Dateline: Atlantis (26 page)

The post Ice-Age inundation was worldwide, covering enormous swaths of land that once stood above water, including a land bridge between Sri Lanka and India. The Mediterranean Sea once was an inland sea. The entire topography of the earth looked like another world before the glaciers melted, according to Thorgeld's maps. Sometime in the past, a vast amount of land stood above the Atlantic waves, Thorgeld surmises, and that land most likely supported a pre-Ice Age Civilization.

By the time Amaryllis finishes reading, her head is racing partly with logical arguments against the whole idea of Atlantis, but also with thoughts of polar bears basking in a tropical Antarctica, a giant island of mountains in the middle of the Atlantic, and pyramids under the sea holding crystals. Lovely crystals that influence dreams and create holographic images. She sees them now blinking on and off under the waves, luring her to swim to them. She does.

At noon, she stops by the hotel's front desk. The bored desk clerk searches for any messages and comes up with a pile of faxed documents. He also squints at a scribbled phone message and passes it on to her.

“For some reason, your voice mail was full, although I don't see any reason why that should be.” He demonstrates by picking up the phone and calling her room. “Yup, voice mail is working. But you got this anyway.” He pushes the phone message toward her as if it were a contaminant.

She narrows her eyes to make sure she's making sense of the letters on the note. It's an invitation to attend a pre-publication book party for Isaac Thorgeld. There is a phone number for a public relations firm, but no contact name.

This is beyond bizarre. No one but Sybil even knows I've seen the book.
Time before Time
is not scheduled to come out in the United States for six more months. Amaryllis knows that from the press release that was tucked in between the proof's cover and first page. She realizes that she is not of any value to a publicist because she's not working the book beat for any major publication. Why invite her? She scowls at the paper and stuffs it into her purse, promising herself she'll deal with it later. She grabs the faxes and tries to thank the desk clerk, but he's on to another customer and doesn't see her leave.

She heads over to the lounge restaurant and orders tea and a croissant. Then she forces herself to re-read the dense documentation Donny faxed to her.

Donny's been busy. This latest group documents gets into the nitty-gritty. He's detailed the academic background of one
Todd Ricketts, an Egyptian and ancient-civilizations professor at the University of Chicago. The professor has spent some years doing postdoctoral work at Oxford University, where he met up with a Conrad Pitch and Isaac Thorgeld.

Man, that Thorgeld gets around
. She looks up from her reading with a start.
How could this be coming together with such serendipity
? She bolts down the rest of her tea.
It's either an elaborate fantasy or Donny's really onto something.

She reads some more, learning that Pitch, Ricketts, and Thorgeld had joined several societies devoted to publishing skeptic's journals. Her eyes fly up again. In the past, Thorgeld stood against any thought about an unknown, ancient civilization. Yet, now, he writes a book steadfastly in favor of searching for a drowned “human family” that perished twelve-thousand years ago. Pitch and Ricketts do not have a similar change of heart. What could have caused the breach? And what evidence would have caused Thorgeld to make such a complete turnaround in his thinking?

Donny's notes go on to say that it looks as if Ricketts and Pitch have taken their movement underground and have picked up support among like-minded academics worldwide. “It's a cabal,” he writes. “And we think we've located its base in London.”

But it gets worse. The secret faction is tied up with Logos. The religious cult has a headquarters in the Northwestern wilderness, but the Rev. Robert Caine has followers all over the country. As a part of his Creationist campaign, he joined forces some years ago with Pitch to stamp out any talk of Atlantis. Donny includes a drawing of the Logos symbol that matches the “Word” plaque Amaryllis saw on Freya's wall.
Oh, no.

While this whirling tornado of information swirls the neurons of her mind, she thinks of the invitation to Thorgeld's publicity bash, set for this evening, and pulls out her cell phone to call Sybil. Her pal says she doesn't have any idea if the event is real or not but promises to find out pronto. If it is a bogus affair, she'll warn Amaryllis.

