The Hunt for Atlantis (20 page)

A soft splash made Nina look around to see a second caiman surface at the other end of the chamber. It was even larger than the first, and seemed unconcerned about remaining unseen, floating on the surface like a log.

A log with teeth. It lazily opened its mouth, letting out a malevolent hiss.

Kari increased her pace. She was now halfway across, the beam drooping again under her weight. Every step made it sway a little more.

She could see the dagger clearly now. Its tip rested in a little metal cup that seemed to be connected to something behind the shallow recess. Another booby trap?

There was also a very narrow ledge just above the end of the beam, so thin she hadn’t been able to spot it until now. It was under a meter across and barely a centimeter deep, just enough to provide a toehold. It had obviously been placed there deliberately by the temple’s builders, but for now their reasoning remained unclear, and Kari had the distinct feeling she wouldn’t like the answer when it revealed itself—

The beam wobbled.

Her attention had been diverted by the mysterious ledge, just for a moment—but a moment was all it took for her to lose her balance. She tried desperately to straighten up, but her weight had already shifted too far over. In a second, she would fall into the pool, into the jaws of the waiting caimans—

She threw herself forward, grabbing the beam with both hands as she landed on her stomach. The narrow wood slammed against her like a truncheon blow. She clamped her knees around the shuddering walkway, trying to stop herself from rolling into the pool.

“Kari!” Nina screamed.

Chase pulled off his jacket, ready to jump in after her. “Shit, she’s not going to make it!”

The caimans, attracted by the noise, closed in.

“Stay back!” Kari shouted. Her knees were still in the water, but she managed to hook both her boots around the beam to drive herself forward.

The long head of the nearest caiman came fully out of the water, opening to expose its jagged teeth—

“Oi!” Chase roared, dropping onto the end of the beam and stamping one foot hard into the water, creating a huge splash. “Over ’ere! Hey!”

The larger of the two caimans changed direction with a flick of its tail, heading for him. The first, still gliding rapidly towards Kari, turned its head towards the noise—and took the heel of her boot against the side of its skull with a crack that echoed around the chamber.

The caiman released a sharp bark of air, thrashing its tail and dropping back into the water. Frantically, Kari hauled herself along the beam, looking back over her shoulder at the great reptile. It was circling in a sinister line through the water, arcing back around for her.

Chase kicked up another splash before leaping back onto the ledge as the caiman erupted from the water, its giant mouth agape. Powerful claws raked the stone wall as its heavy body thudded against the beam.

Kari was nearly jolted into the water by the impact. She clung to the beam with all her strength, the caiman crashing into it again and again in its attempt to pursue Chase, before it finally admitted defeat and dropped back into the pool.

The other caiman was still heading back at her, slimy water streaming from its mouth as it broke the surface. This time it had learned its lesson and was aiming for her upper body, out of range of her legs. Straining, she dragged herself forward again.

Her fingers touched cold stone, and she clawed for the tiny ledge, gaining just enough purchase to pull herself up from the beam and plant one foot upon it, thrusting herself upright.

The caiman lunged—

With a yell, Kari snatched the dagger from its resting place and plunged it down between the caiman’s malevolent yellow eyes, stabbing deep into its brain.

The reptile crashed onto the beam, then slid lifelessly back into the pool as she pulled the dagger out with a spurt of blood.

And where the blood blossomed in the dark water, it suddenly frothed, churned from below by dozens of fins.

Chase had been right.

Piranhas!

Kari flattened herself against the wall. One foot was on the beam, which juddered as the caiman’s body ground against it. The very tip of her other heel was on the little ledge. She waited until the beam stopped shaking, then looked around to see the result of removing the dagger. Something had definitely clicked when she’d grabbed it…

Two things happened at once.

From somewhere above Chase and Nina came a loud clang of metal. She caught a flicker of movement inside the opening Chase had seen, but it was too dark to make out the cause.

