The Atlantis Code (62 page)

“Go!” Natasha said. “Save her!”

Lourds plunged into the water and swam against the inrushing water. It was hard to do that and keep the flashlight trained on Leslie. He hoped that she used it as a beacon to find him.

Gallardo moved quickly through the darkness. He knew he had to get to the surface, but he had one more mission to accomplish first, one last score to settle here. He’d managed to locate the Russian woman when she’d killed the Swiss Guards trying to get the professor. She was in between him and the exit. He could delay a few crucial seconds for killing such a tempting target. It would be a pleasure to end her. Wading through chest-high water, pistol clenched in one hand as he navigated toward the rock wall where he’d last seen her, Gallardo fought the water and surged forward.

He came up behind her. The other cave had lights strung, and he used that light to skyline her against the rock wall. He took deliberate aim at the back of her head.

Then, when the muzzle flash illuminated her features, Gallardo realized she hadn’t been facing away from him. She’d been looking right at him.

Indescribable pain tore through Gallardo’s chest and heart. He tried to squeeze the trigger of his pistol, but his hands no longer worked. His arms dropped to his sides as he fought to stagger away.

His heart had stopped. He felt the dead silence inside his chest.

Then the woman was on him. Her face was as hard as stone.

“You killed my sister, you bastard,” she said.

Gallardo saw one last muzzle flash, felt his head snap back, then he saw and felt nothing.

Lourds found Leslie in the raging waters and grabbed her handcuff chain the way the Swiss Guard had held his. “Hold on,” he spluttered through the water. His feet barely found purchase on the stone floor now, but he kept pushing them forward. He swam when he had to.

Slowly, his heart pounding frantically and his breath coming in ragged tears, he discovered he was making headway against the rising water. Either the pressure was equalizing or the larger cavern was taking much longer to fill.

He had no doubt that the library had already drowned.

He tried not to think about that. Instead, he focused on the lighted mouth of the next cave. Water had already invaded there, too, but there were still a few vehicles the construction crew had left behind.

His throat, nose, and lungs burned as he finally reached solid ground. He pushed against the rock and hauled himself and Leslie from the water. It helped when she could reach bottom. Together they kept moving through waist-high water.

He began to believe they might manage to make it out alive after all.

Then, like one of the undead in the old monster movies Lourds had loved as a child, Murani rose from the water in front of him. The priest’s left shoulder was matted with blood, but he held a pistol steady in his right hand.

“Stop,” Murani ordered.

Lourds waited for Natasha to shoot the man, but no shot was forthcoming. Murani shifted the pistol toward Leslie, and Lourds knew the cardinal was going to kill her, then take him prisoner.

A shot sounded from somewhere along the wall of carved images behind them.

Leaping forward, Lourds grabbed Murani’s hand, then lowered his shoulder and drove the man back against the wall in a move that was highly illegal in soccer but one which Lourds had employed before when a game turned rough. Murani tried to knee him, but Lourds shifted and took the blow on the inside of his thigh.

The Book of Knowledge tumbled free of Murani’s robes. It splashed into the water and started to sink.

Before he could think, Lourds released his hold on Murani’s gun hand and reached for the Book. He seized it in the water before it could disappear.

“No!” Leslie shouted. “Thomas, look out!” She ran toward them, barely making headway through the water.

Half-turned, Lourds saw the pistol aimed at his head and Murani’s face a mask of rage just behind and above it. There was no way the cardinal could miss at such close range.

On instinct, Lourds lifted the Book of Knowledge as a shield. The muzzle flash lit up the cave for a moment, and he felt the impact of the bullet against the Book. Lourds expected the bullet to tear through the Book easily and strike him.

But it didn’t.

Holding on to the Book with his left hand, Lourds reached for Murani with his right. Instead of fighting, though, the cardinal slumped down bonelessly into the water. A bullet hole was centered neatly between his eyes.

Not believing what had just happened, Lourds watched Murani’s corpse float away. When he turned the Book of Knowledge over, Lourds didn’t even find so much as a scuff mark.

“Did you see that?” Lourds asked Leslie as she reached him. “The bullet ricocheted.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.” Leslie pulled at him gently. “Come on.”

Lourds ran his hand over the Book’s cover. There wasn’t a blemish or a divot to mark where the bullet had struck it, but he knew it had.

Natasha joined them. Blood spotted her face, but Lourds knew it wasn’t hers.

“Gallardo is dead,” Natasha declared. “My sister has been avenged.”

Lourds nodded, but his attention was on the Book. If the bullet hadn’t harmed the Book, was it waterproof as well? He opened the Book and found pages wet but unharmed. The symbols floated across the page, and he started to translate automatically.

“No.” Leslie closed the Book of Knowledge. “Not this one. Read a million other books. A
billion
other books. But not this one.”

Slowly, reluctantly, Lourds accepted that. Together, they turned and ran into the next cave as the water continued to rise.

ATLANTIS DIG SITE
CÁDIZ, SPAIN
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009

L
ourds stood sweating in the humidity that rolled in off the Atlantic Ocean. Before him, the work continued to rescue what could be saved of the Atlantean civilization.

