The Gods of Atlantis

BC.’

‘That is, if this comment isn’t just a bit of fantasy made up by a medieval monk,’ Costas said.

‘It’s unlikely that a monk would make up anything involving a Biblical name, as that might have been seen as heresy,’ Schoenberg replied. ‘And the next line in the note clinches it.’

Jack took a deep breath, and read what he had written on the notepad: Alkaios returned, and set up an inscription in unknown writing on the pillar. Ex Pliny.

‘Your translation is most interesting,’ Schoenberg murmured. ‘I translated stulobate, stylobate, as “plaque” or “stela”, a stone panel. But pillar is possible, a stone pillar.’

‘I must have been thinking of the Pillars of Hercules, but actually it does make sense,’ Jack replied. ‘Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century placed stone pillars, padroes, where they made landfall, to stake claim to new land. We know that Hanno the Carthaginian left an account of his voyage on bronze plaques attached to a pillar in Carthage, and I’ve always imagined that one day someone will find a pillar marking his progress down the coast of west Africa.’

‘Remember what you saw three days ago at Atlantis, Jack?’ Costas said.

‘Three days ago?’ Schoenberg exclaimed. ‘You have been to Atlantis again? He leaned forward, peering at Jack eagerly.

Jack nodded. ‘You’re giving us your treasure, so I’ll give you ours. Absolute secrecy, yes?’

‘Of course. Of course.’

‘Costas and I were able to carry out a dive on the site under the guise of a geological assessment. The fault line’s active again and we ended up diving into a live volcano.’

‘A live volcano.’ Schoenberg leaned back, slapping his knee. ‘ A live volcano. I never heard of such a thing. Marvellous. If only I could have told this to our divers in the Ahnenerbe. But they never had the equipment you have. I believe it was the oxygen rebreathers. They were always going too deep. We lost three of them on our expedition to Iceland. I was there, waiting for them, but they never came up.’

Jack glanced at Costas, then back at Schoenberg. ‘We found an extraordinary temple with carved pillars. We’re sure it dates from the earliest Neolithic, eleven thousand years ago or more. My point is, these people were perfectly capable of erecting stone pillars, and indeed had a tradition of it.’

‘So if this note is based on fact, we’re looking for an inscribed stone,’ Costas said.

‘Somewhere on the coast of west Africa,’ Jack murmured.

‘That narrows it down.’

Schoenberg took the sheet of vellum and held it up to the ceiling light, peering at it closely. ‘There’s more. Those final words, Ex Pliny, are a shorthand to show that the source of the story is Pliny’s Natural History. As you can imagine, I immediately found a copy of Pliny in the Heidelberg library and went to Book 5, Chapter 1, the text that deals with west Africa and the limit of Roman knowledge. There’s the usual Pliny ragbag of facts and myths, including an account of the Hercules myth and the expedition of Hanno. He mentions the Roman emperor Claudius, his war against a local ruler in Mauretania and his founding of Roman colonies at Lixus and Traducta Julia, both probably corresponding to the old Punic outposts in that list in the Periplus of Hanno. But there was absolutely nothing in the surviving edition of Pliny to corroborate this note. If the monk had seen a reference to Atlantis, it must have been in some lost text. It was a dead end for me, as without verification I could take it no further. I put it away for decades. Until three years ago.’

Jack looked at Schoenberg shrewdly. ‘You hoped for a lost version of Pliny’s Natural History, containing its own marginalia.’

Schoenberg gave a slight smile, and nodded. ‘One found three years ago by Jack Howard and his team in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum in Italy. As I said, I’ve been a keen follower of your discoveries.’

‘Good old Claudius,’ Costas said. ‘I knew you’d mentioned him for a reason.’

‘Claudius had a special interest in Mauretania,’ Schoenberg replied. ‘Poor lame Claudius was desperate for military glory, to shore up his claim to the empire. It was the main reason he invaded Britain in AD 43. In the secret retirement you discovered he had enjoyed in Herculaneum after faking his death, he probably dwelt greatly on his place in history. In his library you found that copy of Pliny’s Natural History with the marginal note about Claudius’ meeting as a young man with Jesus of Nazareth, added to the scroll by Pliny when he appears to have spent time with his friend Claudius in those fateful final days before Vesuvius erupted. If Pliny was adding material to his text like that – told to him by Claudius – then he might also have added what Claudius knew about west Africa. Claudius had probably amassed huge amounts of information in his years working as a historian before he was reluctantly made emperor. He would have had a special interest in west Africa through his own imperial involvement in Mauretania, and particularly as the author of a history of Carthage, which would have given him considerable knowledge of Phoenician exploration along that coast. He seems to have been a magpie, much like Pliny, interested in fascinating snippets of information that others had ignored.’

