The Hunt For Atlantis

PROLOGUE. Tibet

The sun had not yet risen above the Himalayan peaks, but Henry Wilde was already awake. He had been awake, waiting for the moment when the dawn light cleared the mountains, for over two hours.

More than two hours, he mused. More like years, most of his life. What began as a boyhood curiosity had grown into an… he hesitated to use the word obsession, but there it was. An obsession that had brought him mockery and derision from the academic world; an obsession that had eaten up most of the money he had earned in his lifetime.

But, he reminded himself, it was also an obsession that had brought him together with one of the two most remarkable women he had ever known.

“How long to sunrise?” asked Laura Wilde, Henry’s wife of almost twenty years, huddled next to him in her thick parka. The two had first met as undergraduates at New York ’s Columbia University. While they had already noticed each other-Henry was a six-foot-four ice blond and Laura had hair of such a deep shade of red it seemed almost unnatural-it wasn’t until after Henry had an essay on the subject of his obsession mockingly excoriated by their professor that they spoke. Laura’s first three words caused Henry to fall in love on the spot.

They were: “I believe you.”

“Any minute now,” Henry said, checking his watch before putting a loving arm around her. “I just wish Nina were here to see it with us.” Nina, their daughter, was the second of the two most remarkable women he had ever known.

“That’s what you get when you schedule an expedition during her exams,” Laura chided.

“Don’t blame me, blame the Chinese government! I wanted to come next month, but they wouldn’t budge, said it was this or nothing-”

“Honey?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m kidding. I didn’t want to miss this opportunity either. But yes, I wish Nina were here too.”

“Getting a postcard from Xulaodang doesn’t really seem fair compensation, does it?” sighed Henry. “We drag her all over the world to dead end after dead end, and when we finally find a real lead, she can’t come!”

“We think we’ve found a real lead,” Laura corrected him.

“We’ll know in a minute, won’t we?” He indicated the vista before them. Three snowcapped peaks of roughly equal size rose beyond the rugged plateau on which they had made camp. At the moment they were held in shadow by the larger range to the east, but when the sun climbed above the obstruction, that would change. And if the stories they had gathered were true, it would change in spectacular style…

Henry stood, offering a hand to pull Laura to her feet. She blew out a cloud of steaming breath as she rose; the plateau was over ten thousand feet above sea level, and the air was both thin and cold in a way that neither of them had ever before experienced. But it also had a purity, a clarity.

Somehow, Henry knew they would find what they were searching for.

The first light of dawn reached the three peaks.

Rather, it reached one of them, a brilliant golden light exploding from the perfect white snow atop the central peak. Almost like a liquid, the sunlight slowly flowed down from the summit. The two mountains on either side remained in shadow, the dawn still blocked by the larger range.

“It’s true…” Henry said quietly, awe in his voice.

Laura was somewhat less reverent. “That pretty much looks like a golden peak to me.”

He gave her a smile before looking back at the spectacle before them. The mountain was almost aglow in the dawn light. “They were right. Goddamn it, they were right.”

“That’s almost depressing, in a way,” said Laura. “That a bunch of Nazis over fifty years ago knew about it first, and were so close to finding it.”

“But they didn’t find it.” Henry set his jaw. “We will.”

The Golden Peak -until today nothing more than a legend, a piece of ancient folklore-was the final piece in the puzzle Henry had been assembling his whole life. Exactly what he would find there, he wasn’t sure. But what he was sure of was that it would provide him with everything he needed to reach his final goal.

The ultimate legend.

Atlantis.

The dazzling display of light on the Golden Peak lasted for barely a minute before the sun rose high enough to strike the two neighboring summits. By the time the expedition began to ascend the eastern slope of the peak, the sun was high overhead. Its companions now out of shadow, the mountain was indistinguishable from those around it in the harsh daylight.

There were seven people in their group, three Americans and four Tibetans. The latter group had been hired as porters and guides; while they knew the area, they had been as amazed by the folktale come true as their foreign visitors. Even by Tibetan standards the region was bleak and isolated, and Henry realized they might be the only Westerners ever to have witnessed what they had just seen.

Except, perhaps, for the people whose clues had led them here in the first place.

Henry called the group to a stop. As the others gratefully brushed snow off nearby rocks and sat down, he removed his backpack and carefully took a slim binder from one of its pockets. Laura joined him as he flicked through the pages sealed inside protective plastic sheets.

