The Atlantis Codex Read online

  ‘I’m not interested in your crusade.’

  ‘You’re the cause of it.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Jarvis took a breath as he looked down at the images. ‘You’ve been hunting us for some time now, and yet what have you seen happen to the money that we allegedly stole from the government, even though the government doesn’t actually own the money in question?’

  ‘You can sell your line to the courts, right before they send you down to a security max for the rest of your life. I want to know the location of the money, all of it: account details, transfers, everything.’

  Jarvis smiled quietly and watched Foxx for a long moment before he replied.

  ‘That’s their overriding concern, isn’t it,’ he said finally. ‘The money. They’re not interested in justice or the return of Majestic Twelve’s ill–gotten gains to the people they variously robbed, extorted or murdered over the past sixty years. No, all that doesn’t matter to them. They want the money, while it’s untraceable, so that they can keep it untraceable and take it for themselves.’

  Foxx ground his teeth in his skull.

  ‘The details,’ he repeated, and tossed Jarvis a pen and a pad of paper. ‘From the first dollar to the last.’

  Jarvis didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes from Foxx.

  ‘When you were assigned this case, you were working for your country. I can assure you that things have changed and you’re now working for a business whose sole interest is to take advantage of the cripplingly slow judicial and political system in order to make as much money as possible. You are merely an instrument of that new policy, and anybody who cannot see that is merely blinded by their own dogma.’

  Foxx leaned closer to Jarvis, his voice low.

  ‘And your dogma, Jarvis? You really think that I’m going to sit here and believe that it’s in the best interests of the country that you took off with thirty billion dollars of government assets?’

  ‘The money didn’t belong to the government.’

  ‘It sure as hell didn’t belong to you.’

  ‘That much is true,’ Jarvis conceded, ‘which is why I don’t have it. I never have had any of it, and if you had the slightest inkling of how the modern world worked you would understand that nobody has any of it.’

  Foxx squinted at Jarvis. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘The money,’ Jarvis replied. ‘It’s worthless. Billions of dollars, but it’s all digital, it’s all in an Internet ether of transactions and assets, each valued for its potential and not for its physical worth. That’s how cabals like Majestic Twelve stayed under the radar of the IRS and other government bodies: on paper, their only assets were properties and investments that had no taxation that remained outstanding on them. All of their financial accounts were represented by shares, stocks, mineral wealth and so on whose value was dependent on the markets at any one time. There was no physical money and there never has been. The government seized anything physical after we exposed the corruption of Majestic Twelve by leaking what you now know as the Panama Papers. Everything else…’ Jarvis smiled again. ‘It’s just digital money, numbers, and we’ve let them all just spill away back into a monetary system that is as corrupt as the politicians back in DC trying to leverage it for their own profit.’

  Foxx sat for a moment as he tried to digest what Jarvis was saying.

  ‘You’re telling me that it’s all just gone?’

  ‘It’s recoverable,’ Jarvis corrected him, ‘some of it anyway, but most of it was dispersed widely by our IT expert. I happily allowed him to recover what he could and promptly donate it to thousands of charities around the world. Right now, and over the past six months, you would be amazed at how much money has found its way into the hands of people who actually need it, rather than those who would hoard it all for themselves even when they’re already wealthy beyond avarice.’

  Foxx wrote swiftly on a pad, then looked up at Jarvis. ‘This IT expert, where is he now? We’ll need to talk to him.’

  Jarvis leaned forward on the table.

  ‘He’s dead, murdered by the same people who were hunting us.’ Now Foxx’s expression changed and Jarvis went in for the kill. ‘They’re Russians and they’re heavily invested in the current administration. The victim’s name is Joseph Hellerman, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he was a patriot who died to protect the welfare of two of my operatives who even now are out there doing what they can to prevent Russia and America from facing off over billions of dollars that don’t belong to them and that they’ll never be able to find. And now here we are, you interrogating me for crimes committed to try to prevent corruption in our own government, and you abducting the families of American patriots being hunted by their own people.’

