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THE PHARAOH KEY

 

Preston & Child

www.headofzeus.com

About The Pharaoh Key

Gideon Crew – brilliant scientist, master thief – has just lost his job. It is the least of his worries: he has only months to live.

Effective Engineering Solutions has shut up shop; its enigmatic boss has disappeared without a trace. While clearing their desks, Gideon and his colleague Manuel Garza discover a computer programme that, left running for five years, has finally cracked the code it was attacking. It has deciphered the infamously enigmatic hieroglyphs of the Phaistos Disk. For a century, the ancient stone tablet defied interpretation, but now Gideon and Manuel have a lead on an undiscovered civilization, long-lost beneath the sands of the Egyptian Sahara.

As a man doomed by an inevitably fatal brain syndrome, Crew needs little persuasion to embark on one final adventure. As Manuel and Gideon travel across the world and deep into the desert, the odds are against them – but as Crew will prove, there is no such thing as too great a risk for a man living on borrowed time.

Contents

Welcome Page

About The Pharaoh Key

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

About Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

About the Agent Pendergast Series

About the Gideon Crew Series

Also by Preston & Child

An Invitation from the Publisher

Copyright

Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his
daughter, Veronica

Douglas Preston dedicates this book to
Anna and Peyton Forbes

1

GIDEON CREW SAT in the fourteenth-floor waiting room of Lewis Conrad, MD, restlessly drumming the tips of his left fingers against the back of his right wrist, waiting to find out whether he would live or die. An oversize envelope he’d brought with him, currently empty, lay beside his chair. Despite Dr. Conrad being one of the more expensive neurosurgeons in New York City, the magazines in his well-appointed waiting room had a greasy, well-thumbed look that deterred Gideon from touching them. Besides, they were of a subject matter—People, Entertainment Weekly, Us—that held little interest. Why couldn’t a doctor’s waiting room have copies of Harper’s or The New Criterion, or even a damn National Geographic?

A door on the far side of the waiting room opened silently; a nurse with a file in one hand poked her head out, and hope flared within Gideon’s breast.

“Ada Kraus?” the nurse said. An elderly woman rose to her feet with difficulty, walked slowly across the waiting room, and disappeared into the hallway beyond the open door, which immediately closed again.

As Gideon settled back into his chair, he realized it wasn’t restlessness, exactly, that afflicted him. It was a feeling of unsettledness that had kept him in New York City ever since the completion of his last mission for his employer, Effective Engineering Solutions. Normally he would have made a beeline for his cabin in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, gotten out his fly rod, and gone fishing.

It was so strange. His boss, Eli Glinn, had vanished with no word. The company’s offices in the old Meatpacking District of Lower Manhattan remained open, but the place seemed to be slowly winding down. Two weeks ago, his automatic salary payment had stopped, with no warning, and last week EES ceased paying for his expensive suite in the Gansevoort Hotel, around the corner from EES headquarters. Even so, Gideon had not left New York. He’d stayed on for over two months as his arm healed from the last mission, wandering the streets, visiting museums, reading novels while lounging at the hotel, and drinking far too much in the many hip bars that dotted the Meatpacking District. Finally, he admitted to himself why he’d been hanging around the city: there was something he had to know. The problem was, it was also the last thing he wanted to know. But in the end his need to know had overcome his fear of knowing, and he had made an appointment with Dr. Conrad. And so two days ago, he had been given a cranial MRI and now he was cooling his heels in the doctor’s waiting room, awaiting the results.

No: it wasn’t restlessness. It was a powerful combination of hope and fear pulling him in different directions: hope that something might have happened to him during the past ten months that fixed his condition, known as AVM; and fear that it had gotten worse.

And here he was, waiting, hoping, and fearing, all tangled up in his head like the AVM itself.

The door opened again; the nurse stuck out her head. “Gideon Crew?”

Gideon picked up the empty envelope, rose from his chair, and followed the nurse down the corridor and into a well-appointed doctor’s consultation room. To his surprise, the doctor was already seated behind a desk. On one side of his desk were the beat-up medical records and MRIs that Gideon had been carrying around with him in the envelope for the better part of a year. On the other side was a fresh set of pictures and scans—the ones taken two days before.

Dr. Conrad was about sixty, with a mild expression, gray eyes, and a sheaf of salt-and-pepper hair. He gazed kindly at Gideon through a pair of black-rimmed glasses. “Hello, Gideon,” he said. “May I use your first name?”

“Of course.”

“Please sit down.”

Gideon sat.

There was a moment of silence while the doctor cleared his throat, then looked briefly from the old MRIs to the new. “I take it that you are already apprised of your condition?”

