by Sean Ellis
An uneasy feeling came over him abruptly, a feeling of being watched. He turned slowly, looking to see if Edwards or any of the crew were nearby, and instead found himself staring at Eric Collier.
He started, despite the forewarning of the premonition. “Jesus, where did you come from?”
Collier frowned a little, perhaps irked by the mild blasphemy, but did not address it. “What is the status of your search?”
Booker gestured toward the sea. “We’re almost where we need to be. Finding it once we get there may not be so easy.”
Collier didn’t look away. “It is imperative that you find it soon. Support for the conference is beginning to erode. It must happen soon, in the next few days, before our window of opportunity closes.”
Something about the statement rang hollow. “Why can’t you just go ahead with it? You said we have to restore the Trinity to preserve the psychic dampening field, but that’s got nothing to do with your meeting.”
“There is more at stake than you realize. The Great Work cannot begin until the Trinity is restored.”
The Great Work. Collier had mentioned that to the president, but Booker had no idea what it meant. He shrugged. “I don’t have a lot to go on here. I know approximately where the city was, but pinpointing the exact location is going to be a needle-in-a-haystack kind of search.”
“You are attuned to the Trinity. Open yourself to its power. You will feel it when you get close and it may guide you the rest of the way.” He looked up as if in thought for a moment. “No. The time remaining is too short. I will come to you. Together, we may be able to accelerate the search.”
“Come to me? You’re standing in front of me.”
“I’m not really there. What you see is merely a projection.”
“Wow. That beats the hell out of Skype. So you can’t just beam yourself here?”
“The Trinity allows me to bend time, giving the appearance of instantaneous movement, but it does not eliminate the need for physical movement. To reach you using that method, I would have to walk, and while I am certainly capable of walking on water…,” he smiled and, for a moment, Collier was his old self again. “Six thousand miles is a bit of a hump even for this old SEAL. Begin your search. I will be there as soon as I am able.”
“Six thousand? I thought DC was farther away than that.”
“I’m closer than you think.” Collier smiled cryptically, then blinked out of existence.
47.
New Zealand
Although the rest of the world seemed poised on the brink of nuclear annihilation, it was business as usual for the inhabitants of the Southern Island of New Zealand. To them, the arrival of a group of Chinese tourists—one of them a blind woman—along with a pair of Caucasians, all of them interested in chartering a boat for a penguin watching tour of nearby islands was not cause for alarm. The skipper of the boat raised a bushy eyebrow as Xu’s marines, all in mufti, began lugging enormous Gator Cases and duffel bags full of equipment onto the vessel, but if the entourage aroused his suspicions, he gave no indication. Mira knew that some of the containers held SCUBA gear, but she did not doubt that the Chinese had also brought along weapons.
Atlas believed that she would begin to sense the lost city as they got closer to it, even as she had sensed the tomb of Atl’an, or more precisely, the Trinity fragment that had been buried with the founder of Atlantis. The memory of that search—the beginning of this long, strange nightmare—was a painful one. Atlas had used Mira’s abilities to put him close to the Trinity, and when it was in his hands, he had turned it against the man who she had fallen in love with. She had avenged her fallen lover, or rather thought she had, but Atlas had returned from the grave, and now here she was, helping him again.
Remember the scorpion, she told herself. He will betray you. It’s his nature.
But Atlas was right about one thing; she could sense that they were on the right track. It was faint, like a sound carried on the wind. Mira sensed it more clearly when she faced southwest. “We should go that way,” she said pointing out to sea.
Xu relayed the message to the boat’s operator who brushed the request off with a dismissive wave. “Trust me,” he said, in his twangy Kiwi brogue. “I know where the birds are.”
Xu promptly drew his pistol and aimed it at the man’s forehead.
“No!” Mira shouted. Her protest stopped him. She knew without any uncertainty that he had been ready to pull the trigger. “If you kill him, I won’t help you.”
If it had been anyone but Xu, her words would probably have made no difference at all. But Xu knew that she meant it. He did not lower the gun, but instead barked an order to the marines in Mandarin. The men converged on the still dumbstruck skipper and hustled him away from his post in the wheelhouse. Another of their number took his place and steered the craft in the direction Mira had indicated.
Xu turned to Mira. “You understand that this is a war. Sometimes, sacrifices are required.”
“I’m trying to stop this war,” she replied. “That’s the only reason I’m helping you.” Not quite the whole truth, but close enough. “But if you’re just going to kill everyone when you don’t need them anymore, then what’s the point? I might as well let the U.S. nuke your sorry country back into the Stone Age.”
Xu returned a mirthless smile, but offered no further argument.
As the day wore on, Mira felt the almost magnetic attraction growing stronger. By evening, as they cruised above the submerged Campbell Plateau, she knew that the sea floor beneath her had once been the hinterlands of Lemuria. In her mind’s eye, she could see the ancients, working the land, gathering the harvest and transporting it to the urban center.
They were close.
