Dateline: Atlantis (31 page)

“More cash,” he says. The captain tosses him a look that could knock a man overboard, but the kid keeps smiling.

“Let's say three hundred dollars,” Amaryllis offers.

“American?”

She nods. The captain looks down at his ship's wheel and returns the nod. The young guy in the bandana dances on the deck.

“But we must be quiet. No reggae!” The captain has lost his good-natured smile now. “They test sound there. One noise and we are dead.”

Amaryllis nods and the kid stands at attention. She sets the time for tomorrow, an hour before dawn. The young man looks
unhappy at that but cheers up when the captain tells him they'll be able to do two runs of passengers that day—which means more money.

She shakes hands with the tubby sailor, who finally cracks a smile, showing off one gold tooth next to the nicotine-stained one. Business has been good for him. She trots back to the hotel where Thorgeld and Shoshanna are involved in a fierce game of Go Fish.

She leaps into the driver's seat and moves the vehicle in random circles on the deserted street. He watches, his face contorted in fear. She never learned to drive a car with manual transmission, and now, she was just playing. He yells as she moves into traffic. The palm trees blow as she makes a right-hand turn and jitters and jerks around the block. When she swings by again, he grabs the passenger door and jumps in, breathing like a storm .She kills the engine when attempting a left-hand turn. He leans over and grabs the wheel, reeling the still-moving vehicle onto the shoulder of the road just as an eighteen-wheeler truck speeds by, blowing his horn.

“In Florida, I take care of you. Do you hear me?”
She lowers her head and nods.

This dream doesn't seem to fit with the others, but it must impart important information, otherwise, why else is she sensing the crystal's power? Whenever these projections play at the back of her mind, Amaryllis hears a distant music and the singing of a chant long forgotten. She jots down the dream, wondering why her father was so anxious about his mother's safety. Is this a warning for what lies ahead today, the day of the Nav-Tech dive?

It's four in the morning, much too early for anyone to be taking a pleasure cruise of the Caribbean. As they set out in Captain Johnny's fishing boat, they are encompassed in murky
gloom, Amaryllis sees only distant lights of other boats—mostly large naval craft that are moored at Nav-Tech's many docks.

True to his word, the captain has made the journey to the tower as quiet as possible. Before they are close enough to be heard, he turns off the motor and lets the boat glide for a while. The sea is working in their favor, for swells push them ever closer to the peak that juts out of the waves like a wet knife. Thorgeld produces an armload of high-tech gadgets, including night-vision goggles. Amaryllis holds them up and studies the scene, which looks green and black, like some sort of horror film. The tower is supposed to be funnel shaped, but she can't see any opening at the top. It simply looks sharp, like a finely split blade of obsidian.

“Don't drop anchor until you see the watch change,” Amaryllis whispers to the captain. Silence drops like a blanket on everyone in the boat. In the distance, they see a small patrol boat stationed at the Nav-Tech border. Amaryllis takes the goggles again and sees another Navy boat bobbing near the tower. It looks like a ghost ship, for no crew members are on deck.

They wait for what must only be ten minutes, but each second passes by with Johnny's passengers maintaining the concentration of a tiger stalking a wildebeest, slow and deliberate. Amaryllis sits on the deck in her wet suit, trying to preoccupy herself with checking the meters on her air tanks and feeling the tubes for leaks. She doesn't anticipate this to be a long dive, but the tanks are filled to capacity, nonetheless. The tower may poke through the surface of the water, but no one knows how far down the base sits. Here in this relatively shallow area, the ocean floor is forty-five feet down.

Next to her, Shoshanna stares at the stars, and Amaryllis follows the gaze. Away from the city, she's always astounded at the number of lights in the sky. With the moon at just a sliver, the stars and planets seem brighter still. Venus, her favorite night traveler, grabs her interest and she watches it pulsate with subtle, rhythmic light and energy. She imagines its hazy, foggy atmosphere filled to overflowing with saturated light. Inside her
head, she thinks of the ancient peoples—maybe the ones who lived here—watching the same Morning Star and tracking its glowing, shimmering pearlescence.

