A shaft of light pierced the gloom when his knife sliced through the last of the seaweed. The glow increased, and then they were in open water, on the far side of the ruin from where they’d entered. Sam drove through the water to where Warren was waiting at the entry and motioned to him to return to the surface with them. The Australian gave him an acknowledgment, and then Sam and Remi were rising, the sun’s rays seeping through the water above like a starburst.
Warren shared his air at the decompression stop, but still the tanks were empty by the time they reached the surface. Sam gasped in relief as his head popped out of the water, Remi close behind him, and they bobbed in the gentle waves, catching their breath, the Darwin’s distinctive crimson hull fifty yards away.
Ten minutes later, they had shrugged off their dive gear, dried off, and changed into shorts and T-shirts. After a brief discussion about how to best proceed, Sam and Remi returned to the pilothouse with Sam’s dive bag in tow, where Leonid was seated by the monitors, his expression typically dour.
Sam sat next to him and told him about the earthquake and near miss.
“You’re lucky you made it out alive.”
“That seems to be how our fortunes run, thank goodness.” Sam paused. “Your theory that there have been a decent number of earthquakes slowly eroding the ruins seems accurate. That wasn’t a very big one, but it was large enough to cause damage and almost trap us.”
“Why did you tell the others to come back up?” Leonid asked. “They were outside and barely felt anything.”
“Because we need to discuss what we saw inside the big structure and I don’t want to repeat myself,” Sam said.
Warren had joined Des by the helm. The rest of the dive team stood around the area, waiting to hear what Sam and Remi would say. Sam cleared his throat, and his gaze slowly swept the room before settling back on Leonid.
“Remi found something that changes everything.”
“What?”
Remi interrupted. “First, let’s talk about what we didn’t find. There was no treasure.”
Leonid’s shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly. Remi smiled and continued. “That would have been nice. But one of the things we saw were deep grooves in the walls of a chamber beneath a larger room that appeared to be a central gathering place. It’s hard to know until we clean everything off, but I’d say that the building was the main temple and the chamber was a treasure vault.”
“Grooves in the walls?” Des asked, his tone puzzled.
Sam nodded. “Yes. Carved into the stone. Once we get the hoses in there and clean the area, my hunch is we’ll find glyphs covering every surface in the chamber. Probably depicting holy places, or maybe images of gods.”
“How can you be so sure?” Leonid asked.
Remi raised an eyebrow. “Because the carvings were filled with gold.”
“Gold!” Warren blurted.
Leonid appeared puzzled. “But I thought you said there was no treasure.”
It was Remi’s turn to nod. “That’s right. There were only traces of gold left in the carvings. The rest had been removed. I could see where they’d dug it out of the etchings. But they couldn’t get it all.”
“They? Someone has been inside this temple before us?” Leonid asked.
“That’s right. There’s evidence on every wall. Probably a team of divers in surface-breathing equipment. You can make out where the hoses scraped the edges of the openings, rubbing at them. They weren’t taking any care to conceal their presence, that’s for sure,” Remi said.
“But surely we’d have heard about a find of this magnitude. Are you saying that someone located a modern-day Atlantis and didn’t tell anyone?”
“Obviously, that’s puzzling. Since we never heard of it, as unlikely as it sounds, that appears to be the case.” Remi paused. “It had to be a painstaking process to chip all the gold out of the walls—it probably took weeks of work with a team of divers.”
Leonid shook his head. “I don’t understand. Who beat us to this?”
Sam eyed him. “We can’t be certain . . . but Remi found a clue.”
“A clue?” Warren asked.
“That’s right.” Sam reached into his bag, extracted the object he’d brought from the chamber bottom, and considered it for a long moment before holding it up. The men drew nearer, pressing close to see what Sam held. Leonid was the first to react with a snort.
“What is that? A piece of junk?”
“Not junk, Leonid.”