Lost Empire

CHAPTER 27

“THAT’S MORE THAN A LITTLE OMINOUS,” SAM SAID AFTER A moment.

“It also doubled as the symbol for the afterlife. It’s all about context. Selma, do we have others?”

“Yes, three.” Selma brought them up on screen:

Remi peered at them for a few moments, then said, “Do we have images we can use to compare?”

Selma picked up the phone to check.

Remi went on: “Unless I’m wrong, they’re all Aztec, too. The one on the right is Tecpatl, which represents flint, or obsidian knife; the middle one is Cipactli, or crocodile; the last one is Xochitl, or flower. It represents the last day of the twenty-day month.”Sam asked Selma, “And these were isolated like the first one? No annotations?”

Selma was off the phone. “None. Wendy’s uploading some clean images onto the server now.” Selma used the pointer to back out of the current image files until she found the new ones.They were labeled “Flint,” “Crocodile,” and “Flower”:

“They look like a match to me,” Selma said.

“Me too,” replied Sam. “Remi, all of these are from the Aztec calendar, correct? It might be useful to see the whole thing.”

“I have the one Remi downloaded for me,” Selma said. She scrolled around the screen, found the correct file, and double-clicked it:

“Now, that’s

a calendar,” Sam muttered. “How in the hell did they make sense of that?”

“Patience, I would imagine,” Remi replied. “The symbols we’ve found so far all belong to the month ring. It’s the fourth one from the edge.”

“No wonder the one in Mexico City’s so big. How big exactly?”

“Twelve feet in diameter and four feet thick.”

“It’d have to be that big for anything to stand out. It’s fascinating.”

“More so when you realize it’s over five hundred years old. Three hundred of those it spent buried under the main square. Workers found it while doing repair work on the cathedral. It’s one of the last vestiges of Aztec culture.”The three of them went silent.

Selma’s cell phone rang. She answered, listened, then said, “We’ll be here. Bring it to the side gate. I’ll have Pete meet you.” She disconnected and told Sam and Remi, “Dobo’s on his way with the bell.”“That was fast,” said Remi.

“Feels like Christmas morning,” Sam replied.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER Pete Jeffcoat and Dobo came through the workroom’s side door, one pushing and the other pulling a chest-high wheeled enclosure constructed of two-by-fours; hanging inside it was the Shenandoah’s bell. Aside from a few darkened patches, the tarnish and barnacles were gone, swept away by Dobo’s magic. The bronze exterior fairly glowed under the workroom’s halogen pendant lights.Standing arms akimbo in his denim coveralls and white T-shirt, Dobo surveyed his handiwork. “Nice, yes?”

“Beautiful work, Dobo,” said Sam.

If not for his frequent and easy smiles, Alexandru Dobo would have looked sinister, with his bald pate and thick, drooping mustache. He was, Remi had once observed, a Cossack lost in time.

“Thank you, my friend.” He clapped Sam on the back. Sam took a steadying step, then one more-away from Dobo. “You see inside?” the Romanian asked. “See inside! Pyotr, help.”Dobo and Pete unlatched the bell from its hook, lifted it free, turned it upside down, then returned it, mouth up, to the cage. “Look, look!”

Sam, Remi, and Selma stepped forward and peered into the bell’s interior. Remi sighed. After a few moments Sam said, “Wish I could say I was surprised.”

“Me too,” replied Remi.

Carved haphazardly into the bell’s bronze interior were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of what appeared to be Aztec symbols.

After a few moments Sam muttered, “All aboard the Blaylock crazy train.”

SAM AND REMI GATHERED their team around the worktable, and over the next few hours, and a pair of family-sized pies from Sammy’s Wood-fired Pizzas, they mulled over the mystery before them. The crux of the issue, they decided, could be summed up in two questions:

1. Did Blaylock’s apparent mental instability cast into doubt all they’d found?2. Were Rivera and his people on a fool’s quest based on Blaylock’s influence, or on other evidence?

Clearly Rivera was either searching for something or trying to keep something hidden, something that was probably Aztec in origin.

Pete Jeffcoat said, “If you’re right about the tourists they murdered, then it seems clear they’re trying to hide something. It’s hard for me to believe they’d do that just because of Blaylock. Wouldn’t they have been asking the same questions about the guy that we are?”“Good point,” Sam said.

“If that’s the case,” Wendy said, “then maybe Blaylock wasn’t insane; maybe he was just eccentric, and there was something to his Aztec obsession.”

“As well as his fixation on the ship,” Selma added.

Remi said, “Okay, let’s take that as a given. How and why we don’t know, but Blaylock became obsessed with the Shenandoah, or El Majidi; at some point after that, his mind turned to all things Aztec. Before we go any further, we need to find out when that happened and what caused it.”Sam asked Pete and Wendy, “How’re we doing on Miss Cynthia’s letters?”

“Another hour or so, and we should have them all examined,” Wendy replied. “Another two hours to scan them and have the computer do an optical character recognition search. After that, we’ll be able to easily sort them by date and search by key word.”Sam smiled. “Got any big plans tonight?”

“I guess we do now,” Pete replied. ACCUSTOMED TO how her husband’s brain worked, Remi was not surprised to awaken and find him sitting up at the edge of the bed, Apple iPad propped on his knees. The nightstand clock read 4:12 A.M.“Lightbulb moment?” she asked.