“Checking again?” she asked, teasing. “I thought you’d have them memorized by now.”

“German’s not one of my strongest languages,” he reminded her, finding a particular page. The paper was discolored, stained by damp and time.

The secret documents of the Ahnenerbe-the German Ancestral Heritage Society, part of Hitler’s SS under the direct control of Heinrich Himmler-had been found hidden behind bricks in a cellar of Wewelsberg Castle in northern Germany. Wewelsberg had been the headquarters of the SS, and the center of the Nazi obsession with mythology and the occult. At the end of the war, orders had been given to destroy the castle and the knowledge it contained. Someone had chosen to disobey those orders and conceal the documents instead.

And now the Wildes had them.

The previous year, Bernd Rust, an old friend and colleague of Henry’s, had contacted him about the discovery. Most of the rediscovered SS documents had been turned over to the German government, but knowing of the Wildes’ interests, Rust had-at considerable professional risk-secretly retained a few specific pages, those mentioning Atlantis. Even from a friend they hadn’t come cheap, but Henry knew they were worth every penny.

While he felt a deep discomfort about using Nazi material to aid his search-to the extent that he hadn’t even told his daughter about the documents’ origin-he also knew that without it, he would never find Atlantis. Somehow, half a century ago, the Nazis had discovered something that had enabled them to jump almost to the end of the trail.

The Ahnenerbe had organized expeditions to Tibet during the 1930s, and even into the 1940s as the war raged in Europe. At the behest of the prominent Nazis who were members of the sinister Thule Society, Himmler among them, three expeditions had been sent to Asia. The Thule Society believed that beneath the Himalayas lay underground cities built by the legendary descendants of the Atlanteans, who shared a common ancestry with the Aryan master race. While the explorers made many discoveries about Tibetan history, they found nothing of the Atlanteans, and returned to Germany empty-handed.

But what the papers now in Henry’s possession revealed was that there had been a fourth expedition, kept secret even from Hitler himself.

The Führer was not as inclined as his followers to believe in myths. As the war escalated, he decided pragmatically that the country’s resources were better spent on the Nazi war machine than in sending expeditions halfway around the world to hunt for a legend.

But Himmler was a true believer. And the Ahnenerbe’s discoveries had convinced him that legend was within his grasp.

What came as a shock to Henry was that he and Laura were on the same path… but half a century too late. Piecing together clues from dozens, hundreds of historical sources, tiny scraps of evidence gradually forming a picture like a jigsaw, the Wildes had traveled with Nina ten years earlier to a site on the coast of Morocco. To Henry’s jubilation, they had found traces of an ancient settlement hidden beneath the African sands… only for delight to turn to despair when they realized someone had beaten them to it. Aside from a few worthless scraps, the site had been picked clean.

Now Henry knew by whom.

The Nazis had assembled the same puzzle pieces and sent an expedition to Morocco. The handful of Ahnenerbe documents he now held revealed only hints of what they had found, but on the strength of those discoveries another expedition had been mounted in South America. What they had found there, the documents didn’t reveal-but they did reveal that the mission had led the Nazis to Tibet, to the Golden Peak.

To here.

“I just wish we had more information,” Henry complained. “I’d love to know exactly what they found in South America.”

Laura turned the pages. “We’ve got enough. They got us this far.” She read one phrase from the decaying, blotchy paper: “‘The Golden Peak, said to glow with the light of dawn between two dark mountains.’ I’d say…” she looked up at the looming mountain, “this fits the bill.”

“So far.” Henry examined the text. Even though he had already read it a hundred, a thousand times, he checked it again to assure himself that he hadn’t made a mistake in the translation.

He hadn’t. This was the place.

“So the entrance is supposed to be at the end of the Path of the Moon… whatever that is.” He surveyed the rising landscape through his binoculars, seeing nothing but rocks and snow. “Why do legends always have to have cryptic names? Does it seem to lead to the moon; does it follow the movements of the moon; what?”

“I think it looks like the moon,” said Laura meaningfully. “Specifically, a crescent moon.”

“Why do you think that?” There was still nothing even remotely moonlike in view as he panned across the face of the mountain.

“Because,” she replied, placing a hand on the binoculars and gently pulling them down from his face, “I can see it right in front of me.”

Henry blinked, wondering what she was talking about… until he saw it himself.

