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  "Don't be. It was sudden, over his breakfast coffee. Just like that. I was even there to be with him those last few moments."

  Ashe winced.

  She laced her fingers together, her wedding band winking with golden light in the reflection from the fire.

  "Best way to go, I think. No fear, and the doctors insisted there couldn't have been much suffering. Though it's hard enough on those of us left behind. So I became a hermit for a time, and then that time ended, and I looked about me, and realized that I was still alive, that my children were grown and didn't need me—and that I could, well, have a life of my own."

  Again the tilt of the head. "And you were right, by the way."

  Right? Was she talking about that last nasty exchange? Ashe's mind wheeled back rapidly, faster than light-speed. He was again on warm, dusty Crete, digging at Knossos. Two on the dig were J.J. Edel, twenty years older, and Linnea, young and earnest and ardent about the archaeology. Gordon swinging between finishing his doctoral work and getting lured by the government into the supersecret Project Star, during the years the Iron Curtain still blocked off the East.

  What could he say? He could say—

  "Here's your seltzer, sir. Now, are you folks ready to order?"

  Ashe accepted the drink, and the waiter launched into a recital of a long list of specials. Ashe took a slug of cold seltzer, fighting the urge to tell the guy to take a hike.

  Linnea smiled. "Oh, I'm sorry, we haven't even looked at our menus yet. Would you come back later?"

  "Sure. Just wave a hand," the waiter said, and he left.

  Linnea leaned forward. "The last time you and I saw one another, it you remember, we were walking along the harbor at Heraklion."

  "I remember."

  "And yon told me, in pungent and specific detail that I can still recall to this day, what a fatheaded doormat I was to do all J.J,'s work at the dig."

  Ashe winced and shook his head. "And I've regretted it ever since, though I know that doesn't excuse it."

  "Why should you excuse it? You were right. I did do all his work and let him take the credit. A lot of that was the cultural conditioning of the time—that's what ladies did. And you were right about J.J. incidentally: he really wasn't interested in archaeology or in any of the other degrees he almost got. He was just marking time until his father died suddenly and he took over the business, which he ran until the day he died. And I am delighted to say that my son never showed any interest in inheriting it. The new CEO is, in fact, a woman."

  Ashe nodded.

  "Well, bear with me now, Gordon, because it all ties together." She chuckled softly and again tilted her head. "After you and I had our little talk and you vanished into the ether, J.J. inherited, like I said. And since I was pregnant with the twins—and you know how primitive conditions were at the dig—and J.J. didn't want his little princess working, we both dropped out, moved to New York City, and I became a housewife until the morning I became a widow."

  She finished her seltzer and sat back, sighing. "So as I said, my year of being a hermit passed, and then I looked around and realized that I had a life. Not as a morn or a wife, but as me. And I'd always loved archaeology, with a passion. I subscribed all these years toArcheology and a half dozen other scholarly magazines. So I decided to go back to school. No hurry and I don't care if I even graduate, because I'd never take one of the rare jobs from some young person struggling to follow his or her dream. J.J. did leave me very well off, so I can do what I want. Which, this last winter, was to go back with some students on a little dig."

  She leaned forward, and Ashe did as well. "Not to Crete this time, but to Thera itself. And that's where I found what I sent you."

  Ashe now drew the printout from his coat pocket. The picture in itself was nothing of interest to anyone who might glance casually at it: a photo of a hoop earring of beaten gold, somewhat dull, with bits of mud and debris stuck to it, but on the clearest part, quite distinct, was a jeweler's mark. A modern jeweler's mark.

  Ashe looked down at it and up at Linnea's face.

  She said, "You disappeared that spring from classes, and you kept giving these evasive answers when people asked what you were doing. And a couple of times the department secretary said you got calls from these guys from Washington, DC, which was quite a ways from our university."

  Ashe said nothing.

