The Hunt For Atlantis

extremely unhappy. “They’re worried that if more outsiders come, they’ll try to raid the temple,” he told Kari.

“Raid it of what?” Chase asked sarcastically, looking up from his phone call. “Helicopter parts? There’s nothing left to steal!”

“No, they’re right,” said Nina. “Even if a large part of it’s destroyed, there’s still a lot of gold in there.”

“I can arrange for security,” Kari said. “The Foundation has reliable people who aren’t motivated by money-they can protect the tribe while they provide aid. And I think it’s best if the knowledge of exactly what the temple contains remains our secret, don’t you?”

“I didn’t see any gold,” commented Chase with exaggerated innocence as he finished the call. “All I saw were crushy things and crocs with big teeth and a puzzle we couldn’t work out the answer to.”

“Oh, it was forty, by the way,” Nina told him casually, leaving him open-mouthed. “Forty lead pellets. Now that I understand the numerical system, it was easy.”

“You’re joking, right?” he asked. Nina just gave him a knowing smile in reply. “Okay… Anyway, they’re sending the chopper for us. It’ll be a couple of hours, though-even with a GPS fix, they still have to find us in the dark.”

“Will Agnaldo be all right for that long?” Nina asked Castille. “Don’t we need to get him to a hospital?”

“Don’t worry about me,” di Salvo told her sleepily. “It’s not the first time I’ve been shot.”

“He’s stable,” Castille said. “I’ll do what I can to help the other Indians while we’re waiting.”

Kari went to Chase and took the phone. “I’ll call my father and let him know what’s happened so that he can make all the arrangements with the Brazilians. And then…” she came back to Nina, squatting next to her, “we need to get you to a map. We may have lost the information in this temple, but we can still get to Atlantis before Qobras. The hunt is still on.”

EIGHTEEN

Gibraltar

Chase examined the chart covering the table in the hotel suite, running his finger along the line marking thirty- six degrees north. “That’s a lot of sea to cover.”

“Fortunately, we don’t have to,” said Kari. “One of my father’s survey aircraft is already doing a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar survey of that region of the Gulf seabed. If there’s anything buried beneath the sediment, it will show up-even up to twenty meters deep.”

Chase raised an eyebrow. “And if it’s over twenty meters deep?”

“Then, as you like to say, we’re fucked.” Nina smiled; it was the first time she’d heard Kari swear, and it sounded incongruous coming from her. “Has there been any more word on Qobras?”

“Oh yeah,” Chase said. “I’ve got a friend in Morocco; she’s been keeping an eye on things.”

“She’s not pregnant as well, is she?” Nina couldn’t resist asking.

“Funny you should say that… She says Qobras’s people set sail from Casablanca yesterday. He’s got a survey ship-not as flashy as yours, Kari, but it had a submersible aboard. You were right, Nina-he’s looking in the wrong place. If he holds course, he’ll be over two hundred miles southwest of us.”

“We’ll just have to hope that he stays there,” said Kari. “I’m still very concerned that his people managed to track us so quickly in Brazil.”

“The Nereid would’ve attracted a lot of attention,” Chase mused, “but yeah, I don’t like it that Starkman came right to us. Could be there was a tracker on the boat, but we’ll never know now.” The burnt-out wreck of the Nereid had been found capsized in the river, hit by an antitank missile fired from one of the helicopters. “So we need to keep the knowledge of where we’re going to as few people as we can. How many crew are there on your ship?”

“Twenty-four,” said Kari, “but they’re all loyal to my father.”

“You absolutely, one hundred percent sure about that?” Kari’s lack of an immediate reply gave Chase his answer. “I’d keep exactly where we’ll be going to just the captain and the navigator until we actually arrive, if I were you. And even then…”

“We’ll just have to wait and see what the radar survey shows,” said Kari, seeming pensive. “Thank you, Mr. Chase.”

“If you need me for anything, I’ll be next door,” he said, before walking out.

“See you,” said Nina, looking back at the map. At its largest, the Gulf of Cadiz ’s northern and southern coasts were about three hundred miles apart. Smaller than Atlantis as described by Plato-but the ancient philosopher’s figures had already been proven wrong once before, thrown off by the conversion from the odd Atlantean numerical system into decimal. The actual size would be, at most, roughly two thirds of what Plato had said-and that was assuming that an Atlantean stadium was the same size as a Greek one, which now seemed unlikely. If the temple in the jungle were an exact replica of the original, then one Atlantean stadium-the length of the Temple of Poseidon -was only four hundred feet long, considerably smaller than its Hellenic counterpart.

The combined reductions in scale brought the size of Atlantis down to approximately 125 miles in length, and under a hundred wide. Which would easily fit within the Gulf-and more important, could be located on the relative shallows of the continental shelf before the seabed plunged away to the abyssal depths of the Atlantic itself. The Brotherhood’s search would be well off target.

The Brotherhood… She stared silently at the map.

“What’s on your mind?” Kari asked.

“I was thinking about the Brotherhood. About Qobras.” She looked up at Kari. “Who is this guy? Why is he so desperate to stop us from finding Atlantis?” A memory creased her brow, something Starkman had said. “Or rather, why’s he so desperate to stop you and your father from finding it?”

“I…” Kari’s expression became conflicted.

“What? Kari, what is it?”

Kari gestured at a nearby sofa. “Nina, there’s something I want to tell you.”

Unsettled, Nina sat, Kari next to her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, it’s just… There’s something else that my father and I are looking for as well as Atlantis itself.”

“Something else?” Nina said. “What else could there be?”

“This might sound strange, but… finding Atlantis is only the beginning of what we’re doing. You know that the Frost Foundation has been involved in medical aid programs all around the world?” Nina nodded. “We’ve also been taking genetic samples from as many different peoples as we could. Blood tests.”

Nina’s hand went to the little mark on her arm where she had been vaccinated before leaving for Iran, what seemed like years before.

“Yes, you too,” Kari said. “Please don’t make any judgments before I’ve told you everything! Everything we’ve done has been for a very good reason.”

“You tested my DNA?” asked Nina, shocked. “Without telling me?”

“We had to keep it a secret. Please, let me explain! Please?”

“Go on,” Nina told her, tight-lipped.

“What my father and I discovered-more my father; he had already found the first evidence while I was still a child-was that there is a particular genetic marker that is only present in approximately one person in every hundred. It’s rare-but it’s also widespread. We found it all over the world. We think…” Kari paused, as if reluctant to reveal a long-held secret. “We believe this genetic marker can be traced all the way back to the Atlanteans. In