Pandora's Temple (29 page)

Another distraction from yet another terrible truth from the day of the fire that had imprisoned him within these walls forever. A truth no one else would ever know as even Roy himself had come to accept the lie.

Mostly, but not always.

Not today.

The phone rang.

“What do you mean there’s been a change of plans?” Folsom said, loud enough for Katie DeMarco and Johnny Wareagle to hear inside the car without benefit of speaker.

McCracken could picture him shaking his head on the other end of the line, cursing himself for bringing in the subject of his thesis in the first place. “Just what I said. We’re headed to Greece to meet up with Captain Seven. We have a bad connection or something?”

Folsom cleared his throat. “Let me try this. Do you have the woman or not?”

“Yup, got her.”

“I’m waiting for the but.”

“I’ve got another lead she’s going to help the Indian and me follow up, so it might be a while before I bring her in.”

“This the same domestic terrorist we’ve been talking about? Four bombings, twenty-six deaths total if you include Stuttgart?”

“That’s right. She’s sitting right next to me now, if you want to call that custody. Want me to put her on?”

McCracken could hear Folsom sigh so deeply it sounded like a growl. “It’s really true, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“Everything I’ve heard about you, how you earned that nickname of yours: McCrackenballs . . .”

“Just get the plane refueled and ready, Hank.”

“How much do you charge?” Katie asked him, after several long moments of silence once Johnny Wareagle had driven off back into the night for the private airport they’d flown into from New Orleans.

“For what?”

“Killing.”

“I’m not a hit man.”

She rolled her eyes. “Could have fooled me.”

“And if I was, you’d want me to kill your father, is that it?”

“Why not? It’s what you do best, isn’t it? Just like those men in Greenland.”

“Difference is I only kill bad guys.”

“Me too,” Katie said, shaking her head. “Forty years you’ve been doing this, right? I could never keep doing this kind of shit for that long.”

“That’s because you’re on the wrong side.”

“Not from where I’m standing.”

“If Johnny and I hadn’t stopped you, you would’ve killed another couple dozen people tonight.”

Katie stiffened, visible even through the darkness. “They deserved it.”

“They never hurt you.”

“They were part of Ocean Bore, Roy Industries, extensions of my father.”

“So you hate them as much as you hate him.”

“That’s right.”

“Hmmmmmmm . . . How many people does Roy Industries employ?”

“I’ve never bothered to count.”

“You can’t expect to kill all of them. Or is that what it’s going to take to stop your crusade?”

“No, I only need to kill one person to manage that: Sebastian Roy.”

Sebastian Roy’s computer was already on in anticipation of the Skype call, filled now with a quivery picture of Doctors Gunthar Bol and Peter Whitcomb on the deck of the ship that had become their de facto base for the past three days. The equipment the mission required had been installed on board weeks before, having been on the verge of a breakthrough when Roy had dispatched the scientists to the site.

“I want to talk to my family,” Whitcomb said. “I need to be sure they’re safe.”

“They’re safe, Doctor Whitcomb. Your family, too, Doctor Bol. How long they remain that way depends entirely on you from this point.”

“We can’t do the impossible!”

“I’m not asking you to, gentlemen. Bring me Pandora’s jar and you’ll be with them the next day. And I understand there’s significant progress to report.”

Bol and Whitcomb exchanged a quick glance, as if to decide which of them would respond.

“Your hydrographic survey team, aboard this and the additional five ships, has now completed a detailed review of the seafloor in a fifty-mile grid centered with Athens,” Whitcomb reported stiffly. “And you’re right, they found something.”

“With oil,” Bol picked up, “you would look for sandy layers of sediment under domelike caps of shale, which normally signify the location of a potential reservoir, since oil rises through permeable sediment to the highest point it can go, collecting under unyielding shale mounds. Since your ships weren’t looking for oil here, they used the salt to study disruptions in the seafloor at the subsurface level, figuring if the temple remnants were, in fact, present, they’d be buried under the same shale and sediment that might otherwise reveal oil reserves.”