‘If you were interested, why wait until now to contact us?’ Jack said. ‘Why not three years ago, when we revealed the discovery of the library and the copy of Pliny?’

‘Because I’ve been following progress on your website. By the beginning of last month, I knew your palaeography team in Naples had reached the end of Book 4 of Claudius’ copy of the Natural History, so they should currently be unrolling and photographing the first paragraphs of Book 5.’

‘Okay,’ Jack said, looking at his watch. ‘We have to meet our plane for the flight back. I’ll put in a phone call to Naples. If that comment about Atlantis is in Claudius’ copy, then we can surmise that it was in another copy made by Pliny in those final days, perhaps one that escaped destruction in his villa in Stabiae or that he dispatched to Rome, a copy that was seen by that tenth-century monk. Whatever the case, if our team have found the same marginal note, it would corroborate the note in the codex and take us one huge step closer on our quest.’

Schoenberg eyed Jack shrewdly. ‘Where do you think it would be leading you?’

‘For anyone leaving Lixus or Mogador and intending to go west, the current takes a very predictable southern and western swing from Cape Juby towards the Caribbean.’

‘Can you be more precise?’

Jack pursed his lips. ‘My money’s on the north Caribbean, a landfall somewhere between Puerto Rico and Florida. We have another possible lead to explore, one that will become more real if that Pliny reference can be corroborated.’

‘Can I help?’ Schoenberg said.

‘No later than tomorrow, I hope. I’ll be in touch.’

‘I can tell you more about the Ahnenerbe. Some of the trails we were on that really did seem to go places, and were thwarted only by the war. We could work together.’

‘I’ll hold you to that. Tomorrow.’

Costas got up. ‘One question. Why did you remove that page from the codex? Did you want to keep this secret, for the eyes of the Ahnenerbe only? Were you planning an expedition to find that pillar?’

Schoenberg shook his head. ‘It was that name, Noah. I had seen first-hand Hitler’s rage against the Jews. I had been intimate with the Nazis; I had smelled the sweat on Hitler when he was excited, seen the glint in his eyes. Already there were book-burnings, the destruction of Jewish art. The Codex Palatinus Graecus was my passion, my life’s work, and I intended to return to it after the war. I was not the only Ahnenerbe researcher sent to the Heidelberg library; others were there to keep an eye on me. Nazi Germany was a police state, and the mentality of suspicion and counter-suspicion seeped into every corner of life. The men Himmler recruited as spies were sticklers for detail, men like himself, and would leave no stone unturned if they felt they had to check up on me. I was terrified that one of them would find this page and see that word. Anything to do with Jewish history was to be expunged. When I saw that the note had been erased by some later hand from the original text, I imagined a monk doing that because he might have been alarmed that the codex contained heretical materials, something about Noah that might contradict the Bible, but that he felt the same way that I did about the need to preserve the book. He removed the note, but didn’t see the imprint on the blank insert. If Himmler’s spies had followed me and seen it, there could only have been one outcome. The whole codex would have been destroyed.’

‘And now the time has come to reunite the page with the codex,’ Jack said.

‘That is my intention. If you are successful, this apparently blank page with the word Atlantis may become the greatest single treasure of the Heidelberg library.’

Jack thought for a moment. They had got what they wanted, and there was nothing now to be lost. He needed to know for sure. ‘You said you were intimate with the Nazi inner circle. Did you know Oberst Ernst Hoffman?’

Schoenberg went pale, then quickly regained his composure. ‘Hoffman? I knew of him, of course. He was a Luftwaffe ace, one of Hitler’s favourites. Perhaps I met him in Berlin. I don’t remember.’

‘You met him at Wewelsburg, to be precise. He was one of Himmler’s favourites too. Himmler nurtured his interest in flying.’

Schoenberg looked discomfited. ‘Perhaps. Many officers passed through the Wewelsburg indoctrination school. I can hardly be expected to remember all of them. And Himmler had plenty of favourites.’

‘Indeed,’ Jack said coldly. ‘Actually, you knew Hoffman before that. You were students together in Heidelberg before the war.’

Schoenberg raised his hands. ‘Am I being interrogated again? It was a big university. Perhaps I knew of him. But he was no scholar. He was only interested in flying.’