  Foxx glanced down at his notes, and Jarvis saw Hellerman’s name written there among a list of others: Ethan Warner, Nicola Lopez, Natalie Warner and more.

  ‘Who says that we’ve abducted anybody?’ Foxx challenged.

  Jarvis allowed himself a small smile of victory as he kept his eyes fixed on the soldier.

  ‘Because we’ve got you on film taking Natalie Warner into custody in DC just a few days ago.’

  Foxx looked up sharply and Jarvis tapped the images before them on the table, not giving Foxx time to think, keeping him off balance. ‘You think that you were tipped off, and found us, don’t you?’

  ‘We received an anonymous tip off from a…’

  ‘Cell phone off the coast of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in South Africa, yesterday. The cell was supplied by you and equipped with a GPS transmitter with a unique signal that pinged off a satellite at half past noon local time, right when I asked Allison Pierce to switch it on.’

  Foxx stared at the old man as he realized what had happened. Jarvis sat back in his seat and smiled.

  ‘I know about Allison and I ordered her to switch the cell on so that you would find us. It had to look like we were captured, not surrendering, and it had to happen out here and not in a city where we could easily be repatriated. Now, you need to listen to me very carefully, because if we get this wrong a lot of people are going to die.’

  ***

  XXXIX

  Donona National Park,

  Andalusia, Spain

  Ethan crouched low in the small boat that he had hired from a local store just a few miles away from the silent Guadalquivir River on which he and Lopez now rowed, their oars slipping through the silky water in silence.

  The sun was not yet up above the horizon, the dawn little more than a faint glow to the east as they made their way up the river. Lucy Morgan guided them from the center of the boat, her gaze affixed to a GPS device into which she had loaded an image of the ground penetrating radar data she had shown them on St Kilda island. Ethan watched the glow from the screen illuminating the look of permanent wonder on her face as they eased their way further inshore toward a destination that had lain unknown beneath the feet of mankind for millennia.

  Ethan looked around them and could admit to himself that this was not the kind of place he would have considered as a possible location for the mythical lost city of Atlantis. The Donona National Park was a wildlife refuge and protected by numerous laws designed to prevent human intrusion into the wetland habitat. The park was filled with marshes, shallow streams and sand dunes and formed Las Marismas, the delta created by the river where it flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. Reasonably flat and with scattered tree cover, the area was a haven for scientific research and ecosystem study and neither Ethan, Lopez or Lucy had any right to be there at all.

  ‘This area did not look like this ten thousand years ago,’ Lucy whispered as the boat advanced silently. ‘It was still filled with the same brackish marshes and sand dunes, but the central feature of the area was a series of concentric rings of bedrock with a single channel out to the coast, as it was then. The radar data is incontrovertable: if this is where the city that we now know as Atlantis stood, then it was bui
lt upon a natural formation and not constructed purposefully as Plato seemed to suggest.’

  Ethan frowned as he looked around them.

  ‘How the hell can an entire city be hidden beneath a handful of dunes and ponds?’

  ‘Because the area holds geological evidence of several high–energy events, including major storms but more importantly tsunamis. Geological evidence from this area reveals that repeated tsuanims reached miles inland, suggesting enormous power that could easily have swamped a coastal city like Atlantis, and with tsunamis come not just water but also debris from the land and immense quantities of silt.’

  Lopez gave a snort from the bow of the boat. ‘So, it’s under the mud.’

  ‘In a sense,’ Lucy agreed, ‘although some areas should remain accessible. The park area here has become an aquifer over many thousands of years, and so if Atlantis is down there it will be effectively under water. However, any structures down there would also likely provide shelter from both water and silt if we can find a way into them.’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘And if we do? What then? It’s not like we can excavate anything here, we wouldn’t last a minute before the Russians or the local police are alerted to our presence and we find ourselves in a jail cell.’

