Niki (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
niki_chidon) wrote2008-10-04 09:52 pm
niki_chidon) wrote2008-10-04 09:52 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: From the Cold and Frost, Part 2/6 (National Treasure; Ben/Ian, Riley/OFC)
For ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jedibuttercup because she asked for it;)
Title: From the Cold and Frost, Part 2: Ben
Author: Niki
Fandom: National Treasure (movie)
Series: Follows A More Perfect Union and The Age of Fire and Gravel
Pairings: Ben/Ian, Riley/OFC (Mina)
Rating: I'm aiming for R, at least but dunno...
Disclaimer: Disney owns most of them.
Summary: The next treasure, though to be fair, it's really a part of the previous one...
Notes: Book of Secrets didn't happen. Reading at least Fire and Gravel before this recommended.
Thanks tolalaith86 for yet more Dutchisms! Source reading at the end of the last chapter. Thanks to Mr Niki (he chose his name;) for random historical data. Oh, and to my mom for the suggestion for the location of the treasure.
Follows Part 1
Warning: This chapter handles some adult issues concerning the Nazis and homosexuality. Nothing graphic but I thought it fair to warn you nonetheless.
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Part 2: Ben; "Songs Preserved from Distant Ages"
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In all the articles written about me, my family, and our quest for the Templar treasure the last weeks of the search got the most attention. The action, the drama (even though most of it was hushed up, of course), the excitement. What almost everyone left out were the years of paperwork, the hours spent in musty archives and libraries doing research. Not exciting enough.
I like it. I like the action, yeah, but I get as much pleasure from discovering the next clue in a musty old newspaper as I would – did – from finding hidden inventions in famous buildings.
So this is nothing new to me, the hours we spend in archives and libraries and discussions with scholars. Of course, this time the material is in German, which adds the further problem of needing a translator. Ian speaks some German which helps, and even I can spot familiar place names and important names but it's not enough.
We called Abigail in to help. She was born here and even though her family moved to the States when she was just two, she is bilingual. And she thrives on research, telling us first thing that she'll leave the actual diving for us. Me and Ian, that is.
It could be awkward, this. I mean, we have worked with Abigail for more than a year now but... there have always been others around. Now it's just me, Ian and Abigail and we need to... talk.
I'm so looking forward to that.
But back to the research. What we have discovered so far is that there's nothing to discover. When the bulk of Ahnenerbe's papers were discovered in a cave near the village of Pottenstein in Bavaria, there was nothing, absolutely no mention of the expedition in the South despite having detailed descriptions of their other expeditions to many exotic locations as well as the medical tests the Ahnenerbe scientists had performed on the concentration camp prisoners, including the infamous Jewish skeleton collection. So either the Atlantis papers were part of the material that was destroyed or... or then someone was playing into their own purses and the information was never shared with the main office.
Atlantis... that's huge. You'd think something would have surfaced after the war? Could of course be that they destroyed the evidence and kept quiet because Mina and her team have recovered evidence that the Atlanteans might have been black. That wouldn't fit well into Heinrich Himmler's insistence that the Aryans created civilisation.
Are the artefacts destroyed? Why go through all that trouble of getting the stuff out of the place if they were just going to destroy them?
And how did the Nazis find the city in the first place? Did they, too, have a map? So many questions, so little clues that I would be ready to believe we have imagined the whole thing but for two solid facts: Atlantis does exist, and the Nazis did go there. So why isn't there a single mention of an expedition in the Antarctic area?
We have exhausted most of our leads. We tried following Anne's grandfather's career, hoping to get some clues about the expedition through his service years. The information we have discovered is patchy at best but it does suggest that the excursion took place in the last years of the war when Ahnenerbe was already so big it could have been possible to have secrets within the organisation, maybe even from Himmler himself.
The other avenue, the lake itself, is even more difficult because even though it is not that big it is very deep, and diving in blind would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Well, you never know. Abigail knows someone who knows someone who might have heard something about someone who... you get the point. We're on our way to meet a Mrs Schreiber whose son was working on something that might interest us before his death some decades ago.
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"Frau Schreiber, thank you for talking to us," Abigail says and introduces us. She is speaking in English, having explained to us that our hostess understands the language well enough, only refuses to speak it herself.
"Setzen Sie, bitte," the old lady says, more of a command than a request, and we sit down, me and Ian on a sofa and Abigail on a chair next to Mrs Schreiber's armchair.
She is in her eighties, a handsome woman who sits straight in her chair – like she has been taught to sit with a book on top of her head and has never forgotten the lessons.
She starts talking and Abigail translates. Apparently, her son, Dietfried, was a journalist, looking into the mystery of the lake Toplitz. Because he did his research in the sixties he was actually able to locate eyewitnesses, and even a soldier who allegedly was a part of the party that dumped the crates into the lake.
