The Atlantis Plague (45 page)

David strapped Kate into the helicopter’s bench seat and held her as it banked and swerved, the bombs exploding around them. Malta was guarded, as it had been in the past, quite heavily.

They were accepting refugees by boat, but no one could reach it by air.

He picked up the satellite phone. “Dial Continuity,” he said to Kate. “Tell them we’re in an Immari helicopter, but we are friendlies. Instruct Malta to stop firing on us. We need to land.”

He watched as Kate opened her eyes, eyed him briefly, then fought to dial the numbers. A second later, she began conversing quickly with Paul Brenner.

Paul Brenner hung up the phone. Kate and her team were in Malta.

“Get me the director of the Valletta Orchid District,” he said to his assistant.

Dorian watched the explosions in the distance. Valletta was firing on any incoming aircraft.

He activated his helmet’s mic.

“Find us a refugee boat.”

“Sir?”

“Do it. We can’t access the island by air.”

Ten minutes later, they were hovering above a fishing trawler.

Dorian watched the rope lines descend. His men fell to the boat’s deck and raised their weapons. The ship’s crew and passengers retreated back into the boat’s cabin.

Dorian landed on the deck and glided to the huddling group of people.

“No harm will come to you. We just need a lift to Malta.”

David felt the helicopter touch down on the pad. He brushed Kate’s hair out of her face. “Can you walk?”

He thought she was so warm, not burning up, but… too warm.
What’s happening to her? I can’t lose her. Not after all this.

She nodded, and he helped her out of the helicopter, then wrapped his arm around her and ushered her away from the platform.

An enemy was behind them: Chang, Janus, or Shaw. David didn’t know which. But he knew Kamau was behind him as well and that he would watch David’s back. Kate was his concern now.

“Dr. Warner!” A man wearing designer glasses and a slept-in suit greeted them. “Dr. Brenner has informed us about your research. We are here to help—”

“Take us to the hospital,” David said. He didn’t know what else to say. Kate needed help.

David couldn’t believe his eyes. The hospital was state of the art, yet dying bodies were everywhere, and no one seemed to be interested in helping them.

“What’s going on here? Why aren’t you treating these people?” David asked the district director.

“There is no need. Refugees arrive here sick, and they rise from it in hours.”

“Without treatment?”

“Their faith saves them.”

David looked at Kate. She was getting better. The sweat had stopped pouring off her brow. He took her aside. “Do you believe this?”

“Of course not. I’m a scientist. It’s… something else. Get me something to write on.”

David took a legal pad from one of the bedside tables.

Kate sketched quickly.

David looked back at the Orchid District director, who seemed to be watching them like a hawk. In a corner of the hospital wing, Janus was setting up Kate’s computer and the sample collector, the thermos-like device he had seen before. Kamau and Shaw stood beside them, eyeing each other as if they were waiting for the bell to ring and a fight to begin.

Kate handed her rough sketch to the director. “We’re looking for this. It’s a stone box—”

“I—”

“I know it’s here. It’s been here for a very long time. A group called the Immaru hid it here thousands of years ago. Take us to it.”

The director looked away from them, swallowed, then led them away from the people, out of earshot. “I’ve never seen it. I don’t know what it is—”

“We just need to find it,” David said.

“Rabat. The rumor is that the Knights of Malta have retreated into the catacombs there.”

Dorian flowed with the barbarian hordes of people coursing into the Maltese capital. God, they stank. They carried their sick, pushing and shoving, hoping to rush them to safety.

He held the scratchy blanket around his head, hiding his appearance, trying not to breathe in the putrid odor that assaulted him. Talk about suffering for your cause.

In the distance, beyond the hospital, he saw an Immari helicopter lift off the ground and move further inland.

Dorian turned to the Immari special ops soldier beside him. “They’re moving on. Find us a helicopter. We need to get out of here.”

CHAPTER 83

Malta

From the helicopter’s window, David could see the entire small city of Rabat below. It was nothing like he expected.

