by Nick Thacker
Sarah was sobbing softly, and her father had his arm around her shoulder, but Ben knew which of them was supporting the other. Sarah had proven to be far more resilient than he’d initially thought, even after working with her — and surviving with her — in The Bahamas.
Julie and Mrs. E were out front, walking through the upper chamber. The small room at the bottom of the stairs as well as this massive chamber were both empty, completely devoid of anything that might give them a clue as to what had happened here.
Ben, however, wasn’t thinking about the history of this hall.
“Alex asked Rachel if the book she had — the Book of Bones — was written in Greek,” he said.
Reggie looked up at him, moving forward on an injured leg while supported by Agent Sharpe. “Yeah,” he said. “What of it?”
“Well he asked that after Rachel was trying to explain herself. She was talking about why she thought the only people who could enter the place were ‘pure.’ Why did he think it was interesting that the text was in Greek? Plato was Greek, so of course he wrote it in Greek. Am I missing something?”
At first no one spoke, but then Professor Lindgren coughed, clearing his throat. “Yes,” he said. “You are. He wasn’t surprised about the fact that it was written in Greek — what surprised him was the word she used. ‘Pure.’”
“Why?” Ben asked.
“Well, I think it has something to do with the Greek translation. I’m a little rusty on my Greek, but I think the word is Katharos. It means ‘clean,’ or ‘free from any contaminating substances.’”
“That’s…”
“The rock. Tourmaline,” he said. “It’s pure, like a diamond. Free from any contaminants. Plato wrote what Solon told him — literally a pure substance, one that generates a charge when pressure is applied to it. Any mineral or gemstone that’s not pure like that probably won’t work.”
Ben thought about this for a moment, then nodded. “Fascinating.”
“Yeah,” Julie said. “Or unfortunate.”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. E asked.
“I mean that an entire generation of people was wiped out — 50 or so million of them, including war victims and civilians — all because of a bad translation.”
Ben nodded again. “Yeah, I guess when you put it that way it’s pretty unfortunate.” He paused, frowning. “Still, I think it’s pretty crazy how all this was real.”
“It’s not, though,” Sarah said. “There’s nothing here.”
Ben shrugged. “Just because there’s nothing here now doesn’t mean there was never anything here. Whoever built this place — the Sphinx, the pyramids, all of it — they did it for a reason.”
Reggie shifted his weight on Sharpe’s shoulder. “Yeah, and maybe that reason wasn’t to hide a massive library of knowledge. Maybe this was all built as a backup. I mean, it’s close to where the Atlanteans called home, right? Maybe they came here first, taught the ancient Egyptians what they needed to know to build their temples, farm, become civilized. They laid down roots, just in case they needed them. But they kept going, kept traveling.”
“Right,” Julie said. “Remember what Alex was talking about? Haplo… something?”
“Haplogroup X,” Reggie said. “He said that was how he could trace the movements of ancient peoples with that genetic characteristic from their origin to their final destination.”
Sarah whirled around. “Wait… Alex said he had a way to do that?”
Reggie looked at her, confused. “Yeah — that was what he was all worked up about when he found us. Well, that and you. He was pretty torn up about you.”
Ben felt the tension in the room grow. Alex had given his life to Sarah’s rescue.
“What did he say exactly?” Sarah asked. “Tell me everything.”
84
Julie
AS BEN, MRS. E, and Reggie filled Sarah in on what Alex had told them regarding the Haplogroup X research he’d been working on, Julie focused her attention on another issue.
They had found something here. It was an empty hall, but it was clear it had been built for some purpose. Ben had voiced the concern a minute ago, that at one time there had been something here. Someone, long ago, had spent the time and energy to cut this hall out of the limestone and fill it with something of great importance.
Julie stopped, two feet short of the door that separated the Hall of Records from Room 23.
Limestone.
She frowned, then looked down at the stone beneath her feet. She kicked it with her toe, feeling the hard, unforgiving surface pushing back against her.
Something about limestone…
“What’s up, Jules?” Ben asked, noticing that she had stopped. The others were all inside Room 23 now, and Mrs. E and Sarah were working to clear the mess from the door. The soldiers had apparently blasted their way in, as the metal door now hung from only a single hinge, and most of the bottom half of the door lay in twisted shambles in the corner.
“I just thought of something…” she said. “I’m not sure what it means. If it means anything.”
“What is it?”
“Limestone,” she said, still looking down at her feet. “This place is all limestone, right?”
Professor Lindgren nodded. “From the Mokkatam Formation, which is what the entire Giza Plateau rests upon. There was a lagoon here, fifty or sixty million years ago, and the compressed pieces of coral from that lagoon became a perfect resting place for the layers of mud and sand that came later and formed into the stone.”
“And the pyramids were covered with that, right?”
“Yes,” Professor Lindgren said. “The Great Pyramid had a bright-white casing of limestone as well, none of which is remaining today.”
“And we know exactly where the limestone came from? The limestone that was used for the casing stones?”
At this, Professor Lindgren seemed puzzled. “Well, it’s a matter of debate. Though Egyptologists often point to certain spots around the plateau, it’s believed that the limestone of that purity had to be carried in, from somewhere far away.”
