Dateline: Atlantis (7 page)

“I'm sure it's a kidnapping. They deliberately stole the photographs. They stole mine, too.”

“I know, but the cops really don't care. They're bewildered and that usually means nothing gets done. The best we can hope for is that this becomes a federal case and that involves crossing state lines. Or national boundaries. Then it stops being a local crime and the feds take over.”

Amaryllis casts him a worried look and promises she won't make any more trouble for him. Hagren nods and stares off into space. She retreats to her own department down the hall.

Slipping back to her desk, with a coy smile directed at Barney, she tries to look as busy as possible. That silly quitting idea is long forgotten, she figures. She reaches for her mail and starts extracting useless public-relations sheets. They fly into the garbage as soon as she gives the header a cursory glance. Junk, garbage, wait—this goes to Bill Epstein, city news department. As the papers fill the round file, she mulls over her next plan of action. No great ideas are coming to her.

A figure looms by the desk and she spots Barney sending semaphore in the distance. She lifts her head. Wright is standing almost on top of her, and he's out of his element. The features staff stops in mid-stride. Phones go silent. The clickety-click of typing ceases. Smiles droop. The rest of the workers pull away, like waves retreating from a beach. Wright never comes into the features office.

“Amy, we've got to talk,” he says. “They found him. Alive. Maybe our story is still good.” Her pulse races for the third time this morning.

The sea spray spits into Landon Hewitt's face with pitiless hostility. He had only gone up to the prow of this North Atlantic fishing vessel to get a small peek at the boat's progress. For this imposition, for daring to doubt the craft, he gets a blast of brine, icy cold and sticking to his stubbly, graying beard.

“Damn weather,” he mumbles as he staggers backward, feeling the waves shift his balance sideways, then his knees buckle as the deck shoots upward. His sea legs will take a while to develop, but he can tell the
Elaine's
crew is snickering up their sleeves at the sight—a slightly balding academic, dressed in a skimpy pea coat and jeans, trying desperately to fit in with the salty dogs. Hewitt grabs a railing and remembers the acupressure bands he wears on his wrists. At least he won't be losing half his dinner, the way he did on his last trip to the Azores.

The Azores. The previous time he had to journey out here to this godforsaken bit of real estate in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, some nut case had found “evidence” of prehistoric civilization. It was supposed to be a clever, well-constructed road that dove from mountaintop to below the water's edge. It held proof, the Atlantis wacko said, that a flood had covered much of the Azores' true history. Hewitt and his archaeology students sailed out from England to put this nonsense to rights. The road, Hewitt determined, was a medieval donkey cart trail, and the apparent continuations below the sea were nothing more than black, volcanic tufa—gravel pulled into the sea with each tide. The “road” looked straight but was as man-made as the sun.

Atlantis seekers,
Hewitt blows his nose into a large bandana.
They make my life a misery.
He'd never wanted to be a professional debunker, but circumstances keep leading him there. And then there is the Committee. They don't pay his salary; the British Museum takes care of that quite nicely. But the Committee has an agenda, and on that all-important list is the task of extinguishing any talk of antediluvian civilizations. Somehow, Hewitt, with his multiple Ph.D.s, is usually the man they send to publish the official skeptic's report.

Well, either he or O'Laughry. But Professor Origen O'Laughry is not known for his orthodox methods, and the council prefers Hewitt's clean dissections, autopsies, and burials of lunatic hoaxes.

This time, the journalists have gotten into the fray. Mostly English, or a certain Englishman living in the United States, these men of no academic standing whatsoever have become wildly famous writing books about missing civilizations and a seven-thousand-year-old Great Sphinx. The public is enthused about their books—which Hewitt admits are meticulously researched—but lead to such foolishness as changing known history. If this keeps up, the textbooks will all have to be rewritten, careers ruined, the whole paradigm smashed beyond recognition. This simply cannot happen.

