Dateline: Atlantis (10 page)

“Were the assailants English?” Wright says, frowning.

Garret shakes his head. “As American as mom and apple… “ He gives up on the metaphor. Amaryllis smiles. Wright would never get it. “They were big American guys. The Brit was much smaller, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt. Sort of like a professor.”

Amaryllis and Wright lock eyes at that statement. Garret keeps talking.

“I was too wiped out to try to sort out what was happening so I just lay motionless and listened as these guys discussed my pix of Mexico—the ones that were destined for
National Geographic
—and how they'd be sent to Heathrow eventually.“

Heathrow.
Amaryllis sits stunned, trying to make the connections between her poor, injured friend, Mexico, ruins, Chicago—and now, London.

“Eventually, the guy next to me saw that I was awake and listening, so he filled a syringe with some liquid and jabbed me in the arm. Within minutes, the view became hazy, but I remembered being pulled aboard a small jet, up some stairs that rolled to the side door of the aircraft.”

As Garret unwinds his ugly tale, Amaryllis finds herself drifting in a mental fog, imagining a flight over cornfields and lonely train tracks in a private jet with a British-American crew. Thugs? They don't sound thuggish. But then normal people don't go brandishing Uzis. These people could afford a private jet, but Garret said the rough guys looked like they had come straight off a farm, rough calluses, sunburned faces and all. Garret insists that if they hadn't kept pricking him with the sedative, he might have had a chance to punch someone out during his abduction, but Amaryllis just smiles. Big Garret, the former linebacker, had his manhood threatened. But you can't punch out an assault rifle.

The story ended in a storage closet in little-used building at the University of Chicago.

“A janitor heard me moaning, unlocked the door, and untied my hands. I was so out of it, I couldn't tell what was going on. I only know that the security guy called 911. First, the Chicago police showed up and then the FBI took over. End of story.”

Garret flopped back onto his pillow, worn out from this re-telling.

“And so now you're here, and the pictures are gone,” Wright mutters, staring out the window at the lush view of the blue lake, gleaming azure under the bright winter sun. “If they stole the photos that they wanted, why bring you to Chicago, of all places?”

Amaryllis straightens wanting to defend her hometown from any imagined insults. But Wright isn't criticizing, just ruminating. She chews on the end of her pen and offers an idea.

“U. of C. is home to some of best Egyptologists in the world.”

“So?”

The agent, who'd been hovering near the doorway, slips in and folds his arms. FBI.

“These ancient historians hang together,” she offers to Wright
.
“Maya, Egypt, Babylonia. All are separate disciplines, but all are based on the sacred timeline of our culture's approved
history. Garret's pictures—and my stories—challenge all that. We found a civilization that would have been above water before the Ice Age. They wouldn't want that story to get out.”

She pauses to think.

“And maybe they were trying to lure me here…” Her voice trails off. To Amaryllis' puzzlement, the spook nods. She realizes she's on to something.

The orb has been glowing in Amaryllis' dreams for nearly a week now, although she has never dared peer into it since the day the pyramids flooded in Mexico. She had let Garret hold it once, before they hid it for a short time in his camera bags during the airplane voyage. He was white with exhaustion when he relinquished the ball. He never mentioned it again.

She has kept it all this time, always on her person, in coat jackets or in her briefcase. On the road, it goes in her purse—and never causes a blip from the airport x-ray machines. The curious bit of crystal, flawless and clear, only five inches in diameter, is the most precious thing she owns, yet she can barely make her rational mind acknowledge its existence. Its power weighs on her.

Despite what it signifies—crazy notions of Atlantis—she dreams of touching it again. No, not touching, plugging into it, tapping in, communicating. Sitting on the hotel bed, the urge grips her again and makes her stomach squeeze. In an instant, she's thinking of Gabriel.

