by Nick Thacker
‘For there shall forever lie the secrets and powers of this great and mighty host; I have prior explained their capabilities.
‘Come the time the Great Hall is found, it shall be opened only by the purest of the pure.’
It seems that der Fuehrer has been correct in his assumption that using Die Glocke as ‘The Destroyer,’ as a means of seeking out the most pure, was what the Ancients intended. It is written as such in the passages of the Pesach. However, it challenges my scientific mind to know that he is wasting precious energies on the cleansing of those who are clearly not of the purist descent.
We have but little of the Ancients’ elixir; to waste it on those not obviously of the Aryan race is to waste it on non-prudent endeavors.
23
Graham
GRAHAM SIGHED. SINCE HE’D BEEN taken four days prior, he’d been treated reasonably well. For a prisoner.
The man who’d come to his door had been an employee of Ms. Rascher’s. He was the brute-force grunt-type laborer, the type of man Graham despised. He had always appreciated the use of one’s mind as a tool over resorting to the use of one’s physical prowess.
In his defense, however, the man hadn’t laid a hand on Graham. Professor Lindgren had, admittedly, not wanted to let it escalate to physical violence, but he was glad when the man allowed him to step out of his apartment unaided, retaining just a bit of dignity.
The man had driven him to the private airstrip and even opened the door for him, keeping a close eye on his captive but allowing the older gentleman the freedom to board the plane without interference. He was given a seat inside, told to get some rest, then offered food and drink before they’d even taken off.
He’d declined the meal, opting instead to sleep.
Wherever they’re taking me, it’s not going to be as comfortable as my bed.
He was right about that.
The cell he was in now had been turned into a room, but it was still very much a prison. The rock walls and low ceiling alone were enough to induce claustrophobia in even the most self-confident person, but the lack of adequate lighting and comfortable furniture told him everything he’d needed to know: he was a prisoner. Plain and simple.
Now that he was being interrogated, sitting in a chair in the center of his room, there was no question.
“You sent her the object, did you not?”
Graham Lindgren looked up at the woman, who had previously introduced herself as Rachel Rascher, standing over him. “I did,” he said. There was no hesitation in his voice. No sense of remorse. “You already know that.”
The woman nodded. “Of course we know that. But I want to understand why you sent it to her. Our labs here could —”
“Your laboratory here is suitable to determine what the object is made of, yes,” Graham said. “But it is not a matter of equipment. Solving this problem needs something besides technology.”
Rascher shook her head, allowing the single lock of graying hair to fall over her eye. She brushed it back over her ear, annoyed, adding it back to the rest of her light brown, straight hair she kept tied up in a large, loose bun.
Graham examined his captor. She was slightly squat, but pretty, in the way a scientist or librarian would be. Simple, nothing striking about her looks, and makeup seemed to be something of an afterthought, if it was there at all.
In another life — and if he were thirty years younger — he might even have been attracted to her.
Now, sitting in a chair in the middle of a cold, dark cellar, the ancient rock walls bleeding its cool condensation that added humidity to the already damp room, all he felt was discomfort.
“Why did you bring me here?” Graham asked. “Why not ask for my help like a normal person?”
The woman smiled. “And you believe that you would have offered to help us willingly?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s just theoretical, right? I’m an archeologist, as you know. We deal in hypotheticals. Situations that may or may not have happened. These stories don’t affect anyone today, at least not directly. We try to put together the pieces of the past, in a way that makes them —”
“That’s all we’re trying to do here, Mr. Lindgren. That’s all we've ever been trying to do.”
“Yet you had to resort to kidnapping? Why?”
The woman paced in front of him. “We didn’t have to. We decided to. I decided to.”
Graham raised an eyebrow. “Well, thank you very much. Any chance you’d be willing to let me go?”
“Of course,” Rascher said. “After you tell us what you know about the object.”
“The object?” Graham scoffed. “It’s an artifact! Nothing but a piece of rock, something I found in Greenland.”
He paused. Have I said too much? Does she already know where I found it? Of course she does, he thought. She’s known everything so far. She knows I sent it to Sarah.
My Sarah. He felt a knot of anxiety growing in his chest. He wondered where she was now. Has she received the object? Perhaps she doesn’t know how to open it.
His thoughts were once again interrupted by the woman.
“Professor Lindgren,” Rascher said impatiently. She paced again. She was thin, with broad shoulders and a small, round face. Her lips and nose were small, but her eyes made up for their size. Graham thought she looked a bit like a character from one of the Disney movies he and Sarah used to watch when she was younger.
Bambi? Maybe that rabbit from that movie? What was her name? Or was it a ‘he?’
“Professor Lindgren,” she said again, louder this time. “We’re running out of time. The first event was a success, even if it was small. The second trial is coming up, and I would hate for you to be a part of that.”
“Why?” Professor Lindgren asked. Since he’d been brought here — wherever ‘here’ was — he’d been trying to piece together what was happening.