And at that bombshells she shuts up. I feel like yelling out of pure frustration but Ian touches my arm in calming manner. Abigail's eyes are filled with compassion when she asks our hostess about what happened to her son.
She is obviously unwilling to tell us but then she notices Ian's hand on my arm and smiles for the first time since we came.
"You are together?" she asks in English, and I am surprised about her perceptiveness. We're not that obvious, we can't afford to be. Not even in Europe, even though Ian keeps telling me it's different here.
Ian lets his hand slide down until he's covering my hand with his.
"Yes," he replies simply.
"I wish happiness to you, from my heart." She is quiet for a moment, then starts talking, quietly, in her lightly accented English.
"Before the war we lived in Berlin, my parents, me, and my brother. He was twenty, and handsome, and happy, and he had a lover. My parents did not know but I did, and I was glad for him. Even though we are German, when they start taking the Jews away they also take him away, take both of them away. Later I learn his lover died in the camp but he lived. Then the war was over and the British and the Americans were freeing the Jews. But no one freed the Homosexuals. They are still criminals. They go to prison for their... crimes. Their years in the camp are not even counted in their sentences."
She pauses and I think she's about to cry but she doesn't. Maybe she has no tears left, but I find I have to blink quite rapidly. Abigail is crying quietly.
"The laws change in the 60's. My brother comes out of prison, and Dietfried does not want to write about anything but how his uncle has been treated. They die in a car accident three months later."
I look at this frail, proud old woman with her dry eyes and feel like a bastard for still wanting to know about his son's research. And to my amazement she smiles again.
"It is better now. The law is just now, and even people change. They mention them now, the forgotten ones. They have monuments. People like him, like you, can walk in the street and hold hands, just like me and my husband. You want to go treasure hunting? You can have Diet's papers. I saved all of them."
"Danke schön, Frau Schreiber, vielen Dank," I get out.
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"Damn, what a story," I say outside her door.
I can't help put pull Ian into a hug as soon as we have left the building.
"I feel so ashamed for having it so easy. I don't have to fear dying because I love you," I mutter against his hair.
"When we get back to Berlin," Abigail says decisively, "we are going to go visit one of the monuments she mentioned. I feel like... paying my respects."
"You get no refusal from us," Ian replies for both of us.
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Dietfried Schreiber's research is a goldmine. Abigail translates his complete notes on an interview of a young soldier who was loading the boxes that were later dumped into the lake. And then we get our clue: the boxes were not just dumped, they were hidden in a cave that had been formed in the torpedo tests. He doesn't provide coordinates or anything as easy as that but his descriptions should aid us in locating the cave.
We can find them. We can actually find them.
"So, we tell Riley and Mina now or when we have the boxes?" I ask, leaning back on the office chair we purchased for the hotel room to make working easier during our stay.
Ian gets up from his seat to come stand next to my chair. His grin is teasing and sexy as hell.
"Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you? How did Riley put it? Just because you got lucky twice doesn't mean you'll strike gold every time you dig."
"I got lucky alright," I reply, with a grin of my own, and pull his head down for a kiss. Before our lips meet I remember Abigail is still in the room.
I turn to look at her and she smiles slightly.
"I think that's my cue to leave," she says, and walks to the door.
As soon as the door has closed behind her I take that kiss, and we remove ourselves into the bedroom to celebrate.
I never get tired of this, him. Kissing him, burying my hands in his hair (he's kept it short ever since he came out of the prison), arching my neck when he bites me just low enough for the t-shirt to cover the mark, running my fingers down his back, tracing the old scars, touching and kissing and licking every part of him I can reach and then some.
I enjoy the feel of his skin, his muscles, the strength that meets mine. The knowledge I can't hurt him or break him no matter how hard we play, how desperate I get, how hasty we are. We can do gentle, we can do rough, we can do everything in between; we can do dirty, we can do considerate, and damn it, every time still feels better than ever before. I think I must be in love.
It's very mutual.
Afterwards, Ian holds me close, running his fingers lazily on my skin. This, too, is normal. The moments of tenderness we are not ashamed of.
"It would be worth it," he says quietly.
"Huh?" I am torn out of my musings by his serious tone.
"This. Even if we had to die for it."
This from a man who waited over four decades to get the words 'I love you' out of his mouth. Damn, he never stops taking my breath away.
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We meet Abigail for breakfast. She seems to have spent a sleepless night.
"I have been... thinking," she says quietly, staring at her cup of coffee, and I meet Ian's gaze briefly. Is this the talk I've been dreading?
"About?" I encourage her.
