The Covenant of Genesis (6 page)

‘Just get rid of it!’ said Nina, cringing in revulsion.

‘So much for the search for knowledge,’ Chase said, turning the eel to face him and moving its mouth like some awful ventriloquist’s dummy as he spoke. ‘And she calls herself a scientist!’ The two pieces of the moray trailing from his hands, he swam off into the gloom.

‘Are you okay, Nina?’ asked Gozzi as he arrived, Bobak behind him.

‘Super fine,’ Nina growled.

‘At least it was not a shark, yes?’ Bobak said hopefully.

‘Yes, thank God. Although I have a horrible feeling I’m going to have to put up with a load of stupid eel jokes when we get back to the ship.’

‘I’d never do that,’ Chase said from somewhere out of sight. ‘Besides, I’ve got a DVD I want to watch tonight.’

‘What is it?’ Nina sighed, bracing herself for the punchline.

‘An
Eel
-ing comedy!’

If Nina could have put a hand to her forehead, she would have. Instead, she groaned, then composed herself before turning back to the job in hand.

After she photographed the ruin, the team carefully lifted the fallen bricks. It was a slow process, Chase offering increasingly frequent reminders about the dwindling amount of daylight remaining.

But it paid off.

‘Look at that!’ Nina exclaimed. The collapsed roof removed and some of the sediment cleared away with the small vacuum pump, new treasures were revealed. ‘We’ve definitely struck gold.’

‘That’s not gold,’ said Chase. ‘Looks like copper to me.’

‘Metaphorical gold, I mean.’ She lifted the first object. It was a sheet of copper about ten inches long, almost as wide at one end but much narrower at the other. It had obviously been crushed when the roof fell, but she guessed it had originally been conical in shape. She turned it over. ‘It looks like a funnel.’

‘Wow, kitchen utensils? That’s even more exciting than a net,’ said Chase.

Nina snorted and handed it to him to put into a sample bag, then looked at the item Bobak was holding. ‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was a clay cylinder - or rather part of one, one end roughly broken off. The other had a hole roughly the width of Nina’s little finger at its centre. The cylinder was marked with narrow, closely spaced grooves running round its length. Bobak poked at the little hole, tipping sand out of it. ‘To hold a candle?’

Gozzi guided the pump’s nozzle along what appeared to be a stout wooden pole. ‘Look here!’ he cried. More of the pole was exposed as he moved, revealing it to be six feet long, ten, twelve . . . ‘I think this is a mast!’

‘It can’t be,’ said Bobak. ‘The site is too old. Maybe the boat sank more recently.’

‘So how did it end up
inside
a building that’s been underwater for over a hundred thousand years?’ Nina asked. No suggestions were forthcoming. She ran her fingertips through the sediment, finding the flat face of a plank. Probing further, she felt its edge. She followed it, trying to work out the length of the buried vessel.

Something moved when she touched it.

‘Found something?’ Chase asked. ‘Not another eel, is it?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Nina pulled her new find free of the muck. It was a clay tablet, roughly the size of a slim hardback novel. One corner had been broken off, but apart from some chipping and blotches of microbial growths the rest of it was intact. Several lines of text had been inscribed into its surface, but the elegantly curved script was completely unknown to her. ‘Gregor, Marco, look at this. Do either of you recognise the language?’ Neither did.

‘Tick tock,’ said Chase, pointing towards the surface. The level of illumination had visibly fallen. ‘We need to get back upstairs.’

Reluctantly, Nina put the tablet into the sample bag. ‘Mark the spot,’ she told Gozzi. ‘We’re definitely coming back here tomorrow.’

 

Chase entered the lab. ‘You coming for dinner? It’s after eight, and I’m starving!’

‘Shush,’ said Nina, flapping a hand. ‘I’m on the phone.’

‘Is that Eddie?’ asked an Australian voice from the speakerphone on Nina’s workbench. ‘How are you, mate?’

‘Hey, Matt,’ Chase replied, recognising their friend and colleague Matt Trulli. ‘I’m fine. How about you? I thought you were going to the South Pole or something.’

‘Yeah, in a week. Just got a few last-minute glitches to fix on my new sub; I’m waiting for the spare parts to arrive. Good job I caught the problem now - it’d be a bugger to fix in the Antarctic!’