Have they rifled his belongings, too? Is he safe? She hasn't even e-mailed him since she returned to the United States, and the man nearly drowned. Guilt floods her face, spreading a tinge of shame like prickly heat. Without thinking, she pounces on her purse, pulls out the orb, and unwraps the silk surrounding it. Freed from its captivity, it sends out the subtlest of electrical pulses, as if calling for her. She balances the ball between each palm. A soft humming begins in the back of her mind, like the steady pulse of the harmonic strings on a sitar. Low, waving, and monotonous, they lull her into a state of deep tranquility. A sigh escapes her lips. Her vision narrows until she is peering through
the everyday world. She's looking through a veil. The hotel room about her dims, and reality becomes what the crystal chooses. Magic is happening.

In her mind, she sees a boat slicing through the green waves with proud authority. It's not one of the tall ships of another age. This is a modern-day cutter, a steel-gray vessel with no ornamentation at all. In the dull light from an overcast sky, Amaryllis sees numbers on the side of the boat. They spell out marine call letters—nothing more than gibberish to her:

On the deck are two men and an astonishing, tall, vibrant woman. All are dressed in slickers, drenched by the cold salt spray. The face of the woman is luminous, onyx, intense; her hands fidget with the binoculars she presses repeatedly to her dark eyes. When she hands them to her comrades, she smiles with ease.

“Canary Islands, dead ahead,” she says to no one in particular.

She reads our language. Go to her.

Amaryllis nearly drops the jewel in confusion. This was not like the encounter in Mexico. Where are the caves, the flooded islands, the radiant past? Then the gem told her the entire story of an ancient race. This is a modern image. Disappointed, she tries to wrap the orb again, put it away, and forget the fantastic images she remembers. Another spark calls her back to attention. The crystal doesn't give up so quietly. She hears the orb call her back and she touches it again. Now, she sees Gabriel surmounting a large stone cliff, staring out into the turquoise Caribbean. She nearly gasps as she recognizes the wounds of his brush with death—his deeply scratched nose, the arm bandaged and held in a sling. He gazes toward the east.

As her thoughts shift, so do the visions from the orb. She doubts that Atlantis ever existed and the orb answers her. Headlines pass before her inner eye—the sightings of strange shapes underwater near Cuba, images of submarine triangles located by satellite. Then her mind leaves her body entirely. She floats now on a craft with solar sails in the ink of space, in an airless orbit over Earth, sharpening, ever keening her focus on a tiny square of data. Refocusing, disks spinning. The vision resolves itself into a photo of a perfect pyramid amid three similar structures, visible deep in the Caribbean Sea, just off the Bahamas.

Florida.
In the distance, Gabriel looks as if he has heard someone call him.
Florida.

She almost lets the orb drop to the chenille coverlet and stares at the pulsing object as if it might explode in her presence.
Florida, where my parents died. What madness would make me want to see Florida again?

But the magic is too strong for her to break and she fogs again, seeing the image of two hands appear before her, joined in love.

The hands become arms, the arms connect to bodies, and she sees a man and woman swimming in Scuba gear, circling an odd sub-oceanic structure. The man traces the outlines of a door, but the woman grabs his arm, holding him back. In the woman's face, she sees raw anxiety, eyes pulsing with images of entrapment and certain death.

It has become too much. Amaryllis wrenches herself from the images and hurls the crystal onto the carpet. Breathing hard, she jumps off the mattress, and comes back with a hotel hand towel, and wraps the orb inside of it, and puts it in the hotel room safe. For now, she isn't touching that witches' scrying globe again.

#

During the days it takes to get Garret discharged from the St. Joseph Hospital for his detox from a drug called Versed, Amaryllis is free to roam the city. The FBI believes that if they can find the source of Versed, a common hospital sedative that is not a street drug, they will be close to finding the kidnappers. Wright spends most of his time on the phone with his Los Angeles co-workers and waves her away whenever she tries to take him anywhere. So she hunts up old friends at the
Trib
and the
Chicago Sun-Times.
This is a luscious break from the heavy duties of hospital visits and FBI conversations.