"You and Ian, me and you," she replies and meets my eyes.
"Ah." I don't really know what to say.
"Should I... leave you to it?" Ian asks.
"No, don't. I..." Abigail seems to be searching for the right words, then takes a deep breath. "I hated you for so long," she admits, looking at Ian.
"I didn't hate you when you were threatening us, or when you chased us. I feared you. But when I realised Ben felt... more for you than he did for me, I..."
"I didn't know," I say. She was so... reasonable when she told me to go to Ian.
"I had time to make my peace with it before you... before we... I was... resigned. I knew I had to learn to tolerate him if I didn't want to lose you. I don't love you anymore, I don't want you back, it's not that. But I have always liked you more than loved, and I valued your friendship. I still do. But..." She smiles to Ian, now.
"I learned to genuinely like you too. You're good to Ben, and you are... a good man, despite everything that has happened."
"Thank you," Ian says quietly.
"What I'm trying to say is... I've been... holding back. I've just been polite but now I... Can we be friends? You don't need to hide what you have from me, I won't start crying if you kiss in front of me, and I promise not to... make you feel uncomfortable. It was easier to act like nothing had happened when the whole group was around but now... I have to deal with the break up. And I have to deal with the reality that is you two."
"We never wanted to rub your face in it."
"I know, and I'm grateful. But I shouldn't have made you feel like you need to hide. I don't want to forget what we had. But I'm over it. Friends?" she asks, offering me her right hand.
"Friends," I say, and take her hand.
She offers her left hand to Ian.
"Friends," he also says.
"Now... How about we blow this joint and go to Austria?"
I respond to her suggestion with a grin and lean in to kiss her cheek. Ian follows my example.
"Austria it is."
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Hidden in the Austrian Alps and shadowed by a dense forest the Toplitzsee was almost inaccessible in 1945. These days there's a perfectly serviceable road but that doesn't solve all of the problems. Without my reputation we wouldn't have even been granted a permission to research the lake. So many have tried and died that the government does not let anyone dive these days – but who could say no to a man who found the fabled Templar treasure and Atlantis? I have to say, after the decades of ridicule my family has suffered, I quite enjoy the benefits of fame.
Stories of what the Nazis did here and what they hid here, and even what has been found, differ greatly. What we have been able to confirm is that they did test explosives and torpedoes here in the beginning of the war, and remains of those tests have been found. They also dumped counterfeit money here, a leftover from a plot to destroy the economy of their enemies. The bills were in wooden crates that have since disintegrated in the water. There have always been rumours of gold and treasure hidden here but no one has ever found any traces of that.
Dietfried's source maintains that the boxes they delivered here in 1945 were metal, and as such contained something that was meant to survive the storage underwater. It makes sense that they would not have been dumped into the depths because with the technology of the day they would have been impossible to retrieve. That's why I believe in the cave story.
Dietfried's SS man didn't think they hid gold, or stolen property from the prisoners. He claimed he had been transporting something from one of the Ahnenerbe buildings but without Himmler's say-so. His colonel was working on his own. Does that mean we've found one of our conspirators?
Would SS-Standartenführer Wolff Hegewald really have been able to hide an operation the size of an expedition to Antarctica from the head of the SS, especially in the last years of the war when the army was lacking in resources and men? Sounds incredible, I admit. Would he have been able to disguise it as something else? But the manpower, the scientists... the logistics, the ships... the more I think about it the more incredible it sounds.
When discussing this with Ian he points out that we shouldn't have been able to find Atlantis in the first place, with what we had to work on. And had we perished in our quest, no outsider would have known our true goal. He has a point.
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Getting the needed equipment to the lake was difficult because it is so high in the mountains – dead mountains, they call them. The lake is also 'dead', devoid of almost all life after the first 20 metres because of the lack of oxygen below that. The surroundings look beautiful but I'm in no hurry to dive into the water. I couldn't even tell you why I feel like that, I'm not superstitious as a rule.
It's a bright June morning when I don my diving gear for the first time in years. We have spent a week doing calculations and scouting by the lake before risking going down, and I've used the time to test the equipment and my skills. I'm well aware that entering a cave in the canyon wall I risk stumbling to unexploded material. I'd much rather do this on my own but only fools dive alone. Ian is a fairly good recreational diver, and some of his men are also licensed, and can act as our back up on ground. I'm not happy risking anyone else, especially Ian, and Ian is not happy about risking me but we both understand the requirements of the trade. Besides, I was trained to do this.
There are not many of us; me and Ian, Abigail, a few of Ian's men, and some technicians I've known for years. We'll be going in with a waterproof camera that provides instant picture to the team on the shore. We also invested on the latest gear so that we can communicate underwater with Ian, as well as with the team.
