77 pages • 2 hours read
A.G. RiddleA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue and Part 1, Chapters 1-9
Part 1, Chapters 10-18
Part 1, Chapters 19-30
Part 1, Chapters 31-39 and Part 2, Chapters 40-44
Part 2, Chapters 45-58
Part 2, Chapters 59-72
Part 2, Chapters 73-88
Part 2, Chapters 89-94 and Part 3, Chapters 95-105
Part 3, Chapters 106-119
Part 3, Chapters 120-144 and Epilogue
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
Pierce receives a call from Mallory Craig: There has been an accident at the excavation site and several workers are trapped. He speeds to the site but does not find a cave-in as he suspected. Instead, a worker hands him a phone; Rutger Kane is on the line, gleefully informing Pierce that he is “in the right place” (308). Just then, Pierce notices the detonation wires leading to the ceiling of the chamber, but before he can evacuate the workers, an explosion causes the roof to collapse. Hours pass, and eventually Pierce hears sounds on the other side of the collapsed rock. Rutger informs Pierce that the order to kill him came straight from Lord Barton, adding that he, Rutger Kane, was betrothed to Helena long before Pierce ever came along. He also implies that Helena’s child will mysteriously die.
On the other side of the wall, Pierce hears the men still trying to excavate the top of the stairs. He then hears men screaming and the sound of rushing water. Soon, the water begins pouring into the chamber where Pierce is trapped. With no other option, he enters the structure and seals himself in one of the cryogenic tubes.
At the Antarctic drilling site, Hunt hears the drill suddenly spinning free—it has hit an empty pocket 7,300 feet below the surface. The crew slowly lowers the drill until it hits bottom 300 feet further down. They think it may be a cavern, yet they do not know how an empty cavern could support a mile and a half of ice above it.
As the floodwaters subside, Pierce emerges from his protective tube. The flood has broken through the rock barrier allowing him access to the chamber beyond. He notices a strange light, the source of which is a large “bell” with windows at the top. Scattered along the floor are the bodies of the crew, bloody and “mutilated by a weapon I can’t imagine” (315). He walks out of the mine and emerges from the tunnel, only to be confronted by a host of soldiers in gas masks and biohazard suits. They hold him while the elder Kane orders him taken to another location. As they pass a series of tents, Pierce hears Helena crying out, but he cannot reach her. As the soldiers drag him further into the warehouse, he sees the tents are filled with dead bodies, including Lord and Lady Barton, Rutger Kane, and even Kane’s wife and young son. The cause of death, Kane informs him, is a deadly illness—the 1918 flu pandemic—unleashed by the excavation. Kane blames Pierce for it and allows him to sit by Helena’s bedside while she dies also.
Reading Pierce’s account, Warner remembers losing her own baby five years prior. After her surgery, she recalls the baby’s father, a tech entrepreneur who disappears after she becomes pregnant. Later, that tech entrepreneur is revealed to be Dorian Sloane. She trusts Vale enough to tell him the story, and they lie together and try to get some sleep before she leaves the monastery in the morning.
Inside Immari’s New Delhi Situation Room, reports pour in: Drones have spotted the likely whereabouts of Warner and Vale; the drilling team in the Antarctic have confirmed that they found an entrance to the subterranean chamber; and infection rates of the new flu strain are rising.
As dawn approaches, Vale presses Warner to leave the monastery before she is discovered. She is prepared to argue when Milo enters, informing them they both must leave now without delay. She fills a bag with antibiotics, pain pills, and the journal and assists a hobbling Vale out to the corridors beyond. There, she sees several hot air balloons tethered and waiting. They hear drones, and Vale pushes her toward the balloons while he goes off in the opposite direction to retrieve his gun.
Warner finds a group of monks waiting for her. Two balloons launch ahead of her while another monk beckons her into the third, which is camouflaged to look like a forest from above and sky from below. As her balloon drifts into the air, she sees hundreds of balloons launching simultaneously from all the other monasteries in the mountains. Suddenly, an explosion detonates against the side of the mountain, sending rock, smoke, and debris into the air. She struggles to see through the cloud of ash and smoke when she hears gunfire from above her.
From a high vantage point, Vale fires at two approaching drones. Warner steers the balloon close to the collapsing terrace, and Vale leaps for the basket, managing to land on the edge. He dangles over the valley below, his weight dragging the balloon down toward the burning forest. Warner drops the balloon’s ballast, and it slowly climbs higher while she pulls Vale into the basket. After a moment, she tends to his torn bandages. Below, the monastery burns.
