The Lost Island Read online

  The plump, sausage-like finger pointed at a tiny picture of an island rising from the sea, barely more than a rock, containing two twisted trees that looked like horns. A deft series of keystrokes magnified the image on the screen.

  “The attached inscription says: Perge ad orientem insula Diaboli, tunc pete meridiem. That is: ‘Seek the east side of the island of the Devil, and then go south.’”

  “That’s pretty vague,” said Gideon.

  “Indeed,” said Brock. “Particularly when you consider those two trees are surely long gone. Here’s another example, which we’ve labeled clue five.” He indicated a second tiny drawing, which showed a passageway between two bodies of land, a sort of strait, one with a split rock on one shore that vaguely resembled a cross. “The legend for this image says: ‘Your path is through the strait of the cross.’ That’s it. No compass rose, no indication of distance. Note, however, that there are a total of exactly nine images, or clues.”

  Gideon squinted at the map. “I’ve got to admit the draftsmanship is amazing.”

  “The Irish monks were geniuses at the art of miniaturization. Most of the work was done with single-haired brushes.”

  “So where is this mysterious island located, exactly?” Gideon asked.

  “Ah! The million-dollar question…” Brock paused, his green eyes goggling. “And the answer would appear to be: somewhere in the Caribbean.”

  “Caribbean? How do you know?”

  “I’ve already identified with some certainty the third landmark in the map, here. Columpnas Herculis transiens—the Pillars of Hercules. That was the universal name in the ancient world for the Strait of Gibraltar. Unfortunately, most of the other landmarks seem to be obscure, quixotic, and deliberately misleading.”

  “Why ‘deliberately’?”

  “Because it says it right here: ‘Only those favored by God may follow this map.’ The monks would have made it difficult to follow, to ensure that only those whom God helped could do so. The rest would perish.”

  Glinn interjected. “Dr. Brock’s begun feeding the details into the large geographic database we maintain here at EES.”

  “But what makes you think they reached the Caribbean?”

  “Because from the Cape Verde Islands, where according to the Annales the monks were shipwrecked and had to rebuild their ships, the Canaries Current heads south and southwesterly along the African coast, where it turns west and becomes the Northern Equatorial Current. The trades blow steadily with the current. Our computer models already indicate that the two combined would have taken the monks along the precise route Columbus followed on his third voyage. That would have carried them straight into the Caribbean.”

  Glinn pointed at the screen. “As evidence, all these little islands in this part of the map could only be located in the Caribbean.”

  “I’ve also identified the starting point,” said Brock.

  “Isn’t he a marvel?” Glinn said with evident pride.

  Brock shrugged this off. “It’s here, in what would be the eastern Aegean Sea.” He zoomed in on the first picture at the top left of the map, showing four hills in profile, along with a tiny, stylized drawing of a horse.

  “Ibi est initium,” said Brock, reading the accompanying Latin inscription. “‘There is the beginning.’ The four hills are a well-known landmark on the coast of Turkey.”

  “And the horse?”

  “No idea why there is a horse—not yet, that is.”

  Gideon’s eye wandered along the route. “What about that inscription at the end?”

  “I was just getting to that,” said Brock. “First of all, we can see the phrase Hic sunt gigantes: ‘Here there be giants.’ And then: Respondeo ad quaestionem, ipsa pergamena.”

  “Which means?”

  “It would appear to be a riddle,” said Brock. “It literally means: ‘I, the very page, answer the question.’”

  “And what is the question?” asked Gideon.

  “Yes, indeed, that itself is a mystery. I would say the question would be: What is the nature of this cure? Is it plant, animal, insect, or something else?”

  Glinn spoke. “It seems to me the answer would be somehow hidden on the page, most likely in one of these little drawings. The map tells us how to get there, but the answer to the riddle tells us what to look for.”