The conditions are hardly ideal for diving. The water is murky, and I can barely see where I'm going despite the bright light of my headgear. I find the canyon wall, and follow it down, seeing here and there holes made by torpedoes, all of them too small for our purposes. If the boxes required many men to lift one, they'd have to be big.
Resisting temptation to move sideways I follow the search pattern we set up, for the first time happy I'm not alone down here.
"Ian?" I say even before I have time to think about it.
His reply is instantaneous in my earplugs. "You okay?"
"Yeah, I just... damn creepy down here," I say sheepishly, and can hear the laughter in his reply.
"I'll say. Glad I'm not here alone."
"I'm willing to concede the fact... hey, I think I found something. I can't see... yes, definitely a larger hole than the previous ones. Can you see it?"
"Yes. Worth checking, I suppose," Ian says.
"We can see it too," Abigail tells us.
"I'm going in," I say, following the safety guidelines we drew – one goes in, one stays outside the cave, connected with a rope. If the audio link fails, we can always communicate the old fashioned way with tugs on the rope.
"Be careful," Ian says.
"Always."
I swim in carefully, having just enough room to manoeuvre with the camera. I make sweeping movements with my headlamp but it's soon clear that this one is a dead end.
"Metallic remains of the ammunition?" Abigail's voice suggests through the radio.
"Seems like it."
Then starts the interesting operation of backing out of the cave – it's too small for me to be able to turn around. I get out just as I start feeling a little claustrophobic.
"That wasn't fun," I mutter, and we move further down.
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The search is of course prolonged due to the breaks we take after every 30 minutes, and because we can't exceed the three hour diving time for each day. But three days and miles of canyon range behind us, we find the biggest cave yet. I move in, execute the usual search pattern... and freeze when the beam hits something not natural in its form. Square shapes. Covered in all sorts of garbage but definitely square.
"I'll be damned... would you look at that," I get out.
I swim closer, and count the shapes. There are at least five boxes, perfectly preserved despite their long submersion.
"Well, we found something," Abigail's deceptively calm voice says.
The mask prevents my grin showing when I turn to show thumbs up to Ian who has scrapped the security measures and followed me into the cave.
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Another day's work and we have the boxes up. We resisted temptation to open them before we had all on ground. They are housed in a sealed tent, to protect them from the elements and the air they have not been in touch with for decades.
My hands are shaking barely perceptibly when I reach to open the first box.
It's sealed well but after a brief struggle we have the lid open, and find out the insides are still dry. Then we are tearing through the protective padding.
"Amber," I say, looking at the contents, then, taking stock the amount and shape of the pieces my eyes shoot to meet Ian's gaze. "Amber!"
"Oh my God..." Abigail whispers.
"The Amber Room..." I say, not believing my eyes.
Ian is laughing.
I'm staring at him incredulously, and see Abigail doing the same.
"For c...c...centuries, your family has looked for a t..tr...treasure," he tries to explain despite his hilarity, "and here you are, and in just a f...few years you have discovered the Templar treasure..." he uses his fingers to underline the count. "The Templar treasure, Atlantis, the Amber Room... what next? Should we move on to the missing Wonders of the World?"
I have to grin. "I'll settle for the stolen treasures of Atlantis."
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We do not find those, though, but something almost as precious. We find the lost paperwork about the expedition. From the clues to the planning and then the execution of the said plans. All of the names are codes, and even the correspondence about the ship is using pseudonyms.
We also find paperwork about other expeditions, other research the conspirators kept hidden from their leaders. Detailing trips to all corners of the globe... but none of the artefacts or notes collected during those journeys.
Then we find something concrete, a handwritten document, dated in the last days of the war. It is signed 'Wolf' and it seems like a part of a personal letter. Abigail translates it for us.
"Concerning the artefacts recovered from the fabled A (?), hid them with the aid of Y.G. It will amuse You to find out that the clue to the location is present in the recent works of O.F. – presented by H.H. to the Führer himself, unaware of their true value. There's a page missing... I think it had a map of the location, or other instructions."
"Well, the fabled 'A' is easy... And I suppose 'H.H.' will be Heinrich Himmler, then. But as to the rest..."
Ian looks amused and shakes his head. "I'll be damned," he says softly, then turns to look at me.
"I do believe I know the drawings he is talking about. They were stolen after Hitler's death and have changed hands many times since then..."
"How do you know about them?" I ask.
Ian merely smiles.
"Why don't you contact the kids and ask them to meet us in Grenoble."
"You mean this is enough to drag them from their Frozen Wonderland?" I ask, using Riley's favourite description of his new home.
"Oh, it's big enough, and trust me – Mina would not forgive us for leaving her out of this." He pauses and his smile grows into a grin. "We're going treasure hunting."
