Thorgeld answers the police officer’s questions in careful English, accented slightly with a Scandinavian lilt. When the cops leave, she and this cipher of a human being stand facing each other as the crowd around them begins to disperse. He breaks the unease.
“I think you came to see me?” he asks. “I went to the conference room because someone called me there for an interview with a reporter. When I got there I saw you and the shorter woman, Sybil, run for the staircase.” He gulps, the first sign of emotion he betrays. “I suspected the worst and fetched a security man from the lobby. The rest is tragic.”
“You saved my hide, at least. I think that bastard was going to back up and run over me.” She knows she’s exaggerating, but the terror is creating shattered images in her mind. “And Sybil…”
“They’ll find her. With the plates noted and the quickness of our response, they can’t have gotten far.”
“I better call this into their newsroom. The police radio call won’t tell them everything. Especially not about the Logos connection.”
After reaching the news desk and getting Hamilton on the line, she fills him in on the details, then clicks her cell phone closed. She’s at wit’s end about what to do about Sybil. Thorgeld smoothes his hair and suggests she change shoes so they can get out of the hotel and have some coffee. Just what I need. A jolt of caffeine. But Amaryllis hears herself agreeing all the same. She buys some flip-flops at the hotel store and sets off with the man who saved her life.
#
They perch at a tiny table in the Internet café, the Sun Bean, a block away from the hotel. Amaryllis is not sure if she can trust this man, no matter how benign and bookish he appears. He might have saved her, but in light of recent events, his academic appearance makes her jumpy. Their meeting spot couldn’t be safer and is hopping with activity: college students hammer away on their computers, waitresses heft trays of latte and chai, techno music thumps in the background. Thorgeld sits in an erect posture, as if he is afraid to touch anything. He is listening with his head tilted to one side—probably to favor one ear—as Amaryllis explains how she was baited by a phony press invitation to go to the Four Winds conference room.
“A press conference?” Thorgeld says, his eyes enlarging to a sea of blue.
“That’s what they told Sybil, too. Obviously, it was just a ruse. When Sybil and I got there, the whole thing looked so bogus that we took off.”
“I had no press conference,” Thorgeld says abstractedly, putting a hand up to his receding hairline, as if to jog his brain. “All I had was a message at the front desk, telling me to meet a Miss Amy Quigley for a press interview in room 500. That’s the conference room.” He pauses to put the facts together. “Heaven’s sake, I’m not even on a book tour.”
They had walked into a trap, but Amaryllis can’t understand who the Committee is trying to round up, Thorgeld or her. They stare at each other for a few eternal minutes until she breaks the silence.
“There’s this man who’s been following me. Short. Dark complexion. Bristly black hair. Sort of a square build. Maybe about your age. Anyway, Sybil and I saw him guarding the elevator bank and decided to take the slow way downstairs. Big mistake.”
“That would be Ignacio Cruz,” Thorgeld says, leaning forward enough to put his elbows on the edge of the table. “Believe me, you would have had just as much trouble with him.” He pauses, taking a sip of his coffee. “I can’t believe they are still using him.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“It’s a group of researchers, professors, people who do archeological excavations. I used to work with them.”
Amaryllis nods her head. This was old news.
“The Committee. What did you people actually do? And why were you allied with Logos?” She starts pushing away from the table as if contact with this man might put her in further peril. “And how do I know you’re not still with them?”
Thorgeld rubs his balding head and lets out a soft groan. “If only I could rid myself forever of my association with those people,” he says, sounding as if someone has socked him in the abdomen. “The taint is bad, and I guess it will stick to me forever.”
“Look. I read your book, so I know you’re not lying about a change of heart, but I don’t understand the break you made. If I’m to believe you, tell me how you split with the Committee,” Amaryllis says, trying to puncture his story.
He lets out a pained sigh and flops back onto his seatback. “The Committee was a huge mistake. I only was in it because I was brainwashed, just like the rest of them: Pitch, Ricketts, Fayed Hareem, all of them. We were told what to believe at the universities. We followed in lockstep and never questioned anything.
“Perhaps what you don’t understand is that people in the academic world are trained to be skeptics. And they become so indoctrinated with this idea that there is only one true science that they develop a passionate distaste for those who would challenge them. They cast a huge shadow of doubt on anyone who dares to stand up to their conclusions. You simply don’t break with the pack. If you do, you’re a pseudo scientist—or worse, a cultist. Some, like Pitch, are more intense in their fervid disregard for these interlopers. He developed a seething hatred of them.”
Thorgeld begins to weave a long tale of academic intrigue and purported heresy. Amaryllis learns how Thorgeld’s former best friend, Conrad Pitch, invented the Committee. He explains that the group was launched to stamp out fraudulent claims by archeological hucksters. They had been successful for many years, but Thorgeld began to feel uneasy when the Committee started to interfere with bona fide truth seekers. When they were waylaying psychics, UFO devotees, and religious crazies, the situation was tolerable for Thorgeld. But then the Committee got in bed with religious extremists themselves and the irony was too great.
“The methods Logos used against unbelievers were brutal. Kidnapping, torture, even…the worst. Not to mention that when the Committee devotees got in the way of credentialed professors, I knew they were going too far. The whole arrangement was out of control.”