Ben’s head snapped up, and he made eye contact with Julie. “Purity.”
She smiled, then nodded. “Purity. Limestone of that purity…”
“…may not have been limestone at all,” Professor Lindgren said.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Julie said. “Sarah, that necklace of yours — your father said he found it inside the artifact he gave you?”
“Just the stone. Tourmaline. Not the chain.”
“Which means it was probably put inside the artifact by whoever dropped it in Greenland.”
“And based on Alex’s Haplogroup X data, it seems as though Greenland was right along the route the ancient peoples took from the Mediterranean Sea.”
Professor Lindgren and Sarah seemed excited now, growing animated. Julie felt the excitement as well. Sarah walked over to her father and held out the necklace. “The Atlanteans traveled from the Mediterranean Sea to the Americas, visiting Greenland along the way. They also built this place. That means this stone is from the Atlanteans, and its purity — the nearly colorless white of it — represents the key to their empire.”
“And I’d bet a good chunk of change that it’s only found in places like Santorini,” Reggie added. “Formed by volcanic activity, hydrothermal vents, that sort of thing.”
Julie’s mind was still racing. “So the Atlanteans used Tourmaline as a calling card, in a sense, leaving it places they'd traveled. To point people home.”
“But why dump a bunch of it here?” Ben asked. “If they were building some sort of monument like a pyramid, why spend all that time digging up Tourmaline to use it as ‘casing stones?’ Seems like they were busy enough, traveling around the world and everything.”
“They cased the entire pyramid in Tourmaline, at a huge cost in labor, freight, manpower, and resources. It had to be for a reason. If they wanted something that just looked good, they could have used any o
f the stone from the plateau itself.”
Julie looked at Sarah. “You said Tourmaline was piezoelectric?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Apply pressure, and it generates a small charge.”
“And the pyramid was cased in thousands of tons of this stuff.”
“That’s a lot of pressure,” Agent Sharpe said.
“Exactly,” Julie said. “So what would happen in direct sunlight? Say the sun beats down on it, causing the stones to expand…”
“And thereby causing a massive amount of pressure!” Sarah said. “That’s it! The pyramid wasn’t a tomb, or a monument. It had a purpose.”
“It was a weapon.”
“The ultimate weapon,” Julie said. “Think about it — the compound would have been stored inside the pyramid, and the piezoelectric qualities of the Tourmaline would charge it when it was under pressure — pressure caused by the expansion of those stones from the heat of the sunlight. Enough of that pressure and it would emit an electric charge, which would further heat the compound inside. It would be the bell, but on a huge scale.”
Ben was nodding in agreement. “And the builders could have used mirrors or funnels of some sort to direct the charge from the heated compound out the openings in the pyramid.”
“On an enemy.”
“Right,” Ben said. “It’s the perfect defense mechanism. Anyone approaching too close would be zapped. And it wouldn’t take a lot of zapping of the guys on the front lines for the rest of the army to freak out.”
“So the Egyptians had an amazing weapon in their possession,” Sarah said. “Built the Atlanteans themselves. But they didn’t use it — the casing was removed and shipped off for other projects over the centuries to follow.”
“And we know they never accessed the Hall of Records under the Sphinx.”
“So they probably never knew how to use the weapon,” Sarah continued. “They went about their lives, building smaller — and less perfect — pyramids, carving the Sphinx’s head into the shape of one of their Pharaohs, and altogether forgetting about their mysterious visitors from thousands of years earlier.”
“Sounds like we’ve got it figured out, then,” Ben said. He turned to Rachel Rascher. “Should we see about getting this criminal into a cell?”
Julie was about agree when she froze again. “No,” she said. We’ve got something way bigger to worry about.”
85
Julie
“BIGGER THAN DEALING WITH a racist Nazi who tried to kill us all?”
Julie steeled herself. How could I have not realized it sooner? “Yeah. The terrorist attack in Athens,” she said, her hands trembling. “It was a ‘trial,’ just like she said —” Julie pointed at the still-unconscious Rachel — “and one she used to justify her Nazi-esque racial cleansing.”
“But didn’t she say something about —”
“A bigger trial,” Sarah finished. “She did mention that they were going to ‘reveal themselves to the world.’”
“I wonder what that means?” Reggie asked. “Probably nothing good.”
“Definitely nothing good,” Julie said. “And I’d bet it’s something even bigger than what happened in Athens.”
“So it probably involves this bell thing,” Ben said. “A bigger version of what happened in the museum.”
“Then we need to find it,” Julie said. “It’s out there somewhere. A bell, like the one in here, and the one in the museum in Athens. It shouldn’t be hard to find, right?”
Reggie shook his head. “It could be. It might not be a bell at all — the key to the weapon working was the stuff inside it. Whatever it was that the Atlanteans created and put inside, and then electrically charged it to heat it up.”
“So we’re looking for a powder. Or a liquid,” Ben said. “And some way to plug it in.”
“Right.”
Ben nodded. “Well, that leaves just about everywhere.”
