The Judas Strain - James Rollins [127]
“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 fuck here.”
Seichan 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 a 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. “I 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.”
Seichan squatted down between the knees of Vigor and Gray. She called up the program and typed rapidly. She double-clicked on an icon and a digital map filled the screen.
“This is the temple complex of Angkor, built by the Khmer people of Cambodia in the ninth century.”
“Notice the layout of the temples,” Seichan said, “where each one lies. I had heard stories of how these ruins were supposedly laid out in a starlike grid.”
With his finger Gray drew a line connecting the temples in a pattern and tapped the remaining temples. He held up the first star map and placed it next to the open laptop.
“They’re an exact match,” Vigor said, awed. “Marco’s City of the Dead. It’s the ancient city of Angkor Wat.”
Gray leaned down and hugged Seichan