Now it was Bol’s turn again. “Two quirks of fate in the form of major geological events proved to be the keys here. Had your team conducted this study prior to them having a profound effect on the seafloor, in all probability we’d have nothing to report. The first event was a strong earthquake centered along the southern Greek island of Crete in 2008, in itself not unusual since this is a very seismically active area believed to be riddled by literally thousands of quakes every year that normally cause little damage and often go unnoticed.”

“Except this one,” picked up Gunthar Bol, “caused a deep sea tsunami and seismically reoriented the sub-seafloor. Pandora’s Temple, if it ever did exist, would be buried under so much sand and sediment that it would be effectively unreachable by man, which also explains why no geological or archaeological survey team ever uncovered it before. It would take a seismic event of much greater proportions to make the temple accessible again.”

“Not necessarily greater proportions,” noted Whitcomb, “so much as an event of properly focused intensity, something approximating the original quake that triggered the tsunamis responsible for destroying the temple along with the entire southern coastline of Greece in 1650
B.C.
And that’s exactly what happened in January of 2012, once again accompanied by an eruption of the Santorini volcano.”

Bol’s turn now. “Up until then, Santorini hadn’t been active since 1956 when a large earthquake and subsequent eruption resulted in the destruction of the buildings and evacuation of the entire coastline. The 2012 quake, registering 5.2, occurred in almost the identical spot as the one in 1650
B.C.
on what is now known as the Santorini Fault.”

“Two earthquakes nearly four thousand years apart,” said Sebastian Roy. “The first plunging Pandora’s Temple into the sea to be buried forever and the second exposing its final resting place.”

“Even then,” elaborated Whitcomb, “standard geothermal tests never would’ve revealed the find. It took Ocean Bore’s geomapping technology to uncover the shadow outline of something big down there. The problem is that none of the unmanned submersibles have caught anything with their cameras in the general area. Nothing at all.”

“We know something’s down there, Mr. Roy,” Bol picked up. “But either it’s invisible or there’s something else we somehow haven’t considered. That means we need the best underwater salvage equipment Roy Industries can get their hands on to find what’s down there.”

“It will be en route today, Doctor.”

“What about our families?” asked Whitcomb.

But Sebastian Roy ended the transmission before responding.

Captain Seven angled the small digital camera, linked wirelessly to his laptop, further upward.

“Yo, boys, can you see what I’m seeing?”

Squeezed behind the laptop screen on the plane streaking across the Atlantic, McCracken, Wareagle, and Sal Belamo did their best, squinting to better view the lush scene dominated by what looked like an endless array of villas nestled into sloped hills outside of Athens. McCracken thought he recognized Mount Hymettus, if memory of his own travels through the region served him correctly.

“Looks like a resort community,” he said. “All that’s missing is the golf course.”

“This used to be the location of a wasteland known as the Desert of Lost Souls. The site of Pandora’s Temple.”

Captain Seven moved so close to the screen his face grew absurdly large in the oblong view of the webcam.

“What have you been smoking, Captain?”

“Some badass bud, MacNuts, I shit you not. Got it from this old hippie dude named Pat I ran into. I might just hang out here for a while when all this is done.”

“You too stoned to explain what the hell happened to the desert that used to be there?”

“Not at all, MacNuts, not at all. See, according to that good old Greek historian Herodotus, there’s more to the story of Pathos Verdes. . . .”

The elders wrote that the man wandered out of the vast desert wasteland where few ever dared venture. The Desert of Lost Souls, as this wasteland was called, had been named that for a reason. Many residents of Athens believed it was populated by monsters. Others claimed to have had relatives or friends who years before had trekked there in search of work on the construction of a vast palace or temple at the behest of the gods, only to never return. They spoke of a builder being visited by a messenger dispatched by Zeus, a builder who they say was bequeathed with the visions of a design in scope and complexity like none the world had ever known to be constructed amid the arid wasteland seldom traveled by man. And that tale had drawn more out from the city in search of the structure, almost all of whom never returned. The ones who did professed to have no memory of what they had seen.