Ahead was a long, curving path that swung off to the left, rising up the flank of the peak before sweeping back around to the right and ending at a broad ledge some distance above. In contrast to the jumbled mix of dark rocks and patchy snow around it, the path was an almost unbroken crescent of pure white, indicating flatter, smoother ground. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before.

“Laura?”

“Yes?”

“This is another one of those moments when I’m so glad that I married you.”

“Yeah. I know.” They smiled at each other, then kissed. “So,” she said when they pulled apart, “how far do you think it is?”

“A mile, maybe… about five hundred feet up. Fairly steep.”

“If the ancient Atlanteans could get up there in sandals, I figure we can manage in hiking boots.”

“So do I.” Henry returned the binder to his pack, then waved to the rest of the expedition. “Okay! This is it! We’re moving out!”

The path proved trickier to negotiate than expected. The snow camouflaged a surface strewn with loose rubble from landslides, making each step treacherous.

By the time they reached the ledge, the sun had passed over the summit of the mountain, casting the entire eastern face into shadow. Henry turned and scanned the horizon as he helped Laura up the last few feet of the path. Heavy clouds were rolling in from the north. He hadn’t noticed it during the effort of the ascent, but the temperature had definitely fallen.

“Bad weather?” asked Laura, following his gaze.

“Looks like we might be in for a blizzard.”

“Great. Good thing we got up here before it starts.” She looked back at the ledge, which even at its narrowest was a dozen yards wide as it cut across the face of the mountain. “Shouldn’t be any trouble setting up camp here.”

“Get the guides to pitch the tents before the weather turns,” said Henry. The path ended here; above the ledge, the rock face was steep enough to require proper climbing gear. That was no problem, as they had the necessary equipment. But if the Ahnenerbe documents were correct, they shouldn’t need it…

Laura passed on Henry’s instructions to the Tibetans before returning to him. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to have a look around. If there are any entrances that might potentially lead into caves, they shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

Laura arched an eyebrow, a flash of amusement in her intense green eyes. “Anything to get out of pitching the tents, huh?”

“Hey, that’s what we’re paying them for!” He turned to the man sitting alone on a rock nearby. “What about you, Jack? Coming?”

The third American member of the group peered up at them from inside the hood of his parka. “Give me a chance to get my breath back, Henry! I think I’ll wait here, get some coffee once the water’s boiled.”

“Can’t shake your caffeine habit even in Tibet, huh?” Husband and wife mockingly rolled their eyes at each other as they walked up the slope, leaving Jack on his own. “All those years he keeps telling us we’re mad for searching for Atlantis, then we finally come up with a solid lead and suddenly he practically begs to come along… and when we’re right on the doorstep, he decides to take a coffee break!” said Henry.

After a few minutes Henry paused, staring at the rock face. “Something?” Laura asked.

“These strata…” he said, pointing. Countless eons before, the immense forces causing the Himalayas to rise up where the Indian and Asian tectonic plates collided had also warped the rocks themselves, twisting the layers so they ran almost vertically instead of horizontally.

“What about them?”

“If you moved these stones,” Henry said, pointing to a pile of rubble, “I think you’d have an entrance.”

Laura saw a slice of absolute darkness within the folded strata. “Big enough to get into?”

“Let’s find out!” He pulled at the topmost rock. Snow and loose pebbles dropped from it as he threw it aside. The dark hole beyond grew deeper. “Give me a hand.”

“Oh, so you’ll pay the locals to put up tents, but when it comes to moving heavy rocks, you drag in your wife…”

“There must have been a landslip. This is just the top of the entrance.” He pulled more stones aside, Laura helping. “Use your flashlight, see if you can see how far back it goes.”

Laura took off her pack and pulled out a Maglite, shining it into the hole. “I can’t see the back.” She paused, then shouted, “Echo!” A faint reflection of her voice came from within the dark chamber. Henry raised an eyebrow. “Heh. Sorry.”

“It’s big in there, anyway,” he said. “Nearly as big as your mouth.” Laura gently slapped the back of his head. “I think if we move this rock here, we might be able to squeeze in.”

“You mean I might be able to squeeze in.”

“Well of course! Ladies first.”

“Stupid chivalry,” Laura complained jokingly. They both gripped the offending rock, then braced their feet and pulled. For a moment nothing happened, then with a grinding rasp it burst free. The opening was now about three feet high and just over a foot at its widest, tapering to nothing at the top.

“Think you’ll fit?” Henry asked.

