by Nick Thacker
She’d given her last dime to the students by way of their bonuses, and while she didn’t regret it — they deserved it — she did wish she’d saved just a bit for a flight to Europe.
Or at least Alaska, she thought. Reggie’s in Alaska.
The CSO team could help her, but she didn’t know if they would. They would know that getting involved in an international police investigation was not exactly prudent. The agent with Interpol had essentially said the same thing: ‘Any involvement on your part could be easily misconstrued as obstruction of justice, and our agency has little tolerance for vigilantism.’
She left the Corolla on Elm street, parallel parked in one of two spots on this particular block. The street itself looked as though it had been lifted directly out of an old western movie, the multicolored, boxy establishments featuring a small shop or cafe downstairs and an apartment like hers upstairs.
She’d rented hers from a local shopkeeper, a man who owned a few of the buildings on Elm. He’d given her a steal of a price, likely due to the fact that the one-bedroom space had gone empty for about six months. She’d been there three weeks so far, but had only spent the night there three or four times.
She swung open the door leading to the stairs that would take her to the top floor and stepped inside the musty, old stairwell.
Immediately she knew something wasn’t right. A shuffle, a faint noise, something she wasn’t even fully aware of. Her senses heightened, and she knew she wasn’t alone.
“Hello?” Sarah called out to the dark stairs.
She heard more shuffling, louder. Someone’s definitely up there.
She took a step back, nearly tripping over the threshold. The door leading to the street swung shut, but her back caught it before it could close all the way.
“Sarah?”
She frowned. “Alex? Is that you?”
The young man’s voice hollered down the stairs. “I — I’m sorry, I must have scared you. I’m sorry,” he said again.
Sarah, still shaken, gathered herself together and climbed the stairs. At the top, she fumbled around for her house key and opened the apartment door.
“Come in,” she said. She was past caring about how she looked, past caring about how her living quarters might look.
Not that there was much to be worried about. She flicked on the light as the two of them entered, and she could see the stack of three boxes still sitting in the living room. The kitchen was just past that, and it was bare. Her bedroom featured a mattress, lying on the floor and covered with a single sheet. As she used her laptop or tablet for just about everything these days including entertainment, she had no use for a television or stacks of books.
“Sorry for the mess,” she said.
Alex chuckled.
“How’d you get here so fast, anyway?” she asked.
“I was parked in the lot closer to our camp, so when I left, you were still hiking to your car.”
She nodded. Standing in the center of the living room, realizing for the first time she had nothing to offer this man — no coffee, no alcohol, no chair — she felt awkward. “Sorry, I uh, haven’t really had time to move in…”
He waved a hand. “Don’t. I’m imposing. And I’m not staying long, I just thought I’d stop by and check on you.”
“Check on me?”
“Yeah, you left in a hurry. Seemed like you were a bit out of sorts.”
Can he really read me that easily? she thought. Or am I just that easy to read?
“No, I’m fine. Thank you, Alex.”
He stood there, staring at her. She suddenly felt a bit uncomfortable, so she stepped to the side, hoping he would take the hint as a cue to leave.
“Are you?”
She cocked her head sideways. “Alex… what are you asking?”
He took a step toward her. He seemed even taller in the doorway, his head less than a foot away from the frame. He put his hands into his pockets and looked around at her apartment, as if noticing it for the first time.
“I just want to make sure you’re okay. You got the letter today, and that weird object, and then Interpol called you.”
“Jennifer told you that?”
He nodded. “Sorry. She said you didn’t tell her what they wanted, so we’re all still in the dark. But we’re worried about you.”
“You’re worried about me?”
Alex’s face softened a bit. “You’re… alone. I just thought maybe, if you needed something…”
“Alex, thank you. But I’m good. I promise.” She forced a smile, but her eyes betrayed her feelings as she recalled the last few months. “I’m pretty good at being alone.”
He offered a casual smile in return, but she could tell he didn’t buy it. “Okay, you got it. Like I said, I was on my way to town anyway — picking up some more beer for the group. There’s a place at the end of Elm that’s still open, apparently.”
She nodded. “I’ve heard of it.” She had actually thought about stopping there on the way to her apartment, to maybe grab a glass of wine.
Or something stronger.
Now she wished she had — running the extra errand might have allowed her to miss her awkward encounter with her student.
“I’ll be back first thing tomorrow, Alex,” she said. “And if I’m not, you guys can close up and finish without me. I might have to make a trip, for family reasons.”
“Got it.”
“And your paycheck will still come, either way. You have my word.”
He nodded again, then turned around and stepped over the threshold. When he’d fully exited, he turned and looked in at her. “Please, Sarah. Let me — us — know if there’s anything you might need.”
“I will. Thank you.”
She closed the door, waited a few seconds, then locked it.
She shuddered. The night had gotten colder than she’d expected. There was no breeze, but the air seemed to hang on her, slowly wearing her down.
