit - Lincoln’s only hope of survival.

She found the green box in a cabinet. No time to check if it contained anything useful, and no point either. Either it did, or the maimed crewman would die. Clutching the box, she hurried back along the corridor.

She heard shouting.

Inside the ship.

The pounding of blood in Chase’s head felt almost like physical blows, blackness roiling in from the edges of his vision as the shimmering waves on the surface drew tantalisingly closer, closer . . .

He breached the surface, taking in clean, fresh air in tremendous whooping gasps. Bejo burst from the water beside him. Chase’s vision cleared - to reveal the speedboat bobbing less than twenty feet away. The men inside it spotted the gasping figures, expressions of surprise rapidly changing to anger.

‘Not again!’ Chase wheezed as he pulled Bejo back underwater, bullets churning the surface around them.

‘Mr Lincoln!’ Nina called. The smoke in the passageway had thickened, making her cough. ‘Can you hear me?’

A faint moan reached her. She limped to where she had left him. The pool of blood had spread, little rivulets winding along the deck.

She put down the first aid kit and opened it. There were several rolls of bandages and a packet containing sterile gauze inside: at least she might be able to stop the bleeding. There didn’t appear to be any painkillers, though.

‘I’m going to put on a bandage,’ she told Lincoln as she tore open the packet. ‘I’ll be as gentle as I can, but it might hurt.’

‘Can’t get . . . any worse . . .’ he said in a strained whisper, eyes closed.

Hesitantly, Nina brought the piece of gauze to the wound. A nub of bone was visible amid the torn muscle, blood dripping from it. She fought past her fear and revulsion and pressed the pad against his arm. Lincoln let out a strangled screech.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she gasped. The gauze was already soaked, and she could feel blood on her palm. Keeping it in place, she groped with her other hand for one of the rolls of bandage. ‘I’m going to—’

Someone cried out through the smoke, a panicked plea - which was cut off by a crackle of gunfire. Nina flinched. The shots were close by.

Lincoln forced his eyes open. ‘Go.’

‘But I can’t leave—’

‘Go!’ He pushed her back. The blood-sodden gauze fell into the crimson pool.

Nina regarded him helplessly, then stood. More voices came through the smoke. Closer.

She gave him one final, fearful look, then turned and ran.

The firing had stopped, but Chase and Bejo stayed underwater, swimming some ten feet beneath the surface.

They passed under the pontoon dock. They could have surfaced between its floats for air, under the cover of the deck - but the pirates would expect them to do just that, and be watching. Instead, they kept swimming along the length of the survey ship. Debris floated above them, smashed pieces of—

The Pianosa’s boat.

The wrecked craft was inverted, smoke wafting from the edge of the hole where the RPG had blasted it. But its wood and fibreglass hull was still afloat, the curved keel above the water.

Chase surfaced inside the upturned boat. Bejo popped up next to him. ‘You okay?’ Chase asked. The young man nodded, panting for breath. ‘Thanks.’ He squeezed Bejo’s shoulder in gratitude.

Engine noise. He looked through the hole to see that the first speedboat had already pulled up at the dock beside the gangway up to the main deck. Behind it, the RIB was coming to a standstill.

Its occupants jumped on to the dock. Chase assessed the pirates in a flash: dirty, scruffy, the wiry, slightly pot-bellied build of men used to intense bursts of adrenalin-fuelled physical exertion, followed by celebratory excess.

But there was one man who stood out: taller, harder-faced, conspicuously lacking the cheap gold chains the others wore. Not all the pirates were amateurs; Chase could tell simply from the way the man held his AK - sideways on its strap across his stomach, the barrel pointed down out of harm’s way - that he had received proper military training in the past. The group’s leader.

He barked an order, then quickly ascended the gangway, his entourage following.

Nina peered round the corner of the passageway, looking back towards Lincoln. She couldn’t just turn her back and abandon him. Maybe their attackers would see he posed no threat and leave him alone, in which case she might be able to return and help . . .

She froze as a man emerged from the smoke, a red bandanna pulled up over his nose and mouth. He had a rifle in his hands, pointing it at Lincoln. He warily advanced, stopping a few feet from the injured crewman, and shouted back over his shoulder.

Nina remained still, terrified that he might spot her but unable to look away. The pirate shouted again. More men appeared through the smoke. One of them, clearly the leader, kicked Lincoln’s leg, shouting in Indonesian. The wounded man looked painfully up at the new arrival, who shouted again.

Finally, Lincoln spoke.

‘Fuck . . . you.’

The briefest flicker of anger crossing his face, the pirate leader shot Lincoln in the forehead with his AK. The back of his skull burst open, dark gore sluicing down the wall behind him.

Nina clapped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out. Move, she told herself. Run! But her legs remained frozen, pinned to the spot by fear.

The pirate was about to step over the corpse when something caught his attention. He crouched, lifting something from the bloodied floor.

The piece of gauze.

He regarded it for a moment, then looked up, eyes filled with the realisation that someone else was still alive.

Now Nina ran.

The ravaged corridor blurred past her as she hunted for a hiding place. She reached the storeroom, the damaged cables still crackling on the wall outside it - then continued past it. She didn’t know what was in the storeroom, but she did know that her lab contained somewhere she could hide.

Whether she would be safe there was another matter.

His breath recovered, Chase looked through the hole again. The only pirate he could see was standing beside the RIB’s mooring behind the empty speedboat with his AK-47 slung casually over one shoulder. The rumble of the other speedboat’s engine echoed off the ship’s side, still searching for him and Bejo - but in the wrong place, on the far side of the dock’s long arm.

‘Wait here,’ he said, then swam under the rear of the upturned boat. He surfaced slowly, only his eyes and nose exposed as he scanned the rest of the dock. The body of one of the Indonesian crewmen was sprawled halfway along it - but there were no more pirates in sight. He looked at the floatplane. The fire had mostly burned itself out, a few patches of spilled fuel still alight on the water below the wrecked wing. Its engine was still running.

He slipped back inside the boat. ‘I’m going to get to the plane,’ he told Bejo, ‘see if the radio’s still working. If I can contact the Coast Guard, they’ll get someone out here to help us.’

‘It could take hours for them to get here, Mr Eddie,’ Bejo warned.

‘I’m not sitting under this fucking thing until those arseholes leave. Not while Nina’s still inside the ship.’ He prepared to dive. ‘You wait in here, though. No point both of us risking our lives.’

Bejo gave him a nervous look. ‘Good luck, Mr Eddie. Try not to die, hey?’

‘That’s part of the plan. Actually, that’s the whole plan.’ Chase submerged once more.

He swam the short distance to the side of the dock. Surfacing between two of the pontoon sections, he checked on his enemies. The RIB driver’s back was now to him as he looked up at the Pianosa, and the speedboat had moved away to lurk near the ship’s stern.

Now or never.

Chase pulled himself out of the water, lying flat on the decking close to the dead crewman. Scattered all about him was the expedition’s diving gear. He crawled along the dock. The boxes and crates would keep him hidden from the men in the speedboat for at least part of the way, meaning he only had to worry about the boatman. The pirate was still facing away, now swinging his Kalashnikov half-heartedly from its strap. Amateur, Chase thought with disdain, but it would only take one shout from him to raise the alarm . . .

He passed the plane’s tail. No more cover, but he had barely ten feet to go to reach the cockpit. He looked round the last crate for the speedboat. It was moving slowly away from him, a couple of men standing and peering into the water to each side, guns ready.

If he moved quickly enough, he could make it before anyone saw him.

One last glance back at the boatman—

He was staring right at Chase. His expression was almost quizzical, as if he was wondering why there were now two bodies lying on the dock when there had only been one before . . . until his brain finally registered that one of them had just moved.

He fumbled with his AK.

Caught in the open, Chase was about to dive back into the water when he saw something lying nearby.

His speargun.

He snatched it up as the pirate brought his rifle to bear—

Chase fired first. The spear lanced down the length of the dock - and hit the pirate square in the chest, the Magnum round at its head blowing a fist-sized hole in his ribcage.

The dead man slumped backwards. But the pirates in the speedboat had heard the noise.

Chase dropped the empty speargun and dived back into the water as they started shooting.

The pirate leader kicked open the lab door, sweeping his gun from side to side before stepping inside.

Nina watched through the narrow slit of her hiding place. More men entered the lab behind him. For a moment, it was as if he was staring right at her. Then he moved out of sight, whispering something in his native language.

The only reason he would have to whisper was if he thought there was a danger of being overheard. He knew she was in here. She froze, not even daring to breathe.

The leader stepped slowly round the table, boots crunching on broken glass as he headed for the storage cabinet in one corner. Finger on his AK’s trigger, he reached out, gripped the locker’s handle . . . and yanked it open, aiming his gun inside—

A small wave of items clattered to the floor at his feet. The locker contained nothing but archaeological kit, tools used to examine and clean artefacts recovered from the sea. One of the pirates giggled.

The leader glared at him, immediately silencing the laugh, then gave an order. All but two of his men left the room to continue the hunt.

The leader, however, moved back to the table. He had found what he was looking for.

Nina’s laptop, the expedition’s cameras . . . and the clay tablet.

He brushed the broken pieces of the magnifying lens off the latter and picked it up, giving the strange text a cursory glance before shoving it into a large satchel. Then he turned his attention to the computer, unfolding a scrap of paper and reading the list on it.

Crunched up painfully inside the sonar array’s case, the device itself now propped against one wall, Nina struggled to see what he was doing. He seemed to be looking for particular files. He tapped on the keyboard, performing a search, then smiled as it came up with a result. He slammed the laptop closed and picked it up, then pointed at the SLR camera. The pirate in the red bandanna took it. The third man asked a question, gesturing hopefully at something out of Nina’s sight, but the leader just crumpled the paper in his fist and issued a command. His men turned and left the room. With a last look round the lab, the leader followed them, Nina’s laptop under his arm.

