The Lost Island Page 15

  Amy lowered the printout. “Most scholars think Cythera was an island off the Greek mainland. But here’s the catch: Cythera was also an ancient name for the Straits of Gibraltar. In other words, they were blown past Cythera into the Atlantic—the ‘deepest ocean.’ From there they were driven nine days westward, carried by high winds and currents.”

  “Nine days to cross the Atlantic?”

  “The main route of tropical storms goes southwestward from the Cape Verde Islands straight across into the Caribbean. In such a storm, he would have been driven along by the effects of wind, reinforced by the powerful Main Equatorial Current. This is exactly the route mariners took in times past. In reasonably favorable winds they could make the crossing in twenty days. There are many instances of ships caught in storms making the crossing in as little as a week—if they survived.”

  Gideon fell silent. He felt skeptical—and annoyed. “So you strand us here on this desolate shore, refuse help, place us both in jeopardy—just to prove this ridiculous theory of yours.”

  Amy sighed with impatience. “Haven’t you been listening? If Odysseus had been pushed across the Atlantic in a storm, his ships would have been subsequently caught in the Caribbean Loop Current, which connects to the Main Equatorial Current. And that would have brought him right here.” She hesitated. “That’s the research I was doing on the boat before we were attacked.”

  “Why did you keep it such a big secret?”

  “Because I was afraid of exactly the negative reaction I’m getting from you now.”

  Gideon shook his head. It all seemed so speculative. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it.

  “There’s something else in the Odyssey—something you might find more persuasive.” She read again from the printout: “‘. . . a delicious fruit, which is said to give health and heal all manner of infirmities, but at the expense of mind and memory.’ What does that remind you of?”

  “I suppose it could be a reference to the medicine we’re looking for.”

  “Of course. Can you imagine a clearer description of the remedium Glinn has sent us searching for?”

  Gideon stared into the fire, thinking. He was beginning to feel weary again—too weary to be angry. If this were all true, it could be further proof the medicine was real…and might actually help him. Immediately he was seized with the foolishness of this line of thought and pushed it out of his head. He had to stop dwelling on this false hope, which would only bring him disappointment and grief.

  “Consider the Phorkys Map. ‘Follow the Devil’s vomit.’ We’ve done exactly that. The spume trail leading out from Jeyupsi Cay naturally followed the Loop Current, which fetched us right up here. This is precisely where we’re meant to be—right where the next clue is. Right where Odysseus and his men landed three thousand years ago.”

  Gideon tossed a stick into the fire. “When did this first occur to you?”

  “I was familiar with the speculations of the dissident scholars. When I heard Glinn’s theory about the Greeks reaching the Caribbean, when I saw the Phorkys Map, I began to recall certain passages from the Odyssey. That’s when I began my research in earnest.”

  For a moment Gideon was silent. Then he shifted before the fire. “I’m not saying I buy into any of this. But for the time being, it looks as if I have to go along. So what next?”

  “Aquilonius. The unusual Latin term for ‘northerly.’ Which is where we must head to find the next clue—the very last clue. We’re almost there.”

  “What is that clue?”

  She pointed to the page. The drawing on the map showed a partially twisted rectangle without a bottom. The Latin inscription read: Trans ultra tortuosum locum.

  “Tortuosum locum. Twisted place. Trans ultra. Beyond the beyond. That’s what we’re looking for, ‘beyond the beyond of the twisted place.’ Which should be a little north of here. And—” Her eyes glittered in the dying light—“when we get there, we’ll be in the land of the Lotus Eaters.”

  35

  HIS THIRTY MINUTES in the whirlpool bath was up. Using the powered platforms and the robotic arm, Eli Glinn raised himself with painstaking slowness—his narrow body dripping water perfumed by soothing herbs and oils—and transported the platform to his dressing alcove. It was the work of another difficult thirty minutes to dry and dress himself.

