The Judas Strain - James Rollins [126]
So not worth the risk.
Still, erring on the side of caution, they used oars to silently paddle the boy’s boat out to the waiting seaplane. Fee’az waved them on board.
“Come again! Come again!” he said, formally shaking each hand.
Gray felt obligated to give him some bonus for pulling their asses out of the fire. He reached to his pack, fished inside, and handed him the princess’s golden headpiece.
The boy’s eyes widened, holding the treasure with both hands—then pushed it back toward Gray. “I can no take.”
Gray folded his fingers over it. “It will cost you only a promise.”
Fee’az glanced up to him.
“There are two bodies, two skeletons, in the castle. Under the room of crosses.” He pointed to the castle, then out to the distant hills. “Take them away, dig a deep hole, and bury them. Together.”
He smiled, unsure if Gray was joking.
“Will you promise?”
He nodded his head. “I will get my brothers and uncles to help.”
Gray pushed the golden headpiece toward him. “It is yours.”
“Thank you, sir.” He shook Gray’s hand and said with all the solemnity of a blessing, “Come again.”
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 surfaces 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