The Atlantis Code Read online

  THE ATLNTIS CODE

  THE

  ATLNTIS CODE

  CHARLES BROKAW

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE ATLANTIS CODE

  Copyright © 2009 by Trident Media Group, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Map by Rhys Davies

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brokaw, Charles.

  The Atlantis code / Charles Brokaw.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 978-0-7653-1531-1

  1. Linguists—Fiction. 2. Excavations (Archaeology)—Fiction. 3. Treasure troves—Fiction. 4. Atlantis (Legendary place)—Fiction. 5. Code and cipher stories. I. Title.

  PS3602.R6424A94 2009

  813'.6—dc22

  2009028185

  First Edition: November 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to my family, especially to my wife, who endured a great deal as I wrote it. I love you, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  And to Robert Gottlieb, who has been a driving force for this project from the very beginning, I can’t thank you enough for your support, creativity, and help.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media Group, LLC and all the terrific agents who work with him at Trident Media Group. Thanks also to all the librarians who helped me find obscure material on ancient artifacts, the travel agents who verified that transit was possible in the far corners of the globe, and to my friends in law enforcement who took me out to the shooting range and demonstrated the many weapons I describe in this book. I’d also like to thank my editor, Bob Gleason, and Linda Quinton from Tor for their terrific input on and help with this book.

  CHAPTER

  1

  KOM AL-DIKKA

  ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT

  AUGUST 16, 2009

  T

  homas Lourds abandoned the comfort of the stretch limousine with reluctance and an unaccustomed sense of foreboding. He usually enjoyed opportunities to talk about his work, not to mention the chance to solicit funding for archeological programs he believed in and consulted for.

  But not today.

  Under the sweltering heat of the Egyptian sun in full midday bloom, he dropped his scarred leather backpack at his feet and gazed at the huge Roman theater that Napoléon Bonaparte’s legions had discovered while digging to build a new fortification.

  Although the Kom Al-Dikka dig site had been explored for the last two hundred years—first by treasure hunters, then by learned men seeking knowledge of ancient times—the Polish–Egyptian mission that had been established there more than forty years ago continued to make new and astonishing finds.

  Burrowed into the ground, Kom Al-Dikka stood as a semicircular amphitheater not far from the train station in Alexandria. Passengers stepping off the platform had only to cross a short distance to peer out into the ancient stage. Cars passed nearby on Nabi Daniel and Hurriya Streets. The ancient and modern worlds lay side by side here.

  Constructed of thirteen tiers of marble that provided seating for up to eight hundred spectators, with each seat carefully numbered, the theater’s history reached deep into the past and throughout the ancient world. Its white marble stones had been quarried in Europe and brought to Africa. Asia Minor had provided the green marble. The red granite had been mined in Aswan. Geometric mosaic designs covered the wings. Roman houses and baths stretched out behind it. The whole complex was a symbol of the global reach of the great empire that had built it.

  Lourds studied the vast stone structure. When Ptolemy was still a young man and his greatest works were ahead of him, Kom Al-Dikka had been here, hosting plays and musicals and—if some of the inscriptions on the marble columns had been translated correctly, which Lourds believed they had—wrestling.

  He smiled to think that Ptolemy might have sat in those marble seats and worked on his books. Or thought about them, at least. It would have been incongruous, like a Harvard professor of linguistics attending a World Wrestling event. Lourds was such a professor, and he did not follow wrestling. But he loved to think that Ptolemy had.

  Although Lourds had seen the place a number of times, the sight of it never failed to stir within him a desire to know more about the people who had lived here during those years when it was new and filled with crowds. The stories they’d told barely survived these days. So much had been lost when the Royal Library of Alexandria had been destroyed.

  For a moment, Lourds imagined what it must have been like to walk through the halls of the great library. Its collections were reputed to include at least a half million scrolls. They supposedly had contained the entire known world’s knowledge of the day. Treatises on mathematics, astronomy, ancient maps, animal husbandry, and agriculture: all those subjects had been represented. So had the works of great writers—including the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, artists of such power that their surviving works were still performed. And more.

  Men, knowledgeable and clever men, had come from all over to make their contributions to the ancient library and to learn from it.

  Yet all of that was gone, shattered and burned.

  Depending on the latest round of politically correct scholarship, the destruction was ordered by either Roman dictator perpetuo Julius Caesar or Theophilus of Alexandria or Caliph Umar. Or maybe all of them, over the course of time. Whoever had been ultimately responsible, all those wonderful writings had burned or crumbled or vanished. Along with the secrets and wisdom held within them. At least for now. Lourds still hoped that someday, somewhere, a treasure trove of those works—or at least copies of them—might still exist. It was possible that during those perilous years someone had cared enough to protect the scrolls by hiding them, or by making transcriptions that they hid once the library was destroyed.

