The Covenant of Genesis (14 page)

But as the events leading to the death of Hector Amoros had proved, the wrong hands could at first appear to be the right ones. The IHA’s search for Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, had supposedly been undertaken so that Jack Mitchell, an agent of the US government’s defence research agency DARPA, could stop the blade’s unique properties from being used to create a new weapon that drew on the power of the very earth - but Mitchell had gone rogue, wanting that power for himself. He had been in charge of a black project so secret that neither DARPA nor the Pentagon knew of its existence, even as it threatened to plunge the world into war.

But if whoever sent the virus to wipe her pictures of the mysterious artefacts - and she was certain that that was the true objective, all the other destruction of data merely to cover the fact - was able to bypass the IHA’s security . . . that meant they knew the IHA’s true purpose. Knowledge supposed to be restricted to the highest levels of power.

Whatever was going on was bigger than she had thought. Bigger than she had
feared
.

She rushed out into reception—

To find herself face to face with an old enemy.

Not one who had ever tried to kill her, admittedly. But Nina still felt the brief, involuntary chill of unexpectedly encountering an adversary, long-forgotten loathing rushing back full-force. ‘Professor Rothschild,’ she began, before remembering that outside academia the hard-faced old woman no longer had any power over her. ‘Maureen,’ she said instead, informality used as a weapon to deny her status. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Nina,’ said Rothschild coldly, doing the same. The dislike was mutual. ‘May I speak with you?’

Nina saw Lola hovering behind Rothschild’s shoulder, worriedly mouthing something, but she couldn’t tell what. ‘I’m kinda busy right now, Maureen,’ she said, wanting to get rid of her as quickly, and dismissively, as possible. ‘Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait. Lola can book you an appointment, but I wouldn’t expect anything earlier than next week. I’ve got a lot of IHA business to take care of.’ She turned and strode away to her office.

‘Handling IHA business is no longer your concern, Nina,’ Rothschild said.

There was a note almost of gloating in her voice that brought Nina to a stop. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Ah, Dr Wilde,’ Lola said apologetically, hurriedly rounding Rothschild and presenting a sheet of paper to Nina. ‘I meant to tell you when you got here, but there was so much else going on. Sorry.’

Nina quickly read the text, an official UN statement. ‘
What?
’ she barked. Sensing an impending explosion, Lola retreated to her desk.

‘As you see,’ said Rothschild, now with nothing
but
gloating in her voice, ‘the UN has just confirmed my appointment as the new Director of the IHA. I won’t officially be taking up the post until the day after tomorrow, but I wanted to get things moving in the right direction. Which I’ve already seen is something that is badly needed. The agency has lacked a clearly defined vision and strong leadership since the death of Admiral Amoros - I’m here to put it back on the proper course.’

‘Oh, you are, huh?’ said Nina, angrily crunching the paper into a ball. ‘I’m sure all your years of attacking any theory that’s even slightly outside the historical orthodoxy makes you the
perfect
choice to run the IHA.’

Rothschild glanced at the entrance to one of the conference rooms. ‘Perhaps we should continue this discussion in private?’ she suggested condescendingly.

‘I’m fine right here,’ Nina snapped. ‘And how did you get appointed in the first place? You weren’t on the shortlist. You weren’t even on the longlist - and if you had been, I would have crossed you off it!’

‘Making decisions based on petty personal vendettas is precisely the kind of negative quality the IHA can do without in its senior staff,’ Rothschild replied. ‘And since you ask, I was quite surprised to be approached. But when the Senate recommends you to the UN, it would be foolish not to take the opportunity.’

‘The
Senate
?’ said Nina, stunned. ‘But that’s insane! Why would they do that?’

Rothschild’s lips tightened. ‘Perhaps because they were as tired as everyone else of the appointment process being deliberately dragged out so that the Interim Director could pursue her pet projects with the minimum of oversight?’ Nina was so outraged by the accusation that she couldn’t even form a response before the older woman spoke again. ‘One of my first priorities will be a full review of all IHA projects that are not directly related to the agency’s global security mandate. Anything that fails to meet strict cost-effectiveness criteria, or is based on shoddy mythological theory, will be terminated immediately.’