“Yes. It’s known as a vein of Galen malformation. It’s an abnormal knot of arteries and veins deep in my brain, in an area known as the Circle of Willis. It’s usually congenital, and in my case inoperable. Because the arteriovenous walls are steadily weakening, the AVM is expanding in size and will eventually hemorrhage—which will be instantly fatal.”

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence.

“That’s as good a summary as I could have made.” Dr. Conrad propped his palms on the edge of his desk and interlaced his fingers. “When you first learned of your AVM,” he asked, “did the doctor give you a prognosis on how long you might expect to live?”

“Yes.”

“And how long was that?”

“About a year.”

“When was that?”

“Almost ten months ago.”

“I see.” The doctor shuffled through the images on his desk, cleared his throat again. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you, Gideon, but from these tests and everything else I’ve seen, the original prognosis was correct.”

Although he had half expected this—indeed, he’d had no real reason to suppose it would be different—for a moment, Gideon found he couldn’t speak. “You mean…I’ve only got two more months to live?”

“Comparing your original MRIs with the ones we just did, the progress of your AVM has been textbook, unfortunately. So yes, I would say that is a likely time frame—give or take a few weeks.”

“There aren’t any new treatments or surgical options?”

“As you probably have learned, most brain AVMs can be treated with surgery, radiation, or embolization, but the location of your AVM and its size make it impossible to be treated with those methods. Anything we did, either surgical or radiological, would almost certainly cause severe brain damage, if you survived at all.”

Gideon leaned back in his chair. All the anxiety and uncertainty that had been hovering around him the last several weeks now settled down like a deadweight. He could hardly breathe.

Dr. Conrad leaned forward. “It’s tough, son. There’s nothing I can say to make it otherwise. It may not help to hear this, but: you know how much time is allotted you. Most of us don’t have that luxury.”

“Luxury,” Gideon groaned. “Two months, a luxury. Please.

“When Warren Zevon, the rock star, knew he was dying of cancer, someone asked him how he was coping with that knowledge. His reply? Enjoy every sandwich. My advice to you is similar: don’t become miserable and paralyzed with grief and fear. Instead, do something worthwhile and engaging with the time you have left.”

Gideon said nothing; he merely shook his head. He felt sick. Two months. But why did he expect anything different?

“You’re strong and mobile, and will remain so…until the end. That’s the nature of AVM. So I’ll tell you what I tell my other patients facing the same situation: live every minute the best way you can.”

A long moment passed while Gideon sat in the chair, motionless. Dr. Conrad smiled at him from across the desk with the same kindly expression. When he started gathering together the various reports and scans, Gideon realized the conference was at an end. He stood up.

“Thank you,” he said.

The neurosurgeon stood as well, handed him the paperwork, then shook his hand. “God bless you, Gideon. And remember what I said.”

2

THE CHILL MARCH sun, streaming down 50th Street, struck Gideon full in the face as he stepped out of the building and into the afternoon rush of Midtown, blaring horns and exhaust mingling with the smell of a street vendor’s roasting kebabs. He felt stunned, hardly able to walk. Two months. Despite knowing better, he realized he’d held out a crazy hope that his AVM had been cured—or at least arrested.

A feeling of self-pity swept over him as he turned the corner onto Madison Avenue. Glinn had vanished. He was, it seemed, without a friend in the world. While he had more than enough money to last a couple of months, what good would it ultimately do him? Was he really going to go back to New Mexico and live in an isolated cabin all by himself, fishing and running out the clock?

His cell phone dinged and he glanced at it: a text from Manuel Garza, second in command at EES. It read: Come to the office right away.

Garza. He had long had a difficult relationship with the man, a brilliant engineer who could be both prickly and cold-blooded. But the two had developed a rapport of sorts on their most recent assignment; he’d found that Garza wasn’t quite the ruthless human being he’d assumed. Underneath that brushed-steel veneer, he did in fact have a heart.

Right away. Gideon decided to walk down the sunny side of the avenue, hoping a brisk, two-mile hike would help clear away the shock of what he had just learned. Two months. Jesus.

Half an hour later, he arrived at the ugly loading dock entrance to EES’s corporate headquarters on Little West 12th Street. He hadn’t been there since they stopped his salary two weeks before, but he found that his card and key code still worked. As he entered the vast, cavernous space of the company’s main working area, he was surprised by what he saw. The huge space, once filled with models of various engineering projects, whiteboards covered with scribbled equations, and people in lab coats scurrying about, was now almost empty. The floor was strewn with papers and other detritus: evidence of a hasty breakdown and removal. The worktables and desks were empty, with dead computer monitors, some draped in plastic, and snakes of cabling leading nowhere.

