Dateline: Atlantis (35 page)

“Hardly likely,” Fiona sniffs. “And I don't like that boss of yours barging in whenever he wants to.”

“He smells a Pulitzer,” Amaryllis says with a shrug. “And he doesn't know that I'll be moving back to Chicago when we finish with the story.”

“Won't that be a crusher? Can't wait to see it.”

Fiona, who can hold liquor better than anyone Amaryllis knows, goes into the kitchen and opens another bottle of wine. While they are arguing over Wright's motives, the doorbell rings and Amaryllis buzzes him into the outer doors of her apartment building. Within seconds, he's standing, panting like a bear on the run, at her front door. He must have jogged all the way from the parking lot. He's dressed down this evening in khakis and a lime-green polo shirt, looking exactly as if he were ready for a few holes of golf. Amaryllis is shabby in her old Northwestern University sweatshirt and blue jeans. He doesn't notice. True to form, he doesn't even sit down before firing questions at her.

In calm reporter fashion, she tells him the whole story from Gabriel showing Garret and her the caves to the close call at the Nav-Tech tower. She leaves out the story of the orb. She and Donny have agreed that the crystal will never be mentioned; it's too personal and its potential for misuse is so great that it will remain their little secret. But, Amaryllis has thought about telling
the Navy to check out the crystal in their own tower. It's a likely twin to the one she possesses, and it might keep their scientists busy. Who knows? There even could be ancient inventions they could rediscover.

Wright sits and starts taking notes as she talks, one foot continually pumping on the floor. Every few seconds, he punctuates her report with “good, good.” Then he keeps on scrawling. When she's told him every last detail, Amaryllis sits back in her couch and waits for commentary.

“It's at least a four-part story,” he says, fingers drumming on the page. “We could start it on Sunday and then continue on to Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Did you get any art when you were down there?”

Amaryllis produces the two digital camera chips the Navy allowed her to keep. “They won't do much good. Have they recovered any of Garret's work?”

“Yes, they did. Wonderful stuff. I think there were only a couple chips missing, but that wimpy professor in Chicago coughed up most of the work.”

She sits back and tries to ignore the churning in her stomach. Somehow, being around Wright in these strategy-setting moods gives her fits. The man's nerves are contagious.

He takes a few more notes and draws sample page layouts in his notebook, asking Amaryllis how she likes them. She opts for the designs that didn't take up the entire front page. There are limits to her ego.

After an hour, in which he hasn't touched the wine or any of the cheese and crackers, Wright bounds to his feet and makes for the door. His sudden good mood makes him sparkle with good will. He calls to Amaryllis from the doorway and tells her he'll see her Monday.

After he leaves, Fiona pretends to fan herself off.

“What a lout he is,” she says, her face drawn and mouth set in a rigid line. “He didn't even say who was going to write about the murder attempt.”

Amaryllis realizes Fiona instincts are correct, but there is no way of changing her boss' eccentricities. Besides, the Chicago and Miami papers have covered the murder attempt and the
Star
carried the wire story. She can understand Fiona's outrage, but it's time to get down to serious work—her own story.

#

Donny calls, as he has every day, before Amaryllis leaves for work. They have agreed to keep a long-distance relationship going until she is done with her reportage and the follow-ups that are certain to come. She'll give the
Star
a month, maybe two. He'll visit her one weekend, she'll fly out the next, until it's time for her to pack up and move back to the city of her youth. She finds the prospect of moving exhilarating, not just because of Donny, but because Chicago has changed so much since she had left for L.A. The landscape is so different, it will be almost like settling in a new land. And, the weather? Well, it will be late in the spring by the time she arrives. No one ever knows what spring will bring in Chicago. Sometimes, it is freezing rain and ankle-deep mud, other times, a switch suddenly is set to summer. She is hoping for the summer option.

After they decide that Donny will fly out on Friday night, she sets off for the office, going over the story in her head. No sense wasting any time. The faster she writes this story, the safer they will be from any competitor catching wind of what she had discovered.

Barney greets her at the security doors to the newsroom with a huge hug. She sees the entire features staff behind him, cheering and waving.

“There's my girl,” he says. “We almost lost you. How are you dealing with it?”

“I'm fine.” She brushes away the question. “The FBI nabbed the guy who tried to off me, and the two who attempted to
kidnap me. I identified them in the line-up, and the trial will come up Lord knows when. I suppose I'll be called as a witness.”

“I should hope so.” The voice is Hagren's. The much-beleaguered crime reporter is probably the one assigned to cover Pitch's trial. He's looking pretty relieved just knowing that he has a story that won't be a many-tentacled monster to wrestle. She gives him a big smile. She owes him a good, long debriefing to make his job easier.

After the greeting and hugs subside, she sits down at her desk—which looks exactly as she had left it three months ago—and realizes she's forgotten her log-in name. Memory is a strange thing. You remember the same sequence of numbers and letters for years and then, one day, the whole thing vanishes. Barney fixes her up, and it's time to write. Only she doesn't, because the cursor on the screen keeps winking at her, and she can't think of a thing to say. Everything she had planned on her car ride has slipped away.

She hustles over to Wright's office to get a game plan. She knows the daily budget meeting, when Wright and all the section editors get together to plan the next day's stories, has ended. After conferring with his underlings, Wright will have an exact idea of how the story should flow.

As she draws near Sonia's desk, she begins to shrink back anticipating a showdown, but even Sonia has had a change of heart after Amaryllis' successful adventures. Sonia gives her a little wave of the hand and buzzes her right into the editor's domain.

“I can't write,” she says into the gloomy room. For some reason, Wright always keeps his lights dim. This time, his desk is so dark she almost can't make him out. “I need to know how you are presenting this thing.”