But she had no time to think about it, because the beam had started moving, retracting into the wall behind her. The supporting poles moved with it, slicing V-shaped ripples into the water—the whole thing was mounted on some sort of framework at the bottom of the pool, and now it was disappearing with alarming speed into the cold stone at her back.

“Eddie, do something, stop it!” Nina wailed, helpless as she watched the beam slide away from the side of the platform.

“How?” he demanded, looking for something, anything he could do to stop its relentless retreat. There was nothing.

Close to panic, Kari hopped her foot along the beam, only to have it forced back against the wall within moments. At the speed the beam was moving, she had a minute—less—before it completely disappeared and she was plunged into the pool with the remaining caiman… and the piranhas tearing at the flesh of its dead companion.

She still had the dagger in one hand, for all the good it would do her.

The dagger …

There must be something more, she realized. She had to do something with the dagger, not simply retrieve it.

“Throw me the flashlight!” she shouted.

“She’ll fall in!” Nina protested as Chase pulled back his arm.

“She’ll fall in anyway in a minute!” he shot back. “Kari! Ready?”

“Yes!”

He flung the flashlight. The brilliant light arced across the chamber like a falling star. Kari reached up with her wounded arm, and the light landed in her hand with a slap. Swaying to keep her balance, she brought it up, aiming the beam at the recess high above the other side of the pool. It was revealed as an alcove, a cube three feet to a side. Metal gleamed within, copper or gold, a foot-wide circular object like a shield standing up inside it.

Not a shield; a target.

There was only a meter of the beam still exposed, just seconds before it disappeared completely.

Kari turned and stepped onto it with both feet, snapping back her right arm to throw the dagger. The blade flashed through the torch beam—

It struck the target with a bang, dead center. The metal disc toppled backwards, disappearing from sight.

The beam stopped moving. With a creak of wood and straining ropes, the narrow drawbridge at the far end of the chamber fell, hitting the platform opposite with a whump.

Kari looked down. There was just enough of the beam still protruding from the wall for her to fit both her feet, if she turned them sideways.

She put her free hand against the wall for support, feeling very vulnerable. “Now what am I supposed to do?” she asked aloud.

As if in answer, there was a noise above her. A length of knotted rope, a chunk of wood weighing down its end, dropped from the ledge running along the wall.

Chase and Nina were already making their way to the bridge. “We’ll meet you on the other side!” Chase called as Kari gripped the rope and pulled on it, checking that it wasn’t about to break—or that it wasn’t booby-trapped itself. It seemed firm. Favoring her right arm, she climbed onto the ledge. It was only a foot across, but compared to what she’d just been standing on, it seemed as wide as a motorway.

Nina and Chase were waiting for her at the end of the drawbridge as she dropped down. “That was a hell of a throw,” said Chase as Kari slumped against the wall, exhausted. “How big was the target?” She held her hands a foot apart as Nina checked her makeshift bandage. “Bloody hell, I don’t think I could’ve made that. They weren’t kidding when they said it was a challenge of skill.”

“We’ve still got one more challenge to go,” Nina said.

“The Challenge of Mind? That sounds like your cup of tea, Doc. You up for it?”

She smiled nervously. “Do I have a choice?”

“How long have we got?” Kari asked Chase, voice tired.

“We’ve got… thirty-six minutes.” They all looked down the passage leading deeper into the temple. Even though it was no different from the others they had traversed, it somehow seemed more forbidding.

“Okay, then,” said Nina, standing straight with a defiance she definitely didn’t feel. “I hope my mind’s up to the challenge.”

Wary of traps, they made their way down the passage.

Something was troubling Nina, but she wasn’t quite sure what. It wasn’t just the adrenal aftershock of having narrowly escaped death. There was something else, a feeling, a certainty that she was overlooking some vital fact.

There was no time to think about it, though. Another chamber opened up ahead.

“Hold it,” said Chase, stopping at the entrance. He shone the light into the space beyond. “Smaller than the last one.”

Compared to the expansive pool chamber, this one was miniscule, only about fifteen feet across. As Chase moved the circle of light around, Nina saw that the walls were covered with markings—the same language as on the Atlantean sextant arm, and the entrance of the temple itself.

