He let out a long breath. “There’s only one possible answer. It’s not a language at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Phaistos Disk is not a language. It never was. It can’t be. You just proved it.”
“Then what the hell is it?” asked Garza.
“It’s a picture. A drawing. That’s how steganography works.”
“But how could it be a picture? It’s a bunch of tiny unconnected pictures that don’t fit together.”
“You’ve seen pictures made of arrays of letters? This could be like that.”
“I’m not following you,” said Garza.
“Each one of those glyphs,” said Gideon, thinking fast now, “could represent a black dot of a certain size. Arrange them in the correct array and you get a crude picture. That’s steganography in its purest form. Here was a secret message, made to look like it was written in a language—but there’s no language involved at all. Instead a picture is hidden in what appears to be undecipherable or nonsensical text.”
“I see what you’re getting at. Let me think a minute.”
Gideon watched as Garza’s face turned inward. He had seen this before, when the man was solving a complex mathematical or engineering problem in his head.
“Okay. We have two hundred forty-two glyphs—but look again at the image of the Phaistos Disk. The symbols on the Disk are arranged into eighteen groups. So you take two hundred forty-two divided by eighteen, which yields thirteen with remainder of eight.”
“Which means?” asked Gideon.
“We arrange the symbols sequentially in an array of thirteen by eighteen and see what it looks like.” Garza typed furiously, and in a moment the desired array appeared. But it was fuzzy and vague, and Gideon could make out no obvious image in it.
“No problem,” Garza said, undeterred. “Let’s say each symbol stands for a shade of gray scale, going from white to black. We have the data file in hexadecimal code. We simply plug that in, low values to high, with zero zero in hex being white and FF in hex being black, and arrange the rest in graduated shades of gray.”
“But the ancients didn’t understand assembly language!”
“They didn’t need to. We’re just applying modern methods to an old riddle. And don’t forget, steganography was your idea.”
More typing. An image appeared on the screen, crisp and clear this time. It showed three dark lines snaking into the center, creating a roughly triangular section in the middle. Along the edges of the image were two ragged, convoluted lines. Off center, near the meeting point of the three lines, was a geometric array of five dots.
Garza breathed out. “There it is. The translation of the Phaistos Disk.”
“It’s a bunch of squiggles and dots. Still looks like a damn code!”
“Not to me.” Garza stared at the image. “It kind of looks like it might be an image looking down on something.”
“You mean, like a landscape formation?” Gideon took another squint at the image. “You know, with a little imagination that could look like a valley where three canyons came together.”
“In order to view a canyon in such a way, you’d need to be at a great distance above it.”
“A great distance,” muttered Gideon. And then he breathed: “Yes. Like standing on the top of a mountain. I think you’re right. It’s a landscape. Those could be three streams or washes coming together in a valley, and those other squiggles could be the base of mountains on either side.”
“Then what’s that thing with the five dots?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say that was the X marking the spot. It’s an old symbol called a quincunx.”
“The spot of what? Treasure?”
Gideon leaned back. “There’s only one way to find out: go there. We need to figure out where this canyon or valley is.”
Garza snorted. “Sounds like the wild goose chase to end all wild goose chases.”
“Maybe. But that location was important enough to be encoded on the Phaistos Disk and stored in the palace of a Minoan king. So it can’t be just anything. We simply have to find where on the surface of the earth this place is.” He paused. “Have you heard of a search tool called Terrapattern?”
“No.”
“It works with Google Earth. It’s like facial recognition software, but it recognizes landscapes instead. You start with an aerial view of a geological formation or a map, plug it into Terrapattern, and it finds the exact spot on earth.”
“I’m on it.” Garza began typing furiously. He accessed the Internet, found the Terrapattern program, and fed their image into the software. He hit a button.
Gideon squinted at the icon that indicated the program was now running. “It says it could take up to thirty hours.”
“I’m not surprised. The earth is a big damn place. If I understand how this works, it’s got to compare that crude little drawing to the entire surface of the planet, at many different scales.”
“Let’s get dinner. Maybe when we come back it’ll be done.”
When they returned at eleven PM the program had found a match. A Google Earth picture was displayed on the screen, with a small yellow rectangle indicating the selected area. It was a view from about ten thousand feet up of spectacularly rugged desert mountains, riddled with barren washes, deep ravines, plains strewn with giant boulders, and patches of crescent sand dunes. The highlighted area was not a river, but rather a confluence of three dry washes that cut through the mountains, creating an isolated valley with only one point of ingress. A natural fortress.
Gideon squinted at the screen. “Where the hell is that?”
“Says here: Hala’ib Triangle, Eastern Desert, Egypt.”
“Egypt.” Taking the keyboard, Gideon opened a new window on the computer and called up Wikipedia. “The Hala’ib Triangle seems to be a twenty-thousand-square-kilometer region claimed by both Egypt and Sudan. Zero annual rainfall, zero population, zero life, heavily broken country of rugged mountains, sand dunes, and dry washes. It says here that it’s one of the most extreme desert environments in the world.” He stepped back. “Zoom in to the valley.”
Garza complied, creating a split-screen image showing the Phaistos map on one side and the Google Earth image on the other, both at the same scale.
“Could there be a more desolate place on earth?” Gideon asked, staring at the screen.
It took Garza some time to answer. “I doubt it.”
8
AT SIX IN the morning, Eli Glinn lay in bed, still wide-awake after a long restless night. He was bothered by something, but he wasn’t sure exactly what it was, beyond the aggravation caused by the ridiculous visit that afternoon from Garza and Gideon.
It was the damnedest thing. Both of them should have known him well enough to realize he was perhaps the least sentimental person on earth, impervious to the kind of stunt they had tried to pull. Perhaps they did have a legitimate gripe—Garza, anyway—but the fact was they had been compensated fairly, and he had never given the slightest indication he wanted to continue any sort of relationship with any of his employees after his special project was complete. For the first time since the sinking of the Rolvaag almost six years before, Glinn felt unburdened. He wanted to enjoy this newfound freedom and not have anyone around to remind him of those terrible years of self-recrimination.
But this ridiculous extortion scheme had proven a shock. It had, to his profound surprise, shaken him. When he looked into the Quantitative Behavioral Analysis programs he’d run on the two of them, he found no indication this was a possibility. Their plan was so badly executed that he wondered how two highly intelligent operatives could have conceived it. Gideon was always impulsive and unpredictable, so perhaps it wasn’t so far-fetched for him, but Garza was rock-solid. Although not always…he cast his mind back to Garza’s breakdown on the Lost Island, when he had stolen a helicopter and put the mission at risk. Yes, even Garza had his moments of poor judgment.