Nina waited several seconds before opening the lid slightly. The pirates’ footsteps had faded, but even so she held on a little longer before climbing stiffly out. She looked at the table.

That was why they had come here, why they had killed everyone? To steal the clay tablet?

She was about to go to the door when a sound from outside startled her.

One of the pirates was coming back.

Chase heard the speedboat getting closer, the thrum of its outboard a menacing animal growl behind him as he swam.

The pirates had stopped shooting, finally realising their bullets couldn’t penetrate the water. But they were heading straight for him, picking out his shape through the shimmering waves.

The Pianosa’s keel was directly ahead, a dark, barnacle-crusted mass. If he went under it, he could surface for air - and if they followed him round the ship, he could double back and hopefully reach the dock before they caught up.

He swam deeper, passing beneath the survey ship.

Nina didn’t have time to return to her hiding place. All she could do was dart into the locker, hunching down and pulling the door almost shut.

The pirate entered the lab. It was the third man, the one who had been rebuffed by his leader. Nina watched through the crack of the door as he glanced furtively round the room, then picked up the underwater camera.

‘Thieving son of a bitch,’ Nina whispered. She waited for him to leave. But now that he had one valuable piece of equipment, the thought had entered his head that there might be others. His gaze darted calculatingly over the room’s contents.

He regarded the locker. Frowned. Nina knew why.

When he left the room, its door had been open.

Her hand groped through the cramped space, searching for anything among the loose items that she might be able to use as a weapon.

The pirate advanced on the locker. He gripped the handle, pulled it—

Nina blasted a spray of astringent powder into his eyes.

He shrieked and reeled back, clutching at his face with his free hand. His AK came up in the other. Nina leapt from the locker and slapped it aside. It fell from his hand - but the strap tangled round his arm. She couldn’t wrest it from him.

Instead she raced for the door. Behind her, the pirate shouted as he fumbled for his rifle.

Back up the passageway, reaching the storeroom, sparks still popping from the damaged wiring—

Running footsteps ahead. Another pirate was coming back.

She barged open the storeroom door. A cramped chamber, packed with stacked wooden crates and maintenance gear and large paint cans. A porthole on the opposite wall, two .50-calibre bullet holes flanking it.

The porthole was too small for her to fit through.

Trapped.

She slammed the door shut behind her and yanked a crate down to the deck, jamming it against the entrance.

But it wouldn’t hold them for long.

She looked back at the equipment. The twin cylindrical tanks of an oxy-acetylene torch were secured in a rack. But she didn’t know how to use it, or even light it.

Come on, think, something—

A metal box about the same size as the sonar case turned out to contain a piece of gear she couldn’t immediately identify, some sort of heavy-duty grinder or cutter. But simply hiding in the box wouldn’t save her—

The door banged against the crate. The pirates were outside.

Chase surfaced on the Pianosa’s port side. Not far away was another boat, a sleek cabin cruiser. The machine gun he’d heard earlier was mounted on its bow, another pirate manning it.

Sudden noise to his right. The speedboat rounded the Pianosa’s bow, its occupants shouting warnings to the men aboard the cruiser. The machine gunner immediately swung his weapon round.

Looking for him.

Chase didn’t wait to be seen, powering back under the surface, scraping against the barnacles.

He heard the chug of the .50-cal—

The huge bullets were even less effective at penetrating the water than the 7.62mm ammo of the AKs, smashing apart as they hit the surface. But the impacts alone slammed at Chase like miniature grenade explosions. Barely able to endure the assault on his eardrums, he swam back under the ship.

The two pirates didn’t risk shooting through the metal door for fear of ricochets. Instead, they kicked at it until the crate finally broke.

A strange smell was the first thing they noticed as they burst in. The second was a loud hiss. Both came from the same source: a pair of metal cylinders propped against an angle grinder.

The valves on both tanks had been fully opened, the red and green hoses whipping about like enraged snakes as the gases escaped, filling the room, reaching the corridor outside . . .

The electrical cables sparked.

And the acetylene gas, mixed with pure oxygen for maximum combustibility, ignited.

The fireball rushed back into the confined storeroom, instantly engulfing both men in flames as the gas canisters hurtled across the room on a jet of scorching blue fire. One of the pirates was smashed against the door jamb with bone-cracking force. His companion hit the wall across the corridor, the blunt ends of the cylinders crushing his sternum before spinning away like a monstrous Catherine wheel.

The fireball dispersed. Nina flung open the box and jumped up, one arm covering her face to protect it from the dancing fires as she stumbled over the dead pirates. Looking right, she saw the flaming gas cylinders still whirling on the deck.

No way out that way. She went left, passing Lincoln’s body before braving the smoke to find a way into the open.

Head ringing, Chase surfaced once more. He was back by the floating dock. The speedboat was still on the other side of the ship - but it wouldn’t take long to reverse its course.

He pulled himself up, about to run to the nearby gangway - when he realised that there were men about to come down it. The pirates were leaving the ship.

All he could do was dive back into the sea and hope they hadn’t seen him.

That hope barely lasted a second. AK fire kicked up the water above him. He swam deeper, already hearing the speedboat coming back.

5

Nina’s eyes were watering from the smoke, but she finally saw daylight ahead. But she could also hear gunfire, and shouting. She held in a cough as she cautiously looked outside.

Several men were on the starboard side of the main deck, some clomping down the gangway to the dock, others firing at the water. The pirate leader shouted a command. His men stopped shooting and hurried after their fellows. The leader was the last to go, casting a satisfied look at the smoking superstructure before following them to the dock.

Nina emerged, moving in a crouch towards the empty port-side boat hoist. When she was sure the pirates had gone, she stood.

Big mistake.

A shout came from her left. She whirled to see a motor yacht off the port bow, a man in its bridge pointing at her - and another pirate whipping round a huge machine gun.

‘Shit!’ She threw herself to the deck, scrambling towards the starboard side as the gun opened up—

The hammer-blow clangs of bullets pounding into the side of the hull and up through the decking were almost deafening. Debris showered her as machinery and deck fittings were torn apart. A hole the size of her fist exploded through the painted floor just a foot from her head, another bullet striking a thick metal cross-beam beneath the deck with a piercing bang. She screamed and moved faster towards the starboard hoist, the boat in it rocking and jolting as bullets peppered its hull.

The firing stopped. Maybe the gunner thought she was dead, or had run out of ammo. Nina didn’t care, feeling only relief as she reached the starboard side of the deck.

It didn’t last. From there, she had an elevated view of the dock. The floatplane at its far end had lost most of one wing; the Pianosa’s other boat had capsized, debris floating around it. Two bodies lay on the dock - one was a member of the ship’s crew, but the other was unfamiliar; one of the pirates, a spear protruding from a bloody hole in his chest.

Eddie, she thought. He was the only member of the expedition who could have fired such a shot. Was he still alive - and if so, where was he?

The other pirates provided an answer. Some of the men on the dock started shooting into the water, quickly joined by more in a speedboat. Dozens of little waterspouts shot upwards where the bullets hit. The leader shouted again, sounding annoyed. The pirates stopped shooting - but there was no sign of anyone below the waves.

The pirate leader climbed into the larger of the two moored powerboats, the others splitting up to board the vessels. Engines started. They were leaving.

From her vantage point, Nina already knew they weren’t simply going to sail away. The RIB had rocket launchers aboard, the bulbous dark green warheads already loaded.

They hadn’t come just to rob the ship. They were going to sink it, remove all trace of the expedition.

One of the men in the smaller powerboat, almost directly below, looked up - and saw her. He shouted something, raising his gun—

Nina jerked back. The hoist controls were just a few feet away. Above, the bullet-pocked boat was hanging out over the ship’s side, still swaying . . .

She waited for the swinging boat to reach the furthest point of its arc - and kicked the hoist’s emergency release lever.

The boat plunged downwards with a rattle of chains. The pirates barely had time to scream before over half a ton of steel and wood and fibreglass hit, crushing them flat inside their own boat. Blood spurted over the dock.

The men in the two remaining boats gaped at the sight. Only their leader, at the RIB’s controls, was immediately able to overcome his shock, gunning the engine to curve his boat sharply away from the Pianosa.

Chase surfaced under the longer leg of the dock, seeing the RIB moving off. The other moored pirate craft, he saw with surprise, had become the bottom slice of a boat sandwich, its occupants reduced to a glutinous red jam.

‘Nice work,’ he muttered, looking up to see who had been responsible - and filling with relieved delight at the sight of a very familiar face peering over the deck.

His smile vanished as the RIB came about - and two men inside it raised Russian RPG-7 rocket launchers, aiming them at the Pianosa.

The first shot streaked across the water and hit one of the fuel barrels under the gangway. The explosion instantly consumed the others beside it, a huge ball of fire and filthy black smoke seething upwards. The heavy gangway broke loose, crashing aflame on to the burning dock and destroying several pontoon sections.

But the pirates weren’t finished.

The second RPG hit the ship at its waterline, blasting a foot-wide hole through the steel. The sea instantly rushed in, greedily filling every space it found within. A third detonation, from the other side of the Pianosa - the cruiser had also fired a rocket.

Holed in two places, no crew left alive to contain the flooding, the survey ship was doomed.

And Nina was still aboard.

The pirate leader pointed away from the stricken ship, to the northwest. The surviving speedboat turned and surged off in that direction, the RIB following. The deeper rumble of the cruiser’s engine rose as it joined the smaller boats in their escape.

