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‘Why would they move?’ Eddie called after her. ‘Council tax went up?’

‘Shush!’ She quickly reread the letter. ‘Every answer the monks gave Mom is a non-answer — like saying that parts of the monastery pre-date the 1840s. That could mean anything. They could have transferred statues or altars from the original site.’

‘So you’re telling me a bunch of Buddhist monks lied to your mum?’

‘They’re not technically lying, just being economical with the truth.’ She came back into the kitchen with the letter and map. ‘What if the monks who showed Tobias the cave and the monks who wrote to my mom are the same ones?’

‘They’d be pretty old.’

‘I don’t mean literally the same ones. But they’ve been protecting the cave’s secret all this time. To the point that when they realised Tobias might be able to find it again, they upped sticks and rebuilt their monastery on the only path up the mountain to make sure nobody could get past!’

‘Bit of a long shot,’ said Eddie dubiously.

‘You said my mom might have been wrong. She was — but only in the sense that she’d been given bad data. The monastery was blocking her from seeing the right answer because, well, who’s going to think that a Buddhist monk’s lying to them?’ She put the map on the table and tapped the spot she had indicated earlier. ‘That’s it. That’s the cave. Talonor’s journey meets Tobias’s right there.’

‘Okay, so you think you found it. Now what’re you going to do?’

Nina stared at the map. After a long, thoughtful pause, she said: ‘I’ll need to make a couple of phone calls.’

* * *

‘Hello? Can you hear me?’

Nina’s first call had been to Lola at the IHA to obtain contact details for the remote monastery from the UN’s databases, learning that it had a satellite phone for emergencies. After explaining herself to the surprised monk who answered her second call, she had been put through to the man she hoped could help her. The connection was poor, the speaker’s voice echoing as if coming through a long metal pipe, but she could make him out well enough.

Would the answers she received be as clear?

‘Yes, hello,’ she replied, carefully enunciating each word. She could tell that his first language was not English. ‘Is that Abbot Amaanat?’

‘Yes, it is. Are you Dr Wilde?’

‘I am. Thank you for talking to me.’

‘We do not often get telephone calls, especially from famous archaeologists. It is my honour to speak to you.’

‘Again, thank you. You’ve heard of me, then?’

‘Oh yes.’ Amaanat sounded quite elderly, giving her a mental picture of a hunched, bald old man in red and orange robes. ‘We are not out of touch with the world, even here. What may we do for you?’

Nina composed herself before replying. ‘It’s a personal matter, actually,’ she began. ‘I recently received some old letters belonging to my mother, and found one that had been sent from your monastery. I believe you were the person who wrote it.’ She glanced at the letter. The signature was incomprehensible to her, the curlicued Nepalese alphabet being related to Hindi, but beneath it had been written AMAANAT in tiny, careful capitals.

‘I may have, yes. It can take some time, but we try to reply to every letter we receive. It is only polite. What do you wish to ask?’

‘I want to finish her work. She had some questions about the monastery’s history. Do you remember what you said?’

Even with the satellite link’s time delay, it seemed that he hesitated before replying; not because he was searching his memory, but because her question had caught him off guard. ‘I… do not remember anything like that recently.’

‘Well, this letter was sent quite a long time ago. 1975 — March, to be exact.’

‘That is a long time ago,’ Amaanat agreed. ‘Too long to remember one letter.’

‘But you were at the monastery in 1975, yes?’

‘Yes, I have been here for more than fifty years.’

Nina was caught between caution and her urge to push for the truth; there was nothing stopping Amaanat from hanging up if he resented being interrogated. ‘I can remind you what she asked. The first question was simple: when was the monastery built?’

‘Ah, that I can answer,’ he said, with no hesitation this time. ‘Parts of it date to the seventeenth century, the period of the Three Kingdoms.’

‘And it’s been in the same place the whole time?’

‘It has been rebuilt several times. There have been avalanches, fires and earthquakes.’

‘But you’ve never been at another location.’

‘No. Since I became a monk, I have always been here.’

You should have been a lawyer, with answers that pedantic, Nina stopped herself from saying. ‘I meant the monks, the order in general. Have they ever lived somewhere else?’

‘In the past, we have sometimes moved when necessary, such as when the monastery was being rebuilt. But we are here now.’

Now she had to contain her exasperation at his becoming outright evasive — yet still without actually saying anything that could be proven as a lie. Maybe politics, not law, should have been his calling. ‘My mother also asked about past visitors to the monastery. Do you know when the first Westerners reached you?’

‘I am afraid I do not,’ said Amaanat. ‘Many have visited our monastery, but we do not keep records of all of them.’

‘But would you know if some had come to you in, say, 1846?’

The very specific date prompted another pause. ‘That was a year of great turmoil in Nepal,’ the abbot said. ‘It is very possible visitors came to us after the war with the British. But again, we do not have records.’

‘I see,’ said Nina, her patience finally running out. ‘Tell me: have you ever heard of an Atlantean explorer called Talonor?’

A startled silence, though the constant hollow moan of the satellite link told her he was still on the line. ‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ she went on. ‘Now, I’m following up my mother’s work from over forty years ago. She was trying to find an Atlantean outpost established by Talonor, which the monks — your monks, the same order — showed to an ancestor of ours, Tobias Garde.’

‘Nepal is a very long way from Atlantis,’ said Amaanat. The strain behind his voice implied that politeness was now the only thing keeping him from disconnecting.

‘Yeah, but it’s not far from Tibet, and I found an outpost of Atlantis there, so it’s not really a stretch. You might know the one on Dragon Mountain — that is one of the local names for the mountain on which your monastery’s built, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ he admitted.

‘You could know it by another name. The Midas Cave.’

When Amaanat spoke again, courteous vagueness had been replaced by wary suspicion. ‘What do you wish of us, Dr Wilde?’

‘I told you, I want to complete my mother’s work and find the Midas Cave.’

‘Is that all?’

She wasn’t sure what he meant. ‘Yes. What else could there be?’

‘If you believe that finding the Midas Cave will bring you riches, I am afraid you are mistaken.’ It sounded almost like a threat.

‘I don’t care about riches,’ Nina insisted. ‘You said you know who I am, so you should know I’m not interested in money. I just want to see if my mother was right.’

‘I cannot help you, Dr Wilde,’ said the monk. ‘I am sorry to have wasted your time. May you be well and happy.’

The conversation was clearly over. Unless…

‘Wait,’ Nina barked. ‘If you don’t want to help, that’s fine. But it means I’ll have to take everything I’ve learned about the Midas Cave to the International Heritage Agency and the Nepalese government, and mount an official archaeological expedition to find it.’