The Covenant of Genesis

‘I see. After the UN organised a private flight for the specific purpose of bringing you both back to New York. I hope you’re not going to add the cost of his scheduled ticket to the discretionary budget as well?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she growled. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, Maureen, I still have work to do.’ She held up the crumpled ball of paper. ‘This says you aren’t officially the IHA’s Director for two more days, which means I’m still in charge - and you’ve wasted enough of my time. Lola, I’ll be in my office. Don’t put any calls through unless they’re urgent. Or Eddie.’ She turned her back on Rothschild and entered her office, slamming the door behind her.

9

Nina arrived at the United Nations building having spent the night worrying about Chase. After her confrontation with Rothschild the previous day, she had checked her voicemail to find a message from him. Her relief at hearing his gruff Yorkshire tones was muted by the terseness of the message, which told her little other than that he was on his way back to New York - and that he was ‘knackered’. She could tell he had been through a tense, dangerous time, but not knowing what had happened made her worried and frustrated.

Since then: nothing.

The first thing she did on arriving at the IHA was check if he had left any messages. He hadn’t. She stared blankly out across Manhattan from her office window before sharply turning away. She knew she ought to continue working on her report, in preparation for the inquiry, but her concerns about Chase were too distracting. She needed something else to focus her mind.

Like the pictures on the memory card recovered from her stolen camera.

She copied the files to her new laptop, putting the card in her jacket pocket before opening all the high- resolution images. One in particular dominated her attention, a close-up of the clay tablet, showing the strange text in great detail. She steepled her fingers against her lips as she tried to make sense of it.

Nothing. A few characters - a triangle with what might be a tree or a flower above it; three horizontal lines one above the other, the topmost curling back round on itself - appeared more symbolic than others, reminding her of the stylised pictograms forming the basis of the ancient Chinese and Japanese writing systems, but what they actually represented remained a mystery. Others stood out from the elegant, curved characters making up the bulk of the script by their stark and angular nature, a number of V-shapes pointing in different directions, small dots between the lines, followed by blocks of tightly packed little marks . . .

What did they mean? What was the secret someone was willing to kill to protect?

She had no idea.

Keeping the picture open in the background, Nina reluctantly returned to her report, forcing herself to the recall the unpleasant details of the events aboard the Pianosa. But the image kept drawing her attention over the course of the morning. She almost closed it to remove the distraction, but something about it was sounding a bell in the back of her mind. Something familiar.

What, though? The text resembled no alphabet she knew.

So, if it wasn’t an alphabet, then—

Nina jolted upright. The meaning of one particular type of symbol had just leapt out at her as if illuminated in neon. ‘Why the hell didn’t I see it before?’ she cried. ‘Dumbass!’

The blocks of closely spaced markings weren’t letters. They were numbers. Atlantean numbers. They weren’t quite the same as those she had seen on various Atlantean artefacts, but were close enough to be recognisable as from the same family: considering the apparent age of the tablet, an earlier version.

She grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled them down, converting them to the more familiar Atlantean equivalents, then rapidly performing the complex mental arithmetic to transform the unique numerical system into base ten. Each set turned out to be quite large, getting more so after each of the V-shapes to which they seemed linked. A record of something, then, a count. But what? It could be anything: numbers of people, distances, even the amount of fish caught by the boat in which it had been found.

But she had discovered something. The fact that it appeared to use a form of the Atlanteans’ numerical system meant that whoever made the tablet was in some way connected to them, however far separated by geography and time. And if the Atlantean language could be deciphered, so could this.

Maybe it already had been deciphered. While Nina was necessarily well versed in ancient languages, it wasn’t her specialty - she was an archaeologist, not a linguist. There were experts whose specialised knowledge far eclipsed her own. Her former mentor, Professor Jonathan Philby, had been one such expert, but he was no longer alive.

He’d had peers, though - well, more like rivals, she remembered. Even at the pinnacles of academia, one- upmanship was still a driving force. The names escaped her, but a few minutes’ trawling through online archives for some of Philby’s papers gave her one: Professor Gabriel Ribbsley of Cambridge. She vaguely recalled Philby once naming him as one of the world’s top palaeolinguists . . . after himself, of course. Judging from Ribbsley’s own extensive list of published papers, that still appeared to be the case.

She got Lola to obtain his contact details, then sent a brief email of introduction, accompanied by the barest details of her reason for contacting him - considering recent events, it seemed prudent to keep the recovery of her pictures of the clay tablet as quiet as possible. That done, she forced herself to go back to work on the report. Her experience with tenured professors had taught her they would respond to external enquiries in their own time, and the more prestigious the university, the greater that time would be - all the way up to the heat-death of the entire universe.

So it came as a surprise when Ribbsley phoned less than twenty minutes later.

‘This is, uh, quite an honour, Professor,’ she said after introductions had been made.

‘Oh, the honour is all mine, Dr Wilde,’ Ribbsley replied. Nina couldn’t quite place his accent; there was an undertone that made her think his upper-class English manner was a hard-won affectation. Southern African, perhaps? ‘After all, it’s not every day one gets a request for assistance from the discoverer of Atlantis, and so many other great treasures. I visited the tomb of Arthur at Glastonbury just a month or so ago, in fact. They needed help with the Latin inscriptions - makes one wonder what on earth they teach these days, if something that simple poses a problem! But the tomb itself was quite impressive, so well done, well done.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nina, picking up a less subtle undertone, this one decidedly patronising. ‘But yes, I hope you’ll be able to help me. If you can spare the time.’

‘That depends what it is. I hope for the sake of your reputation it’s not Latin!’ He chuckled at his own joke.

‘No, it’s not,’ Nina told him, not feeling obliged to join in. ‘It’s related to some Atlantean text that was recently discovered. I see from your list of papers in the IJA that you’ve done a considerable amount of work on the subject.’

‘Well, I’d hardly be able to call myself the world’s top palaeolinguist with a straight face if I hadn’t!’ He laughed selfcongratulatingly again. ‘Mind you, I had a head start over the likes of Frome and Tsen-Hu and that imbecile Lopez. Hector Amoros asked me to do some preliminary work before the discovery of Atlantis was even officially announced. Benefits of having friends in high places.’

‘You knew Hector?’

‘In passing, poor chap. He was only an amateur, of course, but a moderately capable one.’

Nina held back a sharp comment that Amoros had actually held a Master’s degree in the subject. ‘This text . . . while we’ve found some Atlantean characters in it, there are others we haven’t been able to identify. I was hoping you might be able to look at it.’

‘I’d be delighted. Just email me what you’ve got, and I’ll cast an eye - or maybe even two! - over it as soon as I can.’

‘That’d be a huge help, Professor. Thank you.’

‘No problem at all, Dr Wilde. As I said, it’s an honour. Not everybody gets to change how we look at human history, after all.’

Was there a hint of jealousy under his bonhomie? But still, she’d managed to get his help. Someone of Ribbsley’s experience might spot in an instant something that had escaped her.

She certainly wasn’t going to send him everything she had, though, or even any of the photographs. Instead, she called up the picture of the tablet and carefully copied a single section of text including one of the V-shapes and