Chase climbed on to what was left of the dock. It was now severed from the ship, slowly drifting away. ‘Nina!’ he shouted up at the Pianosa. ‘Nina, are you okay?’

She crawled to the edge of the deck, dishevelled hair fluttering in the wind, and looked down at him. ‘Eddie, God! Are you all right?’

‘More or less. Is anyone else alive up there?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Nina called back grimly. Toxic black smoke was belching from all the entrances to the superstructure.

Chase glanced at the waterline. The hole made by the RPG was now completely submerged, and dropping lower with increasing speed as the bow took on water. ‘The ship’s sinking - you’ve got to get off.’

‘How? The gangplank’s gone!’

‘Find a life jacket, then jump.’

She looked dismayed. ‘Jump?’

‘Might as well!’ He turned his attention to the overturned boat. ‘Bejo!’

Bejo surfaced beside the wreck. ‘Mr Eddie! You okay?’

‘Yeah,’ Chase told him, pointing at Nina. ‘Get ready to help her when she jumps in. Then bring her over here.’

‘I don’t want to jump in!’ Nina protested, donning a life jacket. ‘It’s too high!’

‘Well, if you wait a couple of minutes it’ll be at water level and you’ll just be able to step off, but I don’t think waiting’s a good idea!’ He indicated the flickers of flame escaping from the ship’s interior.

Nina reluctantly climbed over the railing. ‘Oh . . . craaaap!’ she shrieked as she closed her eyes and dropped into the sea. Bejo quickly reached her and raised her by the shoulders as she gasped and shook her head. He helped her to the dock.

Chase lifted his bedraggled fiancée from the water, then pulled Bejo out before starting for the other end of the dock. ‘Where are you going?’ Nina asked.

‘If the plane’s radio’s still working, we can send a distress call.’ He jogged to the battered Otter. There was an unpleasant moment when he had to push Ranauld’s shrapnel-torn corpse aside to reach the instrument panel, but he saw from the lights on its fascia that the radio was still active.

He reached for the hand-held microphone under the panel and switched the radio to VHF channel 16 - the international distress frequency. ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is the research vessel Pianosa . . .’

The pirate leader looked down sharply as the speeding RIB’s radio crackled. It had been set to receive on channel 16, listening for any distress calls from the survey ship. None had come - destroying the vessel’s bridge and radio masts with the very first shot had seen to that.

But now a survivor was making a call - and worse, it was being answered. Someone aboard an Indonesian Coast Guard vessel was replying in halting English, asking for the ship’s location.

The plane, he realised - it had only been damaged, not destroyed. Its radio was still intact.

No witnesses of the attack could be left alive. His employer had been very clear about that.

The speedboat was the fastest of their three remaining craft. He handed the RIB’s controls to one of his men and beckoned the speedboat closer. ‘There are still people alive!’ he shouted across to its three occupants. ‘Go back and kill them!’

The man at the speedboat’s outboard tugged the red bandanna from his face and gave him an eager, malevolent smile, then swung the vessel about.

‘Oh, bollocks,’ Chase muttered as he concluded the distress call - and saw one of the retreating boats making a hard turn.

They had heard the message.

Stranded on what was left of the pontoon dock, he, Nina and Bejo had nowhere to run. Even if they dived underwater, the pirates could just wait them out, taking shots when they surfaced for air. And they had no weapons.

Except . . .

‘What are you doing?’ Nina called as Chase clambered into the cockpit.

‘I’m going to meet them.’

‘You’re what?’

Chase didn’t answer, instead pushing Ranauld’s body out of the other side. ‘Sorry, Hervé,’ he said as the dead man splashed into the sea. He slid into the pilot’s seat and examined the instrument panel. Most of the dials and gauges were a mystery, but it didn’t matter. With half a wing missing, the Otter wouldn’t be flying anywhere. The only controls he needed were the rudder pedals and the throttle.

The latter, he knew from having watched Ranauld the previous day, was a large lever on the central console. He pushed it experimentally from the marked ‘Idle’ position. The engine note rose sharply, the fuselage vibrating as the propeller increased speed. A good start. He stretched back across the cockpit, untying the mooring rope, then shoved the throttle forward.

A cutting wind whipped through the broken windscreen, the engine’s roar driving into Chase’s skull like a drill. He ignored it, pushing one of the pedals to turn the Otter away from the dock. The plane began to pick up speed - and also to lurch, every small wave on the surface magnified as the floats ploughed through them.

He opened the throttle further. The amount of rudder control increased as the Otter went faster, but the aircraft was worryingly unstable. The wrecked port wing meant it wanted to turn right, the weight of the other wing pulling that side down. But if he applied too much left rudder to straighten out, the plane would tip over.

Sawing at the pedals with both feet in a precarious balancing act, he looked ahead. Through the propeller’s blur he saw the cruiser and the RIB retreating in the distance - and the speedboat coming at him.

More power. He couldn’t let the pirates get into range of the dock. The Otter smashed through the waves. Spray gushed through the hole in the fuselage, soaking him. He was doing thirty knots, and increasing.

The speedboat was approaching fast. One of the pirates stood up, gun ready. The driver changed course, turning to pass along the Otter’s port side.

The missing wing meant they had a closer approach. A better shot.

Chase turned straight at them. The plane began to tip over, a sickening slow-motion sensation as it approached the point of no return . . . then recovered as a wave impact pitched it back. The boat turned again, harder, the driver realising what he meant to do and trying to avoid the collision—

Chase ducked as the gunman fired. A burst of bullets clanked along the Otter’s nose and through the cockpit. One of the remaining pieces of windscreen shattered, sharp fragments whipped back at him by the wind.

Then the boat was past him.

Chase pushed down hard on the rudder pedal.

The plane tipped - but this time he wanted it to. The starboard wingtip sliced into the water. The sudden drag swung the whole aircraft round, much faster than with the rudder alone. Then the centrifugal force of the tight turn pushed the Otter back upright . . . and Chase straightened out, aiming directly at the speedboat as he jammed the throttle fully forward.

The engine noise became a scream, the blast from the propeller almost blinding him. But he could still see just enough to make out the speedboat almost side-on to him as the driver desperately tried to turn out of his way, but too late—

The gunman’s upper body instantly disappeared in a spray of red as the propeller hit him, his legs and abdomen remaining standing for a moment before the Otter’s floats crashed into the speedboat’s side and threw what was left of the body into the sea. Another man was clipped by the tips of the blades and flung over thirty feet into the air, an arc of blood tracing his path to a splashdown some distance away.

The driver barely managed to duck before the crash. The propeller scythed over him, missing by inches, but the force of the collision slammed his head against a seat.

Even braced for the impact, Chase was still thrown painfully against the control column. Clutching his bruised chest, he pulled back the throttle. The engine noise dropped to a low grumble.

He pushed himself up and looked outside. The speedboat was impaled on the Otter’s floats. He climbed out, finding a foothold on the float and edging along it to the plane’s nose. The propeller was still turning, so he jumped into the speedboat’s bow, then hunched down to pass underneath it. The pirate was sprawled across the stern, starting to recover—

‘Come in, number seven,’ said Chase, grabbing him and banging his head against the seat again. ‘Your time is up!’

The pirate swiped an arm at Chase’s face. He responded with a crunching headbutt, breaking the Indonesian’s nose. The man screeched, spitting blood.

Chase pulled the pirate up by the bandanna round his neck. ‘You speak English?’ he demanded. He doubted the snarled reply was complimentary. ‘Let’s try that again,’ he said, hauling him round so that his head was within inches of the propeller’s buzzing tips. ‘Do? You? Speak? English?’

‘Yes!’ shrieked the pirate, eyes wide with terror. He tried to twist away, but Chase forced him closer.

‘Why did you attack us?’

‘Don’t know! Just a job!’

‘Who hired you?’

Despite his fear, the pirate remained silent. Chase frowned and pushed him into the propeller. Most of the man’s right ear disappeared with a meaty thwat! and a puff of blood. He screamed as Chase pulled him away.

‘Who hired you?’ Chase repeated, more forcefully. ‘You’ve only got one more ear, then after that it’s on to the softer bits.’ He glanced down for emphasis.

‘Don’t know!’ the pirate wailed. ‘Only Latan knows!’

‘Who’s Latan?’

‘Boss man, our boss!’

Chase remembered the ex-military man he’d seen leading the pirates. He looked for the retreating RIB. Like the cruiser, it was now just a dot in the distance, powering away at full speed. ‘Where’s he going?’

The pirate lashed out in an attempt to break free. Chase rammed a fist into the other man’s stomach, then grabbed him again.

Thwat!

‘Can you still ’ear me?’ said Chase as his prisoner, blood now running down both sides of his head, screamed again. ‘Where’s your base? Where’s Latan going?’

‘Mankun Island! Mankun Island!’

The name meant nothing to Chase, but he could tell from the desperation in the pirate’s voice that he was telling the truth. He pulled him away from the propeller and threw him down in the stern. ‘All right, Van Gogh,’ he growled, ‘stay there and shut up.’ He sat down, one foot on the moaning man’s chest as he tried to piece together what had happened. Whoever had hired this Latan to attack the expedition had been after something very specific, something so valuable - or such a threat - that everybody aboard the Pianosa had to be murdered to cover up the fact.

It had to be one of the artefacts Nina had found, but how could some old relic be worth so much carnage?

He saw the camera from Nina’s lab under the rear seat. Whatever it was they’d been after, maybe there was still a picture on the memory card . . .

Movement caught his attention and he snapped his head round, seeing the menacing fin of a shark briefly break the surface before slipping back under the waves. The blood in the water must have attracted it—

The pirate twisted out from under his foot, clawing for something behind his back as he took advantage of Chase’s momentary distraction. He sat up, clutching a pistol that had been hidden in his waistband.

