Henry saw immediately that they were armed, automatic rifles slung over their backs.
The only weapon the expedition possessed was a simple hunting rifle, carried more to scare off wild animals than for its effectiveness. And it wasn’t even with them-it had been left at the camp.
Barely a second after the first two men reached the ground, another pair began to descend the ropes. They too were armed.
Henry jumped backwards through the hole and slid down the pile of stones, hitting the cave floor hard.
“Henry!” cried Laura. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t think they’re friendly,” he said, face grim. “There’s at least four men, and they’ve got guns.”
“Oh my God! What about Jack?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see him. We need to get that door open. Come on.” As Laura hurried towards the tomb, Henry snatched up the artifact from the ground near the bodies, wrapping it in the protective velvet as he ran.
The four Tibetans frantically searched the tomb walls. “There’s nothing here!”
“There’s got to be something!” Henry yelled. “A release, a keyhole, anything!” He looked back. A figure was silhouetted against the cave entrance. A moment later it dropped as if swallowed by the ground, to be replaced by another. “Shit! They’re in the cave!”
Laura grabbed his arm. “Henry!”
Another silhouette, and another, and another…
Five men. All armed.
They were trapped.
Red lines lanced through the darkness. Laser sights, followed by the intense beams of halogen flashlights. The dazzling lights swept back and forth, before coming to rest on the little group of people in the tomb.
Henry froze, almost blinded by the beams, unsure what to do. They had nowhere to run, and the laser spots dancing over their bodies meant they couldn’t fight either-
“Professor Wilde!”
Henry was stunned. They knew him by name?
“Professor Wilde!” the voice repeated. Deep and rich, with an accent-Greek? “Remain where you are. You too, Dr. Wilde,” he added to Laura.
The intruders advanced. “Who are you?” Henry demanded. “What do you want?”
The men holding the flashlights stopped, a single tall figure continuing towards the expedition members. “My name is Giovanni Qobras,” said the man, enough light reflecting from the tomb walls for Henry to pick out his features. A hard, angular face with a prominent Roman nose, dark hair slicked back from his forehead almost like a skullcap. “What I want, I regret to say… is you.”
Laura stared at him in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I cannot allow you to continue your search. The risk to the world is far too great. My apologies.” He lowered his head for a moment, then stepped back. “It’s nothing personal.”
The laser lines fixed on Henry and Laura.
Henry opened his mouth. “Wait-”
In the confines of the tomb, the noise of the automatic weapons was deafening.
Qobras stared at the six bullet-riddled bodies as he waited for the echoes of gunfire to die away, then issued rapid orders. “Collect everything that relates to their expedition-maps, notes, everything. And do the same for those bodies back there.” He pointed at the dead Nazis. “I assume that’s the remains of the Krauss expedition. One historical mystery solved…” he added, almost to himself, as his men split up to examine the corpses.
“Giovanni!” one man yelled a minute later, crouched over Henry’s body.
“What is it, Yuri?”
“You’ve got to see this.”
Qobras strode over. “My God!”
“It’s orichalcum, isn’t it?” asked Yuri Volgan, shining his light on the object he had just unwrapped. A deep orange glow reflected on the faces of the two men.
“Yes… but I’ve never seen a complete artifact made from it before, just scraps.”
“It’s beautiful… and it must be worth a fortune. Millions of dollars, tens of millions!”
“At least.” Qobras gazed at the artifact for a long moment, seeing his own eyes reflected in the metal. Then he straightened abruptly. “But it must be kept hidden.” He took out a flashlight and examined the tomb walls, but saw nothing except bas-reliefs of ancient gods. Turning to the altar, he quickly examined the inscriptions. “Glozel… but nothing about Atlantis.”
“Maybe we should search the tomb,” Volgan offered, taking one long last look at the artifact before carefully wrapping it in the velvet again.
Qobras considered it. “No,” he said at last. “There’s nothing here, it must have been looted. I really thought the Wildes might lead us further along the trail to Atlantis itself, but it’s just another dead end. We need to get out of here before the storm arrives.” He turned and strode back towards the cave entrance.
Behind him, Volgan glanced over his shoulder to make sure nobody was watching, then slipped the wrapped artifact into his thick jacket.
Qobras stood at the edge of the ledge, waving a flare to summon the circling helicopter, then turned back to the man standing by the doomed expedition’s camp. “You did the right thing.”
Jack’s face was hidden inside his hood. “I’m not proud of this. They were my friends-and what’s going to happen to their daughter?”
“It had to be done,” said Qobras. “The Brotherhood can never allow Atlantis to be found.” He frowned. “Least of all by Kristian Frost. Funding intermediaries like the Wildes… he knows we’re watching him.”
“What… what if Frost suspects I was working for you?” Jack asked nervously.
“You’ll have to convince him that there was an accident. We can fly you to ten kilometers from Xulaodang-there should be very little risk of your being seen with us. Then you can walk back to the village and contact Frost, give him the bad news: that you were the only survivor of an avalanche, a rock fall, whatever you choose.” Qobras held out a hand. “The radio?”
Jack dug into his pack, returning to its owner the chunky transmitter he had used to give Qobras’s team the location of the Golden Peak. “I’ll have to talk to other people as well. The Chinese authorities, the U.S. embassy…”
“Just keep your story consistent, and your payment will be waiting for you by the time you get back to America. Should you discover that anyone else is trying to follow the path of the Wildes in the future, you’ll inform me at once, of course?”
“It’s what you pay me for,” Jack said sullenly.
A cold smile, then Qobras looked up to watch the helicopter approaching, its navigation lights aglow against the darkening sky.
Five minutes later it departed, leaving behind nothing but bodies.
ONE
New York City
Ten Years Later
Dr. Nina Wilde took a deep breath as she paused at the door, her reflection gazing pensively back at her in the darkened glass. She was dressed more formally than normal, a rarely worn dark blue trouser suit replacing her casual sweatshirts and cargo pants, shoulder-length auburn hair drawn back more severely than her usual loose ponytail. This was a crucial meeting, and even though she knew everyone involved, she still wanted to make as professional an impression as possible. Satisfied that she looked the part and hadn’t accidentally smudged lipstick across her cheeks, she psyched herself up to enter the room, almost unconsciously reaching up to her neck to touch her pendant. Her good-luck charm.
She’d found the sharp-edged, curved fragment of metal, about two inches long and scoured by the abrasive sands of Morocco, twenty years before while on an expedition with her parents when she was eight. At the time, her head full of tales of Atlantis, she’d believed it to be made of orichalcum, the metal described by Plato as one of the defining features of the lost civilization. Now, looked at with a more critical adult eye, she had come to accept that her father was right, that it was nothing more than discolored bronze, a worthless scrap ignored or discarded by whoever had beaten them to the site. But it was definitely man-made-the worn markings on its curved outer edge proved that-and since it was her first genuine find, her parents had eventually, after much persuasion of the typical eight-year-old’s highly repetitive kind, allowed her to keep it.