‘Shoddy mythological theory like Atlantis, you mean?’

‘My
other
immediate priority,’ said Rothschild coldly, ‘will be to begin a full inquiry into the utter disaster that was your Indonesian expedition. The loss of life is of course a tragedy, but there is also your arbitrary abandonment of the original excavation site, the financial irregularities—’

‘What financial irregularities?’ Nina demanded, furious.

‘I mean the money you promised to the ship’s captain for what I believe you described as “additional expenses”. Just because part of the budget is labelled as discretionary doesn’t mean it’s your personal slush fund.’

‘That’s not what happened at all, and—’

‘You’ll be able to present your version of events to the inquiry,’ said Rothschild. ‘This catastrophe reflects extremely badly on both the IHA and the UN. The facts need to be determined, responsibility decided . . .’

‘Blame apportioned?’

A faint smile curled Rothschild’s thin lips. ‘Indeed. If I were you, I would put all my efforts into as complete an account as possible of what happened in Indonesia. And I’d recommend that your . . .
friend
Mr Chase does the same. Where
is
Mr Chase, by the way?’

‘Still over there,’ said Nina, being purposefully vague to deny Rothschild any more ammunition.

‘I see. After the UN organised a private flight for the specific purpose of bringing you both back to New York. I hope you’re not going to add the cost of his scheduled ticket to the discretionary budget as well?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she growled. ‘But if you’ll excuse me,
Maureen
, I still have work to do.’ She held up the crumpled ball of paper. ‘This says you aren’t officially the IHA’s Director for two more days, which means I’m still in charge - and you’ve wasted enough of my time. Lola, I’ll be in my office. Don’t put any calls through unless they’re urgent. Or Eddie.’ She turned her back on Rothschild and entered her office, slamming the door behind her.

N
ina arrived at the United Nations building having spent the night worrying about Chase. After her confrontation with Rothschild the previous day, she had checked her voicemail to find a message from him. Her relief at hearing his gruff Yorkshire tones was muted by the terseness of the message, which told her little other than that he was on his way back to New York - and that he was ‘knackered’. She could tell he had been through a tense, dangerous time, but not knowing what had happened made her worried and frustrated.

Since then: nothing.

The first thing she did on arriving at the IHA was check if he had left any messages. He hadn’t. She stared blankly out across Manhattan from her office window before sharply turning away. She knew she ought to continue working on her report, in preparation for the inquiry, but her concerns about Chase were too distracting. She needed something else to focus her mind.

Like the pictures on the memory card recovered from her stolen camera.

She copied the files to her new laptop, putting the card in her jacket pocket before opening all the high-resolution images. One in particular dominated her attention, a close-up of the clay tablet, showing the strange text in great detail. She steepled her fingers against her lips as she tried to make sense of it.

Nothing. A few characters - a triangle with what might be a tree or a flower above it; three horizontal lines one above the other, the topmost curling back round on itself - appeared more symbolic than others, reminding her of the stylised pictograms forming the basis of the ancient Chinese and Japanese writing systems, but what they actually represented remained a mystery. Others stood out from the elegant, curved characters making up the bulk of the script by their stark and angular nature, a number of V-shapes pointing in different directions, small dots between the lines, followed by blocks of tightly packed little marks . . .

What did they mean? What was the secret someone was willing to kill to protect?

She had no idea.

Keeping the picture open in the background, Nina reluctantly returned to her report, forcing herself to the recall the unpleasant details of the events aboard the
Pianosa
. But the image kept drawing her attention over the course of the morning. She almost closed it to remove the distraction, but something about it was sounding a bell in the back of her mind. Something familiar.

What, though? The text resembled no alphabet she knew.

So, if it wasn’t an alphabet, then—

Nina jolted upright. The meaning of one particular type of symbol had just leapt out at her as if illuminated in neon. ‘Why the hell didn’t I see it before?’ she cried. ‘Dumbass!’