A dark, muscular figure came out of the gloom, lumpy computer bag slung over his shoulder, and Gideon recognized Garza. The man looked furious.

“It’s about time. What did you do, walk?” he said loudly, even before he had reached Gideon. “Can you believe this shit?”

“What shit?”

He swept his hand around. “This!”

“Looks like they’re shutting the place down.”

“Did they cut you off, too? Last week I didn’t get my salary deposit. No note, no explanation, no dismissal notice. Nada.”

“Same here.”

“And now this. After all those dangerous ops, after risking our lives half a dozen times, after all those years of hard work, this is the thanks I get? What do I have to show for it? Nothing but this.” And he raised his wristwatch to Gideon—a black-faced Rolex with a gold band—and shook it in his face. “I don’t know about you, but I am pissed.”

“Pissed” seemed like an understatement. As for Gideon, he felt more stunned than anything else. What did it really matter, when he had only two months to live? “He did pay us well.”

“For all that I did for him, I should be worth seven figures. As it is, I’ve hardly saved up anything. Life is expensive, especially here in New York City, and I’d planned on a steady revenue stream for years to come. But it’s not just the money—it’s the way he did it. I haven’t been able to reach him in almost six weeks. No response to emails, cell phone messages, nothing. I don’t even know where the son of a bitch is. And now we’ve got until five o’clock to clear out our stuff. That’s in ten minutes, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Um, I hadn’t noticed.”

At this point Garza paused and looked closely at him. “Hey—are you all right?”

Gideon tried to answer, but something seemed to be stopping up his throat, preventing him from talking.

Garza took a step closer, comprehension dawning on his face. He already knew of Gideon’s earlier diagnosis, and now he seemed to be putting it together. “You hear some bad news?”

Gideon nodded.

There was a long silence before Gideon finally found his voice. “Two months.”

It was Garza’s turn to look stunned. “Aw, shit. Shit. I’m so sorry. There’s no possibility, experimental treatment, something?”

Gideon waved his hand. “Nothing.”

Garza took a deep breath. “That pisses me off even more. Glinn knew you only had a year to live when he hired you…and look how he’s treated you since! You should be even angrier than I am. We should have had a big score—a really big score—long ago. That’s why I joined EES when we left the military, took all those crazy risks. Eli promised that we’d all have just such a payday. And we did—that’s almost the worst part. Because just when we really, finally struck it rich, he went and funneled every dime back into that white-whale project of his! That was a success, too, of course—thanks to us—but it cost everything and left us high and dry. And now he’s fired us and is shutting down the company!”

It was hard for Gideon to get exercised about Eli Glinn. He mumbled his agreement.

“Well,” Garza said, “I’ve got all my stuff in here—” he raised his computer bag—“so clear out your desk and let’s head over to the Spice Market and get ourselves righteously shitfaced.”

“Now, that’s a good idea. But I don’t really have anything to collect.”

“So much the better. Let’s go.”

Gideon paused to take a moment and look out over the vast, dead, silent space of half-completed projects and dark electronics. Garza paused as well, finally shaking his head.

In that moment Gideon heard, from a distant corner, an electronic chime. A small computer screen woke underneath a clear plastic shroud, creating a glow.

Garza saw it, too. “Looks like somebody forgot to turn off their monitor.” He walked toward the computer and Gideon followed. Taking the corner of the tarp, Garza jerked it away.

A message stood against a white background:

Phaistos Project

TASK COMPLETED

Time elapsed: 43412 hrs 34.12 minutes

Solution Follows

Garza stared at it. “What the hell?”

“Forty-three thousand hours…” Gideon did a quick calculation. “That’s almost five years. You think this computer’s been working on some problem for five years?”

Garza started to laugh, his voice echoing. “It’s just the sort of thing Glinn would do: give a computer some impossible task and let it grind away, day in, day out, just to see if it could come up with a solution. And look here—it finally did! A little late, but what the hell.”

Gideon squinted at the screen. The “solution” following the message was a long listing in hexadecimal. “What’s the Phaistos Project?”

Before Garza could answer, a voice rang out from the far side of the room. “Five o’clock, gentlemen! Sorry, but it’s time to leave. We’re locking the place down.”

Gideon turned to see two security guards at the main door. He glanced back to find Garza bending over the computer, inserting a USB stick into the computer.

“What are you doing?”

“Downloading this data.”

“What for?”

