Dateline: Atlantis (23 page)

Rickett's face is no longer smiling, but he remains silent. Pitch doesn't let the quiet last for more than a beat.

“Someone got out of hand over there in your Windy City, Dr. Ricketts, and now a federal agency is breathing down our collective neck. Explain to all of us why the photographer was killed.”

Ricketts attempts a smile and starts to answer before being interrupted by the Rev. Caine.

“One of our boys could see what was coming,” Caine says, without a trace of regret. “Ricketts here could not protect those photographs, so we decided to deal with things our way. The dead man can't produce any more pictures.”

“Fools,” Pitch says, walking away from the monitor and shaking his head. “While your ‘boys' were playing doctor, the federal agents coaxed Dr. Ricketts to give up the photographs.” Pitch paces between live Committee members and the cameras. He wheels on Caine's camera. “Or didn't you know that?”

From the expression on the Reverend's face, he didn't.

“The two of you were not working in complete synchronization,” Pitch says, raising his voice in exasperation. “One hand snuffs a life, while the other hands over the evidence to the officials. Is that how our operations are going to go? Dr. Ricketts is now the target of a murder investigation, and we better think of a way to clear him.”

“We'll come up with an alibi for him. Airtight,” the Rev. says with grim face. “No more mis-steps. This mission is too important.”

“On this, we agree,” Pitch says, sneering at no one in particular. “No matter how different we are, scientist or preacher, we must coordinate with precision. I won't accept anything less.”

He turns to check the reactions of all the faces, real and virtual. None show dissent. Pitch ends the meeting with a tally of which operatives are in which countries. He authorizes the Rev. Caine to send armed men to Miami to meet Amy Quigley.

#

Pitch stomps through Kensington Gardens, stopping at Round Pond to collect his thoughts. A few dozen feet away, a little girl tosses breadcrumbs for the swans to eat. He watches the majestic birds swallow the pieces with regal tosses of their heads. The grandness of the park, with its gravel paths and fussed-over gardens soothes Pitch's own need for order and control. He finds a bench and sits with the
Time before Time
proof and tries to draw up a plan. So far, nothing comes to mind.

Isaac Thorgeld had been a fellow student at Oxford, then Pitch's roommate when they were getting their doctorates. He hardly knew a man so unlike himself, yet they got on like long-lost brothers. Whereas Thorgeld was a bit of a pretty boy, tending to date any woman within a ten-mile radius of the campus (including the female professors), Pitch was an introvert. He rarely asked a woman out, and, when he did, it was to find a
colleague of similar intellect. As so often happens in academia, or at least in Pitch's field of archaeology, the women with the serious brainpower were often a bit shaggy looking and caked with dirt from a dig. Nothing a good haircut and bath couldn't fix, but they weren't runway models, either. So, Pitch remained frustrated while Thorgeld, blond and perpetually tanned, cherry-picked the loveliest women in town.

Pitch eventually married Rebecca Tunis, an exotic half-English, half-Turkish girl. Isaac stood up as best man. The marriage lasted a year, leaving Pitch with no further desire to put up with such niceties as remembering birthdays or buying flowers. So illogical. Too bad, because Rebecca had been a top-drawer scholar.

He moved back in with Thorgeld, because he didn't feel at home at the family estate after his marriage failure. While Pitch was a compulsive neat freak, Thorgeld couldn't keep his piles of papers confined to one room. While another tidy man might have been driven mad by his roommate's disregard for his living space, Pitch found it pleasurable to clean. He filed papers and labeled boxes with a sense of pride. In an odd way, he felt Thorgeld's copious writings were like his own, so he protected them with the same care.

Pitch left his growing collection of knives in a locked cabinet and labeled each one with information about its year of construction, materials, area found, and date. Thorgeld never once tried to open the doors or take a peek. He seemed to respect Pitch's passion.

While they were students, they would talk long into the night about archaeology and linguistics (Thorgeld's field). Both felt that knowledge grew from a common foundation. The Greeks, they agreed, established a system of knowledge and all learning was built upon this structure. Remove a brick at the base of the tower of intellect, and the whole thing would tumble into useless bits of unrelated facts.