  Toggling his wheelchair, Glinn turned toward Gideon. “We’ve made some important deductions in the last hour. But as you can see, there’s still much we need to learn. Even so, there’s no reason to wait—in fact there are many good arguments against doing so. As a result, we’ve already begun work on chartering and outfitting a boat in the Caribbean. You’ll be on a flight the day after tomorrow.”

  “Wait, hold on. I’m no sailor!”

  “You’ll have a licensed captain on board.”

  “I don’t like the water.” Gideon decided not to mention that he was prone to seasickness.

  “You’ll adjust,” Glinn said. “You’re just the man for this assignment.”

  “I suppose that’s what your computer model tells you?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. A journey like this will take improvisation. You’re the master of improv.”

  “I’ll improv my way right into Davy Jones’s locker.”

  Glinn looked at him appraisingly. “I’m surprised at you, Gideon. This journey won’t be like your other assignments. You’re going for a cruise in the Caribbean. There’s no danger, no physical challenge.”

  “Are you forgetting about the giants?” Gideon asked.

  Everyone laughed.

  “Our initial estimate is that this Phorkys will be found somewhere in the southern Caribbean,” Glinn said. “If, for example, the Irish monks picked up the Caribbean Current near Barbados, it would have carried them through—” He paused a moment—“the Windward Islands, and then parallel to the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, perhaps even as far as the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua and Honduras.”

  “That’s a huge area to cover.”

  “Yes. Encompassing hundreds, even thousands, of islands. And of course the map is full of dirty tricks. It’s intentionally misleading.”

  Gideon had to admire the speed with which they had deduced so much about a map that was so obviously obscure. “In other words, we might be wandering around for weeks,” he said. “Sipping champagne, sunbathing, and visiting every single island and surveying the beach—just in case.”

  “Now you’re getting into the spirit of it,” laughed Glinn. “Trust me, compared with your last assignment, this one’s a walk in Central Park.”

  14

  GIDEON EXITED THE lab into the cavernous space, Garza following behind him.

  “Nothing like that good old railroaded feeling, eh?” Gideon asked.

  “I wouldn’t complain if I were you. A cruise in the Caribbean? I’ll take the assignment, thank you.”

  “He gets on my nerves.”

  “Welcome to the Glinn’s-a-pain-in-the-ass club.”

  As they walked through the enormous lab, Gideon glanced over at Garza. He knew Garza didn’t much care for him, especially his brash, lone-wolf way of doing things. He in turn found Garza to be uptight and rule-bound. It was true that the two of them weren’t exactly buddies. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way.

  “How about a drink?” he asked impulsively as they went through the double set of doors leading to the street.

  Garza paused to look at him. The offer had taken him by surprise. “Well…sure.”

  Spice Market was crowded, as usual, but they were able to grab a small table in the corner. Gideon ordered a Beefeater martini, Garza an IPA.

  As the waitress left, Gideon looked at Garza more closely. He was a small, dark, heavily muscled man, with tightly curled black hair fringed white at the temples. His eyes had an intelligent gleam in them.

  “How long have you been working at EES?” he said to break the ice.

  “Twelve years. Ever since Eli and I got out of the military.
”

  “Military?”

  Garza nodded. “I was an engineering specialist on Glinn’s team.”

  “What kind of team?”

  “Special Forces. Came up through Airborne, then the Rangers.”

  “What kind of work did you do?”

  “We blew things up, mostly.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  Gideon chuckled. “If you’ve tagged along with Glinn all these years, you must enjoy working for him.”

  “Enjoy isn’t the word. Let me put it this way: the man’s an honest-to-God genius, and he’s fair. That’s a rare combination.”

  The martini and beer arrived and they broke off as each indulged in his respective drink. As Garza raised his bottle, Gideon—out of habit more than anything else—noticed the man’s wristwatch. “Nice watch.”

  “Think so?”

  “Oh, yeah. Blancpain L-Evolution Flyback Chronograph. With a red-gold caseband.”

  Garza eyed him. “Most people don’t know anything about Blancpain watches.”

