“Fine.” She was right, but he did not like to be reminded of it. He looked them over again, this time more slowly. The sinking ship was probably the Dourado. But what to make of the others? A wrought iron fence, an old house, a river, an oak tree, a tombstone… He turned the page. There were more on this sheet, but nothing caught his eye as being of particular significance. What could they mean, if anything? And why were they all written on page one hundred twenty-five? After mulling it over for a few long, boring minutes, he flipped the notebook closed and pushed it back toward Kaylin.
“How’s your translation coming?” he asked, more to fill the silence than because he expected her to have discovered anything of significance so soon.
“Slowly,” she replied. “If I’ve got this right, it’s an unfinished letter to his mistress. He mentions someone named Domenic, and talks about his regrets.”
“Maybe they had a son together?” Dane asked.
“Could be. The mention of the Dourado isn’t of much significance. He just talks about how his life changed when the Dourado went down ‘on that January night.’” She bit her lip and looked up another word.
Something in her statement seemed to trip a switch in Dane’s subconscious.
“Say that again.”
“What?” She looked at him with a blank expression.
“That last part about the Dourado,” he said, closing his eyes and pressing his hands to his temples. “Read it back to me.”
“All right. ‘I tell you, darling, my life was forever changed when the Dourado went down that dark January night.’”
“What date, exactly, did the Dourado sink?” His heart beat faster as a wave of adrenalin surged through him.
Kaylin picked up another notebook and turned to one of the first pages. “January twenty-fifth. Why do you ask?”
“That’s it!” He pounded his fist on the table. “January twenty-fifth! One-twenty-five.”
“Page one twenty-five!” she cried with delight. “You’re right. That’s got to be it!” She pushed the letter away, grabbed the notebook, and scooted her chair around the table so that she could look at the sketches along with him.
“Now that we’re fairly certain these symbols are tied in with the Dourado, we need to figure out what he was trying to tell us.” Dane said, feeling confident for the first time since getting Corey’s cry for help.
“Could it be a cipher of some sort?” Kaylin asked.
“I don’t think so. There aren’t enough icons to cover much of the alphabet, and nothing repeats.”
“Perhaps it’s more complicated than that. Maybe we take the words for these different things, combine all the letters, and rearrange them to spell out a message?”
Dane turned and stared at her, his eyes wrinkled in a frown. “How in the world do you think of these things?”
She shrugged. “Ciphers were common back then, and some of them were pretty complicated.”
“I hope that isn’t the deal,” Dane said. “It would be hard enough to unscramble in English, but if he did the cipher in Portuguese…” He left the rest unsaid, as understanding dawned on her face.
“Does your friend have access to a computer program that could decrypt a message like this?”
“First of all, we aren’t sure that there is a message to decode.” He was growing frustrated again, and with the feeling came renewed concerns about Bones and the crew. He pushed away from the table. “I want to get out of here. Let’s get a drink.”
“I’m really not in the mood for a drink,” she said.
“Fine, you can watch me.” He grabbed his jacket and keys, and left the room without waiting to see if she was following.
“Maddock, wait a minute!” she called.
Something in her voice, some underlying tone of revelation, made him turn around.
“What if we’re making this too complicated? What if it’s just a simple map?”
Maps he understood. Curious, he returned to the table and stood looking down over her shoulder.
“The sinking ship is probably the Dourado, so that’s most likely the first symbol in the sequence. Maybe these other images represent real places. Put the clues in the right order, they lead us to the sword!” Her eyes were bright, her face positively aglow. Dane stared at her for a moment, admiring her fresh, youthful beauty.
“Are you still with me?” she said, waving her hand in front of his face.
“Oh, sorry, just thinking.” Dane shook his head, trying to get his thoughts back on to the subject. Guilt soured in his stomach as he thought of Melissa. “If they’re real places, what is this thing?” He pointed to a drawing of four arrows emerging at right angles to each other from a central point, pointing up, down, left, and right. Another smaller arrow pointed down and to the right at an odd angle.
“What’s the matter, sailor boy? Never seen a compass before?” She smiled up at him, and he grinned in spite of himself.
“Fine, you got me on that one.” He settled back into the chair he had vacated moments before. “The problem I see is that so many of these drawings are too generic. How many streams are around here? Or wrought iron fences? Where do we even start?”
“How about the house? It’s a little more detailed than the other images.”
Dane looked at the sketch. It was certainly distinctive, with a large porch running across the front and wrapping around the right side. An odd, tower-like architectural feature graced the front left corner. Chimneys peeked up from either side of the steeply pitched roof. Two second-floor windows extruded Cape Cod-style from the front of the roof. Ornamentation had been sketched in to the porch rails and posts. It might be possible to locate the house. It was as good a way as any to pass the time until he could find out what happened to Bones and the crew.
CHAPTER 13
Antonio stepped away from the door of the cabin. Angelo had everything under control inside, while Louis and Vincent patrolled the deck. He pulled a brand new pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and slapped the bottom of the box a few times before removing the wrapper. It was a personal tradition of his; bring a new pack on the job, and do not open it until the work is done.
This one had been too easy. The people on board had not been expecting anything out of the ordinary, and the diver who had been down at the time had not heard them coming. He was supposed to have been a SEAL, but their reputations must have been exaggerated; they had subdued him quickly. According to Angelo, two of the crew members were missing.
It would not have mattered if the entire crew had been there, Antonio thought, smiling. They had taken their victims completely by surprise.
“And to think they wanted to send Stefan,” he said to no one in particular. Stefan was good, there was no doubt, but Angelo’s team, of which Antonio was a member, was good as well. If only their superiors would let go of their foolish attachment to Stefan. Antonio hated being underestimated.
He leaned against the rail and admired their speedboat. It was a sleek model with a low profile and a powerful but nearly silent engine. The hull was painted a swirl of blues and greens, allowing it to blend in with the sea. A bulletproof, green-tinted windshield swept back in a tight curve. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship.
A loud splash from the stern drew his attention. He looked back, but saw nothing. A porpoise, perhaps? He scanned the horizon. The blue-green waters were choppy today, and devoid of any crafts other than their own and the one they now controlled. There had not been any since they had taken control of the boat. He shrugged and dug out his lighter.