The Atlantis Gene

In many ways, Vale is the action star right out of Central Casting: Rugged and handsome, he is equally adept at handling a gun or C-4 plastic explosives as with gathering intelligence and intimidating a corrupt police official. As a former CIA operative and military veteran, Vale has the perfect skill set to stage daring rescue after daring rescue. Still, he is not Superman, and his many injuries along the way make him a decidedly human character. More than once, Warner is called upon to save his life, even giving him a makeshift blood transfusion aboard a cargo train. Yet despite his gruff demeanor, Vale has a tortured past. The loss of his fiancée in the collapse of the World Trade Center gives Vale the added incentive to protect Warner at all costs. Further, his willingness to reveal his loss to Warner suggests a vulnerability that makes him more human than simply a military fighting machine.

Vale’s backstory also includes a history with Dorian Sloane. Both men served in Afghanistan—Vale to avenge the loss of his fiancée and Sloane to search the mountains for his father. Their past conflict is only hinted at, but the mutual animosity is evident enough to give their conflict added heft. Not content to let either Vale or Sloane prevail, Riddle leaves them both suspended in hibernation tubes, facing each other across a vast chamber, both alive to continue their personal battle.

A quintessential villain, Sloane is given additional layers of evil by virtue of his pedigree: He is the leader of a malevolent, global corporation bent on world domination, and he is the son of a Nazi officer whose mission is to create a genetically selective master race. So desperate is he for the approval of a cold, distant father, Sloane is willing to sacrifice most of the world’s population in service to Konrad Kane’s delusional and paranoid scheme. Implicit in Kane’s Toba Protocol is the historical genocide of the Holocaust and the fraught, scientifically unsound history of eugenics. Taking Gregor Mendel’s legitimate research into genetics, the Nazis—and some in the United States before them—twisted it to their own purposes, seeking to breed the “undesirable” qualities out of humans and leaving a genetically superior master race. While Hitler saw those undesirable traits as anything not Aryan, Sloane, like his father, sees the only acceptable genetic traits as those granting immunity to the Bell. While Hitler and Kane’s motives may seem different, they have a similar underlying theme: a maniacal obsession with controlling human evolution based on their narrow worldviews. Sloane’s transformation from infected child to prodigious antagonist may give him a modicum of sympathy, but Riddle seems more interested in archetypes than psychologically deconstructed antiheroes. Sloane’s willingness to sacrifice everything for his version of the greater good makes him more of a megalomaniac than a tortured soul.

At first glance, Craig appears to be the submissive member of the Kane/Craig duo. Seeming to acquiesce to all of Kane’s orders, Craig is a diplomatic liaison. Interestingly, Riddle offers more detail about Craig than Keegan, at least until the dramatic reveal. Craig is always present, quietly filling in the background. He is more of an administrator than a hands-on conspirator. Keegan, on the other hand, is seen mainly through the eyes of Vale, who trusts him as a mentor and a dedicated Clocktower operative struggling to keep the organization afloat after Sloane’s coup. However, like so many mild-mannered characters whose function is to shock the audience, Keegan reveals himself to be the puppet master behind the entire operation, biding his time, plotting his revenge against his former partner, and gleefully watching him die in an icy tomb. Keegan/Craig’s ability to turn the tables on Kane implies a fatal character flaw in the dominant partner: assuming the submissive one will always remain so, cowering in the shadow of the more forceful personality. That flaw fails to account for the simmering resentment that can build over the course of years and metastasize into lethal revenge.

While Pierce is introduced relatively late in the story, his impact is vital. One of several characters to cheat death, Pierce survives in the timeless chambers of the Atlantean structure only to help destroy it. A former World War I tunnel digger, Pierce is injured in a tunnel collapse and convalesces in a quiet cottage under the care of Helena Barton. Their patient/caregiver relationship develops into love, and Pierce is forced to make a “deal with the devil” (317) by helping the Immari excavate beneath the Bay of Gibraltar in exchange for Helena’s hand in marriage. Part of that deal includes lying to her about his job, knowing she cannot countenance the risk involved. Like so much of the motivation that drives the story, however, Pierce’s willingness to sacrifice his moral code is in service to a greater good. This end-justifies-the-means rationale ultimately backfires and unleashes the Spanish Flu, killing at least 50 million people worldwide, including his beloved Helena. While grief-stricken over the death of his wife, Pierce has the presence of mind to place her in a hibernation tube and save the life of his unborn daughter. While years of isolation and regret have hardened him, Riddle allows him a brief reunion with his grown daughter, Kate Warner, in a short respite before detonating the warheads and destroying the Rock of Gibraltar, the structure buried beneath it, and presumably, himself. However, if Riddle’s recurring theme of cheating death continues into the sequel, perhaps Pierce will be given a second chance.

With his rigid posture and cold demeanor, Kane is a thoroughly menacing villain—a heartless father and a Nazi with a eugenics mindset. Kane believes he is serving humanity’s best interests, but then again, so do many megalomaniacs. With his obsessive fixation on the Atlantean race—and his assumption of their hostility toward humans—Kane has time for little else, including his son, Dieter. His imperious air and dismissive tone place him at odds with Pierce from the start, and were it not for his generous offer of compensation, Pierce would never accept the job. Kane is also a geopolitical symbol who, fair or not, bears the metaphorical weight of the cataclysmic war that has just devastated Europe. When Pierce first meets him, he calls attention to his nationality immediately: “‘You’re German,’ I say as if accusing him of murder, which I consider to be fair” (262). While Kane appears to be in charge from the start, appearances are often deceiving, and nearly a century later, he finally gets his comeuppance from an aggrieved and very patient subordinate.

A Clocktower data analyst, Cohen represents the thousands of intelligence officers who serve in less glamorous roles, poring over numbers and reports and synthesizing the information into credible risk assessments. However, like the fictional Joseph Turner, Robert Redford’s CIA analyst in Three Days of the Condor (1975), Cohen is drawn into a life-threatening conspiracy. Suddenly, Cohen, accustomed to staring at computer screens, is facing battlefield conditions as Sloane’s coup against Clocktower reaches its lethal conclusion. Cohen, however, faces down his inevitable death, stoically wiping clean the hard drive from Clocktower’s Jakarta station while enemy forces blast their way into his safe room. Cohen’s noble sacrifice is a nod to all those cerebral, behind-the-scenes operatives who, while not garnering the spotlight, serve their country, do their duty, and, in Cohen’s case, are killed for a righteous cause.