Laura reached through the hole with one arm and felt around inside. “It widens out. I should be okay once I get through.” She leaned closer and aimed the flashlight downwards. “You were right about the landslip. It’s quite steep.”

“I’ll rope you up,” said Henry, removing his own pack. “Any problems, I can pull you back out.”

After the rope was attached to Laura’s climbing harness, she tied her hair into a ponytail and inched through the opening, feet first. Once inside, she cautiously stood, feeling the loose surface shift beneath her feet.

“What do you see?” asked Henry.

“Just rocks so far.” Her eyes adjusting to the gloom, Laura switched on the Maglite again. “There’s a flatter floor at the bottom. Looks like…” She raised the light again. The beam fell on rock walls-then nothing but blackness. “There’s a passageway back here, quite wide, and I’ve got no idea how far back it goes. A long way.” Excitement rose in her voice. “I think it’s man-made!”

“Can you get down?”

“I’ll try.” She took an experimental step, both hands raised for balance. Small pieces of debris skittered down the pile. “It’s kind of loose, I might have to-”

With a crunch, a large stone broke loose beneath her right foot. Caught by surprise, she fell on her back and slid helplessly down the slope. The flashlight clattered away ahead of her.

“Laura! Laura!”

“I’m okay! I just slipped.” She got to her feet. Her thick clothes had saved her from a bruising experience.

“Do you want me to pull you back up?”

“No, I’m fine. Might as well look around now that I’m down here.” She bent to pick up the tough metal flashlight…

And realized she was not alone.

For a moment she froze, more in shock than in fear. Then curiosity took over, and she warily swept the beam over her surroundings.

“Honey?” she called up to Henry.

“Yeah?”

“You remember that secret Nazi expedition that went to Tibet and nobody ever heard from them again?”

“Gee, you know, I forgot all about it,” he shouted back with more than a hint of sarcasm. “Why?”

Triumph filled Laura’s voice. “I think I just found them.”

There were five bodies in the cave. It quickly became clear they hadn’t been killed by the rock fall that had blocked the entrance; from the almost mummified appearance of the corpses, the most likely cause of death was exposure, the cold of the Himalayas preserving and desiccating the victims. While the other expedition members investigated the rest of the cave, the Wildes turned their attention to its occupants.

“The weather must have deteriorated,” mused Henry, squatting to examine the bodies in the glow of a lantern, “so they came in here for shelter… and never came out.”

“Freezing to death, not the way I want to go,” Laura grimaced.

One of the Tibetan guides, Sonam, called to them from down the passageway. “Professor Wilde! There’s something here!”

Leaving the bodies, Henry and Laura went deeper into the cavern. As Laura had thought, the passage was clearly artificial, carved out of the rock. Some thirty feet ahead, the lights of the other expedition members illuminated what lay at the end.

It was a temple-or a tomb.

Jack was already examining what appeared to be an altar at the center of the rectangular chamber. “This isn’t Tibetan,” he announced as the Wildes entered. “These inscriptions… they’re Glozel, or a variation.”

“Glozel?” said Henry, surprise and delight mingling in his voice. “I always said that was a strong contender to be the Atlantean language!”

“It’s a long way from home,” Laura noted.

She shone her flashlight over the walls. Carved columns ran from floor to ceiling, the style angular, almost aggressive in its clean functionality. The Nazis would be right at home, she thought. Albert Speer could have devised the architecture.

Between the columns were bas-reliefs, representations of human figures. Henry moved closer to the largest one. While the design of the relief was unfamiliar, as forcefully stylized as the rest of the chamber, he knew instantly whom it was meant to be.

“Poseidon…” he whispered.

Laura joined him. “My God, it is Poseidon.” The image of the god differed from the traditional Greek interpretation, but there was no mistaking the trident held in his right hand.

“Well,” said Jack, “Mr. Frost will certainly be pleased that the expedition was a success…”

“The hell with Frost,” Laura snorted, “this is our discovery. All he did was help with the funding.”

“Now, now,” said Henry, jokingly patting her shoulder. “At least thanks to him we didn’t have to choose between breaking into our daughter’s college fund or selling our car!” He looked around. “Sonam, is there anything else here? Any other rooms or passages?”

“No,” replied Sonam. “It’s a dead end.”

