The laptop chimed. Zane let the curtain fall back into place.
“Let’s see what we have here.” Amanda used the touch pad to maneuver to the device’s documents. When the contents displayed, she let out an exaggerated sigh. “Good grief, this may take all night.”
Hundreds of folders appeared on the screen, each named with a long set of what seemed to be random letters. Amanda clicked on the first folder, only to find another underneath it. The nomenclature was the same as before, a string of arbitrary letters.
Carmen frowned. “It looks like layers of dummy files to me. Keep clicking through.”
Amanda did as instructed. Each time she opened a folder, another appeared underneath. Finally, after clicking through about twenty layers she finally arrived at an empty folder. Dead end.
Zane looked at Carmen. “I’m impressed. How did you…?”
“It has nothing to do with my smarts. I’ve just seen this a couple of times before. It’s a common trick to hide a private file. It will throw off the casual snoop but not a sophisticated hacker.” She nodded at the screen. “Go back to where we started. I think that’s the group we need to focus on.”
Once Amanda returned to the highest level of folders, Zane looked at the names again. “Unless I’m missing something, the letters are completely random.”
“Scroll down, please,” Carmen said.
Amanda did as instructed.
“Who has time to put all this together?” Zane took a swig of coffee. “I’m guessing it would take hours — if not days — to put something like that together.”
Carmen answered without taking her eyes off the screen. “A man who is hiding something of great importance, something others would kill for.”
“Look.” Amanda pointed with her free hand.
Zane’s eyes narrowed. The folder names changed from sequences of letters to sequences of numbers.
“Wait!” Carmen said.
Amanda looked at her. “What?”
“Why didn’t I think of this before?”
“Why didn’t you think of what?” Zane asked.
“The folder names. Look at them.” Carmen’s voice was filled with excitement.
Zane examined the first few. He didn’t see anything special about the names. Like the previous ones, they seemed completely random. “Sorry, I don’t see a pattern.”
“How many numbers are there?” Carmen asked.
Amanda used her finger to count off each digit. “Eighteen.”
Carmen looked at Zane. “Sound familiar?”
Zane set his cup down and ran a hand through his hair. “I must need some sleep because I don’t see a thing.”
“I don’t see the significance either,” Amanda said.
“Here, watch this.” Carmen scooted closer and commandeered the touch pad. She inserted the cursor in the middle of the eighteen-digit number and inserted a space. “Okay, how many on each side?”
“Nine?” Amanda asked.
A look of understanding formed on Zane’s face. “Once again, I’m impressed. If you hadn’t done that, I never would’ve seen it.”
“I still don’t get it, guys,” Amanda said.
Zane looked at her. “They’re GPS coordinates.”
Amanda widened her eyes.
“Assuming you’re right, does this mean he’s giving us another location?” Zane asked Carmen.
“Possibly, but I don’t think so. If that were the case, we’d have no way of knowing which one of these is the right one without spending hours going through each and every folder and subfolder. But I do have a theory.” She reached into her pocket and retrieved her phone. After finding something, she set it down, moved back to the laptop, and scrolled through the folders.
Zane realized what she was looking for. “Let me guess. You think one of the folders has the GPS coordinates of the mountain villa.”
“Very good.” Carmen’s eyes narrowed as she studied the numbers. “I think this is it.”
Zane scooted his chair closer as Carmen clicked through the subfolders. A moment later, she stopped. She had just opened a folder, and instead of finding one underneath, there were two. The first was labeled For Your Eyes Only, and the other was labeled with a number.
“I think we hit pay dirt,” Carmen said.
She clicked on the one labeled, For Your Eyes Only first. Inside was the thumbnail JPEG. She double-clicked the image, and an ancient document appeared, or at least a portion of one. The roughly square piece had two straight sides, the top and the right. The bottom and left-hand sides were both torn.
Zane leaned forward for a better look. The cream-colored document was faded and weathered. But what he found even more interesting was what was written on the surface: dozens of darkly shaded lines.
He looked at Amanda. “Do you know what it is?”
She enlarged the image. “It looks like our map.”
“Are those roads?” Zane asked.
Amanda continued staring at the screen. “It’s possible.”
“Rivers perhaps?” Carmen asked.
Amanda pointed at some of the lines. “You might be right. It does remind me of the Nile Delta, with all its fingers and tributaries.”
Zane noticed one of the lines led to a large square space in the upper right-hand corner of the document. He indicated it with his finger. “If that’s true, perhaps this is a lake or some other large body of water.”
“The parchment is so worn it’s too hard to tell,” Carmen said.
“Technically, it’s not parchment. It’s papyrus.” Amanda zoomed in on one of the document’s torn edges. Small threads protruded. It looked like the edge of a torn cloth. “See those fibers? That’s what’s left of the pith strips, the inner part of a papyrus plant. Ancient Egyptians and other ancient peoples removed the pith from the plant then cut it into strips. The papyri were created by weaving together two perpendicular layers of strips.”
“So essentially, we’re looking at torn plant fibers,” Carmen said.
Amanda nodded.
“Is that important?” Zane asked.
“It is in one sense.” Amanda enlarged the image even further. “I’m an archaeologist, but documents aren’t my area of expertise. That’s a very specialized field. That being said, I can tell you it has the look of authenticity.” She looked at Zane. “In my professional opinion, we’re looking at an ancient document.”
“Obviously, Pauling thought it was authentic.” He looked back at the image. “If this is a system of rivers, is there any way to determine where they might be and the significance? Is there a program that would match the image to something on record?”
“There are any number of image-recognition tools online, but something tells me this won’t show up. Remember, Dr. Pauling was just starting to figure out what he was dealing with. That means it’s not the sort of thing you can pull up on Google. It’s going to take some research — potentially dozens of hours of research — to figure out what the lines represent. At this point, I can’t even say they’re rivers.”
“There was another folder,” Carmen said. “Let’s see what’s in there.”
Amanda backed out of the current folder and opened the other one. Inside was another thumbnail JPEG, which she double-clicked on. Zane’s eyes widened. The photograph showed an open drawer, and resting inside was a polished stone relic. Its shape was odd with spokes or spires sticking out of a circular center.
Amanda leaned closer. “It looks like a star.”
“I was going to say a wheel,” Zane said.
Carmen pointed at a tag next to the relic. “Can we get a better look at that?”
Amanda zoomed in, bringing a number and date into view. “It looks like the kind of labeling we use on the archaeological storage drawers at UT.”
“Maybe this was taken at a university,” Zane suggested.