She searched her memories of the city. Her recollections of what had happened after the cataclysm were fractured, but she knew that the ancients possessed a technology for burrowing into solid rock and used it to great advantage in making their cities. Agartha, the original city of the triumvirate, had existed in a vast hollow chamber beneath Mount Everest. The other cities had been more a combination of under- and above-ground living spaces, but even in the latter, the ancients had made extensive use of natural features, carving tunnels into mountains. In Lemuria, they had transformed one tall peak into a monumental tower that looked out over city and sea. Mira felt certain that Le’Mu had been laid to rest in the upper reaches of that pinnacle, but she had no distinct memory of what had happened after that. Clearly, Tarrant had been able to reach Le’Mu’s tomb in order to procure the second Trinity fragment—the one that Mira herself had later discovered aboard the wreck of a German U-boat off the coast of Chile. He had found it with hardly any more information than she now possessed, but that had been seventy years ago.
The boat motored on through the night, and despite being exhausted from nonstop travel, Mira remained awake and alert, her senses humming as the goal drew ever closer. She was almost disappointed when Xu informed her that they would have to change course in order to avoid running into a small group of islands that had showed up on the radar screen. The charts identified the landforms—to call them islands was overly generous—as The Snares; so named because early navigators believed they would pose a hazard to ships traveling through the area. The largest of the group, called simply North East Island on the charts, was almost two miles long, but its exposed top had been weathered to a mostly flat hump with sheer sides, jutting about a hundred and fifty feet above the water. The Snares were inhabited by penguins and puffins, but no humans had ever called the islands home for any significant length of time.
She could feel the tug of the Lemurian matrix from which a new Trinity segment might be forged, the psychic attraction moving as the boat veered north around the epicenter, just like a compass needle reorienting around a large mass of iron. The implication was clear, and yet it was only when she looked at the chart again that Mira realized that she missed an obvious clue.
The mountain tower of Lemuria an
d The Snares were one and the same.
Time and the elements, and no doubt the cataclysmic battle between Le’Mu and Atlas, had shattered the mountain spire into a ragged memory of its former self, but Mira could tell that somewhere just below the waterline, there was a passage into a part of the tower that remained intact.
“That’s where we need to go,” she told Xu, pointing to a sheltered bay on the south side of North East Island.
Xu looked pleased at her confident declaration, but informed her that The Snares were too dangerous to attempt in the dark. The search would have to be postponed until sunrise.
The nearness of the matrix was like a mosquito buzzing in her ear, making sleep impossible. When dawn finally arrived, she was in the wheelhouse, itching to resume the search and end the torment. As the boat rounded North East Island and entered the bay she had indicated, she could feel every nerve in her body being pulled toward a point directly ahead and down.
“Slow down,” she cautioned. “We’re almost over it.”
The sensation was as strong as it had been in Panama and Shambala. She extended a finger, pointing at an imaginary spot beneath the hull where the objective lay, and as the angle of her arm decreased, the man at the helm throttled back, and the let the boat coast. By the time her arm was pointing straight down, the boat was almost motionless in the bay, enfolded on three sides by the sheer cliffs of North East Island.
Xu turned to one of the marines and barked an order. Mira did not need to speak their language to know that he had given the order to send a diver down to explore the sea floor. “You should let me dive,” she told him. “I’ll have a better chance of finding it than your men.”
He studied her face for some hint of deceit, then gestured for her to follow the marine. “Sergeant Li will accompany you.”
Under the marine’s watchful eye, she suited up and donned her gear. Li would not permit her to carry a knife, which concerned her only a little. She had no intention of attacking her dive partner underwater; if the need to do so arose, there were other ways of overpowering a diver. Even at the relatively shallow depth where they would be searching, the undersea environment was an alien place where the difference between life and death was slight. It was for that very reason that Mira would have liked to have a knife. A blade was useful for a lot of things besides violence, and she liked to be prepared.
They dropped into the frigid water and immediately began descending. Mira followed the psychic beacon down to the ocean floor, but found only a silt covered slope, angling down steeply into depths that were unreachable with the gear they were using. The subconscious summons of the Lemurian matrix followed a straight line, passing as easily through rock as it did through water and air. It offered no guidance whatsoever to finding the entrance to the tower. She did not doubt that there was one. Tarrant had found it, but how he had done so, she could not say. It was entirely possibly that he had spent hours, perhaps even days or weeks, groping in the sediment until he found what he was looking for. Mira didn’t have that kind of time.
She and Li swam a circular search pattern around the spot where she most strongly felt the attraction, but as the air in their bottles drained away and the frigid water stole the warmth from their limbs, she had to admit defeat in the first round.
As she huddled under a blanket on the deck, almost overwhelmed by the close proximity of the goal, she tried to figure out how to apply the age old words of wisdom, ‘work smart, not hard.’