Chase rolled backwards, sweeping a savage kick at the pirate. His heel smashed into his chin with tooth-snapping force. The pirate was thrown back, firing a shot wildly into the air as he toppled over the stern to splash into the sea.

Heart racing, Chase pulled himself upright to see the pirate surfacing. Blood streaming down his face, he flicked up the gun—

And was dragged under the water, so shockingly fast that the gun was already submerged again before he could pull the trigger. A plume of bloody froth belched up as the tiger shark which had just clamped its ferocious jaws round the pirate’s chest pulled its meal down into the depths.

Chase let out a startled half-laugh as he watched predator and prey disappear. He regained his breath, then hummed a few bars from the Jaws theme, looking back towards the half-sunken Pianosa and wondering how long it would take to get back to Nina with a smashed boat stuck to his plane.

After all, swimming was definitely an unsafe option.

6

‘Attacked by pirates in the morning,’ said Nina, ‘and a twenty-eight-hour flight in the afternoon. I don’t know which is worse.’

The humour was forced; she was still horribly shaken. But in dealing first with the Coast Guard, then with officials from the Indonesian government after being airlifted to Jakarta, she had concealed her true feelings beneath a mask of officialdom. She was still the leader of the expedition, and she had a responsibility to give the authorities as clear and dispassionate an account of events as possible.

Now, the United Nations wanted to hear that account as well. In person. A flight had been hastily arranged to return her to New York. Gruelling though the long trip would be, Nina was certain it would pale compared to the interrogation she would endure at the UN.

‘Yeah,’ said Chase. ‘Private flight with no other passengers? Horrible. Still, at least you won’t have to worry about getting stuck next to a screaming baby.’

‘No, just you looting the minibar.’ Chase’s expression suddenly became evasive. ‘What?’

‘Well, the thing is,’ he began, not quite meeting her gaze, ‘I, er . . . won’t be going with you.’

‘You what?’

‘I’ll come back to New York as soon as I can, I promise! But there’s something I need to do here first.’ He lowered his voice. They were waiting in the United Nations’ offices in Jakarta, and as well as UN staff there were also officials from the Indonesian government and its law enforcement agencies buzzing around. ‘There was something I didn’t tell the cops. I know where the pirates were going: some place called Mankun Island. So I’m going to head over there and have words.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell them?’ Nina said. ‘If they know where the pirates are, they’ll be able to catch them!’

‘No, they won’t - it’ll take too long. Even if they decide to go after the pirates tomorrow, it’ll be too late. They’ll be gone - and we’ll never find out who hired them. But Bejo knows where this island is, and he knows people in the area. We’ll fly up there, get a boat and check the place out tonight. Before those bastards have a chance to fuck off with their money.’

‘Or maybe you’ll get yourself killed. And Bejo too.’

‘He wants to do it,’ said Chase. ‘The guys on the ship were his friends.’

She shook her head. ‘Eddie, this is a terrible idea. If anything goes wrong . . .’

‘It won’t,’ he assured her.

‘I don’t suppose it would make any difference if I told you that I really, really need you with me in New York, and as your boss ordered you to come?’ One look at his expression gave Nina her answer. ‘Yeah, thought not.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he promised. ‘And I’ll keep Bejo out of trouble. Enough people’ve died today. Enough good people,’ he added with chilling emphasis.

Resigned, Nina rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Just don’t do anything stupid, okay.’

‘Hey, you know me, love.’

‘That’s why I said it.’ She kissed his cheek, then stood. ‘I’d better get to the airport. Don’t want to keep the UN waiting, huh?’

‘Who knows, maybe by the time you get back to New York, I’ll have found out what all this is about.’

‘Maybe,’ she echoed glumly. They regarded each other for a long moment, then embraced and kissed.

‘See you soon,’ said Chase as they reluctantly moved apart.

‘I’d better.’

‘We’re close,’ Bejo warned.

It was now night, a clinging, muggy humidity sticking Chase’s dark shirt to his skin. But he ignored the discomfort as he turned off the little boat’s outboard. ‘You sure it’s the right place?’ he asked. In the distance, he saw a handful of lights.

‘Nobody lives on Mankun, not usually,’ Bejo told him. ‘Pirates use it sometimes. Not often, though - too far from shipping lanes.’

‘They came a fair old way to get to us, though.’ They were almost eighty miles from where the Pianosa had been attacked: a long run for the pirates to reach their base. But it meant less chance of anyone looking for them here.

He picked up a pair of battered binoculars for a closer look. The lights resolved themselves into bulbs hung on a cluster of tumbledown wooden shacks on the shore of a small inlet. Beyond them rose damp, dark rainforest. The biggest of the structures extended out into the water, apparently a covered dock. There was a large boat inside. The motor cruiser? It was an expensive vessel - maybe the pirates planned to sell it.

‘Mr Eddie,’ Bejo said, voice tense. ‘Look left.’

Chase panned the binoculars to find what had caught the young man’s eye. Almost invisible against the black water was a boat, a very faint light at its bow. The dim yellow glow picked out the outline of a seated man - and the glint of metal in his hand. A rifle.

‘They pretend to be fishing,’ said Bejo. ‘But they’re lookouts. They warn the other pirates if the police or the Coast Guard come - anyone else, they just kill.’

Scanning left and right, Chase saw two more ‘fishermen’ lurking in the distance. Nobody could get within half a mile of the inlet without being spotted.

Nobody in a boat, at least.

He gave the binoculars to Bejo. ‘Okay,’ he said, picking up a sheathed knife, ‘wait here. I’ll signal you when it’s clear to row in.’

‘Good luck, Mr Eddie,’ Bejo whispered as Chase climbed into the water, barely making a splash.

The pirate keeping watch from the small boat was not only bored, but frustrated. Every so often, he heard noises from the shore, whooping and cheering as his comrades celebrated the success of their mission. Sure, not everyone had come back from it, but it wasn’t as though the men were close friends. He barely knew the names of most of them, the entire operation having been put together literally overnight, its members hurriedly recruited from seemingly every desperate dive on the Sumatran islands. What he resented was being stuck out here on guard duty while the others drank and gorged and gambled. Latan had even rounded up some whores from somewhere. And here he was, bobbing half a kilometre away with nothing but a lamp and a Kalashnikov for company . . .

A small sound brought his thoughts back to his job. It sounded like bubbles breaking the surface. A fish?

Seeing no sign of any approaching boats, he leaned over to find the source. A couple of bubbles popped a handspan from the boat’s side. The pirate looked more closely, seeing a pale shape below the surface. A big fish. No need for a net; he could just reach in and grab it—

It reached out and grabbed him.

Chase’s hand locked round the man’s neck and dragged his face underwater to silence him as his other hand drove the knife deep into his neck with a chut. He kept hold as the pirate thrashed and wriggled . . . then went limp. The AK-47 splashed into the water, bumping against him as it sank. He waited a few seconds until he was sure the man was dead, then surfaced and climbed aboard.

‘Don’t rock the boat,’ he told the corpse. He looked out to sea, holding his hand in front of the lamp to signal Bejo.

Ten minutes later, they were ashore.

After rowing to meet Chase, Bejo had silently guided the little boat to make landfall a short distance from the rotting buildings, waiting in the water until they were certain there were no patrols on shore. There weren’t. That the pirates only had three men on watch in the boats showed they weren’t expecting trouble.

They were wrong.

Bejo pulled the boat ashore as Chase squeezed as much water as he could from his clothes. ‘What’s the plan, Mr Eddie?’

‘The plan is for you to stay here and wait for me,’ Chase told him. He could see the young Indonesian’s disappointment even in the dark.

‘But I want to come.’ He started towards the shacks.

Chase held him back. ‘When I said “stay here and wait for me”, I was being polite. What I meant was “stay here so you don’t get your fucking head blown off !” Wait here.’

‘But—’

‘Stay!’

‘I’m not a dog, Mr Eddie!’ Bejo protested in an irritated whisper as Chase cautiously made his way along the waterline.

He reached the first building, the large covered dock. As he’d thought, the cruiser was inside, the .50-cal still mounted on its bow. It hadn’t even been unloaded, a belt of ammo dangling from it. He shook his head. Amateurs.

He moved on. The other shacks were lit inside and out by bulbs strung from their roof beams, a generator puttering away somewhere to power them. He crept to the nearest shack and peeped through a gap in the wood. A strong smell of hot grease and searing meat hit him, something sizzling in a large wok atop a camping gas hob. The skinned carcass of a goat hung from the ceiling, chunks of flesh having been crudely carved from it. A man was drunkenly whacking away with a large cleaver.

It wasn’t Latan. Chase moved on, slipping round the shack to the waterline. A rickety walkway ran along it, connecting the huts to a jetty. The RIB was moored to the latter, along with a couple of small rowing boats.

It struck him that the RIB was the only boat capable of a fast getaway; the cruiser would have to be untied, started up and reversed out of the dock. Once trouble started - and it would - the inflatable powerboat would be the first place the pirate leader would run.

He had to make sure Latan didn’t get away. Sabotage the engine, maybe? Or . . .

A noise behind him, a creak of rotten wood. Chase spun, fists ready to pummel the pirate—

‘Mr Eddie!’ squeaked Bejo, throwing up his hands in fright as Chase arrested a blow inches from his face.

He hauled Bejo into the shadows between two of the shacks. ‘I told you to stay put!’ he hissed.

‘They killed my friends!’ the teenager insisted. ‘I want to help - I can help. I just heard some of the pirates talking about Latan. They say he’s waiting for a man to come here with money.’

‘They haven’t been paid yet?’ That explained why they were still here, then - and if he could identify Latan’s employer . . . ‘Okay,’ he said reluctantly, ‘stick with me. But do exactly what I tell you, all right?’

