Raising Atlantis (5 page)

“Asordidissimi hominess,” she said, not skipping a beat.

“One of the dregs of society.”

The pope nodded sadly. “Is this man the reason why you chose to suppress your gifts, leave the Church, and run off to become Mother Earth?”

“Conrad had nothing to do with my decision to devote my energies to protecting the environment,” she said, sounding more defensive than she intended.

The pope nodded. “But you met him while working with the Aymara tribe in Bolivia, shortly before you left the Church.

What do you know about him?”

She paused. There was so much she could say. But she would stick with the essentials. “He’s a thief and a liar and the greatest, most dangerous archaeologist I’ve ever met.”

“Dangerous?”

“He has no respect for antiquity,” she said. “He believes the information gleaned from a discovery is more important than the discovery itself. Consequently, in his haste to uncover a virgin find he will often destroy the integrity of the site, future generations be damned.”

The pope nodded. “That would explain why the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities has forbidden him from ever setting foot in Luxor again.”

“Actually, the council’s director general lost some money to Conrad in a card game when they were consulting on the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas,” Serena said. “The way I heard it was that he paid Conrad off with a Nineteenth Dynasty statuette and that Conrad’s been trying to unload it on the black market ever since. He needs the money, badly I understand, in order to keep going. It would make a wonderful addition to our collection here if you’re interested.”

The pope frowned to show he did not appreciate her dry sense of humor. “And I take it the story is the same in Bolivia, where Doctor Yeats was barred a year after your encounter with him?”

Serena shrugged. “Let’s just say that he found a certaingeneralissimo ’s daughter to be more interesting than the ruins.”

“Do I detect a note of jealousy?”

Serena laughed. “There will always be another woman for a schemer like Conrad. The treasures of antiquity, on the other hand, belong to all of us.”

“I’m getting a clear picture. Whatever did you see in him, Sister Serghetti, if I may ask?”

“He’s the most honest soul I’ve ever met.”

“You said he was a liar.”

“That’s part of his honesty. What does he have to do with all this?”

“Nothing, really, beyond his effect on you,” the pope said, but Serena felt there was more to it than that.

“But what am I to you, Your Holiness, if you’ll forgive my asking? I’m no longer a Catholic nun or Vatican linguist or any other official appendage of the Church.”

“Be it as a nun or lay specialist we contract with, Serena, you’ll always be part of the Church and the Church will always be part of you. Whether you or I like it or not.

Right now, our chief interest is in how the Aymara came up with their language. It’s so pure that some of your colleagues suspect it didn’t just evolve like other languages but was actually constructed from scratch.”

She nodded. “An intellectual achievement you’d hardly expect from simple farmers.”

“Exactly,” said the pope. “Tell me, Sister Serghetti, where did the Aymara come from?”

“The earliest Aymara myth tells of strange events at Lake Titicaca after the Great Flood,” she explained. “Strangers attempted to build a city on the lake.”

“Tiahuanaco,” said the pope, “with its great Temple of the Sun.”

“Your Holiness is well informed,” Serena said. “The abandoned city is said to have originally been populated by people from ‘Aztlan,’ the lost island paradise of the Aztecs.”

“A lost island paradise. Interesting.”

“A common pre-Flood myth, Your Holiness. Many myths speak of the lost island paradise and have a deluge motif. There’s the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s account of Atlantis, of course. And the Haida and Sumerian, too, share a similar story of their origins.”

The pope nodded. “And yet it’s hard to imagine two more different cultures than the Haida and Sumerian, one in the rainy Pacific Northwest of America and the other in the arid desert of Iraq.”

“That a common myth of some event is shared by disparate cultures isn’t evidence that such an event took place,” she said dryly, the academic in her taking over. “Fossil records and geology, for example, tell us there was a flood, an ice age, and the like. But whether there was a Noah who built an ark, and whether he was Asian, African, or Caucasian, is pure speculation. And there’s certainly no proof of any island paradise.”

“Then what do you make of these similar stories?”

