The Lost Island

11

You son of a bitch!” Gideon cried as Garza tightened his grip. “I can’t believe you just destroyed — you fucking destroyed—that priceless work of art!” He jerked his arm away from Garza, took another step toward Glinn.

Unperturbed, Glinn held up a hand. “Wait. Please reserve judgment until the end.”

Breathing hard, Gideon fought to get himself under control. He couldn’t believe it. He had been conned into participating in a horrible act of destruction. This was unbelievable, despicable. He would go to the cops, tell them all about Glinn and the theft. What did he have to lose? He was going to be dead in ten months anyway.

Still using the tweezers, the technician laid the now blank sheet under blotters to absorb the excess moisture, and then put it on a glass stage, part of a large machine.

“That,” said Glinn calmly, nodding at the machine, “is an XRF analyzer. X-ray fluorescence.”

As the technician busied himself with the machine, Glinn continued. “Are you familiar with the term palimpsest?”

“No.”

“In the Middle Ages, manuscript vellum was a very costly material. Only the finest skins could be used — sheep, calf, or goat. The best came from fetal animals. The skin had to be prepared by skilled experts — split, soaked, limed, scudded, and stretched. Because it was so expensive, monks often reused vellum from old books. They’d scrape off the old text, resoak and wash the vellum, and use it again.”

“Get to the point.”

“A palimpsest is the ghostly shadow of that earlier, original text. Some of the most important and famous Greek and Latin texts are today known only as palimpsests, having later been scraped off and written or painted over for other purposes. That’s what we’re looking for here.”

“There’s an older text underneath the Chi Rho painting?”

“There’s something under there, but it’s not a text.”

“For God’s sake, did you have to destroy it to see it?”

“Unfortunately, yes. The Chi Rho page had an ultra-heavy underpainting of white flake, a medieval paint made with lead. We had to remove that to see what was underneath.”

“What could possibly be more important than what was there?” Gideon asked angrily. “You yourself said the Book of Kells is the finest illuminated manuscript in existence!”

“We have reason to believe what’s underneath is more important.” Glinn turned back to the technician. “Ready?”

Stanislavsky nodded.

“Run it.”

The technician raised the stage on the analyzer, adjusted some dials, and punched a command into a digital keyboard. A faint, blurry drawing sprang to life on the embedded screen. Slowly, like a master, Stanislavsky adjusted various dials and controls, fine-tuning the image. At first it looked like a random series of dots, lines, and squiggles, but slowly it came into sharper view.

“What the hell is that?” Gideon asked, peering more closely.

“A map.”

“A map? To a treasure?”

“A map to something better than a treasure. Something absolutely, utterly, and completely extraordinary. Something that will change the world.” Glinn’s gray eye fixed itself on Gideon. “And your next assignment is to go get it.”