‘Okay, Mr Eddie,’ Bejo replied, smiling. ‘So what do we do?’

Junk was scattered round a tree stump between the shacks. Chase picked up a coil of rusted steel cable. ‘Keep watch here, warn me if anyone’s coming.’ He started to creep along the jetty.

‘Where are you going?’

Now it was Chase’s turn to smile. ‘To make sure that boat’s tied up properly.’

It took a couple of minutes to complete his work. Job done, Chase moved back ashore, and accompanied by Bejo continued his search for the pirate leader. The largest and noisiest shack contained about a dozen men, most of them engrossed in a fast-paced dice game that involved a lot of aggressive shouting as the others looked on and drank.

Still no sign of Latan. They passed through the shadows to sneak up to a small hut. Sounds of activity came from within, but this definitely wasn’t gambling, except with the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted disease.

Feeling uncomfortably like a voyeur, Chase looked through a hole to see a bored-looking woman lying on a ratty mattress as a drunken, sweaty man pounded away at her. The bearded Casanova wasn’t Latan, however, so Chase withdrew. He was about to carry on to the next shack when he realised Bejo wasn’t following. He glanced back to see the young Indonesian gawping at the scene inside the hut, mesmerised. In equal parts impatient and amused, he moved back to pull him away—

A large man with a crooked scar running from his temple to his cheek threw open the gambling den’s door and strode towards the hut, shouting angrily. Chase pushed Bejo down, then froze. He was in shadow, his clothes dark, but the pirate was only a few feet away as he banged on the door. If he looked to the side, even for a moment, his eyes would adjust enough to make out the shapes hiding there.

But he didn’t, instead continuing to hammer at the door. The man inside said something that was unmistakably the equivalent of ‘Give me another minute!’ This didn’t satisfy the scarred pirate, who kicked the door open and stomped inside. A yelp, some thumping, and then the interrupted lover was flung out into the open, trousers round his ankles. The door slammed shut. The bearded man yelled a half-hearted insult at the hut, then gathered up his dignity and his pants before trudging back to join the men in the gambling den.

Chase and Bejo remained still until he was inside, then crept round the back of the love shack. The next shack contained only a man sprawled across a bunk, snoring and drooling, with an overturned bottle of whisky beside him. Not Latan. Then a dark, empty shell of a hut, its ceiling half collapsed. They were running out of places to search . . .

A new noise. Not from the pirates - from the sky. A helicopter.

Chase and Bejo dropped flat behind some rusting fuel drums as several men emerged from the largest shack. A fierce wind whirled round the camp as the chopper appeared over the trees. The men were armed, but not on alert. They were obviously expecting the new arrival.

Chase finally spotted Latan, emerging from a small hut at the edge of the derelict settlement. Carrying a canvas bag in one hand, the pirate leader was tugging a shirt over his bare shoulders with the other. He joined his men, and they moved to an open area near the treeline as the helicopter switched on its spotlight and descended.

‘Wait here,’ Chase told Bejo. ‘Seriously, don’t move.’ He checked that nobody else was coming from the buildings, then quickly crawled on his stomach to another pile of abandoned junk closer to the landing site. He wanted to get a good look at whoever Latan was meeting.

The helicopter touched down, two men in dark jungle camouflage fatigues and bearing SIG assault rifles jumping out from either side, clearly unimpressed by the pirates facing them. As the rotor blades wound down, a third man emerged and surveyed the scene before striding towards Latan. About Chase’s age, mid to late thirties, he guessed; tall, blond, eyes commanding. A professional soldier.

‘Are you . . . Mr Vogler?’ Latan called over the falling noise of the helicopter.

The blond man stopped a few feet from him. ‘I am.’

‘Where is our money?’

‘Where are the items?’ Vogler countered. His English was crisp and precise. Chase knew the accent: Swiss.

Latan opened the bag, showing him Nina’s laptop and the clay tablet. ‘Here. But . . .’ His momentarily hesitant expression suggested that he knew he was about to chance his luck, but was greedy enough to try anyway. ‘We want more money. None of my men were supposed to die.’

‘Ironic,’ said Vogler, unconcerned. ‘I was actually thinking about cutting your payment. I heard a rumour from Jakarta that there were survivors - and our deal was that you eliminate everyone aboard.’

‘We kill everyone,’ Latan insisted.

‘Then you completed the deal as agreed - and you will accept the agreed payment.’ Vogler gave him a cold look. ‘I’m sure your friend in Singapore explained that. Trying to deceive the Covenant of Genesis would be very dangerous.’ Chase made a mental note of the odd name - the pirates’ paymasters? ‘We would usually have done a job like this ourselves, but time was a factor. So be grateful for the work . . . and the money.’

He gestured to one of his men. The soldier reached into the helicopter, taking out a briefcase and bringing it to him.

‘Your payment,’ said Vogler, opening the case and showing its contents to Latan. Chase couldn’t see how much was inside, but Latan’s eager expression suggested it was plenty. ‘Now, give me the artefact.’

Latan dumped the canvas bag at his feet. Vogler crouched and examined the items inside, then looked up sharply. ‘What about the cameras?’

‘We saw no cameras,’ said Latan. ‘They must have sunk with the ship.’

Vogler regarded him unblinkingly. ‘Are you sure?’

‘We saw no cameras,’ Latan repeated. Vogler didn’t appear convinced, but after a moment he zipped up the bag and handed over the briefcase.

‘Then our business is concluded,’ he said, lifting the bag and turning for the helicopter. He paused, looking back. ‘I hope I have no reason to see you again, Mr Latan. If there is anything you wish to say, now is the time.’

Latan had already opened the case and was flicking through the banknotes inside, but Vogler’s words wiped the avaricious smile from his face. ‘No, nothing,’ he managed to say.

‘Good.’ Vogler and the two soldiers climbed back aboard the chopper, which brought its rotors to full power and took off in a whirlwind of leaves, disappearing over the dark jungle.

Chase kept his eyes fixed on Latan. Some of the other men eagerly tried to grab their shares out of the case, but Latan snapped it shut. Disappointed, they headed back to the large shack, while their leader returned to the smaller building from which he had come. Chase waited until everyone was back inside, then rejoined Bejo.

‘Okay, I’m going to have words with Latan. You keep hiding here until I come back. Unless everything goes pear-shaped - then you run like buggery!’

‘Pear-shaped?’ Bejo asked, puzzled.

‘You’ll know. Don’t take any chances - just run. Okay, see you soon.’ Leaving Bejo hiding amongst the barrels, he crept across the camp to Latan’s hut.

‘Got you, you bugger,’ he muttered as he looked under a half-closed shutter to see Latan’s hard features in the dimly lit room beyond. The pirate leader had claimed the best - or least worst - shack for his own private use, and done the same regarding its other occupant. He sat shirtless on a bed, an attractive young woman in a tight red minidress stroking his back as she whispered in his ear. Soft music was playing from an iPod connected to a small pair of speakers.

Chase also saw the briefcase - and an AK propped up in a corner. It was within reach of the bed, but if Latan was preoccupied with the woman . . .

He went to the door and peered through a crack. The woman unzipped her dress and shrugged it off her shoulders, Latan’s hands groping her bare breasts. It was a good job he’d made Bejo stay behind; the clunk of his jaw dropping would have alerted the entire village.

The pirate was still within an arm’s length of the Kalashnikov. Chase frowned. Come on, you horny bastard, move away . . .

The pair finally changed position, the woman lying prone on the bed with the now-naked Latan on top of her. She let out a little grunt of discomfort as he thrust into her.

Chase opened the door, and advanced carefully across the wooden floor with the knife in one hand. The couple faced away from him, the AK just out of Latan’s reach. All Chase had to do was get to the gun before the pirate realised he was there—

The floor creaked beneath his foot.

Latan was preoccupied, but the woman turned her head - and squealed at the sight of the knife.

Training kicking in, Latan lunged for the rifle.

If he fired even a single shot, the other pirates would be alerted—

Too far away to make a grab for the gun, Chase grabbed something else instead.

Latan gasped like a choking cat as Chase’s free hand clamped round his genitals. The pirate’s twitching fingers stopped just short of the AK-47. Chase pulled. The fingers hurriedly withdrew.

‘This isn’t my usual sort of thing, by the way,’ said Chase. ‘Just so you know.’ He nodded at the woman, who was pinned beneath Latan and watching fearfully. ‘Sorry to interrupt, love. Don’t mind me.’

‘I fucking kill you!’ the pirate rasped.

‘Takes a lot of balls for someone in your position to make threats,’ Chase told him amiably, ‘but you don’t have ’em.’ He tightened his grip, and Latan gave a strangled groan. ‘So this guy who hired you, Vogler - who is he and where do I find him?’

‘Fuck you - gnngh!’

‘You won’t have anything to fuck with if you don’t tell me,’ said Chase, jabbing the point of his knife against the pirate’s testicles, drawing blood. ‘Last chance. Or I’ll fucking feed them to you.’

‘Never met him before tonight!’ Latan moaned. ‘He talked to me through a middleman in Singapore last night.’ He glanced at the briefcase. ‘Hired us to get the computer and the tile with writing on it, then sink ship.’

‘Why did he hire you? What’s so important about that tablet?’

‘Don’t know, he didn’t say!’

Chase frowned. Latan was probably telling the truth. ‘What about this . . . this Covenant of Genesis?’ he asked instead. ‘What is it?’

He felt Latan tense. ‘I - I can’t tell you!’

