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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  However, beyond the twelve temples marked with the bladed cross, there was no thirteenth site that suggested the location of White Island.

  “Jess, what language were the Traditions written in? Originally, I mean.”

  “The earliest one we know of is in cuneiform, like I said. Before that, we’re not sure. But, whatever written language it was that the First Gods gave us, it’s most likely the source of all the other written languages that appeared around the world, all at the same time. Same thing for agriculture. The fertile triangle in the Middle East, rice cultivation in China . . . agriculture began around the world, all at the same time. Standing stone observatories. All of those things are their gifts to us.”

  “Right.” David drummed his fingers beside the keyboard. “What I was wondering was, is there any chance ‘White Island’ could be a mistranslation, or have other meanings?”

  “It’s not quite that simple.” A strange thought struck Jess. This was like a children’s lesson, one she had had to learn herself. Because the term itself didn’t come just from the Traditions. David had asked her earlier how her Family had managed to keep all their secrets, and the truth was, they hadn’t.

  “In some ways, if you think about it, my Family’s really not so different. Lots of cultures tell the story of how they were given gifts by mysterious visitors. The Aztec legends say that strangers came from a place called Aztlan. That’s been translated as ‘White Island.’ The dwelling place of Hindu yogis with supreme knowledge was called Shveta-Dvipa. That also means ‘White Island.’ And the Tibetans—they believe a ‘White Island’ will be the only part of the world to escape disaster because it’s the eternal land. So it’s not just us.”

  David wheeled around to stare at her, as if she’d just said something striking. “But land’s not eternal, is it?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You know what’s wrong with this map?”

  “It’s not precise?” Jess could see that. How could it be, given the age of it and the conditions under which the First Gods had charted the world? Of course it couldn’t match modern cartographic techniques.

  “Maybe the differences aren’t a matter of precision.” His face alight with some idea, David turned back to the map on the screen, touching it as he spoke. “England joined to Europe. Sicily joined to Italy.” He glanced back at her. “At Cornwall, the sea level nine thousand years ago would’ve been at least sixty feet lower. So how low would it have to be for the world to look like this map?”

  Jess thought back to her most basic introductory courses in geology. “Well, England and the continent were definitely joined by a land bridge. Another twenty to twenty-five feet down would be enough to expose it—but that would’ve been another thousand years or so even earlier than that map. Sicily and Italy, I’m not sure. Whenever they were last joined, it could be a function of sea level, or of earthquakes, or some combination of both.”

  “So we’ve got a map that’s obviously important. It shows the location of the temples, but not the White Island. And it seems to be based on charts that were prepared at least a thousand years prior to it being painted on that wall.”

  Jess couldn’t tell what he was driving at, if he was driving at anything. “That’s if our assumptions of dating are correct. Maybe the temples were built nine thousand eight hundred years ago. Then there’s not as much difference between the time the charts were drawn up and the map was painted.”

  “Still, there’d be a difference, Jess, and if they were making charts over, let’s say a few centuries, then the mapmakers would have to have been aware of a pretty significant rise in sea level over that time.”

  Jess still didn’t get it. “Okay . . .”

  “So the land isn’t eternal. This map’s going to go out of date.”

  “This map? There’s another?” Jess looked at the screen again, wondering what she had missed. “Is it painted over something? Like a palimpsest?”

  David grinned, almost as if he were teasing her again. “Not over something. Under it.” He reached into his pocket, but before he had brought out what he was searching for, Jess had it.

  “The dome,” she said. “The disks on the ceiling are a star map.” The name had been there all along. “That’s why it’s called the Chamber of Heaven!”

  David held out the metal ceiling disk he’d retrieved from the chamber floor. It had eight tacklike points on one side, presumably to hold it in place in the plaster. On the other side, it was simply a highly polished disk of some silvery metal that remarkably hadn’t tarnished.

  “To make a map of the world as good as this, your ancestors would have to know navigation, which means they’d have to be good astronomers.”

