Stone of Truth

by Adam Hiatt

  “Fascinating,” Reddic deadpanned. “Are you sure you know your way around here?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Of course I do. I’ve been here twice before on research assignments.”

  “Just wanted to make sure,” he said, killing the ignition and setting the emergency brake.

  They jumped out of the Bug and walked in the direction of a rectangular, three-story brick building belonging to the campus of the Universidad de las Americas-Puebla. Reddic scanned the university grounds, noticing that it occupied a large area, almost two hundred acres, he estimated. There were several buildings of various shapes and sizes dispersed about, mostly all possessing a southwestern motif. Nearly one-third of the total acreage was dedicated to athletic facilities, which gave Reddic a sense of nostalgia.

  The first clue in Langford’s cryptic postscript had led them here. The word UDLA was the acronym by which the university was known in Mexico. The second part of the message wasn’t as easily identifiable, at least not for Reddic. Jaxon, on the other hand, seemed to have recognized the title immediately, as he was in the lead.

  Following the sidewalk to the front side of the rectangular building, they came upon a myriad of flagpoles at the entrance. Each pole boasted the national flag of one of the countries in the western hemisphere. As the wind blew them to the southeast, the colorful symbols of national sovereignty waved back and forth freely.

  “What did Langford mean by CIRIA?” asked Reddic.

  “You’re looking at it. The Centro Interactivo de Recursos de Informacíon y Aprendizaje. In other words, the library.”

  “Wow, that’s a mouthful where one word would suffice,” said Reddic. “Okay, so where do we go now? What did Langford mean by Terra Nostra?”

  “That, my younger brother, was the most obvious of all his clues. Follow me. I’ll show you.” With that he ambled through an arched portico at the library entrance on a direct path to the stairs.

  Arriving at the second floor, they quietly moved through an open foyer furnished with round and square tables and turned down a row between two medium-sized bookshelves with a small plastic letter “C” fixed to both of them. After approximately fifteen steps Jaxon stopped and waved his hand at a group of hardcover books. All the books appeared to have been written by the same author, a man named Carlos Fuentes. The group was extensive, spanning one entire shelf. Reddic glanced at the titles, hoping to recognize at least one. There was La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, Aura, Gringo Viejo, Agua Quemada, El Naranjo, and many more. The last title that he saw made him smile. It was Terra Nostra.

  “Carlos Fuentes was one of Dr. Langford’s favorite contemporary authors,” said Jaxon, staring at the shelf. “Many of his books are politically charged, but all are historically and culturally significant. Of all the books his absolute favorite was Terra Nostra.”

  “Is it a passage in the book that we’re to look for then?” asked Reddic.

  “I’m not exactly sure. He led us here, so it must have been for a reason,” Jaxon said wistfully. In actuality the relevance of the book was lost on him. He was acting on blind hope that his professor had a purpose for this scavenger hunt.

  Sliding the book off the shelf, Reddic opened to the first page. The paper had a yellow tint to it and smelled musty. On the upper right-hand corner he spotted a small handwritten mark. He brought the book closer to his face and saw that it was a capital “T.” He felt a hint of exhilaration as he examined it.

  “Let me see the letter,” he said, snapping his fingers. Jaxon pulled out Langford’s final words and gave the sheet of paper to Reddic, who rested it on the open book. Scrutinizing it, he found a capital “T” and compared it with the one written in the novel. The penmanship was almost identical.

  He turned the page in the book and found another letter, this time an “O.” The excitement grew as he found yet another letter on the next page, and then another on the following. There were seven handwritten letters on seven pages, virtually unnoticeable to a casual reader.

  Trying to temper his enthusiasm, Reddic said, “Jaxon, write this down for me.”

  Taking back the paper, Jaxon flipped it over and jotted down what Reddic dictated. Holding the thin sheet of paper in his left hand, he stared at what he just wrote. It was a name, an Aztec name.

  Tonauac.

  “I think we’ve found the code-key,” announced Reddic.

  Unsure of how to respond, Jaxon said, “Yes, yes it does.”

  “Come on. Let’s go see if the good professor was right.”

  They sat at the table closest to the corner where Reddic could see all traffic coming up the stairs. He scrolled through the photographs he had taken with his phone until he found the códice. He amplified the size of the picture so the Hebrew characters were plainly visible on the small screen.

  “Here,” he said, giving the phone to Jaxon. “You’re much more familiar with Hebrew than I am. You should write down the characters so there isn’t a mistake.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” Jaxon said, taking the phone. “If Dr. Langford knew the code-key why not just write it on the letter? Why all the cloak and dagger stuff?”

  “Trust me, Langford knew what he was doing. Remember, he was being followed and watched, he told us so in the letter. He had no way of knowing if anybody saw him leave the letter in the locker. It was a contingency plan. Had the letter fallen into the wrong hands it would have been of little value to anybody who didn’t understand the postscript. It was a smart move by a smart man.”

  “I guess if you put it that way,” Jaxon said, nodding reassuringly.