‘I thought I’d take advantage of our tame nautical expert,’ Nina explained to Chase. ‘I was just asking him about the boat we found.’

‘Well, I looked at that photo you sent, and it’s definitely a lateen rig,’ said Trulli. ‘Triangular sail, invented by the Arabs. Something like the sixth century.’

‘BC or AD?’ Nina asked.

‘AD. Why, how old’s the site where you found it?’

‘Older.’

Trulli made an appreciative noise. ‘Another world-shattering discovery by Dr Nina Wilde, is it?’

‘Could be,’ said Nina, smiling. ‘Thanks for your help, Matt - I appreciate it.’

‘No worries - I’ll look in on you in New York when I get back. Oh, and consider this my RSVP to the wedding, okay?’

‘Will do.’

‘See you,’ said Chase as Trulli disconnected. ‘So, dinner?’

‘In a minute,’ Nina said, returning to her work. She held the clay tablet under a large illuminated magnifying lens, using a metal pick to remove the algae that a wash in distilled water had failed to shift. One particularly recalcitrant piece resisted even the pick; she used a spray can of compressed air to blast it with a fine astringent powder before switching back to her original tool. This time, the offending lump came free. ‘What’re they cooking?’

‘Eels.’ Nina shot him a dirty look. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Pretty well. I’ve almost got it cleaned up.’ She indicated the expensive digital SLR camera beside the waterproof camera she had used on the dive, a cable connecting it to her laptop. ‘I already sent some underwater pictures back to New York by satellite, but I thought it’d be easier for someone to identify the language if it wasn’t covered with crap.’

‘So you really don’t know? Guess you’d better withdraw that application to be the full-time boss of the IHA.’

‘It might be easier if I did.’

‘Really?’ Chase put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hey, I was only joking. I thought you wanted the job.’

‘I do. But there’s just been so much bureaucratic and political garbage, especially over the last couple of months. It’s like everybody’s decided to gang up on me at once. Assholes.’ She let out a sigh.

‘I know what you mean. Every time I go through US customs now, I get the third degree from the immigration officers. Doesn’t matter that I’ve got a Green Card and a UN work permit - they treat me like the bloody shoe bomber!’

‘Yeah, you’d think they’d be more grateful, considering we saved the world.’ Nina took several photos of the tablet. ‘Maybe I should remind everyone of that, take up that offer to write my autobiography.’

‘You need to ask for more money,’ Chase told her. ‘Tell ’em you want one meellion dollars.’ He raised his little finger to the corner of his mouth.

‘It’s definitely tempting.’ She turned to him, then flinched as she put weight on her right leg. ‘Ow!’

‘I kept telling you not to push it, didn’t I? You never bloody listen.’

‘It’s fine, it’s fine . . . no, it’s
not
fine, ow,
oww
, son of a bitch!’ Nina hobbled to a nearby chair, rubbing her thigh. ‘Oh, dammit, it’s cramped up. I must have been standing on it for too long.’

‘That and, you know,
swimming
for hours,’ Chase said, with not nearly as much sympathy as Nina had hoped. ‘What if that’d happened a hundred feet down? That settles it. There’s no way you’re going in the water tomorrow.’

‘I could still use the suit’s thrusters,’ Nina suggested plaintively, but she could tell from Chase’s expression that he wasn’t going to give way on this occasion. ‘Crap. I hate watching through the remote feed. Nobody ever points the camera at what I want to look at.’

‘We do eventually. After you moan at us for five minutes.’ He held out a hand. Nina took it and tentatively stood up, trying to straighten her right leg. ‘Does it still hurt?’

‘No,’ she squeaked untruthfully.

‘Come on, hold on to me. I’ll take you down to the mess.’

‘Just a sec - let me send these pictures to the IHA.’ She hopped to the table and tapped at her laptop. ‘Okay, done.’

‘You’re pushing yourself too hard,’ said Chase, putting an arm round her waist to support her. ‘I know this is what you do and that it’s really important to you, but if you’re not careful you might get hurt. Like with that bloody eel. How far are you willing to go for this stuff ?’

‘Far as it takes.’ She smiled at him. ‘Okay, let’s go eat.’

 

Half a world away, banks of supercomputers analysed the photographs Nina had just emailed, breaking down the digital images and scanning them for patterns matching any of a vast range of criteria in just a fraction of a second.

