The Atlantis Codex (Warner & Lopez Book 7) Read online

  ‘I called your office and was told that you were dropped yesterday,’ Cleaver informed her. ‘Why would you be working on a story?’

  ‘Freelance,’ Allison replied. ‘I was already working the story before my boss and I had a little falling out.’

  Cleaver nodded, a cursory gesture that suggested he didn’t believe her. Allison began to feel a twinge of discomfort, as though this man were viewing her as a suspect of some kind.

  ‘The victim, the kid who was shot at the scene, you knew him?’

  ‘No, and he didn’t tell me his name.’

  ‘Then how did you know where to find him, or make contact with him?’

  ‘I was working on a tip–off from another source.’

  ‘And who was the other source?’

  Allison hesitated. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  Cleaver raised an eyebrow, as though he had identified the first flaw in her story. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I just got shot at,’ Allison uttered as though it were obvious. ‘Anything that happens to me could potentially work its way back to others in the chain.’

  ‘You think that this shooting and the attack on you is part of some larger conspiracy?’

  Allison’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not sure yet.’

  Cleaver nodded in understanding, as though he were patronizing her in some way.

  ‘So, these gunmen you mention,’ he went on, ‘they shoot your informant as he’s leaving the area and then they come after you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why would they do that? They presumably don’t know who you are and the shooting of the kid seems like nothing more than a gang dispute. Why would they take the time to hunt you down as well?’

  Allison shrugged. ‘Like I said, I don’t know yet, but they must have been watching us to know that I was there at all. It was a dark night and the kid I interviewed knew how to keep himself out of sight. Maybe they had him followed or something? They might have thought I was a member of another gang.’

  Again, the nodding and now a furrowed brow as Cleaver looked at his notes again.

  ‘And you’re sure you didn’t see the drivers of this other vehicle that you claimed chased you before the crash?’

  Allison sat up in the bed. ‘Claimed? What the hell do you mean claimed?’

  Cleaver lowered his notepad and spoke calmly.

  ‘We have no witness reports of a second vehicle, Miss Pierce, and no evidence other than the bullet holes in your vehicle that you were attacked, and that’s where my problems start.’

  Allison felt a volatile mixture of anger and fear rising up within her.

  ‘What do you mean, problems? I just got run off the road by armed gunmen and you’re questioning me as though I’m the suspect?’

  Cleaver regarded her in silence for a moment before he replied.

  ‘The gunshots directed at your vehicle are consistent with those fired from a small automatic weapon, and that weapon was the one we found in the possession of the victim shot, the one you said you met with.’

  Allison stared at the detective in shock. ‘They must have placed the weapon in his hands before the police arrived at the scene.’

  Cleaver smiled.

  ‘And the gun used to kill the kid was found in the back of your vehicle.’

  Allison felt as though she had stopped breathing. For a moment she could not see the detective, instead focussed on an image in her mind’s eye of being trapped in her upturned vehicle as the shadowy form of her attacker loomed before her. Could he have tossed the murder weapon into her car before he fled?

  ‘The driver, he was out of the car before the police arrived,’ she said softly, not looking at Cleaver. ‘He could have tossed the gun into my car.’

  ‘You didn’t mention that to the officers in your original statement.’

  ‘I’d just been in a damned accident! So sorry for not being on the ball!’

  Cleaver nodded, still staring at her for long periods of time as though assessing her. Allison willed herself to hold his gaze and not show any sign that she had anything to hide, which she didn’t, but despite her innocence she began to feel as though she really was guilty of something.

  ‘And you say that you’d never met the victim before?’

  ‘Never,’ Allison confirmed.

  ‘And yet you used a cell phone that we also have connected to the victim’s movements in the hours before he died.’

  Allison bolted upright in the bed as she suddenly remembered the cell phone.

  ‘The phone, I need it!’ she snapped. ‘That was the whole point of the meeting! The victim gave it to me as evidence. Is it safe?’

  Cleaver appeared surprised. ‘It’s been taken as evidence and will be analysed by our people.’

  ‘I need the images from that cell,’ Allison said. ‘You can do what you like with the phone, but those images are the linchpin for my entire investigation!’

  ‘The cell phone is evidence in a homicide investigation and cannot be released at this time,’ Cleaver told her with ingratiating slowness, as though he was enjoying the process.

  ‘I don’t need the phone,’ Allison repeated slowly, as though addressing a small child. ‘I just need the images from it.’

  Cleaver watched her again for a long time before he replied.

  ‘Any evidence on that cell is part of the homicide investigation and cannot be compromised in any way. As the cell isn’t by your own admission yours, I doubt that it can be released to you at any point.’

  ‘It was given to me!’ Allison repeated.

  ‘So you say.’

  Allison bit her lip as she tried to control her anger. She had been shot at and risked her life to get hold of the damned phone and now it was being kept from her by a detective who didn’t have the faintest clue what was going on here and…

  Allison looked at Cleaver and made a snap decision.

  ‘The victim was part of a gang who were hired by Russians, operating in the Maryland area to smuggle computers and equipment into the country and safe haven. It’s my belief that those Russians and computers were here for the purpose of conducting cyber–warfare against the United States and may have been used to corrupt the presidential election.’