Thorgeld ends the pensive reprieve, jabbing her in the ribs and pointing into the distance. The Navy patrol boat is moving off, and clouds are beginning to redden in the eastern sky. She and Shoshanna zip up their suits and put on their tanks and fins. The captain steers close to the tower and drops anchor. The sun pokes above the horizon, and it's time for the show to begin.

When she splashes backward into the water, Amaryllis has the familiar problem of not being able to tell up from down, east from west, and forgetting to breathe. She dog paddles a bit before getting her bearings, takes deep breaths, and the lets herself sink to a shallow depth. In front of them, behind the murky haze, stands the tower. It resembles a black funnel more than a chimney now. But as they near the structure, it becomes apparent that there is no funnel, the top is merely chipped and weathered. It probably had a triangular top before lightning, windstorms, and tempests worked their way on the black stone. Beneath the waves, the structure widens as it stretches toward the sea bottom.

Amaryllis kicks her frog fins and drifts near enough to touch the tower. She half expects it to send a bolt of electricity through her body, but all she feels is slick stone. Even in the soft light of dawn, it's easy to see that this is another pyramidal structure—only not a stepped building like the ones she's seen before, but a smooth-sided pyramid.

Shoshanna is gesturing and Amaryllis goes down further to see a wall, covered with crustaceans. Shoshanna pokes with her diving knife at a small crevice and the shells and debris fall away, leaving clearly carved characters engraved upon the wall. The women work feverishly, cleaning as much of the wall as they can and photographing the final images. Amaryllis recognizes characters she saw on the submerged pyramid in the Yucatan. Even the jaguar sign that Gabriel decoded is there, incised for the ages.

Shoshanna bobs her head with excitement. She mimes reading a book, and Amaryllis realizes Shoshanna has cracked the linguistic code. She can read what these glyphs say—or at least partially. But there's no way to learn what words Shoshanna has discovered until they re-surface. The frustration is keen, but Amaryllis tries to keep her mind focused on the task at hand.

Stomach squeezing from nerves, Amaryllis gestures for Shoshanna to keep moving downward. The water is fairly shallow here and they stay on the lookout for other divers or shadows of boats. Amaryllis prays that Thorgeld, up on the surface, is surveying the area every second for sharks.

When their fins touch bottom, the number of engravings before them is staggering. Even the heavy coating of barnacles can't cover what must be an ancient text. Amaryllis hopes the flashlights give Shoshanna enough light to boost the flash on her underwater digital camera. She looks to be reading along as she documents each area of the wall. Amaryllis creeps along, feeling the letters of these unknown glyphs, until her fingers reach an empty space. A hole? Damage from a ship?

She looks to the right and sees an opening in the pyramid that appears to be an arched doorway. The divers stand on the sandy sea bottom and aim their flashlights into the door. What they see would have made them gasp if they hadn't been hooked up to air tanks to stay alive. Inside, the walls were covered with writing, only these samples are far less eroded. Without a moment's thought, Amaryllis swims through the door, and Shoshanna follows.

The next second, the water blurs, and the walls seem to move about in a crazy dance of their own. There's a swirling object near Amaryllis that she can sense through her wetsuit. It's as if a monstrous fish has set off a violent wake. She fights to turn about, fighting against the resistance of the sea and in an instant, she's slammed against a back wall. She looks at the clearing water and sees the hand of an unknown diver—a male hand—pushing her, maneuvering her away from the doorway. A portion of the
man's face is visible now; long nose, pointed chin. He's tall and thin, like a scarecrow in a wetsuit. Fear pounds in her temples and she averts her eyes, but he holds something before her face.
Where have I seen him before? The face. The long pointed face. The laughing man I saw in the crystal.

