The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller (55 page)

“We have to hide, Kate,” Adi said.

“From whom?”

“There’s no time,” Surya said.

Time
— the word echoed through Kate’s mind and another fear gripped her. She spun the boys around and searched for the digital readout.

03:23:51. Almost three and a half hours left. Martin had said there was less than 30 minutes before detonation. How? It didn’t matter — the clock was still ticking. She had to think.

The boys were pulling at her again, and behind them, a set of double doors opened.

CHAPTER 129

Dorian slipped the last of the space suit off and surveyed the room — some kind of decontamination chamber. He walked toward the smaller door. His steps echoed loudly in the high-ceilinged iron chamber. The door opened as he approached, and he stepped out into a corridor. Just like Gibraltar. It was all true. This was another Atlantean city.

Lights flashed to life at the top and bottom of the corridor. The place looked pristine, untouched. It certainly hadn’t endured a nuclear blast — two of them. Why not? Had the children made it farther into the Tombs? Had the Atlanteans caught them? Disabled the bombs?

Up ahead, Dorian heard footfalls — boots marching, striking the iron floor in unison. He drew his side arm and moved to the side of the corridor, in the shadow of an iron beam.

CHAPTER 130

Kate stood and peered into the room.

There were a dozen glass tubes, standing on end like the ones Patrick Pierce — her father — had described in the journal. And like those tubes, each of these tubes contained an ape, or a human, or something in between. Kate ventured into the room, marveling at the tubes. It was incredible — a hall of forgotten ancestors. All the missing links in humanity’s evolution, neatly collected and cataloged in this oval room, two miles below the ice in Antarctica, like a child might collect butterflies in a mason jar. A few of the specimens were shorter than Kate, no more than four feet tall; most were about her height, and a few were a good bit taller. They were all colors, some black, some brown, others pale white. Scientists could spend lifetimes in this room; many had already spent lifetimes digging up bones, desperately trying to find pieces of the intact humans floating there, suspended in the twelve or so glass tubes.

The boys followed her into the room, and the double doors shut behind them.

Kate scanned the room. Besides the tubes, there wasn’t much else except a chest-high bar with a glass top. Kate walked toward it, but stopped short as the doors to the room began to open again.

CHAPTER 131

Patrick Pierce kept his hand on the pistol as he watched the man who called himself David Vale. He had let the younger man lead. His story was believable, but Patrick still didn’t trust him.

They walked down one long corridor after another, and Patrick’s mind drifted to Helena, to that day seven years ago when the glass tube had hissed open.

The white clouds parted, and he reached out to touch her. He thought his hand would turn to sand, crumble, and blow away like ashes in the wind when he felt her cold skin. He fell to his knees, and the tears ran down his face. Mallory Craig wrapped an arm around him, and Patrick threw the man to the ground, then slugged him twice, three times, four times in the face, before two Immari security guards pulled him off of Craig. Craig — the devil’s right hand, the man who had lured him into a trap meant to kill him. A frightened boy — Deiter Kane — cowered in the corner. Craig got to his feet, tried to wipe the blood that kept coming from his face, then collected Dieter and fled from the room.

Patrick had wanted to bury Helena with her family, in England, but Craig wouldn’t allow it. “We’ll need new names, Pierce. Any connection to the past must be erased…” New names. Katherine. Kate, the man — Vale — had called her.

Patrick tried to imagine what it had been like for her. He had been an absentee father, and when he was around, an awkward father at best. From the moment he had held Katherine in his arms, he had dedicated himself to dismantling the Immari threat and unraveling the mysteries of Gibraltar and the Bell — to making the world safe for her. That was the best he could do for her. And he had failed. If what Vale said was true, the Immari were stronger than ever. And Kate… he had missed her whole life; worse: she had been raised by a stranger. Not only that, she had been drawn into the Immari conspiracy. It was a nightmare. He tried to push the thoughts from his mind, but they seemed to resurface around every corner they turned, seemed to rise out of the floor of every new corridor, like a ghost that wouldn’t go away.

Patrick eyed the man hobbling in front of him. Would Vale have answers? Would they even be the truth? Patrick cleared his throat. “What’s she like?”

