The Year of the Great Seventh (38 page)

Nate and I needed a solution right now. There was no time left to investigate any further.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t tried something as simple as putting the four words into an Internet search engine before. I opened another of the links from the search. This one was a facsimile of the original edition. Scrolling page by page, I quickly realized that the quatrains from the original edition were in French—Nostradamus’s mother tongue. Not understanding a word, I decided to move on to the next link.

But right before I hit the “back” button, something caught my eye. On the cover of the original edition, there was a long-bearded man wearing a traditional robe and reading a book that was on a table. Behind him, there was a window, and on the table there was a globe.

There was something strange about the globe. Instead of having the world map drawn on it, it was covered with random geographical figures and numbers. And in between the random figures, if you stared at the globe long enough, you could see the four symbols from the crabs camouflaged within the other figures. They’d been there all these years, but only if you knew what you were looking for could you see them.

Nostradamus had left a hidden message. He must have deciphered Cleopatra’s secret.

Unbelievable. All these years, the four symbols had been right here, but no one realized what they meant. Right below each symbol there was a number, and right away I knew what these numbers meant. Each of them was a reference to a quatrain in the book. As they were in French, I pasted the four quatrains into an online translator. I pressed “translate” on the webpage, and after the page flickered for a second, the translations appeared at the bottom.

The year of the great seventh number accomplished,

It will appear at the time of the games of slaughter:

Not far from the great millennial age,

When the buried will go out from their tombs.

A coffin is put into the vault of iron,

Where seven children of the king are held.

The ancestors and forebears will come forth from the depths of hell,

He will lament sacrificing her dead, the fruit of their line.

The body without soul no longer to be sacrificed:

Day of death put for birthday:

The divine spirit will make the soul happy,

Seeing the word in its eternity.

Beneath the oak tree of Gienne, struck by lightning,

The treasure is hidden not far from there.

That which for many centuries had been gathered,

When found, a man will die, his eye pierced by a spring.

So many questions welled up inside me. However, there was one that stood out over the others.
Dad, why do I know what some of these quatrains mean?

Dad had spoken to me about the pyramids known as the minor seven. They were scattered along the Nile, and the one farthest south is known as the Great Seventh. Dad told me it had several numbers engraved above the entrance, and no one had ever established what they referred to. That had to be “
The year of the great seventh number accomplished.”
I searched for the pyramid online, and got the numbers from the Internet. They didn’t mean anything to me.

I wasn’t sure what “
It will appear at the time of the games of slaughter”
meant, but it had to be a reference to a war. “
Not far from the great millennial age”
had to refer to a century. I didn’t know what “
When the buried will go out from their tombs”
meant, but my imagination was already running free.

The second quatrain referred to the Vault of Iron. The first time I came to New York with Dad, he’d taken me to a place called The Cloisters. It’s a branch of the Metropolitan Museum located at the northern tip of Manhattan, in an area known as Washington Heights. I remember that in the Cloisters we’d seen seven stone coffins that belonged to the seven great pharaohs of Egypt. One of them was known as the Vault of Iron.

Having learned my lesson, I searched for the Vault of Iron, and… bingo. It was still on display at the Cloisters. Then it hit me. The first day at school when Nate and I had looked at each other, I’d seen the coffins. This was it. Someone or something had been trying to warn us of our fate, and even though Nate denied seeing them, I knew he had, just like I did.

Like the previous quatrain, I didn’t know what the other lines meant, as they could be interpreted in many ways. However, one thought was that it could either be Nate or me. “
The ancestors and forebears will come forth from the depths of hell. He will lament sacrificing her dead, the fruit of their line.”

When I read the first two lines of the third quatrain, I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. “
The body without soul no longer to be sacrificed: Day of death put for birthday.”

In three hours, it would be my birthday. I simply pushed that thought to the back of my mind. Again, I had no idea what the last two lines meant. “
The divine spirit will make the soul happy, Seeing the word in its eternity.”

The fourth quatrain seemed the solution to all our problems. “
Beneath the oak tree of Gienne, struck by lightning, the treasure is hidden not far from there.”

But unfortunately, I didn’t know what the tree of Gienne was.

I searched online for the word “Gienne,” but all the hits referred to the Nostradamus quatrains. I also tried the online dictionary. No luck. The word didn’t exist as such. Maybe it was a French word. I tried an online French dictionary, but it also came up empty.

I knew I was close. I didn’t know what the quatrains meant, but I had to believe they contained the solution to save Nate. The problem was how to connect them all. The numbers from the Great Seventh pyramid—they had to mean something.

I decided to put the first one into a search engine.

Right away, it returned a list of hits on Octavian (also known as the emperor Augustus), the ruler of the Roman Empire and one-time ally of Mark Antony. The number 010142 referred to January 1, 42 BC—the day he rose to power following the murder of Julius Caesar and was declared
Divi filius
or “son of God.” Augustus went on to conquer Egypt, bringing about the end of the 3000-year Egyptian Empire and the deaths of Cleopatra and her lover, Mark Antony.

I continued searching for the other numbers, and my heart almost stopped beating. They correlated with the dates that Genghis Khan, Hitler, and Mao Tse-Tung also rose to power. They all had something in common: they were dictators who committed genocide and war crimes against humanity.