  Cleaver sat still and watched her as though waiting for something more.

  ‘The kid’s cell had images he took of the gang leaders and the Russians meeting with senior administration officials,’ she said finally. ‘The connection would be hard to dispute and would probably lead to convictions of high ranking politicians and a scandal that would make Watergate look like a joke.’

  Cleaver stared at her for a moment longer before he replied.

  ‘Your former boss said that you were fired mainly for focussing too much time and resources on conspiracy theories and not enough on daily news stories.’

  ‘Daisy is a celebrity–obsessed idiot and is talking out of her as…’

  ‘As likely as that may be, I cannot and will not place a conspiracy theory above a homicide investigation.’

  ‘The pictures are on the cell,’ Allison almost wailed, ‘go take a look if you don’t believe me!’

  ‘I don’t doubt that there will be pictures on the cell, but that’s all there will be. Pictures in isolation don’t qualify as evidence these days, Miss Pierce, and any official would likely brush them off as a spontaneous community outreach meeting.’

  Allison refused to meet the detective’s eye, unable to argue with his logic. ‘They’re still enough to ensure media interest in what happened, maybe enough to uncover a money trail that will lead back to the bigger fish in Russia who organized it all.’

  Cleaver smiled tightly as he stood up and tucked his notebook back into his pocket.

  ‘I’ll be back when I’ve got confirmation from ballistics over which gun fired what and where. You’re not under arrest Miss Pierce, but I would recommend not leaving the country any time soon, is that clear?’

  Allison shot Cleaver a dirty
look, and the detective turned and walked away from her at a sedate pace and with his hands in his pockets. The desire to call him back and tell him about Mitchell and Jarvis and the DIA was almost overwhelming but she held her tongue and instead cursed silently to herself. Now she was jobless, hospitalized, had lost all of the evidence she had gathered and was a suspect in a homicide investigation, and all of it was down to Aaron Mitchell.

  ***

  XXI

  Gunung Padang,

  Indonesia

  The heat of the sun was intense as Ethan walked along a dusty track that ascended the side of a hill amid vast tracts of rain forest. Despite the early hour his shirt was already drenched in sweat as he labored along with Lopez alongside him and Hellerman just behind them, his mind focussed on events far away over which he had no control and no influence, except, bizzarely, for what he did out here.

  ‘Tell me what we know,’ he asked Hellerman as they walked.

  ‘They’re still missing,’ Hellerman replied. ‘That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily in danger.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Two days,’ Hellerman informed him. ‘Your sister Natalie was picked up from her office by individuals that the witness, somebody working for Jarvis, suspected of being government agents. Your parents were picked up the following day; there were no witnesses but local security cameras detected them being guided into an SUV running government plates.’

  ‘You got any idea what department?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘No, the plates matched in color and design but the image resolution wasn’t sufficient for us to make a positive identification of the agency responsible for the arrests, if that’s what they were.’

  Ethan knew that with the closure of the ARIES program the new administration had been denied the opportunity to pick up from where their predecessors had left off. That meant that they would have to use any means necessary to come up to speed in the chase for the remarkable artifacts that they sought and that Doug Jarvis had been able to liberate from the DIA before his spectacular disappearing act.

  The new administration had no need to start questioning Ethan’s sister unless they had somehow made a connection between them when it came to matters of national security. Natalie had once become embroiled in a conspiracy at the Government Accountability Office where she had then worked in DC, when a Majestic Twelve assassin had infiltrated the office in order to tamper with and destroy evidence that could expose members of the cabal to prosecution for their crimes. But Ethan’s parents had never had any direct involvement in the work Ethan had done for the government. To arrest or otherwise detain them was something that occurred in other countries, in fascist states, not the United States.

  ‘It’s a witch hunt,’ Lopez said, having learned recently that her own family had been detained in Mexico. ‘They’re not being held for any other reason than to flush us out and make us look to be enemies of the state, fugitives.’

  Ethan nodded. ‘The administration is willing to lie to the people on a daily basis, even when they’re on the record as doing so. Who knows what they’re willing to do behind the scenes when nobody’s watching?’

  Lopez spoke softly.

  ‘Not racing back to DC was the right thing to do,’ she said. ‘We’d have walked right into their arms and they’d have been able to connect us to Lucy Morgan, to Jarvis and Garrett. It would have brought the whole thing down before we’re finished, and all of it because of emotional blackmail.’

  Ethan nodded but said nothing. That a country such as his own could experience such a political collapse in such an incredibly short time stunned him as much as it had stunned millions, perhaps billions of others around the world. There was nothing that they could do about it except forge ahead and hope that they could find Atlantis before either the Russians or the administration’s people could get there and remove the only bargaining chip that they had.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right spot?’ Lopez asked Hellerman, who was following them with a map under his arm and an enthusiastic grin on his face.

  ‘Without a doubt,’ he replied. ‘And it makes everything we’ve been taught about the origins of civilization plain wrong. Those aren’t my words, but those of a senior PhD geologist at the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences who has been working this site for some years. It’s just up here.’

