Jade grinned at him. “I’m so glad you’re back.”
He looked askance at her. “I’ll just pretend you really mean that.”
“Of course I meant it.”
“And still not convinced. So, what did you find at the Hypogeum?”
“God, it was incredible. Way more than just seeing ghosts. I had an out-of-body experience. I flew up into space, went halfway around the world, and then landed at the vault. I actually saw the lock mechanism that Archimedes described.”
“And was it a timelock like Roche said?”
Jade shrugged. “It was like looking at an electrical schematic. I can tell what it is, but I have no idea what it means or how it works.”
“Could you draw it from memory?”
“Possibly. There’s one thing I remember vividly. It was the last thing I saw before…” Her eye found Shah in the rear view mirror. “Before the vision ended. Three circles. They looked like they were linked, sort of like the Olympic rings, but they weren’t really. It was just an optical illusion.”
“Sounds like Borromean Rings.”
“Is that a Tolkien thing?”
Professor laughed. “Not quite. It’s a math problem. Complex geometry. It would be easier to show it than try to explain it. Got any paper?”
Jade took a notepad and the stub of a pencil from her shirt pocket, and passed it over. Professor flipped through page after page of sketches and field notes until he found a blank page. He spent a few minutes drawing a figure, then held it up to show her.
“That’s it,” she confirmed.
“Borromean Rings,” he confirmed. “They appear to be linked at the center, but when you follow the individual circles, you see that they’re actually sitting on top of each other, which is physically impossible. Well, with true circles anyway. You’ve never seen anything like this before?”
“Don’t think so. Archimedes was a math guy, yeah? Would he have known about them?”
“They don’t show up in the historical record until the 6th century, almost eight hundred years after Archimedes, but he was a genius. Way ahead of his time. And most of his writings have been lost. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he at least toyed with the idea.” He stared at his sketch for a moment. “You know, according to most accounts, Archimedes was working on a problem right before he died. Supposedly, his last words were, ‘Don’t disturb my circles.’ Something to that effect. Maybe he was trying to solve the riddle of Borromean Rings.”
“Well, that was the last thing I saw. I think it’s important. Maybe the key to opening the vault.”
He nodded, then looked at her with the same suspicious glance. “Wait a second. You said we were going to the vault. But we’re driving toward Death Valley. Don’t tell me…”
“I saw where it is. In my vision.”
“And it’s in California?”
“Arizona, actually.”
He shook his head. “No. This is crazy. You had a bad trip, Jade. Infrasound stimulates different parts of the brain, but it can’t put ideas in your head that aren’t already there.”
“Why not? When you hear a song on the radio, it’s just a bunch of high frequency radio waves assembled a certain way. Maybe the ancients who built the Hypogeum built it so that it would play a specific pattern of resonance waves, to produce a specific effect.”
“Jade, think about it. You’ve done most of your work in the Southwest. Of course that’s what you would see. It’s just your brain trying to make sense of it.”
“If you had been there, you’d know that it wasn’t a hallucination. But it doesn’t matter. We’ll be there in a few hours. If we find it right where I saw it in my vision, then we’ll know I’m right. If it’s not there, I’ll admit I was wrong. Does that work for you?”
“If I may,” Shah said, breaking his long silence. “The Hypogeum is important. My partner knew that Jade would go there, and I think she knew what you would find.”
Professor craned his head around and stared at Shah. “Why is he here, again?”
“That was part of the deal for saving your ass,” Jade said. “I made the call. Get over it.”
He frowned but did not push the issue. “I’m still pretty skeptical about the role of infrasound in this, but I’ll allow for the possibility. We’ve seen too much crazy stuff to dismiss it out of hand. And like you said, if it’s not there, we’ll know. But has it occurred to you that, if it really is there, the Changelings know about it and will probably be waiting for you?”
“Which is why I’m glad that you’re back. One of the reasons, anyway.”
“So where is it? Exactly, I mean.”
Jade glanced at Shah again. She had not revealed the exact location to him or anyone else yet. But Professor was right. The Changelings weren’t looking for the vault. They almost certainly knew where it was. They were only interested in keeping anyone else from finding it. She was keeping the secret only to keep Shah from trying to double-cross her. Even a few hours’ advance notice would be enough for him to set up an ambush. But if that was his plan, then he would not make his move until the door to the vault was open, if it could be opened. She would only know his true intentions then.
“The Vault,” she said, “is in Sedona.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Although he initially greeted Jade’s declaration much the same way that he might have reacted to Jeremiah Stillman or someone of his ilk going on about extraterrestrial astronauts — for very nearly the same reason — he had to admit that it made a lot of sense.
The area surrounding the northern Arizona town — equal parts artists’ colony and tourist trap — situated about halfway between the city of Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, was renowned for a wide range of paranormal activities ranging from frequent UFO sightings to energy vortices capable of transporting people to parallel dimensions. The sheer volume of anecdotal evidence suggested that something might actually be happening at Sedona. There were simply too many stories to discount them all as cynical hoaxes or delusions brought on by too much time in the hot desert sun and unrealistic expectations.
The actual scientific evidence for such phenomena was sketchy. Pictures purporting to show auras and other ghostly images were easily dismissed as lens flares, or more often than not, were the result of hucksters using techniques like Kirlian photography to produce visually stunning, but definitely not supernatural images of electromagnetic fields. Terrestrial electromagnetic energy was widely cited as the source of Sedona’s strange phenomena. The area was reputed to be a major junction of electromagnetic meridians, often called “ley lines”—similar effects were often reported at the Pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge, Easter Island, or anywhere that New Age gurus might be able to convince the gullible to part with their money — but EM effects could be measured, and there was no observable difference in the earth’s magnetic field at Sedona to back up this pseudo-scientific explanation.
Nevertheless, Jade’s experiences in Paracas and the Hypogeum had convinced him to give those stories a second look. In almost every case, the effects described by visitors to Sedona and the surrounding area mirrored the effects described in infrasound experiments, ranging from altered mood to hallucinations to temporary loss of consciousness and lapses of memory, which could be mistaken for teleportation — another commonly reported phenomena associated with the Sedona vortices. A resonance chamber in the hills of Sedona, either naturally occurring or constructed by one of the civilizations that had inhabited the area over the preceding nine thousand years, was a perfectly plausible explanation.