The Lost Scrolls

Could any meaningful, let alone accurate, information be transmitted over nine thousand years? She doubted it.

And yet…the legend of Atlantis had persisted all that time. It had exercised a fascination on the human imagination continuously since Plato had recorded it. Does that count for something?

She shook her head. Weariness was getting the better of her. She’d been going pretty hard of late, to say the least. She stood up with a slog of water and a cascade of soapy foam down her long smooth body and legs, and drew the curtain around the tub to shower off before heading to bed.

IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT. Annja had spent the day down in the excavation itself, painstakingly helping to extract burned scrolls from the rubble of the burned cabinets. She was exhausted and felt sticky from sweat, although here in the main lab inside the old warehouse it was quite cool. Apparently the Supreme Council on Antiquities was willing to spring for air-conditioning. Or maybe the television network was springing for it—she was grateful to whomever.

She noticed Jadzia lurking off to one side. The girl was fanning herself with a sheaf of fanfolded paper and trying to chat up a handsome young Egyptian technician working on a computer near her. Either he was shy or deliberately ignoring her. She caught Annja’s attention, glared and looked away.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Annja said, propping her rump on a table. “Wasn’t the Minoan civilization destroyed by a great big volcanic eruption around 1500 B.C.?”

“Yes,” Pilitowski said. “The catastrophic eruption of Thera. It is now estimated to have been at least ten times as powerful as Krakatau in 1883.”

“Although geologists tend to date the eruption from about 1600 B.C.,” Aleksy Fabiszak, the team’s geology specialist, said. “That volume of ejecta would be the same magnitude as the terrible Tambora eruption of 1815, the most violent of recorded history.”

“One point on the volcanic explosivity scale beneath supervolcano,” Maria said.

“So it would have made a royal mess of much of the Aegean,” Annja said. “I mean, the way the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis is supposed to have?”

“Well, if what you’re getting at is that perhaps Atlantis and the Minoan culture of Crete were the same,” Pilitowski said, “a lot of people have come to suspect that.”

Jadzia snapped her gum loudly. “ Somebody should tell her,” she said brassily, as if Annja were not in the room, “that we have found many references on the scrolls that make it impossible the writer was talking about the Minoans.”

Burly, good-natured Dr. Pilitowski looked to the slight, dark Maria, who shrugged. Annja got the impression she wasn’t the only one who found the brilliant language expert a problem child.

“From contextual evidence in what we have translated of these Atlantis scrolls,” Maria said, “it is clear they were written about half a century after Solon. That would make them a century older than Plato’s writing.”

“So far we are not finding any reference to Solon at all,” Naser said. He was a plump, pallid man in his thirties with a neat beard, who spoke with a Lower East Side New York accent. “We suspect that somewhere along the line different end-of-the-world stories got mixed together.”

“Hmm,” Annja said. She was still having trouble dealing with serious archaeologists taking Atlantis seriously. Although she had to admit none of them actually seemed to be vested in the truth of the scrolls, even if they did call them the Atlantis scrolls. But there was no mistaking the excitement that ran through the site whenever the gong went off to announce that they had images of more restored fragments.

“One thing I’m puzzled by,” she said, “is that reading Plato, I didn’t really see any talk about advanced technology. Not like what people always talk about, with flying machines and artificial light and all that.”

“That actually seems to have first appeared in a book called A Dweller on Two Planets, which came out late in the nineteenth century,” Pilitowski said. “Its author claimed to have received the information in dreams.”

Annja raised an eyebrow.

“Well, channeled it, actually.” He shrugged. “What can I say? He was from California.”

“Somebody ought to tell her the new scrolls substantiate much of what Frederick Oliver wrote in that book,” Jadzia said hotly.

Annja looked to Pilitowski, who shrugged. “I do not know that I would go so far as to say ‘substantiate,’” he said. “Nonetheless, we must admit we find certain correspondences.”

“We began to wonder if some alternate account of Atlantis might have surfaced sporadically throughout history,” Naser said, “without impinging on academic scholarship. And that Oliver got hold of it somehow.”

“With all respect,” Annja said, “that seems to be reaching a bit far.”

“Not so far as believing in channeling,” Naser said.

“True,” Annja said with a laugh.