He’d only just been released from the custody of the local and state Spanish police that had descended on the dig site. For the last two days, he’d shared a small cell with some of Cádiz’s worst criminals. He’d suspected that was meant to intimidate him. However, he had managed to ingratiate himself with his cellmates.

Harvard professor or not, Lourds had spent much of his life around the world with such men. Wherever artifacts beckoned with all their promise of riches, thugs like these congregated. Once he’d figured that out, Lourds made it a point to learn to speak their language—whatever variant of the local vernacular it was. The thugs in his recent lodgings weren’t exactly on his Christmas card list, but they’d been sad to see him go. When the Spanish law enforcement teams hadn’t been questioning him, he’d shared stories with the prisoners. He’d become something of a celebrity because CNN kept showing background information on him.

The United States State Department hadn’t stepped in in his behalf too forcibly, because they weren’t sure exactly what Lourds had done. There were several international agencies waiting to speak with his little band. Natasha in particular had excited their interest.

In the end, Pope Innocent XIV had interceded and asked for mercy, citing their work for the Church. His captors listened. All of them had been released.

Gary was still recovering in the hospital. Natasha had gone to make phone calls. Despite the swath of death she’d left behind her, the evidence to connect her with it was completely missing. It appeared she’d be able to clear up her “indiscretions” with her country—the worst of which was apparently not filling out proper paperwork for her vacation time. And Leslie was making nice with the television studio that employed her because they’d discovered she had in her clutches many exclusives on the Atlantis story that CNN didn’t yet have.

She, too, would come out of this relatively unscathed.

Several of the television people recognized Lourds and begged interviews. He’d turned them all down. He thought that would probably make Leslie happy, and he felt like he owed her something.

It didn’t take long for news of Lourds’s presence to reach Father Sebastian’s ears. The old priest had gone to the hospital, had his shoulder taken care of, and returned to the dig site to once more take control.

“Professor Lourds,” Sebastian greeted as he walked up. His left arm was in a sling and he looked pale, but he appeared hearty nonetheless.

Lourds returned the greeting. “I trust the pope got his package?”

Sebastian nodded. “He was very happy to see it. It’s been put away for safekeeping. It will not trouble you any further.”

The night they’d gotten out of the caves, Lourds discovered that Sebastian had survived being shot. Before the old priest had been mediflighted out, Lourds had given him the Book of Knowledge. He hadn’t been able to trust himself to keep it.

He knew he’d never be able to resist reading it, whatever the cost.

Sebastian gestured to the security guards keeping the crowd back. They allowed Lourds to enter, and Sebastian took him by the arm.

“I heard you’d been released a little while ago,” Sebastian said as they walked toward the golf cart Sebastian had driven over.

“Only just,” Lourds admitted. He pulled at his clothing. “I should have found a hotel room and changed clothes first, I’m afraid. I apologize. I’ve still got the stink of the jail on me.”

“But of course you are here. There was no other place for you, was there?” Sebastian smiled.

“No.” Lourds sat in the passenger seat as the priest drove them back toward the cave. “I keep thinking about that library down there. If the Book of Knowledge survived the bullet and the water—”

“Ah, but that Book is a very special Book. You can’t expect the same of the others.”

“I can hope. Maybe the technology that went into making the paper and the ink was different from what we have.” Lourds felt worn to the bone. “Maybe it survived. I’m a trained diver. I’ve also done cave dives.”

Sebastian shook his head. “Then you haven’t heard the bad news.”

“What bad news?”

“It happened only just this morning.”

Lourds waited, and his gut wrenched in anticipation.

“The section of the caves where we found the library and the final hiding place of the Book of Knowledge has been lost to us.”

“How?”

“How do I know?” Sebastian shrugged. “I only know that nothing was there. Perhaps the sea took it away. Peeled it off the mainland and carried it off. All that remains down there is a huge hole that’s allowed the Atlantic to fill most of the cave system.”

Lourds slumped back against his seat and felt defeated. For the last two days, all he’d thought about was the possibility that the library might have survived.

Now it was gone.

“We might be able to save some of the wall sections, the crypt area, and a few other things,” Sebastian said. “But now that the Church has what it came looking for—”

“The pope doesn’t want to keep emptying the coffers.”

“It would be foolish of us,” Sebastian agreed. He sighed. “Still, I’ve been given permission to tidy up a few things here before I leave. I can certainly bring in other interests—perhaps others can continue what we have started, eh?”

“That will also keep the media from wondering what you were really here after.”

“Unless someone tells them.”

Lourds shook his head. “I won’t. No one would believe me anyway.”

“What about the young reporter?”

“All Leslie’s going to tell anyone is that we discovered clues to a library that had been hidden in the caves.”

“She’s not going mention the Book of Knowledge?”

“No. She’s sticking to the standard Atlantis myth. It will play better in the ratings, she assures me. Besides, would anyone from the Vatican admit it existed, no matter what she said?”

Sebastian smiled. “You’d be surprised at the number of things that don’t exist.
Officially
.”

“I don’t think so,” Lourds said. “Not after this.”