  ‘The joy of discovery is all the justification that we need,’ Lucy said as she glanced over her shoulder at him. ‘It’s out here Ethan and it’s waiting to be found, and I know who lived here.’

  ‘You know them?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘We know this place as the mythical city Atlantis, but this area was the location of an extremely ancient culture and city known as Tartessos.’

  ‘Never heard of ‘em,’ Ethan admitted.

  ‘Not many people have, because they’re so ancient that even today some refer to the Tartessians as a mythical culture, a people that may have never even existed. The city of Tartessos was a semi–mythical harbor city described by the Greek Herodotus as being just beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The culture was said to be rich in metals and mineral wealth, just like Atlantis, and even gold and copper from Celtic lands, according to the fourth century historian Ephorus. They traded with the Phoenicians and there have been tremendous treaures discovered in this area, including the El Carombolom hoard of gold now on display at the Museum of Seville.’

  ‘So the people were real enough,’ Ethan said. ‘How come everyone isn’t aware of them then?’

  ‘Their language and writings have never been classified because although they have been compared to both Celtic and Indo–European scripts they have never been fully deciphered, and they also share commonalities with both Sumerian cypher and Egyptian hieroglyphic scripts which suggest them as the common originator of both. Most archaeologists aren’t willing to cross that line as it suggests a link to an advanced pro–genitor civilization on the Iberian Peninsular, and that sounds too much like Atlantis for anyone to go ahead and stick their neck out and say it.’

  Ethan said nothing as they rowed along the river and began to approach an area of dry land that looked little more than a spit of sand poking out of the water, trees silhouetted against the dawn sky.

  ‘It’s just ahead of us,’ Lucy said excitedly.

  Ethan and Lopez stopped rowing and let the boat’s momentum carry them into the shore. The prow bumped up onto the sand and Lopez leaped out and with their help hauled the boat out of the water and onto the beach.

  ‘Now what?’ Lopez asked.

  Lucy held up one hand to silence them as she turned on the spot, her eyes still fixed to the screen as she orientated herself and then promptly marched off into the woods. Ethan grabbed a backpack they had brought with them and pulled it onto his shoulders before he set off in pursuit of Lucy.

  ‘This place doesn’t look like it could contain a lost city,’ Ethan said again, ‘and for that matter it doesn’t look like anybody ever lived here.’

  ‘The area has been occupied for thousands of years,’ Lucy contradicted him as she walked, never taking her eyes from the GPS screen. ‘Until about seven thousand years ago the area was flooded after the melting of the glaciers when the Ice Age ended, but over the millennia since it has gradually emptied, the silt and sand dunes building up over time. That terrain has supported the Phoenician cultures, the Phocaean Greeks and the Tartessians. Remnants of their presence have been found across the breadth of this area but nobody thought to look deeper underground for evidence of older settlements, which is why this data has remained hidden until now.’

  Lucy kept moving for another few minutes and then she stopped near a clearing that was surrounded by trees and bushes and seemed a little higher than the surrounding marshes. Ethan realized that they had followed what he had assumed was a game trail between the bushes but that had in fact become suddenly dead straight and much wider, the foliage around them concealing the pathway that now seemed so obvious.

  ‘Are you seeing it yet?’ Lucy asked, and he realized that she had been watching him.

  Ethan looked ahead and saw a long mound rising up from left to right before them. Although it was not high, it protruded enough from the surrounding land to be noticeable, and then beyond it he saw another more conical formation of land that rose higher still, like a mound surrounded by a…

  ‘Concentric circle,’ Ethan blurted as his mind suddenly grasped an image of where they were standing.

  Lucy gestured to depressions between the mounds that were filled with sand.

  ‘These are known locally as lucios, and are depressions in the ground where sand and silt has been left behind as waters have receded over hundreds or even thousands of years. The higher ground has been bound together by vegetation, and has something beneath it upon which soil and silt has been able to cling, allowing it to stand against the elements.’