Wright begins to chuckle and motions her over to the desk. Together, they go over the Sunday story, which will be an over-arching report that takes the reader to Mexico and the Caribbean and tells what the reporter and photographer have found. Next Monday's paper will concentrate on the Committee
and the lengths to which they went to suppress findings of the ancient civilization. Tuesday, she will sum up the various theories of Atlantis, from Plato to the current ideas of British writers who have been daring to challenge the establishment.

Wednesday, she'll wrap the whole thing up with prognostication about the future of the research. She'll draw in the findings of Knox and Thorgeld and then make a few guesses of her own about what artifacts and buildings are waiting to be discovered. She and Wright carefully sidestep the issue of Nav-Tech. He knows the deal the military made, because he is partly responsible for the compromise. He wasn't about to have his best reporter face trial for trespassing on secret military property. Sometimes, the press isn't open and dedicated to the peoples' right to know. Sometimes, it's just a business.

After the wrap-up, Amaryllis' creative juices return. This time when she sits at the blinking cursor, her hands began working the keyboard at a touch. The first paragraph is intended to shock. She writes: “Planetary amnesia has ended, and the history of the world will change completely. A months-long
Los Angeles Star
investigation of sunken buildings and carvings shows that civilization did not start in the Tigris-Euphrates valley or even along the Nile. It began tens of thousands of years ago on sunken land stretching across the Atlantic Ocean and on drowned coastlines of such areas as Ireland, the British Isles, the Bahamas and much of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.”

That jump-starts Amaryllis, and she is off and running on her keyboard, clicking away at the keys, watching the story scroll up her screen. She gets up only to refill her coffee or visit the ladies' room. She is in her rhythm and doesn't let anything, from the loud chattering of her coworkers to the birthday party someone has set up for the food editor, disturb her focus. She just keeps typing until the office is nearly empty, and the sun is a mere rusty red memory in the west.

Then she puts in the grace notes. From napkin scribbles and old, waterlogged notebooks, she fills in quotations from heads
of governments, archaeologists, people living in the areas she visited. And with a little sadness, she enters a few quotations from Gabriel about the need to keep the inheritance from the ancestors pure and untouched.

She pulls back, fingers numb, and scans her work. She has thrown together all four days' stories in one go. And yet she knows she could write some more. What has been left out? She's mentioned the many arguments for the location of Atlantis from Ignatius Donnelly's imagined island in the middle of the ocean to psychic Edgar Cayce's prediction of Atlantis rising in the area of Bimini. She's mentioned the theories of Atlantis in the Mediterranean and the modern excavation of caves and underground anomalies in Cuba. She's careful not to use the word “Atlantis” to describe what she has found. She doesn't want her careful reporting to be dismissed as daydreaming about a myth.
I think I got it all, even without Nav-Tech.

She burns a CD of her stories and then e-mails the copy to herself for access on her home computer. She's astonished to see that her old story, the one she wrote before leaving for Chicago, still is sitting undisturbed in her story queue.
Maybe all those safeguards aren't necessary.
She pauses a minute.
Yes, they are.
And she pushes the send button for her e-mail.

#

Wright is pacing the floor in his office, while Amaryllis and Barney watch from a safe distance. They both thought the boss would love the story—and indeed, he did, at first. Now, he has questions, lots of them. Most can't be answered. Now, he's at the thorniest problem.

“Did you get the head of the British Museum?”

“Sure I did. It's in the story. They provided a canned quote, but that's all I'm going to get out of them.”

“I mean about Pitch. His background, why he started the Committee, all that.”

“I really can't be writing about him. I'm too close to the subject. It wouldn't be right. Have another reporter do a sidebar.” She stands her ground and curls her fists at her side. She's thinking again of Pitch's smarmy face smirking underwater.

Barney steps in between the two, as if sheltering her from Wright's fever pitch of fact checking.

“Mr. Wright,” he says as if quieting a baying hound. “Pitch did try to kill her. You can't expect her to be objective about that.”

Wright knocks his forehead with a soft fist. “Of course. What am I thinking of? That's Hagren's turf.” He wheels on Amaryllis. “You will tell Hagren everything you know about Pitch.”

She is nodding her head as Barney steps in again.

“Look, she's not exactly the best source for unbiased information. She'll talk to Hagren, sure. But you've got to make sure we don't get sued for libel, especially with Pitch's trial coming up. He could easily get a mistrial if it turns out we've poisoned the public—and possible jury members—against Pitch.”

Wright sets his jaw in a hard line, but he knows when he's been bested.

“Yeah, okay,” he mutters. “Amy, stick around for a few more minutes.”

Barney takes this as his sign to escape. He gives Amaryllis a thumbs-up and closes the door so it makes no sound at all. Wright never looks up but continues pacing. Finally, he looks into Amaryllis' face.

“How do we keep this running?”

“How do we keep what running?”

“The findings. We need a series. We have to keep it alive month after month. It's the biggest thing we've ever latched onto. We can't just let it sink after the four-day set of stories.”

Oh boy, here it comes.
She coughs and moves away from him, sitting down in the guest chair. She bites her lower lip and
discovers that her lips have chapped from all the sun exposure in the Caribbean. She tries to imagine the brilliant turquoise of a Bahamian morning before she speaks.

“I'm not going to be here for that.”

Wright mumbles to himself. Something about a vacation.
I better go right out and say it.

She holds up her left hand and shows him the luminous diamond on her ring finger. It's the two-carat sparkler that Donny gave her in a tear-soaked goodbye at the Miami airport. “After the series runs and we nail down the after-effects, I'm going to leave the
Star.
”