‘Oh, you can,’ Chase said. ‘Get up.’ The woman turned over, arms clutched protectively over her chest, as the pirate leader crawled backwards off her. Chase did a double take as he saw there was more to Latan’s companion than met the eye. ‘Whoa,’ he said, amused. ‘You’re no lady - you’re a man, baby, a man!’ He withdrew the knife so the pirate could sit up. ‘So you’re into ladyboys, eh? And I thought pirates preferred Roger the cabin boy—’

The ‘woman’ suddenly sprang to life, whipping up both feet flat against Latan’s chest and shoving him backwards with surprising force. Latan slammed into Chase, whose grip on the pirate’s jewels was jolted loose as he staggered back. With a roar, the naked man whirled to face his attacker.

Chase brought up the knife to defend himself - but instantly changed his plans as he saw the transsexual reach for the gun. Her hand closed round it—

The knife thunked deeply into the battered old weapon’s wooden grip, transfixing the ladyboy’s hand. She screamed - and her finger clenched convulsively on the trigger. The AK-47 blasted a spray of bullets into the ceiling. Shouts rose outside as the other pirates heard the gunfire.

Chase punched Latan in the face, knocking him down, and ran.

7

Chase sprinted through the little settlement. He passed the rusting fuel drums - Bejo was gone. The kid had done the right thing and got the hell out; now it was his turn.

Yelling from the large shack. He snatched up the handle of a broken oar and smacked it into the face of the first pirate to emerge, ducking round the shack’s side as more pirates jumped over the fallen man and came after him. He saw the sea ahead, the jetty extending out into the darkness. Maybe rigging the RIB hadn’t been such a good idea - he could have used it to escape—

A man ran out on to the walkway in front of him. He saw Chase and raised his gun.

Chase hurled himself through an open window into the neighbouring hut: the pirates’ makeshift kitchen. He landed on a table, which collapsed in a shower of rice and clanging metal bowls. He jumped up, finding himself beside the sizzling wok as the pirate appeared at the window and brought his AK to bear.

Chase snatched up the wok and whipped it round, its contents sluicing out. Boiling fat splashed across the walls - and the pirate’s face. The man screamed as his skin instantly blistered.

A door across the room crashed open. Still holding the wok, Chase spun to see two more men rush in. Neither had a gun - but one saw the meat cleaver on a bench near the hanging goat and ran to pick it up.

The other man, a thick-necked, heavily tattooed thug in a string vest, charged at Chase, knotted hands outstretched—

Chase let him close in - then slammed the wok against the side of his head. The sturdy metal bowl rang like a gong, but that was nothing compared to the sizzling hiss as the hot metal burned the pirate’s cheek like a branding iron. He collapsed, overcome by pain.

The second man approached more warily, the cleaver in his hand. Chase heard shouting outside. It wouldn’t take the others long to realise where he was . . . and surround him.

A frying pan against Kalashnikovs. Not good. He had to get out into the open.

The pirate wasn’t going to let him. He came closer, swinging the hefty blade. Chase jumped back, bringing the wok up like a shield. Another swipe, aiming for Chase’s hand. Metal clashed against metal - and the wok’s bowl broke off the handle to hit the floor with a hollow bong.

He retreated, throwing the handle at the pirate’s face. The man swatted it away, then gripped the cleaver with both hands as they circled each other. Chase bumped against a bench, knocking over a plastic bottle of cooking oil. The glutinous liquid blurped out, spattering on the floor.

The pirate swung.

Chase threw himself backwards, the tip of the blade ripping his shirt across his left pectoral before it struck a metal pole supporting the roof, hacking clean through it at a steep angle. The top half of the pole clanged to the floor, the roof creaking.

Men rushed through the open door—

Chase flipped the plastic bottle at the naked flame of the gas hob.

The oil ignited, the bottle bursting open and showering liquid fire across the kitchen. The pirates who had just entered were engulfed, hideous screams filling the room as they staggered blindly in a futile attempt to escape the searing fat.

But the sudden inferno reached Chase too as it spread to the spilled oil on the floor. His dark jeans were still wet from his swim, but the fire leapt up to light the drops of splattered grease on his clothes. ‘Oh, shit!’ he gasped, jumping back and swatting at his burning leg. He bumped against the hanging carcass, setting it swinging.

The pirate with the cleaver took another swipe, forcing him back towards the blaze. Chase was now cut off from the door, and his opponent was between him and the nearest window. The dead goat caught fire. He flinched away as it swung back and forth, looking for an opening, a weapon. Nothing. The pirate advanced, flames reflecting dully from the cleaver’s blade as he pulled it back for another strike—

Chase plunged his hand into the carcass and spun it round, a shield of meat and bone. The cleaver hacked deep into the dead animal with a crack of breaking ribs. He felt intense heat on the back of his head as his hair started to burn, but held firm as he slammed the flaming goat into the other man’s face and knocked him backwards, jolting the cleaver from his grip.

A crack. The ceiling beam from which the carcass was suspended broke. Chase threw himself sideways as it fell, landing perilously close to the rapidly spreading fire.

He jumped up. The pirate also recovered, looking much less confident without his weapon. Seeing a chance, Chase ran at him.

The other man grabbed the severed length of metal pole and whipped it up like a baseball bat. Chase raised an arm just in time to protect his head from the blow, but still took a jarring hit to the elbow.

The pirate swung again. The pole whacked against Chase’s kneecap. He stumbled and fell. Before he could recover, another fierce strike smashed painfully down across his back. Powerful hands seized him by the throat.

Thumbs dug into his neck, choking him. The pirate hauled him round to look him in the eye, triumph clear in his expression as he tried to crush Chase’s windpipe—

Chase clapped both his cupped hands hard against the pirate’s ears, rupturing his eardrums. The pressure on his throat disappeared as the pirate screamed - but Chase didn’t let go, gripping the other man’s head and yanking it sharply downwards.

On to the broken end of the support pole.

The sharp spike of metal pipe stabbed straight through the pirate’s eye socket and punched into his skull.

‘You’ll need more than an eyepatch to cover that,’ Chase told the dead man as he stood. The fire had spread to the walls and ceiling, the shack being consumed around him.

The only exit was one of the windows. He jumped through it, landing on the waterfront walkway.

Two men on the jetty saw him. Opened fire.

Chase ran past the burning shack as bullets ripped into it, blazing splinters spraying out in his wake. Ahead was the covered dock at the edge of the settlement. If he ran into the darkened jungle, an environment in which he had plenty of survival and combat experience, he should be able to escape the pirates - but that would give Latan a chance to escape and warn his paymaster . . .

The option was removed as someone fired at him from the treeline. The surviving pirates had spread out to form a perimeter, trapping him inside. Latan, thinking tactically. The pirate leader wasn’t fleeing, but had organised his forces to catch the man who had attacked and humiliated him.

More shots, more shouts. They were closing, hounds after the fox.

Foxes. Bejo ran to him, frightened eyes wide. ‘Mr Eddie!’

‘When I said run, I meant away, not towards!’

‘They found the boat!’ Bejo gasped. More bullets seared past. The only place they could go was into the dock. Chase crashed through the double doors, slamming them shut behind himself and Bejo. The planks would provide no protection against bullets, but at least they would be out of sight for a few seconds.

Bejo turned in a rapid, panicked circle. ‘Oh, very bad, very very bad! What do we do?’

The cruiser was tied up in front of them. Chase looked to its bow.

The .50-cal—

He grabbed the handrail and jumped up. The ammo belt was still hanging from the machine gun, but it was almost spent, maybe twenty rounds remaining.

He heard movement outside, Latan bellowing instructions as the pirates ran to the doors.

Chase looked frantically round. There was a toolbox on the deck, a ball of twine amongst its contents. He snatched it up and tied the end to the Browning’s trigger, then looped it round the rear grip before running to the side of the boat. ‘Bejo! Get in the water!’

A splash from below - then the doors crashed open. Pirates rushed in, AKs at the ready . . . as Chase plunged into the water, pulling the twine as he fell.

The Browning swung towards the door and roared, eating through the remaining bullets in less than four seconds.

It was more than enough. The storm of lead swept across the dock, the force of the .50-cal at point-blank range literally explosive. The men were practically vaporised, limbs flying, heads exploding like watermelons stuffed with dynamite.

The machine gun ran dry, the last links of the spent ammo belt tinkling to the deck. The sound of chunks of the pirates hitting the ground was considerably wetter.

Chase surfaced, peering over the dock as a headless body slumped to its knees and keeled over in front of him. Bejo popped out of the water, gasping. He was surprised by the sudden lack of a threat. ‘What happened to the pirates, Mr Eddie?’

‘They’re in pieces of eight.’ Bejo was about to climb on to the dock when Chase stopped him. ‘You don’t want to look up there.’ He pointed at the dock’s open end. ‘Swim out that way and wait for me.’

Climbing out, he took in the rest of the scattered, splattered bodies, feeling absolutely no sympathy or remorse - not after what the pirates had done to the people aboard the Pianosa. ‘Amateurs.’

Someone was still alive, though, a quavering voice calling out. Latan. But his anger and arrogance was gone, replaced by shock. When Chase picked up a fallen AK-47, the pirate leader turned and fled.

Chase pursued. Latan was heading for the RIB. Chase went round the other side of the flaming kitchen on to the walkway, running to intercept him at the jetty—

A thick arm lashed out from round the corner of a shack, clotheslining Chase to the floor. The big, scar-faced man scowled down at him.

Chase raised the AK, but the pirate kicked it from his hand, then drove his heel down into the Englishman’s stomach. Chase groaned. The man lifted his foot, about to stamp on his head, but Chase grabbed it and twisted hard to throw him off balance. The pirate staggered back into the shadowed, overgrown gap between the shacks, almost tripping over the tree stump.

