Thus were we treated in such ill manner, which would later prove virtuous as it did indeed protect us from a great pestilence. But there was a cost for such a cure. Friar Agreer was not allowed to partake of the blood and sweetbread. There was much murmuring and pointing toward his cross and to the man who bore it. In the end, we were allowed only to depart if we left Friar Agreer behind.
In his great Grace and Blessed countenance, Friar Agreer insisted we escape. I wept hard, but obeyed the confessor. With his last word, he left me with his crucifix, so as to return it to the Holy See. The final sight of the noble man had him being led in the opposite direction; and I guessed their destination. Lit by the fullness of the moon, a great mountain towered above the forest, carved with a thousand faces of demons.
“Dear God,” Vigor muttered.
He slowly read the rest.
Upon escaping the city, Marco Polo related how a plague struck his fleet, stranding the ships and crew at a remote island. Only those who consumed the medicine offered by these glowing men remained untouched. Marco left the City of the Dead with enough additional medicine to treat his father and uncle, along with Kokejin and two of her maids. They ended up burning the ships and bodies of the diseased, many of them still alive.
Vigor read the final section.
May the Lord forgive my soul for disobeying a promise to my father, now dead. I must make one final confession. In that dread place, I discovered a map of the city, a chart which I destroyed upon the will of my father; but set to mind not to forget. I’ve recorded it here anew, so as to keep such knowledge from being lost forever. May whoever reads this take good warning: the gateway to Hell was opened in that city; but I know not if it was ever closed.
6:22 P.M.
As Gray listened to the story and its cryptic ending, he worked on the puzzle in the notebook. It helped him concentrate to listen to Vigor while contemplating the mystery in hand. It distracted him from the terror clutching his own heart.
And as the story unfolded, he began to understand.
He’d been a fool.
He studied his notebook, blurring his eyes, seeing the answer hidden in the code. And with the three keys, perhaps a way to read it.
He flipped through the pages, looking for the right one. When he found it, he leaned closer, tracing with a finger. Could this be right? He needed to investigate it more.
He checked his watch.
With less than a half hour left, do I have enough time?
Before he could find out, a rattle of automatic fire echoed to them, sounding like firecrackers. Pop, pop, pop, pop…
Gray leaped up.
God, no…had Nasser found them?
He crossed to the chapel opening and stared out into the dark halls.
“Get everything together,” he urged without turning. “Now!”
Backlit by the filtering sunlight, Gray made out the slim shape of a figure running toward him. Bare feet slapped stone — then a voice called out, balanced between urgency and stealth.
“Hurry!”
It was Fee’az.
The boy did not slow and ran straight at them.
Farther out, coming from the direction of the castle courtyard, angry shouts in Farsi echoed.
Gray caught the thin boy’s shoulder as he flew up to them, breathless.
“Hurry. Smugglers.”
Fee’az did not wait and rebounded back into the outer hall and headed in the opposite direction, paralleling the rear of the castle.
Gray turned to the others. “Grab what you have…leave the rest!”
They set off after Fee’az.
The boy waited halfway down the hall, then fled onward.
Fee’az continued a running commentary. Apparently even the threat of smugglers did not stifle his tongue. “You take so long. With your prayers. I sleep. Under palms.” He waved back in the general direction of the courtyard. “They not see me. Almost step on me. I wake and run. They shoot. Bang, bang. But I am fast on the legs.”
Proving it, he flew through the back rooms and halls.
Behind them, shouts changed in timbre, indicating the raiding party had entered the castle.
Fee’az led them to crude stairs leading down. “This way.”
They reached a narrow, low tunnel, barely taller than a crawlway. It shot off to the south. Fee’az scurried ahead.
After fifty steps, it ended at an old rusted iron grate. The bars had long been sawed away, leaving only stumps. They pushed through and out into the castle’s silted-up moat. Crumbled stone walls marked the boundary.
Gray glanced behind him. The crawlway must have been the castle’s old sewer line.
Waving them to stay low, Fee’az led them along the moat, toward the eastern bay. Shouts still echoed from the castle. The smugglers had not yet realized the mice had fled.
Reaching the water, Gray saw the plane still waited, unmolested.
Fee’az explained, “Dirty smugglers. Never steal plane. They pinch little.” He demonstrated by holding his fingers apart, almost touching, then shrugged. “Sometime kill. Throw bodies to sharks. But never take something so big. Government will send bigger planes, bigger guns.”
So not worth the risk.
Still, erring on the side of caution, they used oars to silently paddle the boy’s boat out to the waiting seaplane. Fee’az waved them on board.
“Come again! Come again!” he said, formally shaking each hand.
Gray felt obligated to give him some bonus for pulling their asses out of the fire. He reached to his pack, fished inside, and handed him the princess’s golden headpiece.
The boy’s eyes widened, holding the treasure with both hands — then pushed it back toward Gray. “I can no take.”
Gray folded his fingers over it. “It will cost you only a promise.”
Fee’az glanced up to him.
“There are two bodies, two skeletons, in the castle. Under the room of crosses.” He pointed to the castle, then out to the distant hills. “Take them away, dig a deep hole, and bury them. Together.”
