Lost Empire

CHAPTER 26

LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

“PETE, WENDY, GET THESE INTO THE VAULT AND DO A QUICK assessment,” Selma said. She slid the shoe boxes across the worktable, and her assistants picked them up and disappeared into the archive chamber.Unsure of the Blaylock letters’ condition, Sam and Remi had resisted temptation and refrained from opening the Ziplocs before they got home.

“A fruitful trip, it seems,” Selma said.

“Your friend Julianne is one of a kind,” Remi said.

“Tell me something I don’t know. If I’m ever hit by a bus, she should be your first call for a replacement.”

“Before or after we call 911?” Sam said.

“You’re a funny one, Mr. Fargo. This Ashworth woman . . . she seemed genuine?”

“She did,” replied Remi. “Between Blaylock’s journal and Morton’s biography we should be able to definitively prove or disprove the letters’ bona fides.”

Selma nodded. “While Pete and Wendy are working with those, care to see what progress we’ve made on the journal?”

“Can’t wait,” said Sam. The three of them sat down at the worktable facing the nearest LCD screen, and Selma used the remote to scroll into their server. She located the file she wanted and double-clicked it. It filled the screen:

“Wow,” Sam murmured. “That’s a busy mind. Could be the thoughts of a genius or a nut.”

“Or someone who did a lot of daydreaming,” Remi said. “But in this case Blaylock doesn’t strike me as the fanciful type. He was a type A personality before the term was coined.”

Selma said, “This is a fairly representative page. Some have nothing but writing, but the majority are a mishmash of notes and drawings, some freehand and some probably done with a template or drafting tools.”

“Clearly the image in the upper left-hand corner is a hand-drawn map,” Sam said. “And some text in the middle of it . . . ‘Great green jeweled bird.’ To the right of that, some more text-can’t make it out-then some geometric symbols in the corner. Have you tried enlarging the text?”Selma nodded. “I had Wendy work on it-she’s the graphics wizard. The more we enlarged it, the fuzzier it got.”

“What’s at the bottom right? Was ‘Orizaga’ there? Selma, have you seen that elsewhere?”

“The name? In many places.”

Remi stood up and walked closer to the screen. “In the middle, on the left and right . . . ‘Leonardo the Liar’ and ‘63 great men.’ Between them, these numbers here . . . ‘1123581321.’ Boy, talk about cryptic.”“The bottom right is clearly a bird of some kind,” Selma added.

“The ‘great green jeweled bird’?” Remi suggested.

“Could be. As for two images in the middle-the one that looks a little like a cave painting and the arc below it-they’ve appeared on dozens and dozens of pages so far.”

The three fell silent, staring at the screen for several minutes. Eyes narrowed, Sam stood up and walked to screen and tapped the number sequence Remi had pointed out. “I must be more tired than I thought,” he said. “These numbers are the Fibonacci sequence.” Knowing his wife didn’t share his love of math, Sam explained: “When added together, the sum of the first two digits equals the third digit. You add the third and fourth digit together and get the sum of the fifth digit, and so on.” He walked back to the worktable and scribbled on a pad:

“You get the idea,” he said. “It’s also the basis of what’s known as the golden ratio, or the golden spiral, or even the Fibonacci spiral. Here, I’ll show you.” He walked to one of the computer workstations, did a quick Google search, and double-clicked a thumbnail. It filled the screen:

“You simply build a grid with whatever Fibonacci numbers you choose and overlay it with an arc,” Sam said. “Your first box could be an inch square or a foot square. Anything.”“That’s what’s on the journal page,” Remi said. “A Fibonacci spiral.”

Sam nodded. “Part of one, at least. The spiral is central to a lot of sacred geometry theories. You see the spiral in nature-the way shells form, in the buds of flowers. The Greeks used the spiral in a lot of their architecture. Even Web designers and graphic artists use it to create layouts. There’ve been scientific studies that show the golden spiral is inherently pleasing to the eye. No one’s exactly sure why.”“The question is,” Remi said, “why was Blaylock obsessed with it? What else can it be used for, Sam?”

“Anything to do with geometry, really. I read that the NSA uses the Fibonacci sequence and the spiral in cryptography, but don’t ask me how. That’s far outside my wheelhouse. Selma, are there any more images that repeat?”

In response, Selma picked up the phone and dialed the archive vault. “Pete, do you remember image twelve-alpha-four? Right, that’s the one. How many repeats so far? Have you digitized it yet? Good, put it on the server, will you? I want to show it to Mr. and Mrs. Fargo. I’ll hold.” A few moments later: “Thanks.”

Selma hung up, grabbed the remote, and used it to scroll back into the server’s file system. “The image we’ve named twelve-alpha-four has repeated nine times so far, usually in the margins but sometimes as a central image. Here it is. Wendy worked her magic and plucked it off the page. It’s still pretty messy.” On the screen, Selma moved the pointer over a thumbnail and double-clicked it. The image enlarged:

“Looks like a skull,” Sam said.

“My thought as well,” replied Selma.

Sam looked at Remi, who was staring at the image, her head cocked to one side, eyes narrowed. He said, “Remi . . . Remi . . .”

She blinked her eyes and looked at him. “Yes?”

“I know that expression. What’s happening in your head?”

She didn’t reply but shook her head absently. Without a word she got up, walked to one of the workstations, and sat down. Her fingers began working the keyboard. Without turning she said, “Just had a moment of deja vu. Ever since we ran into Rivera and his men, their names have been stuck in my head. Why Aztec names? I thought it was just an oddity. I did a semester of Ancient Mesoamerican Studies at B.C., so I knew I’d seen that image before.” She tapped a few more keys and murmured, “There you are . . .”She turned in her seat and pointed at the TV screen. “It’s called Miquiztli. In Nahuatl, the Aztec language, it represented death.”