The Atlantis Stone (8 page)

CHAPTER 18

Vysotsky summoned Valentina. Coming into his office, she saw a half empty glass of vodka on his desk. This early in the morning it meant trouble.

"Valentina. You are looking lovely, as usual. Sit."

Vysotsky gestured at a chair near his desk. She sat.

"It will interest you to know the FSB has taken an interest in your sister."

"My sister? She is in Russia?"

"No. She's in Egypt. Volkov has sent people after her."

"Why?"

"She has a map he wants. Volkov sent three of his agents to America in an attempt to get it. His operatives underestimated your sister's skills."

"She killed them?"

"She did. Now he has a problem. She will be on full alert but it's not enough to make Volkov back off. Sending agents to Egypt means he's determined to get the information from her any way he can."

Valentina affected indifference. "What has this got to do with me?"

"Oh, please, Valentina. Don't pretend you don't care, I know you too well. Your sister is important to you. You demonstrated that in Vienna and Germany."

"She is our enemy. I can't help our blood relationship. I admit, I think about her sometimes."

"That is only natural. If I thought the situation in any way compromised your loyalty, we would not be having this kind of conversation."

The unspoken threat was clear.

Vysotsky continued. "I will be truthful with you. I don't know why this map is important to Volkov but I will not let him have it. I am sending you to Egypt. Try to find out why she is there."

"What if Volkov's men do something stupid?"

"Do not intervene unless it can't be avoided. However, Volkov must not have an opportunity to question her."

"Am I authorized to use lethal force?"

"Did I say that? Use your best judgment."

He's covering his ass, in case somebody is listening. But he's not covering mine.

"Understood."

"Harker's people are staying at a hotel on the Mediterranean coast. You are leaving this afternoon. Do you want backup?"

"You know I work better on my own."

"I thought you would say that."

Vysotsky opened a drawer, took out a flat package and pushed it across the desk at her. He ticked off the contents on his fingers.

"Your tickets and hotel reservation. Location of the hotel where the Americans are staying. A car reservation at the airport. Money, Egyptian and American. Your passport."

"Who am I supposed to be?"

"You are a representative of a Moscow travel agency seeking new destinations for your clients."

"Weapons?"

"A package will be waiting for you in your hotel room."

"Will the Egyptians know I'm there?"

"No."

"Good."

"Do you have any questions?"

"Do you want me to question my sister if there's an opportunity?"

"I want you to stay away from her."

"Something could happen that makes it necessary."

Vysotsky looked at her. "Make sure it doesn't."

CHAPTER 19

At the desk of the hotel, the clerk gave them directions to the ruins and assured them it was safe to visit because the government had posted guards for the protection of tourists.

As they left the lobby Ronnie said, "I sure feel safer now."

They were doing their best to look like tourists. It wasn't hard. No one would think they were anything but what they appeared to be. Selena wore loose slacks and a lightweight, long-sleeved shirt to protect her skin from the sun. A wide brimmed straw hat and large sunglasses completed the image of a foreign woman on vacation.

Nick and Ronnie wore jeans, desert boots and loose, short-sleeved shirts. Baseball caps and sunglasses rounded out their outfits. They might have been brothers. No one would mistake them for locals.

Stalls filled with goods lined the road leading out of town. They petered out after the first kilometer. Except for the potholed highway, there was nothing to see but the Mediterranean off to the right and empty miles of sand to the left. The area was deserted. The roadside stands they saw along the way were shuttered. Faded signs proclaimed souvenirs and guide services in Arabic and tortured English.

The air conditioner in the Rover didn't work. A hot wind coming through the open windows smelled of dust and heat and provided little relief.

They passed an abandoned building advertising bottled water, food and souvenirs. Slogans in Arabic had been spray-painted across the front.

"I wonder where all the people have gone?" Selena asked

"It's because of ISIS," Nick said. He took one hand off the wheel and wiped sweat away from his forehead. "Out here, you're either with them or against them. If you're with them, you're probably off fighting in Libya. If you're against them, you're either a slave or dead."

Selena looked at a map she held in her lap. "Libya's not far away. We should reach the ruins soon."

Ronnie pointed ahead. A low building stuck up from the flat monotony of the coastal plain.

"That must be it."

They reached the temple complex ten minutes later. Nick parked in a paved lot big enough for a hundred cars. It was deserted except for a dented Volkswagen camper bus and a military jeep.

At one time this had been an important temple. The ruin was impressive. A dozen broken columns lined a wide forecourt. Three massive columns carved to represent date palms stood at the entrance, supporting an intact, flat roof. Each column was fifty feet high.

The sun beat down on the ruin, making it shimmer with golden light. The interior of the temple looked shady and inviting.

A bored attendant took a small entrance fee from them. Two soldiers sat nearby, playing a desultory board game in the shade of an awning stretched out from the side of the attendant's shack. Their rifles were propped against the wall.