He smiled, unsure if Gray was joking.
“Will you promise?”
He nodded his head. “I will get my brothers and uncles to help.”
Gray pushed the golden headpiece toward him. “It is yours.”
“Thank you, sir.” He shook Gray’s hand and said with all the solemnity of a blessing, “Come again.”
Gray climbed into the plane.
Minutes later they were airborne, shooting up out of the bay and headed back toward the international airport.
Gray returned to the rear seat, joining Vigor.
“You gave the boy the princess’s headpiece?” the monsignor said, staring down at the boy’s retreating skiff.
“To bury Marco and Kokejin.”
Vigor turned to face him. “But such a discovery. History—”
“Marco has done enough for history. It was his last wish to be buried in peace with the woman he loved. I think we owe him that much. And besides, we don’t need the headpiece.”
Vigor stared at Gray, one eye narrowed, plainly sizing him up, judging his generosity. “But you thought the headpiece might hold a clue. That’s why you took it.” The monsignor’s eyes widened and his voice raised. “Dear Lord, Gray, you actually solved the angelic code.”
Gray pulled his notebook out. “Not quite. Almost.”
“How?”
Seichan overheard their discussion and came back to join them, standing between the seats. Kowalski twisted around, peering over the seat back.
Gray answered the monsignor. “I solved it by throwing out all our old suppositions. We kept looking for a letter-substitution code.”
“Like the inscription in the Vatican spelling out HAGIA.”
“I think that was done to purposefully mislead. The big mystery on the obelisk is not a letter-substitution puzzle.”
“Show us,” Seichan said.
“In a moment.” Gray checked his watch. Eight minute
s left. “I still have part of the puzzle to figure out. The three keys. Keys organized in a certain order.”
He opened his notebook and tapped the three angelic symbols.
Gray continued, “With the obelisk’s code always in plain sight, the keys only served one purpose. To reveal the correct way to read the code. The obelisk has four sides. But on which side do you start? In which direction do you read it?”
Gray flipped his notebook open and found the original page of script supplied by Seichan. “For the gold-inscribed symbols to be so important, they must be written somewhere on the obelisk. And so they are.”
Gray circled them.
“This sequence only appears once. It’s unique. Notice how it wraps from one of the obelisk’s surfaces to the next. It’s delineating where to begin reading and in which direction.”
He added an arrow.
“So you must reorder the sequence to match the keys.” He flipped the notebook pages, searching through the eight variations that he and Vigor had mapped out earlier. He found the right one and circled the key symbols. “This is the proper way the map must be laid out to be read correctly.”
Seichan leaned closer. “What map are you talking about?”
“This is what I noticed back at the chapel,” he said. “Watch.”
He took a pencil and began poking holes through the page and marking the next blank page.
“What are you doing?” Vigor asked.
Gray explained, “Notice how some of the diacritical marks — those small circles in the angelic script — are darkened and others are not. We know from the second key how that symbol’s black diacritical mark ended up being a marker for the Portuguese castle. So the blackened circles on the obelisk’s code must be markers, too. But markers to what? If you poke out each dark circle onto a fresh page, stripping all else away, you get this.”
“Well, that sure helped,” Kowalski said sarcastically.
Gray rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin, concentrating. “Something’s here. I can sense it.”
“Maybe you’re supposed to connect the dots,” Kowalski said with no less sarcasm. “Maybe it’ll form a big flashing arrow spelling out go the fuck here.”
Seichan frowned. “And maybe it’s time for you to shut the hell up.”
Gray did not need their bickering. Not now. Kowalski was fine as a getaway driver, good in a firefight, but Gray needed sage advice, not kindergarten suggestions, like connect the dots.
Then he saw it.
“Oh my God!” Gray sat up, fumbled his pencil, and grasped it more firmly. “Kowalski is right!”
“I am?”
“He is…?” Seichan responded.
Gray turned to Vigor, clutching his forearm. “The first clue! In the Tower of Winds.”
Vigor frowned — then his eyes widened. “Which holds the Vatican’s astronomical observatory…where Galileo proved the earth moved around the sun!” Vigor tapped the sheet. “These are stars!”
Gray took his pencil. He had been staring hard at the sheet and recognized a familiar pattern. “This is a constellation.” He drew it in.
Vigor recognized it, too. “That’s the constellation for Draco, the dragon.”
Seichan cocked her head as she stared down. “Are you saying it’s a navigational star map?”
“It looks that way.” Gray scratched his head with his pencil’s eraser. “But how does one constellation tell us where to go?”
No one answered.
“It can’t,” he finally conceded.
Gray’s heart pounded in his throat. They were running out of time. Had he just taken them down the wrong path?
Vigor sat back. “Wait,” he mumbled. “Remember Marco’s story. The last stanza. Marco said he drew a map of the city, not a map to the city.”
“And?” Gray asked.
Vigor took the paper, spun it around. “This can’t be stars. It has to be the layout of the City of the Dead. That’s what Marco’s text stated. Possibly the Vatican made the same mistake we just did. They misinterpreted Marco’s map in the same manner. They also thought it was a navigational star map.”