“Let’s at least get out of this dungeon and back into a country we know we can trust,” Julie said.
Reggie smirked. “Yeah? And which country is that?”
“Fair enough,” Julie said. She knew the CSO was on something called ‘workable terms’ with the government, but their charter was still strictly domestic. They were bound by their agreement to officially operate in the United States, with jurisdiction extending to foreign countries based on the stated mission.
The problem was that the ‘stated mission’ had to be approved by the board, which was made up of all the members of the CSO, Mr. and Mrs. E — the founding partners — and individual members of each branch of the US military.
While the CSO and Mr. and Mrs. E had more than quorum for voting rights, the military was still… the military. Voting against the US military was never a great long-term strategy, even if the contract clauses of plausible deniability and political immunity were brought up.
The fact remained that the CSO’s operations in Egypt and Santorini were not officially sanctioned missions, approved by any vote — they were here, technically, on a rescue mission for one of their friends. That Mr. E had funded the expedition was not a fact that would have a strong defense in court, if it got there.
Julie looked at the woman at the side of the room, passed out. She was just starting to stir.
“She’ll know,” Julie said, point at Rachel. “This is all because of her. That woman knows where this ‘final test’ is.”
“We can’t interrogate her,” Agent Sharpe said. “It’s against —”
“We can, and we will,” Reggie snapped. “We’re the ones who are here, we’re the ones who caught her.”
“You have no authority here,” he said. “I have no authority here. I came here for my sister, who’s dead now. I have no backup, no team. Yet. But if we get back out, I can make some calls. We can’t just —”
“Sharpe, you need to stand down,” Ben said, stepping closer to the man. “You’ve been blocking us every step of the way, but now that we’re here, I will not allow you to prevent my team from continuing its mission.”
“Your mission? Listen to yourself, Harvey. You sound like you think you’re some soldier. You’re a civilian. Your help here is appreciated, truly, but now that we’ve apprehended Ms. Rascher, I intend to take her in to the proper authorities.”
Julie shook her head and looked around at the stalemate. Sharpe was fuming, his eyes crystalline. He was likely trying to deal with a range of emotions at the moment: his sister was dead, there was a neo-Nazi party hidden beneath the Sphinx, and now a crack team of civilians was trying to take justice into their own hands.
She walked over to him. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to comfort him or punch him in the face — she understood what he was feeling, but she also knew they needed to finish this here, now. Bringing Rachel in would only incite a sparring match between all the international organizations that thought they had jurisdiction. There would be years of court cases, waiting, legal maneuvering, and jail time, but if justice were ever served, it would be decades from now.
And whatever ‘justice’ looks like, it won’t be enough, Julie thought.
She stood face-to-face with Sharpe, trying to come up with the proper words to explain her case. They needed to find out — now — what Rachel knew, and how to stop it. There was no other choice.
She put her hand on Sharpe’s shoulder. “None of us fault you for being here,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“None of us blame you. We would have done the same thing. We would have done anything to get Sarah back, and her father. That’s the story we’ll tell, if we have to.”
“What are you saying?”
“If it comes to it, you won’t get in trouble for any of this. We’ll make sure of it, however we can.”
“Thank you, but I don’t think —”
Before he could finish the sentence, Julie heard the sharp retort of an assault rifle. Her ears were ringing, but she turned to see what had happened.
Profe
ssor Lindgren, shaking, was holding one of the soldiers’ weapons, aiming it at her.
Aiming past her.
She turned around to face the two people on that side of the room and saw that Rachel Rascher was awake, her eyes wide.
She was bleeding. A gunshot wound in the side of her chest was leaking blood. She choked, then coughed. She fell sideways, then back against the wall, where she slid to a sitting position on the floor.
“I — I told her…” Professor Lindgren started. “I told her I would. That’s — that’s what I told her.”
Reggie and Ben ran over to Lindgren and disarmed him, then held his arms as they led him out of the room. Sarah followed, her face a combination of shock and disorientation.
Julie raced over to Rachel, who was now wheezing and coughing blood.
“The final test,” she said. “Where is it?”
Rachel sneered.
“Where is it?” Julie asked again. “Tell me.”
Rachel tried to laugh, but her mouth was filled with blood and bile. She spat, nearly hitting Julie.
Julie watched, knowing the woman was going to die here. Agent Sharpe was looking down at them, watching the conversation but not moving to help.
“It’s over, Rachel,” Julie said. “There’s nothing left. Give us something.”
Rachel's nostrils flared as she stared up at Julie. She had a hard time focusing, and her pupils were dilated.
Her mouth opened, then closed again, then finally two words fell out. “Two… months.”
“Two months?” Julie asked.
Before she could confirm, Rachel’s mouth turned up once more into a sneer, then her head fell sideways, dead.
Julie stood up, then walked out of the room.
Two months.
86
Ben
PROFESSOR LINDGREN WAS SHAKEN up, but still lucid. He knew what he’d done, and his eyes showed little remorse.
Ben sat next to him in the hallway, waiting for Julie to come out. He turned to the older man, about to speak, when the professor dropped his head and looked at Ben.