"Do not wander far," one said as they walked by. "Touching anything inside is forbidden." He gave Selena a lewd look. "Perhaps you would like a private tour of the ruins?"

"I don't want one, but would you like to show my husband around?"

The guard looked confused. His companion laughed.

When they were out of earshot Nick said, "You couldn't resist, could you?"

"Did you see the way he looked at me? I wanted to slap him."

They reached the forecourt and stopped. Selena looked up at the temple and the inscriptions along the walls.

She shook her head. "This can't be the right place."

"What do you mean?" Nick asked. "This is the spot marked on the map."

"That mark is only an approximate location. Stephanie scanned the area marked on the map and found this temple. It's in about the right spot, so we all assumed this was what was meant. But this is too new, too recent. I'd guess the building dates to eleven or twelve hundred BCE, during the New Kingdom period. The pillar in the photograph goes back to King Menes, two thousand years before that. No way the Russian who marked that map found it here."

"Maybe this was built over an earlier site."

"That's possible. But if it was, they would've torn everything down and used the materials in the new building. That was common practice in ancient Egypt. Look at this place. They would never have left that column lying around."

"So what do you want to do?"

"We're here. We might as well go in but I don't think we're going to find what we're looking for."

The interior was cool and dim, a pleasant change from the heat and harsh light outside. The walls were painted with hieroglyphics.

Selena studied the writing. "I was right. This was built in the reign of Ramesses X. That puts it almost at the end of the New Kingdom."

Ronnie said, "Nothing on those walls that says 'this way to Atlantis?'"

"Smartass. It would make things a lot easier, wouldn't it? This is a dead end."

They went outside and back to their car. Another vehicle had pulled into the parking lot. A man and a woman were getting tickets. They looked European. The soldiers had quit their game and given in to boredom.

"You notice those M-16s they got?" Ronnie said.

"Dirty," Nick said.

"My DI would turn purple and scream if he saw someone with a rifle like that."

"Mine would have the poor bastard doing push-ups while he was yelling at him."

"With his foot planted in the middle of the guy's back."

"Yup."

"Are you two done remembering the good old days?" Selena studied the map. "If this is even close to accurate, that spot where the pillar was found has to be nearby."

Nick gestured at the empty desert stretching away to the horizon. Heated air rose in shivering ripples from the sands.

"We can't go wandering around out there hoping to stumble on it."

"If there's another ruin, the ticket taker might know where it is."

"Then let's go ask him."

"You wait here. He's more likely to tell me if you're not standing around looking threatening."

"Threatening?"

"I saw the way you looked at that guard when he offered to give me a private tour."

"I wouldn't call that threatening. Annoyed, maybe."

"If you say so. I'll be right back."

Katerina Rostov and Dimitri moved away from the ticket shack toward the temple. They pretended to be interested in the architecture.

Selena got out of the car.

"There she is," Katerina said.

"How do you want to handle it?"

"We can't do anything here. We watch. And wait for an opportunity."

"She's going over to the shack."

The two Russians watched Selena talking to the attendant.

"She slipped him a bribe," Dimitri said. "Now he's talking to her like they're old friends."

"She's going back to the car."

They waited until the car left the parking lot and headed west, toward Libya. Katerina and Dimitri walked back to the shack.

"Excuse me," Katerina said. "We wondered what our friends were talking to you about."

"Friends?"

"Well, not friends exactly, but we're all staying at the same hotel."

Katerina slipped a hundred pound note across the counter. It disappeared under the attendant's hand.

"They wanted to know if there were any other ruins in the area."

"Are there?"

The attendant seemed disinterested. Katerina slipped another note across.

"Yes, there is a much smaller temple a few kilometers from here, but it is not visited much. I would not advise it."

"Why not?"

The attendant shrugged. "Some people do not like foreigners around here. The place is isolated."

Perfect,
Katerina thought.

"Where is this ruin?"

"You go out to the main road and turn west toward the border. Two kilometers from here there is a track turning south into the desert. Follow that for another five kilometers and you'll come to it. But there is not much to see. A few broken columns, some stones. The track is rough. I do not advise it," he said again.

"Thank you," Katerina said.

The attendant watched the woman and the man go back to their car. They pulled away from the lot and turned west, as the other crazy foreigners had.

"The blond one was pretty," one of the guards said. "All those Western women are whores. I wouldn't mind trying her out."

"You couldn't afford her. Besides, she looks like she'd kick you in the balls if you tried anything," the other guard said. "Come on, I'll give you another game."

The two men settled down to their board game. The attendant went back to the magazine he'd been reading.

Nothing ever happens here,
he thought.

CHAPTER 20

Blowing sand had drifted over the disused road to the abandoned ruins. The flat desert plain of the northern Sahara stretched as far as the eye could see.

"Reminds me of Iraq," Ronnie said.

Nick steered around a depression in the track. "At least there are no IED's."

"We're almost there." Selena pointed at a rough shape sticking up out of the sand.

"Must be. There's nothing else out here."

