Atlantis Found (19 page)

Pitt considered walking over and offering them coffee and sandwiches, but it was only a passing thought. The last thing he needed to do was compromise their security cover.

He had just dressed and finished a quick breakfast when a truck loaded with materials to repair the holes in the hangar stopped on the road outside. An unmarked van pulled up behind the truck and several women in coveralls stepped out. The security guards did not reveal their presence, but Pitt knew they were closely observing the scene. One of the workmen walked over to him.

“Mr. Pitt?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll get in, make the repairs, clean up the mess and get out as fast as we can.”

Pitt watched in awe as men began unloading old rusting corrugated sheets that nearly matched those on the hangar walls. “Where did you find those?” he asked, pointing.

“You’d be surprised how the government keeps track of old building materials,” the foreman replied. “What you see came off the roof of an old warehouse in Capital Heights.”

“Our government is more efficient than I gave them credit for.”

He left them to their work and was about to slip behind the wheel of a turquoise-colored NUMA Jeep Cherokee, when a black split-window Sting Ray Corvette stopped on the road. Giordino leaned out the passenger’s window and yelled, “Need a lift?”

Pitt jogged to the car and climbed in, folded his legs, and settled in the leather seat. “You didn’t tell me you were coming by.”

“I was told to be at the same place as you at eight o’clock. Thought we might as well share a ride.”

“You’re okay, Al,” said Pitt cheerfully, “I don’t care what they say about you.”

 
GIORDINO turned the Corvette off Wisconsin Avenue onto a small residential side street in Glover Park near the Naval Observatory. The street, only one block in length, was shaded by century-old elm trees. Except for a single house hidden behind high hedges, the block was empty. No parked cars, no people strolling the sidewalks.

“You sure we didn’t make a wrong turn?” said Giordino.

Pitt looked through the windshield and pointed. “We’re on the right street, and since that’s the only house in sight, this must be the place.”

Giordino turned into the second entrance of a circular driveway but kept going straight, to the rear of the house, instead of stopping under the front porte cochere
.
Pitt studied the three-story brick structure as Giordino steered toward a detached garage at the back. The house looked to have been built for someone of importance and wealth sometime after the Civil War. The grounds and house appeared immaculately maintained, but the curtains were all drawn, as if its tenants were away for an extended length of time.

The Corvette rolled into the garage, whose double doors were spread open. The interior was vacant, except for scattered garden tools, a lawn mower, and a tool bench that looked as if it hadn’t been used in decades. Giordino turned off the ignition, placed the shift lever in Park, and turned to Pitt.

“Well, what now?”

His answer came as the doors automatically closed. A few seconds later, the car began to fall slowly through the floor of the garage on an elevator. But for a barely audible hum, the ride was soundless. Pitt tried to estimate the rate of descent and distance, but it became dark. After what he guessed was a drop of nearly a hundred feet, the elevator came to a gentle stop. An array of lights flashed on and they found themselves in a fair-size concrete parking garage filled with several cars. Giordino pulled the Corvette into an empty stall between a turquoise Jeep Cherokee with “NUMA” painted on the front doors and a Chrysler limousine. The Jeep, they knew, was Admiral Sandecker’s. He insisted that all NUMA transportation vehicles be four-wheel-drive suburban utility vehicles, so they could be driven in the worst weather.

A Marine guard stood at the entrance to a metal doorway. “Think the car is okay here,” said Giordino impishly, “or should I lock it?”

“Just a gut feeling,” answered Pitt, “but I have the feeling it’s not going anywhere.”

They exited the car and walked over to the uniformed guard, who wore the three stripes of a sergeant on his sleeves. He nodded and greeted them. “You must be Dirk Pitt and Albert Giordino. You’re the last to arrive.”

“Don’t you want to see our IDs?” asked Giordino.

The guard smiled. “I’ve studied your photos. Knowing which is which is like comparing Joe Pesci to Clint Eastwood. You’re not difficult to tell apart.”

He pressed a button beside the door and it slid open, revealing a short hallway leading to another metal door. “When you reach the inner door, stand still for a moment until the guard on the other side ID’s you with a security camera.”

“Doesn’t he trust
your
judgment?” asked Giordino.

The guard never cracked a smile. “Insurance,” he said tersely.