“Who? Oh, Kate?” David looked back and smiled. “She’s… amazing. Incredibly smart… and extremely strong willed.”

“I have no doubt of that.” Hearing the words was so surreal. But it somehow helped Patrick come to terms with the fact that his daughter had grown up without him. He felt like he should say something, but he wasn’t sure what. After a moment he said, “It’s strange to talk about, Vale. For me, it was just a few weeks ago when I said goodbye to her in West Berlin. It’s… awkward to know my own daughter grew up without a father.”

“She turned out alright, trust me.” David paused for a moment, then continued. “She’s like no one I’ve ever met. She’s beatuifu—”

“Ok, that’s uh, that’s enough. Let’s uh… let’s stay focused, Vale.” Patrick picked up the pace. Apparently there was a speed limit to revelations… of a certain type. Patrick moved in front of Vale and began leading the way. He had an arm and a leg on the man — literally, and Vale was unarmed, so he probably wasn’t much of a threat. And Vale’s last answer had convinced Patrick: the younger man was telling the truth.

David pushed to keep up. “Right,” he said.

They plowed down the iron corridors in silence, and after a while, Patrick stopped again to let David catch up. “Sorry,” he said. “I know the goo takes it out of you.” He raised his eyebrows. “Had a few accidents myself exploring in the last month.”

“I can keep up,” David said between pants.

“Sure you can. Remember who you’re talking to. I was hobbling around in these tunnels a hundred years before you. You need to take it easy.”

David looked up at him. “Speaking of, you’re walking fine now.”

“Yes. Though I would trade it to go back. The tube. I walked right out in 1918. A few days in there fixed me right up. I didn’t put it in the journal, at the time all I could think about was what was happening around me. Helena… the Spanish Flu…” Patrick stared at the wall for a minute. “I think the tubes did something else. When I came out in ‘78, I could work the machines. I think it’s why I could go through the portal in Gibraltar.” Patrick eyed David. “But I still don’t understand how you could. You’ve never been in a tube.”

“True. I admit, I don’t understand it.”

“Did the Immari treat you with something?”

“No. Or, I don’t think so. But, actually, I was treated… I got blood from someone who was in the tubes — Kate. I was wounded in Tibet. I lost a lot of blood, and she… saved my life.”

Patrick nodded and paced the corridor. “That’s interesting.” He glanced over at the goo-covered wounds on David’s chest and leg. “The wounds were cleaned, but I thought they were gunshot wounds. How did you get them?”

“Dorian Sloane.”

“So he’s joined the Immari and continued the family legacy. Little devil was growing more evil by the day in 1985. He was 15 then.”

“He hasn’t slowed down. I’m ready.” David said.

Patrick led the way again, resuming a brisk, but somewhat slower pace. Up ahead, a set of double doors that had never opened before cracked and slid aside as they approached. “It’s exciting — opening passages that were closed yesterday. Listen to me, I sound like the fools who hired me during the War.”

David shook his head. “The War.”

“What?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just strange to hear ‘The War’ in reference to World War I. These days it means the war in Afghanistan.”

Patrick stopped. “The Soviets? We’re at war—”

“Oh, no, they’ve been gone since ‘89. Actually, the Soviet Union doesn’t even exist anymore.”

“Who then?”

“Al Qaeda, or actually, now it’s the Taliban, a… a radical Islamic tribe of sorts.”

“America is at war with an Afghan tribe…”

“Yeah, it’s a, uh, long story—”

The lights in the corridor flickered, then went out. Both men froze.

“Has that ever happened before?” David whispered.

“No.” Patrick took out an LED bar and snapped a switch. It cast light into the corridor and all around them. He felt like Indiana Jones striking a torch that illuminated some ancient corridor. He started to make a reference, but David wouldn’t know who Indiana Jones was.

The younger man raised his good arm to block his eyes and squinted.

Patrick paced ahead, taking each step with care. The lights in the corridor flickered again, almost coming on, before winking out. The door at the end of the corridor didn’t automatically open as they approached. Patrick extended his hand to the glass panel beside it. Sparse wisps of fog wafted out, and the pops at his hand were less intense. What was happening?

