“I would tell you to be careful…but even as a little girl, you were reckless. Always daring to do more and more, even when it put you in danger.”
That brought a smile to Gabriel’s face when he heard it. His first impression of Cierra had been that she was a beautiful but fairly strait-laced academic and museum administrator. But she had demonstrated since a wilder side. The way she had handled the jeep during the pursuit down the hillside told Gabriel that she had been in some tight situations before.
That was good. He was liable to need a tough, competent ally again before this was over.
But not today. This day turned out to be a welcome respite for Gabriel Hunt. The expressway climbed and wound through the mountains that surrounded Mexico City, then dipped toward the Gulf of Mexico, turning to parallel that body of water several miles inland. The terrain flattened into plains covered by cultivated fields, interspersed with coffee and banana plantations and areas of oil drilling. The driving was easy, as there wasn’t too much traffic on the expressway.
Gabriel kept a close eye on the rearview mirror, watching for any signs of pursuit, and he noticed that Cierra often turned around to look behind them, too. Gabriel said, “I’m sorry you had to find out about Esparza like this. I know you considered him a friend.”
“Not really,” Cierra said. “Not a friend. I appreciated the things he did for the museum, of course, but that was all. We had little in common.”
“He claimed to have a passion for history and archaeology.”
Cierra shook her head. “I think the only thing Vladimir really has a passion for is power.”
“What about money?”
“That goes hand in hand with the desire for power. You can’t have one without the other.”
Gabriel nodded. Clearly, Vladimir Antonio de la Esparza was going to be a formidable enemy. But Gabriel had gone up against better men than Esparza, he told himself, and he was still here.
They reached Villahermosa late that afternoon and found a rundown motel in which to stay. There were plenty of nicer hotels in the city, but that wouldn’t have fit the image of a poor farming couple.
After taking one look at the neighborhood, they decided to carry all of their supplies into the room rather than leaving them in the pickup. As Gabriel slipped the chain into place on the door, Cierra asked, “Were you bored today?”
Gabriel frowned. “What do you mean?”
“No one shot at you all day. That must be a dull day by your standards.”
That brought a laugh from Gabriel. “Sometimes my life is as mundane as anybody else’s.”
“Really?”
“Well…sometimes. Not too often.”
Cierra smiled. “I think I’ll see if the shower works.”
She went off into the bathroom, and a few minutes later Gabriel heard the water running in the shower. Through the thin walls, he could hear Cierra turning under its spray, soaping up. He tried to put the image out of his mind; there was still work to take care of. He took off his shirt and removed both flags, which he’d folded and taped to his torso, front and back, in flat, compact bundles. He spread out General Fargo’s personal standard on the bed and sat beside it, leaning over to take a closer look at it.
The artwork on the flag was fairly crude and of course somewhat faded, but everything was still clear and distinct. Some of the lines, in fact, were darker than the others, Gabriel realized. The distinction was small enough so that it wasn’t likely to be noticed except on close scrutiny. Two such lines made their way in a snaking, parallel path across the hills to the right of the cavalryman figure. Gabriel had assumed at first that those lines just depicted slopes in the hills, but he realized now that wasn’t right. In some places the lines cut across the slopes that the artist had drawn. They ended at the far right of the circular picture in what Gabriel suddenly realized was a tiny letter Z.
No, he thought as his heart began to slug harder in his chest. It wasn’t a Z. He turned his head so that he was looking at the flag lengthwise, ninety degrees from how it would normally be flown.
It was an N…for North.
The damned thing was a map.
Those two winding lines represented a river making its way generally from north to south. A curving line of right-angled marks crossed the wavy lines, and when looked at from this direction they resembled caret marks…which were sometimes used on maps to signify mountains, Gabriel thought. Little squiggles that were meaningless marks one way became smoke from those mountains when looked at the other way.
Volcanoes?
His pulse was racing now. The reason those marks were slightly darker than the other designs on the flag was because they had been drawn on there after the flag was made, after it had been flown in battle, possibly for a number of years. But not any time recently—they were faded by time, too, just not as much. So: Sometime after the start of the war someone had drawn a map on the flag. The most logical person to have done that was the flag’s owner—General Granville Fordham Fargo.
But what was it a map to?
He was so engrossed that he almost didn’t hear the bathroom door open. He did hear it, though, and glanced up to tell Cierra about his discovery.
The words got stuck in his mouth when he saw that she was standing there in the doorway with nothing on but a towel, wrapped loosely around her torso. Its lower edge fell barely below the curve of her hips, leaving her sleek, honey-golden legs bare. Her arms and shoulders were bare as well, and her raven hair was damp and tumbled loosely around her neck.
Even though the sight of her affected him strongly, it wasn’t enough to make him forget what he had found. His voice sounded a little strained, though, as he said, “There’s a map.”
She stiffened. “A map? What are you talking about?”
“On the flag.” He gestured toward it. “Someone drew a map on it. It’s hidden in the picture, but if you look closely you can see it.”
Cierra hurried forward. If she had intended to seduce him—and the pose she had struck in the bathroom doorway certainly hinted that she had—she had forgotten about doing so as soon as she heard the word “map.”
She lowered herself onto the bed next to Gabriel and leaned forward to study the flag. Her eyes followed his finger as he traced the river and pointed out the mountains.
“You can see the letter N when you look at it from this direction,” he said, rotating the flag. “That’s north.”
“Of course,” she said with a trace of impatience in her voice. “How could we have missed this?”
“Nobody ever said we were looking for a map. And whoever drew it did a good job of concealing it. Unless you were looking for them, you’d think these were just random marks in the picture.”
“But whoever drew it would know where they were.”
Gabriel nodded. “That’s right.”
“General Fargo?”
He shrugged. “Or one of his followers. You can tell from the way the ink is faded that the map wasn’t added any time recently. My gut tells me that Fargo either drew it or had someone draw it.”
“That’s smoke coming from the mountains. They’re volcanoes.”
“Exactly.”
“There are volcanic mountains here in Mexico.” A frown appeared on her face. “But the river’s not right. You can see the way the mountain range curves around and runs in an east-west direction, while the river bisects it from north to south. The closest area that matches that terrain is—”
“Guatemala,” Gabriel said.
Cierra nodded. “Yes. It has to be. The southern tip of Mexico swings to the east to form the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and that orientation continues on over into Guatemala. The rivers run down from the rain forests to the north into the mountains.” She looked up from the map and met Gabriel’s eyes. “But what’s there?”