  After the accident, Glinn had spent a great deal of time finding the kind of clothes that were most comfortable and easy to put on and remove. He had ultimately settled on warm-up pants of ultrasoft Persian cotton with an elastic waistband—tailored precisely to his needs by Jonathan Crofts of Savile Row—and mock turtlenecks one size too large. He now had several dozen pairs of each, and he used them as both daywear and nightwear.

  The arduous process completed, he clicked the remote to extinguish the candles, lowered himself into the wheelchair, and rolled out of the bathroom, through his bedroom, and into the main living area. As was his custom, he maneuvered the wheelchair through the spare, cool-gray space to the massive window overlooking the Hudson. Glinn slept very little, and he often sat here for hours, reading poetry or simply gazing out over the landscape, his thoughts far away.

  The monks used this secret alchemy and were able to heal themselves of “grievous wounds, afflictions, diseases and infirmities.” Was it really true? Was there a secret arcanum—or was it just another primitive legend, born of a crude and imperfect understanding of the world? Perhaps Brock’s skepticism was rubbing off on him.

  But then there was the evidence of the skeletons. That was real.

  His thoughts turned to Gideon and Amy. He felt a most disquieting mix of concern and uncertainty over the pair…and over the direction the project had taken. Their boat had sunk; they were marooned on the Mosquito Coast—and yet Amy had refused help. It was consistent with her Quantitative Behavioral Analysis. At the same time, they had not anticipated an attack from treasure hunters. They were in uncharted territory. Another item of concern lay in the team’s sat phone, which Amy had reported as being low on batteries. Ongoing communication with the two was of vital importance.

  His selection of Amy for this project had been one of the more extensive and arduous headhunting tasks EES had ever performed—and the Quantitative Behavioral Analysis tests on her had proven most interesting. EES was in the business of failure analysis as a means of preventing failure—and her QBA had indicated that, during this mission, she would fail. Yet ironically, the failure would be vital to the mission’s success.

  But that failure was not supposed to take place this early, or take such a form. Curious—and most disturbing. For the time being, however, Glinn realized he would simply have to take her report on faith.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the low chiming of the telephone. Glinn glanced at the clock: five thirty AM. He pirouetted the wheelchair, reached for the phone.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Weaver. I wonder if you could get down here. As soon as possible.” The technician’s voice was tight with anxiety—or, perhaps, fear.

  “What is it?”

  “It would be easier to show you in person, Mr. Glinn.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Hanging up the telephone, Glinn aimed his wheelchair at the elevator and whirred slowly over the expanse of polished slate.

  36

  GARZA ARRIVED IN the lab at a quarter to six, bone-tired and sick to death of dramatic, early-morning confabulations.

  Weaver, the tech, looked weary and drawn. But on top of that, he looked tense, unsettled. Brock was standing in a far corner, hands crossed over his chest, equally put out. Glinn sat beside him, motionless, his face betraying nothing.

  “The DNA test on the two follicles is complete,” Weaver said, and then seemed to falter.

  “Go on, man,” Garza said.

  “Remember how I told you my belief that the vellum on this page might be made from human skin?”

  Garza nodded.

  “It turns out I was wrong.”


  “Exactly what I predicted,” said Brock, primly.

  “And right.”

  Garza said, “Just get to the point.”

  The tech took a deep breath. “According to our analysis, the DNA sequences of these hair follicles match up with human DNA about ninety-seven percent. Yet there are significant sequences that do not match up with the human genome.” He looked around the room. “That’s why I say I’m both right and wrong. It’s humanoid. It’s almost human. I mean, it’s one percent less than a chimp-and-human match, but two percent more than, say, orangutan-and-human.” Weaver swallowed, plucked at his collar. He seemed to be downright frightened by the results.

  “What rot!” Brock cried. “You’ve had the greasy fingers of unwashed monks turning that page over for a thousand years—no wonder it’s permeated with human DNA.”

