Atlantis Stolen (Sam Reilly Book 3) (20 page)

“All right. Then
it’s decided. I’ll sacrifice myself.”

Billie stared at
Edward’s face. He appeared certain and confident about his decision.

“What do you
mean? No, you can’t do that!”

“Of course I can.
I’m the natural choice.”

“What do you
mean? We’re both entitled to the choice of living.”

“Are we really?”
The crest of his eyebrow raised up in a sign that she’d learned meant that he
was right and he was about to explain why to her. “The way I see it, if we
don’t solve this soon, we’re both going to die, and that’s for certain. But
already, we know that’s not going to happen. One of us can survive this challenge.
The question is who that’s going to be.”

“We should draw
straws or something! Christ, you can’t just accept you have to sacrifice your
life!”

“But the
challenge is called sacrifice. And here it is.” Edward took a step out on to
the precipice and then onto the free standing stone which stood like a totem
pole in the valley. “I’m old Billie. If I live another five years that would be
more than I or any other man my age would have any right to.  But you – you
could live another sixty or seventy years!”

“But…”

He didn’t let her
protest. “The decision’s been made now. You have to save yourself. Don’t look
so mortified. I’m not simply doing it for you. We both know there’s a lot more
at stake here than our lives. You need to get through this so you can deactivate
the code to Atlantis. You’re the only one who’s been there in living history.
Only you can save the rest of them!”

“But it will kill
you!”

“Yes, but you
will live. And that is all that matters.” He spoke the words calmly, and Billie
realized that they were the truth – she was the only one who could reach
Atlantis in time and change the outcome. But all the same, she found it
difficult to accept.

“There must be
another way?”

“Maybe there is.
But we don’t have time to find it. We have less than an hour before this temple
floods once more, and then Mark and everyone else are going to find themselves
having a really bad day.”

She thought about
it silently and then hugged him. “Thank you, Edward. If I do succeed, the
entire world is going to know that it was because of your bravery and act of
sacrifice.”

He hugged her
back, and she felt the warm tears on the back of her neck.

“Go,” he told her,
and turned to make his way to the SACRIFICE step.

“Good bye,
Edward.”

Moments later she
watched him, eager to do so before he had time to change his mind, simply step
onto the final stone. She turned to see the last six stepping stones raise
until they met the height of the levelled ground on the other side of the
chasm.

Billie began
running across them.

A split second
later she heard the axe drop.

By the time she’d
heard the third swing Billie was on the other side of the chasm. She
immediately turned around, and looked back at Edward, who was standing there
with tears of joy over his formidable smile.

“You survived!”
she said.

The axe
continued, like a pendulum.

“Another
illusion.” The white of his teeth smiled back at her. “Wasn’t that lucky!”

“Wait there while
I find the reset lever.”

Edward looked at
the swinging axe. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Minutes later,
after she’d reset the challenge so that the two of them could walk across
without repeating it, Edward was across the chasm and holding her tight.

“I can’t believe
you just did that. Edward, you literally just gave your life for me!” she said.

A wry smile came
across his face. “I might have guessed that it was merely a test… I’m very glad
I made the right choice!”

“How did you
know?”

“How did I know
what, Dr. Swan?”

“That the
sacrifice was only in thought, not in practice?”

“What makes you
say I did?”

She stared at
him. Her brown eyes fixed on him, forcing him to be honest.

“I realized the
pygmies must maintain this place. That being so, it would make sense that they
needed to be able to complete the challenges themselves. It simply didn’t make
sense that they would sacrifice one member of their maintenance crew every time
they needed to reach the temple of Poseidon.”

Billie walked
into the final temple. A broad smile played across her face.

This room
displayed none of the watermarks seen in the previous rooms, meaning that it had
remained dry throughout the ages.

The room was said
to be one stadia in length and half one wide. But what the Atlanteans called a
stadia appeared much smaller in real life. In fact, it appeared no larger than
a movie theatre. The interior was less grand than expected despite
fundamentally matching the description that Plato gave in his Critias Dialogue.
The roof was made of intermittent ivory as described in the two and a half
thousand-year-old story, and the walls had silver, gold and orichalcum
scattered. Poseidon himself stood as a statue standing on top of the chariot
drawn by a six winged horse. Unlike the descriptions she had read, the God of
the Sea had gold armor, but it certainly was not made of gold. Poseidon’s height
fell short of the ceiling by no more than a couple feet. Above his head, the
ivory had turned brown.