‘You had a professor who taught you both Greek. You excelled at it and Hoffman didn’t, but he and the professor became fast friends. The professor was forced into the Ahnenerbe, but hated it and let drink get the better of him, then spoke too much. He was last seen being led away screaming to Goebbels’ chamber of horrors in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Word was he was fingered by a former student of his who coveted his senior position in the Ahnenerbe hierarchy and miraculously moved into that office the next day.’

‘Who do you mean? How do you know this?’

‘Because before coming here we had a very interesting visit to Wewelsburg Castle with an expert guide. Frau Heidi Hoffman, to be precise.’

Schoenberg swallowed hard, reached for his stick to get up and then sank back again into his chair. ‘Frau Hoffman. Yes. She has talked to you about the Ahnenerbe?’

‘She has told us a great deal.’

Schoenberg rose again slightly on his stick, and for a moment his face was contorted in contempt. ‘You should be very careful what you believe. This woman is not to be trusted. Did you know she worked for the Lebensborn? She even volunteered herself to be impregnated by SS men. The Lebensborn programme was designed to create a new generation of the master race. Peasants fornicating with peasants. Do you know they even went to Poland to snatch children just because they were blond and blue-eyed? Being blond and blue-eyed is not enough to make you Aryan. They were Poles, for God’s sake. And that woman is a whore.’

Jack nodded at Costas, then got up and followed him to the door. He stopped and looked back. ‘When you scoured the ancient texts, when the Ahnenerbe went to the glaciers, to the icecaps, you weren’t just looking for Atlantis, were you? There was something else. Something Reichsfuhrer Himmler wanted. Something terrifying, from the distant past. Something that could be made into a wonder-weapon.’

Schoenberg stared at him, then narrowed his eyes. ‘I am a scholar, Jack. You know that. The Reichsfuhrer may have had other dreams, but they were not mine. These wild theories died on the funeral pyre of the Reich in 1945.’

‘Thank you for telling us what you know. We’ll be in touch.’

Jack led Costas through the door and closed it. They crossed the veranda and clattered down the wooden steps to the beach, then began to walk towards the jetty and the inflatable boat. The tide was coming in, pushing foaming sheets of water almost to their feet, backed by rolling Pacific breakers that made a muffled roar. It was time to get back to the aircraft before the wind and the water rose any more. Costas hurried up alongside Jack. ‘That was pushing it. Asking about Frau Hoffman and Himmler.’

‘I wanted him to be on edge. I want him to know that we know.’

‘It was revealing that he called Himmler Reichsfuhrer, a little respectfully I thought, after you did.’

‘That was intentional on my part.’

‘He was there in Iceland.’

Jack nodded. ‘He was there, though I’m not convinced he knew the real purpose. Anyone Himmler let in on his scheme was probably doomed to be liquidated. I don’t believe Saumerre will have told him the truth either. My guess is that Schoenberg doesn’t know a lot more than he’s told us. He evidently was not one of the Ahnenerbe men who discovered the ancient site in the Caribbean, though he must have known it was an area where they’d been searching for Atlantis. Once Himmler had decided to use the site for his own purpose, those men were probably all removed from the equation early on. If Schoenberg knew the location, we wouldn’t be here now, and the world would be a much more dangerous place.’

‘There’s a lot of contradiction in Schoenberg,’ Costas said, jerking his head back towards the house. ‘A scholar who tears a page out of an ancient manuscript to prevent it being destroyed by the Nazis. A senior Ahnenerbe man who was under the spell of Himmler, yet was perfectly aware that most of the stuff was nonsense and that many of his fellow Ahnenerbe men were beneath contempt. A Prussian aristocrat who is scornful of Nazi thugs, and of peasants. A family man fearful of his children finding out out about his past. A racist who despises Poles and Chinese. And if we’re to believe Frau Hoffman, a man capable of shopping his old professor to the Gestapo.’

‘I believe Frau Hoffman.’ Jack clicked on his phone, put it to his ear and made a call. He hung back for a few moments behind Costas, and then caught up. ‘I was speaking to Ben. Frau Hoffman needs beefed-up protection. The first thing Schoenberg is going to do is call Saumerre and tell us we’ve been talking to her. We need her alive to be able to work on that antidote to the bacterium, and I’m sure Major Penn and his men will be more than happy to have some of our IMU security team along as well.’

‘You buy Schoenberg’s story about the manuscript, what we’ve just seen?’