Where had she first heard that admonition? Probably from Aimes himself. He had been adept at seeing the potential in people, sometimes for selfish motives, and sometimes for reasons that were not so immediately clear. He had recognized her own abilities at a very young age and rescued her from the child welfare system, an action which had seemed at the time to be magnanimous. Her only cause for complaint, then at least, was his refusal to adopt her. Now, she was grateful that he had not. What he had done was to make her part of a top secret government program designed to turn people with abilities like hers into spies and assassins. In hindsight, she saw the outrageous immorality of his actions, but for a frightened young girl in foster care, it had seemed like some kind of movie fantasy.
Had Aimes been “working smart” when he’d brought her into his research program? Had he been playing some kind of long game, waiting for her to mature, for her abilities to be fully realized so that she would lead him back to the object of his greatest desire?
There was no way to know. Her psychic attributes did not extend to probing the mind of a dead man.
Her abilities….
She sat up and turned to Xu. “I need to speak with you.”
“Then speak with me,” he replied irritably.
She looked around, noting the wary stares of the marines and the ever-cryptic Atlas. Kiong, the blind woman, was evidently below decks. “We should talk privately. Just you and me. And Kiong, too. I think I know how we’re going to find the entrance.”
48.
Somewhere in the South Pacific
Even though he was technically a sailor, an enlisted seaman in the United States Navy, Booker hated ships. As a SEAL, he was accustomed to rapid deployments, traveling by air to almost any place on the globe in a matter of hours. Ship travel was a slow, tedious process, and even though it was a brisk pace by maritime standards, he could not help but think that the George Washington’s thirty knots was roughly equivalent to the legal speed limit of a residential neighborhood. The feeling was made worse by the sheer size of the vessel. Even though he could look out at the water and see the whitecaps passing by, he had no sense of motion. It felt like they were standing still.
On the flip side of course, the ship was relentless, powering forward night and day, and those thirty nautical miles added up fast over the long haul. He knew that they were nearly there, nearly to the spot where, ten thousand years ago, the people of Lemuria had gazed up into the sky that he remembered so well.
His attention was drawn to an incoming helicopter. The CH-53 Sea Stallion easily caught up to the carrier, reminding him yet again of just how slow his own progress was, and settled onto the flight deck, where the ship’s crew hastened to secure it.
The Sea Stallion had a ferry range of over eight hundred nautical miles but given the remoteness of the carrier’s present location, Booker was sure that the helicopter had refueled in-flight, perhaps several times. He was not at all surprised to see Collier step down onto the flight deck.
The former SEAL commander immediately spotted Booker and strode in his direction as if they were the only two souls aboard.
Booker suddenly felt apprehensive, awed by Collier’s presence in a way that he had never been when the man was simply his superior officer. How do I talk to the emissary of God? He decided to let Collier do most of the talking.
“Booker,” Collier called out when he was still a few steps away. His manner seemed friendly enough. “You’ve made excellent progress.”
Booker nodded. “We should be at the edge of the search area in a few hours. After that….”
He didn’t know what would happen after that. He had tried to follow Collier’s earlier advice about ‘opening himself to the power of the Trinity’ but had no way of knowing if a connection had been made.
“We can’t wait that long. As soon as my helicopter is refueled, we’ll go up and conduct the search from the air. This will help.”
He reached into the small pack he carried slung over one shoulder and produced a silvery metal ring adorned with two crystals, placed on opposite sides of the circle.
The Trinity.
Booker’s breath caught in his throat. He had not seen the talisman since their brief layover in Italy. Just looking at it sent an electric thrill through his body, filling him with confidence. The Trinity wanted what they wanted, and it knew how to get them there. The relic was both map and key; it would guide them to Lemuria and open the door to the ancient city.
That realization triggered an unexpected feel
ing of resentment. Collier could have done this from the start; why hadn’t he? If they had simply used the Trinity like a dowsing rod, they might have accomplished their mission long before the Chinese took note of them. Mira would still be alive, and the war that now seemed inevitable might not even have gotten started.
Collier seemed to know what he was thinking. “My attention was required elsewhere,” he said. “I’ll admit that I did not foresee this international crisis, but in many ways it has worked to our advantage.”
His words sounded cold and inhuman in Booker’s ear. “How can you say that? Mira’s dead. The Chinese are ready to start World War III.”
“This war has always been inevitable,” Collier replied, unruffled. “But with the guidance of the Wise Father, we will be victorious and end the source of the problem forever. However, I was speaking of the threat of war. It has already awakened the faithful. We will need their focused attention when the time comes for the Wise Father to reveal more of the Great Work.”
Despite everything he had witnessed, Booker did not share Collier’s evident enthusiasm for a holy war. He was about to say as much, but before he could find the right words, Collier spoke again. “As for Mira Raiden, she’s very much alive. I’m afraid she’s now working with our enemies.”
Booker promptly forgot about his ambivalence toward the international crisis. “What?”
Collier held out his hand, proffering the Trinity like the fabled brass ring on a merry-go-round. Booker reached for it reflexively, but then hesitated. He recalled what had happened the last time he touched the relic in Libya, but that wasn’t the reason for his hesitation. He was afraid because he knew that as soon as he touched the relic, he would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Collier’s accusation was absolutely true.