“There’s a
fortune worth of precious stones covering this temple, but nothing like we were
led to believe,” Billie said. Her tone was almost disappointed.

Edward nearly
read her mind. “But it seems an anticlimax of the vivid description by Plato.”

“Precisely.”

“I wouldn’t fuss.
What we are after is worth a lot more than ten times this amount of gold.”

Billie smiled as
she began to climb the back of the six winged golden horse. “Don’t remind me.
We’re here to save the world.”

Edward began
reciting the navigational guide they found in the Tibetan Atlantis. “For the
six winged beast that pulled Poseidon’s chariot stared at something more valuable
and dangerous still than the entire temple – the prefix to the code to
Atlantis.”

She scaled the gargantuan
beast without a thought of the thirty feet in which it rose above the ground.

And then swore.

The kind of curse
that echoed throughout the temple until it sunk heavily in Edward’s heart, and
he knew in an instant that all was lost.

“What is it?”

She quickly slid
down the back of the horse.

“Someone’s beaten
us to it.”

“How can you be
so sure?”

“Because the
entire piece of orichalcum in which it was supposed to be contained is
completely missing. A blank hole in the ceiling is the only evidence that it
once existed at all. Looks recent, too.”

“How can you be
so sure?”

“There are drill
marks in the ceiling. They look like someone’s used a power drill to quickly
remove the orichalcum placard without any care for stealing the rest of the
temple’s treasures. And that means to me that whoever did so knew the value of
the code to Atlantis.”

“It also means that
pygmy leader lied to us. Someone’s previously entered the temple and come out
alive.”

Edward watched as
Dr. Swan sat down in front of him. Despite her outwardly hard-ass appearance,
he could tell she wanted to cry. The inner workings of her mind, unfamiliar
with failure, continued to search for the next solution.

“If you don’t
mind, Dr. Swan, I would like to find a way out of here. If we’ve failed, I for
one would like to spend my remaining days on earth somewhere other than this
godforsaken temple.”

“I agree, but I’m
not convinced that this is the end. I refuse to believe we can’t find another
solution.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,
but anything’s better than the alternative. Sam Reilly uses a computer whiz who
can work miracles. Perhaps now that we have half of the code, she can break the
first half of it. It’s unlikely, but I’ve never been very good at rolling over
and dying.”

“Okay, so you’ll
take your chances on the cryptanalysis, and computer geeks. What will you do
with your remaining days?”

“I’m going back
to Atlantis. If I can contact Sam and Tom, I’ll bring them too, and we’ll
revisit the temple. See if there’s anything I missed.”

Edward smiled at
her, like he would his own daughter, if only he looked at his own daughter like
that. She had betrayed him. Of that, he was certain, but he didn’t know why –
after all he’d done for her. He looked around the temple. “Now that we’ve
reached this point, do you have any idea how the hell we are going to get out
of here again?”

Billie reached
for a lever behind Poseidon and pulled. “That’s simple. We reset the three
challenges, like this.”

The door opened
behind them, as well as a number of doors behind that, so that they could
simply walk out through the same entrance they came in.

“Okay, let’s go,”
Edward said.

They climbed
through the tunnel, across the stepping stones, past the swinging pendulum,
which should have killed Edward, had it not been for his sacrifice. Then across
the deep chasm, where the bridge remained after they worked out the right
number of stones to move. And then through the tunnel with the cantilevered
roof. Following the entrance tunnel, the dim light of the outside world became
visible once more.

Billie stepped
into the dismal sunlight of the pygmy’s jungle.

Mark picked her
up in a joyous hug and said, “You did it Dr. Swan! By God, I thought for
certain I was waiting for my death, and then the door popped open again.” He
then noticed her more despondent appearance. “What’s wrong? Did you get it?”

“Someone beat us
to it,” Billie mumbled under her breath.

“It was all for
nothing.” For the first time, Billie heard Edward complain.

In the background
the hundreds of pygmy warriors began to chant. Their weapons pounded the ground
with a dire staccato. It could have been a warrior dance after victory, but as
she studied them, Billie knew they were more sinister than that.

