And if he did, the world might be doomed again.
LAGOS AIRPORT HOTEL
IEKJA, LAGOS, NIGERIA
SEPTEMBER 11, 2009
Lourds referred to the notebook computer screens where the images of the bell, cymbal, and drum were open, but he worked on lined yellow legal pads he’d bought on the way to the hotel. Natasha hadn’t been happy about the shopping, but he explained he needed the pads.
His brain was on fire as he compared the four languages represented on the three instruments. He worked feverishly, exchanging values and words, ideas and guesses that had come to him during the long drive back to Lagos.
Even fleeing for his life hadn’t turned off that part of his mind that so loved puzzles of language and culture. This was where his passion lived.
Upon their arrival at the hotel, they’d checked in and gone to their rooms. Leslie had managed to get them all on the same floor.
There hadn’t been any sense of camaraderie, though. Each of them—except for Diop and Adebayo, who acted like long-lost friends—had elected to trudge off to their room separately.
Lourds hadn’t wanted to deal with the women, and he still wasn’t exactly sure where his loyalties lay in handling them. Leslie had managed to bring him this far, and there was the intimacy factor, but Lourds never let sex get in the way of his job. He suspected Leslie was very much the same in that respect.
Sadly, both of them were also driven by the same desire to excel at their jobs. And that put them on different sides of the fence regarding the instruments.
Natasha had her own agenda to avenge her sister’s murder. Lourds suspected that need came out not only from the personal aspect of Yuliya’s murder, but also out of whatever motivation had prompted Natasha to become a police officer in Moscow to begin with.
The problem was, Lourds was near to bursting with ideas about what they were ultimately searching for. He needed a sounding board, someone he could talk to about everything that was buzzing through his head.
And it didn’t seem fair that he didn’t share it with Leslie.
Except that he couldn’t.
He looked at the notes he’d taken over the last several pages of the legal pad and knew he was going to drive himself crazy if he didn’t talk through what he suspected to be true.
It was decision time.
Ultimately, it came down to needing the most dispassionate listener. He judged that Leslie wouldn’t be. If he told her what he believed was true, she would feed off it and push him into making even more and wilder leaps. He needed to be grounded to complete his work.
He left the notebook on the bed, went to the refrigerator, and took out two beers. He was fresh from the shower and dressed in khaki shorts and an old soccer shirt. For a moment, he stood at the door and tried to debate whether he needed an audience, but he knew he did.
Having to explain things, just focusing to put everything he was thinking into perspective and an oratory summary, allowed him to see and think more clearly. Perhaps that was caused by the nature of the teacher within him, but he also believed it was because speaking caused him to think more linearly.
He needed that now.
He glanced back at the legal pad lying on the bed. The name ATLANTIS was underlined, circled, and starred. He really, really needed that now.
Feeling some apprehension, he left the room.
Lourds knocked on the door. He waited a moment outside in the hall, feeling ridiculous and vulnerable all at the same time because he knew she would be watching him through the peephole.
And probably putting the safety back on her pistol, he told himself.
He started to knock again, thinking maybe he’d caught her in bed. It was only a few minutes after 5 A.M. locally.
Then she asked, in Russian, “What do you want?”
“I come bearing gifts.” Lourds tried a smile and held up the two beers.
“I have my own refreshment bar. Go away.”
Some of Lourds’s confidence waned. He dangled the beers at his side. “I need to talk.”
“About what?”
“I’ve deciphered some of the inscriptions on the instruments.”
“Good. We can talk about it in the morning.”
“I want to talk about it now.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it now. Get some sleep.”
Lourds hesitated, knowing he was sounding like a petulant child. “I can’t sleep.”
“Drink those beers. You’ll sleep. You’ve had a big day.”
Lourds tried to think of another argument and couldn’t. Frustration chafed at him. “I need to know if I’m on the right track.”
“I’m not a linguist. I can’t help you with that.”
Unable to argue that point, Lourds apologized for waking her and turned to go. He hadn’t gone three steps before she opened the door and called his name. He stopped and turned.
Dressed in pajamas, her hair free, Natasha looked beautiful. Of course, the pistol in her hand clashed with the demure appearance.
“Come in,” she sighed. “But if you try to get fresh with me after the day I’ve had, I’ll shoot you.”
Lourds paced as he talked. He couldn’t help it. The more he talked, the more energized he felt. Every word he spoke seemed to feed the fire raging inside him.
Natasha sat on the bed with her knees up to her chin. Her pistol rested on the pillow beside her. She hadn’t been sleeping either, Lourds realized. She’d been sitting there in combat mode.
She sipped her beer as he talked, but his just grew flat and warm on the nearby table as the rising sun started to warm the window on the other side of the drapes.
“The inscription talks about an island kingdom,” Lourds said. “I think what it’s actually referring to is Atlantis.”
“Atlantis,” Natasha repeated, and sounded as though she didn’t believe it for a second.