The blocks of closely spaced markings weren’t letters. They were
numbers
. Atlantean numbers. They weren’t quite the same as those she had seen on various Atlantean artefacts, but were close enough to be recognisable as from the same family: considering the apparent age of the tablet, an earlier version.

She grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled them down, converting them to the more familiar Atlantean equivalents, then rapidly performing the complex mental arithmetic to transform the unique numerical system into base ten. Each set turned out to be quite large, getting more so after each of the V-shapes to which they seemed linked. A record of something, then, a count. But what? It could be anything: numbers of people, distances, even the amount of fish caught by the boat in which it had been found.

But she had discovered
something
. The fact that it appeared to use a form of the Atlanteans’ numerical system meant that whoever made the tablet was in some way connected to them, however far separated by geography and time. And if the Atlantean language could be deciphered, so could this.

Maybe it already
had
been deciphered. While Nina was necessarily well versed in ancient languages, it wasn’t her specialty - she was an archaeologist, not a linguist. There were experts whose specialised knowledge far eclipsed her own. Her former mentor, Professor Jonathan Philby, had been one such expert, but he was no longer alive.

He’d had peers, though - well, more like rivals, she remembered. Even at the pinnacles of academia, one-upmanship was still a driving force. The names escaped her, but a few minutes’ trawling through online archives for some of Philby’s papers gave her one: Professor Gabriel Ribbsley of Cambridge. She vaguely recalled Philby once naming him as one of the world’s top palaeolinguists . . . after himself, of course. Judging from Ribbsley’s own extensive list of published papers, that still appeared to be the case.

She got Lola to obtain his contact details, then sent a brief email of introduction, accompanied by the barest details of her reason for contacting him - considering recent events, it seemed prudent to keep the recovery of her pictures of the clay tablet as quiet as possible. That done, she forced herself to go back to work on the report. Her experience with tenured professors had taught her they would respond to external enquiries in their own time, and the more prestigious the university, the greater that time would be - all the way up to the heat-death of the entire universe.

So it came as a surprise when Ribbsley phoned less than twenty minutes later.

‘This is, uh, quite an honour, Professor,’ she said after introductions had been made.

‘Oh, the honour is all mine, Dr Wilde,’ Ribbsley replied. Nina couldn’t quite place his accent; there was an undertone that made her think his upper-class English manner was a hard-won affectation. Southern African, perhaps? ‘After all, it’s not every day one gets a request for assistance from the discoverer of Atlantis, and so many other great treasures. I visited the tomb of Arthur at Glastonbury just a month or so ago, in fact. They needed help with the Latin inscriptions - makes one wonder what on earth they teach these days, if something that simple poses a problem! But the tomb itself was quite impressive, so well done, well done.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nina, picking up a less subtle undertone, this one decidedly patronising. ‘But yes, I hope you’ll be able to help me. If you can spare the time.’

‘That depends what it is. I hope for the sake of your reputation it’s not Latin!’ He chuckled at his own joke.

‘No, it’s not,’ Nina told him, not feeling obliged to join in. ‘It’s related to some Atlantean text that was recently discovered. I see from your list of papers in the
IJA
that you’ve done a considerable amount of work on the subject.’

‘Well, I’d hardly be able to call myself the world’s top palaeolinguist with a straight face if I hadn’t!’ He laughed selfcongratulatingly again. ‘Mind you, I had a head start over the likes of Frome and Tsen-Hu and that imbecile Lopez. Hector Amoros asked me to do some preliminary work before the discovery of Atlantis was even officially announced. Benefits of having friends in high places.’

‘You knew Hector?’

‘In passing, poor chap. He was only an amateur, of course, but a moderately capable one.’

Nina held back a sharp comment that Amoros had actually held a Master’s degree in the subject. ‘This text . . . while we’ve found some Atlantean characters in it, there are others we haven’t been able to identify. I was hoping you might be able to look at it.’