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  The Atlantis Secret

  Book 4 of the Atlantis Saga

  S.A. Beck

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  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The Atlantis Secret: The Atlantis Saga

  Copyright © 2016 by S.A. Beck

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  www.sabeckbooks.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  About the Author

  All Books by S.A. Beck

  Excerpt from The Atlantis Origins

  Chapter 1

  July 7, 2016, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  12:35 PM

  * * *

  Jaxon Ares Andersen was beginning to think she was finally getting a life—not a good life, not even a halfway decent life, but something that kinda sorta looked like a life.

  And that was way better than anything she’d ever had before.

  She and Brett Lawson, her one and only friend at summer school, were sitting at a picnic table under the shade of a palm tree during their lunch break. Being the richest, snottiest school in Los Angeles, Hidden Hills Academy didn’t have anything so gauche as a cafeteria. People brought their own meals or went to one of the fancy restaurants nearby. A couple kids even had lunch delivered by their chauffeurs. Jaxon’s foster mother, Isadore Grant, had packed Jaxon her usual supply of rabbit food—salad with organic vegetables and sprouts, organic gluten-free yogurt, plus some wholegrain bread. At least her thermos had one of Isadore’s epic smoothies. It was the only thing coming out of her kitchen that tasted good.

  Jaxon kept reaching across the table to swipe Brett’s Doritos or steal a sip of his Coke. She left his microwave hamburger and fries alone, though. A girl had to have some respect for her body.

  “This is robbery,” Brett said. “We’re supposed to be the good guys, remember?”

  Jaxon raised an eyebrow and looked Brett full in the face.

  “Stop me,” she said, grabbing some more Doritos.

  Brett chuckled, his smile bringing out the dimples on both his cheeks. His blond hair flopped as he shook his head.

  “No way. You’re a better martial artist than me. It’s those private lessons you get. Maybe I should get some too.”

  “Maybe you should take your hand off my thigh before I give you a personal lesson,” Jaxon said.

  Brett slid his hand away, running it down her leg and over her knee before pulling back.

  “Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. “I figured since you were sharing my lunch that meant we were an item.”

  “That is so middle school. No, we’re not an item.”

  “But we’re really good together. We always have fun at lunch, and we’re cleaning up the city one bad guy at a time.”

  “I can’t date the captain of the golf team. I’d never forgive myself.”

  Brett shrugged. “I’ll give up golf.”

  “Yeah, right. Your parents would have a hissy fit.”

  Brett made a face. “True. Plus, I need it. It’s a good skill to have. Lots of business connections are made on the green. You should try it.”

  “Boring. Rather watch paint dry.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “Unfair to paint?” she asked. “Probably.”

  “So what do you want to do this weekend?”

  “Not sure. What about we get together tonight and talk about it?”

  Brett’s face darkened. “I don’t know.”

  He looked as though he was about to say something more when a shrill, snide female voice interrupted him.

  “Well the eyes are pretty, but the rest is a mess!”

  Jaxon and Brett turned although they already knew who it was.

  Courtney, the class bully and the snobbiest kid in the snobbiest school in the state, was also the class cocaine dealer. At Hidden Hills, that guaranteed her popularity. She was tall, almost six feet, with long blond hair, blue eyes, and a fine figure enhanced by designer clothing. Jaxon suspected that pert little nose had been enhanced by surgery—she wouldn’t have minded enhancing it further with her fist.

  Courtney stood at the front of a little crowd of giggling admirers, studying Jaxon. “Yeah, really pretty eyes. You hardly ever see eyes that blue, even in Sweden. We go to Sweden a lot. My uncle is CEO of Ikea, so we like to visit his country home. It’s so nice to escape the heat. But how did a mongrel like her get eyes like that?”

  “She probably stole them. That’s what her kind do,” one of her followers said.

  “Her kind” echoed in Jaxon’s mind. There it was. Someone always had to point out that she was the only black-skinned person in the class. The only other minority was the son of some Japanese millionaire there for a year on business. Jaxon felt lucky, though. She’d been spending time in the exclusive neighborhood for a couple of months, and no cop had shot her yet.

  Courtney went on as though the girl hadn’t said anything. She never acknowledged anything anyone said unless it was a compliment aimed at her. “So weird to see those pretty eyes on such an ugly face—ugly black skin like she’s straight from the ghetto and a flat face like she’s from some Indian reservation. We got Frankenstein in our class.”

  “Frankenstein’s monster,” Jaxon said, her face flushing with anger.

  Courtney gave her a blank look, a common expression for her. “Huh?”

  “Frankenstein’s monster,” Jaxon repeated. “Frankenstein was the doctor who made the monster.”

  Courtney frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The book. You’ve never seen the movie?”

  There had been a kid in one of Jaxon’s group homes who loved classic horror movies. Jaxon had watched them with him on Saturday nights since she had nothing else to do. What was his name again? Didn’t matter. Just another potential friend taken away as the system shuffled her and the rest of the unwanted kids around like cards in some bureaucratic poker game.

