The Atlantis Gene (The Origin Mystery 1)

“We can reverse,” Howard said quietly.

They waited. The tunnels were quiet. What to do? The sound was clearly gunfire, but David wasn’t in fighting condition and Howard was in intelligence, but he was a manager, not a soldier. Neither could offer any real resistance. In fact, they would probably be in the way.

“No, we go on,” David said.

Five minutes later, they heard another bout of gunfire, but they didn’t stop. Five minutes after that, they reached the room that opened onto the Atlantis structure. The steps lay in the center of the room, fully uncovered. To the right was the jagged opening the journal had described. David could also see the rest of the structure, but it was mostly smooth dark metal. Massive iron I-beams reached high overhead, holding the rock and sea at bay.

David looked up, studying the area above the stairs. There was a huge dome and a place where the structure’s overhang had been cut away from above.

“What is it?” Howard said.

“This is where they extracted the Bell,” David said, almost to himself.

Howard walked to the stairs, put his foot on the first step and looked back at David.

Without a word, David hobbled forward, moving up the stairs, leaning heavily on his cane. As he grimaced and climbed, an overwhelming sense of déjà vu engulfed him. The tunnelmaker, Patrick Pierce, had also been lured down here under the guise of rescuing someone, only to be trapped himself. David crossed the threshold with Howard following closely. He stopped and studied his mentor’s eyes. Was he missing something? What could he do about it now?

Inside, the structure was illuminated with LED lights that ran along the floor and ceiling. The corridors were about eight feet tall — not cramped, but not exactly spacious. They also weren’t square. The bottoms and tops of the corridors curved slightly, giving it an oval shape, except the curves formed in sharper angles. Overall, the halls felt like the corridors of a ship — a Star Trek ship.

David led Howard down the corridors, following the mental image he had formed of the map. Memorizing maps and codes was one of the quintessential tools of trade craft, and David was good at it.

The structure was incredible. Many of the doors to the rooms were open, and as they passed by, David saw a series of make-shift labs, like something you might see behind the glass of a museum, where curators carefully studied or restored historical artifacts. Apparently the Immari had dissected every inch of the structure in the past 100 years.

It was surreal. David had only half-believed the tunnelmaker’s tale, had thought that perhaps it was just that — a tale. But here it was.

The false wall to the chamber was coming up — just around the next turn. As it came into view, David felt himself holding his breath. The chamber was… Open.

Kate. Was she inside?

“Kate,” David called out. There was nothing to lose. Anyone inside could hear his cane clacking on the metal floor from a mile away, so they didn’t exactly have the element of surprise.

No answer.

Howard formed up behind him.

David crept to the edge of the chamber’s opening and peered inside. The room looked like some sort of command center. A bridge, with chairs dotted along smooth surfaces — computers? Something more advanced?

David moved into the room as carefully as he could. He pivoted around, leaning on his cane, scanning every inch of the room. “She’s not here,” he said. “But the journal, the story was true.”

Howard stepped inside the room and hit a switch behind him. The door to the room hissed closed, sliding from right to left. “Oh yes, it’s quite true.”

David studied him. “You’ve read it?” David again wrapped his fingers around the gun tucked in his belt.

Howard’s face had changed. His usually mild expression was gone. He looked satisfied. Confident. “I’ve read it, yes. But just out of curiosity. I knew what it would say because I was there. I saw it first-hand. I hired Patrick Pierce to find this place. I’m Mallory Craig.”

CHAPTER 110

Kate sat on the small plastic bench and stared at the white walls. She was in some sort of lab or research facility, but she had no idea where. She rubbed her temples. God, she was so groggy. Somewhere over the South Atlantic sea, a man had walked back into the plane and offered her a bottle of water. She had declined, and he had proceeded to hold her down and cover her mouth with a white cloth, the type that promptly induced unconsciousness. What had she expected?

She stood and paced the room. There was a small slit in the white door, but the window revealed only the hallway outside and a few more doors like the one to her room.

One of the long walls of the room had a rectangular mirror, recessed a few inches into the wall. This was no doubt an observation room, similar to the ones in her lab in Jakarta, except infinitely more creepy. She stared at the mirror. Was someone in there, watching her right now?

Kate squared her body to the mirror and looked into it as if she could see the mysterious man behind it — her captor. “I did my part. I’m here. I want to see my children.”

A voice broke over a loud speaker. It was muffled and computer-altered. “Tell us what you treated them with.”

Kate thought. She would have no leverage after she revealed what she knew. “I want to see them first, then you release them, and I’ll tell you.”

“You’re not in a position to negotiate, Kate.”

“I disagree. You need what I know. We both know your drugs won’t work on me. Now, you show me the children, or we’ve got nothing to talk about.”

Nothing happened for almost a minute, then on one side of the mirror, a video flickered to life. That part of the mirror must have been some sort of computer screen. The video showed the children, walking in a dark hallway. Kate stepped closer to the mirror, holding a hand out. Ahead of the children, a massive portal opened, revealing only darkness inside. The children walked through. The video paused with an image of the portal closing.

“You’ve read the tunnelmaker’s journal. You know about the structure in Gibraltar. There is a similar structure twenty times larger here. We think it’s eight times the size of Manhattan, almost five miles wide and 50 miles long, and it’s two miles below us. It’s been there, beneath two miles of ice, for countless thousands of years. The children are inside.”

The screen in the mirror switched to a close-up image of the children before they crossed the portal. It zoomed in on packs the children carried. There was a simple LED readout, the type you see on alarm clocks — a series of digital numbers. A countdown.