Return to Atlantis: A Novel (30 page)

A sound reached them from below, the echoing rumble of an idling engine. Its source was revealed as they approached the eleventh level. The main elevator platform, an enormous metal expanse almost filling the width of the shaft, waited here; the hangar itself was filled with precisely lined rows of M60 tanks. One of the armored vehicles was surrounded by portable lighting rigs, a pair of men working on its open engine compartment. Wide flexible hoses snaked across the floor, drawing its exhaust fumes into a large extractor vent. “Routine maintenance,” Kern explained as they continued to descend, passing through the complex web of girders forming the platform’s supporting structure. “Like I said, everything here is kept ready for action. If we needed to, we could have a couple dozen of those babies rolling out of here by tonight.”

“Let’s hope we never need to,” said Nina. The elevator drew closer to its final destination. She moved back to the railing, eager to see what the lowest level contained …

The sheer scale of what met her eyes was astounding. Despite the size of the rest of the base, it was in essence nothing more than a very large parking structure. The twelfth floor, however, was home to something vastly more complex.

The repository was a library—but beyond anything Nina had ever seen. The stacks were arranged in a grid, stretching away seemingly to infinity. And the shelf units were not built on a human scale; they were easily thirty feet high.

It quickly became clear that the whole place was not intended to be directly accessed by humans at all. Between
the stacks ran a network of tracks, along which ran towering robotic forklifts. She had seen similar devices before: automated storage and retrieval systems, designed to collect specific items from large archives and deliver them to a central point. But the system at Silent Peak was several orders of magnitude larger and more complicated than anything she had encountered in academia.

“My God,” she said, genuinely awed. “How big is this place? There must be miles of shelves!”

“Something like three hundred miles, if they were all laid end-to-end,” said Kern as the platform stopped. “But Dr. Ogleby can give you the exact details. I just work here.” He opened another gate so they could exit the elevator, then led them to one of several cabins nearby. It was marked with a sign:
READING ROOMS 01–08
. Kern entered, Eddie and Nina exchanging
what the hell have we gotten into?
glances behind him. Another man in Security Forces uniform sat by the door, looking utterly bored. He stood and saluted them, then returned to his blank-eyed torpor. Kern called out, “Dr. Ogleby! Are you here?”

A bald man popped up like a groundhog to peer at them over a cubicle wall. “Oh, it’s you, Kern,” he said, annoyed at being disturbed. He padded out to meet the new arrivals. Unlike the other base personnel, he was a civilian, wearing a threadbare suit and a garish yellow bow tie.

Kern started to make introductions. “This is Dr. Nina Wilde from the International Heritage Agency, and Captain Tyler—”

“Yes, I know, I know,” said Ogleby dismissively. “I read the email.” Beady eyes scrutinized Nina. “Waste of time and money your coming here in person. The material you want may be Eyes Only, but we could still have couriered it to you in New York.”

“Really? We were told we could only view it here,” said Nina, concealing her sudden nervousness. Dalton
had been very specific that they would have to travel to Silent Peak to see the file.

“Not for something of that classification. You were obviously misinformed.” He turned his grouchy gaze to Kern. “Something else I can help you with, Colonel?”

Kern was evidently well used to Ogleby’s attitude. “Apparently not. Well, Dr. Wilde, Captain, when you’re finished here I’ll arrange for someone to bring you back to the surface.”

“Thank you,” said Nina. Kern exited, leaving her and Eddie alone with the sour-faced librarian. “So, Dr. Ogleby, this is a remarkable archive you have here.”

He didn’t even respond well to a compliment. “It would be if they gave me the staff and money to run it properly. Right, let’s see your papers, then.”

The pair produced their documents. Ogleby read them, then went to a computer to double-check their details. “No need for you to come here at all,” he muttered as he pecked at the keyboard with one finger, logging the new arrivals into the system.

“I’m curious about that myself,” said Nina. “I mean, what we’re here to see is of historical importance, but it’s hardly a national security matter. Why keep it so highly classified?”

“It’s not the material itself, it’s where it came from,” Ogleby replied, still tapping away at the computer. “In this case, the Nazis.”