  Hellerman pointed up a narrow track amid the trees that led to a hill top overlooking the surrounding valleys that had been cleared of trees. As Ethan and Lopez emerged onto the hill top so they realized that it was covered in blocks of stone that formed a series of terraces, unmistakeably formed by human hands.

  ‘The formations are blocks of columnar basalt,’ Hellerman explained, ‘arranged to form the terraces. The site was first discovered over a hundred years ago and was called by the local people the “Mountain of light”. It’s believed to have had a purpose of being some kind of retreat or place of meditation as there is no evidence of crop cultivation on the terraces. The terraces have been reliably dated to around four thousand years old.’

  Ethan looked at the terraces, which although arranged in unmistakeable geometric patterns were otherwise unremarkable. But the site beyond in the distance interested him.

  ‘Is that a volcano?’ he asked Hellerman.

  ‘It is,’ came the reply, ‘Mount Gede is a local point of worship and may be the reference to the light that is associated with this site.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Lopez said. ‘Four thousand years old isn’t enough to be of any significance, right? Why would a much older temple point to a site that didn’t exist when that temple was built?’

  Hellerman grinned and pointed back the way they had come.

  ‘Because the hill we just climbed was not natural,’ he said. ‘You’re standing on top of the world’s oldest known step–pyramid, older than those in South America, older even than those in Egypt. When the team of scientists dug down deeper and began carbon–dating artifacts from below the surface, they found material as old as twenty thousand years, man–made megalithic structures that pre–date even the most rudimentary civilizations known to man today.’

  Ethan looked down over the edge of the hilltop in the direction of an area that was mostly devoid of trees, and to his surprise he could see that the hill was somewhat angular in shape and was surrounded by rings of terraces and what looked like a sort of grand staircase that led up from the very bottom of the hill, similar in appearance to those he had seen at ancient Aztec sites

  ‘Just like Teotihuacan,’ Lopez said, recognizing the same basic structure now concealed beneath the soil and foliage of millenia.

  ‘Precisely,’ Hellerman agreed, ‘and we know that the Aztecs didn’t build the great temples in South America but inherited them from much older civilizations. A place like this confirms that an ancient people were building near–identical structures on opposite sides of the planet and that they knew about the location of the other sites, thousands of years before man was supposed to have been capable of travelling by sea.’

  ‘Lucy must have found her sundial somewhere around here,’ Lopez said. ‘I’m guessing it must have been deep down, right? To be old enough to be relevant.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘If Lucy was able to extract some kind of artefact from this site then she must have somehow done so alone and then covered her tracks. There have been reports of ground penetrating radar detecting buried chambers deep inside the hill but nobody has ever been down there.’

  ‘And nor could Lucy dig herself down,’ Lopez said. ‘So she must have found some other way in.’

  Hellerman nodded and looked around them, but Ethan could tell that they didn’t have a clue where to begin. Ethan thought back to the star maps that they had seen in the temple at Dwarka.

  ‘Didn’t the Egyptian pyramids have shafts that looked up directly at certain stars?’ he asked Hellerman.

  ‘Yeah, they looked up at major bright stars like Siriu
s and others. Why?’

  Ethan felt the heat of the Indonesian sun on his skin and the dense moisture in the air around them. ‘The interior of a major structure like this would need ventilation of some kind,’ he said. ‘Shafts would achieve that, allowing air to move.’

  Lopez smiled. ‘If Lucy found a shaft entrance…’

  Hellerman reacted at once and pulled out the star map from the Dwarka temple, then orientated it to the position that the stars would have been over Indonesia at a time roughly ten thousand years ago.

  Without a word Hellerman led them across the hillside, his face buried in the map until he reached a small group of rocks arranged in a neat square on one side of the hill. Ethan looked about for any observers before he lifted a boot and nudged one of the rocks. It leaned easily under his weight and he could see the exposed earth at its base, not densely packed like the rest of the site but loose as though recently disturbed.

  ‘There must be a capstone under the soil,’ Hellerman whispered, even though they were alone on the hillside at this early hour. ‘Lucy must have covered it back up before she left the site.’

  Ethan and Lopez positioned themselves inside the square of rocks and Ethan could see right away where a shovel or spade had been used to carve a neat square of soil and grass right out of the ground. He crouched down opposite Lopez, forcing his fingers down into the soil and beneath the loosened square of earth, and with a heave of effort he and Lopez hoisted the chunk of earth up. The dense grass roots held the earth mostly together in one chunk as they set it down alongside the stones and looked back to see a square of shaped black rock sitting within the stones. Maybe two feet across, the edge was chipped and scraped where Lucy had worked it free.

  ‘She used her spade to wedge it up and get it open,’ Ethan said as he crouched down alongside it. ‘This would be far too heavy for her to have lifted it all alone.’

  Lopez nodded. ‘She was working with somebody else.’

  Ethan grabbed the edge of the slab, Lopez alongside him, and with another heave of effort they lifted the slab to one side as though they were opening a hatch. The slab broke away cleanly and they leaned it against the wall of stones surrounding the opening before them.