  The desert surrounding this city still held secrets, and the dry, hot sands were wonderful for preserving papyrus scrolls. Such treasures still turned up, often in the hands of rogues, but sometimes under the supervision of archeologists. Scholars could read only the scrolls that again saw the light of day. Who knew how many more caches were still out there, waiting to be found?

  “Professor Lourds.”

  He picked up his backpack and turned to see who had spoken his name. Lourds knew what the speaker saw: He was a tall man, slender from years of soccer. A short-cropped black goatee framed his strong chin and softened the hard planes of his face. His wavy black hair was long enough to hang in his face and fall over the tips of his ears. Trips to the barber took too much time out of his day, so he went only when he no longer could truly stand to go unshorn. That time was getting close, he realized, brushing hair out of his eyes. He wore dun khaki shorts, a gray khaki shirt, Gore-Tex hiking books, an Australian Outback hat, and sunglasses. All well broken in and a bit worn around the edges. He looked, he thought, like a working Egyptologist, much different from the tourists and hawkers working the amphitheaters.

  “Ms. Crane,” Lourds greeted the woman who had called out to him.

  Leslie Crane strode toward him. Men’s heads turned in appreciation. Lourds didn’t blame them. Lesl
ie Crane was beautiful, golden-haired and green-eyed, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless white linen shirt that emphasized her tan and trim figure. Lourds thought she was perhaps twenty-four, fifteen years younger than he was.

  She took his hand and shook it. “It’s so good to finally meet you in person.” She had a crisp English accent, and in her lush contralto voice, the effect was soothing.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this as well. E-mail and phone calls aren’t a replacement for actually spending time with another person.” Although either of those forms of communication were rapid and kept people in touch, Lourds preferred speaking in person or on paper. He was something of an anachronism about that—he still took time to write long letters to friends who did the same in return. He believed that letters, especially when someone wanted to get a point and a line of thinking across without interruption, were important. “Handshakes do have their advantages.”

  “Oh,” she said. As if just realizing she still held his hand, she released it. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  “Did you find the hotel suitable?”

  “Of course. It’s wonderful.” The television company had put him in the Sheraton Montazah, a five-star hotel. With the Mediterranean shoreline to the north and King Farouk’s summer palace and gardens to the south, staying there was an incredible experience. “But it’s close enough that I could have walked here. Though the limo was lovely. A university professor isn’t quite the same as a rock star.”

  “Nonsense,” Leslie said. “Enjoy it. We wanted you to know how much we look forward to working with you on this project. Have you stayed there before?”

  “No.” Lourds shook his head. “I’m just a humble linguistics professor.”

  “Don’t discount your training or your expertise. We’re not.” Leslie hit him with a dazzling kilowatt smile. “You’re not just a linguistics professor. You teach at Harvard and were trained at Oxford. And your background is hardly humble. You’re the world’s foremost expert on ancient languages.”

  “Trust me,” Lourds said, “no few scholars contest that assertion.”

  “Not at Ancient Worlds, Ancient People,” Leslie assured him. “When we complete this series, the world will view you as exactly that.”

  Ancient Worlds, Ancient People was the name of the show produced by Janus World View Productions, a United Kingdom affiliate of the British Broadcasting Corporation. It featured interesting histories and people, presented by lively commentators like Leslie Crane, who interviewed recognized scholars in various fields.

  “You smile.” Leslie grinned, and it made her look even younger. “Do you doubt me, Professor Lourds?”

  “Not you,” Lourds replied. “Perhaps I doubt the largesse of the viewing public. And please call me Thomas. Do you mind if we walk?” He thrust his chin toward a shady area. “At least to get out of this damnable sun?”

  “Sure.” Leslie fell into step beside him.

  “You said you had a challenge to put before me this morning,” Lourds reminded.

  “Nervous?”

  “Not so much. I like a challenge. But conundrums do leave me somewhat . . . curious.”

  “Isn’t curiosity a linguistics professor’s best tool?” she asked.

  “Patience, I think, is the best tool. Though it’s one we often struggle for. Records of a nation or empire’s intellectual life—be it history, mathematics, the arts, or sciences—took time for the scribes to write. Unfortunately, it takes even longer for today’s scholars to decipher those ancient works, especially when we no longer have access to the languages in which they were written. For more than a thousand years, for example, no one left on the planet could read Egyptian hieroglyphics. It took patience to find the right key, and then more patience to decipher the code of their meaning.”

  “How long did it take you to crack Bedroom Pursuits?”

  Out of the direct glare of the sun and in the shade now, Lourds smiled ruefully and rubbed the back of his neck. The translation of those documents had earned him a lot of attention, as much negative as positive. He still didn’t know if the time spent on them was a career milestone or a misstep.

