Andy McDermott - The Tomb Of Hercules

“Thanks. One of us is too,” she replied. Popadopoulos pursed his lips in annoyance, then continued his careful survey of the pages beneath the lamp.

“How are you feeling?” Amoros asked.

“Like I’ve been stuck with about fifty injections of antibiotics. I think I’ll live, though.”

“That’s a relief. It turns out you’re not the only member of the IHA who’s been involved in an… incident today.” He looked at Popadopoulos. “Mr. Popadopoulos, could I ask you to wait outside, just for a moment? I need to discuss something with Dr. Wilde in private.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to jump out the window with it again,” Nina said, gesturing at the scattered pages on the desk. Popadopoulos harrumphed, then left the room. She looked back at Amoros. “What do you mean?”

“I just got off the phone with Eddie.”

“What?” Nina said, suddenly concerned. She’d all but forgotten him in the chaos of the day. “What happened? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. He’s on his way back to New York right now; he called from the plane. He’s been trying to contact you all day, actually.”

Nina glanced at the phone on her desk, noticing for the first time that its message light was flashing. “Oh… Well, I did kind of have other things on my mind.”

“Indeed.” Amoros rubbed a thumb through his salt-and-pepper beard thoughtfully. “You said that the men who attacked you today were Chinese?”

“East Asian, certainly. I didn’t have a chance to check their passports.” The link struck her. “Wait, you think there’s some connection between them and Eddie going to China?”

“Eddie went to Shanghai,” Amoros explained, “because he said he had a lead regarding the sinking of the SBX rig at Atlantis three months ago.”

“What kind of lead?”

“Some classified IHA files were downloaded from the rig via its satellite link just before it capsized. Eddie says he has copies of those files. They included information about the lost Plato texts,” he nodded at the pages on the desk, “and IHA personnel files. Eddie’s…and yours.”

Nina felt a chill. “You’re saying the rig was deliberately sunk? And that it’s got something to do with what just happened to me?”

“There might be a connection, yes. What it is, we don’t know yet… but I assure you, we’re going to do our damnedest to find out. If someone was willing to kill everybody aboard the rig just to cover up stealing our files, it must be for something big.”

“Jesus.” Nina went back to her desk and leaned against it, shaken. “Where did Eddie get these files? Who had them?”

Amoros’s face became more grim. “According to Eddie, Richard Yuen.”

“What?” She remembered him from the party aboard René Corvus’s yacht. Arrogant, smug, cocky, overbearing… but she hadn’t imagined he might also be a killer.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of this, Nina, don’t worry. But there’s not much I can do until I see the files for myself.”

“So when will Eddie get back?”

“Sometime early in the morning, around five a.m. He’s going to come straight here.”

“Right.” She remembered something Amoros had told her earlier. “Wait, when you said he’d been involved in an incident …”

“The important thing is that he’s fine,” Amoros quickly assured her. “And so are you. And you still have the Plato text.”

“Most of it,” she reminded him glumly.

“What do you want to do with it?”

“I think Pops out there wants to bundle it up and jump straight on a plane back to Rome,” said Nina, gesturing at the door. “But we need to keep it safe, until we can find out why Yuen’s willing to kill to find out the location of the Tomb of Hercules.”

“We don’t know for sure that it’s Yuen behind this,” Amoros pointed out.

“Eddie seems to think so.”

“Let’s wait until we get all the facts before we start making any accusations. Especially against one of the IHA’s own directors.” He headed for the door. “I’ll go find Popadopoulos, try to convince him to let us keep hold of the text for now.”

“Thanks,” said Nina. He nodded and left the room. She sighed, suddenly feeling more exhausted than ever. What the hell had Chase been up to in Shanghai?

She sniffed. There was an odd smell, and it wasn’t her-

“Shit!” Nina whipped around to see that one of the pieces of parchment was still directly beneath the hood of her lamp, the leathery sheet beginning to shrivel under the heat from the bulb.

She snatched the lamp away, flapping a hand and blowing on the ancient document to cool it. Her heart raced in panic at the thought of the text going up in smoke right there on her desk, but to her enormous relief it had survived, if more crinkled than before. The smell wasn’t burning…

So what was it?

The odor was faint but somehow familiar, a sharp, sour tang that some part of her mind immediately associated with the kitchen. Like vinegar, or lemon juice…

Nina clapped a hand to her mouth, muffling a “Whoa!” as she realized the significance of the scent. She brought the lamp back down, warming the blank side of the parchment.

Faint brown marks slowly appeared. At a casual glance they seemed unremarkable, nothing more than random stains and scribbles. But Nina knew that the mere fact they had been hidden meant there was far more to them.

She picked up the parchment and shook off the remaining splinters of glass. Then she turned to the other pages…

Popadopoulos reentered the office. “Dr. Wilde, I-Aah!” He froze, mouth goldfishing again as he saw Nina smashing open the frames and plucking the fragile pages from the broken glass. “What are you doing? You, you- lunatic vandal woman!”

Nina held up a hand to shut him up. “The backs of the parchments,” she said, speaking as rapidly as her mind was working. “Nobody ever examined them before, right?”

“There was nothing to examine! They are blank!”

“Oh yeah?” She showed him the page on which the markings had appeared. His flustered horror suddenly became fascination. “You agreed it was unusual that only one side of the parchment was used, right? But all the centuries that the Brotherhood had Hermocrates in its archives, nobody ever thought to ask why . Well, I’ll tell you why.” All the pages now removed from the glass, Nina used the edge of a plastic binder to sweep the broken fragments aside before laying out the pieces of parchment on her desk, facedown. “Because Plato wanted to use the backs of the pages for something else! Look!” She lowered the lamp over a different part of the first page. More markings faded into view. “He drew something in invisible ink!”

“My God!” Popadopoulos exclaimed, hunching down and staring intently at the page.

“Invisible ink,” Nina said again, with a slightly accusatory, mocking tone. “One of the oldest tricks ever invented for concealing information…and the Brotherhood never once thought to check for it in over two thousand years.”

“Our purpose was to keep knowledge of Atlantis out of the hands of others,” Popadopoulos sniffed, “not go treasure-hunting for unrelated Greek myths.” He carefully moved the parchment around under the lamp, searching for more hidden markings. “How long will the ink remain visible?”

“I don’t know-it might be permanent, or it might fade again once it cools. Either way, I’ll make sure everything’s photographed.” She tipped her head to one side. “That’s odd.”

“What?”

“Whatever this is meant to show, it looks as though it’s been cut off.” She pointed at a particular area near the center of the page. “See? All the marks suddenly stop along a straight line, as though… as though another page had been laid on top of it!” She slid the edge of another sheet of parchment over the first to demonstrate. “We need more lights.”