  “We were very, very careful. And we got the same results from both samples. We took the sample from the binding edge of the page, which presumably was handled less. And we ran controls for contamination. That doesn’t appear to be the case.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Brock retorted. “It’s been bound and rebound many times! There’s human DNA all over it.” He turned to Glinn. “Human skin simply wasn’t used for making vellum. It’s nothing more than animal skin—I would guess pig—that’s been badly contaminated.”

  Ignoring Brock, Glinn came forward slightly in his wheelchair. “You say you obtained similar results from both follicles?”

  Weaver nodded.

  “Almost human.” Garza had to make an effort to keep the skepticism out of his voice. “Weaver, this makes no sense. I’m with Brock. It’s contamination.”

  “No hasty conclusions, Mr. Garza,” Glinn said quietly, then turned back to Weaver. “How, exactly, do you check for contamination?”

  “We use a standard technique called BLAST—Basic Local Alignment Search Tool.”

  “How certain is it?”

  “It’s not one hundred percent.”

  “There it is,” Garza said, with a wave of his hand, his irritation beginning to crest—especially at Glinn’s solicitous reception of this nonsense.

  “Are there other ways to check for contamination?” Glinn asked.

  “Well…there’s a new technique we developed for our Swiss client last year, a hybrid version of the BWA-SW algorithm. We could run the sequences through that. Unfortunately, it’s much slower than BLAST.”

  “How does it work?” Garza asked.

  “The Burrows-Wheeler Aligner. Basically, it’s an algorithm for aligning nucleotide sequences against a referent, with the intent of uncovering any sequence contaminants. The variation we developed can work with longer query sequences, and with a higher toleration for error, than the original.”

  “Get started,” Glinn said.

  Weaver nodded.

  Garza spoke. “While you’re at it, do another run or two on those samples. Let’s see if you get the same results.” This all seemed unnecessary to him—but he knew they’d make no further progress until Glinn himself was satisfied.

  “I’d also like to know,” Glinn said quietly, “assuming there is no contamination—what that three percent difference represents.”

  “We could try to match it up with the genomes of any other species.”

  “Exactly. And see if you can extrapolate from that to see what sorts of anatomical differences those genes might represent. I want to know precisely what kind of creature we’re talking about. What it looks like, what its capabilities are—if we’re indeed dealing with a new hominid species.”

  Weaver’s face—already pale—turned a shade paler. No doubt, Garza thought, he was mentally counting up the additional hours of sleep he was about to lose.

  37

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, Amy and Gideon had managed to get all of five miles northward. It had been anything but a “walk on the beach.” Gideon was soaked and sore from wading and crawling through the endless mangrove swamps and lagoons that punctuated the coast, each one humming with noxious, bloodsucking insects and quaking with expanses of stinking mud. There was no way to go around them: they had to slog, wade, and swim across, one after the other.

  The sun was beginning to set over the endless jungle when they decided to halt. Gideon walked into the ocean to wash the muck from his clothes, feeling like some time-traveling Robinson Crusoe, fetched up on a prehistoric shore. They had seen no signs of human life: no footprints or tracks on the beach, and no boats offshore. Glancing back, he saw that Amy was busy cleaning her handgun, so he quickly stripped to the buff, rinsed his clothes, wrung them out, and then put them back on.

  He came back to camp. Amy was just putting her .45 back together.

  “Make a fire, please. I’m going to get us some protein.” She slapped the loaded magazine into place and disappeared into the twilit jungle.

  Gideon found a level area among the palms and began gathering dead leaves, twigs, and driftwood. He doubted Amy would be able to shoot anything with that .45 and resigned himself to another granola bar dinner. The sky was clear, but the sea was still a continuous roar, the march of rollers unceasing.

  He heard a couple of shots, and ten minutes later Amy emerged from the jungle, holding a dead armadillo by the tail. In her other hand she carried a bunch of plantains.

  “Armadillo? Is that the best you could do?”

  She laid the armadillo down on a banana leaf. “You clean it.”