- - - - -End of Part 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - Continued in Part 3
jedibuttercup because she asked for it;) Title: From the Cold and Frost, Part 2: Ben
Author: Niki
Fandom: National Treasure (movie)
Series: Follows A More Perfect Union and The Age of Fire and Gravel
Pairings: Ben/Ian, Riley/OFC (Mina)
Rating: I'm aiming for R, at least but dunno...
Disclaimer: Disney owns most of them.
Summary: The next treasure, though to be fair, it's really a part of the previous one...
Notes: Book of Secrets didn't happen. Reading at least Fire and Gravel before this recommended.
Thanks to
lalaith86 for yet more Dutchisms! Source reading at the end of the last chapter. Thanks to Mr Niki (he chose his name;) for random historical data. Oh, and to my mom for the suggestion for the location of the treasure.Follows Part 1
Warning: This chapter handles some adult issues concerning the Nazis and homosexuality. Nothing graphic but I thought it fair to warn you nonetheless.
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Part 2: Ben; "Songs Preserved from Distant Ages"
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In all the articles written about me, my family, and our quest for the Templar treasure the last weeks of the search got the most attention. The action, the drama (even though most of it was hushed up, of course), the excitement. What almost everyone left out were the years of paperwork, the hours spent in musty archives and libraries doing research. Not exciting enough.
I like it. I like the action, yeah, but I get as much pleasure from discovering the next clue in a musty old newspaper as I would – did – from finding hidden inventions in famous buildings.
So this is nothing new to me, the hours we spend in archives and libraries and discussions with scholars. Of course, this time the material is in German, which adds the further problem of needing a translator. Ian speaks some German which helps, and even I can spot familiar place names and important names but it's not enough.
We called Abigail in to help. She was born here and even though her family moved to the States when she was just two, she is bilingual. And she thrives on research, telling us first thing that she'll leave the actual diving for us. Me and Ian, that is.
It could be awkward, this. I mean, we have worked with Abigail for more than a year now but... there have always been others around. Now it's just me, Ian and Abigail and we need to... talk.
I'm so looking forward to that.
But back to the research. What we have discovered so far is that there's nothing to discover. When the bulk of Ahnenerbe's papers were discovered in a cave near the village of Pottenstein in Bavaria, there was nothing, absolutely no mention of the expedition in the South despite having detailed descriptions of their other expeditions to many exotic locations as well as the medical tests the Ahnenerbe scientists had performed on the concentration camp prisoners, including the infamous Jewish skeleton collection. So either the Atlantis papers were part of the material that was destroyed or... or then someone was playing into their own purses and the information was never shared with the main office.
Atlantis... that's huge. You'd think something would have surfaced after the war? Could of course be that they destroyed the evidence and kept quiet because Mina and her team have recovered evidence that the Atlanteans might have been black. That wouldn't fit well into Heinrich Himmler's insistence that the Aryans created civilisation.
Are the artefacts destroyed? Why go through all that trouble of getting the stuff out of the place if they were just going to destroy them?
And how did the Nazis find the city in the first place? Did they, too, have a map? So many questions, so little clues that I would be ready to believe we have imagined the whole thing but for two solid facts: Atlantis does exist, and the Nazis did go there. So why isn't there a single mention of an expedition in the Antarctic area?
We have exhausted most of our leads. We tried following Anne's grandfather's career, hoping to get some clues about the expedition through his service years. The information we have discovered is patchy at best but it does suggest that the excursion took place in the last years of the war when Ahnenerbe was already so big it could have been possible to have secrets within the organisation, maybe even from Himmler himself.
The other avenue, the lake itself, is even more difficult because even though it is not that big it is very deep, and diving in blind would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Well, you never know. Abigail knows someone who knows someone who might have heard something about someone who... you get the point. We're on our way to meet a Mrs Schreiber whose son was working on something that might interest us before his death some decades ago.
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"Frau Schreiber, thank you for talking to us," Abigail says and introduces us. She is speaking in English, having explained to us that our hostess understands the language well enough, only refuses to speak it herself.
"Setzen Sie, bitte," the old lady says, more of a command than a request, and we sit down, me and Ian on a sofa and Abigail on a chair next to Mrs Schreiber's armchair.
She is in her eighties, a handsome woman who sits straight in her chair – like she has been taught to sit with a book on top of her head and has never forgotten the lessons.
She starts talking and Abigail translates. Apparently, her son, Dietfried, was a journalist, looking into the mystery of the lake Toplitz. Because he did his research in the sixties he was actually able to locate eyewitnesses, and even a soldier who allegedly was a part of the party that dumped the crates into the lake.
