The Atlantis Codex Page 18

  Ethan moved again to the laptop.

  ‘Do we have any idea of what the images we took in the chamber up there mean?’

  The laptop showed an image taken using Lopez’s phone of the wall of the chamber, and the shadows cast across it. Ethan knew that Hellerman had on occasion used software that was capable of matching topology to landscape images but he wouldn’t know where to begin to find such software, let alone use it.

  ‘Jo would have used a computer program or something to figure out where we need to go,’ he said as he looked up at Garrett. ‘You got any idea what that might be?’

  Garrett shook his head was about to answer, but the reply came instead from behind them.

  ‘You need a program called PlaNet.’

  Ethan turned and saw Amber Ryan walk onto the yacht’s deck, a laptop of her own under her arm. Despite the gloom that had settled over the team since Hellerman’s death, Amber’s smile and infectious enthusiasm for their cause was a welcome ray of sunshine. Lopez hurried out from the yacht and embraced Amber, barely out of her teens and the daughter of the late Stanley Meyer, a man who had created a free energy device known as a Fusion Cage. He had intended to give the device away to humanity for free, an act of selflessness that cost him his life at the hands of Majestic Twelve.

  ‘Amber, what are you doing here?’ Jarvis asked as he hugged her. ‘You should be laying low back home.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Amber replied. ‘Laying low just got Natalie Warner taken into custody and Ethan’s parents too. I figured I wasn’t going to wait for someone to come pick me up, so I hightailed it out here.’

  Ethan saw her set her laptop on the table. Amber saw Hellerman’s computer there and looked around. ‘Where is Jo?’

  Nobody spoke, and when Amber looked at Ethan he just offered her a slight shake of his head. Amber turned to Jarvis, the old man speaking softly.

  ‘The Russians got to him,’ he said. ‘The war has started, Amber. You should know that they didn’t hesitate to kill Hellerman.’

  Amber stood in silence for a few long moments as she digested the information. Ethan could see that she was struggling to adjust to the reality that one of their team had been executed by their enemy. Amber closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then opened them again and lifted her chin a little.

  ‘Then let’s make sure that he didn’t die for nothing,’ she said. ‘You need a landscape identified?

  Ethan moved to her side as she opened her laptop and he showed her the image from the chamber at Gunung Padang.

  ‘It’s this one. The shadows presumably describe hills and valleys.’

  Amber nodded as she worked.

  ‘PlaNet is a deep–learning program developed by Google that was trained to recognize locations by looking at over ninety million geotagged images from around the world. Most people can do that too if there are recognizable landmarks in an image, like the Statue of Liberty for instance. PlaNet is different though because it can identify areas based on nothing more than topology, the terrain itself.’

  ‘What’s the accuracy?’ Jarvis asked.

  Amber tilted her head this way and that as she fed the shadowy data from the chamber into her computer.

  ‘It depends on the scale that you’re working on,’ she replied. ‘On a country wide scale it’s very accurate, but if you try to narrow it down to street level the accuracy goes down. The image you have here looks like a regional level terrain mask, so this is gonna be a fifty–fifty kind of thing.’

  Ethan watched as the computer began to work and started churning out a few locations, most of them scattered across the globe in various mountainous regions.

  ‘There’s not enough data to make a match right away,’ Amber said. ‘We don’t know what scale the hills and valleys were, so the computer can’t differentiate between mountain profiles and those of hills.’

  Ethan looked at the shadowy image once again.

  ‘None of the high ground points have defined peaks,’ he noticed. ‘That kind of rules out mountains, right?’

  Amber nodded as she adjusted the program. ‘The peaks are all rounded, so that means that high mountain peaks formed by the collision of tectonic plates is unlikely. Erosion like that typically means older peaks worn down by millienia of wind and rain.’

  The hundreds of locations tagged on the map on the laptop screen were abruptly halved. Lopez moved closer to Ethan’s side as she looked at the screen.

  ‘What about scale?’ she asked. ‘That sarcophagus that bore the engravings that cast the shadow might have held the key to how large the hills were.’

  Amber brought up an image of the sarcophagus and looked at it for a moment. Then, she pointed to the edges where Ethan noticed faint lines carved at equal intervals all around the edge.

  ‘Those look like distances that could be Yojana, the ancient Vedic measure of distance,’ Lopez said.

  ‘Raz mentioned the use of Yojana at Dwarka,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘He said that a Yojana was about ten miles or so.’

  ‘That’s about right,’ Amber agreed. ‘Nobody knows the precise measurement but on this scale it should be close enough to narrow the search. If not, we could try the smaller measurement of a Kosh, which is about two miles.’

  Amber input the new scaling information and abruptly every single location on the map vanished as the computer program failed to come up with a match.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ Amber said. She tried again with the Kosh measurements, but came up empty once more. ‘Either nothing quite matches or we’re missing some important piece of data that will complete the picture for the program. Trouble is, without an actual photograph of the area in question we don’t know what we’re really looking for.’

