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his actions were unobserved. Still holding Lindengood by the hair, he reached over to close the driver’s door. As the man sat back again, Lindengood saw he had the air hose in his other hand.
    â€œYou, my friend, have just become a liability,” Wallace said.
    At last, Lindengood found he could speak. But as he drew in breath to yell, Wallace thrust the air hose into the back of his throat.
    Lindengood retched and bucked violently. He pulled up from the seat despite the restraint, hair tearing out at the roots. Wallace grabbed a second, larger handful of hair, pulled him back, and with a brutal movement shoved the air hose directly down his windpipe.
    Blood filled Lindengood’s mouth and throat and he let out a gargling scream. But then Wallace clamped down on the compressor handle; air shot from the nozzle with terrible, overwhelming force; and a pain unlike anything Lindengood had ever remotely imagined exploded in his chest.

5
    The voice that echoed over the talkback mike was pitched slightly high, as if the person on the other end was sucking helium. “Another five minutes, Dr. Crane, and you can pass through airlock C.”
    â€œThank God.” Peter Crane swung his legs off the metal bench where he’d been dozing, stretched, and checked his watch. It was 4 A.M .—but he suspected that, if the Facility was anything like a submarine, day and night held little meaning.
    Six hours had passed since he’d left the bathyscaphe and entered the maze of airlocks known as the Compression Complex. He’d been cooling his heels since, waiting through the Facility’s unusual acclimatization period. As a doctor, he was curious about this: he had no idea what it might consist of or what technology was involved. All that Asher had told him was that it made working at great depths easier. Perhaps they’d modified the atmospheric composition: reduced the amount of nitrogen and added some exotic gas. Whatever the case, it was clearly an important breakthrough—no doubt one of the classified elements that made this mission so hush-hush.
    Every two hours, he had been instructed by the same disembodied chipmunk voice to pass into a new chamber. Each was identical: a large saunalike cube with tiers of metal bunks. The only difference had been the color. The first compression chamber had been military gray; the second, pale blue; and the third—rather surprisingly—red.
    After finishing a short dossier on Atlantis he’d found in the initial chamber, Crane spent the time dozing or paging through a thick anthology of poetry he’d brought along. Or thinking. He spent a lot of time staring up at the metal ceiling—and the miles of water pressing down on him—and thinking.
    He wondered about the cataclysm that could have sunk the city of Atlantis to such a depth; about the lost civilization that had once flourished. It could not be the Greeks, or the Phoenicians, or the Minoans, or any of the other usual suspects favored by historians. As the dossier made clear, nobody knew anything about Atlantean civilization—not really. Although Crane was surprised the city was situated this far north, the dossier also explained that, even in the original sources, its actual location was obscure. Plato himself knew next to nothing about its citizenry or civilization. Perhaps, Crane mused, that was one reason it had remained hidden so long.
    As the hours slowly passed, his feeling of disbelief refused to ebb. It all seemed miraculous. Not just that it had all happened so quickly, not just that the project was so breathtakingly important—but that they’d wanted
him
. He hadn’t stressed the point to Asher, but the fact was he remained unsure why they’d so particularly required his services. After all, his specialty wasn’t hematology or toxicology.
You are uniquely qualified—both as a doctor and as a former officer—to treat the affliction,
Asher had said.