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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  It was obvious that Ironwood’s researcher had been in the observation area above the Red Room. It was equally obvious what he’d been doing there. One of the overhead cameras was still trained on the nine-foot computer screen.

  Weir might have erased the results of Ironwood’s search, including the parts of the database allowing it to be repeated, but the overhead camera had recorded what had been found.

  Half of what Frank Beyoun mumbled as he worked to re-create what the overhead camera saw, Merrit didn’t understand. The image the camera had recorded was what the mathematician called “keystoned,” and apparently he needed a special program to correct that. He also needed another program to improve the focus. Even then, when it did, the image revealed a string of numbers at the bottom of the screen so blurred that Merrit couldn’t read them.

  Helpful as always, Frank explained that since he knew that the string of numbers consisted of one group of eight numerals and one group of seven numerals, and he also knew the first four numerals in the first group and the first three numerals in the second, he could teach the program how to resolve the other numerals. Or something like that.

  It took two precious hours, but Merrit’s new best friend finally delivered. Frank wrote the numbers down for him: the longitude and latitude of Ironwood’s fourth outpost, to a precision of ten feet. It was the site where the MacCleirigh Foundation and Weir would be going as quickly as they could.

  So would Merrit.

  First, though, he’d have to thank Frank. Personally.

  Agent Roz Marano had worked a miracle. Again.

  “He must’ve had a really huge image file on the hard drive.” She pointed to the computer Weir had used in the quick print shop located less than a mile from Harvard University.

  Ten hours ago, she and Lyle had given up the foot chase from Faneuil Hall—just in time, as far as Lyle’s ruined knee was concerned—when the police radioed they had the fugitives on camera. They weren’t kidding. In Boston, those cameras included the police’s own network, as well as the even more extensive system installed and run by Homeland Security to protect the city’s unique historical landmarks.

  Nine hours ago, Lyle had used Roz’s laptop to review the recordings of the chase. Street cameras showed Weir and the red-haired woman fleeing into a subway station. A few seconds later, the MTBA concourse cameras had picked up the pair as they’d passed through the turnstiles. The woman had used a fare card bought the previous day with cash in a store without surveillance cameras. Impossible to trace.

  More transit cameras tracked the two to the southbound Orange Line platform. As a train had arrived, they’d run in full view toward the end of the platform, only to duck behind a pillar. Coincidentally—though Lyle was not at all convinced that it was a coincidence—that particular pillar was one of three small areas on the platform that the cameras couldn’t cover. It was from that spot that they’d simply vanished.

  That had left the RFID tag as the last hope. Weir had still been carrying the tagged hard drive when he’d run into the subway station.

  From the kit of equipment that filled half the trunk of their AFOSI unmarked car in a custom Kevlar-lined bin, Roz had retrieved radio-tracking gear that let her listen for the RFID’s signals.

  She picked up nothing.

  That was when she’d started transmitting a coded pulse that would, she claimed, reset any changes Weir might have programmed into the tag.

  Four hours later, two Boston police surveillance vans, one FBI van, two Homeland Security command post vehicles, and four air force staff cars had cruised through Boston and the surrounding regions following a precise grid pattern, using equipment similar to Roz’s, transmitting the same reset-and-respond pulse.

  His own effort to assist them had been to ask Andrews Air Force Base to launch an uncrewed Global Hawk drone. They’d done so only after his request had ascended the chain of command to the Pentagon and the Air Force Chief of Staff. Even so, a mere nine hours after Weir and the woman disappeared, the Global Hawk began transmitting Roz’s reset-and-respond pulse over the Greater Boston area, and the sensitive antennas of the drone’s EADS electronic intelligence system began listening for the tag’s reply.

  Within forty minutes, the tag was detected, stationary. The location was the print shop where he and Roz were now.

  Two police cars had been there within eight minutes, but they were twenty minutes too late. By then the tag was no longer responding. A print-shop clerk confirmed that two people answering the descriptions of the fugitives had been there and paid with cash for half an hour of computer time and for a poster-sized print from the shop’s largest printer. The small shop didn’t have security cameras in the parking lots front or back. There was no way to tell what Weir and the woman were using for transportation.

  When the police called to report, Roz instructed them to keep everyone away from the computer Weir had used. She and Lyle arrived forty minutes later.

  The computer was now protected by a web of yellow police tape on a small gray desk that reminded Lyle of a library carrel.

  “He needed this computer,” Roz reasoned, “because he had to convert the file into something he could print out. Which he did.”

  “Any idea what he printed?”

  Roz typed on the computer’s keyboard, then frowned as she read the text that appeared on the screen. “Whatever it was, he wanted to keep it to himself. He overwrote all his work files a bunch of times. There’s nothing to recover.”

  Lyle was about to move on but saw Roz hesitate. Very encouraging. She typed again. Grinned. “He sanitized the computer, but not the printer.”

  “So we can get a copy?”

  “Maybe not the whole file, but depending on how big the buffer is, at least a third of it. Maybe two-thirds.” Roz did something, and the screen changed to show yellow text against a black background. “Give me five minutes and we can print out whatever data are left in the spool file.”