“Oh,” said Laura, disappointed. “This is all there is? I mean, it’s a hell of a find, but I was sure there’d be more…”

“There might still be more,” Henry assured her. “There could be other tombs along the ledge. We’ll keep looking.”

He went back down the passage and returned to the bodies, Laura and Jack following. The corpses were huddled inside antiquated cold-weather gear, empty eye sockets staring back at him from darkened, parchmentlike skin. “I wonder if Krauss is one of them?”

“He is.” Laura pointed at one of the figures. “There’s our expedition leader.”

“How do you know?”

She moved her gloved finger towards the body, almost touching its chest. Henry brought the lantern closer to see a small metal badge attached to the material, an insignia…

A momentary chill, unconnected to the cold, ran through him. It was the death’s-head of the Schutzstaffel-the SS. It was over half a century since the organization had been destroyed, yet it still had the power to evoke fear.

“Jürgen Krauss,” he said at last, peering more closely at the dead man. There was a certain poetic irony to the fact that the leader of the Nazi expedition now resembled the skull on his SS insignia. “Never thought I’d meet you. But what brought you here?”

“Why not find out?” asked Laura. “His pack’s right there; it’s probably got all his notebooks inside. Take a look.”

“Wait, you want me to do that?”

“Well, obviously! I’m not touching a dead Nazi!”

“Jack?”

Jack shook his head. “These bodies are rather more recent than I’m used to dealing with.”

“Wuss,” Henry chided with a grin. He reached around the corpse, trying to disturb it as little as possible as he opened its backpack.

The contents were prosaic at first: a flashlight with bubbles of corrosion from the long-decayed batteries, crumpled pieces of greaseproof paper containing the expedition’s last scraps of food. But beneath these remnants, things became more interesting. Folded maps, leather-bound notebooks, sheets of paper bearing rubbings of more carved Glozel characters, a scoured sheet of copper with what looked like a map or chart scored into its surface… and something carefully wrapped in layers of what he was surprised to discover was dark velvet.

Laura took the copper piece. “Sand-worn… do you think they might have found this in Morocco?”

“It’s possible.” The notebooks should have been the first items Henry examined, but he was intrigued enough by the mystery object-flat, just under a foot long and surprisingly heavy-that he placed it carefully on the ground next to the lantern and peeled back the velvet.

“What’s that?” asked Laura.

“No idea. I think it’s metal, though.” The velvet, stiffened by time and cold, reluctantly gave up its contents as Henry pulled away the last layer.

“Wow,” Laura gasped. Jack’s eyes widened in amazement.

Inside the velvet wrapping was a metal bar some two inches wide, one end rounded off and marked with an arrowhead stamped into the surface. Even under the cold blue light of the lantern, the object had a radiance, sparkling with a reddish-golden glow unlike anything else found in nature.

Henry, transfixed, bent down for a better look. In contrast to the piece Laura was holding, the bar showed no signs of age or weathering, seeming freshly polished. The metal wasn’t gold or bronze, but…

Laura leaned closer as well, her breath briefly condensing on the cold surface. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Looks like it. My God. I can’t believe it. The Nazis actually found an artifact made of orichalcum, just like Plato described. A real, honest-to-God Atlantean artifact! And they had it fifty years ago!”

“You owe Nina an apology when we get home,” quipped Laura. “She always thought that piece she found in Morocco was orichalcum.”

“I guess I do,” said Henry, carefully picking up the bar. “There’s no way this is just off-color bronze.” The underside, he noticed, was not flat-there was a circular protrusion at the squared-off end. In the same position on the top side was a small slot at a forty-five-degree angle. “I think this was part of something larger,” he observed. “Like it was meant to hang from something.”

“Or swing from it,” Laura suggested. “Like a pendulum arm.”

Henry ran a fingertip along the inscribed arrowhead. “A pointer?”

“What are those marks?” asked Jack. Running along the length of the artifact was a thin line, equally faint symbols scribed into the metal on each side. A series of tiny dots, arranged in groups of up to eight. Also visible were…

“More Glozel characters,” said Henry. “But not quite the same as the ones in the tomb-look, some of these are more like hieroglyphics.” He compared them to the ones on the rubbings. They were the same style. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

Jack looked more closely. “They look a lot like Olmec, or something related. Bizarre mix…”

“What do they say?” asked Laura.

“No idea. It’s not exactly a language I’m fluent in. Well, not yet.” He coughed modestly.

