Dateline: Atlantis (12 page)

London had not been happy with the reports of the sub's findings and wired Ignacio Cruz to keep an eye on the mysterious expedition. But, the sub team had been so silent that Cruz had a hard time finding out if they even existed. They kept their trail clean of bar encounters, braggadocio, and displays of odd foreign customs: the things that usually give galleon hunters away.

So, the Brits ordered him away, to look into the Bahamian sightings. Another looney tunes outfit with a website is reporting satellite images of triangles in the blue sea off the large islands. They are using NASA and Landsat images and enhancing the results with their own computers. Some find the results thrilling, but Cruz considers it all heresy. Anything in those blue Caribbean waters would have to have stood above ground 8,000 to 10,000 BCE. To Cruz, it violates scripture. To London, it violates common sense. So, the satellite boys in their tin-foil hats must be disproved.

Some of the anomalies on the satellite website are in these restricted United States waters. Cruz, a Cuban citizen, has to take delicate care. The Committee already holds him responsible for bungling the submarine project.

Cruz knows he's not the only one in disfavor, however. The rumor mill had already churned out the row caused by Landon Hewitt and his disastrous trip to the Azores. Instead of quashing rumors of intelligible, organized script on the sunken slopes of the islands, Hewitt brought along a brash young linguist who found a connection between the writing and proto-Egyptian language. Hewitt didn't know how to shut her up.

That could have been contained, for the Committee and its army of gun-toting evangelicals is adept at hushing up such misadventures, but the linguist, an American named Shoshanna Knox, leaked it to the press—the
Times
, for heaven's sake. She received enough notice and funding to organize her own trip to the Canary Islands, where she is now gleaning piles of information in the forgotten language of the Guanche—the original, decimated Canary Islanders. There, an odd written language of lines and dots, squiggles and swirls remains, but no one alive knows how to speak it. Knox is at work tracing the relationship between the Guanche language to Berber and its precursor tongue. These are bad times for the Committee and Hewitt is no longer on active duty.

Cruz knows it is time for a more efficient means of operation. In the Americas, Cruz has already managed to persuade Mexican insurgents to bomb a water project to hide a newly discovered series of ancient caves. A dogged photographer was deprived of the photos, and the female reporter lured to Chicago, where Professor Ricketts and his boys lay in wait. The writer's story must be on a compact disc in a safe deposit box or uploaded to some impregnable storage site and it's up to Ricketts and his crew to persuade her to tell them where it is. Still, Cruz knows, as he fondles the serrated blade of his diving knife, that she has nothing to prove her story. Nothing at all. But, still, he'd like to see all traces of her findings disappear. He hates dealing with these soft professors and their sloppy methods. He much prefers the American churchmen who provide him with weapons and, occasionally, with soldiers of God. To Cruz, a few missing persons would solve the Committee's problem better than bombs, drugs, or kidnapping. The Committee's methods often stink, but they pay well, so he suffers their half measures.

He wipes a hand across his sun-darkened brow, squinting into the glaring expanse of ocean. Now, comes the difficult part, slipping into a guarded facility of a nation that's already on high alert. He is supposed to find the sites the satellite images indicate.
Yanqui scum,
he thinks as he stands in the water for hours, watching the guards change, noting when the ships pull into port and which ship has liberty tonight. He'll stay here to until the next day if he has to. Breaking U.S. security is one of his favorite assignments.

#

Conrad Pitch, Ph.D., fellow of Oxford University, Keeper of the Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, shoulders the hefty legend built by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge—a god in the pantheon of Egyptologists. Pitch is born to impressive duties, and the tasks leave no respite. Therefore, he is never in the mood for the daily wails of tabloid hawkers that assault his ears when he trods the sodden streets of London. A typical day has begun with soul-piercing rain that drums on until noon. The brollies are put away as the sun shines about Russell Square for a few precious afternoon hours. As Pitch leaves his office, the umbrellas bloom again like black poppies in a tragic jungle, each one funereal, shading a dour face. The lemmings march forward at a soldier-like pace to the Tube. Pitch joins the throng, although he has no intention of taking the grimy Underground. He is pacing along with the rabble on his way to a nearby meeting room.