  Linnea grinned. "I tried to find you afterward, I have to admit. At first to continue the argument. That comment about doormats did stick in my craw, but as the years went by, and J.J. still called me his little princess, I realized that you were right all along. It stuck because it was true. Oh, I loved him, and he loved me, but J.J. never did see me as an adult in my own right—and I guess the role I got in the habit of playing wasn't exactly conducive to changing his worldview." She waved a hand, as though shooing away an annoying fly. "But we're not here to hash over old feminist issues. The thing is, I did try to find you, as well as some of our old friends, and though I eventually found all of them, you remained amazingly elusive."

  She paused, sending Ashe an inquiring look. Tie said slowly, "Most of my subsequent work was on artifacts here in North America. If you stayed with Aegean studies, of course you'd lose track of me—" He shrugged. He had never minded deflecting people from his real work, but it made him feel queasy to issue these half-lies to a friend.

  "Nice try," Linnea said, laughing a little. "I also heard from one of our mutual old friends about a dig in New Mexico, and you'd been in on a find that later vanished. No articles, no papers, no conferences. That, he told me in a letter, spells 'government' and 'top secret.'"

  Ashe looked down, fiddling with his drink. What could he say?

  She didn't seem to expect him to say anything; she kept on. "Then, a few years back, there was all that news about the alien spaceships, and the tapes, though it all disappeared from the news really quickly when it was discovered that they were old artifacts and aliens weren't coining here in peace or in war. People forgot. But I never did; especially when, it turned out, one of the sites mentioned was New Mexico, and a Dr. Ashe was quoted just once. I put the variables together, wondered if you might be part of the equation, and last winter when I uncovered that earring in a place that had been sealed under volcanic ash since 1628b.c. and saw that modern jeweler's mark, I decided that maybe it was time to try again to dig you up. Luckily people are easier to find on the Internet these days, even if their jobs aren't."

  Ashe let out a sigh. "And you decided to find me because . . . ?"

  "I figured if there was anyone who could tell me how a modern earring could get back to the mid-1600sb.c., it was you."

  Ashe hesitated. There was one obvious question to be asked, but he didn't think he could bring himself to do it quite yet. So he went to the next obvious. "You were the one who mentioned threats. I take it you haven't shared your find with anyone?"

  "And don't plan to, if it will cause trouble. As I said, I am not hunting for a career, or even notoriety. Truth, yes. Insight into the past and how we got here today—the roots of our present civilization—yes. But not at the cost of people's lives. I paid my own way to the dig, so no one owned my time, and if it turns out to be a genuine artifact and I'm wrong, I'll restore it to the Greek government. But I do," she said again, in a low voice, "want to know the truth."

  Ashe stared down at the picture again, his mind darting in circles like fireflies in a high wind. Nothing, though, got past that primary question—

  "What is it, Gordon?" she whispered. "You look like you'd seen a—oh!" Her voice broke off.

  He glanced up, to see her eyes gone round and dark with intensity. He realized he was clammy with sweat. At the same moment he saw a wince of compassion tighten her face, and she murmured in a fast, low voice, "I did not take it from a skeleton. I did not see any remains."

  Ashe's breath leaked out, though his heart still hammered.

  She gave her head a quick shake. "Of course you know what that dig is li
ke: two more inches, and we don't know what we'll find. But the Marinates and Doumas teams have not uncovered any human remains so far, and that is still the same."

  That leap of compassion, of sudden understanding, was not the reaction of an eager young student desperate to make a mark in the world. It was the reaction of a woman of experience, of integrity. It was the Linnea he'd once known, only grown up.

  "I'll see what I can do," he promised.

  CHAPTER 3

  EVELEEN RIORDAN FELT her gold earrings swing against her jaws as she stepped into the elevator. Why did she feel so self-conscious all of a sudden? How many times had she worn this pair to work and never thought anything of it?

  But no one had ever asked about them before. How odd, she thought, as Ross tapped a code into the elevator pads. A subtle jerk, a whine of hydraulics, and the elevator did not go up—though the people in the lobby of the Northside Research Institute would think it had. Upstairs a legitimate marketing research company did a thriving business. Down below ground level existed a complex that those busy researchers would have been astonished to discover.

