“I’m saying — if high ranking members of the world knew that such an event was inevitable, would they tell anyone? What if they knew they had time to save some, but not everyone? What if, instead of alerting the world, they turned their efforts to building the world’s largest bunker?”
Sam thought about it for a moment and shook his head. “What about the ship? Did your brother make a note of the ship that took the stone?”
“Yes. He kept a record.”
“And where did the ship go?”
“I tried to follow it up, but the ship sank in transit and its entire crew and cargo was lost.”
“Do you know where?”
“No. They wouldn’t tell me, and if they did, I wouldn’t believe them.”
“You think it’s still out there?”
Dmitri nodded. “Someone’s studied it and knows the truth. Even as we speak, someone in high ranking government around the world knows the precise date.”
Dmitri’s eyes stared vacantly above. He was close to death. Sam had so many questions to ask, but instead he asked just one. “Where’s Billie Swan?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where could they be keeping her?”
“I have no idea, but you were right about the pyramid numbers. Follow the numbers and they will lead you to her.” Dmitri said. “I don’t have much longer. I was born in this temple nearly four hundred years ago. I want to be alone with the shrine of my ancestors before I die.”
Without anything adequate to say, Sam nodded and stood up.
Death gripped his arm. It was weak, but there was enough force to make Sam stop. Death looked at him, with his purple eyes fixed hard. “Tell Elise, there will be others like her. She will need to find them one day.”
“The picture!” Sam suddenly recalled the cave painting toward the entrance. “It was of her?”
“No. Her grandmother.”
“Where are the remaining Master Builders?”
“Scattered around the world — hiding.”
“Why?”
Dmitri gritted his teeth. “Because someone is actively hunting them.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine — Black Sea
In the mission room on the Maria Helena, Sam enlarged the image of the pyramid numbers on the digital projector. They were Roman Numerals and displayed three distinctly different sets of numbers. The first doubled to form the second and then the first and second combined to make the third.
Sam stared at the numbers on the wall. Tom, Genevieve, Matthew, Elise and Veyron all stared too. He turned to Elise, who was well known for her codebreaking abilities. “These numbers tell us where Billie is being held prisoner.”
Elise asked, “Is that what Dmitri told you?”
“Yes. But it’s more than that. I’ve seen those numbers before.”
“Where?”
“Inside Atlantis,” Sam said.
“What?”
“When we found Atlantis, there were a series of numbers on the wall. I remember Billie taking a photo of Roman numerals nearly five feet high.”
Matthew asked, “So what does it represent? It’s much too long to be a latitude and longitude.”
“I have no idea,” Sam admitted.
“Could it be a coordinate?” Tom asked. “Something other than a latitude and longitude? Something older, like the Master Builder’s carrib, in which they identified the location of the pyramid in the Kalahari Desert?”
Sam shook his head. “Too many numbers there to match anything we saw about the carrib.”
“What about the height of a pyramid?” Genevieve asked.
Sam thought about it. “I don’t know. What sort of measurement would achieve such a long number?”
Veyron added, “It could be a different height for each section of the pyramid.”
“Or something entirely different,” Sam said.
Elise smiled.
Sam recognized that smile. He’d seen her make it a few times before, just before she resolved a puzzle that had defeated the rest of them. “You have a suggestion, Elise?”
Elise grinned. “Or the frequency of a sound wave.”
“What?” Sam was surprised by her answer.
“I thought you played piano, Sam?” Elise said, “Don’t you know anything about sound?”
Sam ignored the disparagement. “Okay, so what sound does that represent?”
“It’s high pitched. Probably much higher than most humans could even produce without significant training.”
“There’s three numbers here. What does that mean?”
Elise shrugged. “It’s a very simple tune. Three separate wavelengths. I don’t know what it does.”
“Have a guess, for me,” Sam said. “Is there any way we could trace this back to where Billie’s being held?”
Elise paused, as though she was considering the problem. “Sound can propagate through mediums such as air, water and solids as longitudinal waves… oh, it can travel in transverse wave in solids, too. The behavior of sound is affected by three things. A complex relationship of density, temperature, and speed.”
Sam nodded. It was painful stuff, but he knew something about her unique mind that required her to showcase her knowledge as she worked the problem. It didn’t reveal her conceit, and she wasn’t boasting about her IQ. She didn’t have to. Everyone on board knew she was brilliant. It was simply how her mind worked the puzzle.
Elise continued. Her voice was sharp and animated as she spoke. “Physically, audio is a vibration. Typically, we’re talking about vibrations of air between approximately 20 hertz and 20,000 Hertz. That means the air is moving back and forth at a rate of 20 to 20,000 times per second.”
“Go on,” Sam said.
“If you measure that vibration and convert it into an electrical signal through, say, a microphone, you’ll get an electrical signal with the voltage varying in the same waveform as the sound.”
Elise glanced around the room to see if any of them were still following. Sam guessed she saw a lot of vacant expression.
Elise continued. “Now we have an analogue signal. But not digital. Because we know voltage varies between minus one and positive one volts. Now we hook our volt meter to a computer and instruct the computer to read the meter 44,100 times per second. Add a second volt meter and you get stereo. This format is called stereo 44,100 Hertz — and it really is just a bunch of voltage measurements.”
Sam shook his head. “Elise, that’s great, but just tell us what these numbers mean!”
She typed them into the computer and pressed play. A strange, high pitched wail resonated from her laptop’s speakers. It was eerie and compelling at the same time.
Sam said, “Any ideas where that sound comes from?”
“No idea. Hang on. Let me do a search for it.”
“You can Google a sound?”
Elise nodded, cheerfully. “Basically, I’m searching a few other databases, but in short, I’m looking for digital matches of the wavelength of that specific sound.”
The search program stopped. She clicked on the first link and pressed play. The whistle was identical to the one they’d just heard.
Sam asked, “What is that sound and where was it made?”
Elise grinned, because there was only one place in the world that made that sound. “The Pirahã tribe, along the Macai River of the Amazon Jungle.”
Chapter Sixty — Macai River, Brazil
The Sea King landed in a small clearing at the edge of the Macai River. Elise watched as Sam, Genevieve and Veyron — all armed to the teeth — stepped out into the Amazon jungle. Tom cut the power to the motor, and the massive rotary blades started to slowly whine, until they stopped altogether. Elise was the last to climb out.
She carried an Israeli built, Uzi submachine gun.