  Five minutes later, Lyle stood by a large machine through which a sheet of heavy paper moved like a cloth through an ancient wringer washer. Lyle didn’t mention the similarity to Roz. He wasn’t about to sound even older than he was.

  The image forming on the paper was like a wildly colored piece of abstract art, random except for a string of numbers that ran along one side, and a few strange collections of letters that appeared here and there.

  “Any idea what that is?”

  “False color of something,” Roz said, “but it’s definitely some kind of map.”

  Lyle was a big fan of maps. They showed locations. Locations meant destinations. Journeys to destinations could be tracked.

  The page finally rolled out from the printer—two-thirds complete. In the middle of a field of splotchy, garish colors was a three-dimensional line drawing of a building of some kind.

  Roz handed it to him for a closer look with a reminder that Ironwood was always talking to Weir about using his data to find alien outposts. “Maybe that outline is what they look like.”

  Lyle frowned. “That would mean all those lunatic conversations were legitimate.”

  “Truth and fiction, huh?” Roz took the awkwardly sized sheet back. “I’d say this is a shoreline. Somewhere. What do you bet Geospatial can figure out exactly where it is?”

  “Just don’t tell them about the aliens.”

  Roz smiled. “What makes you think they don’t already know?”

  MALTA 7,567 YEARS B.C.E.

  Late that night, the scholars stood in silence as Stoneworker Apprentice Atlan counted aloud in the center of the observatory ring. Other than the young female’s strong voice, the only sound was the rippling of the dark cloth that wrapped the encircling sun stones, covering all the sighting gaps but one. For the accuracy of this test, the night breeze must not be allowed to deflect the weighted cord Atlan swung as a pendulum, her arm braced on a small wooden frame.

  “Three hundred sixty . . .” Atlan neared the critical stage of her count. “Three hund
red sixty-one . . .”

  Her instructor, Stone Master Nazri, stood several steps behind his student, monitoring her count of each full swing of the pendulum she held, following her sight line to see what she saw. The elderly scholar, frail and, at twenty-five years, stooped with age, wore a white cloak so the other scholars could see him despite the darkness of the new moon. All the torches and lamps had been extinguished to allow the apprentice’s eyes to remain sensitive for her task.

  Nazri raised his hand so the other scholars would know: The next few counts would be close.

  “Three hundred sixty-two . . .” There was no hesitation in Atlan’s voice, no indication that, in only moments, she might achieve the reward of four years of study, or be forced to wait another year for her advancement. “Three hundred sixty three . . . three hundred sixty-four . . .”

  Nazri raised both hands as if to frame his student.

  “Three hundred sixty-five . . . three hundred sixty-six and gone!”

  At the same instant, Nazri swept both hands down, indicating that the timing star had indeed moved behind the right-hand wooden post and disappeared at the moment his apprentice’s pendulum completed its 366th full swing.

  Now it was only a matter of handiwork for Atlan to complete this final test.

  As if this were simply an ordinary day and another lesson, the young apprentice, almost twelve, walked with measured pace to a cutting table, the leather soles of her woven footwear crunching against the dry ground of the viewing yard. Two younger apprentices were there with oil lamps, which they quickly lit with fire moss kept smoldering in metal cages. Other apprentices went purposefully from torch stand to torch stand, bringing light to the circular yard.

  Ten days earlier, Atlan had constructed her sight line and timing gap. With little more than fine rope, sharpened wooden stakes, and some marking tools, she had drawn an arc of a great circle in the finely packed soil of the yard. The length of rope she had used to draw the arc was the radius of the circle. When she then pulled that rope taut between two points on the arc, the section of the arc created in that fashion equaled one-sixth of a full circle—exactly 61 of the 366 degrees by which the star path masters measured the great circle of the sky. One degree for each sunrise in a year.

  With other lengths of rope and wooden stakes, she had used basic geometry to further divide a portion of that arc into its individual degrees, resulting in two sighting posts exactly one degree apart.

  It was a known fact that a pendulum of a given length always completed its swings at a constant rate. So the challenge Atlan faced was to precisely measure a length of fine cord that would make a pendulum that completed 366 full swings in the time it took a star to move between the sighting posts—one 366th part of a day. In time to come, that span would be measured as three minutes, fifty-six seconds.

  For her final test, one that would elevate her from apprentice to master, Atlan had been allowed ten nights to refine the length of the cord. Then, this night, she demonstrated to her master and the scholars of the observatory the preciseness of her craft.

  Atlan pulled her cord straight atop the cutting table, using sharpened iron awls to mark the length of it on a polished rod of fire-hardened wood. Then, with a serrated, carved bone saw, she cut the rod to the exact length of the pendulum cord.

  She presented the rod to Nazri, and the wizened scholar took it to a round stone altar. On the stone, an iron rod rested in a shallow trough that precisely fit it. An apprentice builder carefully removed the iron rod, then used a whisk of feathers to be sure the trough was free of dust and debris.

  Oil lamps glowed and sputtered at the edges of the altar stone as the other scholars gathered around it.

  Nazri gently lowered the wooden rod into the trough.

  It fit exactly.