“I think there’s a problem with the power or something,” Patrick said. He thought he could work the door. He manipulated the controls and the door slid open slowly.

He held the LED bar up, casting light into the massive space. The chamber was bigger than any he had ever seen, down here or anywhere else. It looked as though it were miles long and miles wide.

Rows of long glass tubes were stacked to the ceiling, higher than he could see. They stretched into the distance, miles away, far into the darkness.

They were the same type of tubes Patrick had seen in Gibraltar so many years ago, with two exceptions: these tubes were full of bodies… and the white mist inside was changing. Clearing. The dissipating clouds inside the tubes revealed only brief glimpses of the people inside. If they were even people. They looked more like humans than the ape man in Gibraltar. Were these the Atlanteans? If not, who? And what was happening to them? Were they waking up?

Patrick’s fascination with the tubes was interrupted by a sound, deep inside the chamber: footsteps.

CHAPTER 132

The double doors to the room slid open, and Kate fought to hide her surprise when a tall, middle-aged man wearing a Nazi military uniform strode in. The man came to a halt, and stood still as stone, his back rigid. His eyes moved slowly over Kate and then the children.

Unconsciously, Kate took a step forward, placing herself between the man and her children. His lips curled slightly at the ends, as if her involuntary motion had revealed something, had told him a secret. Maybe the step had betrayed her, but his smile had done the same for him: she knew that cold smile. And she knew who the man was.

“Hello, Herr Kane,” Kate said in German. “We have been looking for you for a very long time.”

CHAPTER 133

Patrick listened as the footsteps somewhere in the darkness stopped. He and David both froze, looking at each other, waiting.

“What is this place?” David whispered.

“I’m not sure.”

“You’ve never been in here?”

“No. But I think, maybe… I have an idea,” Patrick said as he gazed at the tubes. The room was dark; the only light came from the tubes that hung in bunches on metal racks, like bananas hanging from a tree. Was it possible? Could the Immari have been right all along? “I think this could be a giant hibernation vessel. The door in Gibraltar — it was a portal to another place. Probably the structure in Antarctica. And that structure is… It’s what they thought it was.”

“Who?”

“Kane, the Immari. Their whole theory was that the structure in Gibraltar was a small outpost for the Atlantean Homeland, which they assumed was under Antarctica. They believed the Atlanteans were hibernational superhumans, waiting to return north and retake the Earth when the weather suited them.”

“Is there another possibility?”

Patrick looked around at the tubes and shook his head. “Hell if I know. I’m a coal miner from West Virginia.”

At that moment, the steps resumed.

Patrick glanced at David’s cane — the spear. The look on his face exposed his thoughts: if they walked to the footsteps, whoever it was would hear them coming.

“I can wait here,” David said. “Or we could call out.”

“No,” Patrick whispered quickly. “If the Immari have found an entrance in Antarctica… the footsteps could be… might not be friendlies. Or,” he glanced at the tubes. “Either way, we wait.”

Both men receded behind the closest bunch of tubes and crouched in the shadows as the footsteps coming toward them echoed loudly through the tombs.

CHAPTER 134

Dorian watched the Nazi soldiers march past him in the dimly lit corridor. It was true. Some of them were alive. His father could be alive.

He stepped out from behind the shadow, straightened his back, and spoke with force. “Ich heiße Dieter Kane.”

The two men spun and pointed their submachine guns at him. “Halten sie!” One man yelled.

“How dare you!” Dorian spat at him. “I am Konrad Kane’s only surviving son. You will lower your weapons and take me to him at once.”

CHAPTER 135

Konrad Kane crept closer to Kate, like a big cat studying its prey, calculating whether or when to strike. “Who are you?”

Kate’s mind raced. She needed a believable lie. “I am Dr. Carolina Knapp, lead scientist on a special Immari research project sent to find you, sir.”

Kane scrutinized her, then the children. “Impossible. I’ve been here less than three months. Launching another expedition would take far longer.”

Kate wondered if he was suspicious of her accent. She hadn’t spoken German in so long. A short answer would be better. “You’ve been here much longer than a few months, sir. But I’m afraid we’re out of time. We must go. I need to get these children out of these packs and off—”