The Zodiac skipped and slowed, and almost immediately dwindled to a tiny speck of light in the murk. There was more gunfire. Amy did not change course.
“I said, done!” Gideon cried, hurrying back into the pilothouse. “Change course!”
She shook her head. “The least obvious move is not to change course.”
That made sense. “It won’t be long before they realize they were duped,” he said.
“It only needs to work long enough for us to get out of radar range. We’re in a big sea — that’s a lot of sea return for radar — and this boat has a low profile. I think three thousand yards should do it.”
Gideon stared at the radar screen. He could see the green blob that was their Zodiac, apparently motionless. The blob that was the Horizonte was approaching, slowing, turning.
Once again, the sound of gunfire, burst after burst. Staring astern, he saw the dim light suddenly brighten. The Zodiac, no doubt, set afire. There was a puff and a ball of flame as the gas tank in the craft went up. The report of the explosion came rumbling toward them across the water. Another burst of automatic weapons fire, another ball of flame: the spare tank.
Every second was precious, taking them farther away from the Horizonte, farther into the radar wilderness of sea and wind.
“They’re on to us!” called Amy. “They’re coming!”
On the radar screen, the faint green blob that was the much larger Horizonte was peeling away, moving faster, gaining speed. The Zodiac had disappeared from the screen — sunk. There was still a flickering light aft from the burning slick of gasoline.
“Change course,” said Gideon. “Not much, say twenty degrees. Just to test if they can see us or not.”
A hesitation. “Okay.”
Amy changed course. They waited for the Horizonte to alter course accordingly. It didn’t. The faint green blob continued straight, and then, having clearly lost them on radar, made a course change. A guess. A wrong guess.
They were out of range.
A minute later, the image of the Horizonte had dropped off their own radar.
“You realize,” Gideon said, “that the wife, instead of taking her husband for medical help, came after us. I wouldn’t be surprised if he bleeds to death.”
Amy shook her head. “Treasure hunters — I’ve had experience with them. Crazy people. We haven’t seen the last of her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She’s going to be waiting for us at Cayo Jeyupsi. With a dead husband. Pissed.”
25
Brock entered the EES lab, pausing in the doorway. It was seven AM, and these early-morning calls were getting more than irritating. Glinn’s attitude seemed to be, If I don’t sleep, why should you?
Two technicians and Garza were bent over a large, obscure machine, cabled to a flat panel that displayed digital photographic strips covered with fuzzy lines. Glinn was behind them, half in shadow, silently observing the proceedings from his wheelchair.
“Thank you for coming, Dr. Brock,” said Glinn, turning. To Brock’s surprise, he looked almost flustered, unusual for a man of preternatural coolness.
Brock nodded.
“Please,” said Glinn, recovering. “Sit down. Coffee?”
“Thank you. Black, no sugar.”
Brock took a chair in the little conference area of the lab. Garza and the two scientists paused in their work and swiveled their chairs around to join the meeting.
“So,” said Brock, “did you figure out what animal it came from?”
“That’s a difficult problem,” said Garza. “To be sure, we need to do a DNA analysis. But first, some questions have arisen about the making of vellum that we hope you can answer. It’s our understanding that three types of animal skins were normally used in fashioning vellum — sheep, calf, and goat. What about other animals?”
“Well,” said Brock, always happy to deliver a lecture, “in the Levant, many Persian and Arabic manuscripts used a type of vellum made from camel skin.”
“Interesting. Anything else?”
“Very rarely, the skin of pig, deer, horse, or donkey was used. There are instances where cat skin was used in repairs.”
“No others?” Garza asked.
“Not that we know of.”
There was a pause.
“By the way,” Brock said with a sniff, turning to Glinn, “I must say that this idea of yours strikes me as a dead end. I don’t see how the vellum itself could be the answer to the riddle.”
“Consider the quotation, Doctor. Respondeo ad quaestionem, ipsa pergamena. ‘I respond to the question, the page itself.’ You pointed out that pergamena also meant ‘parchment’ or ‘vellum.’” His eyes flickered as he said this. “Think of the sentence another way: the parchment itself is the response, the answer, to the riddle.”
“We’ve run Eli’s conjecture through the language analysis routines of our computer,” Garza said. “They predict the likelihood of it being correct at over ninety percent.”
That a computer program could interpret medieval Latin struck Brock as preposterous, but he let it pass. “How could the vellum itself possibly be the answer to the riddle of this map?”
“To know that, we need to discover what kind of animal it came from.” Glinn turned to the technicians. “What next?”
Weaver — the lead DNA technician — spoke up. “The only way to solve this question is through DNA analysis. To do that we have to find a clean source of genetic material — ideally from inside a hair follicle. The trouble is, the parchment has been thoroughly scraped and washed.”
Brock sighed. “If hair is what you’re after, may I make a suggestion?”
“Of course,” said Garza.
“You know that all pieces of vellum have two sides, a ‘flesh’ side and a ‘hair’ side. The hair side is darker and coarser, with occasional traces of hair follicles. The follicles themselves, of course, will have been destroyed during the initial preparation. However, you might take a close look at the binding edge of the page. The margins of the skins were sometimes less scraped and cleaned than the rest, and often they left a little extra thickness there to hold the binding. You may find an intact hair follicle in that area.”
“Excellent,” Glinn said. “Thank you, Dr. Brock. You are certainly worth your keep.”
Brock flushed at the compliment despite himself.
26
The morning dawned dirty and rough, with a howling wind and dark clouds scudding low across the sky. They had taken refuge in Bahía Hondita, a huge, shallow lagoon with dozens of islands and coves and patches of mangrove swamp — an ideal place to hide. With the jet drive propulsion their draft was only three feet, and with no need to worry about fouling a propeller they’d been able to get the boat up a watercourse and deep into the recesses of a mangrove swamp, where the larger Horizonte could not follow, even if they knew where they were.
Gideon spent the morning cleaning up the mess in the galley and mopping up the blood on the cockpit deck. Amy opened the hatches and examined the engine and boat systems, doing a damage assessment where rounds had struck the boat.
They convened in the galley over espresso one hour before it was time to make a scheduled call to EES. Amy looked gray.
“How’s your injury?” Gideon asked.
“Fine,” said Amy. “Listen, we’ve got some damage. A 50-caliber round fragmented and went everywhere inside the engine compartment.”