  He stared at the creature, with its ridiculous-looking head and bony armor. “Me?”

  “I shot it. Now it’s your turn.”

  “What…do I do?”

  “I thought you were the gourmet cook around here. You think I’ve ever cleaned an armadillo before?” she said. “It’s all yours…First Mate.” She flashed him a wry smile.

  “Excuse me, but the last I checked, your ship had sunk. You’re no longer captain.”

  A silence. “Fair enough. But you’re still going to clean that armadillo.”

  Gideon began working on the animal with his knife, turning it over, slitting open the belly, and pulling out the entrails. It was disgusting work but he was so hungry he hardly noticed. Working the knife between the outer plates and flesh, he was able to carve out the meat, split it, and lay it out in the coals of the fire. As the smell of roasting meat wafted up, he felt a ravenous hunger take hold and he could see the same gleam in Amy’s eyes as she stared at the sizzling carcass. They pulled it out of the fire and cut it up on banana leaves. Although it was almost too hot to touch they began devouring it with trembling hands.

  It wasn’t long before a scattering of gnawed bones lay on the greasy leaves. Gideon felt human for the first time in two days. He glanced over at Amy, who was looking over the text of the Odyssey again, comparing it to the Phorkys Map, her face reflecting the firelight.

  “Any more revelations?” he asked, trying to keep the cynical tone out of his voice.

  “Nothing dramatic.” She laid down the text. “But I’m more than ever convinced we’re following in Odysseus’s footsteps.”

  Gideon lay back, his hands behind his head. “Tell me the story of Odysseus. It’s been a long time since I read it.”

  She eased back next to him. The fire crackled and the stars were coming out. “It’s the first thriller. It’s got everything—monsters, gods, demons, witches and sorcery, adventure, violence, shipwrecks, murder, and a love story. Best of all, it has a hero who is sort of the anti–James Bond, who gets his way not through brute force, but through tricks, deceptions, disguises, and deceit.”

  “The first social engineer.”

  Amy laughed. “Exactly.”

  “Sort of like me.”

  She looked at him. “Maybe a little.”

  “Anyway, go on with the story.”

  “I’ll stick to the salient parts. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus and his men took off with their booty and sailed westward. Ultimately, they got caught in a terrible storm. That’s the storm I told you about earlier, wh
ich blew them ‘past Cythera’ and for another nine days across the ‘deepest ocean.’ On the tenth day, they came to the land of the Lotus Eaters. Here was where three of his men, sent to contact the natives, end up wasted from eating the lotus fruit. Odysseus had to drag them back to the ship and tie them up to get them away. They sailed through the night and came to the land of the Cyclopes.”

  “Cyclopes? The one-eyed giants, right?”

  Amy nodded. “Cyclopes is plural, Cyclops is the singular.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “There were two islands side by side, a big one and a little one. They first landed on the big island, where they feasted on wild goats. Then they made their way to the Cyclopes’ island. Here they found a cave with stores of milk and cheese. This is where Odysseus blew it. Instead of stealing the food and hightailing it, he decided to stay and meet the owner. The Cyclops arrived a while later, an ugly brute by the name of Polyphemus, son of Poseidon. Polyphemus sweet-talked them at first, lulled them into dropping their guard—and then snatched up two of Odysseus’s men, bashed their brains out on the walls of the cave, and ate them raw while the others watched, horrified.”

  “Greek canapés.”

  “Polyphemus imprisoned the rest in the cave for future eating, rolling a huge boulder over the entrance. The next morning he left them penned up while he went out to tend his flock. When the giant returned, Odysseus got him drunk. He told Polyphemus that his name was Nobody. When the giant finally collapsed in a drunken stupor, Odysseus heated up a stick in the fire and drove the sharpened end into his eye. Polyphemus woke up shrieking that he was being killed, but when his distant neighbors called out to ask who was killing him, he responded ‘Nobody is killing me!’ and so they didn’t come to his aid, thinking he was just drunk.”