“First class, of course.” Not a question: an expectation.
“Yes, first class,” said Hammerstein, sharing a contemptuous look with Callum.
“Excellent. In that case, I’d better finish packing. See you down under, gentlemen.”
“You shouldn’t have caved in to his demands,” snapped Callum the moment the call ended.
“We had no choice. We needed him to translate the tablet Vogler recovered from Indonesia—and we’ll need him to translate any new finds at the site.”
“Even so, if it’d just been money he wanted, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Not even Ribbsley could be that greedy. But this …”
“Ribbsley’s a man of very particular tastes. Unfortunately. Which is why we’re allowing you to act as … caretaker.” A faint smile. “I assume Dalton has already authorized you to take care of things when the mission is completed.” The Covenant leader stood. “I have to go. There’s a lot of work to do, and Australia is a very long flight away.” He left the suite without any pleasantries of departure.
Callum stared at the door after it closed. Dalton had indeed granted him license to take care of the problem of Ribbsley’s demands … and more besides. The Covenant had gone too far. This was a direct threat to the authority of the president of the United States, and had to be dealt with.
But subtly. The Covenant had enormous power behind it. He had to wait for the right opportunity, pick his moment, or the consequences could be ruinous.
When that moment came, though … he would be ready.
TWELVE
Chase entered the apartment and flopped down on the couch. “Hi, honey, I’m home. Don’t I get a kiss hello?”
“Thank God,” said Nina, hurrying in from the kitchen and kissing him. “I think we’ve both got a lot of catching up to do.”
“Yeah,” Chase said, taking in her cuts and bruises with a concerned expression. “You want to go first?”
“No, you,” she said, sitting beside him. “Why the hell were you in Cuba?”
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t getting another of those.” He nodded at the Fidel Castro figurine on a shelf, a ceramic cigar-box holder now used to store loose change. “No, I had words with those pirates—Bejo’s fine, by the way—and saw some bloke paying them off.”
“What about the tablet?”
“He took it. And your laptop.”
“Damn. So this guy, was he Cuban? Did you follow him there?”
“No, I was taken—by a bunch of your guys.”
“My guys?”
“Yanks. Three goons dressed like Agent Smith. They stuck me on a plane to Guantánamo Bay.”
“What?” Nina gasped. “Why would they take you there?”
“Because I know someone there. So do you. Sophia. She’s … she’s dead.”
“Oh” was Nina’s only immediate response. She had absolutely no love for Chase’s ex-wife, but could tell that however stoic he seemed outwardly he was affected within. “What happened?”
“She tried to escape and got shot. They wanted me to see the body. It was a mess.”
She put her arm around him. “Oh, Eddie, I’m sorry…. Are you okay?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. “I’m … I don’t know,” he admitted, shaking his head. “It’s weird. I couldn’t stop thinking about her on the flight back.”
Nina’s face twitched in disapproval, but she managed to keep it from Chase, barely. “How so?”
“I’m going to miss her, in some weird way. I didn’t think I would after everything she did, but …” He sighed, to his surprise feeling a weight growing on his heart the more he spoke. “She didn’t use to be like that. Not when I first met her—hell, I wouldn’t have married her if she had been. And I know that she blamed me for some of how she turned out.”
“That’s crazy,” Nina told him firmly. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“No, but …” Another sigh, and he stared down at the floor. “I’m pretty sure she did.”
“Oh, Eddie.” She hugged him sympathetically. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened to her. Any of it.”
Another moment of silence; then he looked at her. “So what about you?” he asked, glad to change the subject.
Now it was Nina’s turn to recount recent events. “Wait, I got fired?” asked Chase when she finished.
“You weren’t fired, you were suspended,” Nina corrected. “Although I kinda get the feeling Rothschild wants to make it the same thing. Miserable old bitch.”
“Sod her—what about this bloke who tried to kill you and Lola? Have they found out who he was?”
“No, nobody’s identified him yet. I’m not even sure what part of the world he was from; I didn’t recognize his accent.”
“I recognized mine,” said Chase. “The guy who paid off the pirates was Swiss.”
“Swiss?”
“Yeah. His name was Vogler. And he’s part of something called the Covenant of Genesis.” He noticed Nina’s reaction. “You know what it is?”
“Only in a biblical context,” she said, sitting up thoughtfully. “In the Book of Genesis, God made a pact—a covenant—with Abraham. In return for acknowledging God—Yahweh or Jehovah, depending how you translate the original Hebrew Tetragrammaton—as the one true and supreme deity, Abraham’s descendants would be granted everlasting ownership and rule of the land on which they lived.”
“This Abraham’s not the one who sang about the Smurfs, I take it.”
“Hardly. Didn’t you ever go to Sunday school when you were a kid?”
“My nan tried to make me a few times. I’d just hang about until she’d gone, then bugger off to play with my mates.”
“Y’know, that explains a lot…. Anyway, Abraham’s a key figure in all three major religions that came out of the Holy Land: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In fact, they’re collectively called the Abrahamic religions, after him.”
“That’s what I like about you,” said Chase. “It’s always an education.”
“I do my best. Even if it’s an uphill struggle.”