And at that bombshells she shuts up. I feel like yelling out of pure frustration but Ian touches my arm in calming manner. Abigail's eyes are filled with compassion when she asks our hostess about what happened to her son.
She is obviously unwilling to tell us but then she notices Ian's hand on my arm and smiles for the first time since we came.
"You are together?" she asks in English, and I am surprised about her perceptiveness. We're not that obvious, we can't afford to be. Not even in Europe, even though Ian keeps telling me it's different here.
Ian lets his hand slide down until he's covering my hand with his.
"Yes," he replies simply.
"I wish happiness to you, from my heart." She is quiet for a moment, then starts talking, quietly, in her lightly accented English.
"Before the war we lived in Berlin, my parents, me, and my brother. He was twenty, and handsome, and happy, and he had a lover. My parents did not know but I did, and I was glad for him. Even though we are German, when they start taking the Jews away they also take him away, take both of them away. Later I learn his lover died in the camp but he lived. Then the war was over and the British and the Americans were freeing the Jews. But no one freed the Homosexuals. They are still criminals. They go to prison for their... crimes. Their years in the camp are not even counted in their sentences."
She pauses and I think she's about to cry but she doesn't. Maybe she has no tears left, but I find I have to blink quite rapidly. Abigail is crying quietly.
"The laws change in the 60's. My brother comes out of prison, and Dietfried does not want to write about anything but how his uncle has been treated. They die in a car accident three months later."
I look at this frail, proud old woman with her dry eyes and feel like a bastard for still wanting to know about his son's research. And to my amazement she smiles again.
"It is better now. The law is just now, and even people change. They mention them now, the forgotten ones. They have monuments. People like him, like you, can walk in the street and hold hands, just like me and my husband. You want to go treasure hunting? You can have Diet's papers. I saved all of them."
"Danke schön, Frau Schreiber, vielen Dank," I get out.
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"Damn, what a story," I say outside her door.
I can't help put pull Ian into a hug as soon as we have left the building.
"I feel so ashamed for having it so easy. I don't have to fear dying because I love you," I mutter against his hair.
"When we get back to Berlin," Abigail says decisively, "we are going to go visit one of the monuments she mentioned. I feel like... paying my respects."
"You get no refusal from us," Ian replies for both of us.
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Dietfried Schreiber's research is a goldmine. Abigail translates his complete notes on an interview of a young soldier who was loading the boxes that were later dumped into the lake. And then we get our clue: the boxes were not just dumped, they were hidden in a cave that had been formed in the torpedo tests. He doesn't provide coordinates or anything as easy as that but his descriptions should aid us in locating the cave.
We can find them. We can actually find them.
"So, we tell Riley and Mina now or when we have the boxes?" I ask, leaning back on the office chair we purchased for the hotel room to make working easier during our stay.
Ian gets up from his seat to come stand next to my chair. His grin is teasing and sexy as hell.
"Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you? How did Riley put it? Just because you got lucky twice doesn't mean you'll strike gold every time you dig."
"I got lucky alright," I reply, with a grin of my own, and pull his head down for a kiss. Before our lips meet I remember Abigail is still in the room.
I turn to look at her and she smiles slightly.
"I think that's my cue to leave," she says, and walks to the door.
As soon as the door has closed behind her I take that kiss, and we remove ourselves into the bedroom to celebrate.
I never get tired of this, him. Kissing him, burying my hands in his hair (he's kept it short ever since he came out of the prison), arching my neck when he bites me just low enough for the t-shirt to cover the mark, running my fingers down his back, tracing the old scars, touching and kissing and licking every part of him I can reach and then some.
I enjoy the feel of his skin, his muscles, the strength that meets mine. The knowledge I can't hurt him or break him no matter how hard we play, how desperate I get, how hasty we are. We can do gentle, we can do rough, we can do everything in between; we can do dirty, we can do considerate, and damn it, every time still feels better than ever before. I think I must be in love.
It's very mutual.
Afterwards, Ian holds me close, running his fingers lazily on my skin. This, too, is normal. The moments of tenderness we are not ashamed of.
"It would be worth it," he says quietly.
"Huh?" I am torn out of my musings by his serious tone.
"This. Even if we had to die for it."
This from a man who waited over four decades to get the words 'I love you' out of his mouth. Damn, he never stops taking my breath away.
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We meet Abigail for breakfast. She seems to have spent a sleepless night.
"I have been... thinking," she says quietly, staring at her cup of coffee, and I meet Ian's gaze briefly. Is this the talk I've been dreading?
"About?" I encourage her.
"You and Ian, me and you," she replies and meets my eyes.
"Ah." I don't really know what to say.
"Should I... leave you to it?" Ian asks.