Thorgeld, however, was inclined to believe that much the Greeks had “invented” had really been borrowed from the
Egyptians, and he got into howling arguments with Pitch, about this deviation from the accepted truth. Nonetheless, Pitch saw nothing of value beyond Dynasty Zero of the Egyptian civilization, and considered the Egyptians lists of former god-kings to be simple myth. Picky, tedious academic arguments, but important ones to men like Pitch, who considered history to be more compelling than the actual life he was living.

For all their quarrelling, there never was a sign that Thorgeld would break ranks with his friend. They were inseparable, mentally joined by common principles.

As their careers grew, Pitch landed a spot at the British Museum, and moved to his apartments in Kensington. Thorgeld received his doctorate and became a lecturer at Oxford. Later, Thorgeld went on to win tenure and a full professorship.

Then, without warning, a shattering new trend began to work its way through academia. A few Americans in Egypt, a renegade Frenchman, and some English crackpots were beginning to find holes in the timeline of civilization. First, pamphlets appeared arguing that the Giza pyramids were aligned with the stars and that whole cities were laid out along zodiacal maps. Then an English journalist wrote a popular book maintaining that the ancients knew of precession, the Great Year—the thirty-five-thousand-year span of time it took for the earth's pole to complete one circuit through the zodiacal signs. There was science to precession, even if Pitch dismissed the zodiac out of hand.

This new theory of such ancient knowledge was impossible to Pitch's way of thinking. It was unbelievable that the ancients could even have a concept of such vast expanses of time. This theory would presume that humans weren't running around with bear-fur pelts on their backs but were civilized people able to spend long hours on such leisure-time activities as astronomy and mathematics. It couldn't be. But the books captured the public yearning for something more exciting than digging up new mummies or finding frozen icemen in the Alps.

Feeling that an earthquake was rumbling under the historical construct that Pitch and Thorgeld held sacred, they formed the Committee. It began as a network of like-minded, alarmed academics and snowballed into an enterprise determined to squash any more talk of forgotten civilizations.

They used to gather in each other's homes, each member offering hospitality for a monthly meeting. At first, the Committee accomplished little more than issuing authoritative papers to peer journals, papers that knocked down alternative theories. Occasionally, when a book similar to
The Sphinx Decoded
broke, they would appoint a member to appear on the BBC, and he or she would proclaim a condemnation.

It was all businesslike and civil until the Langs came along. Their scholarship was impeccable and they were onto something damaging beyond all measure. Pitch never felt so threatened in his life, because what the Langs were digging up—shards of pottery and cracked stellae with the rudiments of a language carved upon them—contradicted all the research he had done. They discovered traces of ruins in the Americas that dated far back into Neolithic Times. At that point, Pitch's career was on the up-swing: the British Museum job was new and he wanted to make an impact, distinguished peer journals clamored for his work, he sensed an Order of the British Empire in his future if things continued on track.

He petitioned the Committee to hush the Langs up, but the group of academics was having little luck keeping things quiet on the other side of the Atlantic, so they widened their sphere and welcomed in like-minded professors across the globe. It didn't help much. Then Pitch met the Rev. Caine.

The preacher charmed Americans wherever he went, holding huge prayer meetings and collecting large amounts of cash to spirit away in his stretch limousine. He, too, had seen the Langs speaking, on the television news, of a civilization that existed in 10,000 B.C. The preacher was horrified. He cast about to
find experts in the field of archaeology who might demolish the Langs' research and discovered Pitch.

