Chapter 48

Gunshots?

Nate ran toward the sounds, the lantern throwing beams in some directions and leaving shadows in others. He’d not found Sarah in the Jones tomb. Now he was looking for Etienne or Remiel’s men. Nate prayed the gunshots were coming from the Russians. Something he could honestly say he’d never prayed for before.

Ten minutes later, he found Ty, Pete, and Zack in a clearing. Ty held a red-lens flashlight on two dead men. Remiel’s Russians.

Nate sank to his knees because they wouldn’t hold him anymore.

Zack planted a hand on Nate’s shoulder. “You’re okay?”

Nate threw him off. “Why?”

“Why did we kill these men?” Pete came over. “Because they were firing on us.”

Ty wiped his forehead with his arm. “They were no match for the boars, though.”

The words caught in Nate’s throat. He could barely speak. Barely breathe. Barely see.

“Hey.” Zack knelt in front of Nate. “What’s wrong?”

“They were my last chance.” The last word fell apart like a hammer crushing ice.

“Nate?” Pete’s voice sounded more concerned. “What’s going on?”

“Sarah is in a hide site beneath one of these crypts. It’s filling with water, and I’ve no way of finding her except for the Russians, who I’d hoped would lead me to her before she drowned.” He fell forward, his palms hitting the dirt, crushed shells cutting his hands.

He was so tired and scared and desperate. “I don’t…can’t…find her.”

Pete dragged Nate to his feet and picked up the lantern. “We’ll figure this out.”

Nate pulled Etienne’s gun out of his back waistband, then put it in again. And took it out. “I have to find Sarah.”

Zack stopped Nate’s hand. “It’s okay, Nate. We’ll find her.”

“How?” Ty asked. “There are hundreds of tombs—”

“Shut up, Ty,” Zack said.

Nate started walking. He was getting to know every inch of this cemetery. It killed him that he could be passing above Sarah at this moment and never even realize it. A dread unlike any he’d ever known filled him with such physical pain he could barely walk. His men followed.

“Where are we going?” Ty asked.

“No idea,” Pete said, still carrying the lantern.

Twenty minutes later, Nate stopped in front of Saint Michael the Archangel. Cassio was gone, and Nate had no idea what to do next.

Zack came up next to Nate to stare at the naked angel. “Explain again about the hide sites.”

Nate told them about Sarah’s hide sites and the cipher and how she solved it. He finished with “She deciphered the parts of the cipher she had, which gave us names but not locations.”

“Where’d she get the original cipher from?” Pete asked.

Nate took the Ziploc bag from his jacket. “A diary written by a sixteen-year-old Puritan girl who was burned for witchcraft and buried in this cemetery.”

Zack undid the bag and took out the diary, the copy of Othello, and a folded page. “What’s this?”

Nate laid the page on top of a flat tomb. “It’s an old pirate map of Capel land and this cemetery.” Along the bottom, Sarah had written the alphanumeric sequences they’d deciphered and the corresponding names of the tombs that covered her hide sites.

Pete and Ty came over with the lantern.

“These alphanumeric sequences,” Ty said. “They were translated into these names using Othello as a substitution cipher key? Made by pirates and maybe used in the Revolutionary War?”

“Yes.” Nate ran his hands over his short hair. What am I going to do?

“Cool.” Ty picked up the three-hundred-year-old diary and started flipping through it like it was the Sunday sports section. “What are these?” He pointed to numbers Nate had never seen:

“No idea.” There were more numbers, but they were smudged.

Pete used a stick to poke the map. “Walk me through these hide sites one more time.”

As Nate talked, Ty read the diary.

A minute later, Ty said, “Hey. This Puritan girl is in love with pi.”

“What are you talking about?” Pete took the diary. “It says, ‘RP loves TT.’ How do you get pie out of that? Idiot.”

“Two capital T’s next to each other resembles pi, you know, like in Greek.”

“TT stands for Thomas Toban,” Nate said. “Rebecca, the girl who wrote that diary, ran away to marry him. In fact, Saint Michael is Thomas’s tomb…” Nate grabbed the lantern and ran over to the archangel. There were no birth or death dates on the plinth block. Only TT, which did resemble the symbol for pi.

Ty used the red-lensed light to illuminate the plinth block. “Look at these stars and roses.”

“Sarah said in classical navigation that roses and stars represent time and distance.”

Time and distance…and pi?

Nate returned to the diary to study the numbers. After a minute, he realized every sequence followed the same pattern. Of course.