“They look like they were added after it was made,” Henry noted. “The inscribing’s much cruder than the arrowhead.” He returned the mysterious object to the velvet. “This justifies us coming here all on its own!” He jumped to his feet and let out a triumphant whoop, then hugged Laura. “We did it! We actually found proof that Atlantis wasn’t just a myth!”

She kissed him. “Now all we need to do is find Atlantis itself, huh?”

“Well, one step at a time.”

A shout from deeper inside the cave caught their attention. “Something down here, Professor!” called Sonam.

Leaving the artifact on the floor, Henry and Laura hurried to the Tibetan. “Look at this,” Sonam said, holding up his light to the tomb wall. “I thought it was just a crack in the rock, but then I realized something.” Pulling off one glove, he stuck the tip of his little finger into the vertical crack and slowly ran it up the wall. “It’s exactly the same width all the way up. And there’s another one just like it over there.” He pointed at a spot on the wall about nine feet away.

“A door?” asked Laura.

Henry followed the path of the crack upwards, using his flashlight to pick out a barely discernible line running horizontally some eight feet above. “Big door. Jack’s got to see this.” He raised his voice. “Jack? Jack!” Nothing but echoes came back to him. “Where is he?”

Laura shook her head. “Hell of a time to take a leak. The most important archaeological find of the century and-”

“Professor Wilde!” One of the other Tibetans. “Some thing outside! Listen!”

The group fell silent, barely breathing. A low thudding noise became audible, rapid beats underscored by a rumbling whine.

“A helicopter?” Laura exclaimed in disbelief. “Here?”

“Come on,” snapped Henry, running for the entrance. The sky outside had darkened considerably. He used the rope to pull himself up the pile of rubble, Laura behind him.

“Chinese military?” Laura asked.

“How did they know where we were? Even we didn’t know exactly where we were going until we got to Xulaodang.” Henry squeezed through the entrance and stepped out onto the broad ledge. The weather was definitely deteriorating; the wind had picked up considerably.

But that wasn’t his main concern right now. He looked for the helicopter; the noise grew louder, but it was nowhere in sight.

And neither was Jack.

Laura emerged behind him. “Where is it?”

Her question was answered a moment later as the helicopter swept into view.

Not Chinese, Henry saw immediately. No red star markings. No markings at all, not even a tail number. Just an ominous dark gray paint scheme that immediately made him think Special Forces. But whose?

He didn’t know enough about aircraft to recognize the type, but it was large enough to carry several people in its passenger compartment. He could see the pilots behind the cockpit glass, their heads turning from side to side as if looking for something.

Looking for someone.

For them.

“Get back in the cave!” he shouted to Laura. With a worried look, she disappeared into the darkness.

The helicopter moved closer. A blizzard whipped up from the ground, snow caught in its downwash. Henry backed up to the cave entrance.

One of the pilots pointed down at the ground. At him.

The aircraft swung around like some giant alien insect, the cockpit windows huge eyes taking a better look at him, then turned away again. A door slid open in its flank. A moment later two coils of rope fell out and whipped snakelike to the ground.

A pair of dark figures dropped from the bobbing helicopter, rappelling down.

Henry saw immediately that they were armed, automatic rifles slung over their backs.

The only weapon the expedition possessed was a simple hunting rifle, carried more to scare off wild animals than for its effectiveness. And it wasn’t even with them-it had been left at the camp.

Barely a second after the first two men reached the ground, another pair began to descend the ropes. They too were armed.

Henry jumped backwards through the hole and slid down the pile of stones, hitting the cave floor hard.

“Henry!” cried Laura. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t think they’re friendly,” he said, face grim. “There’s at least four men, and they’ve got guns.”

“Oh my God! What about Jack?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see him. We need to get that door open. Come on.” As Laura hurried towards the tomb, Henry snatched up the artifact from the ground near the bodies, wrapping it in the protective velvet as he ran.

The four Tibetans frantically searched the tomb walls. “There’s nothing here!”

“There’s got to be something!” Henry yelled. “A release, a keyhole, anything!” He looked back. A figure was silhouetted against the cave entrance. A moment later it dropped as if swallowed by the ground, to be replaced by another. “Shit! They’re in the cave!”

Laura grabbed his arm. “Henry!”

Another silhouette, and another, and another…

Five men. All armed.

They were trapped.

Red lines lanced through the darkness. Laser sights, followed by the intense beams of halogen flashlights. The dazzling lights swept back and forth, before coming to rest on the little group of people in the tomb.