Then there are the financial backers, a shadowy group of Americans who also have something at stake when it comes to Atlantis. It violates Scripture. In the tradition of Irish Archbishop James Ussher, fundamentalist Christians—and Orthodox Jews, too—count backward from Moses, generation by generation, to get a fixed date for the creation of the Earth. Ussher fixed it at sunset Sunday, Oct. 22, 4004 B.C. Others had placed it at various other dates, one improbably suggesting that the world was created at 9 a.m., although how he figured this fact, when there wasn't even a sun yet to register night or day, remains a mystery. The most important thing to this bunch was that nothing was to have existed pre-4004 B.C. Atlantis, which most New Age crazies date around 10,000 to 12,000 B.C., is completely out of the question for the Bible-thumpers.

Hewitt considers it all codswollop, pure rubbish. But because a heavily funded group from America is paying the Committee handsomely to quash any mentions of antediluvian civilizations, he has to swallow their nonsense. He considers Noah's Flood to be a fairy tale, also, but no one has asked him to debunk this myth. The Committee, a group of scientists, is marching to the orders of a group that Hewitt finds most illogical, and dangerous in their obsessions. But they pay, and they pay well. Whether one accepts their theories or not, it's to everyone's benefit to thwart the Atlantis nuts, who are making troubling inroads with the general public.

Already, the theory of land migration to the Americas via the Bering Straits passage has been seriously threatened. Publishers are removing the Beringian migration theory from school textbooks. That damned Thor Heyerdahl pulled a stunning publicity stunt with his famous Ra and Kon-Tiki experiments, Hewitt admits to himself. The late Scandinavian started a revolution. Many people, even respected scholars now believe that the peoples of America came by boat across great distances. “Diffusion” is the term they use. There is simply too much corroborating evidence—mitochondrial DNA and matching blood types between the peoples of the Americas and of Europe and Africa—to discount it anymore. Caucasian bones were dug up in North America. South American cocaine was found in Egyptian mummies. The list goes on and on. No longer can these findings be dismissed as out of context. In the new view, America is no longer a settlement of stone-age Eskimos but a continent of voyagers who hailed from everywhere, ranging from Ireland to China. Leif Eriksson was no joke—and most serious scholars never doubted that he found Nova Scotia long before Columbus hit upon the Caribbean islands. But this nutty idea of sailors crossing thousands of miles of sea by balsa raft around 10,000 B.C.E. (the proper notation for a scientist: Before the Common Era) is a notion Hewitt has trouble stomaching.

It's Atlantis firing up again, that's why. And it is up to Hewitt to put this ember out.

This time, Hewitt is en route in the winter's paralytic freeze to the Azores, the only north Atlantic land to poke above the Great Atlantic Ridge. He's traveling to study some crazy Russian's discovery of undersea “writing.” The man had hired a whole team of underwater geologists to dive deep into the Azores waters. What they found were submarine inscriptions clearly carved and slightly reminiscent of the mysterious Minoan Linear B (a still untranslated script), mixed with a bit of rudimentary Egyptian hieroglyphs. At least that's what the murky photos showed.

Hewitt stumbles along the deck, hanging onto the rail until he can scramble below deck, back to his coffin-like quarters—just enough room for a lumpy cot and a beat-up briefcase. Once there, he opens the case, pressing the numbers of the lock's combination, reaches in and rummages around for the photos.

Even in a computer printout, the picture blown up and highly pixilated, the images are clear. A delta-like triangle, a crosshatch with two target-like rings, a swirl, a snake and an eye, strangely resembling the Egyptian eye of Horus. But what are even more interesting are the barely visible carvings that resemble letters of an alphabet. He's seen something like it before but can't place the location. He stares at the pictures for a long time, pressing his brows together.

Hewitt is no diver—he can barely swim—but geologists who did work below the sea told him these pictures were taken on a remarkably clear day.