“Tchah!”
Nina grinned, then continued: “The three Abrahamic religions actually share a lot of common elements. The Jewish Torah is essentially the same as the first five books of the Old Testament, and the Koran regards the Torah and the Bible as holy books. As far as Genesis goes, the Koran has quite a lot of differences in the specifics, but the fundamental story’s the same—Adam and Eve, the expulsion from paradise, the Great Flood, Abraham … they’re all there, just interpreted differently by the three religions.”
“Yeah, and hasn’t that caused trouble over the years.”
“My fiancé, master of understatement. But as for what the Abrahamic covenant’s got to do with an artifact we found on the other side of the world, I’ve got absolutely no idea.” She glanced at the memory card, which sat in the Castro cigar-box holder, half hidden by coins. “The language on the tablet wasn’t related to any used by the three religions, even the most ancient forms of Hebrew. And besides, the depth we found it at shows that it predates any of them by a long way. So why the Covenant of Genesis?”
“Maybe they were big fans of Phil Collins,” Chase suggested.
Nina managed a small laugh, then shook her head in puzzlement. “I don’t get it. What did the tablet say that was so dangerous to them that they’d try to kill us over it?”
“You said it was some sort of chart,” Chase reminded her. “Maybe we can figure out where it goes.”
“But I don’t know how they measured distances. The numbers could be feet, miles, stadia, moon units … anything!”
“Won’t know unless we try, will we?” He stood, took Nina’s hand, and led her to the small room she used as a study, picking up the memory card along the way.
Once Nina’s iMac was booted up, she copied the photos to it. “Maybe we should put that in a safe-deposit box or something,” she said of the card, not entirely joking.
“Why?
??d you tell Rothschild it got blanked?”
“Because I don’t trust her. And not just because I don’t like her, either. She’s a friend of Ribbsley’s, and she did everything she could to play down the idea that he told someone I had the text. I wouldn’t put it past her to let him know that I still do. Oh, oh, and get this,” she added excitedly. “I tried calling Ribbsley myself. And guess what? He’s suddenly become ‘unavailable.’ Not even his college knows when he’s coming back. Kind of a coincidence, huh?”
“He’s probably scared you might go to Cambridge and deck him.”
“I was tempted, believe me. Okay, let’s see …” She opened the close-up of the tablet, pointing out the different elements she had noticed. “These are the Atlantean numbers, with the compass bearings in front of them, and then I think these sections of text describe each successive destination. Only problem is, I’ve got no clue how to translate them.”
Chase examined the image. “Have you got that sea level program on here?”
“GLUG? Yeah.”
“Bring it up, put in the sea level from a hundred and thirty-five thousand years back. If it’s directions, it’ll help if we’re looking at the right map.”
Nina gave him an admiring glance. “Smart man.”
“I’ll remember you said that, next time you tell me off for watching action movies.”
She ran the program and entered the figures, the sea level around Indonesia dropping by a hundred feet, causing islands to rise and swell. She placed a marker at the coordinates where the tablet had been discovered. “All right,” she said, flicking back to the digital photo. “If we assume for now that the dig site is the starting point, then the first direction is between south and southwest.” A look at the other bearings on the tablet narrowed things down. “These dots, they appear in groups of a maximum of eight, just like the Atlantean system. So if there are eight subbearings in each compass octant, that makes eight sets of eight, plus the eight cardinal bearings …”
“Seventy-two,” said Chase. “Just in case you needed any help.”
“I think I can manage. So their navigational system worked to an accuracy of seventy-two ‘degrees’ to a circle, meaning each dot equals five degrees. In which case,” she said, going back to the map, “the first number takes you on a bearing of two hundred and ten degrees, which takes you …”
“Here.” Chase indicated a point. “That’s the first place where you’d reach land.” He took a large atlas from a shelf and found the pages covering Indonesia. “Nearest town today would be this place, Merak.” It was west of Jakarta, a headland marking the boundary between the Java Sea and the Sunda Strait, which separated the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java. He compared the paper map to the one on the computer. “The strait was a lot narrower back then.”
“A hell of a lot,” Nina agreed. “There’s really only one place where you’d be able to sail through, this channel here.” She compared the two maps. “And it’s right on a bearing of two hundred and ten degrees from where we found the tablet!”
“That’s a good start. So where next?”
Nina worked out the next bearing. “This direction, to the triangle thing.”
“What triangle thing?” Chase asked.
Nina moved the cursor to it. “This triangle thing. With the flower or the tree or whatever on top of it.”
“You mean the volcano?”
She looked at him, surprised. “What?”
“Well, it’s obviously a volcano, isn’t it? It’s a drawing of a mountain with smoke coming out—what else could it be?”
Nina slapped herself on the forehead. “I am such an idiot! How did I not see it?” She zoomed in on the image. “I was so fixated on the idea of its being a symbolic character that I didn’t even think it might just be a simple pictogram.” Another comparison of the two maps. “So, a volcano, which volcano …”
“The really famous one?” Chase suggested with a smile. “Krakatoa.” He pointed it out in the atlas. What remained of the obliterated volcanic island lay at the center of the southern half of the Sunda Strait.
