The Midas Legacy (Wilde/Chase 12) Read Free Page B

record that the expedition hoped to discover, however.
    ‘Matt, move to drop-off position,’ Blumberg ordered. ‘Nerio, Eddie, you’re up.’
    The submersible stopped above the ring of lights, pulsing its thrusters at low power to hold position against the ocean’s slow but relentless current. ‘Okay, guys, we’re here,’ said Matt. The two divers each collected an equipment case, then Eddie leaned his shaved head closer to the camera and grinned at Nina, revealing the gap between his two front teeth, before stepping off the skid.
    ‘Good luck,’ she told him.
    ‘Hope we don’t need it,’ Eddie replied. The deep suit – comprised of a hard casing around his body that let him breathe air at normal atmospheric pressure to eliminate any risk of the bends, heavy-duty seals at the shoulders and hips allowing his drysuited limbs to move freely – was neutrally buoyant, but the case was heavy enough to let him drift lazily downwards. A spool of hair-thin fibre-optic communications line played out behind him, keeping him in direct contact with the sub and the IHA. His feet made gentle contact with the ancient stone. ‘Touchdown! It didn’t collapse, so that’s a good start.’
    Cellini landed a few feet away. ‘This part of the temple should be very stable,’ he said. ‘Only below the altar room is it . . .’ He searched for the best English word, waggling his free hand from side to side. ‘Wobbly.’
    ‘And guess where we’re going,’ Eddie sighed. He became more serious as he surveyed his surroundings.
    He had visited the altar room before, as well as near-identical copies the Atlanteans had built after abandoning their homeland; one in a vast cavern within a Himalayan mountain, the other deep in the jungles of Brazil. The archaeologists cataloguing the lost city on the Amazon had since discovered more chambers beneath its altar room – not hidden, exactly, but neither had they been immediately obvious. Meanwhile, the teams exploring Atlantis itself had uncovered references to a previously unknown treasure held somewhere within the Temple of Poseidon, and all the clues pointed to one of those secondary rooms.
    There were two problems. The first was that nobody was sure if the Brazilian temple’s chambers were exact duplicates of the original – sonar searches suggested open spaces beneath this altar room, but the results were far from conclusive. The second, and bigger, was that even if they existed, the Evenor ’s destructive landing had dropped countless tons of debris into the temple’s interior, making it impossible to know what was beneath.
    Until someone remembered that Nina and Eddie had been inside the temple while it was still intact . . .
    There was a camera mounted on the Yorkshireman’s right shoulder. ‘Nina, you seeing this?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes, all looking good,’ his wife replied. ‘I can see the stairs.’
    An opening in one wall descended into darkness. The rubble blocking it had been removed, only for the IHA’s explorers to find another, more solid obstruction further down. Small underwater drones had been able to squeeze past it to confirm that the stairway continued beyond, but in turn were stymied by further debris. To the fury of their controllers, the second blockage looked loose enough to be cleared by hand, but the little robots lacked the power to do so.
    Which was why, the previous day, Cellini and another diver had used precision explosive charges to split apart the first obstacle. The blast had stirred up debris and sediment, turning the water in the tunnel completely opaque. It had now settled, so he and Eddie could check if the stairway was passable, and if so, explore its depths.
    The Italian gestured to his dive partner. ‘Are you ready?’
    ‘Sure,’ Eddie replied. ‘I’ll try not to wreck the entire place.’ He smiled to reassure the younger man, who clearly knew his reputation.
    Blumberg’s voice came through his earpiece. ‘That would be