“Aren’t they overdoing the security routine?” muttered Giordino. “We could have just as easily reserved a couple booths at Taco Bell to hold a briefing.”

“Bureaucrats have a fetish for secrecy,” said Pitt.

“At least I could have had a burrito.”

They were passed through the door into a vast carpeted room whose walls were covered with drapes to mute the acoustics. A twenty-foot-long kidney-shaped conference table dominated the room. A huge screen covered the entire far wall. The room was comfortably lit, and easy on the eyes. Several men and one woman were already seated around the table. None stood as Pitt and Giordino approached.

“You’re late.” This from Admiral James Sandecker, the head of NUMA. A small athletic man with flaming red hair and a Vandyke beard, he had commanding cold blue eyes that took in everything. Sandecker was as canny as a leopard sleeping in a tree with one eye open—he knew that a meal would come to him sooner or later. He was testy and irascible but ran NUMA like a benevolent dictator. He motioned now to a man sitting on his left.

“I don’t believe you two know Ken Helm, special agent with the FBI.”

A gray-haired man, dressed in a tailored business suit, with speculative, quiet hazel eyes that peered over reading glasses, half rose out of his chair and extended his hand. “Mr. Pitt, Mr. Giordino, I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

Which means he’s perused our personnel files,
Pitt thought to himself.

Sandecker turned to the man on his right. “Ron Little. Ron has a fancy title over at Central Intelligence, but you’d never know it.”

Deputy director was the title that ran through’s Pitt’s mind at meeting Little.

He looked through collie-brown eyes set in a deeply lined face—pious, middle-aged, a face etched with experience. He simply nodded. “Gentlemen.”

“The others you know,” Sandecker said, nodding down the table.

Rudi Gunn was furiously taking notes and didn’t bother to look up. Pitt stepped over and placed a hand on Pat O’Connell’s shoulder and said softly, “Sooner than you thought.”

“I adore a man who keeps his promises.” She patted his hand, uncaring of the stares from the men around the table. “Come sit by me. I feel intimidated by all these important government officials.”

“I assure you, Dr. O’Connell,” said Sandecker, “that you’ll leave this room with every lovely hair intact.”

Pitt pulled out a chair and slid next to Pat, while Giordino took a seat next to Gunn. “Have Al and I missed anything of relevance?” Pitt asked.

“Dr. O’Connell briefed us on the skull and underground chamber,” said Sandecker, “and Ken Helm was about to report on the initial results of the forensic examination on the bodies flown in from Telluride.”

“Not much to tell.” Helm spoke slowly. “Making a positive identification from their teeth has become difficult. Preliminary examinations suggest that their dental work came from South American dentists.”

Pitt appeared dubious. “Your people can distinguish the difference in dental techniques of different countries?”

“A good forensic pathologist who specializes in identification through dental records can often name the city where the cavities were filled.”

“So they
were
foreign nationals,” Giordino observed.

“I
thought
their English was a bit odd,” said Pitt.

Helm stared over his reading glasses. “You noticed?”

“Too perfect without an American accent, although two of them spoke with a New England twang.”

Little scribbled on a yellow legal notepad. “Mr. Pitt, Commander Gunn has informed us that the murderers you apprehended in Telluride referred to themselves as members of the Fourth Empire.”

“They also referred to it as the New Destiny.”

“As you and Commander Gunn have already speculated, the Fourth Empire may be the successor to the Third Reich.”

“Anything is possible.”

Giordino pulled a gigantic cigar from his breast pocket and rolled it around in his mouth without lighting it, out of consideration for the people at the table who didn’t smoke. Sandecker shot him a murderous look at seeing that the label advertised it as one from his private stock. “I’m not a smart man,” Giordino said modestly. The Humble Herbert routine was an act. Giordino had been third in his class at the Air Force Academy. “For the life of me, I don’t see how an organization with a worldwide army of elite killers can operate for years without the finest intelligence services in the world figuring out who they are and what they’re up to.”

“I’m the first to admit we’re stymied,” said FBI’s Helm frankly. “As you know, crimes without motives are the most difficult to solve.”

Little nodded in agreement. “Until your confrontation with these people in Telluride, anyone else who came in contact with them did not live to describe the event.”

“Thanks to Dirk and Dr. O’Connell,” said Gunn, “we now have a trail to follow.”