Rabat was deserted, utterly abandoned, as if every soul had fled the tiny town with only the clothes on their backs. Of course. When the plague had hit, the people here would have flocked to one of Malta’s two Orchid Districts, either Victoria or Valletta.

Across from him, he scanned Janus’s and Chang’s faces. Blank. Impassive. Through the split in the helicopter’s seats, he could see Shaw’s and Kamau’s faces reflected in the glass. Blank. Hard. Focused. The six of them would be alone in Rabat, and Martin’s killer would make his move—for Kate, or for the cure, or for whatever his endgame was.

David glanced out the window again and his mind drifted to history, to safety, to what he knew best.

Rabat lay on the other side of Mdina, the old capital of Malta, a city historians believed had been settled before 4000 B.C. The city sat at one of the highest points on the largest island of Malta, far from the coast.

Malta itself had first been settled by a mysterious group that had migrated down from Sicily around 5200 B.C.

In the twentieth century, archaeologists had found megalithic temples all over the two islands of Malta: eleven in total, seven of which had since been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They were true wonders of the world. Some scientists believed them to be the oldest freestanding structures on the planet. Yet, no one knew who built them or why. They dated back to 3600 B.C., or possibly even earlier. The age of the structures—the history of Malta itself—was an anomaly, a fact that didn’t fit into the current understanding of human history.

The dark ages of ancient Greece only reached back to 1200 B.C. The first civilizations, first cities, in places like Sumer, only dated back to 4500 B.C. Akkadia had been settled around 2400 B.C., and Babylon, supposedly, 1900 B.C. Even Stonehenge, the closest megalithic monuments, at least in character, was thought to have been created in 2400 B.C.—which was still over a thousand years
after
some mysterious group had built the towering temples on the isolated island of Malta. There was no explanation for Malta’s megalithic structures; their history, and the history of the people who built them, had been lost to the ages.

Historians and archaeologists still debated the birthplace of civilization. Many argued that settlements had arisen in the Indus Valley of present-day India or the Yellow River Valley of present-day China, but the overwhelming consensus was that civilization, defined as functioning, permanent human settlements, had been founded around 4,500 years ago somewhere in the Levant or the wider region of the Fertile Crescent—thousands of miles from Malta.

Yet the remains of those primitive settlements in the Fertile Crescent were sparse and crumbling; a stark contrast to the undeniable, comparatively impressive, and technically advanced stone structures on Malta—which may have predated them. An isolated civilization had thrived here, had erected structures to some higher power, but had somehow vanished without a trace, leaving no history, save for the temples where they had worshiped.

The first settlers on Malta to leave a historical record were the Greeks, followed by the Phoenicians around 750 B.C. About three hundred years later, the Carthaginians succeeded the Phoenicians on Malta, but their reign was cut short with the arrival in 216 B.C. of the Romans, who conquered the islands in a few short years.

During the Roman rule of Malta, the governor had built his palace in Mdina. Almost a thousand years later, in 1091, the Normans had conquered Malta and altered the city of Mdina forever. The Nordic invaders had built defensive fortifications and a wide moat, separating Mdina from the nearest town—Rabat.

Perhaps the most enduring legend of Mdina, however, was that of St. Paul. In the year A.D. 60, the apostle Paul had lived there after having been shipwrecked on Malta. Some transformation had occurred during this time.

Paul had been on his way to Rome—against his will. The man that would later be declared an apostle was to be tried as a political rebel. Paul’s ship was caught in a violent storm and wrecked on the Maltese coast. All aboard swam safely to land, some two hundred seventy-five people in total.

Legend has it that the Maltese inhabitants took Paul and the other survivors in. According to St. Luke:

And later we learned that the island was called Malta.

And the people who lived there showed us great kindness,

and they made a fire and called us all to warm ourselves…

Luke’s testament relates that as the fire was lit, Paul was bitten by a poisonous snake but suffered no ill effects. The islanders took this as a sign that he was a special man.