Mark looked at
them, and said, “I guess we won’t have to worry about the end of the world, or
stopping the cataclysmic event at Atlantis.”

“Why not?”

“Because, I think
these pygmies are going to finish us now.”

Through the
forest of warrior pygmies came their leader, Zanzibe. He was smiling like a
fiendish demon. It was impossible to tell whether or not this meant he was
happy or angry. He approached with a knife in his hand. It was made of orichalcum
and adorned with precious and semiprecious stones. Billie noticed that despite
its ornamental appearance, the weapon still had a razor sharp edge.

Was that the
weapon designed to kill his Gods?

It wouldn’t have
surprised Billie in the least if these violent pygmies actually slaughtered
their own creators. They may have worshiped the ancient people of Atlantis for
eleven thousand years, but they were slaves to no one.

She didn’t bother
to look for somewhere to run. They had passed the point of escape. Surrounded
by hundreds of pygmy warriors, and deep in the jungle, their time had ended.
Watching as the leader approached her, she noticed a heightened sensation in
everything she did. Every precious breath of air she drew into her lungs, every
smell, the constant drum of her own heartbeat in her chest, all made her feel
alive.

“Zanzibe,” Billie
said his name as he approached.

“Dr. Swan.” He
grinned revealing a mouth full of white teeth, sharpened like fine spikes. “You
are the first white people to have ever beaten the three challenges.”

“That’s great,
but it was all for nothing.”

“Why so sad? You
have what you came for. You reached the inner sanctum of the temple. Have you
not?”

“Yes, but it has
been looted and stripped until all written markings were entirely removed.
There is nothing of any intellectual value for us there.”

“Yes. Before I
became king some white men came with guns. They forced their way into the
temple, and stripped it of everything.”

“The Nazis
reached it!” Billie said.

“That’s the first
I’ve heard about them getting this far,” Edward said.

“All this time,
and Hitler’s little vermin still have the ability to kill millions of lives.”

The little pygmy bowed
his head. “I’m sorry that you have traveled so far only to discover that what
you searched for had been stolen years ago. Can I ask precisely what you seek?”

“How much do you
know about the people who built this shrine?”

“You mean our
Gods?”

“Yes.”

“They came from a
land across the sea and were the most powerful of all, until the heavens became
jealous and struck them from above with a million individual fires, until their
land sank once more into the sea.”

“That’s about as
much as we know about your Gods,” Billie confirmed. “In their first home, a
machine survived the disaster, which has the power to create much good or death
in the world. Legend has it that there is a code to activate the machine. It
was so valuable, that the code was broken into two and then a shrine in two
separate parts of the world stored one half each. We have already found one of
the halves in mountains far away from here. The other half, we were hoping to
find here.”

“Yes, I know
about the code to Atlantis. People, before you have come in search of it. I
wish I could help you. Maybe if I had something similar to see, then I could
help. Perhaps I’ve seen it before.”

She looked at
him, doubtful, and then handed her tablet over with the image of the second
half of the code to Atlantis. The pygmy took it, and Billie asked, “Ever seen
anything like this?”

The pygmy
grinned. “As a matter of fact, Dr. Swan, I have.”

“Really, where?”

“Until recently,
it was in the temple, just here.”

Her heart sank.

So it was
destroyed then, and with it, all hope.

“There is nothing
more we can do.”

“That’s not
true.”

“Why? What else
do you have in mind?”

“Because, my
people built this temple thousands of years ago, as a tribute to the real Gods.
They adorned the walls with gold – the closest metal to that which the God’s
covered their own temple, which glowed red.”

“Your people
built this temple?” Billie asked, in surprise.

The pygmy nodded
his head.

“It’s not the
original temple of Poseidon? It was a replica?” Edward said.

“Yes,” the pygmy
replied.

Billie looked
around. “But where’s the original?”

“The original was
found by my great ancestors thousands upon thousands of years ago. But I’m
afraid that when the Congo River swelled, our God’s shrine was flooded. For
years, our men would swim into it and study it, so that we could recreate it
exactly in their image. As the millennia went by, the mighty Congo grew, and
soon only the strongest of swimmers could reach it. Now, it would be impossible
to swim to such a depth.”

He grinned again.
“But on your boat, Dr. Swan, I’m sure you would have the means to reach it!”