She laughed. ‘A cultural reference from the twenty-first century? I’m impressed! But we don’t need to worry. I mean, I’m not about to jet off around the world looking for some ancient artefact . . .’

‘Honey,’ said Nina a few hours later, ‘you remember how I said I wasn’t about to jet off around the world looking for some ancient artefact?’

‘Yeah?’ Eddie replied, followed by a more forceful: ‘Oh, you’re bloody kidding me!’

‘I know, I know! But something’s come up.’

He entered her study, giving her a stern look as he folded his arms. ‘What?’

She turned from her laptop to face him. The mysterious artefact Cheng had shown her dominated the screen. After returning home, she’d found the paper he had given her in her purse. Out of a mixture of intrigue and concern for his welfare – and maybe with the encouragement of a few drinks – she had installed an anonymising Tor browser so she could access the dark web, then used the address and password to reach the seller’s page.

What she found caught her interest, almost unwillingly. There was a more detailed description of the object in both German and English, the text hinting at its origin: obtained near the South Pole. The hidden redoubt of the Veteres had been in the Antarctic. There had to be a connection.

Then there were the crystal and the purple stone at the disc’s centre. They appeared to be the same materials as ones she had found in an Atlantean vault buried in Turkey: materials that, in conjunction with the earth’s natural energy fields, produced strange, even dangerous, effects. She knew from unpleasant experience that the Veteres, like their distant descendants from Atlantis, could harness these powers.

A key, the seller called it. But to what?

‘This is something one of my students found on the dark web,’ she explained. ‘It’s almost certainly a Veteres artefact.’

‘I thought everything of theirs was destroyed.’

‘So did I, but it seems history always finds a way to resurface.’ She indicated part of the picture. ‘This text looks like the same script from the Veteres records in Antarctica.’

‘What about that?’ He nodded at a smaller image. ‘Badly drawn pirates?’

The second photo showed a highly stylised skull. ‘I don’t know what it represents – but the text around it is in a different language. It almost looks Atlantean.’

‘This thing’s from Atlantis?’

‘I don’t know. The characters don’t quite match, and some of them I don’t even recognise. It could be an earlier form; proto-Atlantean.’

‘Can you read any of it?’

She nodded. ‘This word . . . if it were written in Atlantean, I’d say it was “rebirth” – or “resurrection”. I can’t translate anything else, though. Maybe if I saw the real thing . . .’

‘Which is where?’

‘Germany. Somebody’s trying to sell it on the black market.’