But Garza was busy tapping on the keyboard.

“Gentlemen?” The guards were starting to walk across the room.

“We’ll be there in a sec, just clearing out our stuff!” Garza shouted from a bent position.

“Sorry, but we’re under orders to shut down at five o’clock sharp.”

Garza pulled the USB stick out and slipped it in his sock. “Wish I had time to fuck this machine up,” he muttered. “That would serve old Eli right.”

Now the guards had arrived. “You’re not supposed to be using any of the electronics,” the taller one said.

“Sorry,” said Garza, straightening up. “We’ll go.”

The guards escorted them to the entrance hall and then paused. “Sir,” the taller one said to Garza, “I’m afraid I have to look through your bag.”

“Bullshit,” said Garza, “this is my stuff.”

“We’re under orders,” said the guard. He reached for the bag and, after hesitating, Garza let him take it.

The guard opened it up, and his blunt fingers sorted through everything. There was no laptop in it, but his busy fingers selected a small hard drive. “I have to take this.”

Garza stared at him. “It’s my data.”

“When you leave this company, nothing is yours anymore,” said the guard.

“Bullshit.”

The guard took the hard drive and dropped it into a slot, where there was a sudden grinding noise from an e-waste shredder.

“Hey! What the fuck?”

“Sorry,” the guard said in a tone that was anything but sorry as he stepped forward, one hand coming to rest on the butt of a holstered Glock. “Time to leave.”

Garza stared at him.

“Let’s go,” said Gideon.

They turned and left without a word, the two guards following them out. Once they reached the loading dock, the massive steel door to EES slid shut with a clang and Gideon heard the automatic bolts shooting home.

Garza turned to him. “Time for that drink.”

3

AS THEY ROUNDED the corner of 13th Street, Garza let out a cry of dismay. “Closed!”

Indeed it was. The Spice Market, where they had occasionally gone for drinks, was padlocked.

“The story of our life,” said Garza bitterly. “Shuttered.”

They wandered down the street to another watering hole, Catch. At five it hadn’t gotten going yet, and they found seats at the bar. Gideon ordered a Hendrick’s martini, dirty, while Garza took a pint of craft beer.

The bartender served their drinks, and Garza raised his glass. “To…what the hell, I can’t think of a good toast, I’m still too pissed off.”

“To being pissed off.”

They clinked glasses.

“Okay,” said Gideon, “now tell me about this Phaistos Project.”

“One of Eli’s crazy shots in the dark.”

“How so?”

“For the past six years, since the sinking of the Rolvaag, he’s been desperate for money. He had to raise two billion for his white-whale project, you see: to return to the Ice Limit and finish what he started. All those intervening years, he tried to scrounge up funds wherever he could—and some of those areas involved treasure hunting. The Loot of Lima, the Lost Dutchman Mine, the Victorio Peak gold…shit like that.”

“Did he ever find any?”

“Hell, yes! Remind me someday to tell you the story of the Caves of Asphodel. My God, when we entered that antechamber…!” He whistled. “So anyway, Glinn launched a whole bunch of speculative projects that he hoped might lead to a payoff. That included trying to decipher various ancient inscriptions. One of those, in fact, led to your own assignment on the Lost Island. There were others. He had his cryptanalysts and historians trying to crack the Voynich Manuscript, the Shugborough Inscription, the Dispilio Tablet, the Rohonc Codex…and the Phaistos Disk.”

He took a long draw on his beer.

“So here’s the story.” He paused a moment, as if sorting out his thoughts. “The Phaistos Disk was found in 1908 or thereabouts in the ruins of a Minoan palace on the island of Crete. It’s three thousand five hundred years old, made of fired clay, and is covered on both sides by a dense spiral of stamped hieroglyphic figures—heads, people, helmets, gloves, arrows, shields, clubs, ships, columns, fish, birds, bees—all tiny little pictures. It seems to be the script of an unknown language. Since its discovery, everyone and their sister has tried to decipher it, to no avail, and today it’s the most famous unsolved inscription in existence. Many claimed to have translated it, of course, but all those solutions have been discredited.”

“So how is it supposed to lead to a treasure?” Gideon asked.

“We couldn’t be sure that it would. Like I said, it was a shot in the dark, one of many. About five years back, Glinn dedicated a single high-powered computer to cracking the code. Over time, the project was basically forgotten as other projects took priority. I sure as hell forgot about it. But all that time, the computer must’ve been cranking away, patiently trying one cryptanalytical approach after another.”

“And finally it succeeded?”

