Atlantis Endgame (3 page)

Ross spread his hands. "Crazy."

Eveleen laid down the earrings, and padded toward the bathroom. "But I guess yon never know! Watch 'em in case they suddenly start beeping mystery messages."

"With our hick, they're more likely to explode," he said grimly.

She was still laughing when the phone rang.

GORDON ASHE REACHED the restaurant twenty minutes early and was annoyed with himself. He could sit in the bar and brood for what would seem like twenty hours, or he could take his laptop in and look like a pompous fool. Or he could drive around the block twenty times.

With a sigh of annoyance he got out of his car and tossed the keys to the parking attendant. He checked his watch again, knowing it was a stupid impulse. Thirty whole seconds had sped by!

All right, he was in a sour mood anyway; why not go inside and brood.

The restaurant was an old favorite. It wasn't dark as pitch inside—he hated that—and it had decent food without a lot of the pretentious posturing that seemed to go with it in tonier places. He headed for the bar, which was mostly empty, for the hour was early yet.

A woman sat alone at the end. Tie almost looked away, but something in the curve of shoulder, the angle of her head zapped his memory. Twenty-five years he hadn't seen her, but he knew her immediately.

"Is that you, Gordon?" Her voice hadn't changed.

"Linnea?" His mind fumbled back and forth between two different tracks of thought: memories of their last meeting—a towering argument—and the e-mail she'd sent him just yesterday. A third track superimposed itself: what subtle measures did the mind use to mark a familiar face or form? He'd probably seen twenty thousand women—more—since he last was in Linnea Edel's presence, but he'd immediately known that precise tilt of chin as if he'd just parted from her an hour ago.

"Yes, it is I," she said, getting off her bar stool and coming forward.

Neither spoke as they looked at each other.
Site's the same,
he thought. Oh, older—and she didn't bother to hide it, either. Her thick cloud of dark hair was streaked with gray, and maybe her contours were softer, for she'd never been fashionably thin (or bad shown the slightest interest in fashion) back then. She was still short and round, and though age, and experience, and the inevitable effects of gravity had carved lines in her face, her Mediterranean bone structure was more sharply emphasized now, and he realized she was more attractive than ever.

He tried a polite opener. "How was the drive up from New York?"

"Slow. And then pretty." She gave him a rueful smile. "Gordon, I hope you're not mad at me. I realized after you sent your e-mail about meeting here—so neutral a place, like a truce—that maybe it seemed like I was threatening you, and it wasn't that, not at all."

Nothing like the exigencies of work to snap the mind back to the here and now. Aware of interested ears at the bar, Ashe said easily, "Threaten me all you like. I have just as much back history to bore you with as you could have for me. But how about we get a booth first, and we can play catch-up in comfort?"

Her eyes narrowed in a subtle signal of comprehension.

She laughed. "Ah, but I came armed with family photos! Lead on."

They were soon settled into a corner booth near the fireplace. A bar waiter appeared, and Ashe asked for seltzer on the rocks with a twist, just to get rid of the guy; he did not want alcohol clouding his brain now. As the waiter moved away, he looked at the drink Linnea had brought and realized she was drinking the same thing.

"Before we start," he said, striving for normalcy, except what is normal when you haven't seen someone since a fight twenty-five years ago, and then she sends yon a sinister letter? "Do yon really have family photos? How is J.J.? And didn't I hear you'd had lads?"

"Two." She raised her fingers. "Twins. Mariana is in the navy, doing something arcane with radar, and adores it, when I hear from her, which is about twice a year. Max is in Los Angeles at film school, working about twenty hours a day, which is what you have to do until you break into that business. I hear from him
once
a year."

She had picked up her glass and was gently clinking the ice cubes round and round, round and round. She seemed to realize that she was doing it and set it down again, then tipped her head, that inquiring angle that had reminded him of a bird, and said, "J.J. died five years ago."

"I'm sorry," Ashe said, hating how inadequate it sounded.

"Don't be. It was sudden, over his breakfast coffee. Just like that. I was even there to be with him those last few moments."

Ashe winced.

She laced her fingers together, her wedding band winking with golden light in the reflection from the fire.

"Best way to go, I think. No fear, and the doctors insisted there couldn't have been much suffering. Though it's hard enough on those of us left behind. So I became a hermit for a time, and then that time ended, and I looked about me, and realized that I was still alive, that my children were grown and didn't need me—and that I could, well, have a life of my own."

Again the tilt of the head. "And you were right, by the way."

Right? Was she talking about that last nasty exchange? Ashe's mind wheeled back rapidly, faster than light-speed. He was again on warm, dusty Crete, digging at Knossos. Two on the dig were J.J. Edel, twenty years older, and Linnea, young and earnest and ardent about the archaeology. Gordon swinging between finishing his doctoral work and getting lured by the government into the supersecret Project Star, during the years the Iron Curtain still blocked off the East.

What could he say? He could say—

"Here's your seltzer, sir. Now, are you folks ready to order?"

Ashe accepted the drink, and the waiter launched into a recital of a long list of specials. Ashe took a slug of cold seltzer, fighting the urge to tell the guy to take a hike.

Linnea smiled. "Oh, I'm sorry, we haven't even looked at our menus yet. Would you come back later?"

"Sure. Just wave a hand," the waiter said, and he left.

Linnea leaned forward. "The last time you and I saw one another, it you remember, we were walking along the harbor at Heraklion."

"I remember."

"And yon told me, in pungent and specific detail that I can still recall to this day, what a fatheaded doormat I was to do all J.J,'s work at the dig."

Ashe winced and shook his head. "And I've regretted it ever since, though I know that doesn't excuse it."