His dyslexia might’ve messed with his words but never with numbers. And everything he’d ever wanted to know about patterns, he’d learned from Sarah.

Some of the tightness in his chest lessened, and he found one of Sarah’s pencils in his coat pocket. Then he turned over the map. Taking the first sequence, he rewrote it as

“See? Every sequence has twenty-two over seven in the middle, which is about 3.14, the early notation for pi. In each sequence, twenty-two over seven is followed by a four.” He tapped the pencil on the tomb. “The four is in the first half of the sequence, not the second.”

Pete shouldered him. “So?”

“I read this as thirty-two pi divided by four, which is eight pi.”

“This sounds like math.” Ty appeared with his red light. “Tell me this isn’t calculus.”

“Nope. Trigonometry.” Nate drew a circle. “Two pi is a full circle. Eight pi just means you go around the circle four times…but you still end up at a zero bearing.” He scoffed lightly. “I bet the pirates were trying to make it more confusing.”

Pete’s hands landed on his hips “It’s working, because I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Stick with me.” Nate started transcribing the other numbers. “These sequences are polar coordinates that will tell us where the hide sites are from some starting point.”

“Polar…what? Oh, jeez.” Ty closed his eyes. “I hate math.”

Zack and Pete studied the numbers while that dull feeling in Nate’s head cleared. Logic started kicking fear’s ass. Logic would find the woman he loved.

Zack shook his head. “What do you mean?”

Nate met Zack’s confused gaze. “Remember basic land nav training? We moved from point A to point B on a map by determining the compass direction from A to B in degrees, zero to three sixty, measured from magnetic north as zero degrees. Then we measured distance in meters.”

And the crowd went silent.

So Nate continued. “These numbers are giving us a direction—a bearing—and a distance to take from some point of origin.”

Ty sighed heavily. “How?”

Pete and Zack just stared at Nate, and he could almost hear their eyes glazing over.

Nate pointed to the numbers he’d transcribed:

“Angles can be measured in degrees or in radians, which are usually written in terms of pi. That’s what clued me in.” He pointed to the circle he’d drawn. “A quarter of a circle is ninety degrees, or pi divided by two radians. Half a circle is one hundred eighty degrees, or pi radians. A full circle is three hundred sixty degrees, or two pi. Get it?”

Zack leaned in closer. “The first part of the sequence is a bearing in radians—”

“What are radians again?” Ty asked.

Zack pushed Ty away. “The second number is a distance…what is that supposed to be in…feet?”

“I’m not sure,” Nate said. “Sarah said pirates described distances using measures like leagues and paces.”

“Why?” Ty threw up a hand. “Why would anyone complicate their lives like this? Why would anyone make math even more confusing?”

“Because”—Zack picked up diary—“pirates didn’t want people finding their shit. They buried their treasure and made confusing maps only they could use.”

Nate considered whether to explain how—unlike compass directions, which were measured clockwise, always from magnetic north as zero degrees—radians were measured counterclockwise, from any point on a circle chosen as the “zero line.”

Instead he said, “To use these coordinates, we need to figure out where the starting point is and decide which direction from that point should be considered zero degrees, or zero radians.”

“You mean a zero line that isn’t magnetic north?” Pete asked.

And Pete got a gold star. “Yes. Then we take our bearings off that zero line, walk the right distance…hopefully find the sites, which we’ll know by the names Sarah deciphered.”

Zack snorted. “Another way the pirates made it hard as hell to find their loot.”

“Oh, hell no.” Ty stomped around, his red light flashing everywhere. “I’m throwing the too-much-trig flag. I don’t do sines and cosines.”

“We’re lucky Nate was a math major.” Pete pointed to the diary. “How do we find the point of origin for these coordinates, figure out a zero line, and determine the distance?”

Nate felt rising panic again. “I’m not sure.”

No one mentioned that Sarah had transcribed over twenty hide site names, yet they only had four possible coordinates.

“Wait.” Zack moved toward Thomas’s tomb. “Didn’t Pops call Saint Michael the fixed point of Capel land?”

Nate looked up. “When?”

“Earlier tonight when we decided to save you.”

“Grady also said Saint Michael marked the center of the cemetery.” Pete walked around the tomb with the lantern and shone it on the TT engraving. “Slice of Greek pi, anyone?”

Nate hurried over with the map to stand in front of the TT. Then he turned toward the direction of the Jones tomb hide site.

“Could Thomas Toban’s tomb be our starting point?” Zack asked. “And…maybe this side of the tomb is our zero line?”

