Read The Atlantis Code for Free Online

Italian accent in the man’s words.
    The four armed men pressed into the room. They used their fists and their weapons to drive the whole television crew to the floor. All of Leslie’s people cowered there and remained still.
    One of the men, the one who had spoken, crossed the room in long strides and grabbed Leslie by the arm.
    Lourds stood instinctively, not able to calmly sit by and watch the young woman get hurt. But he wasn’t trained for this kind of thing. Sure, he’d spent time in rough parts of the world. But he’d been lucky. The worst violence he’d ever experienced personally was a dustup in soccer.
    The man put the machine pistol’s barrel to Leslie’s head. “Sit back down, Professor Lourds, or this pretty young woman dies.”
    Lourds sat, but the fact that the man knew his name unnerved him.
    “Very good,” the man said. “Put your hands on your head.”
    Lourds complied. His stomach turned sour. Even as wild as it had sometimes gotten while he’d been in unsettled lands studying languages, he’d never had a gun pointed at him.
    “Down,” the man ordered, dragging Leslie to the ground. When she was down, the man looked at the items on the desk. Without hesitation, he took the bell.
    And that’s when the man made his first mistake. He and his men took their eyes off Leslie.
    Before Lourds fully realized what was happening, she pushed herself to her feet and flung herself at one of the men. She knocked him over and took his gun, then dived beneath the heavy desk at the back of the set in a single fluid motion.
    Her move took the thieves by surprise. Clearly they weren’t expecting a mere woman to put up much of a fight.
    They had underestimated her, but they were clearly professional because it didn’t take long for them to catch up.
    The sounds of gunfire filled the room as that desk took punishment it was never intended for. Bullets filled the air with wooden splinters.
    Leslie fired back. Her shots were much louder than their attackers’, and she clearly knew what she was doing. Bullet holes tracked the walls behind their attackers, coughing out puffs of plaster dust that looked surreal to Lourds.
    Meanwhile, the crew scrambled for cover.
    So did the thieves.
    No!
Lourds thought.
No artifact is worth the deaths of all these people.
    Then he heard the familiar ping of Leslie’s sat-phone.
    He could call for help.
    In the middle of the chaos, Lourds rolled across the floor and ducked behind the desk with Leslie.
    “I’ll talk. You shoot. Or we’ll both die.”
    “Good point,” she said.
    She handed over the phone, already keyed to an emergency number. More gunfire. And then a scream. Lourds hoped it was one of the robbers who had been hit, not one of the crew.
    When a burst of startled Arabic came across the line of the phone in his hand, Lourds started talking.
    Before he’d finished his second sentence, the sound of sirens outside intensified.
    Help was on the way.
    And the robbers could hear it, too.
    They took off, one of them leaving a blood trail.
    Leslie took off after them, holding her fire until she could get a clear shot.
    Lourds followed, just in time to pull her out of the way as a final volley from the thieves splintered the office door.
    On the floor, terrified but still whole, Lourds wrapped his arms around Leslie. He felt the sweet press of female flesh against his body and decided if he had to die in that instant, there were worse ways to go.
    He held on to the woman, trapping her body under his.
    “What do you think you were doing?” Lourds demanded of the woman. “Do you want to get killed?”
    “They’re getting away!” Leslie tried to pull free from his grasp.
    “Yes, and they should. They should get far away. They have automatic weapons, they outnumber us, and the police are coming—most of the force, if the sound is any indication. You’ve already saved our necks. It’s enough. Put that gun down and let the professionals take over.”
    Leslie relaxed in