"No, don't. I..." Abigail seems to be searching for the right words, then takes a deep breath. "I hated you for so long," she admits, looking at Ian.
"I didn't hate you when you were threatening us, or when you chased us. I feared you. But when I realised Ben felt... more for you than he did for me, I..."
"I didn't know," I say. She was so... reasonable when she told me to go to Ian.
"I had time to make my peace with it before you... before we... I was... resigned. I knew I had to learn to tolerate him if I didn't want to lose you. I don't love you anymore, I don't want you back, it's not that. But I have always liked you more than loved, and I valued your friendship. I still do. But..." She smiles to Ian, now.
"I learned to genuinely like you too. You're good to Ben, and you are... a good man, despite everything that has happened."
"Thank you," Ian says quietly.
"What I'm trying to say is... I've been... holding back. I've just been polite but now I... Can we be friends? You don't need to hide what you have from me, I won't start crying if you kiss in front of me, and I promise not to... make you feel uncomfortable. It was easier to act like nothing had happened when the whole group was around but now... I have to deal with the break up. And I have to deal with the reality that is you two."
"We never wanted to rub your face in it."
"I know, and I'm grateful. But I shouldn't have made you feel like you need to hide. I don't want to forget what we had. But I'm over it. Friends?" she asks, offering me her right hand.
"Friends," I say, and take her hand.
She offers her left hand to Ian.
"Friends," he also says.
"Now... How about we blow this joint and go to Austria?"
I respond to her suggestion with a grin and lean in to kiss her cheek. Ian follows my example.
"Austria it is."
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Hidden in the Austrian Alps and shadowed by a dense forest the Toplitzsee was almost inaccessible in 1945. These days there's a perfectly serviceable road but that doesn't solve all of the problems. Without my reputation we wouldn't have even been granted a permission to research the lake. So many have tried and died that the government does not let anyone dive these days – but who could say no to a man who found the fabled Templar treasure and Atlantis? I have to say, after the decades of ridicule my family has suffered, I quite enjoy the benefits of fame.
Stories of what the Nazis did here and what they hid here, and even what has been found, differ greatly. What we have been able to confirm is that they did test explosives and torpedoes here in the beginning of the war, and remains of those tests have been found. They also dumped counterfeit money here, a leftover from a plot to destroy the economy of their enemies. The bills were in wooden crates that have since disintegrated in the water. There have always been rumours of gold and treasure hidden here but no one has ever found any traces of that.
Dietfried's source maintains that the boxes they delivered here in 1945 were metal, and as such contained something that was meant to survive the storage underwater. It makes sense that they would not have been dumped into the depths because with the technology of the day they would have been impossible to retrieve. That's why I believe in the cave story.
Dietfried's SS man didn't think they hid gold, or stolen property from the prisoners. He claimed he had been transporting something from one of the Ahnenerbe buildings but without Himmler's say-so. His colonel was working on his own. Does that mean we've found one of our conspirators?
Would SS-Standartenführer Wolff Hegewald really have been able to hide an operation the size of an expedition to Antarctica from the head of the SS, especially in the last years of the war when the army was lacking in resources and men? Sounds incredible, I admit. Would he have been able to disguise it as something else? But the manpower, the scientists... the logistics, the ships... the more I think about it the more incredible it sounds.
When discussing this with Ian he points out that we shouldn't have been able to find Atlantis in the first place, with what we had to work on. And had we perished in our quest, no outsider would have known our true goal. He has a point.
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Getting the needed equipment to the lake was difficult because it is so high in the mountains – dead mountains, they call them. The lake is also 'dead', devoid of almost all life after the first 20 metres because of the lack of oxygen below that. The surroundings look beautiful but I'm in no hurry to dive into the water. I couldn't even tell you why I feel like that, I'm not superstitious as a rule.
It's a bright June morning when I don my diving gear for the first time in years. We have spent a week doing calculations and scouting by the lake before risking going down, and I've used the time to test the equipment and my skills. I'm well aware that entering a cave in the canyon wall I risk stumbling to unexploded material. I'd much rather do this on my own but only fools dive alone. Ian is a fairly good recreational diver, and some of his men are also licensed, and can act as our back up on ground. I'm not happy risking anyone else, especially Ian, and Ian is not happy about risking me but we both understand the requirements of the trade. Besides, I was trained to do this.
There are not many of us; me and Ian, Abigail, a few of Ian's men, and some technicians I've known for years. We'll be going in with a waterproof camera that provides instant picture to the team on the shore. We also invested on the latest gear so that we can communicate underwater with Ian, as well as with the team.