After following down the list of numbers, I got to one that didn’t make any sense. It was the same for all the numbers after that.

The date was November 4
^th
of next year.

Now the second line of the quatrain made sense. “
It will appear at the time of the games of slaughter
.” The games of slaughter were the genocides.

It was three hours until my birthday, and I was determined to do whatever it took to stop whatever was about to happen. Our only lead was the Vault of Iron, so we had no choice but to gamble it all on one card. Grabbing my jacket, I stormed through the door and went to Nate’s room.

“Get dressed. We need to get to the Cloisters now.”

“What?”

“You have to trust me on this one. I’ll explain on the way there.”

CHAPTER XXI

NATE WAS BARELY ABLE to stand on his own. Staggering upright and supported by my arm, he managed to get himself dressed.

If anyone saw Nate, they were going to freak out. He looked like a junkie with a strange skin condition. His eyes had gone almost white, his skin was gray, and his face was deformed. Shuffling through his suitcase, I found a black jacket with a hood and his Ray-Bans.

If the stars lined up for us, we wouldn’t have to break into the Cloisters. I checked the Cloisters website before leaving my room. Normally, it closed at 5:00 p.m., but tonight there was a special event and it would be open until 11:00 p.m. The problem was that it was an exclusive black-tie event, and you could only get in if you had an invitation.

It was something we’d have to worry about later. The first mission was to get through the lobby of the motel without raising the attention of the man at reception.

As I didn’t have any cash left and we obviously needed a taxi, I called a car service company and paid with Nate’s credit card.

Opening the door of the room, I checked there was no one in the corridor. The neon light had stopped flickering.

Nate leaned against the door. Wrapping my arm around his, I helped him out of the room and we climbed down the steps one by one. He was still shaking, and every few steps he would clench both hands on the rail.

We came to a halt at the bottom step, and I peeked around the corner to see if the man from reception was still there. Like before, he was engrossed with his tiny TV.

“We need to move as fast as possible,” I whispered to Nate.

He nodded, unable to speak.

Wrapping my arm around his, we walked through the lobby, and when we reached the door, I heard the chair at reception swivel.

“I see you finally found your boyfriend.”

Looking over my shoulder, I smiled back at the man and pushed the door open to get out of there. A Lincoln town car was already waiting for us.

It was drizzling. The raindrops were a mix of water and ice. The man with the Yankees cap was still loitering outside the deli. He stared at me and when he moved his gaze to Nate, his jaw dropped. The driver saw us coming and unlocked the doors. Thankfully, he didn’t move from his seat.

We got into the car and drove off. I glanced back at the man outside the deli and he was staring openly as we drove away.

The driver looked back toward Nate through the rearview mirror. He didn’t seem to react. Maybe he was just focused on the traffic.

I placed my hand on top of Nate’s, interlocking my fingers with his and trying to give him strength to hold it together for a bit longer while I began to explain what I’d found in the quatrains.

We drove up to 145
^th
Street and then the town car crossed over to the west side, taking the Hudson Parkway north. Then we took 180
^th
Street and the driver dropped us in the middle of Fort Tryon Park.

The Cloisters, which are a combination of five interconnected abbeys, sit on the side of the park. The buildings are secluded on top of a cliff overlooking the Hudson Valley. They are made of stone blocks and about two stories high. However, they have only one row of tiny windows right at the top.

When we arrived, spotlights illuminated the neo-gothic arches behind the trees. I remembered the scene from years ago when I visited with Dad.

The drizzle had now turned into pouring rain. We hid beneath the trees as I tried to figure out a plan. It was going to be more difficult to get in than I expected. People in tuxedos were already leaving the party. Some of the staff held umbrellas for the guests as they waited for their limousines.

It was so cold the drops of almost-frozen water felt like pricking needles as they fell on my skin. Nate propped himself against a tree trunk in order to catch his breath. I had to be fast. We had to get in there as soon as possible.

Wind howled through the trees, whipping the nearby branches.

I glanced at the Cloisters and back at Nate. The black hood and the sunglasses could only hide so much. We had to be invisible if we were going to get anywhere near the building. As I looked at the people coming out of the Cloisters in their evening gowns and tuxedos, it seemed it would be impossible to get in there.

I had to do this. I’d done it many times with Emma, Megan, Chase, and Tyson. Crashing parties was our favorite hobby, and this, in principle, was no different. I had to use our golden rules: walk with confidence and use the staff entrance which is always at the back.

On the right side of the park there was a short set of stairs leading behind the Cloisters. It seemed to be the staff entrance, as waiters were bringing out boxes and leaving them on the lawn.

“Can you do it? We need to get in there before they close. We don’t have much time.”

“Let’s do it.” Nate gasped as he observed the glittering scene over my shoulder.

We ducked behind the trees until we reached the stairs. Then, as if we were working for the caterers, I grabbed one of the boxes that the staff had brought out. We went down the steps and I knocked on the back door. I wasn’t sure if this was going to work. Nate wore his sunglasses and the hood and looked the other way. He gave the impression of being anything but a member of the catering staff.

Instantly, someone opened the door from the inside and brushed past us on their way out. To my surprise there were at least twenty people working around a set of long tables in a hall. It was the preparation station for the catering, and thankfully, everyone was packing glasses and plates… and minding their own business.