  Ethan stared at the image and shook his head, out of ideas now. He was about to walk away to try to think when he noticed Lopez looking out across the bay toward the forested mountains of Indonesia. She looked as though she were a million miles away, her gaze unfocussed, lost perhaps somewhere on that lonely jungle road where Hellerman’s spirit had left them.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  Lopez didn’t respond for a moment, but then she blinked and turned to Amber.

  ‘Hellerman was a games freak, kept playing with those virtual reality headsets and stuff, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jarvis replied for Amber with a faint smile, ‘usually when he was supposed to be working. But we can’t use virtual reality because we don’t know where to start yet.’

  ‘It’s not the VR I’m interested in,’ Lopez replied. ‘Hellerman designed games, and he used to use something called normal maps.’

  Amber’s eyes lit up as she looked at the image of the sarcophagus. Instantly she began working as Ethan looked at Lopez, mystified.

  ‘That’s the first time ever I’ve heard Hellerman and normal in the same sentence. What’s a normal map?’

  ‘It’s a 3D map built using a light source,’ Lopez said. ‘By using a photograph, you can build a 3D model of terrain or whatever, using the way light hits objects to define high and low points. He explained it all to me once and nearly put me in a coma.’

  Ethan frowned.

  ‘We already know the topography of the site we’re looking for.’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Lopez said as she watched Amber working.

  Amber took the image of the sarcophagus lid with the light shining across it and dropped it into an art program. Moments later, she produced a gray–scaled image that she moved left and right, the light hitting it and revealing every tiny detail of the terrain.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked Lopez.

  ‘Now, make it taller by about ten percent.’

  ‘Say what?’

  Lopez gestured back toward Gunung Padang. ‘Hellerman said that the chamber and site up there could be as much as ten thousand years old. Sea levels were lower at the time because half of the northern hemisphere was covered in glaciers that were miles thick, heavy enough to compress the ground. I read once that when the
glaciers melted it took centuries for the land to bounce back. When this map was engraved, the people who made it would have seen a different skyline to the one that PlaNet program would be familiar with.’

  Ethan stared at Lopez in amazement as Garrett smiled.

  ‘That’s genius. Hellerman would have been proud.’

  Lopez said nothing as Amber tapped in the adjustments and ran the program once again. Within moments a single location flashed on the screen and Ethan knew in his guts that they had found it, for it was on an ancient coastline far from where anybody had ever thought to even consider searching before.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Jarvis uttered. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘It does if you think about it,’ Amber replied. ‘We all know the legend of Atlantis and of how it was swallowed by the waves, but that occurred at least ten thousand years ago.’

  ‘And a lot’s changed since then,’ Lopez said.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ Garrett said, ‘that nobody ever thought of this before.’

  Ethan nodded as he looked at the location on the map.

  It was flashing on an ancient coastline.

  Atlantis was no longer beneath the waves. It was buried beneath the land.

  ***

  XXVII

  Washington DC

  Allison Pierce walked along a path that followed the Mt Vernon Trail alongside the slowly churning waters of the Potomac River, the sky a perfect bright blue and the winter sun rising over the panoramic view of DC to her left. The air was crisp and cold enough to stiffen her cheeks and force her to push her hands deep into the pockets of her coat.

  The nearby rush of traffic on the parkway was the perfect foil to listening devices, she figured, having been told to come here by Mitchell after a brief and cryptic phone call in the small hours. Things had changed. Time was running out. If she did not leave soon, there would be nothing that he could do to help her.

  Allison had no idea what she was doing here. Her job was in tatters and she couldn’t help the feeling that she was somehow being set up, that this whole thing was a ruse by the government and the administration to silence her for once and for all. Without access to a major broadcaster her ability to report the news, real news, was gone and now she was following the orders of a man who was an assassin, if everything else she had heard about him was true. Common sense told her to run to the Detective Cleaves with everything she had heard and witnessed so far, and hope that they could unravel it themselves. Curiosity however still drove her toward the memorial before her, brilliant white in the light of the morning sun.

  Allison stopped in front of the granite hemicircle that honored all of the women who had served in the armed forces of the United States. She had visited the memorial twice before in her life, both times as a child with her mother, who had proudly served as a cartographer for the United States Army. Allison smiled to herself as she recalled the visits, her mother regaling her with tales of military life while they watched the changing light inside the memorial cast the shadows of quotes into a hall filled with relics of women’s military service. Then they would ascend the staircase to the terrace and look out over the Potomac at DC and her mother would tell her of the great things done there, that one man ruled over the whole country and fought for the right of Americans to live in peace wherever they may be around the world.

  Allison felt some of her old resolve return. Long gone now were the days when the country’s leadership could be said to have the wishes and needs of the American people at heart. It was the corruption and polarization of politics and the rise of corporate influence in Congress and the Senate that had fuelled Allison’s mission to defend the honor of men and women like her mother, who had served their country only to see it become the soapbox for businessmen who cared more for their profits than the people who elevated them to office.

  ‘Do you agree with my choice of location?’

  Allison turned in surprise. She had been so lost in her memories that she had not heard the approach of the woman who now stood so close to her. She was in her forties, Allison guessed, but it was tough to tell for sure. Her skin had a luminous vibrance to it, barely a crease or wrinkle to be seen and her long mousy hair looked as perfect as that of a teenager.