The
Evening Standard
hawker, intent on getting his fifty pence for each rag he sells, barks, “Atlantis found under the sand in Egypt.
Staaaaandard
here!” For the first time in the decade he has worked at the museum, Pitch stops at the man's sorry mess of a newsstand—just a folding chair and wooden racks covered with a makeshift tent of plastic sheeting.

“What did you say?” Pitch commands of the yellow-toothed serf. The man sucks in his already-sunken cheeks and studies the interrogator.

“Eh?
Standard
here.” The gnome-like creature holds up the glaring headline to the academic's rigid face. The headline reads just as the old peddler proclaimed: “Atlantis in the Sand.” A photograph bears the caption, “Radar imagery shows the Sahara was once a fertile plain before the Nile took a turn and climate changed. Can Atlantis be under the sands?” Breathless prose aside, the caption has the glimmer of truth to it. Pitch had seen the NASA images himself years ago. There was no doubt that more than 10,000 years ago, before the retreat of the glaciers, much of the southern Mediterranean was fertile, crop-bearing land. A great deal of that area extends into today's Sahara.

He peers closer at the paper. The actual information is buried beneath the pages of reports of the royals' latest public embarrassment, an MP's latest dalliances, and snaps of swimsuit beauties. But the story does bear a Reuters source credit. It must be on the up and up.

“Let's have it, gov, you buying or not?” the insect croaks. Pitch pops the old vagabond a heavy fifty pence coin and gathers up the tabloid. He scurries off like a priest who's been spied buying pornography.

Behind him the refrain begins again, “
Standard. Evening Standard
here.” Pitch has never bought one of these tabloids in his life. He curls it into a tight baton and continues to ply through the rain, sharp chin set at a haughty angle.

#

The Committee meeting always gets underway on the first Monday of the month at seven in the evening, sharp. Discreetly hidden in the back chambers of an office building, the Committee meetings appear attended by few, at least if one is counting the numbers of bodies present. However, in strategic places around the damp, velvet-curtained room are computer screens mounted with Web cameras. The Internet also provides vocal communication.

Present technologically at this evening's gathering is Fayheed Saheem, the prim, poised director of Egypt's office of antiquities. Crackling into pixilated forms that sometimes resolve themselves into a face is the flamboyant Antonio Dolores del Cristo from Guatemala. Today he wears red, which makes the monitor's color resolution dance the samba. Smiling on a screen is Todd Ricketts, who may be the world's most important authority on Mideast civilizations. He is logging in from Chicago. Another monitor shows an unkempt, bearded figure who will only admit to reporting from rural Idaho in the States. Pitch recognizes the man, half in shadows, as the Rev. Robert Caine. The money man. He runs an odd, survivalist cult in the wilds of the American Northwest, a thriving national church, and sits on top of a fortune thanks to the tithing of his loyal flock. He's made an uneasy pact with the Committee, and Pitch finds him a repulsive but necessary part of the group.

In person sits a line of somber-faced Britons and one Australian. Pitch starts the meeting by holding up his soggy issue of the
Standard.
Susan Treadwell, who is sitting close by, reads the story aloud to the people on the monitors. When she finishes, silence descends.

Finally, Treadwell, a Babylonian expert from the British Museum, pulls at her wool skirt and breaks the agonizing quiet. “We've known about the climate,” she says with a sudden wave of the hand. “The rest is simply postulation. They can't base anything on that.”

“Did you listen to the ending?” Colin Judge, a Greek and Latin professor from Oxford, asks. When the computer heads indicate confusion, he pages through the newspaper to find a small, ending paragraph. “That's where all the good news is, you know. It says here that some American psychic plans to lead a team with ground-penetrating radar to the desert near the Libyan/Egyptian border to find traces of ancient buildings.”

