“They’re the descendants of the Atlanteans?”

Kari nodded. “Precisely. Atlantis may have fallen, but its people had an empire that wouldn’t be equaled for another nine thousand years. They became a diaspora, spreading throughout their former lands-and beyond. We found concentrations as far afield as Namibia, Tibet, Peru… and Norway.”

“ Norway?”

“Yes.” Kari took Nina by the hands. “Nina, the Atlanteans were never lost. They were here among us all along. They are us. My father and I, we have the marker in our DNA.” She looked straight into Nina’s eyes. “And so do you.”

“Me? But…”

“You’re one of us, Nina. You’re a descendant of the Atlanteans. That’s what we’re trying to find. Not just ancient ruins-but people, who are alive today.”

Nina’s head swam. She wanted to pull her hands away from Kari, but couldn’t. As confused and overwhelmed as she felt, the analytical, scientific part of her mind demanded to know more. “How?”

“We think that finding Atlantis will help us retrace the expansion of the diaspora. We’ve already seen how the Atlanteans tried to reproduce their civilization in Brazil -we believe there are other locations where they did the same. The map in the temple showed how far they had explored, all the way to Asia. We want to find those places, follow their paths. Maybe even-”

“Find their descendants?”

“The Indians wanted to know if I was one of the ‘old ones.’ There’s obviously some racial memory there, stories passed down through the generations.”

“So I guess at least we know the Atlanteans were blonds,” said Nina, managing a brief half-smile. Kari smiled back. “So where does Qobras fit into this?”

Kari’s face turned grim. “From what we’ve been able to find out, he considers the Atlantean descendants a threat.”

“Are they?”

“You tell me. You are one.”

Nina didn’t have an answer to that. “So what’s his problem with them-with us?” she asked instead. “Does he know about the DNA marker?”

“Almost certainly. About a year ago, we learned he had a mole working in our genetic research institute, though my father thinks he’s been spying on us for much longer. It’s obvious now that Qobras will go to any lengths to stop us from finding Atlantis-and the closer we get, the more desperate he’ll become.”

Nina sucked in her cheeks nervously. “I’m kind of starting to wish I’d gotten into UFOs or Bigfoot rather than Atlantis.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.” Kari squeezed her hands reassuringly. “Without you, we would never have come this far. And now that we know what the stakes are, we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe.”

Nina looked back at the chart. “Glad to hear it. Although that does assume that we even manage to find Atlantis.”

“If there’s anything down there, the SAR survey will find it.”

“But how are we going to get to it? God knows how deep the sediment will be. And it’s not as if we can just dig it up. Excavations are hard enough even in shallow water, never mind at several hundred feet.”

Kari flashed her a knowing grin. “You haven’t seen our subs yet. They’re quite impressive.”

“Subs? Plural?”

“Starkman was right when he said that the search for Atlantis was more than a mere hobby for my father. More than his businesses, even the work of the foundation, it’s the most important thing in his life.”

“More so than you?”

“It’s just as important to me too.” Nina was about to say that that wasn’t what she meant, but before she could, Kari released her hands. “It will be a while before the first results from the radar survey come in, so…” She gestured at the windows. The hotel looked out across Gibraltar ’s harbor, the Rock itself looming beyond. “Shall we do something?”

Nina shook her head. “I… I don’t know, Kari. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this.”

“Oh. Okay…” Kari sounded disappointed. “If you change your mind…”

“Thanks.”

Kari reluctantly left the room. Nina stayed, staring at the chart.

Not for the first time, she wondered: What the hell have I gotten myself into?

It took another day before the aerial survey yielded any results, and Nina was suffering slightly from cabin fever. Chase made it clear that she was not going to be left unaccompanied outside the hotel; while she enjoyed Chase and Castille’s company, even with Chase’s ribbing, their mere presence hammered home the threat she was facing. Kari tried to get her to go out, but Nina was still in a turmoil over her revelation. She suspected Kari was hurt by her rejection, but she needed time to think, alone.

That time came to an end, and Nina was no nearer untangling her feelings than before. But now she had something else to occupy her mind.

“There,” said Kristian Frost over the videolink. A second LCD monitor had been attached to the laptop, displaying a duplicate of the large radar survey printout being examined by the expedition members. On the screen, a cursor drew a red circle around a particular section.

Nina’s breath caught in excitement as she looked more closely at the area Frost had marked. The image on the printout was in shades of gray, variations in tone corresponding to different reflections of the radar signal as it penetrated the water-and the seabed beneath.

Dominating the printout was a series of concentric circles, narrowing the closer they got to the center. And at the center itself…

“What’s the scale?” she asked. “How big is it?”

“One millimeter is five meters,” said Kari, handing her a ruler. Nina laid it down to measure the circular area at the center.

“One hundred and twenty-five millimeters in diameter, more or less… that’s six hundred and twenty-five meters. Just over two thousand feet. And the proportions of the rings as you move outwards…” She looked up at Kari, her reservations completely blown away in her excitement. “They match what Plato wrote. The only difference is the size, but…”

She moved the ruler to the object at the center of the innermost circle, a rectangle made up almost entirely of solid whites and blacks rather than the shades of gray of the rest of the picture. “Four hundred feet long and two hundred wide,” she announced, quickly converting from metric to imperial measurements. “Exactly the same size as the temple in Brazil!”

“There’s no chance those circles could be some natural formation?” Philby asked. “A collapsed volcano, or a meteor crater?”

“It’s too regular,” said Nina. “It’s man-made, it has to be. How deep is it?”

Frost had the answer. “The seabed is two hundred and forty meters below the surface, with approximately…” He glanced off to one side, checking something on another screen, “five meters of sediment.”

“Eight hundred feet,” Nina said for Chase’s benefit, as he made a pained face trying to do the conversion in his head.

“Kind of deep,” he said, before turning to Kari. “Good job you’ve got subs, that’s close to the limits for scuba gear. We could only stay underwater for a few minutes at that depth.”

“Actually, we have some new diving gear that should help with that,” she replied. “I’ll show you when we’re on the ship.”

“How are we going to deal with the sediment?” asked Nina.

Kari smiled. “I told you, wait until you see our submersibles. We built something quite special. This will be our first chance to use them for real.”

Philby leaned closer to examine the printout. “Am I right in thinking that the lighter something is on the picture, the stronger the radar return?”

“Not quite-the white areas are more like shadows, blank areas where the radar was blocked. The black objects are particularly strong reflections,” Kari explained.

“Which means there must be a lot of solid objects down there.” Philby pointed east of the center. “Look at this, for example. To me, that looks almost like an aerial photograph of ruins. Everything’s jumbled, as though the walls have collapsed, but it still has a fairly regular outline.”