“I was thinking about chaos.”

“Of course you were.”

“And how most mathematicians don’t believe in it. They know it exists-there’s even chaos theory-but I think secretly they all believe in underlying order. Even if it’s not obvious.”“I can buy that.”

“Then why would Blaylock go to all the trouble of randomly carving Aztec glyphs on the bell’s interior? And why the bell?”

Remi said, “I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”

“I’m working through it. Did you read this poem from Blaylock’s journal?”

“I didn’t know there was one.”

“I just found it. Pete and Wendy just uploaded it,” Sam said, then recited:

In my love’s heart I pen my devotion. On Engai’s gyrare I trust my feet. From above, the earth turns, my day is halved Words of Ancients words of Father Algarismo“Not bad for a mathematician,” observed Remi.

“I wonder if he used the bell because it’s durable, unlike paper. I also wonder if he used it because of its shape.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“The first line of his poem-‘In my love’s heart I pen my devotion’-he’s got to be talking about his wife, about Ophelia, which is what he renamed the El Majidi .”

Remi caught on. “And a ship’s bell could be considered the heart of the ship.”

“Right. Now, the second line, ‘On Engai’s gyrare I trust my feet.’ In Swahili, Engai is one of the spellings for the Maasai’s version of ‘God,’ and gyrare is Latin for ‘gyre’; it’s a synonym for vortex or spiral.”“As in the Fibonacci spiral. God’s pattern in nature.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Blaylock was using the spiral to guide himself. Put the lines together and maybe you’ve got Blaylock inscribing the bell with the source of his devotion-his obsession-and using the Fibonacci spiral as some kind of encoding technique.”

“And since by the time he made the inscriptions his wife was dead and he’d found the Shenandoah, his ‘devotion’ was something else altogether,” said Remi. “What about the gyre? How exactly would that fit in?”“Picture a golden spiral.”

“Okay.”

“Now picture it superimposed on the interior of the bell, starting at the crown and spiraling downward and outward toward the mouth.”

Remi was nodding. “And wherever the spiral intersects a symbol it means . . .” She shrugged. “What?”

“I don’t know. Something to do with the last three lines of the poem, maybe. I’m still working on that. All I know is that two of the most frequently repeated items in his journal are the Fibonacci spiral and Aztec symbols. If he’s hiding something, they’re probably involved.”

THEY GOT UP, made a carafe of coffee, and headed down to the workroom. Selma was asleep on a cot in the corner. The overhead halogen lights were dimmed. Pete and Wendy sat at the worktable, laptops open, the screens’ glow illuminating their faces.“Coffee, guys?” Sam whispered.

Wendy smiled, shook her head, and nodded toward the collection of Red Bull cans on the table.

“We’re almost done,” Pete said. “Those Ziploc bags must have done the trick. It’s just a guess, but I’d say the letters have been protected in one way or another for most of their life.”“You got them all?” Remi asked.

Wendy nodded. “Aside from some illegible spots here and there. We’ll have everything uploaded and sorted in a couple hours.”

“Sam’s got a hunch he wants to play,” Remi said.

“We’re all ears,” replied Wendy.

Sam explained his theory. Pete and Wendy considered it for a few moments, then nodded in unison. “Plausible,” Pete said.

“Ditto,” Wendy added. “Blaylock was a mathematician. Those guys love order within chaos.”

From across the room Selma’s scratchy voice said, “Buy what?”

“Go back to sleep,” Remi said.

“Too late. I’m up. Buy what?”

She got off the cot and shuffled to the worktable. Remi poured her a cup of coffee and slid the mug down the table. Selma palmed it, took a sip. Sam reexplained his spiral/bell/symbol theory.

“It’s worth a shot,” Selma agreed. “The crown of the bell would be the likely place to start the spiral, but how do we know how big it is? And you’re assuming it would unravel and end at the bell’s mouth. What if it doesn’t?”Sam smiled wearily. “Killjoy.”

THE GROUP BEGAN BRAINSTORMING. At the top of their list was the question of scale. A Fibonacci spiral could be built to any scale. If Blaylock was in fact using a spiral, he would’ve used a reference size for the first box in the grid. They tossed around ideas for an hour before realizing they were getting nowhere.“It could be anything,” Sam said, rubbing his eyes. “A number, a note, a doodle . . .” “Or something we haven’t even seen yet,” Remi added. “Something we’ve overlooked.”

Across the table, an exhausted Pete Jeffcoat laid his head down on the wood and stretched his arms before him. His right hand struck Blaylock’s walking staff, which rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor.“Damn!” Pete said. “Sorry.”

“No problem.” Sam knelt down to retrieve the staff. The bell clapper had torn free of its leather bindings and was hanging by a single thong. Sam picked them up together. He stopped and peered at the head of the staff. He frowned.“Sam?” said Remi.

“I need a flashlight.”

Wendy pulled out a storage drawer and handed an LED across to Sam, who clicked it on and shone it onto the staff’s head. “It’s hollow,” he muttered. “I need some long-handled tweezers.”Wendy retrieved a pair, handed them over.

Gingerly, Sam inserted the tips of the tweezers into the opening, wriggled them around for a few seconds, then began withdrawing them.

Grasped between the pincers was a corner of parchment.