He produced a Florida highway map and unfolded it on the table. He drew a circle near the city of Tallahassee, just north of the inverted V shape of Apalachee Bay. He then laid the tattoo map alongside it, orienting it so that the serpent was pointing down.
“The mounds are our starting point,” Higgins observed. “Which way from there?”
Kismet touched another point on the tattoo map in the upper quarter opposite the pyramids, where a tiny cross had been inscribed. “I think this is supposed to represent Saint Augustine.” He drew another circle, and then connected it with a straight line to the first, then approximated the converging lines of Fontaneda’s map to form an off-center downward pointing triangle. The lines crossed southeast of Gainesville in the Ocala National Forest.
“The entrance to the cavern is where these lines converge.” As he circled the X at the convergence of the lines on the highway map, he took another look at what lay in the center of the triangle. The mark was almost exactly on the south shore of Lake George, but what caught his eye was the St. Johns River, flowing north out of the lake and meandering across the landscape all the way to Jacksonville. The undulations of the river course almost exactly matched the curves of the tattooed serpent on Fontaneda’s map.
Kismet recalled something Dr. Leeds had told him during their first encounter, that the snake was an ancient symbol of life. In the Bible, a snake had tricked Eve into eating from the forbidden fruit, an action which had led to banishment from Eden and the Tree of Life. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a snake had devoured a similar plant with the same properties, depriving the hero of the prize of eternal life.
Now it seemed they would be the one’s snatching the prize of life from the serpent’s devouring jaws.
Despite Kismet’s reluctance — and Higgins verbalized objections, there seemed little choice but to accept Russell’s offer. The major would be able to provide them with resources that might help them pinpoint the location, but more importantly, the soldiers would keep Leeds off their back. That would be of particular importance if they actually found the Fountain, though when he discussed it with the major over coffee the following morning, he omitted mention of their ultimate goal, saying only that they were looking for a cavern that might be an important archaeological site. Russell seemed to accept the explanation without question as he arranged for a convoy to take them south. The major and his three guests rode in the relative comfort of a government issue passenger van, while a platoon of soldiers from Russell’s battalion, part of the National Guard’s 78th Homeland Response Force, bracketed them in Humvees.
About an hour into the five-hour journey down the Interstate however, the officer finally indulged his curiosity. “So, I’ve played along this far. Care to let me in on the big secret?”
Kismet gazed back at him, impassive. “What do you want to know?”
“This is a treasure hunt, right? Your ‘archaeological’ site…” He made air quotes. “I get that people are willing to kill for money. What I don’t buy is that you want it bad enough to take that chance. So what’s really going on?”
Kismet felt Higgins’ eyes on him as well as Russell’s. He glanced off into the distance at the scenery flashing by.
They had just passed Macon, Georgia, which Kismet had been surprised to learn in his research had once been inhabited by the same mound building culture that settled near Lake Jackson. Had those early settlers brought the secret of the Fountain of Youth to American? Were they the “Serpent priests” Leeds had spoken of, carrying the Seed of the Biblical Tree of Life, or something like it?
He put on his best poker face and answered. “I haven’t deceived you, major. I’m following up on a lead that someone sent to my office, regarding an otherwise undiscovered cave — a natural wonder — that may also have special historical significance. You'll have to ask Dr. Leeds why he thinks it’s worth killing for.”
Russell continued to watch him, unconvinced, but did not press the point. “You served, right? Army?”
“Yes.” Kismet was nonplussed by the change of subject. “Army intelligence during the first Gulf War. It was ages ago. Didn’t end well. Why?”
“Basic military wisdom: know your enemy. Now I know who the enemy is, but without knowing why — his motivation — I can't very effectively defend against him. I think you know more than you are telling. Now, my orders don’t require me to know the ‘why’ but I think that, sooner or later, you're going to have to tell me what makes this cavern so important.”
It was early evening when they arrived in Gainesville, where they spent the night at a budget motel just off the Interstate. Russell’s men set up a rotating guard schedule that not only maintained security on the vehicles but also watched access to their rooms.
The following morning, they headed east, into the Ocala National Forest. A remote campsite near Juniper Springs was selected, and while the soldier went to work erecting four GP, Small tents, Kismet reviewed topographical maps of the nearby lake country to establish parameters for their search. If the entrance to the cavern lay at the “snake’s mouth” as Fontaneda’s map suggested, then they would have to concentrate their search at the point where the St. Johns River flowed into Lake George. On the map, the tributary looked eerily similar to a serpent’s forked tongue.
In another site, not far from the lake and just to the north of the army encampment, another group was establishing a campsite for the night. To a curious observer, they appeared to be clients of a commercial fishing tour operator, but there were two people in the party who looked completely out of place among the plaid shirts and ball caps that were de rigueur among the rest of the group. One was an attractive blonde woman in her early thirties, who might have been lovely were she not so bedraggled by days of travel at an exhausting pace. The humidity had caused her golden hair to frizz about her head like a halo, and she seemed to be attracting more than her fair share of interest from flies and mosquitos, despite the fact that she maintained an almost constant cloud of cigarette smoke around her. The winged insects weren’t her only problem either; she was the only woman in a group of men that ordinarily wouldn’t have even been in the same zip code as someone with her pedigree, and like a forbidden fruit ripening on the tree, she had unfortunately attracted their attention. Only one man in the group seemed to be immune to her charms and despite her initial ambivalence about him, Elisabeth Neuell now found herself irresistibly attracted to Dr. John Leeds.
She had felt a similar attraction to Kismet, though for much different reasons, and for a long time thereafter, she considered what might have happened if she had stayed with him. That of course hadn’t been possible; too much had gone wrong between them. Kismet had always been, at best, nothing more than a means to end.
She had felt similarly about Dr. Leeds at first, but perhaps because he, unlike Kismet, had not succumbed to her repeated seductions, she now found herself obsessed with the idea of having him. Him, and the thing he sought — the secret of Eternal Life.
They had worked well together. It had been she, and not the occultist, who had recognized the clue in Joseph King’s letter to Kismet’s agency, and realized that it was a literal reference to a cemetery. Without Kismet's interference, they would almost certainly have learned the Fountain's location from Joe and Candace King. And while it was Leeds’ money that was paying for their army of redneck renegades, it was her feminine presence that had staved off desertion and mutiny, particularly following the twin disasters at the cemetery and again on the train. Three had been killed and several more wounded. One of them had been arrested and had probably already spilled his guts to the authorities. Her flirtations were about the only thing that kept the rednecks from bolting.