"Why should you excuse it? You were right. I did do all his work and let him take the credit. A lot of that was the cultural conditioning of the time—that's what ladies did. And you were right about J.J. incidentally: he really wasn't interested in archaeology or in any of the other degrees he almost got. He was just marking time until his father died suddenly and he took over the business, which he ran until the day he died. And I am delighted to say that my son never showed any interest in inheriting it. The new CEO is, in fact, a woman."

Ashe nodded.

"Well, bear with me now, Gordon, because it all ties together." She chuckled softly and again tilted her head. "After you and I had our little talk and you vanished into the ether, J.J. inherited, like I said. And since I was pregnant with the twins—and you know how primitive conditions were at the dig—and J.J. didn't want his little princess working, we both dropped out, moved to New York City, and I became a housewife until the morning I became a widow."

She finished her seltzer and sat back, sighing. "So as I said, my year of being a hermit passed, and then I looked around and realized that I had a life. Not as a morn or a wife, but as me. And I'd always loved archaeology, with a passion. I subscribed all these years to
Archeology
and a half dozen other scholarly magazines. So I decided to go back to school. No hurry and I don't care if I even graduate, because I'd never take one of the rare jobs from some young person struggling to follow his or her dream. J.J. did leave me very well off, so I can do what I want. Which, this last winter, was to go back with some students on a little dig."

She leaned forward, and Ashe did as well. "Not to Crete this time, but to Thera itself. And that's where I found what I sent you."

Ashe now drew the printout from his coat pocket. The picture in itself was nothing of interest to anyone who might glance casually at it: a photo of a hoop earring of beaten gold, somewhat dull, with bits of mud and debris stuck to it, but on the clearest part, quite distinct, was a jeweler's mark. A modern jeweler's mark.

Ashe looked down at it and up at Linnea's face.

She said, "You disappeared that spring from classes, and you kept giving these evasive answers when people asked what you were doing. And a couple of times the department secretary said you got calls from these guys from Washington, DC, which was quite a ways from our university."

Ashe said nothing.

Linnea grinned. "I tried to find you afterward, I have to admit. At first to continue the argument. That comment about doormats did stick in my craw, but as the years went by, and J.J. still called me his little princess, I realized that you were right all along. It stuck because it was true. Oh, I loved him, and he loved me, but J.J. never did see me as an adult in my own right—and I guess the role I got in the habit of playing wasn't exactly conducive to changing his worldview." She waved a hand, as though shooing away an annoying fly. "But we're not here to hash over old feminist issues. The thing is, I did try to find you, as well as some of our old friends, and though I eventually found all of them, you remained amazingly elusive."

She paused, sending Ashe an inquiring look. Tie said slowly, "Most of my subsequent work was on artifacts here in North America. If you stayed with Aegean studies, of course you'd lose track of me—" He shrugged. He had never minded deflecting people from his real work, but it made him feel queasy to issue these half-lies to a friend.

"Nice try," Linnea said, laughing a little. "I also heard from one of our mutual old friends about a dig in New Mexico, and you'd been in on a find that later vanished. No articles, no papers, no conferences. That, he told me in a letter, spells 'government' and 'top secret.'"

Ashe looked down, fiddling with his drink. What could he say?

She didn't seem to expect him to say anything; she kept on. "Then, a few years back, there was all that news about the alien spaceships, and the tapes, though it all disappeared from the news really quickly when it was discovered that they were old artifacts and aliens weren't coining here in peace or in war. People forgot. But I never did; especially when, it turned out, one of the sites mentioned was New Mexico, and a Dr. Ashe was quoted just once. I put the variables together, wondered if you might be part of the equation, and last winter when I uncovered that earring in a place that had been sealed under volcanic ash since 1628
b.c.
and saw that modern jeweler's mark, I decided that maybe it was time to try again to dig you up. Luckily people are easier to find on the Internet these days, even if their jobs aren't."

Ashe let out a sigh. "And you decided to find me because . . . ?"

"I figured if there was anyone who could tell me how a modern earring could get back to the mid-1600s
b.c.,
it was you."

Ashe hesitated. There was one obvious question to be asked, but he didn't think he could bring himself to do it quite yet. So he went to the next obvious. "You were the one who mentioned threats. I take it you haven't shared your find with anyone?"

"And don't plan to, if it will cause trouble. As I said, I am not hunting for a career, or even notoriety. Truth, yes. Insight into the past and how we got here today—the roots of our present civilization—yes. But not at the cost of people's lives. I paid my own way to the dig, so no one owned my time, and if it turns out to be a genuine artifact and I'm wrong, I'll restore it to the Greek government. But I do," she said again, in a low voice, "want to know the truth."

Ashe stared down at the picture again, his mind darting in circles like fireflies in a high wind. Nothing, though, got past that primary question—

"What is it, Gordon?" she whispered. "You look like you'd seen a—oh!" Her voice broke off.

He glanced up, to see her eyes gone round and dark with intensity. He realized he was clammy with sweat. At the same moment he saw a wince of compassion tighten her face, and she murmured in a fast, low voice, "I did not take it from a skeleton. I did not see any remains."

Ashe's breath leaked out, though his heart still hammered.

She gave her head a quick shake. "Of course you know what that dig is like: two more inches, and we don't know what we'll find. But the Marinates and Doumas teams have not uncovered any human remains so far, and that is still the same."

That leap of compassion, of sudden understanding, was not the reaction of an eager young student desperate to make a mark in the world. It was the reaction of a woman of experience, of integrity. It was the Linnea he'd once known, only grown up.

"I'll see what I can do," he promised.

CHAPTER 3

EVELEEN RIORDAN FELT her gold earrings swing against her jaws as she stepped into the elevator. Why did she feel so self-conscious all of a sudden? How many times had she worn this pair to work and never thought anything of it?