  “The sun map,” Jess said. Her thoughts tumbled over one another. “Carved on the meteorite. They knew the planets orbit the sun. They knew Jupiter had moons, that Saturn had a ring.”

  David nodded. “To see the moons and the ring, they had to have telescopes at least the equal of Galileo’s. They also had some pretty good math to work out the orbits.”

  He laid the disk on the desktop beside the keyboard, used a trackball to move the map to one side, and started typing.

  “Let’s put together the photos of the ceiling map.”

  David’s next words made Jess forget their need to outrun the ruthless killers who were after them.

  “You know, if we can figure out a date for when that map was made . . . when we see the pattern of the ceiling stars, we should be able to figure out where you’d have to be to see them.”

  “A location,” Jess said. Then David said what she was thinking.

  “Maybe the location. White Island.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “What’s the plan?” Roz asked. “Good Cop, Bad Cop? Or Bad Cop, Worse Cop?”

  “Not necessary. I think this one’s going to be easy.” Lyle peered through the glass partition into the infirmary of the Lakenheath RAF Base, home of the U.S. Air Force 48th Fighter Wing. On the only occupied bed inside, Holden Ironwood Jr. was patched up and on a morphine drip.

  “Famous last words.”

  “Watch and learn, Roz. And don’t let any medical staff through that door once I’m in there.”

  “Yes, sir. No matter how loud Junior screams.”

  Lyle didn’t comment. He slowly and silently turned the doorknob, waited a moment, then jerked the door open noisily.

  On the bed, the patient’s eyes fluttered open, but since he could only turn his head slowly, exactly how much of his delayed reaction was due to drugs, and how much to injury, Lyle didn’t know. Nor did he particularly care.

  He held his ID up, though he doubted the groggy man could read anything on it. Again, not important.

  “Jack Lyle, Air Force Office of Special Investigations. We’re going to talk before you’re processed.”

  The man on the bed licked his dry lips, running his tongue along the edge of the stained dressing that covered his face from his cheek to his mouth. According to the medical reports, Ironwood’s son had been shot twice—a graze to the shoulder and a more serious hit through his left calf. He’d also suffered multiple scrapes and superficial puncture wounds along the right side of his body. The injuries were consistent with being trapped in the partial collapse of the tunnel the rescue workers had found him in. Plus, his left arm was broken in three places, and his left shoulder dislocated. The face scrape was an added insult.

  “Wh–at?” Holden Jr., a.k.a. J.R., spoke slowly, but, according to the monitor beside his bed, his heart rate had definitely speeded up.

  “Processed,” Lyle repeated. “I’m turning you over to the MPs this afternoon for transport to Leavenworth.”

  J.R. was becoming more awake with each passing moment. “Leavenworth?”

  “Military prison.”

  “I’m under arrest?”

  “No. You’re a captive.” Lyle always enjoyed this part.

  J.R. struggled to sit up, failed, his panic growing. “Wait, wait, wait . .
. start over.”

  Lyle identified himself again, then said, “You are an enemy of the United States who has been captured and who will be—”

  “No! Stop it!”

  Lyle waited.

  “I’m not an enemy. I’m a U.S. citizen.”

  “Who’s involved in a conspiracy to steal vital defense-related assets and sell them to foreign powers. You got caught. You’ll be spending the rest of your life in Leavenworth.”

  J.R. let his head slump back on his antiseptically white pillow and stared at the ceiling. “I want a lawyer.”

  “Civilians get to talk to lawyers. Military captives get to talk to me.”

  J.R. glared at Lyle. Lyle didn’t look away. “Something to say?”

  “I wanna talk to my father.”

  “I can arrange that. All you have to do is tell me where he is.”

  J.R. blinked, finally awake enough to realize the game he was actually in.

  “That’s right. He got away,” Lyle continued. “The big fish. But, as consolation, we have you. Pulled out of a hole in the ground in England. A country, by the way, that has no record of you having entered it. Impressive, but also confirmation that you have sophisticated partners. In the conspiracy.”