Henry froze, almost blinded by the beams, unsure what to do. They had nowhere to run, and the laser spots dancing over their bodies meant they couldn’t fight either-

“Professor Wilde!”

Henry was stunned. They knew him by name?

“Professor Wilde!” the voice repeated. Deep and rich, with an accent-Greek? “Remain where you are. You too, Dr. Wilde,” he added to Laura.

The intruders advanced. “Who are you?” Henry demanded. “What do you want?”

The men holding the flashlights stopped, a single tall figure continuing towards the expedition members. “My name is Giovanni Qobras,” said the man, enough light reflecting from the tomb walls for Henry to pick out his features. A hard, angular face with a prominent Roman nose, dark hair slicked back from his forehead almost like a skullcap. “What I want, I regret to say… is you.”

Laura stared at him in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I cannot allow you to continue your search. The risk to the world is far too great. My apologies.” He lowered his head for a moment, then stepped back. “It’s nothing personal.”

The laser lines fixed on Henry and Laura.

Henry opened his mouth. “Wait-”

In the confines of the tomb, the noise of the automatic weapons was deafening.

Qobras stared at the six bullet-riddled bodies as he waited for the echoes of gunfire to die away, then issued rapid orders. “Collect everything that relates to their expedition-maps, notes, everything. And do the same for those bodies back there.” He pointed at the dead Nazis. “I assume that’s the remains of the Krauss expedition. One historical mystery solved…” he added, almost to himself, as his men split up to examine the corpses.

“Giovanni!” one man yelled a minute later, crouched over Henry’s body.

“What is it, Yuri?”

“You’ve got to see this.”

Qobras strode over. “My God!”

“It’s orichalcum, isn’t it?” asked Yuri Volgan, shining his light on the object he had just unwrapped. A deep orange glow reflected on the faces of the two men.

“Yes… but I’ve never seen a complete artifact made from it before, just scraps.”

“It’s beautiful… and it must be worth a fortune. Millions of dollars, tens of millions!”

“At least.” Qobras gazed at the artifact for a long moment, seeing his own eyes reflected in the metal. Then he straightened abruptly. “But it must be kept hidden.” He took out a flashlight and examined the tomb walls, but saw nothing except bas-reliefs of ancient gods. Turning to the altar, he quickly examined the inscriptions. “Glozel… but nothing about Atlantis.”

“Maybe we should search the tomb,” Volgan offered, taking one long last look at the artifact before carefully wrapping it in the velvet again.

Qobras considered it. “No,” he said at last. “There’s nothing here, it must have been looted. I really thought the Wildes might lead us further along the trail to Atlantis itself, but it’s just another dead end. We need to get out of here before the storm arrives.” He turned and strode back towards the cave entrance.

Behind him, Volgan glanced over his shoulder to make sure nobody was watching, then slipped the wrapped artifact into his thick jacket.

Qobras stood at the edge of the ledge, waving a flare to summon the circling helicopter, then turned back to the man standing by the doomed expedition’s camp. “You did the right thing.”

Jack’s face was hidden inside his hood. “I’m not proud of this. They were my friends-and what’s going to happen to their daughter?”

“It had to be done,” said Qobras. “The Brotherhood can never allow Atlantis to be found.” He frowned. “Least of all by Kristian Frost. Funding intermediaries like the Wildes… he knows we’re watching him.”

“What… what if Frost suspects I was working for you?” Jack asked nervously.

“You’ll have to convince him that there was an accident. We can fly you to ten kilometers from Xulaodang-there should be very little risk of your being seen with us. Then you can walk back to the village and contact Frost, give him the bad news: that you were the only survivor of an avalanche, a rock fall, whatever you choose.” Qobras held out a hand. “The radio?”

Jack dug into his pack, returning to its owner the chunky transmitter he had used to give Qobras’s team the location of the Golden Peak. “I’ll have to talk to other people as well. The Chinese authorities, the U.S. embassy…”

“Just keep your story consistent, and your payment will be waiting for you by the time you get back to America. Should you discover that anyone else is trying to follow the path of the Wildes in the future, you’ll inform me at once, of course?”

“It’s what you pay me for,” Jack said sullenly.

A cold smile, then Qobras looked up to watch the helicopter approaching, its navigation lights aglow against the darkening sky.

Five minutes later it departed, leaving behind nothing but bodies.