  “No, I’ve never seen the movie, you nerd,” Courtney said. “Why would I?”

  “So that you don’t sound like an idiot when you talk about it?”

  That got a couple of titters from the crowd. Jaxon smiled. She was getting better at fending off airheads like Courtney.

  “Watch it, ugly duckling,” Courtney snapped.

  “That’s from a book,” Jaxon said, “and I’m sure you haven’t read it because you never read. Oh, by the way, the ugly duckling turned into a swan when it grew up.”

  Jaxon tensed as she realized her mistake. She shouldn’t have brought up reading. That left Courtney an opening, and the girl saw it immediately.

  “Yeah, like you can read. You sound like a total retard in class.”

  Jaxon flushed, grateful that her dark skin kept people from seeing it.

  Dyslexia. It’s called dyslexia, and a lot of people have it. It doesn’t mean I’m stupid. She didn’t say anything, though. She felt too ashamed.

  As Jaxon fumed, Courtney turned to Brett. “I don’t know why you hang out
with this spaz.”

  “She’s fun, and she isn’t a cokehead,” he said.

  Courtney sneered at him. “You used to be cool.”

  “You used to be sober. Oh wait, that was fifth grade.”

  “So when did you guys start sleeping together?” Courtney asked.

  “We’re not,” Brett and Jaxon said at the same time.

  “Wow, Brett, that was a quick denial! Sounds like someone’s covering up or maybe too embarrassed to admit they’re bagging an ugly duckling like her. Hey, ugly duckling, keep him looking at your eyes—they’re the only attractive part of you. Better not lose them.”

  Without warning, Courtney jabbed her long, manicured nails at Jaxon’s eyes. Jaxon whipped a hand up and pinched hard on the pressure point between Courtney’s thumb and forefinger.

  “Ow! Watch it,” the bully cried, yanking her hand away and shaking it to kill the pain. She glared at Brett. “Get some taste or you’ll end up a loser like her.”

  With that, she spun around and stomped off, her gaggle of followers trailing behind. A couple looked over their shoulders in wonder at Jaxon.

  “Nice move,” Brett said.

  Jaxon didn’t reply. Her hands were shaking, and she was seeing red. She could go toe to toe with a gang member in a dark alley, but a classmate making fun of her always left her in pieces.

  “You okay?” Brett asked.

  “Let’s go out again tonight,” Jaxon said, hearing her voice come out weak, pleading.

  Brett sat back, exhaling slowly. “Remember what happened last time?”

  They’d been out on one of their nighttime crime-fighting hunts when they had bumped into some guy who tried to steal Brett’s Porsche. The guy had pulled a gun. Jaxon had managed to disarm him, but the incident had freaked them both out. That had been a week before, and they hadn’t gone on any night adventures since.

  “We’ll be careful,” Jaxon said.

  “We were careful last time. You can’t avoid trouble if it comes to get you.”

  “Come on, we’ll be fine. I need it.”

  She did need it. Walking the streets at night and looking for trouble made her feel alive. Her foster parents were clueless, and she could slip out of the house easily. She’d done it more than a dozen times.

  Once out in Los Angeles at night, she felt like a completely different person—free, confident, useful. The first time she’d gone out on one of her nighttime walks, she had been in her own neighborhood and had stopped two of her neighbors from roughing up a prostitute. She wasn’t even looking for trouble—she just wanted to get some air—but that first experience got her hooked. The prostitute was grateful, and when she mentioned she’d been in a group home like Jaxon, something clicked.

  There was a city full of lost people out there, being victimized by sharks masquerading as human beings. That first experience just a few doors down from the Grants’ mansion had woken Jaxon up to her potential.

  After that, she gradually increased her range, getting out of her privileged little cul-de-sac and venturing into rougher and rougher neighborhoods. She stopped several muggings and saved a couple of girls from getting assaulted.

  Brett was right, of course—trouble did have a way of finding her. It had been that way all her life. The only thing that changed was that instead of hiding in her shell hoping it would pass her by, now she encouraged it. A lone sixteen-year-old girl in a bad part of town was a magnet that pulled in all sorts of bad characters.

  That was the point. You couldn’t tell bad from good just by looking at someone, so you had to get the bad ones to come to you. And then you punished them.

  Jaxon nearly had a heart attack when she stumbled upon Brett doing the same thing. Like her, he felt lonely and out of place in the boring upper-class life he led, a life of golf resorts and airy cokeheads like Courtney. His parents lived with him, but they were almost as distant as the parents Jaxon had never known.

  So she and Brett teamed up, looking for trouble in some of the worst areas of the city, with Jaxon as the bait.

