The Atlantis Code (60 page)

Murani said nothing, but Lourds could see that he wasn’t happy. The Swiss Guards were dividing among themselves. Two groups had started to form, one that stood with Father Sebastian, the other that aligned themselves with Murani.

Lourds was stuck between them, and it was the wrong place to be. He looked down at the drum to check to see if it was salvageable. The instrument was a tangle of broken pottery and leather cords. Thankfully the shards had broken into big pieces. He thought he might be able to reassemble the fragments. Even better yet, the inscription with the two languages looked salvageable.

Then he saw an inscription
inside
a drum shard, a series of lines with marks drawn on them.

“What is that?” Murani knelt down beside Lourds.

“I think,” Lourds said, fascinated, “it’s a musical score, maybe a diatonic scale. The ancient Greeks worked with music theory. They called it
genera
and developed three primary types. The diatonic was used for the major scales and church modes, so it was also called the Gregorian mode.”

“Could it be the key the inscription was talking about?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible that—” Before Lourds could say anything more, Murani shattered the bell.

Lourds almost cried at the artifact’s loss.

But the inscription inside was clear.

The shards had to be pieced together to reveal the musical score. Murani broke the cymbal, pipe, and flute in quick succession. So much history, gone forever. But inside each of them, inscriptions revealed a musical score.

“They go in order, right?” Murani asked. “As they’re shown on the engraving?”

“Who knows? Maybe.”

Murani arranged the score on the ground and ran through the buttons again. Then he began to play.

The cave came alive with the sound of music. Excitement filled Lourds. The beautiful notes took away some of his fear. Leslie joined him, standing beside him as the echoes of the music filled the space. She took his hand in hers. She held on tightly.

For a moment after the last note was played, nothing happened. Then an explosion was followed by a rattle of gunfire. Everyone turned back in the direction of the caves they’d come through, looking to see where the sound originated.

In the next moment, the two factions of Swiss Guards separated even further. The had rifles pointed at each other. It seemed each side was willing to kill—or to die—for their cause.

Then stones ground out in the center of the cave and jerked their attention back in that direction. The grumbling, rumbling noise filled the cavern as it echoed and re-echoed.

As Lourds watched, the cavern floor irised open at the center. Cunningly wrought stone teeth retracted and revealed a pit. A golden glow dawned inside the darkness.

Lourds started forward immediately. Leslie hung on to his hand and followed.

Murani hastened past Lourds, though, and reached the pit first. He aimed his flashlight, then the pistol, into the pit.

Surprising himself, Lourds hesitated a little as the thought of an Old Testament demon or lurking evil hit him.
You don’t believe in things like that
, he reminded himself. But here, with all the evil surrounding him, with all the impossibilities he’d uncovered so far, he suddenly found he could believe in anything. He took a tighter grip on Leslie’s hand as he approached the pit.

Liquid fire burned Gary’s side as he took a breath. For a moment there after the bullet had struck him, he’d forgotten how to breathe. That had scared him more than he’d ever been scared in his life. And that was saying something, because there had been several close calls since he and Leslie had hooked up with Lourds and Natasha.

Get up, you great wanker! Them people are going to burn to death while you lay about!

Painfully, fearful of another bullet striking him because he still heard gunfire echoing in the cavern, Gary forced himself to his feet. He felt light-headed, but he managed—and that surprised the hell out of him.

He concentrated on breathing and walking. It turned out to be more of a lurch, actually, but he made it work for him. He felt the heat coming off the mobile building as he neared it.

Men had already broken the glass out of the windows, but there wasn’t enough room to squeeze through to safety. They screamed at him in frustration.

Increased dizziness clawed at Gary’s mind. He felt the darkness eating away at the edges and waiting to consume him.

The harsh, flat cracks of more gunshots sounded behind him.

Are we winning?
he wondered. Even he couldn’t see how they would prevail.

When he reached the building, he almost had to turn back from the heat. Instead, he made himself reach for the door. Someone had wedged a crowbar into the door to block escape. He grabbed it. The heated metal scorched his hand, but he held on just long enough to yank it free. Then he threw it to one side.

The men poured out of the mobile building. Two of them grabbed him up under the arms and carried him away from the fire. All of them spoke Italian, and Gary couldn’t understand most of what they were saying.

Somewhere in there, just as it was starting to dawn on him that he’d been a hero and gotten shot for his trouble, Gary fell into unconsciousness.

Steps carved into the side of the pit tunnel led down into darkness. Even though Lourds added his flashlight beam to Murani’s, the darkness didn’t retreat enough to reveal what was held below.

The glow seemed concentrated down in the bottom of the pit.

Murani pointed his pistol at Lourds.

“You first,” the cardinal commanded.

Lourds thought about objecting and knew it wouldn’t do any good. But that was only a small part of why he started down the steps. The other part, the larger part, was that he had to see what was there.

If the Atlanteans, or whatever they’d called themselves, had taken the time and trouble to hide the Book of Knowledge in such an elaborate place as this, what else could be hidden there?

The smart thing to do was lower a light into the yawning abyss and see what pitfalls—literally—lay ahead. But Lourds knew that neither he nor Murani were willing to wait long enough for a cautious examination of the site.

One of these days that curiosity of yours is going to get you killed
, Lourds chided himself.

The pit was colder than the room above. The sea gurgling against the rock was louder as well. Lourds couldn’t help thinking how far below the ocean’s surface they were at the moment. It had to be 250 or 300 feet at least. And it was two miles back to the cave entrance.