After publishing his paper, Timeaus and Critias: An Alternative Interpretation, on his personal weblog on the university’s server, he’d put his attention toward researching the object that he had mentioned in the research analysis: a round, heavy piece of rock, one face of it protruding outward in a knob-like shape, the opposite face depressed inward.
To most people it was nothing; an odd piece of ancient history that would look nice on a mantle or, if the finder was generous, in a museum display.
To Professor Lindgren, however, it was much more intriguing. The first clue was that the object was hollow, formed out of two separate pieces of rock, molded together with nearly perfect precision so that the two faces came together with an artisanal level of symmetry.
The second thing that seemed remarkable about the object was its final resting place: according to his research, nothing like it had ever been found anywhere in the world, and especially not in Greenland. Only inhabited for the past 4,500 years, the island was considered the least densely populated territory on the planet, and even then a third of its residents lived in a single city, Nuuk.
Graham had been there for a vacation — a trip that Merina, the woman he was dating, liked to refer to as a ‘work-cation.’ He had never been to the world’s largest island, and it had always intrigued him, but as a vacation destination, Greenland was not typically at the top of the list.
They’d spent two weeks there, and Graham had talked her into doing a ‘brief’ three-day tour of the southwestern areas surrounding Saqqaq, where the earliest known settlers had landed and founded their city. There, he’d been able to talk one of the museum docents into allowing him to explore the caves surrounding Disko Bay, and in one of these he’d found the object.
It had been lying in a pile of broken rock, and without any tools or equipment he hadn’t been able to determine whether or not the rock was part of some larger object, but beneath the pile of shards he’d found it. The round, reddish disk. He’d picked it up and immediately knew it was something of value.
Nothing like this should have existed in that corner of the world.
He had been working on his controversial paper about Plato’s writings for some time, and this object, while not directly related, seemed to be the perfect addendum.
He turned his attention back to Rachel Rascher. “Why should I be afraid of your ‘next event?’ What are you planning?”
She frowned.
“You haven’t told me anything yet, yet you want my help. What is this all about? The paper I published —”
“The paper you published is nothing, Professor Graham. And my team has removed all traces of it from your university’s servers. It was controversial, but that’s it. A vast overreach on your part.”
“Okay, then —”
“The object you reference,” Rachel continued, “is what we were interested in.”
“It’s an artifact. Something I found in Greenland, of all places.”
“We know. In the paper, you wrote that artifacts ‘…such as the one I procured on a recent trip to Greenland prove the validity of assertions made by my predecessors, that our historic genealogy is assumed complete. These pieces of history prove that we know little about where our ancestors called home.’”
Graham was at first impressed by the woman’s ability to recount with perfect accuracy the statement from his paper, but his confusion quickly returned. “Again, it’s just an artifact. I haven’t even been able to do the proper amount of research into it. I have no idea —”
“It’s real, Professor,” Rascher said. “It’s as old as you suggest in your paper. And it is, as you claimed, not from anywhere near Greenland.”
“You know where it’s from?”
She nodded. “I do. But I need that artifact, Professor. That is what this is all about. You could have simply sent it to me, but instead you shipped it — using a courier that could easily have misplaced it — across the world, to your daughter.”
He winced. Sarah. He’d inadvertently gotten her involved in all of this. He should never have ignored the first email he’d gotten from Rachel.
‘Professor Lindgren,’ the email began.
‘I have been observing your career for some time, and I hope you will grant me the honor of calling myself your fan.
‘I have read the paper you published yesterday, and I am intrigued by its premise: that our history is yet to be properly defined. Specifically, I am intrigued by the ideas you put forth regarding the ‘messiness of our imperialism,’ in that our artifacts have ended up scattered around the world.
‘You mention in a footnote an artifact you have recently come across in Greenland. I am vastly taken by the mysterious promise this object seems to imply; would you be open to arranging a time we can meet?’
The email seemed innocent enough. But to Professor Graham it came across like a ransom note: give us the artifact, or we’re coming to get you. There would have been no reason to suspect that but for three things:
First, the email had no sender. After extracting the email headers — a trick he’d learned long ago from a colleague — he’d found out that the ‘sender’ had hidden their address behind a wall of server-generated gibberish.
Second, no one had paid any attention at all to the artifact when he’d submitted the paper for peer review. Sure, the ‘peer review’ had been just the fifteen or so others in his department at the university, as well as a few friends and colleagues he’d come to know and trust, but if anyone should have been keen on discovering more about this ‘throwaway’ artifact he’d discovered in Greenland, it would have been them.
Finally, whomever had sent the email had done it only a day after he’d published the article, and even then it had only been published online, on one of the university’s blogs. It could hardly be considered a worldwide publication, and he knew the web crawlers for the search engines that would spread the content throughout the internet would take at least a week to pick it up.
So he did the only reasonable thing he could think of: he’d sent the artifact to his daughter. She was remarkably brilliant, and if anyone could figure out where, exactly, something like this had originated, without making a fuss about it or trying to publish something in contradiction to his own work, it would be her. He couldn’t send it to an estranged colleague in the states, as they might dawdle and take their time with it, and his own laboratory resources were tied up with bigger problems.
