Washington D.C.
The pattern, Stone thought, was proving damned elusive.
The numbers were a code. The Spear of Destiny was somehow the key to cracking it, but the Spear was gone. A discreet inquiry by phone had confirmed their worst fears. The hotel had been robbed at gunpoint, the safe and several rooms—the rooms that would have been theirs—ransacked.
The loss of their single advantage over the Dominion had left them all stunned and Stone was struggling to reorient himself. The attack on Avery had left him shaken. He should have anticipated the Dominion’s response, should have taken steps to ensure her safety, as well as protecting the Spear better. It had all been so predictable, yet he had missed the signs and Avery had nearly paid a very dear price for his mistake.
He closed his eyes, tuning out the hum of activity in the pub on the airport concourse where, in the absence of a better destination, they had gathered to plan their next move. Tuning out his dining companions was a problem of a different stripe. Hardly a word had been spoken since their arrival, but their thoughts were anything but quiet. Stone was no mind-reader. He didn’t need to be to pick up the none-too-subtle cues of body language.
Sievers was easy, not surprising since Stone had spent the better part of a year dissecting his behavior. The contractor was struggling to understand the significance of what was happening, but because he was following orders and dealing with compartmentalized directives, the uncertainty of the situation did not bother him as much as the possibility that he might have made the wrong call. The obvious course of action, the one Sievers knew he should take, was to simply grab Stone and head for the nearest EmergInt office. He wasn’t ready to do that, not yet at least, but if Stone could not show him that they were making progress, the gravity of that option would eventually be impossible to overcome.
Kasey was harder to read. She was the product of a culture where displays of emotion were regarded as a sign of weakness. Compounding that, she had chosen a career where keeping secrets was the essential life-support system. Yet, he had spent enough time with her to identify her self-control mechanisms. Kasey shielded herself with sarcasm and a self-assuredness that bordered on arrogance. He took her present silence as an indication of how frustrated and out of her depth she now felt. Nevertheless, she sat up straight in her chair, sipping a Coke and surreptitiously checking for any signs of Dominion surveillance, as if she might, by sheer willpower, bring about order out of chaos. Stone sensed that the success of their mission was of less importance to Kasey than not being solely responsible for its failure. She was not, of course. They were in an impossible situation, constrained by too little information and facing an enemy who held all the cards, but to someone like Kasey, that was no excuse.
Avery, who had neither formal military training nor any particular cultural programming, was about as hard to read as a neon sign, but the message was not at all what Stone would have expected from someone who had just narrowly escaped a kidnapping. Rather than retreating into herself, Avery’s brain was in overdrive as she wrestled with the mystery of what Patton had called the Devil’s gift. Her brute force attack had not yielded any fresh insights, but Stone was impressed with her resiliency. She was made of tougher stuff than she appeared.
“I don’t get it,” Sievers said, breaking the long silence. “Why try to kidnap her if they already had what they wanted?”
“They didn’t have it,” Stone replied. “And they weren’t certain that we had it. They were waiting for us at the airport. It wouldn’t have been difficult to figure out which plane we were on or to get our flight plan. When we landed, they followed us, first to the hotel, then to the Library. Trading Avery for the Spear was the preferred option because they couldn’t be sure where we were keeping it. When that didn’t work, they had to go with Plan B. Unfortunately for us, it worked.”
“We have to get the Spear back,” Kasey declared. “We’re dead in the water without it.”
“What about the kidnappers?” Sievers suggested. “We know what they look like. Shouldn’t be too hard to put names to the faces. We track them down, sweat them until they give up their accomplices.”
Kasey brightened at this idea, but Stone shook his head. “That will take time that we don’t have. We need to get ahead of them.”
“And how are we gonna do that if we don’t know where they’re going?”
“By cracking the code,” Avery declared.
“Without the Spear?” Kasey made no effort to conceal her doubtfulness.
Avery caught Stone’s gaze and held it. “A code is just another pattern, right? If we start with what we already know, then all we have to do is fill in the blanks.”
“We don’t know anything,” Kasey said, irritably.
Avery grabbed a napkin and a pen and started writing. “This is how you do it, right? List everything you know and figure out what the connections are?”
Stone couldn’t help but smile as Avery’s list took shape.
Patton
Code
Spear of Destiny
Devil’s gift.
“What else?” she asked, her pen hovering above the napkin.
“The Devil,” Sievers suggested. “Sounds like it was his nickname for someone. A real person.”
“Good.” Stone was pleased that Sievers was taking an interest. He needed the man to be engaged in their current effort, rather than scheming to return Stone to the black site. “But the code is the important thing. It’s a message, hidden in those numbers.”
Kasey rolled her eyes. “Duh.”
Stone smiled. Kasey’s sarcasm was also a good sign.
Avery wrote down the code on another napkin.
29 33 13 108 10 8
“Wasn’t that Patton’s high school locker combo?” Kasey said with a wink to Sievers.
“I’ll try Googling it.” Avery tapped the digits in, then shook her head. “Nothing. A lot of basketball scores. A substitution cipher would make sense. It’s short, but if that’s what it is, we should be able to crack it even without the key.”
“I doubt it will be that easy. Patton would have known a thing or two about encryption.” Stone drummed his fingers on the table. “What did he say? ‘Let him that hath understanding count the number. The Spear will point the way.’”