Chase heard the whine of a starter motor. Latan had reached the RIB. Clutching his aching stomach, he got up, seeing the dull line of the steel cable he had earlier secured round the stump.

Scarface saw it too, and immediately realised what Chase had done. He shouted a warning, but the RIB’s engine drowned him out. The cable was still slack: he tried to pull the looped end off the stump.

‘No you fucking don’t!’ Chase wheezed, shoulder-barging him. The pirate fell over the stump and landed in the junk behind it. Chase moved to kick him in the head—

The man slashed at his leg with a jagged spike of rusty metal. The tip ripped through his jeans. Chase lurched away as the pirate stabbed again, barely escaping having the six-inch shard plunged into his thigh . . . but catching his heel on a root and falling backwards.

Still clutching the makeshift dagger, the pirate leapt up. The RIB surged away from the jetty. The cable flicked back and forth on the ground beside Chase, hissing metallically.

The pirate dived at him, the spike plunging down at his chest. Chase whipped up both hands to catch the man’s wrist, stopping the bloodied point an inch above his heart. Face contorting, yellowed teeth bared, the pirate pushed harder, his weight forcing the trembling blade lower, lower . . .

Pressing into the skin, piercing it—

Whack!

‘Get off him!’ yelled Bejo, hitting the pirate across his back with a length of rotten wood, knocking him off Chase. The plank snapped in half, the blow only distracting rather than hurting the muscular pirate, but it was enough.

Chase grabbed the whipping cable and looped it round his neck.

Too late, Scarface realised what was about to happen—

The other end of the cable had been firmly fastened to the RIB’s outboard. The retreating boat reached the limit of its length - and jerked to an abrupt stop as the line snapped taut. The loop round the pirate’s neck closed to nothing in an instant, neatly snipping off his head. It thumped off the tree stump, expression frozen in shocked horror. The look on Bejo’s face was almost identical.

‘You okay?’ Chase asked as he kicked the decapitated corpse away and stood. Bejo nodded wordlessly, mouth hanging open as Chase retrieved his AK and looked out to sea. The RIB’s engine was still running, but the boat was drifting at the end of the cable, the propeller shaft broken. In the light of the burning hut, he could see that the sudden stop had caused Latan to slam head first into the boat’s steering wheel . . . then bounce back into his seat, leaving most of his face behind. He wouldn’t be giving warnings to anybody.

‘Mr Eddie,’ said Bejo in a strained voice. Chase turned - to find a gun pointing at his chest. The transsexual prostitute stood before him, shakily clutching a revolver in her uninjured hand. From the anguished rage on her face, her relationship with Latan had been more than merely that of hooker and client.

‘Oh, bugger,’ muttered Chase. Being gunned down by a ladyboy wasn’t even remotely how he’d pictured himself going out. ‘Okay, sorry about your boyfriend,’ he said, stalling, ‘but he was kind of a bad guy. Nice, er, lass like you could do a lot better . . .’

She spat something in Malay, thrusting the gun at his face. ‘Pretty lady is very angry with you,’ said Bejo, raising his hands.

‘Yeah, I got the gist.’ She thumbed back the hammer. ‘All right, so you’re a bit upset,’ Chase continued, getting worried, ‘but shooting me won’t make you feel any better. Trust me, I’ve shot plenty of people, and—’ His eyes flicked to something behind her, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Bloody hell, it’s Latan! Latan’s alive!’

It was a feeble gambit that would never have worked on anyone with training - but the young transsexual half turned to look, hope clear in her eyes. Chase could have simply whipped up his AK and shot her, but instead chose the less fatal option of kicking her in the groin. She crumpled to the ground and curled into a foetal position, moaning. Bejo winced. ‘Not very nice thing to do, even to angry lady.’

Chase pulled the revolver from her hand and tossed it into the sea. ‘If she really was a lady, that wouldn’t have hurt so much.’

As Bejo worked out what he meant and regarded the fallen figure with surprise, Chase surveyed the village. The blaze had spread to the other shacks, including Latan’s - which meant that not only had the money gone up in smoke, but so too had any clues there might have been amongst the pirate’s belongings. There was nothing more to be found here.

He made sure there was a boat the two prostitutes could use to get off the island, and then he and Bejo returned to their craft. As he’d hoped, the two remaining lookouts had decided that not investigating the gunfire and burning buildings on the shore would be their best bet for a long and healthy life, leaving the way clear.

As Bejo guided the boat back out to sea, Chase wondered once more why the tablet Nina had found had caused so much death. With Latan gone, he had lost one lead - but at least now he knew the identity of his paymaster, Vogler, and the organisation for which he worked.

But what was the Covenant of Genesis?

8

New York City

Despite having slept as much as she could during the long flight, Nina’s internal clock was still twelve hours out of synch when the UN jet landed, her body telling her it was evening while her native city was only just getting started for the day.

And it promised to be a long one.

Picked up by a driver and taken to the United Nations headquarters, she wondered what was in store. The expedition to the Java Sea had received the full backing of the IHA, and therefore the UN itself, and there was no possible way the pirate attack could have been predicted . . . but the fact remained that she had been in charge of an operation on which numerous people had died. Somebody would be held accountable, and in all probability it would be Nina herself.

What would happen next? She wasn’t sure. Despite having been a part of the IHA since its founding almost three years earlier, this would be her first time at the focal point of an investigation. She had faced senior officials before, but they had been debriefings following operations with a successful conclusion: not the least of which was saving New York, and the UN itself, from nuclear destruction.

This time, though, the conclusion had been anything but successful.

She took an elevator up through the glass and steel slab of the Secretariat Building to the IHA’s offices, her gloom weighing more heavily upon her with each passing floor. The moment she stepped out of the lift, it became clear the feeling was justified.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked as she hurried through the security doors into the IHA’s reception area, seeing the staff milling about in mixed states of confusion or anger.

‘Dr Wilde!’ said Lola Gianetti, leaving the reception desk to meet her. ‘Oh, thank God you’re back. I heard what happened - we all did. It’s terrible!’

‘I know, I know. But what’s all this?’ People were congregating outside the secure server room, one man repeatedly banging on the door.

‘The server’s gone down,’ Lola told her. ‘People have lost everything. ’

‘So why don’t they use the backups?’

‘No, I mean, they’ve lost everything,’ Lola clarified ominously, leading Nina through the throng. ‘Jerry and Al are in there trying to fix it.’

‘Wait, they’re both in?’ That definitely meant something bad had happened; the IHA’s lead computer technicians normally worked different shifts.

‘Yeah, Al’s been there all night, and he called Jerry in at about five a.m. Come on, coming through, move it!’

People peppered Nina with questions as she reached the door. ‘Whoa, okay, hold it!’ she said, raising her hands. ‘I only just got here, and I probably know less about what’s going on than you do. Everybody go back to your offices, have a coffee or whatever, and as soon as I know what’s happening I’ll let you know. Whatever it is, it’s not going to be solved by standing in reception re-enacting the storming of the Bastille.’

‘Nina, I’ve lost the entire Egyptian database!’ protested the door-banger, a historian called Logan Berkeley. ‘That’s over half a terabyte of material, and they’re saying it’s completely gone!’

‘It’s not completely gone,’ Nina insisted. ‘Even if we lose the servers, and even if we lose the backup servers, we’ve still got the off-site backups.’

‘Yes, but I’ve still lost—’

‘A day’s work, at most. It’s a pain in the ass, I know, but it’s not the end of the world, okay?’ She swiped her ID card over the door’s electronic lock.

Berkeley tried to follow her in. ‘I still need to ask them how long—’

Nina stopped in the doorway. ‘Hey, hey!’ she snapped. ‘This is a secure area - authorised personnel only. Go on, get your ass back outside. Shoo, shoo!’ Berkeley reluctantly retreated.

She closed the door and slumped against it, taking a deep breath. ‘Okay, guys. What’s the bad news?’

The server room was a windowless space lined with rack-mounted computers and hard drives, forming a miniature maze round the central workstations. Jerry Wojciechowski, an overweight middle-aged bearded man resembling a geek Santa, and Al Little, younger, thin almost to the point of emaciation and fuelled entirely by energy drinks, were working furiously at their computers. Al, even darker bags under his eyes than usual, looked up at her. ‘We got burned, Nina. Some fucker hit us with a virus.’

She knew from the mere fact that he’d sworn in front of her that the situation was dire; normally, he only blurted out the first half-syllable before gulping it back and apologising. ‘What’ve we lost?’

‘Everything,’ said Jerry. ‘Literally. It was a worm - it scrubbed all the drives down to the bare metal.’

‘And it nuked the backup RAIDs as well,’ Al added. ‘Even some of the desktops in the office.’

‘How the hell did it do that?’ asked Nina. ‘I thought all this was impossible to hack!’

‘So did we,’ Jerry told her mournfully. ‘We upgraded everything after that breach two years ago to beyond military grade. We’re running the same operating system as the NSA. It’s totally secure. In theory.’

‘Except,’ said Al, ‘that this fucking thing came straight in without tripping a single warning. The only way it could do that is if whoever sent it had access codes for the entire system.’ He let out an angry snort. ‘We’ve lost absolutely everything since the last tape backup for off-site storage. And that was two days ago.’

‘So, when you say everything . . . that includes emails and files uploaded to the shared server?’

Jerry nodded at her, and a sickening realisation struck Nina. The IHA’s very existence was built on secrets: her discovery of Atlantis three years before had, to her horror, given a madman the key to creating a genetically engineered plague . . . which he had very nearly unleashed upon the world. To a certain extent, the IHA’s mandate of finding and protecting other ancient wonders was a cover for a darker mission: to ensure that they didn’t fall into the wrong hands.