Gray shook his head. “That’s a rather strange coincidence that a city should be laid out in the exact pattern of the Draco constellation. If I’m not mistaken, even the stars outside the dragon line mark the placement of real stars.”
Vigor nodded. “But remember, from my study of ancient civilizations…from the Egyptians through Mesoamerica, many civilizations built their monuments and cities patterned after the stars, made to mimic them.”
Gray remembered a similar lesson. “Like the three Egyptian pyramids are supposed to represent the stars of Orion’s belt.”
“Exactly! Somewhere in Southeast Asia is a city patterned after the Draco constellation.”
Seichan suddenly swung around. “Choi mai!” she swore under her breath. “I remember something…something I heard about…some ruins in Cambodia. My family has roots in the region. Vietnam and Cambodia.”
Seichan rushed to her pack, pawed through it, and pulled out her laptop. “There’s an encyclopedia program on here.”
Seichan squatted down between the knees of Vigor and Gray. She called up the program and typed rapidly. She double-clicked on an icon and a digital map filled the screen.
“This is the temple complex of Angkor, built by the Khmer people of Cambodia in the ninth century.”
“Notice the layout of the temples,” Seichan said, “where each one lies. I had heard stories of how these ruins were supposedly laid out in a starlike grid.”
With his finger Gray drew a line connecting the temples in a pattern and tapped the remaining temples. He held up the first star map and placed it next to the open laptop.
“They’re an exact match,” Vigor said, awed. “Marco’s City of the Dead. It’s the ancient city of Angkor Wat.”
Gray leaned down and hugged Seichan’s shoulders. She tensed, but didn’t pull away. Gray owed everyone a debt of gratitude, even Kowalski, whose simplistic overview had broken the way to the solution.
Gray checked his watch.
Not a minute to spare.
He held out his hand toward Vigor. “Your phone. It’s time to make a deal.”
Vigor passed him the cell phone and battery.
Gray snapped the battery in place, praying for some measure of good fortune. He dialed Nasser’s number, supplied by Seichan. Vigor reached over and gripped Gray’s hand, offering support.
The phone rang once and was picked up.
“Commander Pierce,” a cold and furious voice answered.
Gray took a steadying breath, struggling not to lash out. He needed to be deliberate and firm.
“My plane is about to land,” Nasser continued, not even waiting for acknowledgment. “For your treachery, I will allow you to decide which of your parents will die first, your mother or your father. I will make you listen to their screams. And that parent, I promise, will be the luckier of the two.”
Despite the threat Gray took some solace. If Nasser wasn’t lying, both of his parents were still alive.
Taking comfort in that, Gray kept his voice even, his jaw muscles aching with the restraint. “I will offer you a trade for their lives.”
“There is nothing you can offer,” Nasser barked back.
“Even if I told you that I’d solved the obelisk’s angelic code?”
Dead air answered him.
Gray continued. “Nasser, I know where Marco’s City of the Dead lies.” Fearing even this might not be enough to sway the bastard, Gray spoke the next words slowly, so there was no misunderstanding. “And I know how to cure the Judas Strain.”
Vigor turned to him, startled.
Silence continued on the phone.
Gray waited. He stared at the digital map of Angkor Wat on the laptop. He sensed that the two arms of the Guild operation — the one following the scientific trail, the other following the historical — were about to slam together.
But who would be crushed between them?
Nasser finally answered, his voice a trembling rage.
“What do you want?”
OUTBREAK
13
Witch Queen
JULY 7, MIDNIGHT
Island of Pusat
The drums pounded louder than the rumbles of thunder overhead. Lightning spattered, flashing the jungle into stark greens and blacks, limned in silver by the reflection off the wet leaves.
Bare-chested, Monk pulled Susan by the hand up a steep turn in the jungle path. They’d been following the trail for the past two hours in the dark, sometimes waiting for lightning to show them where to step next. Rain continued to pour through the canopy. The switchbacked trail had become a running stream. But the remainder of the jungle was a dense tangle of grappling vines, heavy leaves, thorny bushes, root-choked trunks, and sopping mud.
So they kept to the trail, heading up, always up.
Ryder climbed behind them. He had their group’s one pistol. A 9mm Sig Sauer P228 with a Teflon finish. Unfortunately he had no spare magazines. Only the thirteen rounds already in the gun.
Not good.
Monk knew that once the storm broke, the jungle would be scoured by Rakao’s men. This island was their base of operation, giving them the home-field advantage. Monk did not delude himself into thinking he could escape being tracked and captured.
He glanced back through a break in the jungle. They were about three hundred feet up. The giant cruise ship sat in the center of the lake, a quarter mile out. Somewhere on board was his partner, pulled alive from the black waters, out of the grip of some nasty calamari.
But was she still alive?
Until he knew for sure, Monk would not give up hope.
Not for Lisa, not for himself.
To that end, Monk needed allies.
Drums continued their perpetual beating, louder and more urgent, as if striving to drive the typhoon away. They had climbed high enough that each pound of leather drum now reverberated against his rib cage, down to the bone.
The Judas Strain sf-4 Page 30