Austin compressed his lips in a tight smile. He didn’t want to scare Carina, but she needed to be aware that she had a bull’s-eye painted on her back.
“Our friend Buck said that you were a kidnapping target. The people he worked for have a long reach. We saw that in Turkey.”
Carina tilted her stubborn chin up at an imperious angle. “I’m not going to let anyone make me spend the rest of my days hiding in a closet.”
“Don’t blame you. I’d like to offer a compromise,” Austin said. “Stay at the boathouse tonight. I’ll prepare a sumptuous dinner of Thai takeout. Sleep off your jet lag and get a good start in the morning.”
“I’d like that,” Carina said without hesitation.
The pilot announced that the plane was making its approach to DullesAirport and would be on the ground in fifteen minutes. Austin glanced across the aisle. Zavala looked like a dead man sleeping. He could fall asleep on a bed of nails and be up at a moment’s notice, ready to spring into action.
Austin removed the cell phone from Zavala’s jacket and put in a call to the Trouts. Paul answered. Austin said he was back from Turkey and asked if he and Gamay had received the Jefferson file.
“We’ve read it,” Paul said. “We’ve got a good rendering of a ship of Tarshish, but need more information to plot a course. But you need to know something, Kurt: We followed a lead to the American Philosophical Society and stumbled into a real snake pit.”
“I have a problem imagining that venerable institution of learning as a nest of vipers.”
“Times have changed. Shortly after we visited the library, a librarian was killed. Her assistant would have met a similar fate if Gamay and I hadn’t showed up and chased the killer away.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“Yeah. Big guy, with a baby face and round blue eyes.”
“I’ve met the gentleman. Is the assistant okay?”
“Still a bit shaky. We persuaded her to get out of Philadelphia after the police finished interviewing her. She wanted to stop by her apartment. We insisted that she come directly to Georgetown. Gamay loaned her some clothes that fit, more or less.”
“I’d like to meet her. How about seven o’clock tomorrow?”
“We’ll bring the doughnuts and coffee. You haven’t told me about your trip to Istanbul.”
“Turkey has a snake infestation problem too. See you in the morning.”
The thump of the plane’s landing gear on the tarmac woke Zavala up from his sound sleep. He looked out the window. “Home so soon?”
Austin handed the cell phone back. “You dreamed your way across the Atlantic.”
Zavala puffed out his cheeks. “I was having nightmares about eunuchs, thanks to you.”
The plane taxied away from the general aviation area to a special NUMA hangar. The three passengers debarked and carefully loaded the plaster casts along with the baggage into a Jeep Cherokee from the NUMA motor pool. Austin dropped Zavala off and drove to his boathouse after stopping to pick up an order of Thai food.
Dinner was on the deck, with selections from Austin’s collection of progressive jazz in the background. He and Carina sipped brandy to the music of John Coltrane and Oscar Peterson and agreed not to discuss the mysteries surrounding the Navigator. They talked about their work instead. Carina matched every NUMA adventure with a fascinating episode of her own.
The combination of brandy and hours of travel took its toll, and Carina started to nod off. Austin showed her to the bedroom in the Victorian turret, and, unable to sleep, he went back down to his study. He stretched out in a comfortable leather chair and studied the amber liquor in his glass as if he were looking into a crystal ball. In his mind, he went over every detail, starting with the SOS from the oil rig.
He was hoping his ruminations would produce a picture with the clarity of a Rembrandt, but what he got was a Jackson Pollock abstract. He rose from his chair, went to a bookcase, and found Anthony Saxon’s book. He settled back into his chair and began to read.
ANTHONY SAXON was a true adventurer. He had hacked his way through the jungle to discover long-lost South American ruins. He had narrowly escaped death at the hands of nomadic desert tribesmen. He had rummaged through countless dusty tombs and made the acquaintance of numerous mummies. If only a tenth of what he wrote was true, Saxon was cut from the same mold as such famous explorers as Hiram Bingham, Stanley and Livingstone, and Indiana Jones.
Several years before, Saxon had launched what could have been his greatest adventure. He intended to sail a replica of a Phoenician ship from the Red Sea to the coast of North America. The Pacific Ocean crossing would have proven his theory that Ophir, the fabled site of King Solomon’s mines, was in the Americas. However, the ship burned to the waterline one night under mysterious circumstances.
Saxon believed that Ophir was not a single place but the code name for several sources of Solomon’s wealth. He theorized that Solomon launched two fleets under the direction of Hiram, the Phoenician admiral. One flotilla left from the Red Sea. The other flotilla crossed the Atlantic, after passing through the Straits of Gibraltar.
Saxon had found a strange glyph in a Peruvian ruin that matched similar symbols inscribed on tablets in Lebanon and Syria. He called the glyph the Tarshish symbol, and thought it might have been short-hand for “Ophir.” There were several photos of the glyph in his book.
Austin stared at the pictures.
The symbol was a horizontal line with back-to-back Zs at each end, identical to the mark carved into the Navigator’s kilt and the side of the bronze cat.