The Atlantis Code (50 page)

The last of the Keepers arrived in the late evening. Lourds had offered to pick him up at the airport, but the man declined.

When Lourds opened the door to the private suite at the Hempel Hotel Leslie had surprisingly arranged for them, he was taken off guard for a moment by the man’s appearance. He was of medium height and athletic build. His skin was dark, but his eyes were hazel. A silver headband held his long black hair from his face. He wore stonewashed jeans and a chambray work shirt under a fringed leather jacket. He might have been all of twenty-five years old.

“Professor Lourds?” the young man inquired in a polite voice.

“I am,” Lourds acknowledged.

“I’m Tooantuh Blackfox. Call me Jesse.”

Lourds shook the proffered hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jesse. Come in.”

Blackfox stepped easily into the room. His eyes, though, roved the suite instantly and took in everything.

“Have a seat.” Lourds gestured to the long conference table he’d had brought up to the room. Diop, Adebayo, and Vang Kao Sunglue, the other Keeper, sat at the table.

Natasha stood near the windows. Lourds didn’t doubt that she’d already gone “shopping” for weapons to replace those she’d had to give up in Nigeria. A long jacket reached to her thighs.

Gary and Leslie sat to one side. Lourds had forbidden any filming, but he hadn’t had the heart to ban them from the meeting. They’d come a long way together.

Leslie had also provided a touch-pad projection computer setup that Lourds was currently using. He was familiar with the system from the university.

Brief introductions were made. Thankfully, they already shared a common language and some history through their exchanged letters.

Vang was an old man, more withered and ancient than Adebayo. He wore black slacks and a white shirt with black tie. He was of Hmong descent, one of the tribal people in Vietnam that the United States had recruited to fight their war against Communist North Vietnam. He’d carefully slicked back his wisps of gray hair.

According to what he’d told Lourds, he’d been a lawyer in Saigon. But that was before it had fallen and been renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Now he lived once more out in the mountains as his people had always done. There he was a shaman. As a Keeper, he cared for the clay flute that had been handed down for thousands of years through his family.

He had been loath to leave Vietnam with the instrument. The flute had never been risked before.

But they were all, Lourds knew, curious about the heirlooms they’d been guarding all those years.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lourds said as he stood at the front of the conference table, “we’ve all taken part in a remarkable journey during the last month.” He looked at Adebayo, Blackfox, and Vang. “Some of you have been embarked upon this journey for much, much longer. Let’s see if we can bring it to a close. Or at least head in that direction.”

Lourds tapped the keyboard in front of him. Images of the inscriptions on the instruments appeared on the large screen behind him.

“Those instruments each come with two inscriptions,” Lourds said. “You’ve told me that you can’t read either one of them. As you know from your conversations with each other, all of you have been told the story of an island kingdom where many wondrous things were. That, according to the tale, is where the five instruments come from.”

All eyes focused steadily on him. The room was entirely quiet.

“According to the stories you were told, God chose to strike down the island in His holy wrath,” Lourds went on. “I’m here to tell you that one of the inscriptions on each of the instruments confirms that story.”

“You translated the inscriptions?” Blackfox asked.

“Yes. I’ve translated what is on your instrument as well as the writings on the other instruments I’ve seen.”

“You’ve seen the other two instruments?” Blackfox hadn’t been there for the briefing Adebayo and Vang had received.

“Yes, and I suspect that the one on the pipe you’re in charge of will have the same inscription.”

“It does.”

Lourds looked at the young man. “How do you know that?”

“Because I translated it.”

Leslie saw the surprised look on Lourds’s face and smiled a little.
You’re not the only brainiac in the group, are you, Professor?

Then she caught Natasha looking reproachfully at her and dropped the smile.

“How did you translate the inscription?” Lourds asked.

Blackfox shrugged. “What do you know about the language of my people?”

“The Cherokee were an advanced society,” Lourds replied. “The popular misconception is that Sequoyah invented the Cherokee syllabary.”

Blackfox smiled. “Most people refer to it as the Cherokee alphabet.”

“Most people,” Lourds replied, “are not linguistics professors.”

Gary held his hand up just like he was in class. Leslie snorted quietly.

“Yes, Gary?” Lourds said.

“I don’t know what a syllabary is, mate.”

Lourds leaned a hip against the conference table and folded his arms across his chest. Looking at him, Leslie felt again why she’d been attracted to him. He was smart and handsome, and his passion for his work and teaching was obvious. Stealing him away from that work was almost like cheating his mistress.

Watching him work was a total turn-on. Except that she knew now he was a hound dog. Still, she’d been warned, and the whole physical relationship between them had been due to her manipulations, not his. It almost made her feel sorry for him when she thought about what she was going to do.

“A syllabary is a system of symbols that denote actual spoken syllables,” Lourds said. “Instead of letters, symbols are grouped together. It’s pure phonics-driven and many words are differentiated by tone. The written syllabary doesn’t reflect the tone, but readers know what it is from the context in which it’s presented. Clear?”

“Sure.” Gary nodded.

“There are eighty-five symbols in the Cherokee language,” Lourds said.

“Do you speak the language?” Blackfox asked.

“I can when pressed to do so. Reading it is harder.”

“They got it wrong when they thought Sequoyah invented the syllabary.”

“I know,” Lourds agreed. “The Cherokees had a priesthood called the Ah-ni-ku-ta-ni who invented writing and guarded the knowledge of it zealously. From what I’ve read recently, the Cherokee priests oppressed their people and were finally killed in an uprising.”