  It was a crazy thing to do, dumb even by Brett’s standards, yet they kept on going back to it like a favorite drug. She loved the thrill, the secrecy, the danger. Also, she loved the fact that she got to do some good with her life. They saved a lot of people from being robbed or worse.

  Plus she liked the simplicity of it. On the streets, some thug could come up to her, and she could simply beat him up. Someone like Courtney turning the class against her and laughing at her skin color, what did Jaxon do about that? She couldn’t hit her no matter how much she wanted to.

  Jaxon had been thrown out of enough schools for stunts like that, and she didn’t want to get thrown out of another one. She had an okay thing with the Grants. As far as foster parents went, they ranked pretty high. Stephen never stared at her boobs, and they didn’t try to convert her to some hardcore brand of religion. And neither of them got all condescending like some white foster parents did, like Jaxon should be eternally grateful that her Great White Saviors had consented to have an unwanted “colored girl” in the house. She’d had more than a few foster families like that. She had to hand it to Courtney—at least she was honest about her racism.

  So yeah, Jaxon had a decent thing going. Sure, Isadore’s hippie food was nasty, but Jaxon got to live in a mansion and had private martial-arts and yoga lessons. Plus, she had the doofus across the table as a friend. The Grants said they’d keep her until she went to college, which was two years away. She’d never lived in one place that long in her entire life.

  Having a bit of a life felt nice, and tasting what life was like made her want to taste even more.

  Brett was still sitting there, looking at her dubiously. She could tell he’d been following her thoughts.

  “I really think we should cool off for a while,” he said. “We could have gotten killed.”

  “Please?”

  He inclined his head and sighed. Jaxon felt a spike of guilt. That incident with the gun had really shaken him up. To her surprise, she didn’t feel the same. In fact, it made her want to go out even more. Sure, she had been so scared at the time that she had almost peed herself, yet she wanted to go out again more than ever.

  The bell rang, signaling the time to go back to class.

  “Please, Brett?”

  He looked up and grinned at her. “It is pretty fun, huh?”

  Jaxon laughed. “Much better than that stuff Courtney snorts up her nose, not that I’d know.”

  “Oh, trust me, it’s way better than that stuff.”

  Jaxon rolled her eyes. “Oh God, don’t tell me how you know that. So I’ll meet you at the end of my street at 10:00 p.m.?”

  Brett hesitated.

  “Come on, please?”

  “I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about this.” He glanced at the students filing into the building. “We’ll talk after class.”

  “No way. Isadore will swoop down and whisk me away to some lesson, and you know she never lets me use the phone. We have to plan it now.”

  “I just think we’re pushing our luck.”

  “Please?” she asked.

  Brett sighed. “Okay, but we have to be careful, understand?”

  “Thanks!” Jaxon jumped up and gave him a hug across the table.

  “Oh, hey, if you put it that way, we can—”

  Jaxon clamped a hand over his mouth. “Don’t say anything lame. In other words, don’t say anything at all.”

  She pulled her hand away and picked up her book bag.

  Brett stood and gave her a mock bow. “I only said yes because I knew you’d go out there without me if I said no. I wouldn’t want that. You need someone to protect you.”

  Jaxon wagged a finger at him. “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve said all day.”

  Chapter 2

  July 7, 2016, SONORA DESERT, 55 MILES SOUTHWEST OF TUCSON, ARIZONA

  12:35 PM

  * * *

  If there was one thing Otto Heike had
learned in his time as part of the Atlantis Allegiance, it was that getting shot at really sucked.

  It wasn’t so much the “a high-speed chunk of steel could rip through my body at any moment” part or even the little fact that he could wind up dead in the next few seconds, it was more the nastiness of it all. A group of strangers were doing their best to kill him and his friends for no other reason than wanting to stop Otto from rescuing his girlfriend and making what would be the biggest historical discovery since King Tut’s tomb. Those people figured that since they had larger numbers and more guns, they could tell the Atlantis Allegiance to do whatever they wanted.

  Like dying.

  It was bullying pure and simple, Otto thought as a burst of semiautomatic rounds chewed up the windowsill through which he was trying to peek outside, spitting bits of concrete into his face. He had never liked bullies.

  The only way to deal with bullies was to fight back.

  Otto waited until the burst finished, and he popped up from the windowsill just enough to level his grenade launcher, pull the trigger, and lob a round across the overgrown parking lot to hit the cracked pavement right in front of the three black sedans parked nose to nose like a wall a hundred yards away.

  Otto ducked just as another bullet whizzed through the window to smack into the back wall of the abandoned gas station where the government agents had him cornered. A moment later, there was a flash and a boom outside.

  “Good shot, Pyro!” Grunt said beside him. The hulking mercenary popped up to spray the cars with bullets from his machine gun then ducked down again to avoid any return fire. “Looks like you dazzled a few. Wind’s too strong to keep the smoke blocking their line of fire, though. Launch another, and maybe we’ll get a chance to get out of here.”