Atlantis Stolen (Sam Reilly Book 3) (2 page)

“Do you think the
two places could be connected?”

“What, an old
city in Africa and here?” Hank shook his head. “I doubt that very much.”

“So, can you
deliver it to my fiancée? I have another 6 months of service, but I know that
you are returning next month for a short while. I trust you. Can you take it
for me?”

“Of course. If
you trust me with something so valuable?” Hank replied, his voice reassuringly
kind, like a father to a son.

“I wouldn’t have
come if I didn’t.”

“Then of course I’ll
do it.”

*

Felix Brandt
couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw it as he came over the hill. Albert Olsen
had found the Arcane Stone!

The child had no
idea of its purpose, but even a fool must have recognized its immediate value.
And that would lead him to show it to someone, and before long, someone who knew
about it, who had waited many generations to find it, would get access to its
secrets.

No, Olsen was
a good boy, with a bright future, but something had to be done.

Felix left his
house after dark. He should have waited later, but he couldn’t afford the
possibility that Olsen would be innocent to such an extent that he would show
someone tonight. After debating the problem over and over, he walked out into
the street.

Along the rocky
edge of Pearl Street, his footsteps echoed quietly into the night until he
reached its end. There he turned right and walked along the Heere Gracht, where
the moon shined sympathetically on the first high tide, which flooded the newly
deepened canal. Soon, he thought, ships would line it as they had in Amsterdam.

At the end of the
canal he reached the wall, where many of the laborers took shelter. It was
unusual for a man of his background to be seen at such a place in the early
evening, but as the richest man in the new settlement, he had little to fear
for his actions.

He knocked on the
door. Albert Olsen answered immediately. His shoes were still on and it looked as
though he’d only just arrived home from somewhere.

“Hello Mr.
Brandt,” Olsen said, politely.

“May I come in?”

Olsen looked
nervous. “Of course. Is something wrong?”

“It’s all right.
I just wanted to talk to you.”

The room was small,
with a bed at one end and a fireplace next to it. There was little more to it
and nowhere to sit.

“I’m sorry I
don’t have much to offer you, Mr. Brandt,” he said, while placing a small pot
of water on the fire. “Would you like a warm drink? I’m afraid I don’t have
anywhere for you to sit.”

“That’s not a
problem. I don’t want to take up much of your time. I have a question for you.”

“For me?” Olsen
appeared confused, but Felix wondered if he detected a slight amount of fear
too.

“Yes, it’s about
what you found today.”

Olsen stopped
pouring the warm water into a mug.

“What I found
today?”

Felix carefully
studied the man’s eyes. They failed to meet his own, and answered his question
immediately.

Yes, Albert
Olsen is trying to hide something.

“It’s quite all
right, Albert. I don’t want to take it from you, if that’s what you’re worried
about. It’s just that I have a collection of local artifacts that have been
discovered over the years, and I’m interested in one in particular. I have seen
a number of drawings of it, and was hoping you may have stumbled upon it.”

Albert kept
quiet, but nor did he deny his discovery.

Felix pulled out
a rolled piece of paper with a drawing and opened it in front of him. “Did it
look something like this?”

Albert stared at
it for a moment and said, “Yes, it’s identical. Where did you get the drawing?”

“I was given it a
long time ago, by someone who’d found it during an earlier expedition.”

“Is it valuable?”

“Yes, of course.
Not in the sense that it is made out of gold or anything like that. But
historically, it is worth a fortune. I once heard it described as the key to
their greatest city.”

“What city? The
place was a marsh before we came.”

“That’s not
important.” Felix quickly changed the topic. He’d already said too much about
THEM. “Did you show it to anyone?”

“No, of course
not. Something like that looked as though it could be worth more than my entire
life savings! I didn’t want anyone to steal it.”

“Of course…
You’ve done the right thing,” he reassured Albert.

In one quick
motion Felix slid the tip of the knife through the gap between Albert’s ribs
and into his heart. It was as quick a death as could be contrived. A lifetime
of training, and he’d never had the need to do so before.

Albert barely
made a sound.

Felix wasn’t a
born killer. And he took no pleasure in it. He stared at the boy’s face.
Aghast, he noticed there was no hatred in Albert’s eyes and no pain, simply
absent disbelief. Felix wanted more than anything to relieve the child from his
anguish.

“I’m so sorry Albert,
really I am,” Felix said. “But some things, I’m afraid, were supposed to remain
buried – forever.”

*

Hank Worthington watched
as the fifth marker pole was driven deep into the ground below the shallow
water, forty feet out from the bank of the river. Today was the first day of
the process of reclaiming the land from the sea, so that the man paying his
wages could have his mansion built on prime real estate.

It wasn’t an
entirely new idea for the Dutch, but on the outlying Trading Post, where land
was plentiful, the return compared to labor required to achieve the task made
it seem fanciful. Hank looked up, having heard the familiar sound of hammer on
steel as the wooden marker pole was driven into the soft soil below until it
struck bedrock. Tomorrow his team would begin the laborious task of backfilling
the water below with rock and then soil.

He shook his head
at its absurdity.

Built like a
dike, and doubling as a fortress to guard the entrance to the main canal, which
Mr. Brandt too had commissioned, the expansion onto the river seemed
outlandish, even to him. And Hank was a 3
^rd
generation master water engineer,
whose family had been employed on a number of water projects in Amsterdam. But
this was different.

“Felix Brandt is
a fool,” he said out loud.

“Yes, but a very
rich one,” his apprentice agreed.