“Wait one half hour and silt and seaweed will completely obscure the view,
Herr Doktor Professor,
” Luther Grundenstand, the German diver and anthropologist who agreed to accompany Hewitt, said. “It's not as if the clear streams of sunlight cannot penetrate the gloom. I've seen it myself—the sudden burst of clarity. But it is unusual.”

That had set off Hewitt's internal hoax detector. But Grundenstand's next comment gave Hewitt doubts.

“These incisions in the rock?” the diver said, pointing at the cross and circles. “That can't be natural. Impossible to get such clear geometric designs from nature alone. This looks like script. I think we need a linguist, too.”

Grudgingly, the professor had dialed the Berlitz Institute, finding the most erudite language expert on the staff. The school's credentials are impeccable, but Hewitt couldn't forget Charles Berlitz, the grandson of the language school's founder, who went on to write crazy books about the Bermuda Triangle and, of course, Atlantis. The Berlitz Institute was a dicey choice, but the obvious one to make. The Committee needed the best expert available.

Shoshanna Knox had shown up at the docks at Land's End in Cornwall, ready to board the
Elaine
with only a notebook in hand and light backpack strapped to her sturdy nor'easter slicker. She nodded to Hewitt when he approached, her eyes emitting the tiniest glint of defiance. Hewitt knew why. A woman of color had to scramble in many areas of academia, and linguistics was not any different. No black woman could earn a doctorate at Oxford without demonstrating a fistful of moxie.

Hewitt put his out his hand and exchanged a few brief words. Her accent was American. Her hair a wild powder puff of retro-Afro styling. The dangling earrings tangled in the soft brown aura were of the Egyptian ankh, the sacred symbol of eternal life. She was not what he expected.

So, when does Hewitt ever get what he anticipates? He sits on his miserable bunk, a sad affair of lumps organized to form the shape of a mattress and wraps a scratchy wool coverlet around his shoulders. He hugs himself, trembling with an inner cold, the kind that layers of blankets can't soothe away. He's out in the North Atlantic, on a vessel where the crew detests him, with a scientific team so motley, he wonders how they will ever function together.

Although it is day, he leans back against the pea green wall and drifts into a semi-somulent state, eyes closed and head rolling along with the waves. His mind wanders until a sharp metallic clang at the door brings him out of his stupor.

“Enter,” he says, inwardly cringing at the over-formality of his speech. When working with the Germans, it becomes necessary to sound as rigid and precise as possible, but with the Americans, he comes off as a pumped-up prig. Relief softens his facial muscles, and he lowers his jutted chin as Grundenstand appears. The German bears a sour expression; it doesn't look as if he'll be diving any time soon.

“
Herr Doktor Professor,
” the tall blond man says, standing at attention at the doorframe. “They say tomorrow the sea should be clear.”

Hewitt nods without meeting his diver's eyes, feeling a bit queasy as he does so. He presses the acupressure band on his left wrist.
Who'd think I'd resort to acupressure? Whatever works.

“I will take down the submersible,” Grundenstand continues in his grinding voice. “But there is only room for two. Are you interested?”

Interested in diving? No. Hewitt can't stand the thought of sinking into that frigid brine. He clears his throat and gestures for the diver to come further into the closet-sized room. The man shuffles sideways the way a child enters a haunted house. Like all Northern Europeans, he likes his personal space.

“I don't dive, Luther,” Hewitt says, taking care to pronounce the name correctly—Loo-ter. No sense coming off like most of his countrymen, who slaughter any language they can wrap their Anglo-Saxon tongues around. “That's why I brought others on this team.”

Grundenstand lowers his white-blond eyebrows a touch. This is the closest he comes to showing emotion. He's not pleased with Hewitt's shortcomings.

“Any member of the crew could go with you…”

“The girl volunteered,” the diver interrupts.

“Then let her go.” Who better to examine exotic “script” than a linguist?

The hollow look in Grundenstand's pale eyes show that this is most irregular.

“She's certified,” Hewitt says, forcing a smile that he knows looks phony.

“
Ja,”
Grundenstand answers, “
Morgen früh.”