  “There’s no conspiracy. My old man—” J.R. caught himself.

  “Your old man what?”

  J.R. closed his eyes. No doubt, Lyle imagined, visions of life in maximum security danced in his morphine-addled mind.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Answer some questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Where Holden Sr. is. Where the database is. How he got it. Who he’s selling it to. What—”

  “He’s not selling it to anyone!”

  “What’s he doing with it, then?”

  “Looking for . . . for that underground pile of crap you pulled me out of. Ruins, you know? He’s found a couple of those old places. All over the world.”

  Score one for Roz, Lyle thought. “Who’s helping him do that?”

  J.R.’s face twisted. He winced at the pain the movement caused him. “Nathaniel Merrit. He’s the bastard who left me down there. He does all my old man’s dirty work.” He looked Lyle in the eye. “There’s your killer. It’s not me.”

  Lyle concealed surprise, changed tactics. He’d been expecting J.R. to name China or Russia or some other unfriendly country as the entity helping Ironwood exploit the SARGE database. Not an individual.

  “Who’d he kill?”

  “I tell you what I know, I don’t go to Leavenworth?”

  “You cooperate, I cooperate. Remember what I said: You’re not the big fish.” Lyle left the rest of the deal unspoken. It was still too early to expect Junior to give up Senior. He’d have to be eased into it. “Now, this man Merrit. Who is he? What’s his connection to your father? And who’d he kill?”

  J.R.’s mouth twisted into an unpleasant grin; then he groaned as his cracked lip split.

  But he told Lyle everything.

  “Yes, I know, I know, it’s a real mess,” Ironwood said to his wife of thirty years. “Never really thought it would get this far. Bet you never did, either.” He paused, pensive. “What was that you’d always say? ‘Holdie, the trouble with you is that when you want something, you want it all. Never did learn to settle. Or share.’ ”

  Ironwood sighed and scratched his head through the straw hat he wore. The Vanuatu sun was strong this afternoon, and the sweat rolled down his scalp and face in a never-ending trickle. Still, it’d been almost three years since he’d last talked to Nan. He could take the heat a bit longer.

  “Never did,” he told her. “Never did at all.”

  Bracing one hand on the white marble gravestone, he awkwardly knelt to adjust the bouquet of flowers he’d brought. Birds-of-paradise. Her favorite. Just as this island paradise had been. “Let me get that,” he said. He brushed aside a few yellow leaves that had fallen from other bouquets, the ones he had delivered every day. “Have to talk to Etienne about that. Got to have you looking neat. Know how much you . . . Aw, Nan. Miss you, Little Girl. Miss you something terrible.”

  He put both hands on the gravestone incised to Nancy Lou Ironwood, beloved wife and mother, and rested his head against his arms. “But I had this all worked out from the beginning, and we’ll get by,” he whispered to her. “We always do. You and me.”

  He heard footsteps in the gravel and looked over his shoulder.

  Crazy Mike was standing twenty feet back along the white gravel path that wound through the low shrubs and fluttering palm trees of the cemetery. Crazy Mike was native to the island. He ran the main house here and drove the Rolls as needed.

  The young man scuffed his sneakers in the gravel again, not wanting to interrupt, but he held out a phone.

  Ironwood gave a grunt and pushed himself to his feet, brushed the white stones and dust from the knees of his khakis, and straightened his hat. “What’ve you got there, son?” He started back down the path to his driver.

  “Phone call, Mr. Woody. For you.”

  Ironwood hesitated. There were maybe ten people in his head office who knew how to get in touch with him, but they used the encrypted satellite phone back in his house on the harbor. He had no idea who among them would know that Crazy Mike was his driver, let alone know his driver’s mobile number.

  “Who?”

  Crazy Mike shrugged, shoulder bones jutting sharply through his blue-and-white-flowered shirt.

  Ironwood took the phone. “Who the hell is this?”

  “Holden Ironwood?”

  “I asked first.”

  “That you did. Jack Lyle. Air Force Office of Special Investigations.”