Jack nodded. ‘I’ve spent enough time with Maria and Jeremy looking at old vellum to know the real thing when I see it, and the imprint of the text was authentic. It’s not that I’m worried about. Schoenberg was playing us. He wants us to take this to its conclusion, to use all our skills to find whatever lies at the end of this trail.’

‘That word, Jack. The word we’ve just seen in the ancient text.’

Jack took a deep breath and stopped walking, putting his hands on his hips and staring out to sea. He turned to Costas. ‘ Atlantis.’

Costas slapped him on the back. ‘Pretty amazing. I thought that word was history for us, but here it is shining again like a big red neon light.’

‘It’s explosive,’ Jack said, his voice tight with emotion. ‘Absolutely explosive. If we can prove they went west, find where they went, then it looks as if we might be on the way to bending history again, as big a bend as you can imagine.’

‘Noah and Alkaios, Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh? You think these are the same two men?’

‘I’m convinced of it. We already know from Katya’s interpretation of those symbols on the cave wall at Atlantis that Noah was Uta-napishtim, and Enlil was Gilgamesh: the shorter names were like nicknames, the longer ones more formal shaman names. But Alkaios makes complete sense to me as another name for Enlil-Gilgamesh. Alkaios was the hero of the West, the early version of Heracles. If Enlil-Gilgamesh returned from his huge ocean voyage, leaving Noah-Uta-napishtim in his new Atlantis, he may have acquired mythical stature among those people of the north African coast – the “Ladies of the West” as Pliny calls them, maybe at Lixus itself – who may have equated him with their ancient god Alkaios. Over time he became Heracles, and it would have been natural for Pliny to use this familiar name for a god-hero already associated with the gateway to the Western Ocean, the Pillars of Hercules.’

They reached the boat, and Costas untied the stern line and jumped in. Jack gestured at his phone again and climbed the rocky spur to get better reception. A few minutes later he pocketed the phone, and bunched his fist. ‘Yes.’ He clambered back down, untied the painter and hopped in beside Costas, resuming his position in the stern beside the engine. ‘Two very quick phone calls clinched it.’

‘Spill it.’

‘The first one to Maria, who’s in Naples. She saw that marginal note in Claudius’ manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History yesterday morning, but assumed it was probably a reference to the Atlantis story in Plato. She was looking at the infrared spectrographic images of the first part of Book 5 as I called her, and she was able to read out the note. It was exactly the same as on Schoenberg’s sheet. Exactly the same. That confirms it. It wasn’t made up by a medieval monk. It was copied from Pliny.’

‘And?’

Jack grinned. ‘The second call was to Dillen. He was back in his office in Cambridge, having closed the excavation at Troy yesterday. It was something that’s been niggling me ever since we saw those Stone Age symbols at Atlantis. I knew I’d seen something like them before, and I don’t mean the symbols on Palaeolithic cave paintings, but somewhere unexpected, the reason why it didn’t click for me straight away. You remember I said that when I was a student I did a study tour of Phoenician sites in west Africa? When Schoenberg mentioned Lixus, I suddenly remembered. At the top of the acropolis I found a large hole, probably where masonry had been dug out centuries ago from the Roman site for reuse. At the bottom was a much older stone, worn, apparently toppled sideways, with barely discernible symbols on it that I assumed were early Phoenician. I asked Dillen to dig out my study tour report from his shelves and take a look at my photograph. He said there were only three very worn symbols visible, but that they looked like a crescent, a V and three slashes. Those were the first three symbols from the Atlantis cave that Katya interpreted as the name Gilgamesh.’

Costas looked incredulous. ‘The pillar mentioned by Pliny? You mean you found it more than twenty-five years ago?’

Jack grinned again. ‘Sometimes things stare you in the face for a long time. You just have to know what you’re looking at.’

‘That makes it real for me,’ Costas said. ‘An ancient exodus west across the Atlantic from Lixus following the current would very probably land you in the Caribbean.’