“A few charred teeth make for a pretty faint trail,” offered Sandecker.

“True,” agreed Helm, “but there is the enigma of that chamber inside the Pandora Mine. If they go to such extremes to keep scientists from studying the inscriptions, slaughter innocent people, and commit suicide when apprehended—well, they must have a compelling motive.”

“The inscriptions,” Pitt said. “Why go to such lengths to hide their meaning?”

“They can’t be overjoyed at the outcome,” said Gunn. “They lost six of their professional killers and failed to secure photographs of the inscriptions.”

“It’s bizarre that such an ordinary archaeological discovery would cost so many lives,” Sandecker said expressionlessly.

“Hardly an ordinary discovery,” Pat said quickly. “If it is not a hoax perpetrated by old hard-rock miners, it could very well prove to be the archaeological find of the century.”

“Have you been able to decipher any of the symbols?” asked Pitt.

“After a cursory examination of my notes, all I can tell you is that the symbols are alphabetic. That is, writing that expresses single sounds. Our alphabet, for example, uses twenty-six symbols. The symbols in the chamber suggest an alphabet of thirty, with twelve symbols representing numerals, which I managed to translate into a very advanced mathematics system. Whoever these people were, they discovered zero and calculated with the same number of symbols as modern man. Until I can program them into a computer and study them in their entirety, there is little else I can tell you.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve done extremely well with what little you have had in such a short time,” Helm complimented her.

“I’m confident we can crack the meaning of the inscriptions. Unlike the complicated logosyllabic writing systems of the Egyptians, Chinese, or Cretans, which are as yet undeciphered, this one seems unique in its simplicity.”

“Do you think the black obsidian skull found in the chamber forms a link to the inscriptions?” asked Gunn.

Pat shook her head. “I can’t begin to guess. Like the crystal skulls that have come out of Mexico and Tibet, its purpose could be ritual. There are some people—not accredited archaeologists, I might add—who think the crystal skulls came in a set of thirteen that can record vibrations and focus them into holographic images.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Little seriously.

Pat laughed. “No, I’m pretty much of a pragmatist. I prefer hard-core proof before I advance wild theories.”

Little looked at her pensively. “Do you think the obsidian skull—”

“Skulls,” Pitt corrected him.

Pat gave him a queer look. “Since when do we have more than one?”

“Since yesterday afternoon. Thanks to a good friend, St. Julien Perlmutter, I obtained another one.”

Sandecker looked at him intently. “Where is it now?”

“Along with the skull from Telluride, it was taken to NUMA’s chemical lab for analysis. Obsidian obviously can’t be dated by conventional means, but a study under instrumentation might tell us something about those who created it.”

“Do you know where it came from?” asked Pat, burning with curiosity.

Without going into tedious detail, Pitt briefly described the finding of the skull inside the derelict
Madras
by the crew of the
Paloverde
in Antarctica. He then told of his meeting and conversation with Christine Mender-Husted, and how she graciously gave him the skull after accepting Perlmutter’s offer for her ancestor’s papers.

“Did she say where the crew and passengers of the
Madras
discovered the skull?”

Pitt tantalized her and the others seated around the table by taking his time to reply. Finally, he said, “According to the ship’s log, the
Madras
was bound from Bombay to Liverpool when it was struck by a violent hurricane—”

“Cyclone,” Sandecker lectured. “To a sailor, hurricanes occur only in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans. Typhoons are in the Western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean.”

“I stand corrected,” Pitt sighed. Admiral Sandecker loved to show off his inexhaustible reserve of sea trivia. “As I was saying, the
Madras
ran into a violent storm and heavy seas that lasted for nearly two weeks. She was battered and driven far south of her course. When the wind and waters finally calmed, it was found that their water barrels had been damaged and much of their drinking supply lost. The captain then consulted his charts and made the decision to stop at a barren chain of uninhabited islands in the subantarctic south Indian Ocean. Now known as the Crozet Islands, they form a tiny overseas territory of France. He dropped anchor off a small island called St. Paul that was very rugged, with a volcanic mountain rising in its center. While the crew repaired the water barrels and began filling them from a stream, one of the passengers, a British army colonel on his way home with his wife and two daughters after serving ten years in India, decided to go on a little hunting expedition.