Chapter 21

"And so, using the lightnings stolen from the gods, and the lights that seared at a distance and other wonders, which they had taken from their foes, the brave Athenians defeated the Atlanteans and drove them from their land."

Jadzia sat in a swivel chair staring up at the huge plasma screen in the third-floor lab. The recovered text, the black of carbonization stripped away by software filters, still looked to Annja as much like happenstance scrawls and scratches as writing. Yet Jadzia was clearly in her element.

"Afterwards, when the favor of the gods was withdrawn, the weapons soon ceased to function. Some said the gods disfavored Athens for using the great magics the Atlanteans had wrongly employed, which by rights ought be reserved for the Olympians alone, and that was why the great disaster wrought by the gods struck Greece even as it sank the isle of Atlantis."

She turned to Annja. In the half light her eyes were blue lamps of excitement. "Annja, don't you see? This proves it!"

The Cantonese techs spoke excitedly among themselves in their own language.

"Proves what?" Annja said.

"Why – all of it," Jadzia said. Her cheeks were flushed, her voice breathless. "Atlantis. Unknown energy sources." Her eyes got even wider. "Free energy."

Annja frowned, gazing at the screen as if to suck comprehension out of it by sheer force of will. "I'm not sure I'd go that far," she said uncertainly.

"How far will you go? What more do you need? Don't be so stupid."

Annja's frown cut deeper. After all that had happened, Jadzia was still Jadzia.

****

When they'd finally returned to Joey's Jeep, Annja discovered he had left the driver's door unlocked. In fact the lock was broken. That he hadn't got it fixed and hadn't warned them, but let them solemnly lock all the other doors as if it mattered, seemed to speak volumes about him.

Vearle did not emerge from his shack at the sound of the airboat's return. Annja hoped it didn't mean that Euro Petro goons had paid him a call. She suspected they had not. Sulin had put everything into the trap at Hogue's lodge.

Deep into dusk, when the light was soft and gray and dangerous – because it took the edges and points off things and distorted perspective – Annja found a backwater motel. The clerk was a middle-aged woman who was far more interested in her television than the two self-professed college students from Biloxi, although she did show a grateful smile at being paid cash for a night's accommodations. She didn't bother asking for a license plate number.

Annja got a room around the back, "where it was quiet," as though a car happened down this dismal back road any more than once every ten or twenty minutes. What it really meant was that any EP searchers driving by wouldn't instantly spot their late informant's rather distinctive vehicle. She parked the Grand Cherokee under a big black oak tree to make it hard to spot from an airplane. Or a satellite – she was darned if she wanted their getaway car to turn up in a few hours on Google Earth.

She made the still-weeping Jadzia carry her own bag inside, on general principles. Jadzia was too distraught even to complain. Annja carried the scrolls and the rest of the gear. A pair of full-auto .223s and six full 30-round magazines would go a way toward alleviating those pesky nocturnal fears.

She had suspected Jadzia of being overly theatrical. But when she closed the door with a bump of her butt and let the last bags thump to the thin vomit-colored carpet, the wave of sadness and loss and fear rolled over her like a tsunami. She found herself sitting on the bed with Jadzia. They held each other and cried into each other's shoulders.

Sometime well after dark they cried themselves out. Then Annja took herself mentally by the scruff and shook herself. No matter how she thought things through she could find reasons, and good ones, to blame herself for Tex's death. But he had made his own choices at every stage. No one had held a gun against his head to get him to join her quixotic quest. He had walked with open eyes into a trap laid by someone he had mistakenly trusted.

In the end it didn't matter. What did matter was Tex was dead andAnnja and Jadzia were going to have to work fast and smart and most importantly get extremely lucky not to join him in short order.

"So we need to figure out how we're going to survive past tonight," Annja said, as the two women sat on the bed with the TV on and the sound off, eating delivery pizza.

"And avenge Tex," Jadzia said fiercely.

Annja nodded. That seemed right to her, even flying in the face of contemporary morality as it did.

She took a deep breath. "I still think our best chance is to do what we've been trying to do all along – recover as much of the contents of these scrolls as we can and publicize them. The question is how? And also where?"

"Jet propulsion labs in Pasadena is where we sent them," Jadzia said thoughtfully, folding a slice of pizza lengthwise. "They have a CT scanner and an MSI machine."

"So it's a logical choice."

"Too logical," Jadzia said.

"Meaning what?" Annja asked.

"I bet that's where Gus Marshall is," Jadzia said. "Waiting for us in case we decided to head straight there instead of to meet Mr. Hogue."

Annja sighed. "You're right. He's probably hired half the private investigators in the greater L.A. area to keep an eye out for us."

"The police too, maybe."

Annja thrust her chin forward and tilted her head to one side. "Maybe. EP seems to be as reluctant to involve the law as we are. But I agree, we can't take the risk."

"The new university in Shenzhen has CT scanners and multispectral imagers," Jadzia said.

"China?"

"Just inland from Hong Kong, I think. It's sort of a boomtown. There wasn't much there but farming villages twenty years ago. Now it's a big city with a lot of high-tech manufacturing." Jadzia nodded. "They wanted us to send some of our scrolls to them for processing. But there was some kind of trouble, tension with the U.S." Annja knew the United States was a major subsidizer of the governments of both Poland and Egypt, which in turn jointly sponsored the Alexandrian library project. "Some kind of stupid politics."

"I'm with you there," Annja said. She was starting to feel as if they just might have a shot. Not a good one, perhaps – but better than the blank nothing of a future she had seen like a wall ahead a moment before. She thought out loud. "So with China and the U.S. mad at each other – and with China a rival with the big Western companies for oil, with their big boom going on – the Chinese'd be pretty unlikely to be in bed with Euro Petro, wouldn't they?"

Jadzia nodded solemnly. "Sometimes you are not so stupid after all." She upended her soda bottle and took a hefty swig.

"Uh, thanks."

Jadzia was frowning when she lowered the big plastic bottle. "But we have a problem," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "It takes forever to get visas for the People's Republic."

Annja's face lit up in a great big smile. "Not necessarily," she said. "The network has a good working relationship with the national government, as well as GuangdongProvince's. The Communist party bosses, too. And by that I mean, massive bribery."

"The universal language," Jadzia said.

****

"It does seem to clear up one thing that was bothering me," Annja said, studying the ancient text on the screen of the third-floor laboratory in Shenzhen.

"What's that?" Jadzia asked.

"How the Athenians could possibly have defeated Atlantis, if the Atlanteans really had all that marvelous high-tech stuff. No matter how brave or resourceful you are, energy-beam weapons are going to confer a pretty decisive advantage over your bronze swords and bull-hide shields. But if the Greeks managed to get hold of some of those weapons – "

"It's what guerrillas always do," Jadzia said. "I need to pee now." And with that bit of over-sharing she turned and walked out of the lab.