Fiona nodded to herself. She had figured out the significance of the characters almost right away. “It’s a grid system.”
“Grid system?” Kenner asked.
“The Phaistos letters give you coordinates on the X and Y axes. Any location on the map can be expressed with a unique address. You know, like ‘B-6…Hit! You sank my battleship!’”
“Of course,” Gallo murmured. “But why put reference characters on all four sides?”
“Dunno. Maybe that allows you to draw intercept points that aren’t at perpendicular angles. Let’s say you gave someone the address A-M-1-9. You would draw a line between A and M, and then another line between one and nine, and where those two lines cross, you have your waypoint.”
“That’s all very interesting,” Kenner said. “But it doesn’t tell us where to look for the Amazon city.”
Fiona shrugged. “Without a set of coordinates, there’s not much I can do.”
“Could there be a clue in the Phaistos symbols?” Gallo asked. “Perhaps the coordinate address also forms a word or a name?”
“Another literacy test? Like in the Labyrinth.” Fiona considered this for a moment. There was an undeniable logic to that idea. “You said that you have an idea of where the Amazon city is?”
“South America,” Gallo said. “Somewhere in the Amazon Basin… Don’t say it. I know how crazy it sounds.”
Fiona tried unsuccessfully to stifle a grin.
She stepped closer to the screen, paying careful attention to the Phaistos characters on the left-hand vertical edge, closest to the part of the map that corresponded to equatorial South America. From there, she drew random mental lines across the map to the opposite side, looking for pairings like those she had found in the Labyrinth. She saw three possible combinations. She repeated the process top-to-bottom, coming up with two more likely pairs. One of those couplets combined perfectly with one of the three possibilities, forming a sequence that she recognized from the Phaistos disc. The lines resulting from that unique ‘address’ fell at a point north of a spot where the Amazon met with one of its many tributaries.
“Okay, I think I know where it is.”
“Tell me,” urged Kenner’s disembodied voice.
She did her best to explain her conclusions and how she had reached them.
“Mount Roraima in Brazil,” Gallo said, when Fiona was finished. “Well that explains a lot.”
“I can show it to you on a map,” Fiona said, hoping to find a way out of the room.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Kenner said, and then as if in an aside, he added, “I wish you would have let me bring her. It would have made this much easier.”
“No way was I going to let you drag her along into the jungle,” Gallo replied.
“Bring me along?” Fiona said. “Aunt Gus, where are you?”
“Honestly, darling, I haven’t the foggiest. But now I know where I’m going.”
27
Lazarus jumped out of the launch and started dragging the bow of the craft up onto the rocky beach, until there was no risk of it being washed back out to sea. At the stern of the rigid-hulled inflatable boat, Pierce tilted the outboard up out of the water, and then jumped out to help. When the boat was high and dry, both men helped Carter offload several water-tight containers, which held everything she needed to set up a small-scale gene sequencing operation.
With the threat from the vines more or less under control, there was no immediate need for further genetic testing in Liberia, so Pierce had brought the equipment with them. To reduce the possibility of Cerberus tracking another chartered boat ride to the cave entrance, he had procured the Zodiac semi-rigid inflatable boat — a craft Lazarus had used extensively in his prior life — but he worried that this precaution had come too late. Cerberus might already know about the citadel. While he was confident that the Forgotten were more than a match for any incursion in the near term, the Gorham’s Cave refuge would have to be abandoned. For the present however, it would continue to serve as Herculean HQ.
Carter appraised the opening in the cliff face. She shook her head and muttered, “Caves. I can’t seem to get away from them.”
“I know what you mean,” Pierce said. “For what it’s worth, this one is nicer than most. Although…” He dipped a hand into his pocket and took out a pair of bronze medallions adorned with the emblem of the Herculean Society. He passed one each to Carter and Lazarus. “You’ll need to wear these. Keep them visible at all times.”
Lazarus stared at his medallion for several seconds. Pierce braced himself for a deluge of questions, but if the big man had any, he did not voice them. Instead, he looped the pendant chain around his neck, and then lifted the heaviest of the cargo boxes into his arms.
Pierce led the way into the ancient Neanderthal dwelling and up to the concealed entrance to the citadel. While Lazarus shuttled containers into the hidden cavern, Carter began inspecting the Nemean Lion’s impervious skin. Pierce checked in with Dourado, as he had done every half-hour since learning about Fiona’s and Gallo’s disappearances more than twelve hours earlier.
The answer was the same this time as it was in each of the previous instances. “Nothing yet. I’ll call as soon as I know something.”
Pierce sagged back in his chair, frustrated. While he had been on the move, traveling back from Liberia, he had at least been able to console himself with the illusion of progress. Now that he had reached his destination, he was confronted with the realization that there was nowhere to go next. Worse, the citadel was a reminder of his own failure to protect the people he loved. If he had taken Gallo and Fiona with him to Liberia, or insisted they remain in the cave…
If, if, if.
Carter’s voice pulled him out of his self-pitying reflection. “You weren’t kidding about how tough this thing is.”
He glanced over and saw her struggling with the Lion skin. “The Lion’s own claws were the only thing Hercules found that could cut through it.”
“Hercules didn’t have a diamond-tipped scalpel,” she replied, holding up the tool she had used to remove a tiny slice of the preserved hide. “There’s no magic at work here, Dr. Pierce. Just things that we don’t understand yet.”
“Will you be able to extract any viable DNA from it?”
“I think so. I’m curious about one thing, though. How exactly will this help you find your friends?”
The question stung. “Honestly, I don’t know if it will. Kenner believes these chimeras originate from a specific source. I was hoping that you might be able to isolate whatever factor is responsible. A genetic footprint, if you will. A chemical agent or something like that. But that was before. Now…?” He shrugged.
“Well, you might be on to something. I don’t know about chemical agents, but identifying the genetic contributors may give us a geographical ballpark.”
“How so?”
She gestured to the skin. “For starters, this isn’t a lion.”
“I know. It’s a chimera. A lion and something else.”
She shook her head. “Actually, I don’t think it’s a chimera either. Not in the genetic sense at least. I think it’s actually a transgenic hybrid.”
“What’s the difference?”
“In biology, a chimera is an organism that has two or more distinctive cellular populations. A bone marrow transplant or tree grafting creates a chimera because the recipient now has two distinctive cell populations. Two different sets of DNA, coexisting in the same body. If you graft a lemon branch onto a lime tree, it doesn’t become a new organism. Just a lime tree that also gives you lemons. A hybrid is a combination of genetic material from two different sources, but it has only one cellular population — one set of DNA.”