Nate reread the distance numbers, mentally translating them into possible lengths. With the cemetery no more than half a mile on a side, the lengths could only be in feet or yards or—as Sarah had mentioned earlier—paces. Which, if he remembered correctly, were about 2½ feet. His breath hitched, and then, for the first time since waking from his nightmare, he smiled. “Yes.”

“That means”—Ty slapped the angel’s ass—“Thomas, my man, you are our compass rose.”

Hooah, brother. Hoo-fucking-ah.

* * *

Nate put one foot along the base of the tomb and walked in the direction of the Jones hide site, counting paces aloud.

Too many minutes later, he returned.

“What are we dealing with?” Pete asked.

“Paces. I walked the distance off at 520 paces, close enough to 528.” His legs were probably longer than the pirates’. “I also marked the Jones site on this map.”

“Can we kill some boars now?” Ty asked. “Or search for Sarah?”

“In a few, brother,” Zack answered. “Right, Nate?”

“As soon as I check the alignment of the Jones tomb to the sides of Thomas’s tomb.” He lay the map on the flat tomb and drew a line between his penciled dot marking the Jones site and Saint Michael’s tomb, which, thank goodness, was already on the map. “Three pi divided by two is three-quarters of a circle. If I go clockwise from this line by three-quarters…”

He marked a line perpendicular to his first line, put an arrowhead on it, and wrote a large 0 next to the arrow. After staring in the direction he’d just paced, he turned the map, and…bingo! “My zero line here lines up with this side of the tomb with the TT on it.”

He took a precious moment to close his eyes and take a few inhales and exhales. The deep breaths evened out his heart rate, and a spiral of hope pushed aside his exhaustion.

He opened his eyes and, on the map, recorded the bearings and distances for the other three tombs. They weren’t perfect or precise, but it was all they had.

Ty read over Nate shoulder. “You’re sure Sarah is in this cemetery?”

“Yes.” Nate divided a gym flyer he’d found in his jacket pocket and, on the back, drew two crude maps of the cemetery. Then he listed the tomb names and marked the four approximate hide site locations.

After explaining to the men how to use the coordinates with Saint Michael as the starting point, he said, “The hide sites are beneath large, mausoleum-type structures and sit along creeks or estuaries. Maybe even a river. We’re splitting up into pairs, each taking two hide sites.”

Zack grabbed one of the rough maps, and Pete took the other.

“There’s another thing. These hide sites are only dry during certain weeks of the year, and then they fill up again.” Thunder rumbled again. “Etienne said that Sarah’s is filling now.”

* * *

Although the water wasn’t that cold, Sara was shivering. Because of her mistake with the door, the water had risen to her neck. Pretty soon she’d have to tread water, and she wasn’t sure she had the strength.

She heard thunder through the open door. The rain made echoey sounds on the water, and she screamed again.

“Sarah?”

She spun around in the water, in the dark, having no idea which way she was facing.

“Sarah!” A woman’s voice was definitely calling her.

“I’m here! I’m here!” she screamed, but it came out as a throaty cough. She’d no voice left.

“Sarah! Swim to the door in the wall.”

“It’s stuck.” Except all that came out was a hoarse bark.

“Swim to the door.”

It wouldn’t budge.

“Sarah!” The voice was now coming from outside.

Sara gripped the edge of the door until she couldn’t feel her fingers and yanked again. It’s not working. Although the door was only open a few inches, mud rushed in with the water. She rested her head against the wall and felt a pain in her hand. She still clutched the shard.

She dove down, using the edge of the door as a guide. She couldn’t see, but she’d gotten used to that. Her hands told her the bottom metal edge of the door was bent and had dug into the wood flooring. Using the blade, she cut the wood around the bent metal. She had to come up twice for air, but on the third time she got the metal edge to bend up. The door shifted a few more inches. Water came in faster, so she pushed harder.

“Sarah!” The voice sounded desperate.

That desperation spurred her to force the door open even a few more inches…she was able to slip her arm and leg through. The river flowed in faster, rising above her head, and she coughed. Suddenly, something grabbed her wrist. A strong hand with a tight grip. She coughed and swallowed what felt like a bucket’s worth of brackish water.

The door pushed in, like the person on the other side had kicked it. The hand on her wrist drew her out, but she struggled to breathe. The more water she gulped, the more she felt faint. The more light-headed she became, the more she panicked. The more panic took over, the more she fought the person who held her arm. Finally, when she had no more strength and could no longer breathe, she slipped into darkness.