Jack nodded. ‘When we were on Seaquest II in the Black Sea after our dive into the volcano, do you remember I brought up Thor Heyerdahl and his Ra expeditions? I guessed that an exodus west from Atlantis and the Mediterranean would have gone south with the current towards Cape Juby just as Heyerdahl did, and then west across the open ocean. I knew after talking to Frau Hoffman that Himmler’s men must have chanced on the site of the Atlantean landfall in the Caribbean, and that was where he must have decided to establish his secret hideaway. So I phoned Rebecca’s foster-father Mikhail and asked him to look into any evidence for unusual German activity in the Caribbean before the war, as well as any U-boat sightings in May and June 1945. I told him to liaise with Lanowski to correlate anything he found with geological evidence for a likely underwater site. Mikhail’s a military historian, and I knew from spending time with him last year that he’d recently written a book on the strategic significance of the Caribbean at the outset of the Cold War. A moment ago, when I spoke to Ben, he was on Mikhail’s farm in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, where he took Rebecca this morning for safety. Ben passed the phone to Mikhail, who’d just received a package of material from the US National Archives. I could sense his excitement. He thinks it’s exactly what we want.’

‘Any details?’

‘It involves one of the last combat missions against the Nazis. Three weeks after the German surrender. It sounds like something out of the annals of the Bermuda Triangle, but it’s much more real and much more horrifying than that. Mikhail’s still working through the file, but he’s going to tell me the full story when I get there.’

‘We’re going to the Adirondacks?’

‘ I’m going to the Adirondacks.’ Jack picked up the phone again, then paused. ‘The Embraer’s all fuelled up at Tofino and it’s going to fly us to Syracuse in upstate New York, where I’m going to rent a car and drive into the mountains. I should arrive at Mikhail’s place before dawn tomorrow morning. You’re going on from Syracuse to Seaquest II off Bermuda. I need you in the operations room to kick up a brainstorm with your new best buddy Lanowski. As soon as we can pinpoint a location for the Nazi hideaway in the Caribbean, we need everything we can get on the geology and oceanography, and the predicted weather conditions over the next forty-eight hours. That’s the time frame we’re looking at. The Embraer’s going to return from Bermuda to Syracuse and I’ll aim to join you with Rebecca on Seaquest II tomorrow evening, after Mikhail’s told me what he’s found out. Then all eyes south to the Caribbean.’

Costas jerked his head back to the bungalow above the beach. They could just make out Schoenberg’s straw hat in the window, and a cell phone clamped to his ear. ‘You gave that one away. You told him that’s where we were heading.’

‘We’re all playing each other. Saumerre will be playing Schoenberg just as Himmler once played his Ahnenerbe cronies, convincing them that the archaeology was the main prize, letting only a chosen few know his true intent and then disposing of them when they’d served their purpose. Schoenberg’s telling him that as soon as I’ve followed the lead I told him about, I’ll get back to him to reveal where we’re heading. He believes I’ll do that because he offered me more information about the Ahnenerbe, about other treasures waiting to be discovered. Part of Schoenberg, the scholar and adventurer, just won’t believe I’d pass up on a chance like that, that somehow he and I will go off together on fantastic voyages of discovery. Another part of him, the Nazi, believes that what he revealed to us in that rant about Frau Hoffman will come as a terrible shock and persuade us that everything she said about Himmler and his plan was a pack of lies. Schoenberg would like to think that we’re after the archaeology, not the deadly weapon that Saumerre wants. Remember what we saw at Wewelsburg Castle. That place poisoned everyone who came in contact with it, whether real scholars like Schoenberg or the academic failures and thugs who formed the core of the Ahnenerbe, the spies and sycophants whom Schoenberg despised. For Schoenberg, sitting there overlooking the sea dreaming of unresolved quests, the fantasy is reborn in his mind after all these decades, something that we’ve used to get information out of him, just as Saumerre has too.’

‘So you really intend to tell him the probable location?’

‘As soon as Mikhail tells me, and just before I board the plane to Bermuda. That way I’m in control. I want to push this to a confrontation. Saumerre may become impatient and events may move faster than we predicted. Ben’s convinced that Shang Yong’s hitmen will know about the farm and will have assumed that’s where Ben went with Rebecca when she left school this morning in Manhattan, where they’ve been shadowing her.’

Costas looked at his watch. ‘Better get going. Our pilot will be waiting.’

Jack pulled the starter cord and the Mariner coughed to life. He stared for a moment back at the figure in the bungalow, now with the phone down, watching them. ‘Part of me would still like to think that he’s just another victim of that war.’

Costas shook his head. ‘Remember what you told me when we went to see him. What it was really all about, the Ahnenerbe. Racist theory that resulted in the corpses and the living dead in the concentration camps, and on those gurneys in that bunker. Those were the victims.’

Jack nodded. He gunned the engine, driving the boat out into the channel, then throttled back for a moment and gave Costas a steely look. ‘Forty-eight hours to endgame.’

‘Roger that.’