  ‘Lillian Cruz,’ she introduced herself with a handshake and a faint New Mexico hint to her tones. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘I’m not sure why I’m here,’ Allison replied.

  ‘I am,’ Lillian said as she looked at Allison appraisingly. ‘You will have met Aaron Mitchell by now.’

  Lillian gestured to a nearby bench and they walked toward it and sat down with their backs to the traffic and the urban sprawl of DC before them on the far side of the Potomac.

  ‘Aaron Mitchell is a patriot and is helping us with our work.’

  ‘Our work? Who are you?’

  ‘I have a story to tell you, and while some of it will seem familiar, much of it will blow your mind. These things are not the kind of stories you can broadcast on the television and expect to keep your job.’

  ‘We’re already past that,’ Allison said.

  ‘Your time will come.’

  ‘Quit the jabbing and get me to the right hook, ‘cause right now if this story of yours doesn’t convince me I’m not getting on any flight out of here.’

  Lillian smiled at Allison’s tone and spoke softly, as though even here somebody might be listening.

  ‘Over seventy years ago, in the aftermath of the Second World War, a small commitee of a dozen powerful industrialists and military figures was formed by President Harry Truman. Their purpose was the investigation of a series of impactor sites and sightings of inexplicable aerial phenomena that had become increasingly common and prevalent during the course of the war, culminating in a crash and recovery operation in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.’

  ‘The supposed UFO crash?’ Allison asked.

  Lillian nodded. ‘The committee was named Majestic Twelve, and the only reason it ever existed is because of a leaked document that has since been denounced as a hoax by the FBI and the CIA, despite the fact that the document was dated as having been created in the 1950s, and contained names that no civilian would have known about at the time. Majestic Twelve was formed under intense security at a time when paranoia over Russia was at its height. It wouldn’t have been possible to just stumble across something like that, nor to accurately forge it many decades later.’

  ‘Everybody has heard of MJ–12 to one degree or another,’ Allison replied, ‘what’s the story behind the story?’

  ‘After major investigations into the CIA’s secret programs in the 1970s, the CIA destroyed the vast majority of its documents pertaining to anything that could have exposed its agents or directors to any kind of legal action. During this purge, everything else containing information about Majestic Twelve was also destroyed. This left the cabal still in existence but without any paper trail or other evidence that they ever existed, and that’s where it all went wrong.’

  ‘They went off the range?’

  ‘They went off their heads,’ Lillian said. ‘Free of any kind of oversight but still closely connected to the military industrial complex and the administration of the time, MJ–12 ceased to be an investigative operation and became one of the most dangerous and brutal cabals the world has ever not known. In their pursuit of power they murdered, pillaged and oppressed without fear of opposition for almost forty years, until another small and covert unit was created to investigate anomalous phenomena, just as MJ–12 had been so many years before. This unit was a part of the Defense Intelligence Agency and was codenamed ARIES. It was led by Douglas Jarvis.’

  ‘Jarvis,’ Allison said. ‘That’s the man who I’m supposed to meet in Indonesia.’

  ‘The same,’ Lillian confirmed. ‘For several years, the ARIES team worked on some of the most bizarre cases the intelligence community has ever seen, picking t
hem up when local law enforcement couldn’t solve mysterious events or when other intelligence agencies rejected reports as fantasy or unworkable. The ARIES team investigated alien remains in Israel and Peru, poltergeists, free energy devices, orbital satellites of unknown origin, even small groups of Civil War survivors alive in New Mexico, their bodies immune to the effects of ageing.’

  Allison’s eyes widened as she listened and then she realized that Lillian Cruz was watching her, as though waiting for something. Allison peered at her for a long moment, and then she noticed again her flawless skin and hair, the twang of her accent and…

  ‘No,’ she gasped, then chuckled and shook her head. ‘I’m not buying that.’

  ‘I know,’ Lillian replied, ‘that’s why all of this is between you, me and the river. Nobody would believe any of this and yet it all happened. Majestic Twelve pursued me for years before I was able to secure my freedom, as the last survivor of the Battle of Glorieta Pass in 1862.’

  Lillian handed Allison a small, clear plastic bag, inside which was a vial of what looked like blood and a yellowing photograph of several soldiers leaning against an old cart. Among them was a woman, and Allison took only a moment to recognize the woman in the image as Lillian Cruz.

  ‘The photograph of course could be faked,’ Lillian said, ‘but my blood cannot. You would require Non Disclosure Agreements from any laboratory you send the blood to but they should then tell you what you need to know. I was born in Montrose, Colorado, in 1824. My blood contains a bacteria ingested when I, my husband and his fellow soldiers hid in a cave near Misery Hole, New Mexico in 1862. The bacteria is called bacillus permians and is found in salt crystals in underground caves, where it has been revived after over two hundred million years in laboratories in Los Alamos. You can Google the damned things if you want.’

  Allison stared at the vial and then at Lillian and suddenly she realized that this was no deception, that this was something real that she could have tested, find confirmation of the story that she was being told.