Her crew could wait no longer, and crowded in behind her, adding their own flashlight beams to the scant light hers provided.
“Whoa.” Patrick, focused on the Poseidon statue, stumbled on the soft, uneven dirt. “It’s just…” Words failed him, so he shook his head, continuing to gaze at the sculpture of the god of the sea.
“What’s the Stonehenge thing?” The grad student, who had been so amused by Patrick, indicated a circle of stone that ringed the statue. Though they were marble, and their lines sharp, the thick bases and circular arrangement did suggest Stonehenge in miniature.
“I guess it’s an altar.” Overwhelmed by the temple, Sofia found thinking a challenge.
“And there’s an obelisk where the heel stone should be.” Patrick rounded the statue, kicking up a cloud of dust as he went. “Hey, wait a minute.” He froze. “Sofia?”
“What is it?” She joined him on the far side of the statue and followed his line of sight. The back wall that divided the cella from the adyton, the area to which only priests were admitted, sloped away from them, and each layer of stone grew progressively smaller, giving the illusion of…
“A pyramid,” Patrick whispered.
“Why not? We’ve got an obelisk here. Perhaps Atlantis was, in some way, a cultural forerunner to both the Greeks and the Egyptians.” She wanted to kick herself for uttering such an unexamined theory. Such speculation was unscientific and unprofessional. She turned the beam of her flashlight into the adyton and almost dropped it.
The light gleamed on a contraption of silver metal supported on four stone pillars. It was a pyramid-shaped frame made of a metal that looked like titanium. Suspended beneath it was a metal bowl shaped like a satellite dish. The pyramid was capped by a grasping silver hand. Only the hieroglyphs running around the cap just below the hand looked like something from the ancient world. Otherwise, its appearance was thoroughly modern…
…and thoroughly alien.
Chapter 2
“What the hell is that thing?” Patrick’s words, whispered in a reverential tone, gave voice to Sofia’s own thoughts.
“Everybody stay out until I call for you.” She wanted to make a complete photographic record before anyone else entered the chamber. But more than that, she wanted to experience it by herself, to get the feel of the space and let her intuition speak to her. It was something she’d always done — her way of communing with the past.
She circled the odd contraption wondering just what in the world it was. She’d never seen its like in an ancient world site, but here it was, inside a temple that had spent the last few millennia buried under twenty feet of silt. She took a few minutes to photograph the chamber before turning to a tiny doorway in the back wall. She ducked through and found herself in a small room that was, surprisingly, faintly lit by sunlight. She identified its source as a shaft high in the opposite wall above a stone shelf that might have been a priest’s bed. Moving closer, she looked up and saw a square of sky at the far end. This was the shaft her crew had uncovered. Patrick was right. It looked like a larger version of a pyramid’s air shaft.
“Sofia.” Patrick called, soft but urgent, from the cella. “Mister Bishop’s here and he’s brought armed men with him.”
“What?” She whirled around. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would they need to be armed?”
“I don’t know. A few of them are Guardia Civil, and others look like Americans.”
Just then, gunfire erupted somewhere outside, reverberating through the stone chamber like thunderclaps. A final scream pierced the air, cut off in an instant by a single shot.
“You’ve got to get out of here!” Patrick hurried up to her. “The shaft. I’ll give you a boost.”
Before she could argue, Patrick scooped her up and lifted her toward the opening. She struggled to find handholds in the smooth stone, but Patrick kept pushing. He was stronger than she’d imagined. A few more shots rang out just as Patrick got his hands under her feet and shoved her the rest of the way in.
“What about you?” She felt like a coward, fleeing this way.
“I’ll be fine. He likes me.” His words rang hollow. “You just climb as fast as you can. I’ll stall him.”
Fighting back tears, she scrabbled up the shaft, her feet finding purchase on the sides and forcing her upward. Why had Mister Bishop done this? Behind her, she heard Patrick’s voice.
“Mister Bishop, what happened out there?” His voice quaked with every word.
“Nothing you need concern yourself with.” Bishop’s deep voice echoed in the shaft. “Where is Doctor Perez?”
His words chilled Sofia to the bone. She had no doubt he planned on killing her and Patrick once he’d extracted whatever information he sought. She didn’t know why he wanted to find Atlantis, but now that she’d discovered it, she, and her people, were expendable.
“She’s out on the dig site. Inspecting one of the outer canals on the south side, I think.”
“There are two sets of footprints.” His voice was cold.
“One of the assistants took some pictures and then I sent her back out.”
If she hadn’t been deathly afraid for her life, Sofia would have admired Patrick’s ability to invent on the fly. The fear was gone from his voice. She wished he could have escaped along with her but, should the worst happen, she was determined not to let his sacrifice be in vain. She continued her climb, now almost halfway to the top.
An unfamiliar voice, rough like sandpaper, spoke up. “What’s that opening behind you?”
“We think it’s an air shaft like the ones in the Great Pyramids.” Patrick reply came out fast and unnatural. Sofia could hear it, and she was sure Bishop and his cronies could too. “We got lucky. It was capped up at the top. Otherwise, it and this whole chamber would have filled with silt. We’d have had a heck of a time uncovering this thing, not that we know what it is.” He was clearly trying to divert their attention to the strange contraption.
“Oh, we know exactly what it is.” Bishop cleared his throat. “To be more precise, we know what it does.”
Don’t say anything else, Patrick. The more you know, the worse it is for you. Just run away.
Perhaps if Sofia were a telepath, Patrick would have heard her plea and clammed up. Instead, he rambled on. “Really? What does it do? It looks like…”
A gunshot rang out and Sofia muffled a cry of grief and fear. She looked up at the square of light at the end of the shaft. It was no more than ten meters away, but at the rate she was going it might as well be a thousand. If Mister Bishop, or one of his men, looked into the shaft, she was dead. She tried to quicken her pace, reaching out as far as she could, and her hand closed on cold metal.
“Pack up the machine.” Bishop was all business. His voice carried no hint that he had just witnessed the slaughter of innocent people. “Carefully, now, and be certain to crate it up before you take it out.”
“Yes, Bishop,” the man with the rough voice replied.
“I wonder.” Mister Bishop now sounded thoughtful. “Could a person fit inside that shaft?”