Garza retrieved the USB stick and held it in his hand. “It’s right here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, it’s the translation, all right. Eli put his best cryptanalyst, philologist, and coder to work, creating the program for that computer. If that computer says it finished, it finished. We just have to figure out what it’s telling us.” He took another pull at his beer, draining it.

“What do you think it means?”

“We’ll find out. Maybe a thirty-five-century-old message from one Greek king to another, something like, Give me back my wife Helen or I will kick your ass.”

Gideon chuckled despite himself. “Why was Glinn interested in it, specifically?”

“Because of its fame. And he was a gambler of sorts, always putting a chip down on one long shot or other.”

“If it’s such a gamble, why did you just bother downloading it?”

“Are you kidding? The gamble wasn’t the secret the Phaistos Disk contained—it was thinking he could ever decrypt it at all. But that program succeeded—and the joke’s on him.” He waggled the USB stick in front of Gideon. “Whatever the message on this tells us, whatever it leads to, there’s one thing for sure: it’s got to be worth money. Probably a hell of a lot of money. It might make us famous—and we’ll have done it right under Glinn’s nose.”

“I need another drink.”

They ordered a second round. When it came, Garza raised his glass. “My turn for a toast. To fame, glory, and riches.” He took a deep swig. “And it’s ours, Gideon—yours and mine. Finally: a chance to get some of our own back! We’ll take our time, do it right, translate that hexadecimal file, and—”

“No,” Gideon interrupted.

“What do you mean, no?”

“We’re not going to ‘take our time.’ If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it now. Like, today.”

Garza began to object, then suddenly shut up. “Right. I forgot. Two months.”

“I’ve just been given a prescription from a neurologist: enjoy every sandwich. Well, for better or worse, life just served me up this particular sandwich. So let’s go up to my suite and put that USB stick into my laptop and see what the Phaistos Disk has to say after all these centuries of silence.”

“Fair enough. We’ll do it now. But I have a condition of my own.”

Gideon, who’d been about to stand up, went still. “Yes?”

“We both agree that whatever this Phaistos Disk leads to, it’s worth money. Right? It might be Homer’s lost work, Margites. It might be the keys to a spaceship. It might be the proverbial diamond as big as the Ritz. But it’s going to have value.”

“And your point?”

“My point is, I’m sick and tired of finding something and then turning it over to somebody else. When—if—we find whatever pot of gold is waiting at the end of this rainbow, we’re keeping it. Agreed? We’re not giving it to some museum, or donating it to the Library of Congress, or whatever. We’re turning it into cash—whether that means breaking it up and selling it piece by piece, or auctioning the thing off to the highest bidder.”

“But…” Gideon began, then fell silent.

“But what?” Garza replied, his tone shading toward the belligerent.

“We don’t know what it is. It could be anything. It might be of great historical or cultural value. It might be the patrimony of some civilization that—”

“Now you’re sounding like Glinn. I’m not doing this for the good of humanity—I’m doing it for myself. I don’t care if it’s a centerfold of the Mona Lisa—we’re selling it for the most dough we possibly can, and then splitting the proceeds. You can always donate your half to—well, to medical research, maybe. I just want to be crystal-clear about this: if it has value, we’re gonna steal it. Are you with me?”

This was followed by an awkward silence. Then Gideon shrugged. “What the hell. The worst that can happen is I have a few weeks to feel guilty about it.”

“Good man.” And with that they stood up and shook hands.

4

THE BAR AT the top of the Gansevoort Hotel was quiet, the rooftop pool still shut down for the winter. Gideon had fetched his laptop from his room, and he and Garza slipped into a leather banquette in one corner.

Garza ordered a round of mojitos while Gideon fired up the computer. The drinks arrived. Garza pulled the USB stick out of his pocket. “Ready?”

“Go for it.”

Garza inserted the USB stick, called up a hexadecimal-to-ASCII converter, and fed in the downloaded data. An obviously nonsensical output resulted.

“Okay,” said Garza, “that’s strange.”

Gideon took a long drink of his mojito. “Are you sure the computer successfully decoded the Disk?”

“I told you—I’m sure. Try hex-to-decimal.”

Pulling the laptop toward him, Gideon ran the conversion utility again, but another list of apparently random numbers resulted.

“Try Unicode,” said Garza.

“How will that help?”

“Just try it.”

More garbage.

They tried Base64, octal, HTML numeric, binary, and Windows ALT codes.

Garza sat back. “Okay. What totally obvious thing are we missing?”

“Here’s what I don’t get. If the computer had really deciphered the Disk, why would yet another decryption step be necessary? Why did the computer output it in hex at all? Why not just in regular plaintext, or ancient Greek, or whatever the original language was?”

