It was a feeble gambit that would never have worked on anyone with training—but the young transsexual half turned to look, hope clear in her eyes. Chase could have simply whipped up his AK and shot her, but instead chose the less fatal option of kicking her in the groin. She crumpled to the ground and curled into a fetal position, moaning. Bejo winced. “Not very nice thing to do, even to angry lady.”
Chase pulled the revolver from her hand and tossed it into the sea. “If she really was a lady, that wouldn’t have hurt so much.”
As Bejo worked out what he meant and regarded the fallen figure with surprise, Chase surveyed the village. The blaze had spread to the other shacks, including Latan’s—which meant that not only had the money gone up in smoke, but so too had any clues there might have been among the pirate’s belongings. There was nothing more to be found here.
He made sure there was a boat the two prostitutes could use to get off the island, and then he and Bejo returned to their craft. As he’d hoped, the two remaining lookouts had decided that not investigating the gunfire and burning buildings on the shore would be their best bet for a long and healthy life, leaving the way clear.
As Bejo guided the boat back out to sea, Chase wondered once more why the tablet Nina had found had caused so much death. With Latan gone, he had lost one lead—but at least now he knew the identity of the pirate’s paymaster, Vogler, and the organization for which he worked.
But what was the Covenant of Genesis?
EIGHT
New York City
Although she’d slept as much as she could during the long flight, Nina’s internal clock was still twelve hours out of sync when the U.N. jet landed, her body telling her it was evening while her native city was only just getting started for the day.
And it promised to be a long one.
Picked up by a driver and taken to the United Nations headquarters, she wondered what was in store. The expedition to the Java Sea had received the full backing of the IHA, and therefore the U.N. itself, and there was no possible way the pirate attack could have been predicted … but the fact remained that she had been in charge of an operation during which numerous people had died. Somebody would be held accountable, and in all probability it would be Nina herself.
What would happen next? She wasn’t sure. Despite having been a part of the IHA since its founding almost three years earlier, she’d never before been at the focal point of an investigation. She had faced senior officials before, but only during debriefings following operations with a successful conclusion—not the least of which had been saving New York, and the U.N. itself, from nuclear destruction.
This time, though, the conclusion had been anything but successful.
She took an elevator up through the glass-and-steel slab of the Secretariat Building to the IHA’s offices, her gloom weighing more heavily on her with each passing floor. The moment she stepped out of the elevator, it became clear that the feeling was justified.
“What’s going on?” she asked as she hurried through the security doors into the IHA’s reception area, seeing the staff milling about in mixed states of confusion or anger.
“Dr. Wilde!” said Lola Gianetti, leaving the reception desk to meet her. “Oh, thank God you’re back. I heard what happened—we all did. It’s terrible!”
“I know, I know. But what’s all this?” People were congregating outside the secure-server room, one man repeatedly banging on the door.
“The server’s gone down,” Lola told her. “People have lost everything.”
“So why don’t they use the backups?”
“No, I mean, they’ve lost everything,” Lola clarified ominously, leading Nina through the throng. “Jerry and Al are in there trying to fix it.”
“Wait, they’re both in?” That definitely meant something bad had happened; the IHA’s lead computer technicians normally worked different shifts.
“Yeah, Al’s been there all night, and he called Jerry in at about five a.m. Come on, coming through, move it!”
People peppered Nina with questions as she reached the door. “Whoa, okay, hold it!” she said, raising her hands. “I only just got here, and I probably know less about what’s going on than you do. Everybody go back to your offices, have a cup of coffee or whatever, and as soon as I know what’s happening I’ll let you know. Whatever it is, it’s not going to be solved by standing in reception reenacting the storming of the Bastille.”
“Nina, I’ve lost the entire Egyptian database!” protested the man banging on the door, a historian named Logan Berkeley. “That’s over half a terabyte of material, and they’re saying it’s completely gone!”
“It’s not completely gone,” Nina insisted. “Even if we lose the servers, and even if we lose the backup servers, we’ve still got the off-site backups.”
“Yes, but I’ve still lost—”
“A day’s work, at most. It’s a pain in the ass, I know, but it’s not the end of the world, okay?” She swiped her ID card over the door’s electronic lock.
Berkeley tried to follow her in. “I still need to ask them how long—”
Nina stopped in the doorway. “Hey, hey!” she snapped. “This is a secure area—authorized personnel only. Go on, get your ass back outside. Shoo, shoo!” Berkeley reluctantly retreated.
She closed the door and slumped against it, taking a deep breath. “Okay, guys. What’s the bad news?”
The server room was a windowless space lined with rack-mounted computers and hard drives, which formed a miniature maze around the central workstations. Jerry Wojciechowski, an overweight middle-aged bearded man resembling a geek Santa, and Al Little, younger, thin almost to the point of emaciation, and fueled entirely by energy drinks, were working furiously at their computers. Al, with even darker bags under his eyes than usual, looked up at her. “We got burned, Nina. Some fucker hit us with a virus.”