“They’re the worst
kind.” Hank pulled out the engineering plans to show his young apprentice.
“Ordinarily, we would have supported this point here, where the natural bank of
the river formed and then built his fortress above it, where it could still
protect the entrance to the canal.”

“So why didn’t
you?”

“Because Felix
Brandt was specific. This spot, right here. He even took me out in a rowboat
and showed me precisely where he wanted the new land to reach.”

His apprentice
looked at the map depicting the landfill areas. “He wants a lot of new land?
There’s nearly a square mile of it! I wonder why he doesn’t simply build
further back. It’s not like land around here is scarce or valuable?”

“Indeed. Why not?”
Hank waited for the boy to come up with an answer on his own. When none came,
he said, “Felix gave some stupid excuse that he would then one day own the
greatest amount of deep waterfrontage on the island, and therefore could
command its trade.” Hank gave a supercilious smile and then continued, “But I
think he did so simply to prove that what he wants, he can have.”

Out on the water,
the familiar chime of hammer on steel continued as the sixth pole commenced
being driven into the deeper water below.

Hank’s ears piqued
to the sudden change in resonance.

That pole
driver struck something other than sand, rock or wood. But what?

From the shore he
watched as the men withdrew the wooden pole and attempted to reset it. By the
third attempt, one of his men dived down to see what they had struck. The big
man who’d entered the water climbed back onto the barge after holding his
breath for nearly a minute.

Hank looked at
the man’s face. Even from forty feet away, he could see that something was
wrong. “Come with me. Let’s go see what the problem is.”

“I’ll get the
rowboat.”

The two climbed
into the small boat and his apprentice took the oars. Within a couple minutes
they were tying up alongside the barge.

“What have we
got?” Hank asked, taking the outstretched leathery hand of Jeroen, who was
driving the piers. The two had worked together for nearly twenty years.

“We hit something
hard. There’s no way we’re going to be able to drive anything through it.”

“That’s fine.
We’ll build over it anyway.” Hank looked at Jeroen’s clothes, still dripping
wet. “You’ve had a look. What have we struck?”

Jeroen looked
nervous as he handed him a small ingot of orange metal. It could have been
brass or even a copper alloy.

“You found it
down there?”

“Yes. But I have
no idea where it’s come from. There’s a lot of it down there. I think its best
if you have a look for yourself.”

Hank looked at
the water. It wasn’t quite spring and the ice had only recently thawed. He was
going to say something but Jeoren stopped him.

“Trust me, you’re
gonna want to see this.”

Not wanting to
spend the rest of his day arguing over whatever the hell his men had found, he
took his shirt off and dived into the water. The icy temperature stung him, but
he forced his eyes open as he swam toward the bottom. It wasn’t deep. Maybe
twenty or thirty feet at most. His head barely dipped the surface before he saw
it.

It looked like
the center of an old city. But nothing like any city he’d ever seen, or even
heard of. And it was covered in the same orange colored, bright, metal that
young Albert Olsen had discovered while digging in the canal. The entire place
had the surreal appearance of a lost Egyptian city. Not that he’d ever seen one
of those either. A friend of his had shown him sketches after visiting there
when they were both students.

Hank returned to
the surface and climbed the rope ladder onto the barge.

He could see Jeroen’s
face – waiting to say ‘I told you so.’

“Well Hank, what
do you make of that?”

“I’d better go to
the owner with this one…” Hank said, without hiding the disgruntlement from his
voice. “And that will mean delays.”

*

An hour later, Hank
returned to the worksite. On the beach, a tent had been set up with a desk at
its center - an office for himself and the architect. To the north it was protected
from the wind by large piles of rock and soil in preparation for the build.
Sitting opposite his desk, Jeroen and his apprentice waited for him.  A glance
at their faces told him they had both been waiting in expectation.

He was still
carrying the strange piece of orange metal when he came into the small worksite
office, and sat down, placing it on the table as he would a paperweight – and
said nothing.

“Well Hank, what
did Mr. Brandt have to say?” Jeroen asked.

Hank cracked his
knuckles together. “He says it’s the remains of the India Star, an old brass lined
ship of war, dumped here years ago to stop the never-ending erosion to the
beach.”

Jeroen laughed at
the explanation.

“That’s bullshit
and you know it as well as I do. That looked like a city to me.”

Hank met his eyes,
and forcefully replied, “Yeah, well maybe it was one of ‘their’ old cities,
before we came. Now it’s ours, so why shouldn’t we build on top of it? It looks
pretty solid to me.”

“I don’t care if
it was one of ‘their’ cities.” Jeroen lit a pipe. “Heck, some of that red metal
stuff must be worth something?”

“Yeah, well maybe
Mr. Brandt isn’t too keen on slowing down his project while we all go archeological
on his building site. Besides, so what if it is? All the better for building on.
Anything that solid must make for a good foundation.”

“So, then, what
are we going to do with it?”

“The owner says backfill
with rocks and soil, lay the foundations, and prepare for stage two of the
building.”

“And that’s what
you’re planning on doing?”

“Like I said,
it’ll make good foundations.”

Jeroen stood up
to leave and then said, “Hank…”

“Leave it alone Jeroen.
I said it’s time to go back to work. I want this place buried by the end of the
week.”

That night, Hank
drank whiskey quietly in his own tent. Ordinarily he’d have been happy to have
one with his men, but he needed the time to think this one through. Something
in the back of his mind kept reminding him of the damn copper-colored ingot.
He’d never seen anything glow like that. It was almost a type of orange gold.