Amaryllis is about to lose her wits. She looks about for Shoshanna, but her face mask obscures most of her peripheral vision. From what she can tell, her partner must be moving toward the attacker, probably with the intent to disarm him. She scrutinizes the object in her attacker's hands. It's a diving knife, bright and lethal looking with an eight-inch blade. She recoils, the sound her thundering heart sounding like a roomful of tribal drums. Thinking he means to stab her. But he's not aiming the dangerous blade at her, he's displaying it, like a trophy. And then she notices the initials carved in the handle—K. L. For Kristoff Lang. She reaches for her own knife, but the man drifts away out of reach. He maneuvers around Shoshanna, who is wasting energy trying to tackle this eel of a human. She has her knife out and is slashing, but she can't make contact with his slippery movement. He swims like a sea snake to the door. Before Amaryllis can push away from the wall, she hears a low thud that sets up powerful vibrations in the water. The interior of the pyramid goes black.

The man shut the door.
Thrashing in the dark, Amaryllis attempts to force the opening, but can't tell where the gap had been. She presses against stone after stone, and none of them yield. She struggles, thrusting against rock and water until she realizes there's nothing she and Shoshanna can do except pray that Thorgeld realizes they've been down too long and engineers a rescue.

Amaryllis scratches her nails against the limestone walls, feeling for an opening. She remembers the coroner's report and her stomach contracts.

I'm going to die my parents' death.

#

Pitch surfaces and makes his way to a small launch manned only by Cruz. It's hidden behind the tower, away from the Bahamian boat. Thanks to his old friendship with a retired Navy captain, Pitch was able to get clearance for his dawn trip to the tower, but he dared take only one crewman. That blasted Caine wanted to send his goons in, but Pitch wouldn't hear of it.

He smiles to himself at the simplicity of this operation. It was easy enough to figure when the dangerous Lang woman would make her move. He canvassed every boating outfit from Nassau to Freeport City until he found one that scheduled a boat in Nav-Tech's general direction. The company logged it as “private dive” and booked it under Thorgeld's name. The captain wouldn't give any details, but Pitch had all the information he needed. The time was written on the log-sheet, and Pitch has no trouble reading upside down.

Now, having made his kill, Pitch enjoys a rejuvenating rush bursting through all his cells. He swims strongly to the launch and nearly hoists himself aboard single-handedly. What power to have the ability to shut the door on a life. A couple of troublesome lives at that. He doesn't get a chance for this sort of rough stuff too often, thanks to that brute Caine. Usually, when violence is warranted, he chooses Cruz or Caine's boys to do the dirty work. But this time, he wants to delight in the delicious irony of seeing Miss Amaryllis Lang die the same way her loathsome parents succumbed. The Knox woman is just extra pleasure. He'll deal with Thorgeld at another time.

Cruz is babbling at him, but he hasn't removed his goggles or wetsuit yet, so he has no idea what the man is going on about. When he finally clears his ears, he realizes that Cruz is yelling, gesticulating toward the distance, saying something about patrol vessels coming their way. One is headed toward the Bahamian fishing vessel where he is sure Thorgeld is on board.
Good, they'll
pick him up for trespassing.
The other is bound in Pitch's direction. No problem. He'll merely show them his clearance pass.

“It's not Navy,” Cruz says, pointing at the cutter that's charging their way. It is still a long way in the twilit distance, but Pitch can discern, through binoculars, that the insignia is indeed not naval. Maybe Coast Guard. Then he thinks with a sudden burst of intuition and panic that he's been linked with that kidnapping Ricketts had bungled or maybe even with the guard Caine's cretins murdered.

Conflict rises in his esophagus, because he needs to wait another twenty minutes, after those women are good and dead, to open the door again. It wouldn't do to have them locked up in there, contaminating the space. As much as Pitch hates the fact that the tower stands, he still maintains the archaeologist's love of artifacts. He simply can't let the tower be desecrated by dead bodies. It must be left as it was found,
in situ.
It's bad enough that the Navy installed that makeshift door to keep intruders out. More desecration of the ruin is unthinkable.

The boat is far away enough for Pitch to make another dive and finish those two off with the knife, if they aren't dead already. It's a bit messier and not true to plan, but it will have to do. Let Cruz deal with the questions on the surface. Pitch readjusts his gear and begins to ready himself for another dive. Cruz tackles him and holds back his arms. With a snarl, Cruz begins to shout.