Thorgeld demurred at the group’s tactics and the rest of the Committee—which had grown into an international, secret society—let him know that they expected blind obedience.
“Sometimes, when a group of people believe something so obsessively, it becomes impossible to process conflicting information,” Thorgeld explains. “The Committee knew rational Ph.D.s were publishing papers with verifiable findings, but findings that were completely at odds with their own. It was too much for them to bear. So denial and, ultimately, violence was the only answer.”
The beginning of the end of his active involvement with the Committee came when two archaeologists began snooping in waters between Florida and the Bahamas, dredging up objects that hinted at a drowned civilization.
As the professor rambles on, Amaryllis takes a sudden involuntary breath, but Thorgeld doesn’t hear it. His story is picking up steam.
“I told Pitch that I wasn’t going to stand by and see the Committee ruin the lives to those two young idealists. I guess they reminded me of myself, had I chosen another path for my life. I left the meeting, but not before I heard them talk about using Ignacio Cruz to terminate the investigation.”
“Terminate?” Amaryllis says, with her throat constricting.
“Usually, we’d just debunk theories, but Pitch wanted a more forceful way of stopping them.” His eyes dart around the room. She knows he’s hiding something.
“What happened?” she whispers, and bolts down some chai. “Who were they?” She doesn’t really want to know the answer, but the question pops out of its own accord.
Thorgeld pries at his buttoned-up collar and blanches before her eyes.
“They were Kristoff and Maggie Lang,” he says, rubbing his eyes with frustration. “Two talented archaeologists from Chicago who were in Pitch’s way. I’m pretty sure they were killed because I never saw a journal article by them again.”
There’s a prickle of
adrenaline in her stomach. Blood pounds in the artery near her right ear. She’s afraid to take another breath. She looks into her chai and hears herself mumble.
“My real name is Amaryllis Lang.”
From the crushed look on Thorgeld’s face, he has not realized what a gaffe he has made. He turns even whiter, blond eyebrows perched high on his forehead in an almost comical state of shock.
“My God…if I had known…” His mouth continues to work but no sounds emit.
“Why were they killing people, anyway?” she demands. Her anger bolts to the surface and she doesn’t care if Thorgeld is responsible for her heartache or not. “How did they dare…?” She falters, unable to finish a coherent sentence.
“If the Langs’ work and all the other ‘heretical’ researchers are correct, and if someone really does find an ancient, submerged civilization, that puts all of academia’s theories in peril. And, of course, Logos can’t have anything but the literal truth of Biblical creation.”
He takes another sip of coffee, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his thin neck. He looks as if he’s considering his next words with care.
“You can hardly understand what it means to a man like Pitch to see his entire life’s work blown away by a new idea. By then, the truth doesn’t matter to him. The timeline must be maintained.
“Listen, I know Pitch better than any man, and I can tell you that he doesn’t trade on everyday human emotion. He’s driven. He’s a proud man, proud of his birth, his family, his job, and his scholarship. The last I heard, he was up for an honor respected in all of Britain. A man like him simply cannot believe himself to be wrong. And he won’t let anybody make him look foolish, either.”
“So who is Cruz after now, since I assume he set up the phony press conference?” Amaryllis asks, trying to keep her voice level, trying to keep herself objective, despite the millions of questions that are flying through her mind.
“I’d say the both of us,” Thorgeld answered. “Cruz is an interesting case. He sort of floats in between Logos and Pitch. His sympathies are with the religious side, but he’s Pitch’s man. The professor all but owns Cruz. But what the Committee is after right now, I cannot tell you. I don’t know how they figured out I’d be in Miami. They must have been trailing you and discovered me by coincidence.”
Amaryllis doesn’t think there are any coincidences when it comes to the Committee. She tilts her head as a question forms.
“Why are you in Miami if you’re not doing a book tour?”
“I’m meeting with someone you should know. A young, brilliant linguist named Shoshanna Knox.”
Amaryllis closes her eyes and remembers. Gabriel knew her, too. She speaks our language.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: STATIC
How could he have bungled this assignment so badly? Things have gone wrong before—like that embarrassing incident with the U.S. military—but never has he seen anything like this. Ignacio Cruz holds his head in his hands as he sits in a secluded corner at the Four Winds Hotel lobby. All he did was step out to check the elevators, and his prey disappeared. That persistent reporter and the traitor Thorgeld, both of them were gone from the hotel before he could turn around. He knew they had been in that conference room; he heard two women talking. He wasn’t sure if Thorgeld had made it there yet, but he wanted to take a gander at the elevators, just to be sure. Five o’clock came and went, and nobody showed up at all.
When he finally headed back to the lobby, he saw cops everywhere and went into survival mode. He hid in an unused dining room off of the lobby, peeking through the blinds, and saw the body of a security guard brought up from the garage. Then the reporter and Thorgeld were giving statements to the police.
The plan was so simple.
Then he received a phone call from one of the Logos people and discovered the reporter slipped though their fingers, too. But they still had her friend and they weren’t sure what to do with her.
