Fiona did not miss the implicit threat. “Fine. Show it to me again.”
The picture of the belt returned to the screen, and this time Fiona stared at it more closely, memorizing every detail. She was feeling better now, thinking more clearly, and not just because the juice had given her a dose of fructose. She was doing something now, and even though she was a long way from any kind of escape plan, it was a step in the right direction. She recalled what Pierce had told her in the Labyrinth. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
“Okay, what is it you want to know?”
Gallo’s voice came over the speaker. “We are trying to determine where Queen Hippolyte’s city was. We have a rough idea, but we need to narrow down the search area. We’re hoping there’s a clue in the Phaistos writing on the border.”
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
Gibraltar
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.