She knew from the mere fact that he’d sworn in front of her that the situation was dire; normally, he only blurted out the first half syllable before gulping it back and apologizing. “What’ve we lost?”
“Everything,” said Jerry. “Literally. It was a worm—it scrubbed all the drives down to the bare metal.”
“And it nuked the backup RAIDs as well,” Al added. “Even some of the desktops in the office.”
“How the hell did it do that?” asked Nina. “I thought all this was impossible to hack!”
“So did we,” Jerry told her mournfully. “We upgraded everything after that breach two years ago to beyond military grade. We’re running the same operating system as the NSA. It’s totally secure. In theory.”
“Except,” said Al, “that this fucking thing came straight in without tripping a single warning. The only way it could do that is if whoever sent it had access codes for the entire system.” He let out an angry snort. “We’ve lost absolutely everything since the last tape backup for off-site storage. And that was two days ago.”
“So, when you say everything … that includes emails and files uploaded to the shared server?”
Jerry nodded at her, and a sickening realization struck Nina. The IHA’s very existence was built on secrets: her discovery of Atlantis three years before had, to her horror, given a madman the key to creating a genetically engineered plague … which he had very nearly unleashed upon the world. To a certain extent, the IHA’s mandate of finding and protecting other ancient wonders was a cover for a darker mission: to ensure that they didn’t fall into the wrong hands.
But as the events leading to the death of Hector Amoros had proved, the wrong hands could at first appear to be the right ones. The IHA’s search for Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, had supposedly been undertaken so that Jack Mitchell, an agent of the U.S. government’s defense research agency DARPA, could stop the blade’s unique properties from being used to create a new weapon that drew on the power of the very earth—but Mitchell had gone rogue, wanting that power for himself. He had been in charge of a black project so secret that ne
ither DARPA nor the Pentagon knew of its existence, even as it threatened to plunge the world into war.
But if whoever sent the virus to wipe her pictures of the mysterious artifacts—and she was certain that that was the true objective, all the other destruction of data merely to cover the fact—was able to bypass the IHA’s security … that meant they knew the IHA’s true purpose. Knowledge supposed to be restricted to the highest levels of power.
Whatever was going on was bigger than she had thought. Bigger than she had feared.
She rushed out into reception—
To find herself face-to-face with an old enemy.
Not one who had ever tried to kill her, admittedly. But Nina still felt the brief chill of unexpectedly encountering an adversary, long-forgotten loathing rushing back full force. “Professor Rothschild,” she began, before she remembered that outside academia the hard-faced old woman no longer had any power over her and corrected herself. “Maureen,” she continued, informality used as a weapon to deny the academic her status. “What are you doing here?”
“Nina,” said Rothschild coldly, doing the same. The dislike was mutual. “May I speak with you?”
Nina saw Lola hovering behind Rothschild’s shoulder, worriedly mouthing something, but she couldn’t tell what. “I’m kinda busy right now, Maureen,” she said, wanting to get rid of her as quickly, and dismissively, as possible. “Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait. Lola can book you an appointment, but I wouldn’t expect anything earlier than next week. I’ve got a lot of IHA business to take care of.” She turned and strode toward her office.
“Handling IHA business is no longer your concern, Nina,” Rothschild said.
The hint of gloating in her voice brought Nina to a stop. “Excuse me?”
“Ah, Dr. Wilde,” Lola said apologetically, hurriedly rounding Rothschild and presenting a sheet of paper to Nina. “I meant to tell you when you got here, but there was so much else going on. Sorry.”
Nina quickly read the text, an official U.N. statement. “What?” she barked. Sensing an impending explosion, Lola retreated to her desk.
“As you see,” said Rothschild, now with nothing but gloating in her voice, “the U.N. has just confirmed my appointment as the new director of the IHA. I won’t officially be taking up the post until the day after tomorrow, but I wanted to get things moving in the right direction. Which I’ve already seen is badly needed. The agency has lacked a clearly defined vision and strong leadership since the death of Admiral Amoros—I’m here to put it back on the proper course.”
“Oh, you are, huh?” said Nina, angrily crunching the paper into a ball. “I’m sure all your years of attacking any theory that’s even slightly outside the historical orthodoxy makes you the perfect choice to run the IHA.”
Rothschild glanced at the entrance to one of the conference rooms. “Perhaps we should continue this discussion in private?” she suggested condescendingly.
“I’m fine right here,” Nina snapped. “And how did you get appointed in the first place? You weren’t on the short list. You weren’t even on the long list—and if you had been, I would have crossed you off it!”
“Making decisions based on petty personal vendettas is precisely the kind of negative quality the IHA can do without in its senior staff,” Rothschild replied. “And since you ask, I was quite surprised to be approached. But when the Senate recommends you to the U.N., it would be foolish not to take the opportunity.”
“The Senate?” said Nina, stunned. “But that’s insane! Why would they do that?”