No human had been involved in the process, yet: the machines of the National Security Agency in Maryland routinely examined every piece of electronic communication that passed through the networks of the United States, hunting for anything that might potentially be connected to crime, espionage or terrorism. All but the tiniest fraction of the constant deluge of data was deemed to be harmless. Of the remainder, most were passed on to human NSA analysts to make a proper determination.

But there were some search criteria that were kept secret even from the NSA itself, only a handful of people in the entire country - the entire
world
- being aware of them.

Nina’s pictures matched one of those criteria.

The supercomputers processed the images, picked out the strange characters, compared them against a database - and raised an alarm. Within minutes, three men in different countries had been informed of the discovery.

The Covenant of Genesis had a new mission.

A new target.

‘Good morning, Captain Branch!’ said Nina brightly as she limped on to the
Pianosa
’s bridge.

Branch, an angular, tight-faced American, acknowledged her with a sullen nod. ‘You know the currents are stronger here than at the original site?’ he began, not wasting any valuable complaining time with pleasantries. ‘I’ll have to run the thrusters to hold position. That means I’ll be using more fuel than I expected.’

She forced a polite smile. ‘The IHA will cover any overages, Captain.’

‘It better. And I’d like that in writing sometime today, Dr Wilde.’

‘It’s at the top of my to-do list,’ said Nina, making a mocking face at him as he turned away. The other crew member in the room grinned. ‘How about you, Mr Lincoln?’ she asked him. ‘What’s the weather forecast for today?’

‘Well,’ said Lincoln, a handsome young black man from California, ‘it’s gonna be a very pretty morning, with about a five-knot easterly wind and a thirty per cent chance of rain in the afternoon. Although I foresee a one hundred per cent chance that our guests from the IHA are gonna get wet.’ He gestured down at the pontoon dock, where the day’s diving preparations were under way.

‘Not me today,’ Nina said. ‘Got to sit this one out.’

‘Damn, that’s a shame. Still, if you need something to do, may I invite you to take advantage of the
Pianosa
’s extensive range of leisure activities? By which I mean a deck of cards with the aces marked, a box of dominoes and the PlayStation in my quarters. I got
Madden
!’

‘That’s enough clowning around, Mr Lincoln,’ Branch snapped. ‘Go make yourself useful and check the galley inventory. I’m sure somebody’s been helping themselves to the canned fruit.’

‘Yes,
sir
!’ said Lincoln, giving Branch an exaggeratedly crisp salute and winking at Nina as he exited. She smiled back at him, then looked through the windows. The ship was about six miles from the nearest island, a low shape at the head of a chain stretching off into the distant haze. The sea was calm, the only other vessel in sight a white dot rounding the island. Away from the shipping lanes, the
Pianosa
’s only company over the course of the expedition so far had been the occasional passing yacht or fishing boat.

Although it meant negotiating several steep sets of stairs and ladders, she decided to head down to the dock; anything was better than hanging around with Branch. Compared to other survey vessels Nina had been aboard in the past, the
Pianosa
was relatively small, a 160-foot piece of rust-streaked steel that was a good decade older than she was. But while Branch was far from the most charming ship’s master she had ever met, he knew his job, and his ship was up to the tasks the IHA needed of it, even if it lacked creature comforts.

‘How’s the leg?’ the drysuited Chase called as she reached the bottom of the steep gangway running down the ship’s side to the dock. Only one of the
Pianosa
’s boats was in the water today, the other hanging from its crane on the deck above.

‘Oh, just fine. Y’know, I think I feel up to diving after all.’

He eyed her right foot, on which she was conspicuously not putting her weight. ‘Sure you do.’

‘Oh, all right, it still hurts like hell. It sucks when you’re right.’

‘But I’m always right!’ Chase said smugly. ‘Your life must just be one crap thing after another.’

She gave him a sly smile. ‘You really want me to go down that road?’

‘Maybe not, then. Did you get the weather?’

‘Yeah. Looks like it’s going to be fine - maybe some rain later, but nothing serious.’

‘Suits me. Oh, here we go.’ Bobak and Bejo made their way down the gangway, carrying a plastic case between them. They put it down and opened it to reveal a bright yellow pod the size of a large pumpkin, a spotlight and a bulbous lens cover giving it a lop-sided ‘face’. Bobak connected one end of a long cable to it. ‘At least you’ll be able to watch.’