The Atlantis Plague: A Thriller (The Origin Mystery, Book 2)

by A. G. Riddle

  Why are they fleeing here? What's here that could save them?

  A shudder ran through the helicopter, throwing David into the back seat.

  “They've got anti-aircraft missiles!”

  “Take us out!” David shouted.

  He grabbed Kate and held her. She was almost listless, her eyes absent.

  Kate opened her eyes. Another shockwave hit her, but this was a different one—not a tidal wave. She was back in the helicopter, with David. He looked down at her.

  What was happening to her? She felt different now. The things she had learned, the memories, they had changed her in some indescribable way. Humanity was… an experiment. Was he part of it?

  “What?” he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “Are you okay?” he demanded.

  She closed her eyes and shook her head, not wanting to confront reality.

  David strapped Kate into the helicopter’s bench seat and held her as it banked and swerved, the bombs exploding around them. Malta was guarded, as it had been in the past, quite heavily.

  They were accepting refugees by boat, but no one could reach it by air.

  He picked up the satellite phone. “Dial Continuity,” he said to Kate. “Tell them we’re in an Immari helicopter, but we are friendlies. Instruct Malta to stop firing on us. We need to land.”

  He watched as Kate opened her eyes, eyed him briefly, then fought to dial the numbers. A second later, she began conversing quickly with Paul Brenner.

  Paul Brenner hung up the phone. Kate and her team were in Malta.

  “Get me the director of the Valletta Orchid District,” he said to his assistant.

  Dorian watched the explosions in the distance. Valletta was firing on any incoming aircraft.

  He activated his helmet’s mic.

  “Find us a refugee boat.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do it. We can’t access the island by air.”

  Ten minutes later, they were hovering above a fishing trawler.

  Dorian watched the rope lines descend. His men fell to the boat’s deck and raised their weapons. The ship’s crew and passengers retreated back into the boat’s cabin.

  Dorian landed on the deck and glided to the huddling group of people.

  “No harm will come to you. We just need a lift to Malta.”

  David felt the helicopter touch down on the pad. He brushed Kate’s hair out of her face. “Can you walk?”

  He thought she was so warm, not burning up, but… too warm. What’s happening to her? I can’t lose her. Not after all this.

  She nodded, and he helped her out of the helicopter, then wrapped his arm around her and ushered her away from the platform.

  An enemy was behind them: Chang, Janus, or Shaw. David didn’t know which. But he knew Kamau was behind him as well and that he would watch David’s back. Kate was his concern now.

  “Dr. Warner!” A man wearing designer glasses and a slept-in suit greeted them. “Dr. Brenner has informed us about your research. We are here to help—”

  “Take us to the hospital,” David said. He didn’t know what else to say. Kate needed help.

  David couldn’t believe his eyes. The hospital was state of the art, yet dying bodies were everywhere, and no one seemed to be interested in helping them.

  “What’s going on here? Why aren’t you treating these people?” David asked the district director.

  “There is no need. Refugees arrive here sick, and they rise from it in hours.”

  “Without treatment?”

  “Their faith saves them.”

  David looked at Kate. She was getting better. The sweat had stopped pouring off her brow. He took her aside. “Do you believe this?”

  “Of course not. I’m a scientist. It’s… something else. Get me something to write on.”

  David took a legal pad from one of the bedside tables.

  Kate sketched quickly.

  David looked back at the Orchid District director, who seemed to be watching them like a hawk. In a corner of the hospital wing, Janus was setting up Kate’s computer and the sample collector, the thermos-like device he had seen before. Kamau and Shaw stood beside them, eyeing each other as if they were waiting for the bell to ring and a fight to begin.

  Kate handed her rough sketch to the director. “We’re looking for this. It’s a stone box—”

  “I—”

  “I know it’s here. It’s been here for a very long time. A group called the Immaru hid it here thousands of years ago. Take us to it.”

  The director looked away from them, swallowed, then led them away from the people, out of earshot. “I’ve never seen it. I don’t know what it is—”

  “We just need to find it,” David said.

  “Rabat. The rumor is that the Knights of Malta have retreated into the catacombs there.”

  Dorian flowed with the barbarian hordes of people coursing into the Maltese capital. God, they stank. They carried their sick, pushing and shoving, hoping to rush them to safety.

  He held the scratchy blanket around his head, hiding his appearance, trying not to breathe in the putrid odor that assaulted him. Talk about suffering for your cause.

  In the distance, beyond the hospital, he saw an Immari helicopter lift off the ground and move further inland.

  Dorian turned to the Immari special ops soldier beside him. “They’re moving on. Find us a helicopter. We need to get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 83

  Malta

  From the helicopter’s window, David could see the entire small city of Rabat below. It was nothing like he expected.

  Rabat was deserted, utterly abandoned, as if every soul had fled the tiny town with only the clothes on their backs. Of course. When the plague had hit, the people here would have flocked to one of Malta’s two Orchid Districts, either Victoria or Valletta.