  “With that carbon-fiber bracelet, it’s one of the finest watches made. Worth, what, fifty grand?”

  “I wouldn’t know. A grateful client gave it to me.” Garza paused. “What makes you the expert?”

  “I used to be a high-end thief and scumbag, remember?”

  “Right.”

  “Tell me something,” said Gideon. “What is this big project Glinn’s been working on ever since I came to EES? You know, that underwater model that everybody’s crawling over.”

  Garza took a long draw on his beer, draining a third of it before setting down the bottle. “Glinn should be the one to tell you about it.”

  “Come on. I’ve signed NDAs up the wazoo. It’s obviously no secret within the confines of EES—I thought that was the whole point of the open lab.”

  “True.” Garza waved over another IPA. “That project…it’s Glinn’s Moby-Dick.”

  “How so?”

  The fresh beer arrived, and Garza took the opportunity to drain it down almost by half. “Well…” He hesitated for a moment, seemed to come to a decision. “You remember Palmer Lloyd, the billionaire who went nuts a few years ago?”

  “Sure do.”

  “You may also remember he had plans to open a museum, which got shelved after he went to the funny farm.”

  “I remember the auction of all the stuff at Sotheby’s. Unbelievable collection.”

  “Yeah. Well, five years ago—before all that went down—Lloyd hired EES to, ah, expropriate the world’s largest meteorite from Chile for his museum.”

  Gideon put down his drink. “I never heard about that.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “The meteorite had been found by a prospector on an uninhabited island called Isla Desolación, at the tip of South America. Twenty-five thousand tons. Long story short: we went down there, secured the meteorite, loaded it on a chartered supertanker, got chased by a Chilean destroyer, and were wrecked in a storm. The meteorite went to the bottom in two miles of water and three-quarters of the crew died, including the captain. That’s when Palmer Lloyd lost his mind. And that’s when Glinn became…obsessed.”

  “Were you on the ship?”

  “Yes. What a nightmare.” Garza took another long pull of the IPA.

  “And so Glinn’s still trying to recover it?”

  “No. We’re not trying to recover it.”

  Here Garza ordered a third beer and fell silent, waiting for it to arrive.

  “If you’re not trying to recover it, what are you doing?”

  “We’re trying to kill it.”

  “Kill—?”

  “It wasn’t a meteorite, after all.”

  “What was it?”

  “Sorry. I’ve already told you too much. If you want to know more, ask Glinn. I will say, though, that we’ve lost some great projects because of this damn obsession.”

  “But not the Phorkys Map.”

  “Phorkys. There’s something odd about this project.” For a minute, Garza’s thoughts seemed to go far away. “Eli used to share with me even the most sensitive details of every project. But this time, he’s playing his cards close. He won’t even tell me the name of our client. I’d like a guarantee that it’s someone who’s going to do right by this discovery—not some corporation that’ll just turn it into a billion-dollar profit center.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “It makes me wonder if the client is unsavory.”

  Gideon shook his head. “Glinn has talked about these computer programs of his that can predict human behavior. Is that for real?”

  Garza’s third beer arrived. “Yes.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Eli founded Effective Engineering Solutions as a company specializing in ‘failure analysis.’ We’d get hired to come in after some cluster-fuck. Our job was to figure out what went wrong, and why. Not a nice business, because often you end up blaming your own client.”

  “Making it hard to get paid.”

  “Oh, Eli always gets the money up front. The bigger problem is that, once we’ve completed our work, sometimes the client wants to deep-six the report. And the people who prepared it.”

  “Tough business.”

  “You’re not kidding. But Eli’s the toughest man I know. Any normal person would have died from the injuries he sustained on that shipwreck.”

  Gideon shifted in his chair. “So what about these computer programs?”

  “Eli developed them. The human factor is always the most important in any engineering project. So these programs can predict, to a certain extent, human behavior. He calls it QBA—Quantitative Behavioral Analysis.”

  “Sounds like science fiction.”