“Looks safe,” he announced, “but don’t quote me on that. Just be careful.” He stepped into the room, pausing as if expecting some hidden trap to be triggered, then signaled for Nina and Kari to follow. “Okay. So, Challenge of Mind. Go for it, Doc.”

“Right …” she said, taking the flashlight so she could examine the inscriptions on the walls. “Oh God! This could take days to translate!”

“We’ve only got thirty-three minutes to sunset. Think fast.”

“Nina, over here.” Kari had gone to the wall opposite the entrance. A stone block, unmarked by text, appeared to be a door, and next to it was what looked almost like…

“It’s a scale,” said Nina. “A weighing scale.” She aimed the beam beneath it. A trough was carved out of the stone, and inside it were a hundred or so lead balls, each the size of a cherry. “I guess we have to put the right number of balls into the scale. But how do we work out how many to use?” There was a lever by the scale’s copper pan; she reached for it, but Kari stopped her.

“I have a feeling that we only get one attempt,” she said, pointing up at the ceiling. Suspended above them was a large metal grid of foot-long spikes, ready to impale everyone in the room when it fell. Nina hurriedly pulled her hand away from the lever.

She flicked the light across the walls until she spotted large symbols carved over the closed door. They were arranged in three rows, one above the other, with groups of six different symbols in the uppermost one, five in the remaining two. Nina immediately recognized the first symbol. Groups of little marks like apostrophes …

“They’re numbers,” she announced. “It’s some kind of mathematical puzzle. Working out the answer tells you how many balls to put into the pan.”

“Is that all?” Chase sounded almost disappointed. “Christ, even I could do that. Let’s see … the top one, there’s three of those little dots, five upside-down Vs, seven bent-over Ls, two sideways arrows with a line under them, four backwards Ns and one backwards N with a line next to it. That’s 357,241. Doddle.”

“And you’d be wrong,” said Nina, managing a smile. “The numerical order is reversed from ours—the first symbol, the little dot, is actually the smallest number; each one of them is one unit. So the first number’s actually 142,753. It’s the same symbol from the river map on the sextant arm, and I know I’m right about it being a one, because otherwise we would never have found this place.”

“All right, smarty.” Chase grinned. “So the other numbers are … 87,527 and 34,164. So, what, we subtract them? That makes, uh …”

“Twenty-one thousand and sixty-two,” Nina and Kari said together, almost immediately.

Chase whistled, impressed. “Okay, so we don’t need a calculator. But there’s no way there’s twenty-one thousand balls in that trough.”

“What if it’s a combination of operators?” Kari suggested. “Subtract the second number from the first, then divide by the third?”

“Too complicated,” Nina said, staring at the numbers. “There’s no symbol suggesting that you need to perform different operations. Besides …” She frowned, working it out. “The result would be a fraction, and I don’t think putting one-point-six-two balls into the scale is likely to be the right answer.”

Chase winced. “Bloody hell. It hurts just thinking about doing that in my head.”

“The first number plus the third divided by the second is two-point-oh-two,” Kari suggested. “I doubt they would have calculated results down to one fiftieth accuracy. They may have rounded it to two …”

“It’s still too complicated!” Nina cried. “And it’s too arbitrary. The first plus the third divided by the second? It’s like setting a crossword puzzle but missing all the down clues!” She pointed the light back at the other walls. “The clue must be somewhere else, in the other text. I just have to find it.”

“Tick-tock, Doc,” said Chase, pointing at his watch. “Twenty-nine minutes.”

Nina knelt at one of the walls, scanning the light over the symbols. After a minute, she blew out her breath in frustration. “All of this is about the building of the city and the history of the people afterwards. I don’t see anything that relates to the puzzle at all.”

“There’s nothing about the people before they came here from Atlantis?” Kari asked.

