The Judas Strain (34 page)

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.