  Garza laughed. “It started out as science fiction. Glinn got the idea from reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Remember Hari Seldon and the discipline of ‘psychohistory’?”

  Gideon shook his head. He hated science fiction.

  “Asimov invented a new science that combined history, sociology, and statistics. Psychohistorians could make predictions about the behavior of groups of people. With QBA, Glinn took psychohistory out of fiction and made it fact. His programs make predictions, not about groups, but about how a single person will react, in a given set of circumstances.” He took a sip of his beer. “You can bet that both you and I have had thorough QBAs done on us.”

  “How comforting.”

  “In an odd way, it is. Eli knows more about you than you do yourself.”

  Gideon thought back to the time when he first encountered Glinn—and the extraordinary amount of information the man had already dug up on him, including his terminal condition. “So how did Glinn get from failure analysis to engineering?”

  “Failure analysis is one side of the coin,” Garza said. “Engineering’s the other. Engineering is the science of not failing—of doing something right. It isn’t enough to figure out how to do something right. You also have to figure out how not to do something wrong. You have to analyze every possible path to failure. Only then can you be sure of success.”

  “Like the meteorite disaster.”

  “That was our only failure—although I concede it was a big one. Up to that point EES had never failed, ever. It was our trademark.”

  “So you’re confident we’ll succeed with Project Phorkys?”

  Garza stared moodily at the IPA bottle, and then chuckled to himself. “A simple Caribbean cruise? With Glinn’s fanatical attention to every detail, every possible avenue of eventuality? Oh, yeah, Gideon. We’ll succeed, all right.”

  15

  VERY LATE THE following night, Eli Glinn sat in his wheelchair, alone in the silent vastness of the central EES laboratory, thumbing through a tattered, burned, and half-destroyed book of poems by W. H. Auden. It was almost five o’clock in the morning, and his entire body ached w
ith the old ache that never left him.

  Tucking the book into a pocket, he directed his wheelchair out of the laboratory and to the elevators. The doors opened, and he placed his hand on a digital reader; a moment later the doors closed again, and an LED display indicated the elevator was ascending to the penthouse.

  When the doors reopened, Glinn rolled out. Three years earlier, finding that his infirmities made commuting difficult, Glinn had turned the uppermost floor of EES headquarters into a small penthouse and roof terrace, designed to accommodate his physical limitations. The apartment allowed him to retreat when he felt like it, and to reappear at the most unexpected moments, day or night, to supervise or review what was happening in the various labs and offices. He rarely left the building—it was too taxing. More to the point, Glinn no longer felt comfortable with strangers. There were too many pitying glances, too many people who spoke to him in a certain gentle tone of voice, too many small children who hid behind their mothers’ skirts and pointed when he appeared.

  The wheelchair whirred into the apartment over polished slate floors. A soothing array of cool gray walls met the eye, the space Zen-like in its spareness and asceticism. There was virtually no furniture; Glinn was wheelchair-bound and he almost never had visitors to his private space, eliminating the need for sofas or chairs.

  Glinn brought the wheelchair to one of the apartment’s few tables, picked up a remote control festooned with dials and various-colored buttons, and turned on the gas fire. Gesturing again with the remote, he aimed it at a pocket door, which slid open with a hiss, leading to his master bedroom. Another click of the remote started the water in the whirlpool bath, and a fourth click caused a row of scented candles to flicker on.

  With great economy of movement and the help of two powered platforms and a robotic arm, Glinn undressed and was lowered into the churning, steaming whirlpool. This was not a luxury; it was a necessity in dealing with his broken body, to soothe away the pain that accumulated over the course of the day.

  As he lay back in the water, he once again picked up the well-worn collection of W. H. Auden and began to read the famous poem titled “In Praise of Limestone.” After another moment, he put the book aside. It had been recommended to him by a woman: the only woman in his life. Or rather, almost in his life, as their relationship had terminated prematurely with her brutal death in the sinking of the supertanker Rolvaag.