“Not that I can see.” Nina hurried across the chamber to look at the text on the opposite wall. “This is more of the same. It’s almost like a ledger, a record of the tribe year by year. How many children were born, how many animals they had … There must be a couple of centuries of data here. But none of it has anything to do with the challenge!” She jerked an angry thumb at the symbols over the door.

“I just thought of something,” Chase said. “This thing’s a challenge of the mind, right? Well, what if it’s some sort of lateral thinking puzzle?”

“What do you mean?” asked Kari.

“This is obviously a door, right?” Chase stepped up to it. “We didn’t even think about just opening it.”

“Give it a try!” Nina told him.

Chase reached out and pushed the door. It remained completely still. He tried one side, then the other. Nothing happened. Just to be thorough, he also attempted to lift it, then pull it outwards from the wall. Still nothing.

“Bollocks!” he exclaimed, stepping back. “I really thought that might work.”

“So did somebody else,” Nina said, joining him. “Look! I just realized, the door’s not quite the same color as the rest of the chamber. It’s been carved from different rock. And there are marks on the stones around it—chisel marks, and crowbars. But none on the door itself. This is a newer door; the Indians have replaced it! Somebody didn’t want to solve the puzzle, so they just smashed the door open.”

“The Nazis?” Kari wondered.

“Sounds like their kind of approach,” said Chase. “They must have been able to persuade the Indians to let them bring more than just a flashlight inside.”

Kari nodded. “Probably at gunpoint.”

“Right. Problem is, we don’t have any crowbars. So we’ve got to do it the hard way.”

Nina hurried back to the carvings on the side wall. “I think we still can. These numbers, there’s something odd about them. Look.” She ran her finger along the lines of symbols. “You see? They’re arranged in groups of eight, at most. Never nine or ten. Eight here, eight here, eight here…”

“You think they could have been working in base eight?” asked Kari.

“It’s possible. They wouldn’t be the only ancient civilization to use it.”

“What’ve you found? What’s all this eight stuff?” Chase asked.

“I think we’ve been projecting our own biases onto the people who built this temple,” Nina said, excitement glinting in her eyes. “We assumed they were using base ten math, like we do.” She caught Chase’s questioning look. “Our numerical system is based around multiples of ten. Tens, hundreds, thousands …”

“Because we’ve got ten fingers, right. I did pass my GCSE maths,” he said. “Well, just about.”

“It’s a very common system,” Nina went on. “The ancient Greeks used it, the Romans, the Egyptians … It’s common because it’s literally right there in front of you.” She held up her fingers to demonstrate. “But it’s not the only system. The Sumerians used base sixty.”

“Sixty?” hooted Chase. “Who the hell would use that?”

Kari smiled. “You would. Every time you look at your watch. It’s the basis of our entire timekeeping system.”

“Oh, right.” Chase nodded sheepishly.

“There’ve been plenty of other bases used by ancient civilizations,” Nina continued. “The Mayans used base twenty, Bronze Age Europeans used base eight…” She snapped her head around to look at the symbols again. “Base eight! That’s it, it must be!”

“Why would anyone use eight?” Chase asked. In response, Kari held up her hands, fingers splayed—but with her thumbs tucked against her palms. “Oh, I get it—they used their thumbs to count on their fingers, but didn’t actually count the thumbs?”

“That’s the theory,” said Nina, searching through the inscriptions. “So instead of going one, ten, one hundred, the numbers actually go one, eight, sixty-four…” She rushed back to the door. “So the first column is single units, the second multiples of eight, then sixty-four, five hundred and twelve, four thousand and ninety-six and…”

“Thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-eight,” Kari finished.

“Right. So the number would be, let’s see … three single units, plus five units of eight, forty, plus sixty-four times seven …”

Chase made a pained noise. “I’ll let you two work all that out.”

Kari came up with the answer first. “Fifty thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven.”

“Okay,” said Nina. “You do the second number, I’ll do the third.” Another burst of mental arithmetic produced the answers: 36,695 and 14,452. “All right! So the first minus the second minus the third is …”

They both thought hard about it, Chase watching intently—only to see both their faces fall at almost the same moment. “What? What’s the answer?”