“Can they do that?” Pitch demands.

“We've made nice with Libya ever since all that trouble with the revolution,” says the metallic-tinged voice of Ricketts, smiling into the Web cam like a TV interviewee. “Well, of course, you Brits are with us, too.”

Pitch blanches. You Brits. The last thing he needs is a political discussion led by the glib American. He signals for silence like a bobby ordering a full stop. “The point is, we have some more barmy folks with too much money, stomping about the desert and trying to rewrite history,” Pitch barks. “Can you revoke their permit, Fayheed?”

Saheem just shakes his head like the feeble old bureaucrat he has become. Once, he imagined himself a media star and led camera crews all over the sands of Egypt encouraging documentaries about the ancients. But when he was accused of faking artifacts and staging sideshows with previously discovered treasures, the Egyptian government began stripping him of powers. After the Egyptian revolution, he's become a beaten dog. These days, Saheem spends most of his time in a dank office, handing out permissions to dig to the select few who dare ask. Essentially, the entire area of Giza is off-limits to foreigners—except members of the Committee, of course.

“They asked Libya,” Saheem says, with an apologetic lift of the hands. “If they wander over the border, I don't know how we'd catch them.” He stops to fan his brow and then begins to snicker. “Besides, there's nothing out there. Sand and heat. I don't envy them.”

Pitch nods curtly at the camera. “It probably doesn't amount to anything.” He then wheels on the monitor with Ricketts' handsome face. “But you idiots have really gotten us into a pinch.”

It is Ricketts' turn to pale—or his computer image, anyway. Pitch refers to the drugged photographer Ricketts' team snatched from Los Angeles. “Look, it's under control,” the Chicago professor says, his smile fading. “The cops think it's a mob job and…”

“But what were you thinking, man?” Pitch demands. There are murmurs of assent around the room.

“We had to get those photos to Chicago so we could analyze them.”

“They'd know more in Mexico. Why drag the man your way?”

“For another reason you've probably forgotten. We wanted to lure the reporter. She's the daughter of the Langs.”

A strange sound of strangled breath issues from Del Cristo's speakers. The younger members of the Committee stare at Pitch in consternation. He is silent, waiting for Ricketts to finish his mad speech.

“It appears that nature still beats nurture,” Ricketts continues, that smarmy smile beginning to spread across his face. “You see, she was adopted by her aunt and uncle and given the family name of Quigley. But she's a Lang, through and through. And she's just as keen on destroying our work as her late parents were.”

The Rev. Caine perks up. He's the only church member of the Committee, but he also is the man with the cash. All attention turns to him.

“Want us to give you a hand with that, Professor Ricketts? I have some big guys out in Chicago. That's my hometown,” he says in a nasal twang.

Pitch strokes his chin. He once wore a Van Dyke beard, which only accentuated the point of this jaw line. But now it's smoothly shaven and he sports a clean mustache. Less devilish, he told his co-workers. He already had flunked one of his
students for making a joke about Dante's circles of Hell and the amounts of research Pitch assigned.

“No, that won't be necessary,” Pitch says. “Let's be glad that Ignacio Cruz is on call.”

Ricketts swallows so hard, his Adam's apple bounces in his throat. Del Cristo attempts to speak, but lapses into a weak cough. The rest of the meeting they spend on damage control, figuring how to counter the claims of the persistent and irritating translator, Shoshanna Knox.

#

The meeting over, the Rev. Caine takes off his headset and removes the Web cam. He's not averse to technology, like so many in his field. He's discovered that it has helped enrich his flock. Instead of remaining an evangelical preacher in the suburbs of Chicago, he's been able to create a countrywide movement named Logos, with hundreds of thousands of members in the United States. It, of course, is what the Lord meant for him, and Web technology came along just at the time he was thinking of branching out, spreading the word of God to the world.