The Judas Strain (Sigma Force 4)

Gray climbed into the plane.

Minutes later they were airborne, shooting up out of the bay and headed back toward the international airport.

Gray returned to the rear seat, joining Vigor.

"You gave the boy the princess's headpiece?" the monsignor said, staring down at the boy's retreating skiff.

"To bury Marco and Kokejin."

Vigor turned to face him. "But such a discovery. History—"

"Marco has done enough for history. It was his last wish to be buried in peace with the woman he loved. I think we owe him that much. And besides, we don't need the headpiece."

Vigor stared at Gray, one eye narrowed, plainly sizing him up, judging his generosity. "But you thought the headpiece might hold a clue. That's why you took it." The monsignor's eyes widened and his voice raised. "Dear Lord, Gray, you actually solved the angelic code."

Gray pulled his notebook out. "Not quite. Almost."

"How?"

Seichan overheard their discussion and came back to join them, standing between the seats. Kowalski twisted around, peering over the seat back.

Gray answered the monsignor. "I solved it by throwing out all our old suppositions. We kept looking for a letter-substitution code."

"Like the inscription in the Vatican spelling out hagia."

"I think that was done to purposefully mislead. The big mystery on the obelisk is not a letter-substitution puzzle."

"Show us," Seichan said.

"In a moment." Gray checked his watch. Eight minutes left. "I still have part of the puzzle to figure out. The three keys. Keys organized in a certain order." He opened his notebook and tapped the three angelic symbols.

Gray continued, "With the obelisk's code always in plain sight, the keys only served one purpose. To reveal the correct way to read the code. The obelisk has four sides. But on which side do you start? In which direction do you read it?"

Gray flipped his notebook open and found the original page of script supplied by Seichan. "For the gold-inscribed symbols to be so important, they must be written somewhere on the obelisk. And so they are."

Gray circled them.

"This sequence only appears once. It's unique. Notice how it wraps from one of the obelisk's surface to the next. It's delineating where to begin reading and in which direction."

He added an arrow.

"So you must reorder the sequence to match the keys." He flipped the notebook pages, searching through the eight variations that he and Vigor had mapped out earlier. He found the right one and circled the key symbols. "This is the proper way the map must be laid out to be read correctly."

Seichan leaned closer. "What map are you talking about?" "This is what I noticed back at the chapel," he said. "Watch." He took a pencil and began poking holes through the page and marking the next blank page.

"What are you doing?" Vigor asked.

Gray explained, "Notice how some of the diacritical marks—those small circles in the angelic script—are darkened and others are not. We know from the second key how that symbol's black diacritical mark ended up being a marker for the Portuguese castle. So the blackened circles on the obelisk's code must be markers, too. But markers to what? If you poke out each dark circle onto a fresh page, stripping all else away, you get this."

"Well, that sure helped," Kowalski said sarcastically.

Gray rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin, concentrating. "Something's here. I can sense it."

"Maybe you're supposed to connect the dots," Kowalski said with no less sarcasm. "Maybe it'll form a big flashing arrow spelling out go the f**k here."

Siechan frowned. "And maybe it's time for you to shut the hell up."

Gray did not need their bickering. Not now. Kowalski was fine as a getaway driver, good in a firefight, but Gray needed sage advice, not kindergarten suggestions, like connect the dots.

Then he saw it.

"Oh my God!" Gray sat up, fumbled his pencil, and grasped it more firmly. "Kowalski is right!" I am?

"He is . .. ?" Seichan responded.

Gray turned to Vigor, clutching his forearm. "The first clue! In the Tower of Winds."

Vigor frowned—then his eyes widened. "Which holds the Vatican's astronomical observatory. . . where Galileo proved the earth moved around the sun!" Vigor tapped the sheet. "These are stars!"

Gray took his pencil. He had been staring hard at the sheet and recognized a familiar pattern. "This is a constellation." He drew it in.

Vigor recognized it, too. "That's the constellation for Draco, the dragon."

Seichan cocked her head as she stared down. "Are you saying it's a navigational star map?"

"It looks that way." Gray scratched his head with his pencil's eraser. "But how does one constellation tell us where to go?"

No one answered.

"It can't," he finally conceded.

Gray's heart pounded in his throat. They were running out of time. Had he just taken them down the wrong path?

Vigor sat back. "Wait," he mumbled. "Remember Marco's story. The last stanza. Marco said he drew a map of the city, not a map to the city."

"And?" Gray asked.

Vigor took the paper, spun it around. "This can't be stars. It has to be the layout of the City of the Dead. That's what Marco's text stated. Possibly the Vatican made the same mistake we just did. They misinterpreted Marco's map in the same manner. They also thought it was navigational star map."

Gray shook his head. "That's a rather strange coincidence that a city should be laid out in the exact pattern of the Draco constellation. If I'm not mistaken, even the stars outside the dragon line mark the placement of real stars."

Vigor nodded. "But remember, from my study of ancient civilizations . . . from the Egyptians through Mesoamerica, many civilizations built their monuments and cities patterned after the stars, made to mimic them."

Gray remembered a similar lesson. "Like the three Egyptian pyramids are supposed to represent the stars of Orion's belt."

"Exactly! Somewhere in Southeast Asia is a city patterned after the Draco constellation."

Seichan suddenly swung around. "Choi mai!" she swore under her breath. "1 remember something . . . something I heard about. . . some ruins in Cambodia. My family has roots in the region. Vietnam and Cambodia."

Seichan rushed to her pack, pawed through it, and pulled out her laptop. "There's an encyclopedia program on here."