Leaning back, he surveyed his surroundings. The Jemez Mountains rose up protectively around the bowl-like valley that cradled his house, their flanks studded with majestic ponderosa pines. Straight ahead, between the mountainsides, the valley fell away into distant foothills that graded into the stark red deserts of New Mexico. The sky was a pale blue, touched here and there by Japanese brushstrokes of cirrus clouds. Gideon poured himself a generous splash of scotch, closed his eyes, and took a long, reverent sip. He let the heavy, peaty single-malt linger in his mouth for a moment, then swallowed, opened his eyes again, and turned his attention to the mail.
There wasn’t much of it: he’d always managed to stay off mailing lists. The day before he and Garza had departed for Egypt, he paid all his bills three months in advance. There was a letter from the HR department of Los Alamos National Laboratory; he chucked it away like he might a Frisbee. There was an invitation from the Yazzie Gallery in Albuquerque, admitting two persons to a special preview of their forthcoming exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe’s early Precisionist-style work. Ten years before, such an invitation might have aroused a strong interest in him—of a predatory and not entirely licit nature. But he’d given that kind of thing up. Besides, the preview was still over a month away.
Putting this aside, he arrived at the final piece of maiclass="underline" a battered postcard depicting the Great Sphinx of Giza. He held it up, curious. It looked as if it must have traveled around the world a dozen times. Not only was it creased and soiled, but his address had been scrawled in almost indecipherable letters, abraded by travel. The postmark was from Cairo, dated a week earlier. Curiously, there was no message or note on the card. Instead, there was only a symbol, evidently scribbled in a hurry:
Gideon stared at it for a moment. It couldn’t be. But then again, it must: the postcard could only be from one person: Garza. And it could only mean one thing—he’d survived.
Gideon felt a swelling of indescribable emotion. Garza had promised to let him know if, should they get separated during the expedition, he had managed to survive…and this was his fulfillment of that promise. It was incredible. Somehow, Garza had saved him and Imogen, allowed them to escape—and then on top of that he’d managed to survive Blackbeard and his vengeful horde, as well. How was it possible?
Gideon took another sip of scotch and stared at the dusty postcard, shaking his head, his emotions finally boiling over into a peal of laughter. He turned the card over in his hands. The man was resourcefulness personified, the ultimate survivor. It was just like the ferry sinking, with him showing up out of the blue, against all odds. No wonder Eli Glinn had selected him as his lieutenant. Garza was truly a cat with nine lives.
Had he somehow recovered the treasure? But no—that was too much to hope for. Just his surviving was more than enough. Besides, Garza would have used the postcard to let him know.
At the thought of that vast treasure, Gideon stirred. He reached into the pocket of his faded jeans and pulled out a precious stone: a flawless diamond, perhaps five carats, of a deep saffron color. He held it up to the sun, now falling behind the fringe of pine trees, marveling at the way the light turned the jewel to liquid fire. This was the one—the only one—that had made it all the way home, unbeknownst to him, in the inner pocket of his filthy robe. He was, in fact, unpacking his stuff and getting ready to toss the shabby garment away when the stone dropped out.
He carefully placed the diamond on the wide red cedar arm of the chair, then raised the sandwich and took a bite. Munching contentedly, he began planning what he would do tomorrow. There was a particular hole about a mile up Chihuahueños Creek, which he had been saving for a long time, where a large rock had snagged a deadfall. In the deep scoop of water behind that obstruction, he knew in his bones there lurked a wily old battle-scarred cutthroat trout. He’d left that trout alone, waiting for something special. And now that something had arrived—in the form of a postcard. Tomorrow, truite amandine paired with a flinty Graves would do very nicely for his daily meal.
Finishing the sandwich, he glanced back at the small but exquisite diamond. Only one—but it was enough.
You know how much time is allotted you, the neurologist had told him. Do something worthwhile with the time you have left. And as he reflected on the events of the last two months—the triumphs, the letdowns, the surprises, the moments of beauty and fear and greed and compassion that had together made up their unraveling of the mystery of the Phaistos Disk—he realized that it was, in its own way, a microcosm of how he’d lived his entire adult life. That it had, in fact, been an adventure most eminently worthwhile.
And then there was the shock of its conclusion, and what they had found in the treasure chamber. Imogen had refused to tell him what it meant; what that last commandment—if it was a commandment at all—had been. When the world is ready, she had said, the chamber will be opened. And the truth—if we choose to believe it—will be known.
Gideon took another sip of scotch. He stretched, then settled himself more comfortably in the chair. That day, and that truth, he reflected, could wait until after he was gone. And with that, his thoughts dissolved into memories: of avenging the death and disgrace of his father; of grappling with a trained assassin atop a crumbling smokestack; of stealing a page from perhaps the world’s most valuable manuscript, and getting away with it; of discovering a living, breathing creature the world had always consigned to myth and fable. He shook these and other memories away with a smile. He had tricked, talked, and fought his way through enough adventures to last a dozen lifetimes. Now the ultimate adventure was approaching. When that happened—tomorrow, the week after, the month after—it was a mystery he felt prepared for.
But right now, he had a more immediate concern: a certain fat trout, sleeping in the creek that sparkled along its course out of sight over the rise of land.
He stretched once more, then winked at the setting sun. And it was without surprise that he noticed it winked back at him.
New York City
ALMOST TWO THOUSAND miles to the northeast, the sun had set. In Lower Manhattan, evening was already in full swing. From the windows of his penthouse in the building on Little West 12th Street, Eli Glinn—a piece of paper in one hand—looked down at the Millennials and Generation Zs and slack-jawed tourists milling around outside the restaurants and bars below. While the Meatpacking District was no longer the hippest scene in Manhattan—that transitory claim currently belonged to the Lower East Side—weekends were still busy with the B&T crowd.
After several minutes during which nothing moved except his eyes, Glinn turned away from the window and faced the interior of his apartment. While all the equipment and mechanical contrivances once necessary for his physical limitations had been removed, very little furniture had been added, and the space retained a spare, Zen-like asceticism. The various computers, web intercept devices, and other surveillance and data-gathering equipment he’d retained after the dissolution of Effective Engineering Solutions had been relegated to the floor below. The rest of the building had been leased to an independent film production company, who’d been delighted to find such a vast soundstage—formerly the central laboratory of EES—near the southern tip of Manhattan.