He pulls at the wiry hair on his head in agony. All he planned to do was to get the reporter and Thorgeld out of the way for about twenty minutes. That was just enough time for him and Hewitt, stationed at the reporter’s hotel, to search their rooms for pictures, artifacts, any evidence they were carrying around with them. He knows that after the dive near the Berry Islands, the Lang brat surfaced with photographs. Any pictures that could corroborate her newspaper story must be suppressed at any cost.
Still, no one is supposed to be kidnapping anyone. The Logos people just jumped in again like the clumsy gorillas they are.
Everything has turned on him, but he has to minimize the damage. First, he calls Hewitt to warn the incompetent fool. Hewitt, as usual, is so slow he has not yet used the duplicate maid’s key to get into the room.
“Abort, abort,” he tells Hewitt. He has no idea if the Lang girl is already on her way back to her room. God forbid she should run into Hewitt on the way. She’ll remember him from the Bahamas.
Cruz closes his fists in fury as he considers the prospect of following this reporter around for a few more days. And where is that Mexican man who protected her so well at the dance club? Probably, he has no green card. The Miami airport is tough, he thinks as he puts his hand to the jacket pocket holding his fake U.S. passport. Without the right connections, it’s difficult to travel on a whim.
Then rage seizes him again as he relives the botched press conference scam. He thought he set up the room convincingly. He even invited the Lang girl’s reporter pal from the Herald. He had an unnerving feeling Lang would check the invitation. Giving one to her friend seemed an obvious safety net. So what had he overlooked? Logos.
He thinks again of the friend, tied up in the Logos van. The last thing we need is another death. He calls the van’s driver.
“Praise God,” the man says instead of hello. Cruz never can get used to their bizarre way of talking. His neck bristles with irritation.
“Listen, Cruz here. Get rid of the girl. No killing, nothing like that. Just get her out of the van. And then take off, somewhere remote. She can i.d. you and every cop in the city is looking for you idiots.”
“There is no love in your heart, brother Cruz,” the driver says.
“And there’s no brain in your head. What was all that about the guard? He’s dead, did you know that? How am I supposed to explain this to the boss?”
“Our boss knows it was for the greater good.”
Cruz rolls his eyes. They have no idea what it’s like to have the wrath of Pitch come down on them.
“Just cut the girl loose and scramble. Fast.” Cruz disconnects and winces. The worst task of all is explaining this gaffe to Pitch. In Hewitt’s case, that would be par for the course. But Cruz if mismanages things like this... Someone has to own up to the mess. And that person is me. With a wince, he opens his cell phone again and stares at it as if it were vermin. Sighing, he begins to dial the international code for the United Kingdom.
#
At the end of the financial committee meeting, the Rev. Caine is applauding, pleased at the fine job his fundraising team has done over the last quarter. All his holdings are showing profits and now this extra income will help influence others to think the right way about God.
“Praise Jesus,” he says, popping a cigar in his mouth and then applauding. A servant hurries over to light the cigar. No one bothers to point out the “no smoking” sign in the meeting room. “A ten percent raise for all of you. You’ve done Logos proud.”
The chief financial officer beams. The whole room is aglow when Caine’s cell phone starts bleating. He excuses himself to step into the hallway.
“Praise…” he says.
“God, yes, we have big trouble down here.” Caine is amazed that this mere minion has the nerve to cut him off in mid-salutation. But something buzzes inside his brain at the sound of the word “trouble.” Caine is not used to that.
“What kind?”
“We tried to ambush the reporter like you said. We got her and her friend into the van. Bu
t then a security guard pulled a gun, and I fired. The reporter got away. I just heard the guard passed on. “
Homicide. This would be a black stain indeed on Logos’ fine name. Not that it hadn’t happened before, but then, no one ever found out. God often had tests for men like Caine, but he figured he’d made it through the worst of them. This time, things would work out just as well. The angels were on his side.
“Get to the swamp country and disappear for a while.”
“Well, that’s what we are aiming to do, but we still have the reporter’s friend….”
“And she can identify you,” Caine finishes the lug’s thought. “Are you well out of town?”
“Yup, nothing but trees and bugs and marsh land around here. “
“Leave her out by the road. Maybe a hungry ‘gator will find her a tasty snack.”
“But what about us?”
“What about you? You better pray, son, because no one asked you to do any killing. I’d find myself a private spot, get on my knees and pray until Sunday.”
“But…what if the cops…”
Caine hangs up the phone. Nope. No one’s going to ruin the reputation of his fine baby. No one. This murder will stay far away from his world.
#
In the middle of teaching his hieroglyphics class, Pitch’s favorite after-hours task at the museum, he sees an assistant motioning to him. He wants Pitch to come into the hall. The professor puts down his chalk and tells the class to wait a second. It’s another crisis, the shaking messenger boy tells him. However, he doesn’t know what sort of emergency it is. He knows only that Pitch must take a telephone call at once.
Pitch strides back into class and claps his hands like a monarch ending a royal visit with the common folk.
“That will be it for the day. We’ve nearly spent our class time, anyway. I’m sure you’ll have more than enough translation work to get you through to Friday.”
Dateline: Atlantis Page 20