But as the events leading to the death of Hector Amoros had proved, the wrong hands could at first appear to be the right ones. The IHA’s search for Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, had supposedly been undertaken so that Jack Mitchell, an agent of the US government’s defence research agency DARPA, could stop the blade’s unique properties from being used to create a new weapon that drew on the power of the very earth - but Mitchell had gone rogue, wanting that power for himself. He had been in charge of a black project so secret that neither DARPA nor the Pentagon knew of its existence, even as it threatened to plunge the world into war.

But if whoever sent the virus to wipe her pictures of the mysterious artefacts - and she was certain that that was the true objective, all the other destruction of data merely to cover the fact - was able to bypass the IHA’s security . . . that meant they knew the IHA’s true purpose. Knowledge supposed to be restricted to the highest levels of power.

Whatever was going on was bigger than she had thought. Bigger than she had feared.

She rushed out into reception—

To find herself face to face with an old enemy.

Not one who had ever tried to kill her, admittedly. But Nina still felt the brief, involuntary chill of unexpectedly encountering an adversary, long-forgotten loathing rushing back full-force. ‘Professor Rothschild,’ she began, before remembering that outside academia the hard-faced old woman no longer had any power over her. ‘Maureen,’ she said instead, informality used as a weapon to deny her status. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Nina,’ said Rothschild coldly, doing the same. The dislike was mutual. ‘May I speak with you?’

Nina saw Lola hovering behind Rothschild’s shoulder, worriedly mouthing something, but she couldn’t tell what. ‘I’m kinda busy right now, Maureen,’ she said, wanting to get rid of her as quickly, and dismissively, as possible. ‘Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait. Lola can book you an appointment, but I wouldn’t expect anything earlier than next week. I’ve got a lot of IHA business to take care of.’ She turned and strode away to her office.

‘Handling IHA business is no longer your concern, Nina,’ Rothschild said.

There was a note almost of gloating in her voice that brought Nina to a stop. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Ah, Dr Wilde,’ Lola said apologetically, hurriedly rounding Rothschild and presenting a sheet of paper to Nina. ‘I meant to tell you when you got here, but there was so much else going on. Sorry.’

Nina quickly read the text, an official UN statement. ‘What?’ she barked. Sensing an impending explosion, Lola retreated to her desk.

‘As you see,’ said Rothschild, now with nothing but gloating in her voice, ‘the UN has just confirmed my appointment as the new Director of the IHA. I won’t officially be taking up the post until the day after tomorrow, but I wanted to get things moving in the right direction. Which I’ve already seen is something that is badly needed. The agency has lacked a clearly defined vision and strong leadership since the death of Admiral Amoros - I’m here to put it back on the proper course.’

‘Oh, you are, huh?’ said Nina, angrily crunching the paper into a ball. ‘I’m sure all your years of attacking any theory that’s even slightly outside the historical orthodoxy makes you the perfect choice to run the IHA.’

Rothschild glanced at the entrance to one of the conference rooms. ‘Perhaps we should continue this discussion in private?’ she suggested condescendingly.

‘I’m fine right here,’ Nina snapped. ‘And how did you get appointed in the first place? You weren’t on the shortlist. You weren’t even on the longlist - and if you had been, I would have crossed you off it!’

‘Making decisions based on petty personal vendettas is precisely the kind of negative quality the IHA can do without in its senior staff,’ Rothschild replied. ‘And since you ask, I was quite surprised to be approached. But when the Senate recommends you to the UN, it would be foolish not to take the opportunity.’

‘The Senate?’ said Nina, stunned. ‘But that’s insane! Why would they do that?’

Rothschild’s lips tightened. ‘Perhaps because they were as tired as everyone else of the appointment process being deliberately dragged out so that the Interim Director could pursue her pet projects with the minimum of oversight?’ Nina was so outraged by the accusation that she couldn’t even form a response before the older woman spoke again. ‘One of my first priorities will be a full review of all IHA projects that are not directly related to the agency’s global security mandate. Anything that fails to meet strict cost-effectiveness criteria, or is based on shoddy mythological theory, will be terminated immediately.’

‘Shoddy mythological theory like Atlantis, you mean?’

‘My other immediate priority,’ said Rothschild coldly, ‘will be to begin a full inquiry into the utter disaster that was your Indonesian expedition. The loss of life is of course a tragedy, but there is also your arbitrary abandonment of the original excavation site, the financial irregularities—’

‘What financial irregularities?’ Nina demanded, furious.

‘I mean the money you promised to the ship’s captain for what I believe you described as “additional expenses”. Just because part of the budget is labelled as discretionary doesn’t mean it’s your personal slush fund.’

‘That’s not what happened at all, and—’

‘You’ll be able to present your version of events to the inquiry,’ said Rothschild. ‘This catastrophe reflects extremely badly on both the IHA and the UN. The facts need to be determined, responsibility decided . . .’

‘Blame apportioned?’

A faint smile curled Rothschild’s thin lips. ‘Indeed. If I were you, I would put all my efforts into as complete an account as possible of what happened in Indonesia. And I’d recommend that your . . . friend Mr Chase does the same. Where is Mr Chase, by the way?’

‘Still over there,’ said Nina, being purposefully vague to deny Rothschild any more ammunition.

‘I see. After the UN organised a private flight for the specific purpose of bringing you both back to New York. I hope you’re not going to add the cost of his scheduled ticket to the discretionary budget as well?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she growled. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, Maureen, I still have work to do.’ She held up the crumpled ball of paper. ‘This says you aren’t officially the IHA’s Director for two more days, which means I’m still in charge - and you’ve wasted enough of my time. Lola, I’ll be in my office. Don’t put any calls through unless they’re urgent. Or Eddie.’ She turned her back on Rothschild and entered her office, slamming the door behind her.

9

Nina arrived at the United Nations building having spent the night worrying about Chase. After her confrontation with Rothschild the previous day, she had checked her voicemail to find a message from him. Her relief at hearing his gruff Yorkshire tones was muted by the terseness of the message, which told her little other than that he was on his way back to New York - and that he was ‘knackered’. She could tell he had been through a tense, dangerous time, but not knowing what had happened made her worried and frustrated.

Since then: nothing.

The first thing she did on arriving at the IHA was check if he had left any messages. He hadn’t. She stared blankly out across Manhattan from her office window before sharply turning away. She knew she ought to continue working on her report, in preparation for the inquiry, but her concerns about Chase were too distracting. She needed something else to focus her mind.

Like the pictures on the memory card recovered from her stolen camera.

She copied the files to her new laptop, putting the card in her jacket pocket before opening all the high-resolution images. One in particular dominated her attention, a close-up of the clay tablet, showing the strange text in great detail. She steepled her fingers against her lips as she tried to make sense of it.

Nothing. A few characters - a triangle with what might be a tree or a flower above it; three horizontal lines one above the other, the topmost curling back round on itself - appeared more symbolic than others, reminding her of the stylised pictograms forming the basis of the ancient Chinese and Japanese writing systems, but what they actually represented remained a mystery. Others stood out from the elegant, curved characters making up the bulk of the script by their stark and angular nature, a number of V-shapes pointing in different directions, small dots between the lines, followed by blocks of tightly packed little marks . . .

What did they mean? What was the secret someone was willing to kill to protect?

She had no idea.

Keeping the picture open in the background, Nina reluctantly returned to her report, forcing herself to the recall the unpleasant details of the events aboard the Pianosa. But the image kept drawing her attention over the course of the morning. She almost closed it to remove the distraction, but something about it was sounding a bell in the back of her mind. Something familiar.

What, though? The text resembled no alphabet she knew.

So, if it wasn’t an alphabet, then—

Nina jolted upright. The meaning of one particular type of symbol had just leapt out at her as if illuminated in neon. ‘Why the hell didn’t I see it before?’ she cried. ‘Dumbass!’

The blocks of closely spaced markings weren’t letters. They were numbers. Atlantean numbers. They weren’t quite the same as those she had seen on various Atlantean artefacts, but were close enough to be recognisable as from the same family: considering the apparent age of the tablet, an earlier version.

She grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled them down, converting them to the more familiar Atlantean equivalents, then rapidly performing the complex mental arithmetic to transform the unique numerical system into base ten. Each set turned out to be quite large, getting more so after each of the V-shapes to which they seemed linked. A record of something, then, a count. But what? It could be anything: numbers of people, distances, even the amount of fish caught by the boat in which it had been found.

But she had discovered something. The fact that it appeared to use a form of the Atlanteans’ numerical system meant that whoever made the tablet was in some way connected to them, however far separated by geography and time. And if the Atlantean language could be deciphered, so could this.

Maybe it already had been deciphered. While Nina was necessarily well versed in ancient languages, it wasn’t her specialty - she was an archaeologist, not a linguist. There were experts whose specialised knowledge far eclipsed her own. Her former mentor, Professor Jonathan Philby, had been one such expert, but he was no longer alive.

He’d had peers, though - well, more like rivals, she remembered. Even at the pinnacles of academia, one-upmanship was still a driving force. The names escaped her, but a few minutes’ trawling through online archives for some of Philby’s papers gave her one: Professor Gabriel Ribbsley of Cambridge. She vaguely recalled Philby once naming him as one of the world’s top palaeolinguists . . . after himself, of course. Judging from Ribbsley’s own extensive list of published papers, that still appeared to be the case.

She got Lola to obtain his contact details, then sent a brief email of introduction, accompanied by the barest details of her reason for contacting him - considering recent events, it seemed prudent to keep the recovery of her pictures of the clay tablet as quiet as possible. That done, she forced herself to go back to work on the report. Her experience with tenured professors had taught her they would respond to external enquiries in their own time, and the more prestigious the university, the greater that time would be - all the way up to the heat-death of the entire universe.