  Atlan had demonstrated that she could travel anywhere in the world and with a few simple tools create a precise unit of measure that would allow her to construct observatories and libraries and outposts, according to common plans and known facts.

  The other scholars, having seen the result, went back to their studies.

  Nazri gave his student the highest praise possible. “Well done.”

  She bowed her head, apprenticeship at an end. “Master.”

  He gestured with a trembling hand to have her look up at him. “No. We’re the same now, Stone Master.”

  Atlan drew in a breath at hearing that title. She knew what was to come, but had no idea what it might mean.

  The next morning, Atlan met with Nazri and three other stone masters outside the observatory’s central chamber, set apart from the other low stone buildings of the scholars’ community. The plaster walls of the structure glittered in the brilliant summer sun—tiny flecks of mica mixed with the yellow pigment produced a sparkling point of light, not for decoration, but for distant ships approaching during daylight. The wind was heavy with the promise of rain later in the day. At this hour, though, the sky was a brilliant blue, the clouds small and distant and pure white.

  Atlan, now wearing the cloth trousers, cloth shirt, and stiff leather protective apron of a stone master, breathed in that morning air as if noticing it for the first time. The day felt new to her. Her life was about to begin again. On that hilltop of baked white soil and rock, looking out over the interior ocean that one day would be called the Mediterranean, she believed she could see the curve of the world, believed she could feel the world spinning in its endless dance among the other bodies of the sky, as timeless and predictable as the swinging of a pendulum and the known facts of geometry.

  Her studies had made her part of the pattern of all that was known, and all that was still to know. There could be no greater fulfillment.

  “Are you ready?” Nazri asked her.

  She clicked her answer.

  “Then the doors are yours to open. Paid in blood.”

  Atlan was puzzled by her former master’s words. Knowledge sometimes demanded a heavy price. Bridge ships could disappear forever on voyages of discovery. Inland expeditions set out, never to return. But to wayfinders and star path masters on solid land, where was the danger?

  The other masters stepped aside in silence. Atlan approached the doors of the central chamber, placed her hands under the wooden crosspiece that kept them secure, lifted it—and cried out in surprise and pain.

  Blood pulsed from a lattice of shallow cuts on her palms and fingers.

  She looked to Nazri, but he had no sympathy.

  “You said you were ready.”

  Atlan had come too far to give up now, or question those who had taught her, and anger was not in the nature of the khai. She turned back to the crosspiece and found there was nowhere she could place her hands to avoid the thin blades lining its underside. The price of knowledge, she thought. So Atlan lifted the crosspiece, knowing that because of the pain, she would remember this day forever. And perhaps that was the reason for it.

  The doors gave way.

  There was a stone meeting table in the center of the torchlit chamber. The domed ceiling held the familiar constellations of the White Island. The encircling wall held a map of the world, clearly marked with trade and transportation routes, though some were different from the ones she knew. Still, Atlan had been in enough similar chambers to wonder why this one was open to star path masters only.

  As Nazri bound her wounds with strips of white linen, the other masters placed a wayfinder’s case on the meeting table. The curved wooden chest was larger than any Atlan had seen before, and the silver panels inset into it were somehow different. The star patterns she saw on one specific panel made no sense at all.

  “What kind of case is that?” she asked.

  Nazri finished tying the linen around her bloodied hands. “An old one.”

  The masters worked the strips of wood that locked the case, sliding one after another in the proper sequence to release its lid.

  Without ceremony, they swung open the hinged top of the case. Inside, Atlan was intrigued to
see, there were no standard wayfinder’s tools. No lenses, no cords, no horizon boards. Instead, there was a large roll of vellum.

  The masters placed the roll of supple leather on the table and removed the case.

  “Unroll it,” Nazri said.

  With hands made clumsy by her bandages, Atlan untied the cord that kept the vellum bound. She smoothed it on the table, seeing many other dark dried streaks of what she presumed was blood from other new masters who had also fallen victim to the bladed crosspiece.

  On the vellum was a map, faint in the torchlight. From the texture of its markings, Atlan saw it was a rubbing. The thin hide had been placed over a relief map, then shaded with charcoal.

  “It’s an island,” she said. In her mind, she rotated the outline of it, trying to match it with other islands whose outlines she knew. Something about it was familiar but, as with the altered details on the world map that surrounded her, Atlan couldn’t quite place the differences.

  The other masters stood silent, watching, expressionless.

  “Look closer,” Nazri said.

  Atlan lifted a corner of the parchment to improve the lighting on it. On one part of the island, she saw the faintest outline of a familiar cross—the mark of the Navigators. She felt a thrill of recognition.

  “This is a rubbing from the Great Hall.”

  “Look closer.”

  Atlan was no longer aware of the throbbing pain in her hands. She had never been to the White Island, never seen the Hall of the Navigators itself nor the treasure that filled it. From her lessons, though, she knew each part of it in her heart, each map and chart and table memorized exactly. As the image of the Hall’s great map rose in her memory, she realized what was different about the surrounding wall map in this chamber. It wasn’t that the trade routes on it were unfamiliar—the outlines of the land were subtly changed.

  With that realization, like lightning caught by a scholar’s spool of copper, Atlan suddenly recognized the outline on the vellum.