Rothschild’s lips tightened. “Perhaps because they were as tired as everyone else of the appointment process being deliberately dragged out so that the interim director could pursue her pet projects with a minimum of oversight?” Nina was so outraged by the accusation that she couldn’t even form a response before the older woman spoke again. “One of my first priorities will be a full review of all IHA projects that are not directly related to the agency’s global security mandate. Anything that fails to meet strict cost-effectiveness criteria or is based on shoddy mythological theory will be terminated immediately.”
“Shoddy mythological theory like Atlantis, you mean?”
“My other immediate priority,” said Rothschild coldly, “will be to begin a full inquiry into the utter disaster that was your Indonesian expedition. The loss of life is of course a tragedy, but there is also your arbitrary abandonment of the original excavation site, the financial irregularities—”
“What financial irregularities?” Nina demanded, furious.
“I mean the money you promised to the ship’s captain for what I believe you described as ‘additional expenses.’ Just because part of the budget is labeled as discretionary doesn’t mean it’s your personal slush fund.”
“That’s not what happened at all, and—”
“You’ll be able to present your version of events during the inquiry,” said Rothschild. “This catastrophe reflects extremely badly on both the IHA and the U.N. The facts need to be determined, responsibility decided—”
“Blame apportioned?”
A faint smile curled Rothschild’s thin lips. “Indeed. If I were you, I would put all my efforts into as complete an account as possible of what happened in Indonesia. And I’d recommend that your … friend Mr. Chase do the same. Where is Mr. Chase, by the way?”
“Still over there,” said Nina, being purposefully vague to deny Rothschild any more ammunition.
“I see. After the U.N. organized a private flight for the specific purpose of bringing you both back to New York. I hope you’re not going to add the cost of his scheduled ticket to the discretionary budget as well?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she growled. “But if you’ll excuse me, Maureen, I still have work to do.” She held up the crumpled ball of paper. “This says you aren’t officially the IHA’s Director for two more days, which means I’m still in charge—and you’ve wasted enough of my time. Lola, I’ll be in my office. Don’t put any calls through unless they’re urgent. Or Eddie.” She turned her back on Rothschild and entered her office, slamming the door behind her.
NINE
Nina arrived at the United Nations building having spent the night worrying about Chase. After her confrontation with Rothschild the previous day, she had checked her voice mail to find a message from him. Her relief at hearing his gruff Yorkshire tones was muted by the terseness of the message, which told her little other than that he was on his way back to New York—and that he was “knackered.” She could tell he had been through a tense, dangerous time, but not knowing what had happened made her worried and frustrated.
Since then: nothing.
The first thing she did on arriving at the IHA was check if he had left any messages. He hadn’t. She stared blankly out across Manhattan from her office window before sharply turning away. She knew she ought to continue working on her report, in preparation for the inquiry, but her concerns about Chase were too distracting. She needed something else to focus her mind.
Such as the pictures on the memory card recovered from her stolen camera.
She copied the files to her new laptop, putting the card in her jacket pocket before opening all the highresolution images. One in particular dominated her attention, a close-up of the clay tablet showing the strange text in great detail. She steepled her fingers against her lips as she tried to make sense of it.
Nothing. A few characters—a triangle with what might be a tree or a flower above it; three horizontal lines one above the other, the topmost curling back around on itself—appeared more symbolic than the others, reminding her of the stylized pictograms forming the basis of the ancient Chinese and Japanese writing systems, but what they actually represented remained a mystery. Others stood out from the elegant, curved characters making up the bulk of the script by their stark and angular nature, a number of V-shapes pointing in different directions, small dots between the lines, followed by blocks of tightly packed little marks … br />
What did they mean? What was the secret someone was willing to kill to protect?
She had no idea.
Keeping the picture open in the background, Nina reluctantly returned to her report, forcing herself to recall the unpleasant details of the events aboard the Pianosa. But the image kept drawing her attention over the course of the morning. She almost closed it to remove the distraction, but something about it was sounding a bell in the back of her mind. Something familiar.
What, though? The text resembled no alphabet she knew.
So, if it wasn’t an alphabet, then—
Nina jolted upright. The meaning of one particular type of symbol had just leapt out at her as if illuminated in neon. “Why the hell didn’t I see it before?” she cried. “Dumbass!”
The blocks of closely spaced markings weren’t letters. They were numbers. Atlantean numbers. They weren’t quite the same as those she had seen on various Atlantean artifacts but were close enough to be recognizable as from the same family—considering the apparent age of the tablet, an earlier version.
She grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled them down, converted them to the more familiar Atlantean equivalents, then rapidly performed the complex mental arithmetic to transform the unique numerical system into base ten. Each set turned out to be quite large, getting more so after each of the V-shapes to which they seemed linked. A record of something, then, a count. But what? It could be anything: numbers of people, distances, even the amount of fish caught by the boat in which it had been found.
But she had discovered something. The fact that the tablet appeared to use a form of the Atlanteans’ numerical system meant that whoever made it was in some way connected to them, however far separated by geography and time. And if the Atlantean language could be deciphered, so could this.