They squeeze in a lunch that's hilarious and the conversation witty, with flowing beer and mock tragic sob stories of axe-wielding copy editors. Amaryllis' spirits are bolstered by such entertaining company. All of her friends want to know the details of her Mexican story and her photographer's strange abduction, but she's parsimonious with the facts. She has a good reason to be, for every time she leaves a lunch or get-together, she's aware of a car tailing her taxi. At first, it seems imaginary, but now she's sure someone's watching her. She changes routes frequently and stays in touch with Wright often via cell phone.

The day before Garret is to be discharged, she arranges a lunch with friends at her favorite sushi restaurant, Katsu, which now is twice its old size and—thanks to television publicity—jammed full of customers. The owner's wife recognizes her and produces four miraculously vacated places at the sushi bar. After the reporters and editors stuff themselves with soft-shell crab and salmon-skin hand rolls, Amaryllis begins to sense something that pulls her from her moorings. All this closeness with her friends stirs up a desire to go home. She's dying to make contact again with her family just down the street. It happens so quickly and with so much force that she nearly loses her breath from the sudden punch of emotion.

Outdoors, when the handshaking is over and calls of “See ya, Amy,” retreat into the distance, she jumps into the Toyota she rented for the day and puts the car in drive. She's heading west to her family home. She arrives before she can mentally find balance, so she sits there, shivering in the car that never had a chance to heat up, staring at the home she once loved and wants to adore again. It's brown brick, just like every other building in the neighborhood, with an enormous front porch that once held hopscotch games and lemonade sales, and firefly-counting contests.

Everyone always says that when you return to the home of your youth, it looks tiny. But to Amaryllis, this house has taken on the proportions of a fortress. So many memories. So much time lost in reconnecting with her past.

She slips through the busy traffic, checking behind her to see if the tail has found her. Satisfied that she's alone, she climbs each neatly shoveled porch step, clambers over the wooden (green now—once they were red) floorboards and stands at the door. She closes her eyes and pushes the bell. She takes a breath so large that her lungs hurt. At first, she thinks her moment of connection is fruitless, for there's no answer. Her stomach flutters, as she figures whether to leave a note in the mailbox. But then a voice coos inside. Amaryllis rings again.

“Who's there?” the voice repeats. Amaryllis realizes an unseen eye is peering through the peephole, trying to figure out if this visitor is a political huckster or an Avon lady.

“It's Amy!” she hears herself shout.

The door flies open, warm air rushes toward her fear-taut face, and Freya stands in front of her, all soft, round and comforting. Her hug is like falling into a big, warm down quilt.

“Amy Quigley, my Lord help me. Get yourself in here. Why didn't you call?” Freya grabs her visitor by the frosty woolen sleeve and yanks her into the toasty living room.
City of extremes.
Amaryllis smiles. She never liked the blandness of Los Angeles.
She can handle the weather here. If anything, it makes things more interesting.

“Oh my, oh my,” Freya says, alternately hugging Amaryllis and then standing back to stare. “After six years, you're suddenly standing right here in front of me! When did you get into town?”

#

Freya fusses like a woman with a royal visitor, peeling off Amaryllis' coat and puffing up cushions on the couch. She creates a cozy place to sit, plops Amaryllis there, then goes to the kitchen (twenty steps away—Amaryllis counted them when she was twelve) to fetch coffee and cookies.

“I got here this week. A business thing,” Amy calls. “Don't go to any trouble on my account.” But Freya is back with all sorts of edible delights. She smiles like a woman who's been given her youth back again.

“Gol-lee, Freya, Salerno butter cookies,” Amaryllis laughs as the goodies plunk down on the walnut coffee table. “How homey can you get?” She pulls in the smell of old paint and antique wood, chopped onions in the kitchen, and Freya's lilac perfume. The old home is as cluttered as ever, with Freya's collection of needlepoint creations crowding the walls, and odd curios from distant lands filling shelves. On the bookshelves, they are placed in front of the hundreds of volumes of books throughout the rooms. She guesses the volumes are double-shelved, knowing the family's reading habits. No one was ever without a book in hand in this home.