Joyce blew a lock of blonde hair out of her eyes. “They thought I had something that properly belongs to them.”
“Do you?” Gabriel said.
“If they didn’t find it.” She located the floorboard she’d been searching for and pried it free. She reached into the hole in the floor. “Ah.” Joyce straightened, pulling something wrapped in an oilcloth out of the hole. She stood, put the object down on top of the dresser and gently unwrapped it.
In the folds of the oilcloth was a flat, circular object with intricate designs cut into its golden surface. It wasn’t a single solid piece but rather seemed to be made up of several concentric rings set one inside the next, with a protruding bit in the center, like a handle or a knob. The sharp, angular designs along the outer rim were cuneiform symbols, Gabriel realized, and had been cut all the way through, like stencil letters—light shone through them from underneath. The bit in the center was shaped like a starburst, each of its three arms a different length and each tipped with a small jewel. Two of the gemstones were green, one red.
“This,” she said, lifting it carefully out of its swaddling, “was known as the Star of Arnuwanda.” The gold glittered in the lamplight.
SOA. The acronym in Joyce’s journal entry.
“Arnu—?” Noboru said.
“Arnuwanda the Second. He was king of the Hittites around 1320 B.C., and supposedly the last custodian of the Three Eyes of Teshub. Shortly before he died, he had this device constructed to his specifications. Then he had the man who made it for him executed. He didn’t trust anyone to know how it worked, for fear that they might use it to find the Three Eyes.”
Noboru looked over at Gabriel. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
“Some,” Gabriel said. “The Three Eyes of Teshub are these legendary jewels that were supposed to unlock an ancient hidden weapon of the Hittites. But the jewels themselves were also hidden, or lost, or something.”
“Cast to the three winds,” Joyce said, “by Teshub himself. But the Star is supposed to show their resting place. Teshub spoke to Arnuwanda in a dream and told him how to build it.”
“Thoughtful of him,” Gabriel said. “Where did you find the thing?”
“Not me. My uncle. He dug it up in Turkey last month. He didn’t trust the locals he’d hired, he thought they might try to steal it for the gold, so he shipped it to me for safekeeping.”
“And you brought it to Borneo,” Gabriel said. “Does he know?”
“Not exactly.”
“How not exactly?”
“He thinks I’m still in the States. I asked Michael not to tell him about the grant.”
“And Michael agreed?” Gabriel asked.
She shrugged. “I told him I didn’t want to worry Uncle Daniel, that he’d be anxious for no reason. Remember, Michael just thought I was going to be studying in a library.”
“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “You sure fooled everyone.”
“Are you going to tell me you’ve never told a lie when you’ve been on the trail of something big?” she said. She returned to the oilcloth and pulled out a second item, a folded piece of paper. She kicked aside a pile of clothing to clear a space on the floor, then opened the paper and spread it out. It was a copy of an ancient map of the eastern hemisphere with penciled-in grid lines crisscrossing over the crude drawings of continents and landmasses, dividing the map into little squares. Cuneiform symbols similar to the ones on the Star appeared in many of the squares.
“This is an enlargement of Arnuwanda’s map,” Joyce continued. “The cult has one too. It’s easy enough to get, you can copy it out of any book on ancient Anatolian history. Without the Star it’s nothing. But with the Star…here I’ll show you. Hold your flashlight above the Star and shine it down.” Gabriel pulled the flashlight from his belt and switched it on. He positioned the beam to shine through the Star so that its shadow fell on the map.
Gabriel smiled. “The symbols.”
“Exactly,” Joyce said. The beam passed through the cuneiform symbols around the perimeter of the Star and projected them onto the map. “It’s Nesili, the language of the ancient Hittites. Now check this out.” She gripped the starburst shape at the center of the device and turned it. It clicked along a hidden track and as it did the outer perimeter rotated in the opposite direction. She kept turning it, apparently trying to align the symbols from the Star with those on the map, but the ones on the map were printed in a different order—they didn’t match.
“How confident are you,” Gabriel said, “that it’s the real Star?”
“Oh, it’s real,” Joyce said. “This is just Arnuwanda being a sneaky bastard.” She kept turning the starburst slowly, one click at a time. “Obviously it’s a puzzle of some kind, and for the longest time I had no idea what the key could be. But I had a lot of time to think in that cage.”
Gabriel kept his eyes on the map, trying to find a pattern to the symbols.
“The legend says that when Teshub scattered the Three Eyes around the world, he gave each for protection to a different one of the three natural elements,” Joyce continued. “Earth, water and…well, no one’s sure what the third one is. In the earliest translations of the legend, they couldn’t decipher the difference between earth and whatever the third element is, so they called it ‘loose earth,’ but that was just a way of saying ‘We don’t know what this symbol means.’ Unfortunately the original tablet the legend was carved on was destroyed centuries ago, and ever since we’ve only had those faulty translations to work from.”
“You think the three elements are the key to making this thing work?” Gabriel asked.
“I do,” Joyce said. She pointed to one of the Nesili symbols. “This is the one that means ‘earth’—ordinary earth, like dirt or soil.” She turned the starburst until the symbol was directly opposite her on the rim, then held the Star so the projected image lined up perfectly with an identical symbol on the map. The beam from Gabriel’s flashlight passed through one of the tiny green jewels and hit the map with a virescent pinpoint.
Right in the center of Borneo.
Joyce said in a hushed voice, “Arnuwanda made several trips to Borneo. I’ve been convinced for years that one of the Eyes of Teshub had to be here. This just confirms it.” She dug through the piles on the floor. While Gabriel held the Star and flashlight steady, she turned up a pencil, a scrap of paper, a protractor and a compass from the pile by the bed. “If I can just figure out these coordinates…” Squatting next to the map, she quickly jotted down notes, muttering to herself and estimating measurements.
A knock at the door made her spring up. She grabbed the map and the Star and rapidly covered them both with the oilcloth. Gabriel approached the door with one hand on the grip of his Colt. He turned the knob and pulled the door open.
Merpati stood in the doorway. She held a tray with a big plate of steaming dumplings on it.
Joyce ran over and took the tray from her. “My god, food.” She grabbed a dumpling and jammed it into her mouth. Her eyelids fluttered.
Gabriel nodded his thanks to Merpati and closed the door after she had left. He turned to Joyce, who was shoving another dumpling into her mouth. “I take it the cult didn’t bother feeding you.”
She shook her head, chewing. “Rainwater and roots,” she said around a mouthful. She swallowed and added, “They didn’t want me to die before the sacrifice, but they didn’t go out of their way to keep me fat and happy either.”
Gabriel picked up a dumpling and bit into it. Warm, salty liquid flowed onto his tongue, flavored by the scraps of pork and scallion nestled inside the dough. Noboru came over and helped himself. It had been a while since they’d eaten, too.