“Nazis?” said Eddie, in his surprise using his normal accent before hurriedly correcting himself. “Uh, I mean, Nat-zees.”

Fortunately, Ogleby didn’t pick up on it. “It was part of a scientific archive seized by US forces at the end of the war, some of which had been stolen from Greece during the German occupation there. A lot of the other material concerned what you might call ‘ethically questionable’ Nazi experiments”—he gave them a decidedly ghoulish smile—“so the whole collection was classified, including the material you want to see.”

“Why?” Nina asked. “It couldn’t possibly be connected to anything the Nazis did.”

“It was connected just by association,” said Ogleby in a patronizing tone. “The Nazis were very good at filing. You release one file, people want to know where the others are, and what’s in them. It’s simpler just to classify everything so only people with a need to know can see it. That way, we still have the information without bleeding hearts bleating about our benefiting from ‘immoral knowledge.’ There’s no such thing.” He finished typing. “We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but at least we can stop people from whining that someone removed the cork.”

Nina agreed with him in principle that knowledge itself could not be immoral—as far as she was concerned, the cliché that “there are some things man was not meant to know” was an anti-intellectual crock—but that hadn’t stopped her from quickly developing a dislike for the librarian. “Well, we’re in the need-to-know club now, so if we could see it?” she said spikily.

Ogleby’s nod was distinctly disapproving, but he signaled impatiently toward one of the cubicles. “Go on, in there. You can get a good view of the system at work.”

As well as a well-lit reading desk, the cubicle contained something that reminded Nina of a smaller-scale version of an airport’s baggage carousel. A large flap set into the cabin’s outer wall opened onto a set of steel rollers that would channel anything coming down it into a flat collection area; another set of rollers at the opposite end led back through a second flap. A window looked out into the hangar and its miles of shelves. “Your material is on its way,” said Ogleby. “The shuttle should be here in a minute.”

Eddie and Nina moved closer to the window. The tracks crisscrossed the vast space between the stacks, points at alternate intersections allowing the shuttles to follow the most efficient course through the grid. As they watched, one of the towering machines trundled
past, carrying a large container resembling a bank’s safety deposit box. Sparks crackled from its bumper-car-like overhead power grid. It clattered through a set of points and turned down an aisle, disappearing from view. Other shuttles were at work farther away.

“The place looks busy,” said Nina.

“It always is,” Ogleby replied. “We send out at least three hundred retrieval requests per day—and new material arrives all the time, of course. The Pentagon, CIA, NSA, even the White House—everybody has files down here. And we keep track of every single one.” Pride briefly overcame grumpiness. “Nothing’s ever been leaked or stolen from Silent Peak. Not so much as a Post-it.” His abrasive attitude returned. “How long will you need?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug.

The gesture irritated their host even more. “Well, this isn’t a social club, so don’t waste time chatting about it. As soon as you’ve got what you need, put everything back in the box and push it down the belt, then you can leave. In the meantime, I have work to do, so if you need anything, ask the zombie over there.” He cast a disdainful look toward the mind-numbed man by the entrance, then stalked out of the cubicle.

“Thank fuck he’s gone,” said Eddie.

“I know. What a jerk!”

“No, I meant I can finally talk again.”

“With you, silence is golden,” Nina told him. “Especially with that god-awful accent you were using. Seriously, what the hell was it? You’re
married
to an American—how can you not know what we sound like?”

“Oh, I know what you sound like. Sort of shrill, and annoying—ay up.” Their discussion was interrupted as another shuttle stopped outside the window. A hydraulic whine as it raised its cargo to the drop-off point, then the flap opened with a bang and a metal container skittered down the rollers to stop in the collection area before them.

Nina examined the delivery. It was somewhat larger
than a standard box file, a barcode laser-etched on the brushed steel. Beneath it was a large label bearing an identification number, along with the cryptic line
SCI(G3)/NOFORN
. The more readily understandable
EYES ONLY
was printed beneath it in red. “What does that mean?” she asked, tapping the jumble of letters.