The shape was the stub of a broken column. Nick parked and they got out of the car.

Ronnie sniffed at the air.

"Smell that?"

Nick took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. The sun had a peculiar brownish halo around it. A breeze had started, like the breath of a furnace. It brought no relief from the heat.

"Yeah. We'd better do a quick search and get out of here."

"What are you two talking about?" Selena asked. "What's the matter?"

Ronnie rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "When I was in Iraq and it was like this, it meant we were going to get hit with a sandstorm."

"There's a sandstorm coming?"

"Feels like it."

"Then we'd better start looking."

Selena went over to the broken column. She bent down to read an inscription on the weathered stone.

"This is from the right period, when Menes was king."

The wind picked up, kicking dust into the air.

Ronnie pointed south. "Here it comes."

To the south a dark, roiling cloud rose in a towering wall toward the sky. It spread across the horizon, a tidal wave of sand coming straight toward them.

"Oh my God," Selena said.

"We'll never make it back to the highway before that hits," Nick said. "Get in the car. We'll have to ride it out."

The wind grew stronger. The sand lifted up and began to move in a rippling carpet across the ground. Tiny bits and particles flitted through the air, stinging as they hit. They ran to the car and climbed in and rolled up the windows.

"Ever been in one of these?" Ronnie asked Selena. "It's an experience."

Selena watched as the ominous cloud approached.

"Do you have a cloth to wrap around your face?"

"But we're inside the car."

"That will help but it's still gonna get hard to breathe in here. Here."

Ronnie pulled a red bandanna from his back pocket and handed it to her. She wrapped it around her nose and mouth.

"Thanks." Her voice sounded muffled through the cloth.

"You look like you're getting ready to rob a bank," Nick said.

He took off his shirt. Ronnie did the same. They used the clothing to cover the lower part of their faces and waited.

The car shuddered as the leading edge of the storm struck against it. In an instant, Selena could see nothing outside the car. A dense wall of moving sand shrieked around them. The wind pounded on the car and rocked it on its wheels. The inside of the Rover began to fill with a thin haze that stuck to her skin and coated everything with a fine layer of grit. She closed her eyes against the assault and concentrated on breathing.

She tasted the Sahara as it tried to kill her. The howling of the wind made it impossible to think. Selena felt like curling up and pulling a blanket over her head, but there was no blanket and no place to curl up in.

She wasn't sure how long it had been, but after a while the storm passed. The wind died and the air cleared. It was possible to see again through the windows, except where sand had blasted the glass into silvery translucence.

Selena took the bandanna away from her face and coughed.

She handed it back to Ronnie. "You were right."

"About what?"

"About it being an experience. Is it over?"

"Yes," Nick said. "Let's check the damage."

He grunted as he pushed the door open against piled sand. When they got out of the car, the world had changed.

The Land Rover was buried to the tops of the wheels. In places the sand had stripped away the paint, exposing bare metal. The site of the ruined temple had been scoured clean, exposing a paved court and the broken remains of fallen columns that had been hidden under the sand. After five thousand years all that was left of the main building was a low outline of weathered stone.

The three of them shook sand out of their clothes. Nick looked at the car.

"Ronnie, let's start digging out. Selena, take a look at those ruins while we're doing that."

"Wish we had another shovel," Ronnie said.

"Yeah, but we don't. You take the shovel. I'll use one of the floor mats for a scoop."

While they worked to clear sand away from the wheels, Selena began examining the ruins.

The fallen columns were covered with inscriptions. They were in bad condition, weathered by the passage of time. Even so, she could read some of what had been written.

The first column Selena looked at was inscribed with a dedication to Ma'at, the goddess of justice and truth, daughter of the sun god, Ra. Ra was the most important of the old Egyptian gods, the giver of life and light.

She moved to the next column. The writing was illegible. Past the column was a broken slab of stone lying on the ground that might have once been part of a wall.

It was inscribed with Linear D.

Finding it sent a shot of adrenaline surging through her body. She began taking pictures. Once she got back to the hotel, there'd be plenty of time to make an accurate translation. Nick came over. His shirt was dark with sweat. He wasn't in the best of moods after digging sand with a floor mat.

"I want to get out of here. Have you found anything?"

"Yes." She pointed at the fallen slab. "This is that same writing. I took pictures. I haven't had a chance to look at the rest of the ruins yet."

"Hurry up, will you?"

He stomped back to the car and popped the hood. She could hear him swearing as he did something to the engine.

Sometimes he can be a real ass,
she thought.

Looking through the ruins, she found no more of the linear writing. She took pictures anyway. There could be something in the hieroglyphics. She finished and went back to the car where Nick and Ronnie waited.

"I'm done."

Nick got in the car without saying anything and started the engine. It sputtered and coughed and started.

They headed in the direction of the coast. The track they'd followed to the site was buried in sand. He drove slowly. If they got stuck, AAA wasn't coming to the rescue.

Half an hour later they reached the highway.