“I’ve always considered them to be indicators of the universality of the human intellect.”

“So to you Genesis is nothing more than a metaphor?”

She had forgotten the pope’s habit of turning their every conversation back to her faith. She slowly nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“You don’t seem so sure.”

“Yes, definitely.” There, she said it. He had forced her to say it.

“And the Church itself? Just a good idea gone bad?”

“Like all human institutions, the Church on earth is corrupt,” she said. “But it’s given us hospitals, orphanages, and hope for the human race. Without it civilization would sink into a moral abyss.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.” There was tenderness in the pope’s eyes and a tone of disbelief in his voice as he asked her, of all people: “Sister Serghetti, I want you to pause and consider whether the Spirit is prompting you in your heart to take on a holy mission that may truly make you worthy of your calling as Mother Earth.”

The only thing the Spirit was telling her was that something wasn’t right here. She had rebuked the Vatican and left the Church. Now the pope was asking her to be his official emissary. “What sort of mission?”

“I understand you are an official observer and adviser to the implementation of the international Antarctic Treaty.”

“I’m an adviser for the Treaty’s Committee for Environmental Protection,” she explained. “But I represent Australia, Your Holiness, not the Church.”

The pope nodded and tapped his fingers on his arm-rest.

“You know those recent news reports about seismic activity in Antarctica?”

“Of course, Your Holiness. A glacier the size of Delaware was sliced off last month after the most recent temblor. And another one the size of Rhode Island broke away before that.

In short order it may all add up to the equivalent of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.”

“What if I told you that our intelligence sources have located a secret and illegal American military expedition in Antarctica, in land claimed by your own homeland, Australia?”

“I’d say the Americans are violating the Madrid Protocol of 1991, which established Antarctica as a zone of peace reserved exclusively for scientific research purposes. All military activities are banned from the continent.” Serena leaned forward. “How do you know this?”

“Three U.S. spy satellites recently disappeared from orbit,” he explained.

She blinked. How long had the Vatican been in the business of tracking foreign spy satellites? “Perhaps they stopped working or were deliberately destroyed,” she suggested.

“Dead U.S. satellites are usually left in orbit,” the pope explained as easily as if he were discussing New Testament hermeneutics. “And if one satellite, let alone three, had died, congressional overseers would have made more noise than Vatican II. That did not happen.”

“I’m afraid we’ve stepped beyond my area of expertise, Your Holiness,” Serena said. “What are you suggesting happened?”

“The satellites were placed into orbits that would move more slowly across the skies than other high-altitude spy cameras, giving them more time to photograph targets.”

“Targets?”

“Military strikes are usually mounted immediately before a spy satellite passes overhead, so they can record the damage before the enemy has time to cover it up. But after the latest seismic activity in Antarctica, no known spy satellites would have passed over the affected area. That suggests that one or more of the missing satellites may be watching.”

“Are you suggesting the U.S. military is actually causing those seismic shock waves?” she asked.

“That’s what I want you to find out.”

She sat back in her chair. The pope had no reason to lie to her. But there must be more to this than what he was telling her. Why else would the Holy See take such profound interest in an empty continent populated by more penguins than Catholics?

“Is there something more you want to tell me?” she asked.

“Does it involve Doctor Yeats?”

The pope nodded. “He apparently has joined the American expedition in Antarctica.”

So it did involve Conrad, she realized, but in an altogether unexpected scenario. “Why would the American military need an archaeologist?”

The pope said nothing, and Serena knew in an instant that the Vatican was enlisting her help as a linguist and not as an environmentalist. All of which meant the Americans had found something in Antarctica. Something that would require the expertise of archaeologists and linguists. Something that had clearly rattled the Vatican. The only reason the pope was reaching out to her was because he had no other choice. The Americans obviously weren’t consulting with him. But perhaps they should have, she suddenly realized.

“You have something to show me, don’t you, Your Holiness?”