Annja looked sidelong at Jadzia. The young woman—she just acts like a girl, Annja thought—posed a conundrum. For one thing, Annja wasn’t used to evoking knee-jerk hostility in people she hadn’t met. It bothered her. She led an isolated enough existence that she felt threatened when somebody reacted to her with such vehement negativity, as if perhaps she had at last been found out as invalid and unworthy for human companionship.

For all her rigorous training in cryptology, which Annja knew was no soft science, involving some of the most abstruse and demanding maths around, Jadzia clung to the role of true believer in Atlantis mysteries and doubtless a thousand other conspiracy theories. She wasn’t the first person Annja had bumped up against who harbored both serious scientific credentials and crackpot beliefs. She sometimes suspected that really high-level scientists could only be expected to be sane and knowledgeable in their own field of expertise, and anything else was fair game.

So maybe Jadzia’s hostility arose from antipathy toward the role Annja played, authentically enough, of house skeptic and counterpoint to Kristie Chatham, who believed in everything.

Annja had certainly suffered many flame attacks from such antifans before she quit visiting the show’s message boards, despite the insistent entreaties of her producer, Doug Morrell, that she do so. But that virulence didn’t spill out of cyberspace into her lap.

She suddenly remembered something odd said in passing the day before. “Why do they call Jadzia the anticomputer geek?” she asked Maria. Very softly, she thought.

But apparently among Jadzia’s attributes was a very keen sense of hearing. “I kill computers,” she announced proudly, her voice sharp edged.

“How?” Annja asked. “With a sledgehammer?”

She hadn’t meant to say that—really. But instead of flaring up at the comment, or the laughter it evoked from the eight or so other team members in the large room, Jadzia laughed louder and more brazenly than the others.

“Just by touching,” she said proudly.

Annja cocked an eyebrow at Pilitowski, who shrugged a big sloped shoulder. “It is true,” he said. “We cannot let her handle anything electronic. In seconds—” he snapped his fingers “—pfft!”

“It has to do with my personal magnetic field,” Jadzia said. She wore schoolgirl blue and white, with knee-high white stockings instead of the thigh-highs she’d had on the day before. Her skirt wasn’t any longer. “It disrupts electronic devices.”

“I don’t buy that,” Annja said. “Things like that don’t happen in the real world.”

“Lend me your cell phone?” the blond woman purred.

The gong sounded so loudly Annja jumped.

ONLY TWO OF THE team members were on duty down in the current excavation—a short, stocky Polish man named Tadeusz and a willowy Egyptian woman a head taller named Haditha, who wore what looked like a ruby in her pierced left nostril. The pair had trouble communicating verbally, since neither’s English was the strongest. Haditha spoke beautiful French. Tadeusz was a bit hard of hearing into the bargain. Yet they worked well together, seeming to have evolved some brand of nonverbal communication.

Everyone tacitly assumed they were sleeping together, although they never seemed to seek each other out off-hours. The consensus held that this was a cunning pose. Annja, knowing what a hotbed of intrigue and gossip the best-ordered dig could turn into after only a couple of weeks, reserved judgment. Like everyone else archaeologists loved a good story, and were reluctant to let facts spoil it—outside their chosen area of expertise, of course.

They came out of the bubble tent on the run. A few bright lights shone randomly from the nearby buildings, casting jagged patterns of light and shadow across the demolition rubble. As they went in the door of the former warehouse, Haditha heard a peculiar double cough from behind. The noises had an edge, reminiscent of knuckles on hardwood.

Tadeusz pitched forward on his face on the floor beside her. She stared at him in astonishment. The back of his pale head was stained dark and wet.

3

A sound behind Haditha made her turn. She gasped at a black insectile figure looming over her.

The man in the night-vision goggles and blackout gear stuck the thick muzzle of his sound-suppressed machine pistol against her sternum and fired the same precise 2-round burst his partner had used on the Polish archaeologist an instant before. Haditha recoiled, then simply collapsed, her dark almond eyes rolling up in her head.

From high above and in front of the black-clad pair came small muffled crashes, themselves hardly louder than coughs. Shards of glass descended from above, swooping like falling leaves, breaking to smaller pieces on the black rubber runner that ran along the central aisle. More black-clad figures rappelled from the broken skylights.

WITH A FROWN Annja snapped her head up from where she leaned close to the big flat-screen monitor. “What was that noise?”

Most of the team members ignored her. A number of new images were coming in from scrolls shipped intact to the jet propulsion laboratory, where layered MRI scans were used to extract the writing from within the rolled papyri.