Garza didn’t answer.

“Maybe we just aren’t drunk enough to figure it out.” Gideon waved over the waiter, and they ordered another round.

“We’ve got to go back to the beginning,” said Garza, slumped in the banquette, twirling the ice in his empty glass. “There are two possibilities here. Either the Phaistos Disk was written in some sort of ancient ciphertext, or it is, quite simply, in an unknown written language.”

“Meaning that one is a real honest-to-God code, and the other a philological mystery.”

“Yup.”

The fresh drinks arrived as Garza fell into thought. “I dimly recall that the computer attack on the Phaistos Disk assumed, first, that it was in an unknown language. So it was programmed to look at many ancient forms of writing—Linear A, Linear B, cuneiform, Luwian, Egyptian hieroglyphics—and try to find parallels. If that failed, the program would go on to assume it was a ciphertext of some ancient language, and attack it from that assumption.”

“So what particular attack finally succeeded?”

“Good question. For that, we’d need the log file.”

“The log file?”

“It’s similar to that generated by an installer program. It keeps a list of what particular attack algorithm is currently running, and how long it runs, before giving up and moving on to the next. If we had the log file, we could check its last entry and discover exactly what algorithm succeeded.”

“So where’s the log file?”

“Still in the computer,” said Garza. “Back at EES.”

“So we break in. Steal it.”

“Are you kidding? That’s got to be one of the most secure buildings in New York City. It’s like breaking into the gold vault at the Federal Reserve.”

Gideon took a sip of his drink. “Good point. We won’t break in. We’ll get in by other means.”

“Other means?”

“Social engineering.”

“Yeah, right. Who are we going to socially engineer?”

“Glinn.”

Garza started to laugh. “That’s hilarious. Socially engineer the world’s expert on social engineering?”

“Why not? He’s just egotistical enough to believe he’s too clever. When you think about it, he’s a perfect target.” He paused. “You really want to get back at Glinn, right? Piss him off? So here’s your chance. We just need to find his prime weakness and work up a script.”

A long silence, and then Garza drained his drink. A broad grin spread over his flushed face. “Sally Britton.”

Gideon searched his memory. “The dead captain of the Rolvaag? What about her?”

That’s his weakness. That—and the arrogance of always being right.”

5

TWO DAYS LATER, Gideon and Garza followed the same two security guards—one in front, one behind—up a dedicated elevator to the top floor of the EES building on Little West 12th Street. This penthouse was Eli Glinn’s private quarters, a sleek aerie perched atop the old meatpacking building. Gideon had been inside only once before.

They came to a blank metal door, and one of the guards punched in a code, then stood in front of a device in the wall, which evidently scanned the irises of his eyes. The door whispered open, revealing a small, dim entryway; another door hushed open, and they proceeded down a corridor that eventually opened into a small, exquisite yet austere library with a marble fireplace.

In a chair near the fire sat Eli Glinn. He had been reading. Laying aside the book, he rose from the chair.

Gideon was shocked at his appearance. He was transformed—a far younger man, it seemed, glowing with health. It was almost as if he were aging backward. All signs of his previous infirmity were gone. While always self-assured, he now seemed uncharacteristically cheerful—or, more accurately, self-satisfied. His gray eyes, smooth domed forehead and unlined face, impeccable gray suit, straight bearing, and subtly condescending expression were more intense than ever. And why not, thought Gideon with a flush of resentment: the man had succeeded. He was vindicated. He had atoned for the most catastrophic mistake of his life—the sinking of the Rolvaag—and done so with great skill and sangfroid. His fine spirits and good health made Gideon feel his own anger grow at the way the man had abandoned those who’d helped him achieve this goal.

Glancing over at Garza, Gideon could see the man was having a much harder time dealing with Glinn’s persona than he was. Garza’s face was darkening, his black eyes flashing with resentment. And he saw, too, that Glinn was observing Garza’s reaction with supercilious amusement.

“Please,” said Glinn, “sit down.”

They sat down and Glinn resumed his seat. “May I offer you anything? Coffee? Water? A glass of port?”

Garza shook his head and said “No” with ill-concealed disrespect.

Glinn threw one leg across the other and gazed at them with speculative eyes. “Before we begin, let me lay my cards on the table. I’m well aware you two are planning some sort of confidence game. It’s astonishing, and rather amusing, that after all our time together you might think I could be taken in.”

“I think,” Gideon said, “you might be wise to see what cards we’re holding before you lay your own on the table.”

Glinn gave this a brief, cynical smile.