“I do.” With gnarled fingers, the pope unfurled a copy of a medieval map across his desk. It was dated 1513. “This was discovered in the old Imperial Palace in Constantinople in 1929. It belonged to a Turkish admiral.”

“Admiral Piri Reis,” she said. “It’s the Piri Reis World Map.”

“You recognize it, then.” The pope nodded. “So you’ve undoubtedly seen this too.”

He passed across an old U.S. Air Force report. It was dated July 6, 1960, code-named Project Blue Book.

“No, I haven’t,” she said with interest, picking up the slim report. “Since when does the Vatican have access to classified American military intelligence?”

“This old report?” the pope said. “I’d hardly call it classified. But the addendum is.”

She thumbed through the pages, written by the chief of the cartographic section of Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts. The conclusion of Air Force officials was that the Antarctic portions of the Piri Reis World Map did accurately depict the Princess Martha Coast of Antarctica and the Palmer Peninsula.

Her eyes lingered on the last page, where Lieutenant Colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer of the Eighth Reconnaissance Technical Squadron wrote:

The geographical detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice cap by the Swedish-British-Norwegian Antarctic Expedition of 1949. This indicates thecoastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice cap. The ice cap in this region is now about a mile thick. We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographic knowledge in 1513.

Then came the Pentagon addendum, dated 1970 and handwritten in bold strokes by USAF Colonel Griffin Yeats.

She knew that this was Conrad’s father, and it made the hair on her neck stand on end. The note said: All future reports regarding Piri Reis World Map and Project Sonchis shall be passed through this office and classified accordingly.

“Sonchis,” she repeated, closing the report.

“Any significance?”

“There was an Egyptian priest named Sonchis who allegedly provided Plato with his detailed account of Atlantis.”

“Admiral Reis’s map states it is based on even earlier source maps going back to the time of Alexander the Great.”

“You’re saying what exactly, Your Holiness?”

“Only an advanced, worldwide maritime culture that existed more than ten thousand years ago could have created these source maps.”

Serena blinked. “You believe that Antarctica is Atlantis?”

“And its secrets are buried under two miles of ice,” he said. “What we are dealing with is not just a lost ancient civilization, but the lost mother culture your friend Doctor Yeats has been searching for, one possessing scientific knowledge that we have yet to comprehend.”

“If this turns out to be real it will throw many things into question,” Serena replied, “including the Church’s interpretation of the Genesis account in the Bible.”

“Or uphold it,” the pope said, although he didn’t sound hopeful. “But should that be the case, we are all the worse for it.”

“You’ve lost me, Your Holiness.”

“God has shown me a prophecy about the end of time,” he said. “But I have not revealed it to the Church because it is too terrible to contemplate.”

Serena sat on the edge of her seat. Her usual concerns aside, this pope certainly seemed to have control of his senses and be of sound mind. “What did you see, Your Holiness?”

“I saw a beautiful rose frozen in ice,” the pope said.

“And then the ice cracked, and out of the crack came fire and a war waged by the sons of God against the Church and all mankind. In the end the ice melted and tears rolled off the petals of the rose.”

Serena recalled the sixth chapter of Genesis, which said that the “sons of God” ruled the Earth in an ancient epoch of time. Their offspring, born of women, did so much evil that God destroyed them and the entire human race in the Great Flood, save for Noah and his family. But Serena also recalled that apocalyptic visions, whether from the Bible or from the mouths of young Portuguese shepherds, do not detail the future in high-definition clarity. Instead they synthesize it and set it against a unified, timeless backdrop of symbols that require interpretation.

“So Your Holiness feels that this vision, the myth of Atlantis, and the current American military activities in Antarctica are altogether one and the same?”

“Yes.”

She tried to mask her doubt, but each element alone strained credulity. “I see.”

“No, you don’t,” he said. “Look closer.” The pope held a rolled-up parchment in his hand. “This is one of the source maps we believe Admiral Reis used. The map, really.”

Serena slowly reached forward and took the map from the pope’s hand. As soon as she clutched it in her own, she felt a jolt of anticipation surge through her veins.