The Devil Colony (Sigma Force 7)

Still, the sight of the man’s last smile stayed with Gray. A cold fear settled in his gut. What did the bastard mean?

7:19 A.M.

Ten minutes later, Gray and the others were speeding down the Natchez Trace Parkway in the second Humvee they’d stolen that day. They’d taken one of the assault team’s vehicles, figuring they’d be less likely to be bothered that way. Plus, they needed the extra room.

Monk lay sprawled across the backseat, stripped to the waist, his belly bandaged in a pressure wrap from an emergency medical kit Gray had found in the back of the Army vehicle. Apparently the assault team had been expecting some injuries. He’d also found a morphine stick and jabbed Monk in the thigh with it.

His friend’s eyes already had a happy glaze around their edges.

Seichan, with her cuts and lacerations taped, manned the wheel, leaving Gray to examine the buffalo hide. He’d fetched it from the grave before leaving. The leather was brittle, but he was able to unfold it, revealing an image of a riotous battle dyed into the skin, showing Indians in the midst of waging a great war. Thousands of arrows flew, each delicately but indelibly tattooed into the skin. Elsewhere, pueblos tumbled from cliffs. Faces, feathered and painted, screamed.

Gray remembered Kat’s report from Painter, about the destruction of the Anasazi following the theft of sacred totems from the Tawtsee’untsaw Pootseev. Was that slaughter—that genocide—being memorialized on this buffalo skin?

This raised a larger question.

Gray had the buffalo hide open to the middle, spread over his lap. A large section was missing. He felt the surface with his fingers. It was much rougher.

“Lewis scraped this part of the artwork off the hide,” Gray said.

“Why?” Seichan asked.

“He’s written something here in the blank space.”

He stared down at the meticulous lines of script, flowing in a large swatch down the middle. While everyone was tending his or her wounds, he had sponged off the old blood that still covered most of the hide. The iron in the hemoglobin had stained the skin, but the words he found there were still legible.

“Only it makes no sense,” he said. “It’s just a jumble of letters. Either it’s a code, or Lewis really had gone mad.”

Seichan glanced down at the hide, then back to the road. “Didn’t Heisman say Lewis and Jefferson communicated in code? That they exchanged messages in their own private cipher.”

“That’s true.”

Gray pictured Lewis dying over that long night, waiting for Mrs. Grinder to find him. He had plenty of time to write this last message to the world, but what did it contain? Did it name his killer? Was it his last will and testament?

Gray’s fingers again rubbed the tough hide, where it had been crudely abraded. What did Lewis erase here? Along the edges, bits of what looked like a map remained: a corner of a river coursing down a mountain, some pass through another range, a piece of a lake. Was this a more detailed map of the terrain around the lost city of the Tawtsee’untsaw Pootseev? Did the gold map point to the general position, while this dyed rendition offered a more precise location? Is that how Fortescue was able to find it out west—that is, if he did in fact find it?

Gray put the bits together in his head. “I think the traitor, General Wilkinson, killed Lewis for the gold tablet in his possession, but he never knew about the significance of the buffalo hide. After his assassination, Lewis didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands, so he scraped it clean and left this last cryptic message to the world. He used his own blood and body to hide it.”

“Why hide it?”

“Perhaps to keep his murderer from knowing he’d been named. Maybe he hoped the hide would reach Jefferson with his other possessions, and if not, he’d at least leave a final testament to the future. We may never know. All we know is that there’s no map here to help Painter.”

Gray’s disposable phone rang. He picked it up. “Kat?”

“How’s Monk doing?” she asked, trying to sound strong but cracking at the edges.

“Sleeping like a baby,” he assured her.

Gray had already called her as they set off down the road, updating their situation. He’d given her a quick debriefing about the map.

“I have a jet waiting for you at a private airfield near Columbia,” she said.

“Good. We should be there in a few minutes. But what about Seichan? Isn’t everyone and their brother hunting her?”

“With what’s going on in Yellowstone, no one is concerned with the three of you any longer, especially as I’ve passed on an intelligence briefing implicating Waldorf, explaining how the situation at Fort Knox was an inside job orchestrated by him, and how he’d fabricated his story of terrorists to cover his own actions. That should buy you all enough clearance to get back home.”

“We’ll be there as quickly as we can.” Gray had one other concern. “Have you figured out how Waldorf managed to set up that ambush? How he knew we’d be digging up Lewis’s body? As far as I know, only you and Eric Heisman knew about it. Possibly also the curator’s assistant, Sharyn.”

“As far as I can tell, they’re both clear. And to be honest, with everything that’s happening so fast, some bit of intel may have reached the wrong ears. And you know the Guild has ears everywhere.” Kat sighed. “What about you? Did you make any further progress with the buffalo hide?”

“No. Nothing that can help Painter. I’m afraid he’s on his own from here.”

Chapter 39

June 1, 5:20 A.M.

Yellowstone National Park

Kai moved through the forest of otherworldly cones with her shadow chained to her. Ashanda followed so quietly behind, even the handcuffs were silent. Despite the bomb on Kai’s wrist, the woman’s presence was reassuring in some odd way.

Maybe it’s some sort of Stockholm-syndrome kind of thing, Kai thought.

But she sensed that it was more than that. She knew the woman did Rafael’s bidding, but there was no enmity in her. In many ways, the woman was as much a prisoner as Kai herself. Weren’t they both wearing handcuffs? Plus Kai had to admit that there was a kind of simplicity and beauty in Ashanda’s quietness, and in the soft sound of her humming that Kai occasionally overheard—filled always with that sadness under the surface.

Still, Kai could never shed the weight of the bomb on her wrist. It grew heavier with each step, a constant reminder of the danger she was in.