Gideon went on. “You’ve agreed to see us because—admit it—you’re curious.”

“True.”

“And despite your suspicious nature, a small part of you thinks that maybe, just maybe, we do in fact—as we implied in our communication—have a message for you from the late Captain Britton.”

“Highly unlikely.”

Gideon smiled. “Unlikely, yes. Highly unlikely, perhaps—in your opinion. But not impossible.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Of course you will. Manuel?”

Garza leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his shoulders stretching the fabric of his suit. “You son of a bitch,” he said, voice low. “I gave you sixteen years. I almost died on the Rolvaag and again down there when we returned to the Ice Limit, just a couple of months ago. I was the one who saved your ass on Phorkys island. You’d be dead many times over if it weren’t for me. And Gideon. And now that you finally got what you wanted, you threw us away like so much garbage.”

Glinn inclined his head. “Your anger is irrational. I paid you extremely well. And it’s not just you: I’m disbanding the company, as you know, so everyone has lost their jobs, except for a few guards.”

“Without even a note of thanks.”

“Manuel. Do you mean to imply that after all these years, you know me so poorly? I am not a man of the empty gesture. You already know how grateful I am to you—and Gideon. You want a piece of paper to that effect? A Hallmark card, perhaps? I would consider that an insult if I were you. Come now—this is not how individuals like us conduct our affairs. Let’s stop bandying useless recriminations and get to the real reason you are here. As I understand from your message, you each want a million dollars. And in return you will give me a letter from Captain Britton, addressed to me, which she entrusted to your care shortly before her death.”

Garza nodded. “Think of it as severance pay.”

“How nice, but it meets the definition of extortion more exactly.”

“Call it what you will.”

Glinn leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “Why didn’t you give me this letter years ago, after the Rolvaag sank?”

“When you see the note, you’ll understand. It’s the nature of what she wrote to you.” Garza paused. “What she had to tell you…is awful.”

Glinn’s smoothly groomed eyebrows rose. “Of course there is no note. What a shabby and ill-conceived plan.”

“How can you know it’s a con,” Gideon said, “without actually seeing the letter?”

“Come now, Gideon. I’ve built my entire career on quantitative behavioral analysis. This is so clearly a trick that it’s painful.”

“I see you’re just too smart for us,” said Gideon abruptly. He turned to Garza. “Let’s go.”

“Security will let you out.” Glinn pressed a button, and the two security guards materialized in the library doorway.

Gideon rose, along with Garza.

“After you, sirs,” one guard said, gesturing with his hand.

At the door Gideon paused, turned to Glinn, and said:

There is no love;

There are only the various envies, all of them sad.

“Come on,” said the guard as the door whispered open.

“Wait,” said Glinn, holding up a long white hand.

Gideon turned.

“Why did you just say that?”

“Just quoting the first two lines in the note. They’re from a poem by W. H. Auden, in case you didn’t know.”

“I know where they’re from,” Glinn said. A silence hung in the room, and finally Glinn sighed. “I see your game is more sophisticated than I anticipated. Please come back and sit down.”

They returned to their chairs, and Eli looked from one to the other. “Now, Manuel. Please tell me the exact circumstances of how you came into possession of this alleged note.”

6

GIDEON GLANCED AT GARZA. The engineer was a lousy liar, and he hoped Garza would continue to be just as poor now. It was important Glinn continued to think their con was, in fact, a con.

“We need to go back to the last moments of the Rolvaag,” said Garza. “The ship was caught in the grips of the storm, dead in the water, broadside to the sea. If you recall, you, Captain Britton, and I were on the bridge when the captain gave the call to abandon ship. You protested and left the bridge in a rage. Remember?”

“Vividly and most unfortunately. Keep going.”

“You went down to the hold to try and secure the giant meteorite in its cradle. The captain followed you down in the hope of convincing you to return to the bridge and trigger the dead man’s switch—the one that would release the meteorite and save the ship. But you refused. As I saw for myself, watching that reconstructed video feed of the Rolvaag’s final moments several years later, in the forensic lab of the Batavia. Do you recall all that?”

“Of course I recall it. Get to the point.”

“After that, Britton returned to the bridge. The ship was in its death throes, at a twenty-degree heel from which it was unable to recover. I saw her grab the paper log and scribble something in it. Then she tore out the page, folded it twice. And handed it to me. ‘If you and Eli survive,’ she said, ‘give this to him. I’m going down to electronics to try and trigger the dead man’s switch from there.’ I stuffed the note into my pocket. The ship sank ten minutes later, carrying Captain Britton down with it.”