  “Actually,” he said, “those documents weren’t called Bedroom Pursuits. That was the unfortunate nickname given to them by the members of the mass media who covered the story.”

  “My apologies. I didn’t mean to offend.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “But those documents were the histories of the author’s sexual conquests, correct?”

  “Possibly. Perhaps they were only his fantasies. Walter Mitty by way of Hugh Hefner. They were rather vivid.”

  “And surprisingly explicit.”

  “You’ve read them?”

  “I have.” Leslie’s tanned cheeks flamed. “I have to say that they are quite . . . compelling.”

  “Then you also know that some critics called my translation pornography of the poorest sort. An ancient version of Penthouse Forum.”

  Delight shone in Leslie’s green eyes. “Oh, now you’re just being salacious.”

  “How so?” Lourds raised his eyebrows innocently.

  “A university professor with knowledge of Penthouse magazine?”

  “Before I was a professor,” Lourds said, “I was also a college student. In my experience, most male college students have at least a passing acquaintance with it.”

  “Even though that translation got you lambasted among the pedagogue crowd, I know several top professors who say it was an important piece of work on a difficult document.”

  “It was a challenge.” Lourds warmed to the topic, hardly noticing the passersby. Voices out in the street offered bargains in Arabic, English, French, and local dialects, but he paid them no attention. “The original document was written in Coptic, which was taken from the Greek alphabet. The man who created it also added in a number of letters, some that were used only for words that were originally Greek. The document, written by a man who called himself Anthony, doubtless after the saint—though the man was more of a satyr, or at least he imagined himself so—at first looked like gibberish.”

  “Other linguistic experts had tried to translate it, but none of it made any sense. You figured out that it was written in code. I didn’t know codes existed that far back.”

  “The first known codes are attributed to the Romans. Julius Caesar used a simple letter substitution, or shift, to mask messages to his military commanders. His traditional shift traded three spaces.”

  “A becomes D.”

  “Yes.”

  “We used to do those when I was a girl.”

  “At the time, the shift was a clever scheme, but even then Caesar’s enemies quickly caught on. So it is today. Substitution codes are no longer used by anyone interested in keeping things truly secret. They’re too easy to crack. In the English language, the most often used letter is E, and the second most used is T. Once you can ascertain those values in a block of text, the rest of the letters fall into place.”

  “But the Bedr—, that is to say, the piece that you deciphered, was unusual.”

  “Against what we’ve uncovered so far from that time period, yes. Given the content, the writer had every reason to code his words.”

  “The thing that made it even more interesting to me as I read your translation was that the Copts were an extremely religious sect. Even by today’s standards, that document is a bit shocking. So something like that document would have been quite . . .” Leslie faltered for words, evidently unsure of how risqué to be.

  “Exotic,” Lourds supplied. “Or inflammatory, depending on your point of view. Of course, today’s standards are a lot more confined than they were back in the ancient world—a legacy left over from Saint Augustine, the Victorians, and the Puritans, among others. But even by ancient standards, those documents were inflammatory. Possibly even dangerous to the life of the writer. I agree. So he was careful. In addition to the coding, the document was also written in the Sahidic dia
lect.”

  “What’s the distinction? Isn’t it still a Coptic language?”

  “Not exactly. The Sahidic dialect was an offshoot of the original Copt language.”

  “Which began as Greek.”

  Lourds nodded. He liked the young woman. She was quick and knowledgeable, and she seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say. Some of the doubts he’d felt about agreeing to this meeting started to fade. The university was always looking for ways to increase its exposure to the public, but that didn’t always turn out favorably for the professors put on the firing line. Most journalists and reporters listened only long enough to hear a sound bite they could use—even taken out of context—to make whatever points they wanted to make. Lourds had seen his share of what could happen when a professor was chewed up by the media. It wasn’t pretty. So far, he had held his own, but his work with Bedroom Pursuits had gone closer to the edge than he’d liked.

  “Sahidic was originally called Thebaic, and was used in literary form beginning around A.D. 300. Much of the Bible was translated into this language. Coptic became the standard dialect for the Coptic Orthodox Church. Later, in the eleventh century, Hakem b’Amr Allah pretty much abolished the Christian faith, chasing it into hiding.”

  “So much turmoil,” Leslie commented.

  “Here as well as around the world. Conquerors often try to destroy the language of a civilization they overpower. Look at what happened to Gaelic when the English conquered the Scots. The clans were forbidden from speaking it, from wearing their hereditary dress, even from playing the bagpipes. Killing their language breaks a conquered people’s connection with their history.”

  “Takes away their knowledge, you mean?”