“
NOFORN
means ‘no foreign nationals,’ ” said Eddie. “I’d better look away, then. Don’t want to break any rules.”

“I think we’re past the stage of worrying about that,” Nina said with a halfhearted smile.

“Just a bit. And
SCI
stands for ‘sensitive compartmentalized information.’ Super-top-secret, basically. The
G3
part’s probably some particular need-to-know clearance. Which Dalton arranged for you, so you’d better start using it. The quicker we’re out of here, the better.”

She took the box to the reading desk. “Yeah. I didn’t like what Ogleby said, that we could have had this brought to the IHA. You think Dalton’s trying to set us up to be caught red-handed?”

“I’m surprised we haven’t been arrested already, to be honest. Or shot.”

“There’s a pleasant thought.” Nina sat and opened the box, Eddie leaning over her shoulder to see what was inside.

It didn’t contain a great deal: a manila folder with thirty or so typewritten pages within, and a large padded envelope housing a flat and heavy object. She flicked through the folder first. The opening pages were a summary of where and when US forces had acquired the material from the Nazi archive at the end of the Second World War, and the bureaucratic decision-making process that had kept it hidden to this day. Following them were translations—from German to English, of the Nazis’ own records, and then from ancient Greek to English—of the material itself.

Nina put them aside and picked up the envelope. Inside was another folder, but this was metal bound in
thick black leather, not a simple card sleeve. A brass zipper ran around three sides. She carefully unfastened it and opened the cover.

She immediately recognized the contents.

It was the rest of the torn parchment she had seen in the Brotherhood of Selasphoros’s archives in Rome.

“W
hat is it?” Eddie asked.

“Something that’s been missing for a very long time,” Nina replied in a reverential whisper. The US government had taken the same approach to preserving the fragile sheet of browned animal skin as the Brotherhood, pressing it between two pieces of glass. Despite this, the ancient document’s condition was considerably worse than its matching half; it had passed through more hands over the centuries.

But it was still readable, the closely spaced Greek text clear. She gazed at the long-lost words of Kallikrates, starting to translate …

“So?” said Eddie impatiently. “What
is
it?”

“The Brotherhood had the other half,” she explained, indicating the torn top of the page. “Their part described the mental effects of what happens when the three statues are brought together—the ‘visions.’ But this …” She rapidly skimmed through the rest of the writing. “This is about the
physical
effects. And it matches what happened in Tokyo—the statues becoming charged with earth energy, the levitation …”

“Levitation? What, you started floating around the room?”

“Not me, the statues. And they just kind of … hung there. But never mind that.” She kept reading, hungry to learn more. “In the Brotherhood’s text, Nantalas, the priestess, believed that the statues were the keys to god-like powers, which came from something she called the sky stone.”

“A meteor?”

“Seems likely. The statues are meteoric rock, after all—they must have been cut from it. But this text actually says what that power is.” She pointed at the top of the parchment. “It follows on directly from the part I read in Rome. When she put all three statues together and touched them to the sky stone, it ‘rose from the floor, lifted by the power of the gods. Even though the chamber was not open to the sky, lightning flashed through the Temple of the Gods and the ground shook with thunder. After Nantalas lowered the stone, the king agreed that such power should be used against the enemies of Atlantis, but knew there would be those in the royal court who would be fearful of angering the gods by doing so. He said that he would bring the court to the Temple of the Gods so they could witness with their own eyes the power of the sky stone.’ The royal court,” she added thoughtfully. “If they were involved, it would have been recorded in the altar room …”

“How big was the stone?” Eddie asked.

“It doesn’t say. But the inference seems to be that it was fairly large—bigger than the statues, certainly.”

“So the whole thing’s basically an earth energy weapon, then? Only a natural one?”

“It looks like it. And the Atlanteans had it, eleven thousand years ago.”

“Then where is it now?”

“I think that’s what a lot of people are trying to find out.” She gave him a worried look. “And Eddie … I’m the key to finding it. When I had all three statues in
Japan, I felt … 
drawn
to something. I didn’t know what at the time, but it
has
to be this sky stone.”