“Most of them were killed,” Blackfox agreed. “Several of their descendants, young men who still knew the language of the priests, hid among the people. They kept their society secret and intact. Sequoyah was one of them. The outrage against the priests was so strong that a written language wasn’t allowed for hundreds of years.”

“How does the inscription on the pipe you’ve been protecting compare to the Cherokee language?”

“It’s very similar.”

“May I see it?”

The pipe was a straight barrel of fired blue-gray clay with six holes. It was little over a foot in length. The inscriptions were there as well, but it would take a magnifying glass to make them visible.

Lourds ran his fingers over the instrument’s semi-rough surface. “You’ve read the inscription?”

Blackfox nodded. “It tells the same story that you’re telling. There was an island kingdom, a place where our people came from, that was destroyed by the Great Spirit.”

“But you haven’t been able to translate the other inscription?”

“No.”

Lourds took a quick breath and refused to be disappointed. The other language would fall prey to his skills soon. He was confident of that, but impatient.

“Did Sequoyah know about the pipe?” Lourds asked.

Blackfox hesitated. “He’d never seen it. That wasn’t permitted.”

“But he’d known it existed.”

“Possibly.”

Lourds stood and paced. “I think someone did, and I think that someone was looking for the instruments in the 1820s or 1830s.”

“Why do you think this?” Vang asked. He was always very quiet and conservative in his dialogues since his arrival yesterday.

“Have you ever heard of the Vai people?” Lourds asked.

Vang shook his wizened head.

“They are people who live in Liberia,” Adebayo said.

“Exactly,” Lourds said, smiling. “They didn’t have a written language. But in 1832, a man named Austin Curtis moved to Liberia and married into a Vai tribe. As it turns out, Curtis was just part of a group of Cherokee immigrants that moved into the area.”

“You think they were looking for the pipe?” Diop asked.

“Possibly.”

Diop shook his head. “That may not be so. In 1816, Reverend Robert Finley proposed the American Colonization Society and James Monroe, who had already been elected President of the United States, helped found it. Under this society, freed slaves were returned to West Africa. This man Curtis may have simply been involved with that.”

“Whatever the case,” Lourds said, “we know that Austin inspired the Vai people to adopt their own written language. Which they did. It’s very similar to the Cherokee written language. The actual Vai syllabary is attributed to Momolu Duwalu Bukele.”

Lourds handed the pipe back to Blackfox. The young man put it in its protective case.

“I believe people have been searching for these instruments since they were first made,” Lourds said. “Many thousands of years ago.”

“Who?” Blackfox asked.

“I don’t know. We’ve been discussing it for days now.” Lourds felt the fatigue hovering over him. Only his self-discipline, excitement, and the certainty that he was about to crack the final language kept him going.

“The inscription also says that the instruments are the keys to the Drowned Land,” Blackfox said.

“When I first translated that,” Lourds admitted, “I didn’t believe it. I thought perhaps there might have been a way once, but not when an island has been underwater for thousands of years. Salt water even leeches away silver over time. Turns it into an unrecognizable lump of oxidized metal. I couldn’t imagine doors made of gold. Much less this.”

He turned to the display and tapped the keyboard. Immediately the image of the massive door down in Father Sebastian’s dig in Cádiz filled the screen.

“I don’t know what this door’s made of,” Lourds commented, “but it doesn’t look like gold. However, after being on the sea bottom—or near to it—that door appears to be unblemished.”

“That’s Cádiz, Spain,” Blackfox said. “I’ve been watching this story.”

Lourds nodded. “It is.”

“Do you think that was the Drowned Land?”

Tracing the inscriptions across the vault door, Lourds said, “This is the same writing as the transcription I haven’t—yet—been able to translate. I’d say it’s a safe bet.”

“Do you think we need to go there?”

“No,” Adebayo said. “Our stories tell us that the seeds of man’s final and eternal doom lie in that place. God must have his vengeance, and we must not seek out his wrath again.”

“It’s possible that we need to destroy the instruments,” Vang said.

The idea of that—which had most emphatically
not
been discussed before—horrified Lourds.

“No,” Adebayo said. “We were given these instruments by our ancestors. We were told to protect them, as they were told by their ancestors before them, and I believe we should do that or anger God again.”

“But,” Blackfox said quietly, “if the inscription is correct, if the Drowned Land—or Atlantis or whatever you want to call it—does hold a temptation that could destroy the world again, shouldn’t we remove that temptation?”

“I think so,” Vang said.

“And what if we incur God’s wrath by destroying those instruments?” Adebayo asked.

Neither Blackfox nor Vang replied.

“Man is shaped by his belief and his resistance to temptation,” Adebayo said. “That is why God has provided the mountains, to make our way hard, and the oceans, to make it look like some journeys are impossible.”

“We could save the world by destroying those instruments,” Vang said. “Even one of them. The ancestors say all five must be used.”

“I don’t think destroying them would be so easy. The cymbal and the bell have been lost to us for thousands of years,” Adebayo said. “How do you account for the fact that even under trying circumstances they still exist?”

No one answered.

“I propose to you,” Adebayo said, “that you’ve already seen God’s will in motion. He has preserved these instruments, and he has sent Professor Lourds our way to bring us together. For the first time, the Keepers are joined.”

Lourds didn’t know how to feel about that. He’d never pictured himself as a divine instrument.

“There’s something else to consider,” Natasha said.

The men looked at her.

“If you destroy the instruments, your enemies—whoever they are—win. You lose. You will have failed the task you had set before you.” Natasha paused. “Not only that, but your chance to strike back against your enemies will be gone.”