  They dropped fast and smooth; then the elevator doors slid open onto spacious hallways with full spread-spectrum lighting and rows of healthy ferns and other plants. Off both sides offices full of computer banks and desk cubicles opened up, people moving to and fro. The designers had made it as pleasant as they could, but to Eveleen it still felt like vintage government-agency ambience, and modest as their apartment was, she was glad to call it home.

  "Ah, there you are." Major Kelgarries emerged from an adjacent hallway, three or four disks in one hand and a sheaf of files in the other. He's been riding a desk for a long time, but he still looks and moves like a man used to being in the field, Eveleen thought as Ross returned the brief greeting and they followed Kelgarries's broad shoulders the last few paces to one of the conference rooms.

  It was one of the big rooms, with a big projection screen on one wall. No one spoke as they entered and set up their laptops. Ross moved straight to the coffee dispenser next to the door and brought them both a cup. Eveleen was still feeling off balance. She smiled at Gordon Ashe, and decided the light touch was the way to handle his odd request. She tapped her earrings and blinked her eyes, as if to say, See? I remembered!

  He smiled back, but his smile was tight, and perfunctory at best.

  Eveleen looked away, troubled, and began seeing the clues she'd overlooked: tension. Tension in Kelgarries, tension in Ashe, tension in Milliard, the big boss, muttering over there into a cell-phone. Tension in the older woman sitting in the corner, laptop open. She talked quietly with the tall redhead whom Eveleen recognized as one of the top computer simulation experts in Project Star.

  The redhead gave Eveleen a brief wave.

  "Hi, Marilyn," Eveleen murmured. Then wished she hadn't spoken, for her voice seemed oddly loud.

  "We're all here," Ashe said then. "Eveleen, if I may trouble you for those earrings, please?"

  She no longer felt like laughing as she unfastened and handed them over. In silence she and Ross watched Ashe examine the simple gold loops, then place them on the light-plate of a projecting microscope arranged next to his chair. Eveleen felt Ross tensing up beside her, his gray eyes narrowed.

  Everyone watched as Ashe took out a small manila envelope from a file and shook its contents out into his hand: another hoop earring. Then he produced from a pocket a jeweler's eyepiece and bent over the earring, glancing occasionally at the projection screen, where Eveleen's pair loomed as large as basketball hoops, every dimple strike of the jeweler's hammer plain. He reached and turned over the two earrings on the microscope's projection stage.

  Eveleen felt tension grip her own neck when she realized she'd heard his breathing stop. In silence he placed the earring from the envelope on the microscope, pushing aside one of the ones already there. There was his hand, big enough for them to see the whorls of his fingerprints as he nudged the earring into the center, next to the other, and then Eveleen realized what she was seeing.

  The earring was identical to one of the pair she'd brought, a little more worn, but it had the same little jeweler's squiggle on it and in exactly the same place. It was the same earring.

  Cold certainty settled into the pit of her stomach, and Eveleen felt a familiar dizziness; the paradoxical nature of time travel wasn't something anyone ever got used to. She was too experienced a Time Agent to mistake what she and everyone else in the room were seeing: Bilocation, the selfsame object existing simultaneously in two places at once.

  "Where?" Ross demanded, gazing at Gordon Ashe, his face like granite. "And when? And how long have you known about it?"

  Eveleen took her lower lip between her teeth. The truth was, a weird little voice in the back of her mind gibbered and giggled, Mrs.Withan was scared of Ross. He had no idea he looked as out of place in her clean, low-key apartment building as a pirate in a swimming pool. Tall, lean, scarred hand, his walk the silent, action-ready walk of someone who was raised on the streets, Ross didn't look even remotely like any sort of software salesman.

  The street kid was very obvious in his attitude now. But Ashe had been handling that oblique threat for years.

  'To answer your questions in reverse order: I did not know about it until last night. 'When' is somewhere in the middle of the 1600sb.c. We think it might be 1628. And where . . ." He smiled wryly. "Have you ever heard of the legend of Atlantis?"

  Eveleen said, startled, "But that's New Age woo-woo!"