The conditions are hardly ideal for diving. The water is murky, and I can barely see where I'm going despite the bright light of my headgear. I find the canyon wall, and follow it down, seeing here and there holes made by torpedoes, all of them too small for our purposes. If the boxes required many men to lift one, they'd have to be big.
Resisting temptation to move sideways I follow the search pattern we set up, for the first time happy I'm not alone down here.
"Ian?" I say even before I have time to think about it.
His reply is instantaneous in my earplugs. "You okay?"
"Yeah, I just... damn creepy down here," I say sheepishly, and can hear the laughter in his reply.
"I'll say. Glad I'm not here alone."
"I'm willing to concede the fact... hey, I think I found something. I can't see... yes, definitely a larger hole than the previous ones. Can you see it?"
"Yes. Worth checking, I suppose," Ian says.
"We can see it too," Abigail tells us.
"I'm going in," I say, following the safety guidelines we drew – one goes in, one stays outside the cave, connected with a rope. If the audio link fails, we can always communicate the old fashioned way with tugs on the rope.
"Be careful," Ian says.
"Always."
I swim in carefully, having just enough room to manoeuvre with the camera. I make sweeping movements with my headlamp but it's soon clear that this one is a dead end.
"Metallic remains of the ammunition?" Abigail's voice suggests through the radio.
"Seems like it."
Then starts the interesting operation of backing out of the cave – it's too small for me to be able to turn around. I get out just as I start feeling a little claustrophobic.
"That wasn't fun," I mutter, and we move further down.
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The search is of course prolonged due to the breaks we take after every 30 minutes, and because we can't exceed the three hour diving time for each day. But three days and miles of canyon range behind us, we find the biggest cave yet. I move in, execute the usual search pattern... and freeze when the beam hits something not natural in its form. Square shapes. Covered in all sorts of garbage but definitely square.
"I'll be damned... would you look at that," I get out.
I swim closer, and count the shapes. There are at least five boxes, perfectly preserved despite their long submersion.
"Well, we found something," Abigail's deceptively calm voice says.
The mask prevents my grin showing when I turn to show thumbs up to Ian who has scrapped the security measures and followed me into the cave.
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Another day's work and we have the boxes up. We resisted temptation to open them before we had all on ground. They are housed in a sealed tent, to protect them from the elements and the air they have not been in touch with for decades.
My hands are shaking barely perceptibly when I reach to open the first box.
It's sealed well but after a brief struggle we have the lid open, and find out the insides are still dry. Then we are tearing through the protective padding.
"Amber," I say, looking at the contents, then, taking stock the amount and shape of the pieces my eyes shoot to meet Ian's gaze. "Amber!"
"Oh my God..." Abigail whispers.
"The Amber Room..." I say, not believing my eyes.
Ian is laughing.
I'm staring at him incredulously, and see Abigail doing the same.
"For c...c...centuries, your family has looked for a t..tr...treasure," he tries to explain despite his hilarity, "and here you are, and in just a f...few years you have discovered the Templar treasure..." he uses his fingers to underline the count. "The Templar treasure, Atlantis, the Amber Room... what next? Should we move on to the missing Wonders of the World?"
I have to grin. "I'll settle for the stolen treasures of Atlantis."
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We do not find those, though, but something almost as precious. We find the lost paperwork about the expedition. From the clues to the planning and then the execution of the said plans. All of the names are codes, and even the correspondence about the ship is using pseudonyms.
We also find paperwork about other expeditions, other research the conspirators kept hidden from their leaders. Detailing trips to all corners of the globe... but none of the artefacts or notes collected during those journeys.
Then we find something concrete, a handwritten document, dated in the last days of the war. It is signed 'Wolf' and it seems like a part of a personal letter. Abigail translates it for us.
"Concerning the artefacts recovered from the fabled A (?), hid them with the aid of Y.G. It will amuse You to find out that the clue to the location is present in the recent works of O.F. – presented by H.H. to the Führer himself, unaware of their true value. There's a page missing... I think it had a map of the location, or other instructions."
"Well, the fabled 'A' is easy... And I suppose 'H.H.' will be Heinrich Himmler, then. But as to the rest..."
Ian looks amused and shakes his head. "I'll be damned," he says softly, then turns to look at me.
"I do believe I know the drawings he is talking about. They were stolen after Hitler's death and have changed hands many times since then..."
"How do you know about them?" I ask.
Ian merely smiles.
"Why don't you contact the kids and ask them to meet us in Grenoble."
"You mean this is enough to drag them from their Frozen Wonderland?" I ask, using Riley's favourite description of his new home.
"Oh, it's big enough, and trust me – Mina would not forgive us for leaving her out of this." He pauses and his smile grows into a grin. "We're going treasure hunting."
- - - - -End of Part 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - Continued in Part 3