  He sat the phone on the tabletop and ran his hand over the sheet of paper to smooth the creases out. Satisfied, he began drawing each character in the order that it appeared on the códice. He worked fastidiously so that his reconstruction would be accurate. His eyes were intensely focused on the task.

  After almost five minutes he put the pen down and counted the number of characters on the sheet of paper and compared it with the total number on the códice. Worried that something was wrong, Reddic held his breath while Jaxon calculated. He felt relieved when he said the number matched.

  He slid the sheet along the tabletop so that Reddic could see the composition. At first glance it looked like a matrix code. There were four lines with six characters and one line with five.

  Reddic analyzed the foreign writ. He felt slightly overwhelmed, almost helpless. It was all completely unintelligible to him.

  “Does any of this make sense to you?” he asked.

  “No, not at all. They’re just random consonants. How in the world are we going to decrypt this?”

  “Well, we have the code-key, so that’s a start. We’ll just have to take it one step at a time.” A young girl coming up the stairs distracted Reddic. The girl, an attractive Hispanic wearing jeans and a white blouse, flashed her white teeth in a smile and sat at a table on the other side of the room next to a window. Reddic watched her for another half minute before he spoke again.

  “I’m assuming that this is a transposition cipher since we have a code-key,” he said, nearly whispering. “It’s a pretty straightforward procedure. I’ll walk you through it.” He picked the pen off the table and held it out for Jaxon. “Tell me about the language of the code-key.”

  “It’s Nahuatl,” said Jaxon. He took the pen and twirled it between his fingers as he spoke. “It was the primary language of the Aztecs. Some scholars believe it was an adopted form of a pre-Columbian language indigenous to Mesoamerica over a thousand years prior to their emergence. It was usually written in glyphs, but the spoken Nahuatl, when written phonetically, supposedly resembled a Latin-based language.”

  “So it had an alphabet, so to speak?”

  “Today it does. I’m not sure if there was an alphabet in existence during Aztec rule. However, like I said, it could be compared closely to Latin.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” said Reddic. “If you look at the code-key, what is the alp
habetical order of the letters?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Jaxon.

  “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. We need to assign a number to each letter according to the order in which it would appear in the alphabet.”

  “Fine,” Jaxon said, swiftly scribbling on the paper. “Here you are.”

  Reddic studied the key letter numbers for a moment. Now that the order was established they were able to make an attempt at decrypting the cipher. He explained the next step carefully. They were to separate each letter in numerical order and then tally up that letter to all those that preceded it. For instance, there were three letters before the first “A”; adding one made four. Five letters came before the second “A”, making its total six.

  After marking off each letter Reddic drew a 7x7 table, explicating that the numerical value for each letter would allow them to know how to rearrange the Hebrew characters. Since there were seven total letters in the code-key they would fill the first row of the table with the first seven letters of the cipher.

  “Hebrew is read from right to left,” Jaxon corrected. “The first set of characters needs to be in the last row.”

  “Do your thing,” said Reddic. He waited for his brother to fill in the text before resuming. “Now it gets a little trickier,” he said.

  The next stage required that they take the following six letters of the cipher and copy them over to the table. However, Jaxon recognized the problem immediately. One column would be devoid of a letter. But which column should be left blank? Pulling the sheet of paper away, Reddic scratched on the outside of the table each letter of the code-key in alphabetical order along with the total amount of letters preceding it.

  Pointing with the tip of the pen, Reddic said, “Take a look at this. We’ve decided that the first ‘A’ has a total value of four, since three letters precede it, right? That means that in the first column there can only be four total characters. The second ‘A’ adds up to six, so the second column will have six letters in it, and so on and so forth. Do you understand?”

  Jaxon’s eyes were alive with fervor and zeal. “Yes, the pattern is astounding,” he said. “The ‘T’ has no letters before it. Therefore, the sixth column will have only one representation.”

  “That’s exactly right. Now get going.”

  Sticking to the newly acquired model, Jaxon methodically finished the transfer. But after all the rules were satisfied there was still one character that remained. Addressing the issue to Reddic, they decided to put it in the final column.

  With a look of triumph Jaxon scooted the paper across the table to Reddic, who promptly passed it back. “You haven’t completed it yet,” he warned. “You need to break up the table into individual words to translate.” Reluctantly, Jaxon wrote out the Hebrew characters a third time, accomplishing the undertaking in a matter of minutes.

  “Are you satisfied?” he asked curtly, holding the paper in front of his face.

  “So what does it say?”

  Jaxon cleared his throat. “It basically says, `âsâh yârêachlemo dalet `adhiym shemesh yâdha`mebho’o bet geresh resh samekh het.” Reddic gave a contemptuous glare of disapproval. “Oh, you want to know what it means,” Jaxon said acerbically. “There’s a difference between asking what it says and what it means. It’s like asking for a transliteration when you really wanted a translation.”

  “All right Professor Smith, what does it mean?”

  “I accept your apology,” Jaxon replied. He moved his chair closer to Reddic and put the sheet of paper between them. Near the bottom of the page there was a single line of Hebrew writ.

  עָשָׂה- יָ רֵחַ - ד - לְמוֹעֲדִים - שֶׁמֶשׁ - יָדַע - מְבוֹאו - ב׳רסח

  “The message is enigmatic, especially when you consider that there are numbers mixed in with the text.”