“That works for me.” Nina quickly found another book and leafed through it to show Chase a nineteenth-century woodcut illustration: an almost cartoon-perfect volcanic cone, smoke rising in a plume from the summit. “The largest volcano on Krakatoa used to be huge. It’d make an unmissable landmark if you were traveling by sea.”
“Well, if the map really is using Krakatoa as a landmark,” said Chase, “then you can work out all the distances, can’t you? If it says Krakatoa’s three hundred zogs or whatever from where we started, it should be a piece of piss to convert that into miles. Seeing as you’ve already got the directions, you’ll be able to work out exactly where it takes you.”
“Again, smart man. I knew there was a reason why I wanted to marry you.”
“I thought it was the screaming orgasms?”
“Very funny. But let’s figure this out …”
Several minutes of work with pen, paper, and protractor yielded a result, the course laid out by the ancient tablet traveling through the Sunda Strait and around the headland at the westernmost tip of Java before crossing the expanse of the eastern Indian Ocean to …
“Australia,” Nina said, tapping the country’s North West Cape just above the Tropic of Capricorn. “That’s where the chart takes you. Whoever these people were, they reached as far as Australia. A long time before anyone else. The earliest known signs of human occupation only date back fifty thousand years. These people were there over eighty thousand years before that.”
Chase looked at the computer map. “They took a big risk, going straight across the sea like that. They could’ve just kept going along the Indonesian coast.” The lower sea level meant that the eastern islands of Indonesia had reached practically all the way to Australia, which itself had merged with New Guinea to extend the continent northward to the equator.
“They didn’t need to,” Nina realized. “Why would they? They had the sailing skills and the navigational abilities to cross the sea directly. It’d save them days, maybe even weeks. And they kept going.” There were still more bearings on the tablet. A few more minutes, and the rest of the course was revealed, traveling down the western coast of Australia and using Shark Bay’s vast dogtooths and the Houtman Islands as landmarks before finally terminating at a point over a hundred miles north of the city of Perth. On the modern map, there was nothing of note about the spot, even the nearest small town a good twenty miles away.
“That’s it?” said Chase, unimpressed. “There’s not a lot there.”
“There must have been something there,” Nina said, more excited. “A settlement, maybe, or a port—something worth traveling all that way for.” She zoomed in on the sea level map, bringing up the present-day position of the coast as a yellow outline. “It must have been in this bay—it’d give them shelter from the sea, and there’d be fresh water from this river.” A closer zoom revealed individual contour lines. “Look how steep the sides of the bay are. They couldn’t have built a settlement right on the shoreline; they’d need somewhere flatter …”
She scrolled farther inland. “Somewhere like that.” Above the eastern end of the small bay was a gently sloping plain. “If you were building a settlement, it’s got everything you need—water, farmable land, sheltered access to the sea …” Enthusiasm rose in her voice. “It was above sea level back then, and it’s still above sea level now … so if there was a settlement there, we might still be able to find it!”
“You think it’s buried there?”
“Yes! Absolutely! If we go there, we might be able to excavate it!” She leaned back, already compiling a mental list of everything she would need.
“Not wanting to piss on your chips,” said Chase, “but I don’t think the IHA’s going to go for that right now.”
Nina snorted. “Who needs the IHA? This’d be proper archaeology, just a map and a shovel and a brush, no need for computers or submersi
bles or millions of dollars’ worth of hardware. I’ll show that shriveled old bitch what being an archaeologist is really all about,” she added, more to herself than to Chase.
“Calm down, Lara,” he said. “So you want to jet off to Australia to find the lost city of … of whoever the hell these people were?”
“Why not? It’s not as though we’ve got anything else to do right now. We’re both suspended, remember?”
“Yeah, but there was one thing the IHA was handy for—paying for everything!”
“That’s what credit cards are for,” said Nina. Chase decided not to tell her how much his flights had cost. “Come on, we can do this! We fly to Australia, check out the site, do some digging—the worst that can happen is that we don’t find anything, and even then at least we had a vacation to take our minds off everything.” She stood, hands pressed together eagerly. “Whaddya say?”
He could tell from the almost manic glint in her eyes that she was not going to take no for an answer. “You do remember that there’s someone else trying to find it as well, right?”
“The Covenant of Genesis? Maybe, if they’re even capable of figuring out where to look.”
“We just did it in half an hour,” he pointed out. “They’ve got the original tablet to work from, and you even told that Ribbsley guy about the numbers on it. What if that was the only thing they were missing?”
“All the more reason to find it before them. Come on, Eddie! A few days, that’s all I’ll need. If there’s nothing there, then fair enough, that’s the end of the line. But if there is something there …”
“Great. More flying,” Chase complained. But she had a point; if there really was anything at the new site and the Covenant found it first, they would presumably destroy it, making all the deaths aboard the Pianosa even more meaningless. “Oh, all right. Let’s go to a land down under.”
Nina kissed him. “Thanks, Eddie.”
“Just one thing, though—I’m not doing all the bloody digging!”
THIRTEEN
Australia
Shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare, Chase stepped out of the Land Rover Defender and surveyed the landscape. “As the Aussies say … crikey.”