As the balloon drifts lazily over the mountains of Tibet, Warner reads the final pages of Pierce’s journal:
A year after Pierce emerges from the cryogenic tube, the 1918 flu pandemic, referred to at the time in America, without cause, as the “Spanish Flu”— “that’s what we’ve sold the world on, how we’ve labeled the pandemic” (329)—has killed millions worldwide, and the Immari have not found a cure. The cumulative death toll from the war and the pandemic is between 50-100 million people. Meanwhile, Pierce’s team has fully excavated the “Bell,” which Kane sees as a potential weapon. Studies indicate that the pandemic will wane over time. Pierce argues in favor of contact tracing, but Kane insists on secrecy.
Pierce’s final entry comes 20 years later in 1938. He expresses deep remorse over his part in unleashing the pandemic, all for the privilege of marrying Helena. Kane takes the Bell back to Germany for further study, convinced it can be a tool to create a genetically superior master race. Kane’s “revisionist” history portrays the Immari as the noble saviors who journeyed from their Aryan homeland to seek the secrets of Atlantis to save humankind. Convinced that these surviving Atlanteans are genetically predisposed to cold climates, Kane sends expeditions to Antarctica and the highlands of Tibet, Nepal, and India seeking to destroy what remains of the Immaru. Pierce’s final words refer to a secret chamber within the ruins of the Gibraltar structure, a chamber even Kane does not know about. It contains a highly advanced technology that is dangerous in the wrong hands. Pierce conceals a map to the chamber behind a false wall.
The journal convinces Warner that Immari’s work since discovering the Bell and her research has had a single goal: to isolate the Atlantis Gene and give humanity immunity to the Bell’s effects. Recalling the history of the 1918 pandemic, Warner notes that its symptoms were “distinctly un-flu-like,” killing people with stronger immune systems rather than weak ones. A vaccine was never developed. Warner speculates that by distributing the bodies killed by the Bell, Immari hopes to unleash another pandemic, the survivors of which will be the master race possessing the Atlantis Gene. This, she claims, is the Toba Protocol. Then, recalling Qian’s tapestry—the scene of the deity offering salvation to humankind—Warner wonders if the key to humanity surviving the Toba Catastrophe was not a random genetic mutation but a gift from the Atlanteans. That gift would enable humans to develop different neurological wiring and thus find a way to survive.
Seeking to confirm her theory, Warner recaps humanity’s last 70,000 years: On the brink of extinction from the Mount Toba eruption, something subtle yet distinct suddenly changes in the human brain, which allows them to develop language and art, build tools, and become by far the most dominant species on the planet—and all in a relatively short amount of time. This transformation is known as the Great Leap Forward. She further theorizes that, if the Atlanteans gifted Homo Sapiens with the Atlantis Gene but not Neanderthals or other subspecies, it was because we needed the genetic advantage, but they did not. Once humanity survived and flourished, however, they saw the other subspecies as a threat and killed them off. Part of the Toba Protocol then may be an attempt to “synchronize” human evolution with the Atlanteans, creating a species equal to the Atlanteans so that, if and when they do return, they won’t see humans as a threat. Vale believes that the Immari do not simply want to co-exist with the Atlanteans as equals but to eradicate them.
Warner and Vale’s best course of action is to locate Pierce’s secret chamber, but the balloon is losing altitude and they are far from Gibraltar. Fortunately, they find a small bundle in the balloon containing Indian currency, a change of clothes, and a map of northern India.
Hunt drives his snowmobile back to the previous drill site. When he reaches a favorable spot, he spies the site through binoculars and sees massive machines far bigger than he’s ever seen before attended by figures in strange white suits. Several men emerge from a huge, centipede-like machine carrying a cage with two monkeys. The cage is hooked to a crane, and the monkeys are lowered into the hole where Hunt and his team had been drilling. The hole is covered, they wait, and then they remove the cage—both monkeys are dead. As they load the bodies back into the mechanical centipede, Hunt spies two children inside.
On the ground in New Delhi, Vale enters the “Timepiece Trading Company,” a front for Clocktower operations. He hopes some remnant of Clocktower has not fallen to Immari security forces. Inside, he asks the clerk for a “special piece…A Clocktower” (348); this is the coded language operatives use to identify themselves. The clerk ushers him into a back room.
The clerk directs Vale to a phone, a direct connection to Clocktower Central. Eventually, Clocktower Director Howard Keegan answers. He informs Vale that Clocktower has fallen, but that he is organizing a counterstrike against Immari. Vale asks for safe transport to Gibraltar, and Keegan is already there, planning to hit Immari’s Gibraltar headquarters. Keegan tells Vale that he has been Vale’s anonymous source all along, and that taking down Immari has been his “life’s work.” They agree to meet in Gibraltar.