Not wanting her next call to show up on caller ID, she walks over to a pay phone—not easy to find in this modern hotel—and dials the public relations number on her invitation. Loud bleating tones and an electronic voice inform her that the number has been disconnected. Something is wrong with this event and emergency bells are going off in her mind. But she still wants to talk to Thorgeld. For the first time since she saw that unnerving man tailing her at the bus stop, she wishes she has a bodyguard with her. She's ashamed of this need, but can't brush away the feeling of openness, and vulnerability. She wishes she brought Gabriel.

#

The public library, which would be the least exciting of Miami's attractions for most visitors, is Amaryllis' next destination. To Amaryllis' good fortune, no one has tried to follow her here. Thanks to Donny and to Sibyl's Lexis-Nexis search, she's almost done with her Nav-Tech research, and the peppy librarian is leaping about to find new material for her. Librarians, she discovers, feel unappreciated in this era of Internet searches and will often scale high bookshelves to find material one can't pull up on the ‘Net.

From what Amaryllis has found, Thorgeld is a distinguished linguist and has written for many journals about dead or dying languages. He seems to have been most prolific a couple decades ago. Then, his writings trickled off. In the last five years, he had only three articles published, all on ancient tongues.

Pitch's work is voluminous, as is Rickett's. Amaryllis could have been in the reading room for three days plowing through their archeological material. What stands out is their rock-solid insistence that civilization began at 4,000 BCE.

Then, for some reason, Thorgeld suddenly diverges from his colleagues. Why? The public record shows no inkling of a
disagreement. To think, Amaryllis puts her head down on the hard wood of the study carrel. She tries not to nod off, but the lack of sleep from her night of reading is fogging her brain. She begins to drift, seeing the crystal orb floating in front of her, just out of her grasp, filling her head with an intense light. Night presses at the edges of her consciousness. Visions form.

Hands meet fathoms below the ocean's surface. They reach for a carved stone object but end up touching each other instead. The woman stretches for the rock with the delicacy of a sea anemone. She brushes it and eases it out of the sand. The piece of granite is carved with something reminiscent of a rune. The man and woman cannot exchange expressions with diving gear in place, but the man smiles with his hazel eyes. Her father's eyes.

The vision blurs and re-forms:

Rancor fills a room when the man brings the rune stone to the university. Shouts cascade down the hallway. The woman quivers in her office. She begins to pack her desk, gently wrapping each stone vase, carved plaque, and the album of undersea photographs. The books and papers fill another box. A sense of fear fills the air. There is a prickly dread of being hunted.

Amaryllis moans slightly in her sleep, knowing she's getting information from the orb but is unsure how that can happen. She lays her head on a book.

A meteor careens out of orbit, streaking like a blazing arrow through the Earth's atmosphere, crashing into the turquoise Caribbean Sea. Forests burn. Volcanoes erupt. A tsunami comes roaring toward her, a wall of water loosened from the glaciated northern climes. She braces for impact.

A chirping cell phone jolts her back to life. Shaking off sleep, she answers the call. Sybil's voice cuts through the static.

“The press conference is real, I guess,” Sybil says. “I got an invitation, too. I asked the book editor if I can go, and she was completely ambivalent. What do you think?”

“Yeah, let's go. I'm really eager to meet this Thorgeld guy. He might have just the information to help me piece together the past. But it's sketchy. The P.R. firm's number doesn't work.”

“Well…” Sybil's voice drifts away as if she couldn't make up her mind.

“I read the book. I can summarize it for you if you think you need to do a write-up.”

“I'm sure we're not going to do a feature on a book that's coming out six months from now. But thanks.” She pauses again. “Well, they don't seem to need me around here this afternoon. Okay, what the heck, I'll go.”

“It's at five, but I don't know where the hotel is, and I haven't gotten a rental car yet.”

“I'll pick you up at four-thirty at your hotel.”

“Right.”