  Across from him, he scanned Janus’s and Chang’s faces. Blank. Impassive. Through the split in the helicopter’s seats, he could see Shaw’s and Kamau’s faces reflected in the glass. Blank. Hard. Focused. The six of them would be alone in Rabat, and Martin’s killer would make his move—for Kate, or for the cure, or for whatever his endgame was.

  David glanced out the window again and his mind drifted to history, to safety, to what he knew best.

  Rabat lay on the other side of Mdina, the old capital of Malta, a city historians believed had been settled before 4000 B.C. The city sat at one of the highest points on the largest island of Malta, far from the coast.

  Malta itself had first been settled by a mysterious group that had migrated down from Sicily around 5200 B.C.

  In the twentieth century, archaeologists had found megalithic temples all over the two islands of Malta: eleven in total, seven of which had since been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They were true wonders of the world. Some scientists believed them to be the oldest freestanding structures on the planet. Yet, no one knew who built them or why. They dated back to 3600 B.C., or possibly even earlier. The age of the structures—the history of Malta itself—was an anomaly, a fact that didn’t fit into the current understanding of human history.

  The dark ages of ancient Greece only reached back to 1200 B.C. The first civilizations, first cities, in places like Sumer, only dated back to 4500 B.C. Akkadia had been settled around 2400 B.C., and Babylon, supposedly, 1900 B.C. Even Stonehenge, the closest megalithic monuments, at least in character, was thought to have been created in 2400 B.C.—which was still over a thousand years after some mysterious group had built the towering temples on the isolated island of Malta. There was no explanation for Malta’s megalithic structures; their history, and the history of the people who built them, had been lost to the ages.

  Historians and archaeologists still debated the birthplace of civilization. Many argued that settlements had arisen in the Indus Valley of present-day India or the Yellow River Valley of present-day China, but the overwhelming consensus was that civilization, defined as functioning, p
ermanent human settlements, had been founded around 4,500 years ago somewhere in the Levant or the wider region of the Fertile Crescent—thousands of miles from Malta.

  Yet the remains of those primitive settlements in the Fertile Crescent were sparse and crumbling; a stark contrast to the undeniable, comparatively impressive, and technically advanced stone structures on Malta—which may have predated them. An isolated civilization had thrived here, had erected structures to some higher power, but had somehow vanished without a trace, leaving no history, save for the temples where they had worshiped.

  The first settlers on Malta to leave a historical record were the Greeks, followed by the Phoenicians around 750 B.C. About three hundred years later, the Carthaginians succeeded the Phoenicians on Malta, but their reign was cut short with the arrival in 216 B.C. of the Romans, who conquered the islands in a few short years.

  During the Roman rule of Malta, the governor had built his palace in Mdina. Almost a thousand years later, in 1091, the Normans had conquered Malta and altered the city of Mdina forever. The Nordic invaders had built defensive fortifications and a wide moat, separating Mdina from the nearest town—Rabat.

  Perhaps the most enduring legend of Mdina, however, was that of St. Paul. In the year A.D. 60, the apostle Paul had lived there after having been shipwrecked on Malta. Some transformation had occurred during this time.

  Paul had been on his way to Rome—against his will. The man that would later be declared an apostle was to be tried as a political rebel. Paul’s ship was caught in a violent storm and wrecked on the Maltese coast. All aboard swam safely to land, some two hundred seventy-five people in total.

  Legend has it that the Maltese inhabitants took Paul and the other survivors in. According to St. Luke:

  And later we learned that the island was called Malta.

  And the people who lived there showed us great kindness,

  and they made a fire and called us all to warm ourselves…

  Luke’s testament relates that as the fire was lit, Paul was bitten by a poisonous snake but suffered no ill effects. The islanders took this as a sign that he was a special man.

  According to tradition, the apostle took refuge in a cave in Rabat, opting to live a humble existence underground, refusing the comfortable surroundings offered to him.

  During the winter, Publius, the Roman governor of Malta, invited Paul to his palace. While Paul was there, he cured Publius’s father of a serious illness. Publius is then said to have converted to Christianity and was made the first Bishop of Malta. In fact, Malta had been one of the first Roman colonies to convert to Christianity.

  “Where should we land?” Kamau called over radio, interrupting David’s reverie.

  “In the square,” David said.

  “At the Church of St. Paul?”

  “No. The catacombs are a little farther away. Put us down in the square. I’ll lead the way.”

  He had to focus. Some mysterious group had settled Malta, and the world had fought over this tiny island for thousands of years since. Legends of miraculous healing, evidence of megalithic stone temples that predated civilizations around the world… and now something on Malta was saving refugees from the plague. How did it all fit together?

  He turned to Kate as the helicopter landed.

  “Can you walk?”

  She nodded.

  David thought she seemed… distant. Was she okay? He had the irresistible urge to put his arm around her, but she was already out of the helicopter, and the two scientists were shuffling out of their seats, following her.

  Shaw and Kamau joined them.

  “I assumed the catacombs would be under St. Paul’s Church,” Janus said.

