‘And you think Schoenberg may be one of those.’
‘I don’t know. He may just be a retired scholar with a past that was beyond his control. But if I’m right and Saumerre has got to him, then we have to be doubly cautious, because he could be playing us too.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’re looking for the site of Atlantis reborn, right? The place where the survivors of the exodus inscribed those symbols we know from Atlantis in the Black Sea, symbols that Himmler’s Ahnenerbe archaeologists who discovered the new Atlantis copied in that secret chamber in Wewelsburg that Frau Hoffman showed us. We know from her that the new Atlantis was where Himmler decided to build his secret hideaway, the destination for the U-boat dispatched with Hoffman and his deadly cargo in the final days of the war. We know that he shrouded the place with the mystique of Atlantis, which had for so long been the obsession of the Ahnenerbe, a mystique that may continue to motivate a man like Schoenberg. We’re on this trail now with such urgency because of the deadly virus that may have been successfully delivered by the U-boat to this new Atlantis, a virus Saumerre desperately wants to get his hands on. A man like Schoenberg could be caught in between, ignorant of the deadly biological weapon and Himmler’s true purpose, but passionately believing in the association of the place with the dream of revealing the Aryan roots of civilization that he now wants to see fulfilled before he dies.’
‘So you think Saumerre could have made a deal with him.’
‘I think Saumerre may have told him to give us all the information he has. Remember, Saumerre wants us to find this place. He has his contracted thugs, the Chinese gangsters of Shang Yong, but he doesn’t have the resources or the expertise to follow the archaeological trail we’re now on. He’s watching and waiting for us to get there. As soon as he knows enough to allow him to organize the logistics needed to get his men in place with the right equipment, he’s going to have a go again at kidnapping Rebecca so that he can blackmail me into revealing the location. It’s why I asked Mikhail to get Rebecca out of school to his place in the Adirondacks. I’m not going to let that happen again.’
‘You’d give away the location if it came to it?’
Jack gave him a steely look. ‘I have a plan.’
‘Okay. Just keep me in the loop.’ Costas looked out, shading his eyes, and pointed ahead. ‘That must be it now.’
Jack saw a narrow strip of beach on the shoreline to the right, and the eaves of a low wooden house in the forest behind. He turned the boat towards the beach, throttled down and stood up, one hand on the tiller and the other holding the painter line to steady himself. He steered into a small cove beside a spine of rock jutting into the bay, and then brought the boat against a small floating dock. He sat down, flipped the gear lever to neutral and threw the painter line to Costas, who leapt out and secured it to a wooden post. After switching off the engine, Jack climbed out, and together they made their way along a rickety boardwalk towards the beach.
He clicked on his cell phone and paused to read two urgent text messages, one from Lanowski and one from Katya. He called Costas back. ‘Incredible stuff. It really takes us forward. You remember Lanoswki’s Plato code, the idea that Plato and Solon before him embedded Pythagorean messages in their texts? Well, take a look at this. He’s found a code in Solon’s text, the Atlantis papyrus that Maurice and Aysha discovered in the desert five years ago.’
Costas peered at the message. ‘He says it’s a simple geometric code, easy enough to understand if you play chess in three dimensions. Typical Lanowski. For easy, read impossible. Sounds like he’s found a soulmate in Solon.’
Jack scrolled down. ‘Lanowski translates the ancient Greek as The priestess prophesied that the new Atlantis would be founded over the western ocean, where the palladion becomes heavy again and where the two mountains form a saddle and two peaks like the horns of a bull.’
‘That’s what Lanowski thinks Solon was told by the high priest at Sais, but that he instructed Solon not to write it down because it was sacred.’
Jack nodded. ‘It’s fantastic. Remember the weight of meteoritic iron along the North Anatolian Fault, at Atlantis, and the shape of the volcano? It may simply be saying that the new Atlantis will be founded at a site very similar to the old, but if that’s what the fleeing Atlanteans were looking out for, so should we.’
‘You’ve got something from Katya too? Not personal?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Read it. She’s worked on those Stone Age symbols on the cave wall at Atlantis. She’s convinced they’re syllabic, and two proper names. It seems incredible, but the nearest equivalents among known early names she can come up with are Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh.’
‘Not really so incredible though, is it, Jack? They’ve been staring at us from the Epic of Gilgamesh all along.’
‘And now we know they’re embedded in the reality of the Neolithic, in Atlantis,’ Jack said, shaking his head slowly. ‘Maybe that’s who we should be trying to see, real men, not mythical demigods, when we imagine a voyage west to that place where the palladion was heavier and the mountain had twin peaks.’
Costas jerked his head up to the treeline. ‘We’d better get moving if we’re going to use our time well.’
Above the berm of seaweed at the high-tide mark were huge bleached logs that had been washed in by winter storms, jumbled on the beach like a line of natural sculpture. They clambered over them and made their way up a wooden stairway towards the house. They could see an old man with a stick waiting for them, wearing a bandanna neck scarf and a straw hat. Jack raised his arm, and the man waved back, then beckoned for them to follow him as he turned towards the open screen door of the veranda.
18
T en minutes later, Jack and Costas were sitting in wicker chairs around a low glass-topped table piled high with books and papers, with steaming mugs of coffee in front of them. Schoenberg had taken his hat off to reveal a full head of white hair, neatly swept back. He was a tall man, lean-limbed, with fine features, and moved with an easy confidence. It was hard to reconcile the genial image with the world the man had grown up in and his role in it, and for a fleeting moment Jack thought that maybe he had been wrong, that the man should be judged for what he had become and what he had made of his life. He looked at the brown leather document case that Schoenberg had placed on the table between them. They had exchanged niceties and news of Dillen’s latest work, but Jack had remembered that Schoenberg was not one for small talk.
‘I’ve been hoping for this moment for many years, to share what I know with the right person,’ Schoenberg said, his German accent still marked despite more than half a lifetime in Canada.
‘James Dillen said it was most important that I come to visit you now. I’m fascinated to hear what you have for us.’
‘You are, I know, very familiar with the Periplus Maris Erythraei .’
Jack stared at him, then nodded. ‘The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Roman merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, written in Greek in Egypt. One of the most extraordinary ancient texts on seafaring and maritime exploration to survive. Two years ago, we discovered a Roman shipwreck in the Red Sea with a huge trove of gold bullion destined for India, the best corroboration yet of the ancient trade across the Indian Ocean described in the Periplus.’