  Ironwood waved his driver away and began to walk along the path. “You’re a resourceful man, Mr. Lyle. Is it ‘Mister’? You got a rank?”

  “Agent Lyle will do.”

  “ ’Course it will.”

  “And I’m not that resourceful. I got this number from your son.”

  Ironwood felt an icy band around his chest. “Did you now.”

  “I need you to come home, Mr. Ironwood.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Up to you. Technically, you’re untouchable. But you know that. No extradition agreement between the U.S. and Vanuatu. Not even formal diplomatic ties. And I understand Ironwood Industries has made some significant investments in schools and infrastructure down there, so I’m guessing the local government wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to change the status quo.”

  Ironwood wasn’t about to be taken in by Lyle’s easygoing manner. Sharks swam in those waters. He used the same technique himself.

  “If you say so, Agent Lyle.”

  “That’s technically, of course. Operationally, well, you know the United States government isn’t in the habit of letting its enemies walk around free in any country. So one way or another, you will be coming home. It’s just that if you fly back in your own plane, it’ll be a more pleasant experience than returning in a cargo jet. Bound and gagged.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, sir. What’s this talk about me being an enemy?”

  “Let’s not play games. You know what you stole. Your son’s told us everything. Even told us where to find Frank Beyoun’s body.”

  Ironwood came to a sudden stop on the gravel path, as startled as if he’d been slapped. “Frank? What happened to Frank?”

  “No games. Your son’s already talking. We show photos of what’s left of Beyoun to the rest of your ‘Red Team,’ you can count on them wanting to start talking, too.”

  Ironwood stared at the horizon, at the soft white clouds above the blue Pacific. Didn’t see any of it. “What happened to Frank?”

  “Your man murdered him, Mr. Ironwood.”

  “My man?”

  “Nathaniel Merrit. Head of your security. Former marine. Though I doubt they’d want to claim him as their own. We have him down for at least two other murders as well. All on your orders.”

&
nbsp; Ironwood erupted, shocked to his core. “That is a lie!”

  “Not according to your son.”

  Ironwood took off his hat and wiped his brow. This was wrong. Horribly, impossibly wrong. “Listen to me, and listen good, Agent Lyle. I never gave Nathaniel Merrit or anyone else such ‘orders.’ ”

  “Then come back and we can straighten it all out.”

  Ironwood looked around the cemetery. Couldn’t see a bench, didn’t want to sit on a gravestone, but he couldn’t stand.

  He saw a twisted root stump and dropped down on it to catch his breath, his legs spread wide in front of him, hand on knee to brace himself.

  It had been such a simple undertaking. Dave’s genetic clusters, the SARGE database, underground maps leading to alien outposts. Evidence of visitation . . . it all would finally turn the world on its head with the truth. How had something so straightforward, so necessary, led to murder?

  “Mr. Ironwood?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Will you come home, sir?”

  Ironwood looked back to Nan’s gravestone. There was space in the plot beside her. Eventually, he’d be there beside her. Not just yet.

  “Agent Lyle, we’re going to sort this out.”

  “I agree. Best place to do that is back here.”

  “All right. But first you’ve got to do something for me.”

  Far too quickly, far too smoothly, Lyle answered, “I’m listening.”

  Ironwood shook his head. The poor SOB. Expecting him to strike a deal. More like a bargain, and one he planned to cram in the agent’s craw. “I’m going to presume you found a copy of your database in my casino.”

  Lyle said nothing.

  “I’m going to further presume you’ve seen one of the products of that database. A printout, let’s say, of a site in Cornwall, England. Is that right?” Ironwood took a deep breath, prepared if need be to wait for kingdom come, because the first person to break silence would be the one with the most to lose.

  Finally, “That’s correct.”

  Ironwood released his breath. He was still in business. “Good man. Then, if you haven’t already done so, Agent Lyle, I suggest you have an expert examine that printout. To figure out how much information is in it. And then tell you how the heck all that information got squeezed out of your precious SARGE. You following me?”