  Ethan stepped forward and realized that the vast clearing upon the edge of which they stood was in fact a depression that was filled with the barely discernible form of a mound surrounded by the broken shape of three concentric circles of raised land, all of it almost perfectly concealed beneath the shifting sand and the foliage.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Lopez said. ‘It’s right under there?’

  ‘It’s right under there,’ Lucy confirmed, ‘and there’s enough of it above the water table that we might be able to get in there and take a look.’

  Lucy set off along the narrow path at a swift pace, driven now as much by conviction as evidence. Ethan followed her over the first of the rings and then across the depressions of sand, Lucy aiming instinctively for the main mound in the center and no doubt already thinking about how to get inside.

  Ethan and Lopez kept pace with her as she approached the central mound and then she slowed and surveyed the surface of what to any observer would have appeared to be a perfectly natural formation. Lucy stared at it for almost a full minute, long enough that Ethan began to wonder whether she was just soaking the moment up, the glory of being on the verge of a discovery like no other.

  ‘This is how Howard Carter must have felt, just before he opened the tomb of the Pharoah Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings,’ she whispered.

  Lopez glanced at Ethan. ‘I’m pretty sure Howard Carter didn’t have the Kremlin pursuing him when he got there, but even then he would have got the hell on with it. Do you know where the entrance is?’

  Lucy gave Lopez a withering look and gestured with her thumb to the south west side of the mound. ‘The entrance would have faced the port and the main route into the city, but that entrance will be buried deep down right now. Any major temples and other structures often had ceremonial purposes and were orientated toward the equinoxes. My guess, based on other cities from antiquity, is that there would be a structure close to the surface and with some kind of cavity that would be used to overlook the city, right about here.’

  Lucy thumped her heel against the edge of the mound. She knelt down and pressed one hand to the sloped ground as though she were trying to sense the presence of something be
low her, and then she switched off the GPS device and began pushing mounds of sand away to the sides.

  Ethan and Lopez moved alongside her and began likewise shifting the sand into piles either side of them. Lucy dug down, the sand becoming damp as she burrowed and revealing dark soil, and then Ethan saw the soil wiped clear of what looked like smooth stone or rock.

  ‘Here,’ Lucy said in delight as she frantically began clearing space beneath them and expanding the exposed surface of the rock.

  In the pale light of dawn Ethan saw more rock appear, and then all at once he saw that the rocks were individual bricks that were perfectly aligned with each other, pushed together so closely that it was not possible to wedge even a piece of paper between them. He began to work harder, yanking bushes out of the soil and hurling them aside as they burrowed down and to the sides in search of an entrance.

  ‘The stonework is like that of the Egyptians, but the cut has more in common with Incan sites,’ Lucy said as she worked. ‘It’s the upper level of some kind of temple.’

  Ethan could see that although each of the stones bore flat edges in the manner of Egyptian temples, the angles were randomized rather than uniform, more like Inca temples such as those he had seen at Macchu Pichu some years before. The stones there had been selected as close fits to the next and then shaped to fit perfectly.

  Lucy scraped at the soil with her bare hands and finally encountered a flat, square panel of smooth cut stone, some two feet square, that was set into raised blocks. Ethan stood back and guessed that the stonework was of sufficient quality here that it might be considered very nearly water tight.

  ‘We need to get in there,’ Lucy said.

  Ethan pulled out a pair of folding metal shovels from his backpack, the handles of which formed wedges perfect for prizing stubborn rocks from compacted soil. Ethan shoved the handles in at two points along one edge of the stone and then he and Lopez pressed their boots down on them as hard as they could.

  The handles bowed under the pressure and then Ethan heard the tell–tale rumble of rock scraping against rock. The stone shifted and Lucy shoved a third shovel into the opening gap to pin the stone open. Ethan moved to one side and then got his fingers underneath the stone as he and Lucy heaved it upward.