  “No,” David half-shouted over the dying roar of the helicopter behind them. He glanced over at St. Paul’s Church, the stone building that had been built in the seventeenth century atop the cave—now referred to as St. Paul’s Grotto—where the apostle had lived so simply.

  As the group cleared the helicopter’s dying roar, David explained. “The catacombs are just ahead. For sanitary reasons, the Romans wouldn’t allow their citizens to bury their dead inside the city walls of the capital of Mdina. They built an extensive subterranean network of catacombs—burial chambers—here in Rabat, just beyond the city walls.” David wanted to add more—the historian in him could hardly resist. The catacombs in Rabat held the bodies of Christian, Pagan and Jewish bodies, laid side by side, like members of the same denomination, an act of religious tolerance almost unheard of in Roman times, where many officials routinely persecuted religious leaders.

  At the same time that the families of Pagans, Jews, and Christians were laying their loved ones to rest in adjacent subterranean burial chambers in the catacombs of Roman Malta, a man named Saul of Tarsus, a Jew and a Roman citizen, was zealously persecuting the early followers of Jesus. Saul had violently tried to destroy the upstart Christian church in its infancy, but later converted to Christianity on his way to Damascus—after Jesus’s death on the cross. Saul of Tarsus would become known as the apostle Paul, and the catacombs in Rabat had been renamed in his honor.

  David focused on the task at hand.

  They ducked down another alley and he stopped at a stone building. The sign read:

  MUSEUM DEPARTMENT

  S. PAUL’S

  CATACOMBS

  Janus pushed the iron gate open, then the heavy wood door, and the group wandered into the museum’s lobby.

  The large marble-floored room was quiet, eerily still. The walls were adorned with placards, photos, and paintings. Glass cases were filled with stone items, and smaller artifacts David couldn’t make out crowded several corridors off the main room. Yet all eyes focused on David.

  “What now?” Chang asked.

  “We set up camp here,” David said.

  As soon as the words were spoken, Kamau cleared off a table, set down his duffel bag, and began sorting their weapons: handguns, assault rifles, and body armor.

  Janus rushed to Kate and held a hand out for the backpack. “May I?”

  Kate handed him the backpack absently, and Janus began setting up a research station. He powered up the computer and connected it to the thermos-like device that Martin had given Kate to extract DNA samples.

  Janus placed the sat phone on the table. “Should we call Continuity? Report our status?”

  “No,” David said. “We only call when we have something to report. No sense in… revealing our location.”

  He glanced at the phone. One member of the team had been doing just that—revealing their location. He grabbed the phone from the table and handed it to Kate. “Hang on to this.”

  Shaw stood a few feet from Kamau, watching him sort the weapons and armor. David locked eyes with him and they each stared for a moment.

  Shaw broke off first. He strolled nonchalantly to one of the small tables flanking the stairwell that descended into the catacombs. He picked up a folded brochure and began reading it.

  “What now, David?” Shaw asked casually. “We wait for a medieval knight to come wandering out and we ask him if he’s seen an old stone box?”

  Janus spoke up, trying to break the tension. “I want to point out the urgency of our situation—”

  “We’re going in,” David said.

  Kamau took the words as a cue. He attached his own body armor and handed another set to David.

  “It’s a needle in a haystack,” Shaw said. He held up the brochure. “The network is extensive. Only a few of the catacombs are normally open to the public, but this… device could be anywhere down there. We’re talking miles of tunnels.”

  David tried to read Kate’s expression. It was emotionless, almost cold. Was she having another flashback?

  “I feel we should split up,” Janus said. “We can cover more ground.”

  “Wouldn’t that be… dangerous?” Chang said sheepishly.

  “We could go in teams of two: one soldier, one scientist in each one,” Janus said.

/>   David considered the proposal. His other choices were leaving someone behind, here in the museum, where they could close the catacombs or acquire backup. He had no good options.

  “Okay,” David said. “Shaw and Chang, lead the way.” David wanted to put his two suspects together, have them break off first, put distance between them and the rest of the group. “Kamau and Janus next. Kate and I will bring up the rear.”

  “We have no bloody clue what’s down there,” Shaw half-shouted. “I’m not going down there unarmed. You can shoot me if you like, David.”

  David walked to the table, picked up a tactical assault knife and threw it at Shaw, point first. Shaw caught it by the handle. His eyes flashed.

  “You’re armed. You’re going first, or I will shoot you. Try me.”

  Shaw paused for a moment, then turned and led the way down the stairway, followed closely by Chang and then the other four.

  CHAPTER 84

  St. Paul's Catacombs

  Rabat, Malta

  The catacombs were musty and dark. The museum lighting system wasn’t functioning, but the glow of the LED lanterns revealed a scattering of display cases and write-ups where tours would pause and read about the chambers.

  After about ten minutes, the tunnel split.

  “We rendezvous in the lobby in one hour, no matter what. Turn back if you don’t find anything,” David said. “Try to make a map of where you’ve been.”