  “I don’t see any numbers,” said Reddic.

  “That’s because they’re the same as letters. In Hebrew each letter has a numerical value. Let me show you.” He pointed to the cluster of characters on the right side. “The seventh character from the right that, coincidentally, looks like a seven is the Hebrew letter dalet, having a numerical value of four. The last group of characters on the far left is bet geresh resh samekh het, totaling two thousand two hundred and sixty-eight. So if you interpolate those into the text, the literal translation of the message is: Make Moon, Four Seasons, Sun Knows Descend, 2,268.”

  “So something makes the moon have four seasons while the sun knows that either it or the moon will descend 2,268 units of some kind? That’s really bizarre,” said Reddic, chuckling mildly. “Do you have any clue what that implies?”

  Shaking his head, Jaxon rubbed two fingers over each temple, thinking about the translation. He closed his eyes. He wondered if it was a riddle or a puzzle. Or was it a message so undemanding that he was over thinking it? Maybe it was a fabrication that Faulkner wanted them to have to throw them off course. He exhaled deeply. If only Dr. Langford were still alive. He would surely be able to discover the meaning.

  Thinking of his professor made his mind begin to drift. He struggled to regain focus as recollections about the brilliance of his former great mentor flashed before his eyes. Langford had taught him so much about life and the art of historiography. He was a father figure to Jaxon, especially after the death of his real father. He didn’t know whom he would work with when he returned to Cornell, and he didn’t care. He was considering leaving the program; perhaps being a historian wasn’t meant to be.

  His thoughts turned to his dissertation. It was Langford’s idea to explore the religious parallelism of both continents. He had learned so much in a very short time. The number of shared traditions and beliefs that he had found was staggering. Even comparing something as mundane as structural achievements or city planning was a compelling argument that a primordial relationship between the two worlds existed.

  Jaxon’s eyes suddenly shot open. He lifted his head and tried to hone in on his most recent thought. He forced his mind to push away the clouds of doubt and uncertainty. Everything was becoming clear. How could he have been so stupid? It was right in front of him the whole time. It was the entire point of his dissertation.

  Pounding the table with his fist, he jumped up and knocked his chair over. The Hispanic girl turned, staring, wondering what all the commotion was about.

  “I think I know what it means,” he said, unable to contain his excitement.

  “Well sit down and tell me,” Reddic urged.

  “There’s no time.” He grabbed the letter and stuffed it in his pocket. “We can talk on the way.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  They traveled north on a windy rural highway through the interior of Mexico. The scenery changed dramatically. The urban landscape of Mexico City and Puebla was gone, supplanted instead by tobacco and blue agave fields. Sheep, horses and an assortment of livestock leisurely grazed on prairie grass within old wooden fences that marked the boundaries of rustic homesteads. Occasionally, dogs jumped out into the road as if they were intent on attacking the green Volkswagen and then they would frantically scurry back to within the friendly confines of their owner’s property.

  Almost thirty minutes had flown by without a single word about the ambiguous message. Jaxon stared out his window at the countryside, making comments about the local laws governing water rights and agricultural taxes. Reddic listened tolerantly as he carefully maneuvered the vehicle around the tortuous corners and over the hills of the serpentine highway. His patience, however, was running dry.

  “So,” Reddic clamored. “What were you going to tell me about the meaning of the deciphered message?”

  Jaxon turned from the window rolling his neck. “It’s all beginning to make sense,” he said.

  “What’s making sense, the cipher?” Reddic asked.

  “No, well yes, but I was referring to my dissertation.” He shifted positions in the cramped seat, angling toward Reddic. “I don’t
think I ever told you before, but my dissertation topic was not my idea. It was Langford’s.”

  “And?”

  “I mean it was his baby. He tried to give me the impression that I had autonomy in terms of what to research, but in reality he was directing the whole thing. For example, when we met regularly he would review the pieces that I had written. Every single time he would point out the positive aspects and compliment me on my research abilities, telling me that I had a bright future. Then he would offer suggestions as to how it could be improved.”

  “All professors do that, Jax,” Reddic interrupted.

  “Yes, you’re right, they do. But he worked in specifics, not generalities like other professors. He would explicitly tell me I needed to look up such and such author and analyze his work and incorporate it into my dissertation. The source material was incredible, Reddic. Many times it was a primary source that few scholars knew even existed.”

  “That must have been good for your research, but I still don’t understand your point.”

  “Remember when Faulkner accused Langford of using me to find the Stone of Truth?” Reddic nodded. “Well he may not have been too far off.”

  “You believe Faulkner?” asked Reddic incredulously.

  “Of course not. I know Langford wasn’t manipulating me. On the contrary; I believe he was pushing me toward it.”

  Reddic paid close attention as Jaxon recounted numerous research topics that his professor had admonished him to explore. Festivals, religious celebrations, rituals, language roots, traditional legends, and Mesoamerican measurements were among the themes that he studied. He told of Langford’s fascination with the significance of mountains within ancient religious contexts.