Lucy took a notepad from her jacket and a small pen, and quickly sketched an image. Ethan looked at the drawing, of lines emanating downward from a semi-circle.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘An ancient petroglyph that portrays the sun,’ Lucy explained. ‘It’s common throughout the ancient world in various similar forms, but this one stands out as exceptional because I have also found it at one of the supposedly impossible cities beneath the waves. The photograph was taken by divers examining the top of a pyramid, and the light from the shot by chance illuminated the engraving beneath a layer of sea moss.’
‘Where was this pyramid?’ Ethan asked.
Lucy smiled conspiratorially.
‘You help me and you’ll find out,’ she said, ‘if you want to.’
Ethan glanced at the crackling fire and the piles of books that had kept him company for so many months, and then he made his decision.
XI
The apartment suite in which Yuri Polkov sat overlooked the broad green glittering waters of the Thames River, the Houses of Parliament and London Bridge visible to the right from the exclusive St Katharine’s Docks. Two stories below, a private marina housed exotic yachts tucked away from prying eyes.
Yuri’s old eyes scanned the cityscape before him, rooftops shining in the sunlight and reminding him of the glittering lights of the oilfields stretched across the Siberian wastes that had once been his home.
‘The files you requested.’
Vladimir Polkov set a thick file of paperwork atop the polished mahogany desk behind which Yuri sat and then backed away respectfully. The old man continued to stare out across London before he seemed to break out of his reverie and looked down at the file.
‘I requested the woman,’ Yuri replied, his accent still heavily influenced by his upbringing, pride in his heritage preventing him from losing his Russian accent.
‘She escaped,’ Vladimir admitted. ‘She had help from an American.’
Yuri continued to look down at the file as he replied. ‘I have mountains of paperwork. I have libraries filled with thousands of books. I do not need files, for they are nothing without the person who collated them.’
‘They have value,’ Vladimir insisted. ‘Do not dismiss them so easily.’
Yuri glared at his son and waved him away with an angry flourish of one veined hand. Vladimir turned without further protest and marched out of the office, closing the door quietly behind him.
Yuri looked down at the folder and reluctantly opened it to see within a dense stack of paperwork hurriedly filed by Dr Lucy Morgan. Yuri did not read the paperwork, instead placing his hand atop the files as though by doing so he could somehow communicate with their creator.
Yuri Polkov had followed the work of Dr Lucy Morgan for almost six years and found himself thoroughly fascinated by what she had achieved, despite the intervention of a crazed US pastor and the United States intelligence service. That they had, as far as his sources could reveal, confiscated one of the most amazing finds any scientist could ever hope to have made in their career and prevented her from even studying it was a tragedy for which he had great sympathy. Lucy Morgan should by now have been a household name, not a low-grade researcher buried somewhere inside Chicago’s Field Museum.
‘You deserve this,’ Yuri whispered to himself and in a moment of wistfulness hoped that Lucy Morgan could hear his words. ‘You will not be forgotten.’
Yuri removed his hand from the folder and then began to read, all the while aware that his theft of her files was a crime. He had wanted the woman, not the work, for from her he could learn of the greatest secret ever concealed from mankind and reveal it to the world.
Yuri Polkov had been born the only son of a farmer who had scratched a meagre existence from the unyielding permafrost of Siberia’s bleak plains. His parents had struggled their entire lives to provide what they could for him and to his eternal gratitude that had included a solid education in a local school largely funded by the oil refineries that provided accommodation and education for the children of workers based out on the lonely ice fields. Yuri’s parents had invested what they could to ensure that Yuri also benefited from this unique opportunity and he had learned to read at an early age.
As Yuri had grown older so his parents had grown weaker, their constant toiling in the fields and the bitter winters wearing them down until it had fallen to Yuri to support them as they had once supported him. But working alone, unable to afford to hire helping hands and witness to his parents terminal decline in health, a rage had been born in him that he had been unable to quell. Unable to provide for them via honest means, Yuri had been forced to turn to his wits and guile in order to improve their terrible circumstances.
In the event, it had not even really been crime that had saved them, not in the truest sense anyway. Yuri’s early reading had fostered a fascination with fossils and dinosaurs, and that fascination had grown into personal study of geology, geography, palaeontology and other disciplines of science. Unable to afford a place at university, Yuri had whiled away countless cold nights reading any book he could get his hands on, and as his knowledge of palaeontology had grown so too had his awareness of the black market in fossils that thrived behind the scenes across the globe.
Yuri had originally intended to pursue an honest trade in fossils and the remains of species that he found in the Motherland, however the government of the time lay claim to anything found on Russian soil as being the property of the Politburo. To claim remains of any kind for oneself, or indeed to profit from them in any way, was punishable by the severest means. Nonetheless, as Yuri began to employ his knowledge of palaeontology in the pursuit of rare fossils, so the temptation to sell them for profit became too great to bear.
At the age of twenty three, while working in the permafrost of Siberia in early spring, Yuri made the discovery of a lifetime. There, suspended in ice before him around the edge of what had once been a Siberian tar pit, were the remains of a perfectly preserved juvenile mammoth. The freezing temperatures had preserved the animal to an astounding degree: the fur seemed as alive as the day the animal had died, the tusks in perfect condition, even the eye sockets not desiccated as with so many similar specimens. Yuri guessed that the animal must have died in a snowstorm and been frozen within hours of its demise before any predators or insects could gain access to the body. Over thousands of years more ice and snow piled over the remains, partly crushing them but otherwise preserving the body intact.
Yuri had immediately been faced with a dilemma. He was not a scientist or official with any significant connections, so he knew that if he reported the mammoth they would be whisked away to Moscow and established scientists would lay claim to the fame associated with the remains. Yuri Polkov of would merely be a small name attached to the find but would benefit from none of the excitement that would surround such a magnificent specimen. Yet, if he embarked upon the uncertain course of smuggling the remains out of Russia for sale in some other country, he ran the risk of arrest and imprisonment in one of Siberia’s notorious jails.
In the end Yuri had decided to excavate the remains himself, a task made easier by his access to large farm machinery belonging to his father. He had managed to excavate the mammoth and place it upon a trailer which he towed behind a tractor into one of the barns. He had then prepared a permanent container for the remains, which he had filled with densely packed snow before placing the mammoth in the container and packing it in with it more snow and ice before sealing the lid shut.