So what was it?

The odor was faint but somehow familiar, a sharp, sour tang that some part of her mind immediately associated with the kitchen. Like vinegar, or lemon juice…

Nina clapped a hand to her mouth, muffling a “Whoa!” as she realized the significance of the scent. She brought the lamp back down, warming the blank side of the parchment.

Faint brown marks slowly appeared. At a casual glance they seemed unremarkable, nothing more than random stains and scribbles. But Nina knew that the mere fact they had been hidden meant there was far more to them.

She picked up the parchment and shook off the remaining splinters of glass. Then she turned to the other pages…

Popadopoulos reentered the office. “Dr. Wilde, I-Aah!” He froze, mouth goldfishing again as he saw Nina smashing open the frames and plucking the fragile pages from the broken glass. “What are you doing? You, you-lunatic vandal woman!”

Nina held up a hand to shut him up. “The backs of the parchments,” she said, speaking as rapidly as her mind was working. “Nobody ever examined them before, right?”

“There was nothing to examine! They are blank!”

“Oh yeah?” She showed him the page on which the markings had appeared. His flustered horror suddenly became fascination. “You agreed it was unusual that only one side of the parchment was used, right? But all the centuries that the Brotherhood had Hermocrates in its archives, nobody ever thought to ask why. Well, I’ll tell you why.” All the pages now removed from the glass, Nina used the edge of a plastic binder to sweep the broken fragments aside before laying out the pieces of parchment on her desk, facedown. “Because Plato wanted to use the backs of the pages for something else! Look!” She lowered the lamp over a different part of the first page. More markings faded into view. “He drew something in invisible ink!”

“My God!” Popadopoulos exclaimed, hunching down and staring intently at the page.

“Invisible ink,” Nina said again, with a slightly accusatory, mocking tone. “One of the oldest tricks ever invented for concealing information…and the Brotherhood never once thought to check for it in over two thousand years.”

“Our purpose was to keep knowledge of Atlantis out of the hands of others,” Popadopoulos sniffed, “not go treasure-hunting for unrelated Greek myths.” He carefully moved the parchment around under the lamp, searching for more hidden markings. “How long will the ink remain visible?”

“I don’t know-it might be permanent, or it might fade again once it cools. Either way, I’ll make sure everything’s photographed.” She tipped her head to one side. “That’s odd.”

“What?”

“Whatever this is meant to show, it looks as though it’s been cut off.” She pointed at a particular area near the center of the page. “See? All the marks suddenly stop along a straight line, as though… as though another page had been laid on top of it!” She slid the edge of another sheet of parchment over the first to demonstrate. “We need more lights.”

Nina ran from the room, soon returning with two more lamps swiped from nearby offices. She plugged them in and placed them on her desk. “Warm them all up. We need to see the markings on every page.”

It took several minutes, but with the help of Popadopoulos each of the parchments was given the same impromptu heat treatment as the first. They all turned out to have faint marks hidden on them. “I can’t tell what it is meant to represent,” Popadopoulos complained, stepping back to get an overview of the whole collection.

“I can,” Nina told him. “Or at least, what it’s going to be. Look at this.” She indicated a group of small symbols on one page. “These are Greek letters-the bottom halves of Greek letters, at least. And the top halves are…” She searched the other pages, spotting more symbols along the edge of a different sheet. When they were brought together, the symbols matched up perfectly to form a word-βoθvó. Mountain. “The whole thing’s a map! It’s like a jigsaw-all we have to do is put it together and it’ll tell us how to find the Tomb of Hercules!”

Popadopoulos regarded the parchments in disbelief. “But that would mean…”

“The clue was right there, all along! ‘For even a man who cannot see may know the path when he turns his empty face to the warmth of the sun’! Empty face-blank page! Critias must have told Plato how to find the Tomb, but for whatever reason they wanted to obfuscate the details-maybe they didn’t want Plato’s students to run off and raid the place. So when Plato dramatized what he’d been told into the dialogue of Hermocrates, he put hints on how to find the map within the text itself-and hid the actual map right there on the master transcript!”

“Only for the ancient Brotherhood of Selasphoros to steal it,” mused Popadopoulos. “All they cared about was suppressing the section of the dialogue concerning Atlantis, but they never realized how much else was in it…”

“But now we do,” Nina reminded him. “Let’s put it all together.”

It took some time to assemble the puzzle, the faintness of the markings and damage to parts of the pages obscuring details, but eventually they succeeded. Mostly.

“Bollocks!” Nina burst out. Popadopoulos gave her a strange look. She blushed. “That’s, er, something I picked up from my boyfriend. He’s British. But look, we’re missing a whole section of the map.”

The assemblage of pages looked almost random, sheets of parchment overlaid upon one another at different angles, some nearly hidden under two or three others. But the image that was revealed was clear enough. It was a map, a path leading to a representation of a mountain annotated with a single Greek word.

Hρακλεφ. Heracles. Hercules.

The Tomb of Hercules. It existed, was an actual, physical place. Nina felt a surge of adrenaline at the sight. She’d been right.

But it was impossible to reach…

“I see,” said Popadopoulos, examining the map. “This river, it curves and twists as it widens, as if it is about to reach the sea. But… no sea.”

“The coastline,” Nina moaned. “The map of the coastline’s on the other pages, the ones we don’t have. And if we don’t have the coastline to use as a point of reference, there’s no way we can find the Tomb!”

“There is one good thing, though, hmm?”

“What?”

“Whoever stole the other pages cannot find the Tomb either!”

“You have a point.” Nina looked back at the map. So close to finding what she was looking for, yet she couldn’t take the very first step… “I’ll photograph this, make sure all the details are recorded.”

“Good! Then I can arrange for the return of what is left of the text to my archive, yes?” asked Popadopoulos hopefully.

Nina considered this. “Not yet,” she said, ignoring the historian’s glower. “I still think there’s more to it. There are other phrases in the text that Plato seems to have left as clues, like he did about the map. But I’m sure I’ll need the original copy of the text to work them out.”

Popadopoulos growled in frustration. “Very well, Dr. Wilde, very well. The parchments are already so badly damaged they will be difficult to preserve… But I do not see how you will be able to find the Tomb even if you do decipher other clues. You are still missing several pages.”

“Then we have to get them back.” Nina set her jaw in determination. “I already think I know who’s got them. We go after him and get them back.”

“Assuming,” Popadopoulos warned, “that he doesn’t come after you first.”