Grey takes Sloane on a tour of the Antarctic drilling site, which includes a mobile lab—the centipede-like machine Hunt observed. While Sloane is confident that Konrad Kane’s body is still aboard the sub, Grey is skeptical. Sloane admits he is “obsessed” with finding Kane, implying the presumably dead German is his father.
Inside the mobile laboratory, Sloane approaches Surya and Adi who are locked inside a glass cell. He plans to send them into the alien structure carrying backpacks loaded with nuclear warheads to destroy the structure and kill its occupants. He frames the task as a game with a reward at the end: a reunion with Warner. Before sending them in, he pins a note to one boy’s chest: It is a letter from Sloane—now revealed to be Dieter Kane—to his father.
With the backpacks strapped securely to the two boys, and four hours before the warheads automatically detonate, they are sent into the subterranean chamber.
The White House press secretary holds a press conference to assure a nervous country that the President is “taking steps” to address the “Flash Flu” epidemic. He is not currently considering closing the borders for fear of an even more severe economic impact. When asked about a series of viral, YouTube videos meant to induce panic, he dismisses them as unreliable.
Vale and Warner spend the plane ride to Gibraltar baring their souls to each other: she about her miscarriage and he about losing his fiancée in the 9/11 terror attacks. As they land in Gibraltar, Vale cautions her not to say anything about the journal, the monastery, or the Immari facility in China; he is still unsure who among the Clocktower survivors he can trust.
Inside a safe house, while Vale and others plan the counterstrike, Keegan, now revealed to be a double agent, approaches Warner to offer her a deal: He will spare Vale’s life if she turns herself over to Immari to be studied. As one of the lone survivors of the Bell, she is of enormous interest. She reluctantly agrees. Keegan then asks about the journal, having bugged their conversation aboard the plane.
Hunt finds the other two men inside the next drill site shelter. They ask what he saw, but he is guarded, unsure if he can trust them. They have figured out that this job does not involve oil and want to be informed. Hunt relents and recounts what he saw, including the huge equipment, the dead monkeys, and the two boys in the glass cage.
Measuring the distance between her balcony and Vale’s, Warner considers jumping. When Vale comes out on to his balcony and sees her clinging to the edge of her railing, he imagines the stunt as a romantic one and offers to catch her. She leaps, he catches her, and he pulls her into his room and on to his bed, removing her shirt. She needs to tell him about Keegan, but their lovemaking is too intense. It can wait.
As Vale sleeps, Warner exits his room only to be confronted by Keegan. She swears she hasn’t told him about the deal. Thirty minutes later, she is aboard a plane heading for Antarctica.
Riddle covers a great deal of ground in these chapters. First, Pierce’s tale winds down with a grand, conspiratorial flourish: The Spanish Flu was actually a pathogen released from the Atlantean structure buried below the Bay of Gibraltar. Kane’s efforts to weaponize the Bell backfire, killing everyone near the site, including the pregnant Helena. An embittered Pierce, with nothing left to lose, resigns himself to helping the elder Kane with his research. However, he keeps his journal secret along with a map to a hidden chamber which, he believes, holds the secret to defeating the Immari. The twists and turns of the plot are formidable.
Second, the link between the buried structure and the Immari’s centuries-old plot to control human evolution—and the Immaru’s long efforts to stop them—is solidified. Much in the way The Da Vinci Code reveals a millennia-long battle between those who would reveal the true nature of Jesus and those who would keep it secret, The Atlantis Gene wades into similar territory: a millennia-long battle between those who would annihilate most of humankind to preserve a select few and those who would seek to stop them. Riddle’s knack for unspooling yet another plot twist just when it seems the spool was empty is impressive. Keegan’s double-cross of Vale and Sloane’s true identity as Dieter Kane are merely two of the surprises Riddle has in store for his readers.
Riddle also draws a direct connection between the events in the journal and the events transpiring in the present. Pierce and Helena are strikingly mirrored by Vale and Warner: Both men, suffering from battle wounds, are nursed back to health by women with whom they fall in love. Both men have trauma in their pasts: Pierce’s experience in the tunnels of World War I and Vale’s in the collapse of the World Trade Center. By connecting the two narratives, Riddle also connects past and present. He suggests that history is not a discrete series of events which abruptly end to make room for the next one, but rather a single, continuous narrative in which the actions of past participants necessarily impact the lives of those not yet born. The timeline of history is not linear but recursive, constantly looping back on itself. Unfortunately, in the world of The Atlantis Gene, lessons of that past tend to be forgotten rather than learned from.