But this ragged shell of a man, his bare feet cracked and filthy from the mud-strewn street, claimed to have emerged from this very wasteland. He was emaciated with wild white hair sprouting in all directions, the pupils of his eyes so big they seemed to have swallowed the whites.

“I am Pathos Verdes, and I come bearing a warning,” the raggedy man announced from atop an earth berm fashioned by the endless storms that had recently racked Athens in the center of the square. Residents from the mud and wood huts layered into hillsides on either side of the city center gathered around him, attracted there by something they could not explain. “You, all of you, must avoid the Desert of Lost Souls. The gods grow angry at your trespass, your intrusion. That you would dare become interlopers in a world where entry is denied to mortal man. Desecrate their temple and risk destruction of your world. There are no second chances, no additional warnings beyond the storms the gods have seen fit to bestow upon you so you may know their wrath. Know that a much worse fate awaits your city if you do not heed their warnings now.”

“And who you are to know of this, to be so bold as to threaten us this way?” challenged a city elder.

“Builder of the temple, and the only man alive to know of its existence and purpose. I cannot speak of that purpose other than to say your people have exhausted the patience of the gods.”

“And what do you truly know of this holy place?”

“That it is not holy at all, but cursed—as is any man who dares climb the steps it took me years to fashion. More years have passed since its completion, how many I know not. But those years have seen me try repeatedly to join my family in the afterlife, failing on each occasion no matter how great my resolve or how sharp the blade.”

“So why do you come here now, after all these years?” another from the crowd yelled out.

“Because your city’s population swells. And with the travelers who enter your walls come more and more mention of the temple’s existence spoken by those without knowledge of its purpose, a purpose forged by the gods themselves who all trespassers spit upon in their intrusion.”

“There is no law against exploration, Pathos Verdes, or growth,” said one elder.

“No, but there is a terrible price to be paid when either threatens to forfeit or betray the temple’s ultimate purpose. Know, as I have known, that the gods do not bluff or issue second warnings. If the Desert of Lost Souls is not closed to your people, the gods will visit upon your city a great and terrible cataclysm, unleashing a wrath not seen in a century.”

“Yet,” another dweller cried out accusingly, “you live.”

“For this purpose—I see that now. The gods preserved my life so I could save yours. To deliver their message unto you. This will be your only chance to heed the gods’ warning. There will be no other.”

The next morning, Pathos Verdes was gone, having vanished as quickly as he had appeared. Some say he was spotted walking back to the east and the Desert of Lost Souls. Others insisted that he seemed to be steering himself toward the rising sun when he simply vanished, the way a god might. For a brief time anyway, his warnings were heeded, but then men grew bold with ambition and greed. And before long the words of the strange disheveled man were first questioned and then ignored. If there was truly a golden temple out there, it would be found, threats of the gods or not.

Days after the expedition of explorers and warriors set out in search of the great bounty, the earth rumbled, shook, and began to split in places. Structures collapsed, throwing the city into a terrible panic. The residents ventured out into the streets in fear but also in hope that the worst was over.

It wasn’t.

The quakes set off the long quiet volcano Santorini, its terrible force churning the seas into massive waves stretching toward the skies and blackening the sun as they rolled toward shore, growing with each foot. It is said that all Athens was destroyed, and the Desert of Lost Souls, along with the golden temple it contained, was lost to the seas forever. And the final part of the story, to this day and forever unproven, was that accounts of the survivors tell of a “man ghost” with mad eyes and wild tangles of white hair trudging amid the refuse of the city, muttering and sobbing to himself.

“Stoned or not, do you really believe all this?” McCracken asked when Captain Seven had finished his own recapitulation of the historian’s words.

“Stoned for sure, let me put it this way, MacNuts. The Aegean volcanic chain and numerous deepwater fault lines didn’t just show up yesterday. A study in 1959 concluded that the tsunami inundation caused by the 1650
B.C.
earthquake did indeed reach a height of fifty meters above sea level and that its effects were felt as far away as what is now Tel Aviv.”