“It’s minus four hundred and eighty,” Nina told him despondently. “It can’t be base eight.”

“What about base nine?” asked Kari. “If decimal gives too large a result, and octal too small…”

“The answer would still be in the thousands. Shit!” Nina gave Chase a questioning look.

“Twenty-four minutes.”

“Damn it! We’re running out of time!” She angrily kicked the door. “What the hell are we missing?”

Chase crouched and rummaged through the lead balls, hoping there would be some hidden clue in the trough. There wasn’t. “What if we just take a best guess and put that many balls in the pan? There’s a chance we might get lucky.”

Nina touched her pendant. “That would need the biggest piece of luck in the world.”

“It’s all we’ve got. We can’t just give up—even if we go back through all the other challenges, the Indians’ll kill us as soon as we get outside. And Hugo and Agnaldo and the Prof.”

“If we get it wrong, we’ll be killed anyway,” Kari reminded him, pointing at the spikes suspended overhead.

“Maybe there’s some way we can pull the lever from outside the room…”

But Nina was no longer listening. Something else Chase had said was now foremost in her mind.

Back through all the other challenges …

That was what had been troubling her, gnawing at her mind. And now that she knew what it was …

“There’s another way through!” she burst out. “There has to be! The tribespeople maintain the temple, and the traps—they must, they need to be reset. And repaired.” She indicated the stone door. “But there’s no way the temple’s builders would have forced the very people who were supposed to be protecting it to go through the challenges every time they needed to go inside—one little mistake, and they’re dead! So there has to be some way for them to get through safely without running the gauntlet every time.”

“A back door?” asked Chase.

“Yes, like a service access, or even just some way to open the exit of each challenge without actually having to complete it.” Nina turned the light back to the chamber walls. “Maybe there’s a switch, or a loose block, some way to open the door.”

They hurriedly searched the walls of the chamber, fingertips brushing over the cold stone to feel for anything out of place. After a minute, Chase raised his voice. “Here!”

Nina and Kari joined him in one corner of the room. At floor level, right where the two walls met, was a small vertical slot. It wasn’t much of an opening—but compared to the precise joins of the other blocks, it was clearly a deliberate feature rather than poor workmanship. “What’s inside?” Kari asked.

“No idea—it’s too small to get my hand into. Nina, you’ve got nice dainty little fingers—have a root around.”

“And I’d like them to stay nice,” Nina complained, but she knelt by the slot anyway. “Oh God. I just hope there’s not some finger-chopping thing or a scorpion inside…”

She warily slipped her fingers between the blocks. A little more … more …

Her fingertip touched something. She flinched, afraid it was a hair-trigger that would drop the spikes onto them. But the trio remained unimpaled.

For now.

“What is it?” asked Kari.

“There’s something metal in here.”

“A switch?”

“I don’t know … hold on.” Nina tried to slide her fingers around the obstruction. “It could be.”

Chase leaned closer. “Can you pull it?”

“Let me,” said Kari. “Nina, you should wait in the passageway. Just in case something goes wrong.”

“If it doesn’t work, then we’re going to be dead soon anyway,” Nina said. “You two get out of the chamber. Go on!” she added, before either of them could object. She took several deep breaths as they backed through the entrance to the chamber. “Okay. Here goes …”

She wrapped her fingers around the metal, paused for a moment to wonder what the hell she was doing, and pulled it.

Clink.

The hanging framework of spikes remained still.

Another, louder clink of metal came from the stone door. Nina exhaled loudly. “I think it worked …”

“Get out of the room,” Chase ordered, waving Kari to stay back as he walked to the door. Nina gratefully obeyed. He braced himself, then pushed. The door swung open, heavy stone rasping over the floor. Another dark passage lay beyond.

“You did it!” Kari cried.

“Nice work,” said Chase. “But we really need to shift—we’ve only got twenty-one minutes left.”

“We’d better get a move on then.” Nina patted Chase’s arm as she passed him. “And you were right about the lateral thinking.”