“The first part is from the Bible,” Avery said. “Revelation thirteen. ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man, and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.’ Maybe the numbers are Bible verses? Or Bible page numbers? What if we start with that verse, then count letters.”
She navigated to an online edition of the King James Version and looked up the passage. “All right, if I start with the word ‘let’, counting forward to twenty-nine gives us the letter ‘O.’ Then ‘T.’” She continued counting and writing letters, then frowned at the final result.
O H A A T H
“Maybe I should start at the beginning of the verse.”
“Or maybe it’s a math problem,” Kasey said. “Try adding the numbers up?”
Stone couldn’t tell if she was serious, but Avery shrugged and then did just that.
“201?” She looked up to see if that number had any significance to Stone, the shrugged. “Well, I suppose that would be too obvious.” She tapped the pen against the sum. “There’s a Latin inscription on the Spear. Maybe we’re supposed to convert this into Roman numerals. Or maybe the number itself is significant, like in numerology?”
Stone turned to Sievers. “You’re the closest thing we have to a Patton scholar here. Was he interested in esoterica?”
“Not from what I’ve read.”
“It’s a joke,” Stone declared. “Subterfuge. He’s got us chasing our tail.” He closed his eyes trying once more to focus on the important details and separate out the extraneous. “‘The Spear will point the way.’ The way to what? Are we looking for a physical location?”
“That would make sense,” suggested Avery. “X marks the spot. Go here and find the Devil’s gift.”
“The numbers could be map coordinates,” offered Sievers.
Stone opened his eyes. “Latitude and longitude? Okay, let’s try that. Twenty-nine degrees, thirty-three minutes, thirteen seconds, by one hundred eight degrees, ten minutes, eight seconds. That would narrow it down to an area less than a quarter of a mile across. Without cardinal directions, there are four places on earth that match those coordinates.”
“I’m on it.” She tapped the phone a few times, then studied the results. “First location, roughly twenty-nine north, one-oh-eight east, is in China, about a hundred miles east of Chongqing. There’s a massive limestone karst formation there. Caves, sinkholes, natural bridges.” She glanced over at Sievers. “Did Patton ever go to China?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We can’t discount it,” Stone said. “Based on the surrounding text, I don’t think Patton ever laid eyes on this ‘gift,’ whatever it is, so it could be at any of these locations.”
“Not this one. Twenty-nine south is in the Indian Ocean, about four hundred miles west of Australia. Deep water, not much else. Same story in the western hemisphere. Smack dab in the middle of the... oh.”
“What?”
“Those coordinates are less than two hundred miles south of Easter Island.”
Stone considered this. There were few places on earth more remote than Easter Island. “A good place to hide something. Where’s the last one?”
Avery’s excitement reached a new peak. She turned the phone to show them all the results. “Mexico! That can’t be a coincidence.”
Stone nodded, but the discovery was not a surprise. This was the connection he had known would be there. All this did was confirm that they had correctly identified the numbers as coordinates. But did they hide another secret?
“It’s in the Sierra Madre mountain range, in the state of Chihuahua,” Avery continued. “That’s the same area where Patton hunted Pancho Villa.”
“Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” said Sievers. “Patton said he was afraid someone might stumble across it while looking for another treasure. People are always looking for lost gold out there.”
“The scout,” Avery said. “He said the scout was still looking for treasure. I think he was talking about Emil Holmdahl. He was a cavalry scout who accompanied Patton on his hunt for Pancho Villa. The guy was a real character, but tough as nails. After World War I, he spent the rest of his life running guns and looking for Pancho Villa’s lost treasure. At one point, the Mexican government accused him of digging up Villa’s body and cutting off the head, which he then sold to the Skull and Bones society at Yale University.”
“Skull and Bones.” Stone wondered how, or even if, that piece fit into the puzzle. With three United States presidents and many other influential politicians and businessmen among their alumni, there were always rumors that the secret group had a much darker agenda. Those rumors notwithstanding, it was true that among their macabre eccentricities was a penchant for collecting the skeletal remains of famous historical figures. The collection, housed in their exclusive hall known as The Tomb, did contain human skulls, though probably not actually the skulls of Martin Van Buren, Geronimo, or Pancho Villa as was claimed.
“Do you think there could be a connection between them and the Dominion? Maybe Holmdahl found something about this gift and passed it on to the society along with Villa’s skull. That could be how the Dominion found out about it.”
It felt to Stone like a tangent, too many steps removed from the central issue. “We should go to Mexico. Start looking at those coordinates.”
“Hang on a sec,” Kasey said. “The numbers aren’t a code after all? Then why did the Dominion steal the Spear?”
Avery was ready with an answer. “Patton said ‘the Spear will point the way.’ We assumed it meant that the Spear was needed to crack a code, but it could mean that once we get to that spot, the Spear will somehow show us where to go.”
Kasey threw up her hands. “Then we’re back where we started. We have to get the Spear back.”
Stone shook his head. “I don’t think the Dominion has figured this out yet. They think the numbers are a code and that the key is somewhere on the Spear. That’s why they were so desperate to get it. The diary, too, for that matter. Right now, we know more than they do. When they finally do figure it out, we’ll be waiting for them.”