Amaryllis clicks her phone shut and looks up at the disapproving librarian. The woman has morphed from amiable to haughty within seconds.

“No cell phones in the library,” she says in a hushed voice.

“I'm sorry. I forgot it was on. Did you find that Navy material we were looking for?” Amaryllis pushes the off button on her phone with a flourish.

The librarian's expression hovers between schoolmarm mode and light-hearted friend. It must be hard to enforce rules when you're having fun with the research. She hands over a small pile of documents on Nav-tech, one including a darker, sharper picture of the tower. It still looks forbidding, but now looks less like a modern structure than a pitted, timeworn relic

“Most of the info was classified, and I couldn't get past the passwords. But this is what I found.” The librarian is starting to brighten as she speaks. Her dark eyes look as if they have glitter in the brown irises. She also piles on some printouts on Logos. Amaryllis flips through these and sees that the church started in Western Springs, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.

“Wonderful,” Amaryllis purrs, carefully keeping her voice low. “This is exactly what I need.”

The librarian is aglow now, her braids bobbing as she nods her head. “You aren't planning to go to Nav-Tech, are you?” she ventures.

“I can't get in, right? Why would I want to go there?”

“Because you look like the type who's never going to give up.”

#

The conference quarters at the Four Winds Hotel is as sterile as an operating room. In one corner is a small table covered with cheddar cheese and boxed crackers. Cheap paper cups are stacked nearby. At the end of the room stands a plywood dais, complete with a microphone. Folding chairs line up before the speaker's platform, but they are unoccupied. In fact, there is no one anywhere—no prowling public relations agent, no reporters, and definitely no speaker. Amaryllis and Sybil aren't quite through the door when Amaryllis jerks her friend aside and pushes her back down the hallway.

“Stop. Don't go in there.” They stand, flattened against the wall, wary as swallows. “Something doesn't smell right.”

“I feel it, too. There's someone near us, creeping around.”

Amaryllis checks her watch. Five minutes to five. Even considering traffic jams, this doesn't make sense. Someone should be here by now. The snack table also looks too hastily thrown together to be an official public relations production. If there's
anything the flaks know, it's that reporters are lured by food—lots of it. Cheap cheddar cheese isn't going to do the trick.

She peers around the doorframe again and peers at the microphone. She realizes what's amiss with the apparatus: it has no cord linking it to any electrical outlet or speaker. It's a dummy.

“This is a scam,” she whispers to Sybil. “Let's get out of here.”

They rush to the exit but spy a lone man lingering near the bank of elevators. He doesn't look like a hotel guest in his leather jacket and studded jeans, and he radiates malice. He hasn't heard them yet, so they double back and slip open the door to the stairwell, then whirl down to the bottom floor. Six flights later, they stand in the garage, sucking wind. As they are about to move on, a hand clamps down on Sybil's shoulder.

“Holy shit,” Sybil yells as she tries to kick the man grabbing her. But there's nothing to damage. He's about six-foot-ten and solid as granite. Amaryllis tries to edge away, but his other hand squeezes her by the arm. She's in so much pain, she's paralyzed. She looks about the garage and sees no people to call out to. It's a vacant, concrete pit, as quiet as a crypt. That is, until a squeal of tires starts from the far end of the garage and an old-model minivan pulls up before them. She thinks she sees the Logos seal on the door in the few seconds before the man shoves her toward the vehicle.

“Get in,” a rough voice says. The man shoves both women into the back seat and Amaryllis gets a good look at her captors. Wearing all black with “the Word” emblazoned on the front of their t-shirts, the two men look like clones. Muscular build, dark brown crew-cut hair, cross pendants hanging from their necks. She sees the man in front has a gun, although he lets it sit on the front seat beside him. The grunt who has pulled the women into the back is pulling out lengths of clothesline from the floor, presumably to tie them up. Amaryllis can't stand it.
I didn't come all this way to be lured into a death trap by a bunch of religious loonies
. She shakes off the man holding her arm and starts screaming.