“Stop!” she called, but the man flung himself against the glass, which shattered on impact. He flew out into open air and disappeared from sight. She ran to the window and looked down, where their prisoner of seconds before now floated in the water, his head caved in on one side. He had struck the top of a lamppost just before hitting the water.
“So much for questioning him,” Matt said. “What do you think he meant by a cleansing?”
“I don’t know for sure.” Tam felt cold inside. “But I think we’d better figure it out.”
“I think I squeezed his head too hard. He looks pretty out of it to me.” The man Bones had snatched out of the boat using one of the sub’s remote appendages lay atop an awning just above water level, held fast by the remote arm. He’d lost his weapon, and now stared up in disbelief at the sub’s high-density cutting blade, which hovered inches above his chest.
“We’ll see how he handles questioning.” Dane once again engaged the external audio and spoke into his mic. “Nod your head if you can hear me.” The man nodded. “Good. What’s your name?” The man frowned and pressed his lips together. “Let’s try this again,” Dane said. He spun the cutting blade and lowered it an inch for emphasis. “Give me your name or this is about to get painful for you.” He wasn’t about to slice this fellow apart, but hopefully, his bluff was convincing.
The man’s face twisted in anger then sagged. “Abel.” He looked like he was going to be sick.
“See how easy that was? Now, tell my why you were shooting at my friends.”
Abel took a deep breath and narrowed his eyes. For a moment, he looked as if he might refuse to answer. “The Cleansing.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Bones asked.
Abel’s eyes bugged out and he gaped, but it wasn’t the sound of Bones’ voice that elicited the reaction. A diver rose from the water, inches from him. With a single, swift movement, he sliced Abel’s throat, and sank back into the water.
Dane released Abel’s body and tried to snatch the diver using the mechanical hand, but the man moved too fast. Dane took Remora down while Bones engaged the sonar and began pinging the area all around them, but the diver was gone.
“We’re not going to find him,” Dane said. “Too much silt and debris in the water for visual or sonar, and he’s not a large target. Besides, he could swim through any of these submerged buildings and get away.”
“What just happened?”
“Not a clue,” Dane said. It was the truth. Try as he might, he could not construct a scenario in which the murder they’d just witness made any kind of sense. “Let’s pick Willis up and then find Matt and Tam. Maybe they can help us figure it out.”
Chapter 7
Sofia rolled the mechanical pencil back and forth between her teeth, her index finger tracing an invisible line under the row of symbols. She cursed, dropped the stack of papers onto her lap, and fell back onto the pillow. She needed sleep, but she couldn’t turn her brain off. Since her arrival in Huertas, a barrio of Madrid, she and Arnau had made progress deciphering the codex. As she had suspected, the codex bore a strong similarity to Egyptian hieroglyphs, but too many of the symbols still eluded them.
She moved to the window and gazed down at the street below. Streetlights shone on a young couple enjoying the night life, and a few stray singles who cast envious glances at the two lovers. Under different circumstances, she’d be down there among them, drinking in the local culture and perhaps enjoying tapas and cerveza at Magister or Viva Madrid. Right now, though, she couldn’t bring herself to put the codex aside.
“Five more minutes, and then lights out,” she told herself. She sank down on the lumpy bed in Arnau’s guest room and returned to her stack of papers. Wanting to protect the ancient codex, she and Arnau were working from blown-up images of the artifact. She had abandoned her plan to send copies to colleagues skilled in ancient languages because she could think of no one whom she could completely trust. Some would turn her in to the authorities for stealing the codex. Others would seek to discredit her find, while still others would try to translate it on their own and steal the credit for themselves.
And then there was Arnau. She was not entirely comfortable working with him. His dealings with her, as far as she knew, had always been honest, but the fact he’d been caught trading in stolen antiquities strained his credibility. Then again, considering her present circumstances, who was she to judge?
She decided to begin by re-reading what she’d translated so far. It was not a literal translation. The symbols conveyed meaning, but could not be directly transcribed into complete sentences, so she and Arnau had fleshed things out, using a combination of educated guesses, wild speculation, and atrial and error. In the places where they were least confident about the translation, they’d inserted their best guess in brackets.
The words of Paisden, priest of [Atlantis?] We are betrayed by our [Fatherland? Motherland?] Our crystals have been taken and our [machines?] [fail?] My [servant?] leads our people to [safety?] but I remain [steadfast? Dedicated?] The deluge shall soon [unknown] I believe we are the last [remnant]…
The rest remained untranslated, save for a few words, including an intriguing reference to temples. She gained no new insights, and put the papers down even before her allotted five minutes was up. Weariness weighed heavy on her and her eyelids drooped. Tomorrow, she’d look at the codex through fresh eyes.
“Let’s see if the Marlins have made any more stupid trades.” She took out her phone, opened the web browser, and punched in the Miami Herald’s website. She gasped when she saw the headline.
Killer Tsunami Strikes Key West
She read on, concern turning to disbelief as she read the report. A freak wave had struck Key West without warning, causing death and devastation to a small section of the island. The tsunami was odd, not only because it seemed to come out of nowhere, but because its size and behavior were so far out of the norm. It had come from the direction of the mainland and was reported to be a concentrated wall of water rather than a typical, broad wave. Strangest of all, scientists could determine no cause for it. Seismic detectors all around the Gulf of Mexico and in the Atlantic detected no activity whatsoever. The sole clue was a brief burst of energy, emitted by an unknown source, minutes before the wave struck.
Sofia leaned back and considered this terrible news. It wasn’t just the tragedy that impacted her, but the similarity to the wave that had swamped her dig site. In both cases, a wall of water appeared out of nowhere, with no obvious cause, and behaved in a way no known tsunami ever had. The articles she’d read hadn’t mentioned a surge of energy preceding the event in Spain, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Something in the back of her mind nudged at her thoughts. What was it? The codex mentioned machines, and a deluge to come. The machine in the temple! What if… No, the very idea was absurd. Of course, belief in Atlantis seemed absurd until she’d unearthed the city.
“Oh my God. I have to tell somebody.” But who? Could she really go to the American embassy with this story? They’d think her a lunatic. But she couldn’t just let this drop. She was certain she was onto something.
A loud knock startled her. Someone was at the apartment door. She heard Arnau moving through the front room. He opened the door and whispered something unintelligible.
“Why the need to be so quiet?” a deep voice said. “We are alone, no?”
“I don’t want the neighbors to hear us.”