  Ross then surprised her—surprised everyone—by saying, "Plato, fourth century B.C. Retelling Solon's story."

  Kelgarries snorted a mirthless laugh. "Glad I didn't put any bets on that one."

  Gordon nodded, giving Ross a brief smile. "Dialogues between Timaeus and Critias. So you did a little reading while you were up at my cottage in Maine?"

  Ross grinned back. "Books were on the shelf, and you did say to feel free."

  Gordon looked around at them all. "Our so-called Atlantis, as far as we can tell, did in fact exist. But it was not a great continent, and it did not sink. It was a volcanic island—actually an arc of small islands, the very top of a massive undersea volcano—just north of Crete, now called Thera. Which means 'fear,'" Gordon added with a sardonic lift of his brows. "The people of the time seem to have called it Kalliste. And as near as we can tell, approximately in the 1620s B.C. from thirty to fifty cubic miles of it blew into the sky, sending out a tsunami that took out all the ports along the Aegean and sent a black cloud into the atmosphere that ruined crops in China and showed up in tree rings as far away as northern California."

  Eveleen rubbed her temples, stunned at what had to have been the magnitude of that volcanic eruption.

  Kelgarries turned to the red-haired expert. "Marilyn?"

  "For purposes of comparison," she said in a strong French accent, "the explosion at Mount St. Helens in Washington was an explosion of a mere half-cubic-mile, as you Americans would say. Krakatoa was about eight cubic miles."

  The woman next to her—short, thick graying hair—listened, taking notes steadily, but as yet she had not spoken, and no one had introduced her.

  Ashe tapped the projection stage of the microscope, making the huge images on the screen tremble and bringing their attention back to the earrings. "And this was discovered buried under approximately twenty-five meters—say eighty feet of volcanic ash, undisturbed until just this summer."

  Ross looked sick. "A volcanic island?" His mouth tightened. "I suppose our bones were next to it?"

  Eveleen felt her heart squeeze at thatour. No one had mentioned him yet, but she knew that he'd be there beside her, somehow, no matter how.

  "No," Ashe said. "Understand that the progress at that dig is barely measured in inches, especially in the past few years, and as yet there have been no remains. Just a few scattered artifacts in the street of a city. The people, as far as we can tell, seem to have been evacuated."

  "By us?" Eveleen sp
oke, her throat dry. That voice at the back of her mind was no longer laughing. If everyone got away, why was my earring there? "I mean, it's clear that we were there. That we're going to be there."

  Ross tapped a pencil on the edge of his laptop, a militant tattoo. "Why all this background chat? Are you building up to some big idea about the Baldies maybe causing that volcano to blow?"

  "Well, we don't know," Ashe said. "The truth is, until yesterday somehow this remarkable incident in Earth's history had seemed a random natural event, albeit extraordinarily spectacular. As a possible site for our investigations, it had been previously overlooked. Probably because as yet there has been so little excavation done, and we know so very little about what happened—and of course there had been no mysterious artifacts found, none of the globe ships or other signs of the Baldies that we've discovered and dealt with in other times and places."

  Eveleen's mind worked rapidly through what she knew of history. "Thera. . . north of Crete. Those were the Minoans, weren't they? The bull worshippers? Weren't they supposed to be this sophisticated, peaceful trading civilization?"

  "They were," Ashe said. "They were probably the most sophisticated culture Earth had produced until the past couple of centuries—and some will argue about that, considering the wars we've managed to wage against ourselves and the environmental damage our industrial developments have caused. The Minoan houses that have been excavated so far had running water, possibly hot and cold. Toilets. Showers, even, in one place. A standard of living, in short, that would not be out of place today. Only they didn't wage war, they traded, all along the Mediterranean, for their distinctive artwork shows up in tombs in Egypt as well as points north and west. Yet right around this time they vanished. Simply disappeared from history."

  Ross nodded. "Right. But you said that no bodies were found, and that they might have evacuated. So how did that civilization vanish?"

  "No one knows," Milliard said, pointing to a sheaf of printouts. "We've pulled up as much research as we can, and most of it is speculation."