both knew it.
'My father was the captain of a submarine,' he said. 'Your father was a passenger on that sub. Granted, I have no idea what either one of them was doing in the Antarctic, but they still died in vain.'
And no one gave a damn, he silently added.
She pushed her soup away. 'Will you help us?'
'Who's us?'
'Me. My father. Yours.'
He caught the sound of rebellion, but needed time to hear from Stephanie. 'How about this. Let me sleep on it, and tomorrow you can show me what you want.'
Her eyes softened. 'That's fair. It is getting late.'
They left the cafe and followed the snowy pavement back toward the Posthotel. Christmas was two weeks away, and Garmisch seemed ready. Holiday time, for him, was a mixed blessing. He'd spent the past two with Henrik Thorvaldsen at Christiangade, and this year would probably be the same. He wondered about Christl Falk and her Christmas traditions. A melancholiness seemed to dominate her, and she made little effort to disguise it. She appeared intelligent and determined-not all that different from her sister-but the two women were unknowns who demanded caution.
They crossed the street. Many of the windows in the gaily frescoed Posthotel were lit to the night. His room, on the second floor, above the restaurant and lobby, had four windows on one side, another three facing the front. He'd left the lamps burning and movement behind one of the windows caught his attention.
He stopped.
Somebody was there. Christl saw it, too.
Curtains were yanked back.
A man's face came into view and his gaze locked onto Malone's. Then the man glanced right, toward the street, and fled the window, his shadow revealing a rushed exit.
Malone spotted a car with three men inside, parked across the street.
'Come on,' he said.
He knew they needed to leave, and quickly. Thank goodness he still carried the keys to his rental. They rushed to the vehicle and leaped in.
He fired up the engine and whipped from the parking spot. He slammed the transmission into gear and roared from the hotel, tires spinning on the frozen asphalt. He powered his window down, turned onto the boulevard, and spotted a man in his rearview mirror emerging from the hotel.
He gripped the gun from his jacket, slowed as he approached the parked car, and fired a shot into the rear tire, which sent three forms inside ducking for cover.
Then he sped away.
TWENTY-TWO
12:40 AM
MALONE TWISTED HIS WAY OUT OF GARMISCH, USING TO MAXIMUM advantage its maze of unlit narrow streets and his head start on the men who'd been waiting at the Posthotel. He had no way of knowing if they had a second vehicle handy. Satisfied that they were not being pursued, he found the highway leading north that he'd traveled earlier and, following Christl's instructions, realized where they were headed.
'Those things you need to show me are in Ettal Monastery?' he asked.
She nodded. 'No sense waiting until morning.'
He agreed.
'I'm sure when you spoke with Dorothea there, you were told only what she wanted you to know.'
'And you're different?'
She stared at him. 'Totally.'
He wasn't so sure. 'Those men at the hotel. Yours? Or hers?'
'You wouldn't believe me no matter what I said.'
He downshifted as the highway began to descend back toward the abbey. 'A piece of unsolicited advice? You really need to explain yourself. My patience is about gone.'
She hesitated, and he waited.
'Fifty thousand years ago a civilization arose on this planet, one that managed to progress faster than the rest of humankind. Leading the way, if you will. Was it technologically developed? Not really, but it was highly advanced. Mathematics, architecture, chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology, astronomy. That's where it excelled.'
He was listening.
'Our concept of ancient history has been strongly influenced by the Bible. But its texts dealing with antiquity were written from an insular point of view. They distorted ancient cultures and completely neglected some important ones, like the Minoans. This particular culture I'm talking about is not biblical. They were an oceangoing society with worldwide commerce, possessing capable boats and advanced navigational skills. Later cultures like the Polynesians, the Phoenicians, the Vikings, and finally the Europeans would all develop these skills, but Civilization One mastered them first.'
He'd read about those theories. Most scientists now rejected the idea of a linear societal development from the Old Stone Age through the New Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Instead, scholars believed that humans developed independent of one another. Proof of that existed even today, on every continent, where primitive cultures still coexisted with advanced societies. 'So you're saying that, in times past, while Paleolithic peoples occupied Europe, more advanced cultures could have existed elsewhere.' He recalled what Dorothea Lindauer told him. 'Aryans again?'
'Hardly. They're a myth. But that myth may have a basis in reality. Take Crete and Troy. They were long considered fictional, but we now know them to be real.'
'So what happened to this first civilization?'
'Unfortunately, every culture contains the seeds of its own destruction. Progress and decay coexist. History has shown that all societies eventually develop the means of their downfall. Look at Babylon, Greece, Rome, the Mongols, Huns, Turks, and too many monarchical societies to even count. They always do it to themselves. Civilization One was no exception.'
What she said made sense. Man truly did seem to destroy as much as he created.
'Grandfather and Father both were obsessed with this lost civilization. I must confess, I'm drawn to it, too.'
'My bookshop is loaded with New Age materials about Atlantis and a dozen other so-called lost civilizations, not a trace of which has ever been found. It's fantasy.'
'War and conquest have taken their toll on human history. It's a cyclical process. Progress, war, devastation, then reawakening. There's a sociological truism. The more advanced the culture, the more easily it will be destroyed, and the less evidence of it will remain. In more simplistic terms, we find what we look for.'
He slowed the car. 'No, we don't. Most times we stumble onto things.'
She shook her head. 'The greatest human revelations have all started with a simple theory. Look at evolution. It was only after Darwin formulated his concepts that we started noticing things that fortified the theory. Copernicus proposed a radical new way to view the solar system, and when we finally looked we found out he was right. Before the last fifty years no one seriously believed that an advanced civilization could have preceded us. It was regarded as nonsense. So the evidence has simply been neglected.'
'What evidence?'
She removed Einhard's book from her pocket. 'This.'