Besides that, he felt the pressure of time weighing down on him. Whoever the mysterious emailer was, he got the sense that they weren’t interested in negotiating.
At the time of the email, however, he was under no impression that anyone’s life was in danger, and certainly not his own. He’d taken his time in sending it to Sarah, only after doing a bit of research on his own.
He’d come to some remarkable, even unbelievable, conclusions, but nothing he’d found seemed to imply that there was anything he needed to worry about.
That was, until, he’d gotten the second email from the same encrypted sender:
‘Your time is up, Professor. We are coming to get the answer.’
24
Ben
“JULIE, THAT’S NOT A CLUE,” Reggie said.
Ben watched his tall, lean friend pacing back and forth in the living room. Julie had explained everything she’d learned, as well as her conversation with Mrs. E.
The cold Alaskan night air whipped around the double-paned windows and in through microscopic cracks, hitting Ben's skin just as the heat from wood-burning stove met with the air and knocked the frigid out of it.
“It’s… all we have.”
“It’s nothing. Where are we supposed to go? Atlantis?”
Julie shrugged.
“Maybe it’s another clue,” Ben said. “Maybe wherever Sarah’s father is relates to Atlantis somehow.”
Reggie paced. “Probably so. And it probably relates to that little rock he sent her, too. Still, that’s not enough to go on. We can’t call up Mr. E and tell him, ‘hey boss, we’re just going to take the private jet out to Atlantis, look around until we find it.’”
Julie walked farther into the room. “So what do you suggest? You and Ben aren’t really doing much to help out.”
“That’s because of the whiskey,” Reggie snapped.
“You mean it’s that bad?” Julie asked. “Or you’re already drunk?”
“No,” Reggie said. “We ran out. Ben and I were using it as ‘thinking juice.’”
Ben looked up at his fiancée with a goofy grin on his face. He blinked a few times, trying to make the two Julies standing there turn back into just one. He shrugged, then tried to stand. “I’ll — I’ll get more.”
Julie pushed him back down onto the sofa. “No, I’ll do it. You’ll just break something.”
He laughed but didn’t argue. As soon as Julie left the room, Reggie stopped pacing and turned back to Ben. “Okay, buddy. Time to decide.”
Ben looked up at him. “Wh — what are you talking about? I thought we’d already decided to go? We just need to figure out where —”
“No,” Reggie said. “I’m talking about Julie. You going to actually marry her, or are you just going to keep bumping it off?”
“Bumping it off?” Ben asked. He tried to focus on Reggie, but his eyes were again failing him.
“Yeah. You were supposed to be married a few months ago. Went on a cruise so you could plan it out and everything. Remember? You guys were so excited about it, and —”
“If I recall,” Ben started, “you showed up. You yanked us off the boat and sent us to a floating theme park. And we got shot at, and almost eaten by giant crocodiles. At the same time. That’s what I remember.”
Reggie laughed. “You didn’t have to go. Besides, we made it through — so why are you waiting around? Why not just keep the date and get it over with. I keep telling you, buddy, stop waiting around or I’m going to —”
“Shut up, Reggie,” Julie called out from the kitchen. “You know I can take you out.”
“I’ve been drinking,” he said, still laugh
ing. “That means I’m even stronger. Don’t mess with me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, hotshot.”
Ben was lost in thought. He had been trying to consider what Julie had told them, about her theory, and now Reggie’s comment about getting married, but he felt the alcohol pushing his thoughts around and mashing them together, as if his mind was just a lump of clay. He and Julie had been engaged, and he assumed they still were, but they hadn’t talked much about it since the incident in The Bahamas.
He loved her, but he felt like there was a reason they kept drifting apart. Sure, they lived together, but their adventures — and near-death experiences — made things difficult. To them, ‘normal’ was getting attacked by a killer saltwater crocodile or hanging off a frozen ice cliff in Antarctica, with a Chinese army bearing down on them.
He pushed the thought away and looked back at Reggie. “What did Sarah say her dad was researching, anyway?”
Reggie frowned, thinking. “I don’t think she did.”
“And she’s researching… what?”
Reggie thought for a moment, steadying himself on the edge of the flatscreen television. Ben hoped Reggie hadn’t had too much too drink, as the TV wasn’t mounted securely onto anything. “Uh, I think she said something about… people? Maybe old people?”
“She’s an anthropologist, Reggie.”
“Right. So yeah, definitely people.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Why would he send her that artifact? It didn’t have anything to do with her research, and she’s not even an archeologist.”
Julie walked back, carrying two glasses of whiskey, an ice cube in each. She handed one to Reggie, then set Ben’s on the end table.
“You trying to skimp on me, Jules?” Reggie asked, holding the glass up eye level to his head, noticing that it was less than half full.
“No, just trying to save a little money. You guys drank the cheap stuff already, so we had to start in on the top-shelf stuff.”