Sarah waited until she heard the footsteps on the stairs, then she turned and walked into her bedroom. She collapsed on the mattress, lay there for a few minutes, then reached down and grabbed her laptop from her bag.
Time to find my father.
19
Julie
THE TROUBLE WASN’T IN DECIDING whether or not they should go — she knew they should. Julie liked Sarah Lindgren, and she knew Sarah would come to their aid if their roles had been reversed.
The trouble was in deciding where to go.
Dr. Lindgren’s father was likely somewhere in Europe, as that had been the last place he’d been seen. Sarah was somewhere in the Great Lakes region, which could be anywhere from Minnesota to Pennsylvania. She’d want to get a head start, as whatever trail they might find would already be growing cold, so Julie assumed Sarah would be looking for flights to Sweden right about now.
Interpol was a capable organization, with the resources and manpower to run an intra-European search for the missing person. If CSO was going to get involved, Julie knew they’d need a strong lead for their involvement to be of any use, as well as for plausible deniability — they needed to be able to prove they had gotten involved in the case not for Dr. Lindgren’s father, but because there was something of historic value at stake.
Julie wondered what the next move should be. Her hypothesis was that whomever had taken Professor Lindgren had left a cyber footprint somehow, somewhere, but Julie wasn’t sure where to begin looking for it.
Thankfully, she wasn’t searching alone. Mr. E and his wife controlled the biggest stake in one of the largest communications corporations on the planet, and they had already begun putting feelers out into the worldwide surveillance and intelligence communities.
Nothing had immediately turned up, but that was to be expected. Anything obvious — transactions on the professor’s credit card, successive accessing of bank accounts — would be obvious tells, and the criminals would no doubt be smarter than that.
The problem was that while Julie
was confident something would turn up, she had no idea how long it might take. Any time spent waiting around for a database record to appear onscreen was time lost in the field, chasing down the captors.
But, as she had argued to Ben and Reggie, the computer might be able to tell them where to start the chase.
It was the only thing they had to go on at the moment, and it was in this computer system Julie was placing all her trust. Still, she felt nervous: if no leads appeared onscreen, and Mrs. E wasn’t able to coax anything else out of the machine, where would that leave them?
“Any luck?” Julie asked.
Mrs. E was on the computer monitor’s screen in a picture-in-picture window Julie had resized to fill a quarter of the screen’s real estate. They had set up a videoconference to build a search algorithm together, in real-time, to try and make the best use of their collective mind power.
Reggie and her fiancé, Ben, were in the living room enjoying the rest of the bottle of cheap whiskey Ben had opened, and joking about times past. Their voices carried easily to the bedroom desk where Julie was stationed.
“Nothing yet,” Mrs. E responded. “I broadened the search parameters to include his known associates.”
Julie squeezed her brow between two fingers. “He’s not a criminal,” she said. “He won’t have any known associates.”
“Everyone has known associates, Juliette,” Mrs. E said. “His might be straight-laced colleagues, but they will show up in any searches now. And in a way, that makes the search easier. Anything suspicious should be easy to spot.”
Julie nodded. Of course the woman was correct, but still — that would be too easy. “It’s not going to work, E.”
“You must have faith. We just need —”
“No, it’s too simple. Too obvious. The people who took him aren’t going to leave a breadcrumb like that — they would make sure anyone at Professor Lindgren’s university, any of his friends, any minor associates he's had in the past, were all far away from him at the time of his abduction. It would be too easy for one of them to admit they saw something suspicious. Too easy to call in a police report.”
Onscreen, Mrs. E nodded. Then she smiled. “That is why I have added an additional parameter to our search.”
Julie cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“I have made sure to pull in any relevant professional associations. Not just people — other universities, appearances, articles, publications, and references.”
Julie frowned. “But that’s going to give us everything there ever was on this guy. It can’t all be relevant, and it’s going to be a ton of stuff to wade through.”
Ben’s laugh echoed through the cracks in the doorway. The thick logs and chinking were wonderful sound barriers, but the gaps between doors and doorframes throughout the small cabin allowed plenty of sound in.
She shifted in the office chair and tried to ignore the two mens’ racket as Mrs. E responded. She was constantly amazed at mens’ ability to compartmentalize. If Reggie was concerned about Sarah, it sure didn’t sound like it from in here. The laughing and joking grew to a chaotic level.
And the whiskey probably doesn’t help, she thought.
“No, that is the beauty of the algorithm,” Mrs. E said. “It is built to automatically filter out unnecessary details, like anything too old or too far away from him geographically. But any mentions of the man will turn up in the search.”
Julie shrugged. “Anything’s worth trying, I guess. Have you gotten any results yet?”
Julie could see Mrs. E’s face turn away from the camera as she fiddled with the computer mouse and clicked around the screen. “There are some results, but I am going to collate the list and have my husband’s assistant work through it this evening.”
“Read a couple of the first ones, most recent to older.”