“I think so. Though they don’t call it by that name in the inscriptions.”
“What name do they give it?”
Lourds shook his head. “I’d have to know more of the language to understand that. What I have to do is substitute words and ideas for the symbols on those inscriptions. I can use the name they refer to the island as Atlantis, and even call the people Atlantean, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are.”
“Then why was the island called Atlantis?”
“That was the name Plato identified it by in his discourses. Subsequently, the ocean the island presumably sank in was called the Atlantic.” Lourds tried to frame everything in his mind. “Allow me for the moment to simply call the place Atlantis.”
“You do realize that the Roman Catholic Church believes they’ve found Atlantis? It’s been in all the news.”
“It doesn’t matter if they did or didn’t,” Lourds said. “They’re not going to find anything there worth having.”
Natasha smiled at him and shook her head. “You sound awfully sure of yourself.”
“I am. It’s been buried undersea nine or ten thousand years. That can be hard on artifacts—though in the right circumstances, much can survive. Pottery, carved stone, gold. But I doubt it will differ much from other artifacts from the time. Do you think they’re going to find anything?”
“I’ve found, Professor Lourds, that the world is made up of many strange occurrences. Take this situation. I have always known I could get killed in the line of duty. It’s the nature of my work. But the thought that Yuliya might be killed because of some object she dug up never crossed my mind.”
She paused for a moment, but Lourds didn’t say anything. She resumed talking.
“More than that, the world also has a number of things that have existed thousands of years and continue to exist. The pyramids. The tombs of pharaohs. Ancient documents that you’ve undoubtedly read.”
“Yes, but that site in Cádiz had been underwater for thousands of years till the tsunami lifted it from the sea bottom.” Lourds shook his head. “They’re not goi
ng to find anything new or different there.”
“Then why is Atlantis so important?”
“I don’t know. But I know this—it just happens to be the place where everything on those inscriptions happened.”
“What did happen?”
“A cataclysm.”
“The island sank.”
“Yes. But from what I’ve translated, the authors of the inscription believed God sank the island.”
“You don’t?”
Lourds sighed. “I’ve not been a big believer in God involving himself in our lives. I’m sure he’s got plenty of other things to do than answer prayers.”
“I don’t think those people prayed to have their island sunk.”
“Probably not.” Lourds frowned.
“Did the inscription say why God sank the island?”
“He was angry with the people.”
“In the Old Testament, he seemed to be angry a lot.”
“Not exactly a new story, is it?”
“Why are you excited about it?”
“Because it fits in with what Adebayo told me about the Drowned Land. His name for the world that was sunk.”
“I didn’t hear what he had to say.”
Realizing there hadn’t been time to tell Natasha the story during the trip back to Lagos, Lourds did so. “The thing that interests me is that Adebayo said all the people spoke the same language in those days. No one knew another language.”
“Isn’t there a biblical story about that?” Natasha asked.
“A famous one. The Tower of Babel.”
“I remember. Men decided to build a tower to ascend into Heaven and join God. Seeing this, God destroyed the uniformity of man and caused them to split off from each other, each speaking a different language.”
“Exactly. The Tower of Babel was believed to have been built in Babylon,” Lourds said. “That’s supposedly part of the reason Babylon is named that. The name comes from the Akkadian language and roughly translates into ‘Gate of the God.’ ”
“Why are you discussing the Tower of Babel? I thought this was about Atlantis.”
Lourds sighed. His mind was working overtime these days. Instead of slowing down, it seemed to be speeding up. “Because if you have one place where one language reigned supreme among all its people, it stands to reason that it would be on an island.”
“What about the Fertile Crescent area? Mankind was supposed to have come from there.”
“The archeology to date seems pretty clear, so I’m not going to dispute that. What I’m going to propose is that a group of those people set sail and found a wondrous island out in the Atlantic Ocean and set about creating a society like none that had been seen before.”
“Why?”
“Because Plato said that’s what the nation he called Atlantis was like.”
“Some people also say that Atlantis is pure imagination.”
“Maybe it was,” Lourds responded. “But this island, the one that generated these artifacts, according to the inscriptions I’ve translated, was real. If anyone was going to do any ambitious building back in such ancient times, the kind of building that would raise up a tower so high that it threatened God, why not Atlantis?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m proposing that an advanced civilization on the island that produced these instruments might also have built the Tower of Babel there.”
“The dig site doesn’t seem to have any skyscrapers hidden in the rubble. Nothing like that has come up in the news stories,” Natasha said.
“From what I’ve seen, they haven’t found much in the way of a city on top of that area,” Lourds pointed out. “When the island sank, it could have lost everything on the surface. And they haven’t found much in the caves either.”
“They found a door,” Natasha said.
Lourds looked at her. “What door?” He hadn’t turned on the television in his room.
Natasha reached for the remote control and switched the set on. CNN came to life, and the topic of discussion was the discovery of the strange metallic door down in the caves.