The steps were cut narrow and shallow. There was barely enough room for Lourds to walk down. He hadn’t seen any bodies of the Atlanteans, but he was willing to bet they’d been small people.

Footsteps rasped behind Lourds. When he stopped and looked up, he found Leslie behind him.

“It might not be safe down here,” he said.

“It’s not safe out there,” she replied.

“I suppose it isn’t.”

“I couldn’t let you go alone.”

Lourds gave her a small smile. She could have, and they both knew it. He was willing to wager that her curiosity pushed at her as sure as his propelled him.

“Let’s hope that coming down here was the smart thing to do.” He turned and headed back down into the darkness.

A door lay at the end of the steps. It wasn’t locked, and it opened inward easily at Lourds’s touch. The air inside the room was stale and musty, but it carried odors that suddenly made the professor’s heart beat faster and chase away the remaining fear in his head.

“Do you smell that?” Lourds asked excitedly as he went forward with more confidence. He knew those scents immediately, and he’d know them till his dying day.

“What? The dust?”

“Parchment,” Lourds said. “Ink. Lots of it.”

He shone the flashlight inside the room and was astounded to see rows of books. They stood neatly ranked on shelves on the walls as well as in free-standing shelves that occupied the floor space.

Lourds walked to the nearest shelf and plucked a book from the row. The book was bound in a leatherlike material, but it wasn’t leather, at least not any leather that Lourds knew about. Leather wouldn’t have held up for thousands of years without showing some kind of aging. This book—
all
the books—looked as though they’d just been written.

Lourds balanced the book, bound in bright blue, on his left forearm and opened it with his left hand. He held the flashlight in his right. It was hard doing that with his hands cuffed. Symbols like the ones he’d decrypted on the musical instruments filled the crisp white pages.

He shone the flashlight around the room again. There were hundreds—perhaps
thousands
—of books on the shelves. The titles hinted at histories, biographies, sciences, and mathematics.

“My god,” Lourds said softly. “It’s a library.”

“Is that all you see?” Leslie sounded distracted. “Look at this!”

Lourds followed the line of her flashlight beam as Murani, Gallardo, and the others entered the room.

Drawn by the beauty before her, Leslie reached out her manacled hands to touch the amber figurine standing at the end of one of the shelves. Light glinted from the polished surface and fired the veins of its matrix with gold.

The figurine stood almost four feet tall and displayed a man holding the model of a solar system in his hand. Six planets of different sizes orbited the sun.

“They had the solar system as sun-centric,” Lourds said. “They were thousands of years ahead of everyone. And the size ratio looks right, too.” Wonder overcame him as he looked at the rest of the books.

“That’s a big deal?” Leslie asked. “I thought everyone knew the planets revolved around the sun.”

“No. In fact, the Church locked up Galileo for heresy for saying as much.”

“You’re kidding.”

Lourds couldn’t believe she didn’t know that. “No, I’m not kidding.”

“Astronomy’s never been my thing,” Leslie admitted.

Like a child in a candy store, Lourds passed through the aisles and sought out titles he could decipher. “Have you any idea of the knowledge that might have hidden here all these years? Do you know what kind of strides might have been possible in the world if other cultures had possessed this knowledge?”

“I’m assuming that all these old books are a big deal.”

“A very big deal,” Lourds said. His head was spinning with possibilities. It made him think of everything that had been lost at the Library of Alexandria. A world of ancient knowledge . . . here . . . at his fingertips. He was overcome with wonder.

“Lourds,” Murani called out impatiently.

Lourds turned and was hit in the eyes with a bright flashlight beam. He raised his cuffed hands. “What?”

“Where’s the Book of Knowledge?” Murani demanded.

“I don’t know. It must be here somewhere.”

“Here,” Leslie called.

Lourds tracked her voice through the stacks. The others converged on her as well.

As soon as the construction workers fled the mobile building, Natasha knew the surviving Swiss Guard’s game plan had altered from offense to defense. He’d also made the mistake of allowing her to get her hands on the second man she’d killed.

She put her pistols away and took up the dead man’s rifle and ammo bandolier. She slung the bandolier across her shoulders and checked the magazine in the rifle. It was nearly full.

It was good having real weapons again.

Calmly, knowing her opponent had only two avenues open to him, Natasha hunkered down in the shadows by an earthmover and waited. She hated not being able to go to Gary. He was unconscious, unmoving on the cold stone of the cavern floor. A few of the men had started for him, though. She hoped Gary was still alive. She hoped those he’d saved would save him.

The Swiss Guard broke cover and ran for the construction workers’ vehicles. He’d opted for saving his own neck instead of trying to join his comrades in the caves farther on.

Natasha shouldered her weapon, led the man just a little, and squeezed the trigger. The round caught him in the neck just under the protective Kevlar helmet. The shot knocked him down. He didn’t move again.

Satisfied that the cave was clear, Natasha ran to Gary’s side. The construction men scattered away from her, obviously intimidated by the rifle she carried. Many of them headed for the vehicles and started to leave.

The rise and fall of Gary’s chest let her know he was still alive.

Natasha looked up at one of the men. “You,” she ordered in her cop voice.

“Me?” The man looked scared.

“My friend saved your life,” Natasha said. “I want you to save his.”

“Of course.” The man called to another, and together they lifted Gary from the ground.

“Carefully,” Natasha said.

The man nodded and headed toward one of the vehicles. He called out to the driver, and the truck pulled over to them.