Lost Empire (Fargo Adventures 2)

“Wendy’s working on a search, but we’re up against the same problem: Except for a few cities, Sulawesi is thousands of square miles of rain forest, dead volcanoes, and not much else. There are places on that island that have never been explored. There’s very little Internet and even fewer online art collections. If we had a few weeks—”

“We don’t. Just do your best. If you find something that looks or sounds even remotely Aztec, flag it.”

“Sam, you have to take a breath.”

“When I’ve got Remi back. Let’s go back to the outrigger. You have the lab report. Remind me: What do we know about the materials used?”

“The wood used was durian. We know where it exists today. I’m working on where it might have grown before the sixth century. Same with the rest of it—the rubber tree, the pandan leaf, the gebang palm . . .”

“Let me guess: There aren’t many experts on those either.”

“Not that I’ve been able to find.”

“How about Blaylock’s letters?”

“We’ve decoded them all. Unless there’s a code behind the code, there’s nothing else there. That applies to his journal, too. How about the Constance letters you found on the Shenandoah?”

“They’re not coded. The first two letters discuss the voyage to the Sunda Strait. The last was probably written shortly before he died. You can read it when we get home. He tells Constance he wished he’d come home to marry her.”

“So sad. How about the maleo statuette you found?”

“It could be emerald or jade or any number of other gems I’m not familiar with. I’ll do a search for minerals endemic to Sulawesi, but I don’t think it’ll solve our problem. I’m going to need access to our server so I can look at everything from here.”

“Sure, give me ten minutes.”

“Good, thanks. What are we missing, Selma?”

“I don’t know, Sam.”

“We’re missing something.”

THREE HOURS PASSED. Sam and Selma talked every twenty minutes, discussing progress, dissecting what they knew, and rehashing what they suspected.

At hour four, Selma called again. “We’ve made a little progress. We found a book by a Norwegian botanist that discusses both the pandan leaf and gebang palm. I talked to him on the phone. He thinks that around the fourth and fifth century, both of them were heavily concentrated in the northern third of Sulawesi.”

“But not restricted to there.”

“No.”

“I just realized what we’re forgetting.”

“What?”

“The codex. Remember the bush the maleo is sitting on?”

“Yes. Damn. How did I forget that?”

“Doesn’t matter. Have Wendy do her thing: Enlarge the image, clean it up, and show it to the Norwegian.”

Sam hung up and returned to his laptop. As he had been on and off for the last three hours, he was scrolling through the gallery of images and scans they’d collected. There were dozens of Constance letters, hundreds of journal pages, the Orizaga Codex, the Fibonacci spirals . . . They all began to blur together.

He switched to Google Earth and continued his scan of Sulawesi, looking for anything that might ring the faintest of bells in his head. Minutes turned into an hour.

He zoomed in on a secluded bay on Sulawesi’s northeastern coast. As it seemed with every spot around Sulawesi, islets and atolls were scattered like confetti.

Sam stopped suddenly and tracked his finger backward, moving the map. He zoomed in again, paused, then zoomed some more. He squinted his eyes. Then smiled. “A hollowed-out flower,” he muttered.

HE WAS REACHING for the phone when it rang. It was Selma: “You were right, Sam, there are experts for everything. I heard back from a zoologist in Makassar. She claims up until the early seventeen hundreds, maleos were more migratory. Every year they would congregate in the northeast part of the island for a few months.”