Mrs. E nodded. “A talk Professor Lindgren gave at a university in London, titled, ‘A Brief Explanation of Geologic Formations of Early Scotland.” Mrs. E’s eyes danced over the screen. “Next one is another talk, this one called, ‘Examples of Prehistoric Weaponry,’ given at —”
“No,” Julie said. “That’s only slightly more interesting than the first, but there’s no way he’d say anything so earth-shattering someone would want to kidnap him because of it.”
Mrs. E nodded. “After that is a paper published in a small periodical, called, ‘Timeaus and Critias: An Alternative Interpretation.’” Mrs. E sighed. “As I explained, Julie. Most of the data is still compiling, and —”
“When was that talk?” Julie asked.
“Let me check.” Julie heard the sounds of clicking and watched Mrs. E’s eyes on the screen in front of her. “Apparently it was published four weeks ago, though I am not able to see page. It appears as though the article has been taken down, or the link no longer works.’”
“Taken down?”
“No information is provided, Juliette. I apologize. The link is dead. I will have our assistant attempt to retrieve an archived copy if it exists anywhere. The publication does not seem to have online copies of all their articles, which means we might have to track down a hard copy.”
Julie shook her head, then stood up. “Don’t worry about it, E. Thanks. Have her check, but I believe Sarah has access to her father’s office — anything he wrote will likely be stored on a computer or hard drive there, if not on the cloud already.”
“Yes, of course.” She paused, waited for Julie to look at her, then spoke again. “Do you — do you think there is something in this article that might be helpful?”
“Hard to say,” Julie said. “But the timeline checks out, I guess. Anything earlier than that and I’d wonder what the thieves were waiting around for. But it’s the title of the article that strikes me as interesting.”
“How so?”
“Timeaus and Critias,” Julie said. “Are you familiar with those?”
“Plato?”
“Yes. I was thinking about the Professor’s letter, the one Sarah got just before the call from Interpol. There was a quote on it, one written by Plato: ‘We are twice armed if we fight with faith.”
“Intriguing.”
“Maybe,” Julie said. “Or maybe it’s nothing. There are plenty of good Plato quotes floating around out there.”
“Was the quote in Sarah’s letter from Timaeus and Critias?”
“They were two separate dialogues, if I remember correctly. And I’m not sure, but I doubt it.”
“So what is the relation?”
“Well,” Julie said, “and I’m just thinking out loud here, if Professor Lindgren was forced to write a letter to his daughter — a very intelligent historian and anthropologist, so certainly a credible source — but he was told to only ask her for help figuring out what the little object was that came with the letter…”
“Then he would have tried to sneak in some additional information, knowing that he was under pressure, and probably fearful of what might happen to him.”
Julie nodded. “It’s a bit conspiratorial, I’ll admit, but if he was ordered to seek out assistance from someone, and he could convince his captors that the letter was written in his typical ‘style’ and nothing more, it would have been an ingenious clue.”
“But what is the clue?” Mrs. E asked.
“No idea,” Julie said. “Hang on.”
She pulled open a web browser on the computer and typed in a few keywords. Plato, Timaeus and Critias. She pressed enter.
She scrolled through the first few results — translations of the two dialogues, an explanation of them and an overview on Plato, and then her eyes stopped on the third result.
She sucked in a breath.
Let’s hope it’s not that, she thought.
“Find anything?” Mrs. E asked.
Julie had forgotten she was still on a video chat. “M — maybe.”
She clicked the search result and waited for the page to load. It was a transcription and summarization of the two famous dialogues in Pla
to’s canon, but the emphasis was on Critias, on a story told through the mouth of a man named Solon.
A story Julie was very familiar with.
“What did you find?” Mrs. E asked again.
“Well, if Professor Lindgren is actually trying to leave a clue for us, I think we’re going to have a difficult time finding him.”
“And why is that? What are the dialogues about?” Mrs. E asked.
Julie sighed, feeling her knuckles gripping the edge of the desk more and more tightly as she read on.
“They’re about the legend of Atlantis.”
20
Rachel
RACHEL RASCHER STEELED HERSELF. Her team was counting on her, and she felt like she was about to lose control. The scientists here, the staff, and the handful of investors and supporters she had around the world, the silent partners of their endeavor, were counting on her.
She had built this — her dream — from the ground up, working with fragmented pieces left to her by her grandfather and his predecessors, including her own father. She knew how close they were to a final compound, a solution to the problem that had plagued them for years, but the closer they got the more nervous she became.
She knew the nervousness was based on emotion, not rational thinking, and that by better controlling her emotional state, she could push the thoughts to the back of her mind and continue her work.
Still… nothing has prepared me for this.
Rachel strolled down the dim and narrow hallway, heading toward the room at the end of the hall. Room 23.
So many failed trials. So many failed compounds.
They were running low on the original compound, and that meant they were running out of time. Her team had worked for years on this project, and some of them their entire lives.
In her case, she felt like she had worked on this project for multiple lives.