As Lourds watched, his incredulity grew. The camera locked on the door. He gasped, unable to believe his eyes.
“The door is clearly shown here in the footage we’ve received from Father Sebastian’s public information team,” the news reporter was saying. “As yet, the excavation team hasn’t been able to progress beyond the door. My sources tell me that the archeologists fear the possibility of potential collapse as the excavation crews continue their work. For now, they are proceeding cautiously, if at all.”
Lourds grabbed a pen and paper from the nearby desk. Standing in front of the television, he started writing furiously.
“What is it?” Natasha asked.
“That writing on the door,” Lourds said hoarsely, “is in the same language and character set that I’m deciphering on those instruments.”
You really shouldn’t be doing this, Leslie Crane admitted to herself as she swiped the keycard through Lourds’s hotel room door. But she’d known she was probably going to do it the minute she kept the extra keycard for Lourds’s room that she’d gotten from the desk.
She’d tried staying mad at him for not stopping Natasha from burning her phone, but that hadn’t worked. In the end, Lourds was the story she’d sold to the production studio, and she had to have the story. Lourds was going to hand her a professional triumph.
More than that, she wanted the man himself for personal reasons. She’d slept just enough on the way back that she hadn’t been able to drift off to sleep. There was nothing like sex to take the edge off her emotions when she was feeling like she was.
She stepped into the room and found all the lights on. She’d expected the professor to be at the desk or in bed. She’d figured that he would spot her the minute she came through the door. They were all a little jumpy after their adventures the past few days. Having him see her walk in would have taken some of the surprise out of the equation of a meeting, but she didn’t think it would lessen any of the desire they felt for each other. She and Lourds were good in bed together. She was confident he felt the same way.
Only he wasn’t there.
Irritation filled Leslie when she thought Lourds might be prowling around the hotel after Natasha had given them all such stern warnings about keeping a low profile. Was the man out risking his neck and her story?
She started clearing off the bed. When he got back from wherever it was he’d gone, he could find her there and they could have makeup sex. It was nearly always the best kind. She didn’t think Lourds had been overly distraught about the rancorous feelings she’d harbored toward him just lately, but that didn’t dampen her enthusiasm.
Then she spotted the yellow legal tablet covered with Lourds’s neat handwriting on the desk. One word jumped out at her.
Atlantis.
Mesmerized, Leslie picked up the tablet and flipped through the pages. Atlantis was mentioned several times, as if Lourds kept coming back again and again to the same answer.
Island kingdom. Drowned Land. Defiance of God. One language. Atlantis.
Her sexual cravings forgotten, Leslie grabbed the tablet, took it to her room, and shot pictures of the pages with her digital camera. Her heart thudded frantically in her chest as she worked. She expected Lourds to return at any instant.
But he didn’t.
When she finished, she took the tablet back to his room. Her thoughts raced in circles within her mind. This was even bigger than she’d imagined it was. What she had was pure gold. If she could link Lourds’s name to the Atlantis dig site, somehow tie the bell they’d found on her show to it, the ratings for this program would go through the roof.
Not only that, but she might be able to sell another series. Maybe even for big bucks. If the Atlantis dig back in Spain turned out to be anything important, and it was getting more interesting with the discovery of the mysterious door, she could own a piece of that with the artifact
s they were tracking.
Her excitement grew. So did her desire for sex. She settled onto the bed and waited. Impatiently.
After another hour, Lourds finally talked himself dry. The excitement still bubbled within him, though, and the idea of the massive door Father Sebastian had discovered wouldn’t let him go.
He couldn’t believe Natasha was still awake.
“So what are we to do?” she asked.
“Diop and Adebayo have called the other Seekers,” Lourds said as he sat on the edge of the desk across the room. “We’re going to meet in London.”
“They’re bringing the instruments?”
“Yes.”
“They’re showing a lot of trust in us.”
“No.” Lourds shook his head. “Wrong dynamic. They’re showing a lot of desperation. Gallardo and his employer have two of the instruments. If he’s able to decipher them, and there’s no reason that he won’t be able to—”
Natasha flashed him a teasing smile. “You’re admitting that someone else might be as linguistically gifted as you are?”
“Whoever it is,” Lourds pointed out, “has known more about what we’re chasing than we have.”
“Do you think he knows about Atlantis?”
Lourds didn’t hesitate. Now that she’d asked the question, everything seemed clear to him. “Probably.”
Natasha’s brows furrowed. “Have you given any thought to the Church’s position in this?”
“The Church? The Catholic Church?” Lourds shook his head. “Why would they—?”
“Be funding and directing a dig site at a place that might be Atlantis?” Natasha interrupted. “I asked myself the same question. What possible interest could the Roman Catholic Church have there?”
Lourds considered that because connecting the two events—Atlantis and the Church excavation with the instruments—had truly never occurred to him. However, in light of the potential links to Atlantis—and knowing that the Church had a wealth of documentation at their beck and call—how could the Church not know?
The Atlantis Code Page 34