At first, Pitch, a man of science, refused to meet with the fundamentalist. This man was a Creationist, after all. There seemed little common ground upon which to stand. Pitch worried about the taint of superstition on his sterling reputation. It wasn't until Caine revealed the full range of his holdings—a survivalist camp in Idaho, the munitions cache, a ready army of soldiers of God—that Pitch saw a use for the Reverend. When the preacher offered substantial sums of U.S. dollars to finance television specials, glossy magazines dedicated to archaeology, and American info-mercials (a sort of long-form television advert), Pitch embraced Caine's anti-Atlantis crusade. The Langs were eliminated and forgotten by a fickle public. The Committee, now grown in size and strength to oppose any alternative theory that came down the road, went after more of Caine's enemies.

Still, the alliance was uneasy, and Pitch knew Caine regarded him with suspicion. He also knew the old fool considered himself smarter than the combined brainpower of the entire Committee membership, because he thought God talked directly to him. Such an idiot needed to be handled with exceeding care. He was like a vial of nitroglycerin. Drop it, and an explosion could erase everything.

A call of ducks taking wing over the pond wakes Pitch from his reveries and he focuses on the heretical book proof in his hands. He sighs as he pages through the industrious output of his former friend. Pitch suspected the betrayal was brewing when Caine came aboard. Thorgeld remained a member and even set up the robust Hall of Truth site on the World Wide Web when the Internet boom had just begun. But soon, he stopped attending meetings, preferring to send e-mail instead. When the evangelicals began supplying the Committee with guns and musclemen—and assassins, when necessary—Thorgeld stopped talking to the Committee at all.

About five years ago, Thorgeld drifted away from his friendship with Pitch. He left Oxford, married a Moroccan woman, and only resurfaced from time to time to write the odd article on forgotten languages, such as Akkadian and Aramaic.

But this. No one expected this.
As fervent as Thorgeld had been to stamp out Atlantis seekers, now he had become one. He was Paul on the road to Damascus. Hobnobbing with that Knox woman had him causing trouble from the Middle East to the New World.

But what can Pitch do with a man who had been so loyal so long? Perhaps it was a mental breakdown of some kind. Maybe the Moroccan woman got to Isaac's head. Isaac often had problems with losing himself in the love affair at hand. Pitch does not dare send a madman like Cruz to deal with this. Hewitt? Well, he is a man of mediocre talents.

The idea is to catch Thorgeld before he makes it to Mexico or Cuba or wherever else he plans to go. And the one to intercept the turncoat must be Pitch himself. Perhaps he can talk some sense into his old comrade. If he details the expected O.B.E. honor and what it means to him and to scholarship in general, Thorgeld is bound to attend to him. He owes him that. At least that.

He looks up at the clouding sky and pulls his coat tighter about him. The end of February is always a grim time in London. He could do with a sunny vacation. He shoves the proof under an arm and paces around the pond, plotting his next few moves.

For the first time in many years, Amaryllis
listens
.
She checks into a decent hotel with a large business center and purchases a new bathing suit from the expensive hotel store. She settles in her room and calls Donny, gets his voice mail, and leaves the hotel's fax number. Then she changes into the bathing suit—her usual humdrum style of navy blue maillot—and goes to the pool to swim a few laps. The exercise begins to pull the ropes of stress free in her body. She ends up in the hot tub, letting the jets work on her shoulders and neck.

She can't help but think about Gabriel and the senseless argument they had before she left for Miami. All he seemed to want was to find another pyramid—and more than once he asked her if he could have the crystal they found in the Yucatan. Their one night of passion had been nothing more than an aberration, just like so many of Amaryllis' past encounters with men. She inhales sharply and gets a dose of chlorinated water up her nose. She shakes her head to clear her breathing.

She just can't tell the difference between a man's desire for sex and his need for love. Maybe that's because there isn't one, she thinks. As for herself, she struggles to remember wanting anything like deep, passionate love. An easy compatibility is all she ever asks for, yet, even that seems impossible to find, in Chicago, Los Angeles, and all over the world. She hadn't had many boyfriends over the years, putting most of her energy into her job. Now, resting her neck against the smooth ceramic tiles of the hot tub, she wonders if a little wild romance is just what's been missing from her controlled life. Sex with a man like Gabriel
had the requisite fire but not the simmering quality to keep a fulfilling affair going.