They reached the boat, and Costas untied the stern line and jumped in. Jack gestured at his phone again and climbed the rocky spur to get better reception. A few minutes later he pocketed the phone, and bunched his fist. ‘Yes.’ He clambered back down, untied the painter and hopped in beside Costas, resuming his position in the stern beside the engine. ‘Two very quick phone calls clinched it.’
‘Spill it.’
‘The first one to Maria, who’s in Naples. She saw that marginal note in Claudius’ manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History yesterday morning, but assumed it was probably a reference to the Atlantis story in Plato. She was looking at the infrared spectrographic images of the first part of Book 5 as I called her, and she was able to read out the note. It was exactly the same as on Schoenberg’s sheet. Exactly the same. That confirms it. It wasn’t made up by a medieval monk. It was copied from Pliny.’
‘And?’
Jack grinned. ‘The second call was to Dillen. He was back in his office in Cambridge, having closed the excavation at Troy yesterday. It was something that’s been niggling me ever since we saw those Stone Age symbols at Atlantis. I knew I’d seen something like them before, and I don’t mean the symbols on Palaeolithic cave paintings, but somewhere unexpected, the reason why it didn’t click for me straight away. You remember I said that when I was a student I did a study tour of Phoenician sites in west Africa? When Schoenberg mentioned Lixus, I suddenly remembered. At the top of the acropolis I found a large hole, probably where masonry had been dug out centuries ago from the Roman site for reuse. At the bottom was a much older stone, worn, apparently toppled sideways, with barely discernible symbols on it that I assumed were early Phoenician. I asked Dillen to dig out my study tour report from his shelves and take a look at my photograph. He said there were only three very worn symbols visible, but that they looked like a crescent, a V and three slashes. Those were the first three symbols from the Atlantis cave that Katya interpreted as the name Gilgamesh.’
Costas looked incredulous. ‘The pillar mentioned by Pliny? You mean you found it more than twenty-five years ago?’
Jack grinned again. ‘Sometimes things stare you in the face for a long time. You just have to know what you’re looking at.’
‘That makes it real for me,’ Costas said. ‘An ancient exodus west across the Atlantic from Lixus following the current would very probably land you in the Caribbean.’
Jack nodded. ‘When we were on Seaquest II in the Black Sea after our dive into the volcano, do you remember I brought up Thor Heyerdahl and his Ra expeditions? I guessed that an exodus west from Atlantis and the Mediterranean would have gone south with the current towards Cape Juby just as Heyerdahl did, and then west across the open ocean. I knew after talking to Frau Hoffman that Himmler’s men must have chanced on the site of the Atlantean landfall in the Caribbean, and that was where he must have decided to establish his secret hideaway. So I phoned Rebecca’s foster-father Mikhail and asked him to look into any evidence for unusual German activity in the Caribbean before the war, as well as any U-boat sightings in May and June 1945. I told him to liaise with Lanowski to correlate anything he found with geological evidence for a likely underwater site. Mikhail’s a military historian, and I knew from spending time with him last year that he’d recently written a book on the strategic significance of the Caribbean at the outset of the Cold War. A moment ago, when I spoke to Ben, he was on Mikhail’s farm in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, where he took Rebecca this morning for safety. Ben passed the phone to Mikhail, who’d just received a package of material from the US National Archives. I could sense his excitement. He thinks it’s exactly what we want.’
‘Any details?’
‘It involves one of the last combat missions against the Nazis. Three weeks after the German surrender. It sounds like something out of the annals of the Bermuda Triangle, but it’s much more real and much more horrifying than that. Mikhail’s still working through the file, but he’s going to tell me the full story when I get there.’
‘We’re going to the Adirondacks?’
‘ I’m going to the Adirondacks.’ Jack picked up the phone again, then paused. ‘The Embraer’s all fuelled up at Tofino and it’s going to fly us to Syracuse in upstate New York, where I’m going to rent a car and drive into the mountains. I should arrive at Mikhail’s place before dawn tomorrow morning. You’re going on from Syracuse to Seaquest II off Bermuda. I need you in the operations room to kick up a brainstorm with your new best buddy Lanowski. As soon as we can pinpoint a location for the Nazi hideaway in the Caribbean, we need everything we can get on the geology and oceanography, and the predicted weather conditions over the next forty-eight hours. That’s the time frame we’re looking at. The Embraer’s going to return from Bermuda to Syracuse and I’ll aim to join you with Rebecca on Seaquest II tomorrow evening, after Mikhail’s told me what he’s found out. Then all eyes south to the Caribbean.’
Costas jerked his head back to the bungalow above the beach. They could just make out Schoenberg’s straw hat in the window, and a cell phone clamped to his ear. ‘You gave that one away. You told him that’s where we were heading.’
‘We’re all playing each other. Saumerre will be playing Schoenberg just as Himmler once played his Ahnenerbe cronies, convincing them that the archaeology was the main prize, letting only a chosen few know his true intent and then disposing of them when they’d served their purpose. Schoenberg’s telling him that as soon as I’ve followed the lead I told him about, I’ll get back to him to reveal where we’re heading. He believes I’ll do that because he offered me more information about the Ahnenerbe, about other treasures waiting to be discovered. Part of Schoenberg, the scholar and adventurer, just won’t believe I’d pass up on a chance like that, that somehow he and I will go off together on fantastic voyages of discovery. Another part of him, the Nazi, believes that what he revealed to us in that rant about Frau Hoffman will come as a terrible shock and persuade us that everything she said about Himmler and his plan was a pack of lies. Schoenberg would like to think that we’re after the archaeology, not the deadly weapon that Saumerre wants. Remember what we saw at Wewelsburg Castle. That place poisoned everyone who came in contact with it, whether real scholars like Schoenberg or the academic failures and thugs who formed the core of the Ahnenerbe, the spies and sycophants whom Schoenberg despised. For Schoenberg, sitting there overlooking the sea dreaming of unresolved quests, the fantasy is reborn in his mind after all these decades, something that we’ve used to get information out of him, just as Saumerre has too.’
‘So you really intend to tell him the probable location?’
‘As soon as Mikhail tells me, and just before I board the plane to Bermuda. That way I’m in control. I want to push this to a confrontation. Saumerre may become impatient and events may move faster than we predicted. Ben’s convinced that Shang Yong’s hitmen will know about the farm and will have assumed that’s where Ben went with Rebecca when she left school this morning in Manhattan, where they’ve been shadowing her.’
Costas looked at his watch. ‘Better get going. Our pilot will be waiting.’
Jack pulled the starter cord and the Mariner coughed to life. He stared for a moment back at the figure in the bungalow, now with the phone down, watching them. ‘Part of me would still like to think that he’s just another victim of that war.’