He paused and waited.

“And?” Glinn finally said.

“When I was rescued, I was unconscious. The rescuers, of course, stripped me of my frozen clothes. It wasn’t until a week later that I was in any condition to recall the note. Luckily the rescuers had gone through my pockets and everything was returned to me in a ziplock bag, including the note. I intended to give you the note at the first opportunity, but you were in a coma for almost a month and your recovery was agonizingly slow. The note was hastily folded, and I’m sorry to admit I read it.”

“That would be unlike you.”

“You try holding a note like that for a month and not reading it. I was astonished. I had no idea you and the captain had fallen in love with each other.”

At this Glinn shifted. “I wouldn’t put it in those terms.”

“Then you aren’t being honest with yourself. Of course you loved her. And she you.”

“Continue, if you please.”

“The note said such terrible things that I decided giving it to you would set back your recovery. So I put it away, intending to destroy it but never being quite able to.”

“But now,” Glinn interrupted, “after feeling ill used by me, you’ve decided to extort money via this same note.”

Garza crossed his arms and sat back defiantly. “You owe me. And Gideon.”

Glinn did not respond immediately. Gideon took the moment to examine Glinn’s face closely, but it had smoothed back into its usual impassive expression.

“Well,” said Glinn at last. “it’s quite a story. But remember that I know you, Manuel. I’ve studied your psychology. I have a QB Analysis on you a foot thick. You are not a good liar—despite having concocted a rather clever farce.”

“It’s not a farce,” said Gideon, breaking in. “Think about it: her writing a note to you when she realized she was going to die. It’s perfectly consistent with her own psychology, as far as I understand it. Think back to that moment. Doesn’t it seem logical she would write you a last note, a sort of farewell damnation?”

Glinn looked at the floor for a long time, then raised his head. “The transparency of this ploy is rather sad. Even if you showed me the alleged ‘note,’ I wouldn’t believe it. Frankly, I’m surprised the two of you couldn’t do better than this.”

“But it’s the truth,” Garza protested. “And this one time, you’re just going to have to take it on trust.”

Glinn swiveled his gray eyes on him. “You ought to know me better than that, Manuel. I never take anything on trust, especially in this kind of situation.” He paused, thinking. “Besides, I don’t have to. In fact, I’m sorely tempted to teach you two a lesson. Because in all your supposed cleverness, you seem to have overlooked a small fact.”

“Which is?” Garza asked.

“The bridge of the Rolvaag was thoroughly covered by CCTV cameras.” He looked from Garza to Gideon and back. “And thanks to the two of you, we have those tapes.”

Gideon and Garza said nothing.

“Those tapes will show the touching scene you describe on the bridge…or, more likely, not. Would anyone care to go down to the computer room and review them with me—before I have you thrown out on your ears?”

At this, Gideon glanced at Garza. He noticed that their exchange of looks did not get past Glinn.

“Well, shall we?” Glinn pressed.

“We can’t be sure the moment was captured,” said Garza. “Not all the tapes were recovered.”

“The bridge cameras had overlapping coverage. Since the tapes are indexed and sequenced, it will take all of five minutes to verify your story.”

Gideon could see Glinn was absolutely sure they were lying—but instead of leaving it at that and dismissing them, he couldn’t resist the triumph of exposing them. That was in keeping with his fatal weakness.

Glinn smacked his hands on the arms of his chair and rose. He pressed the button again, and the two guards returned.

“Please escort us to the central computer room. We’ll be watching a bit of video.”

*

Once again, Gideon found himself in the vast, cavernous central space of EES. The place looked even more abandoned than before, their footsteps on the polished concrete floor echoing in the empty vault. Their two escorts, once again in front and behind, stopped them at the security barrier.

“You’re going to make us go through security?” Garza asked.

“Naturally,” said Glinn.

“We never had to do this before,” Garza protested.

“Times have changed.”

After more grumbling, Garza emptied his pockets and Gideon did likewise. The guards took away their cell phones.

“What are those two USB sticks?” Glinn asked, pointing to Gideon’s tray.

“My private stuff. None of your business.”

Glinn motioned to the guards. “Put those aside with the cell phones.”

They walked through the metal detector. Glinn led them across the room to a low console of computers, which appeared to be among the last machines still hooked up and running. The machine that had deciphered the Phaistos Disk was now gone. This was a good sign—it suggested to Gideon that the data and log files had been transferred to the central system.

Glinn sat down at the console and booted up its workstation. Gideon watched as the man typed, drilling down through various files and folders.

“Here we are.” A huge series of video files appeared, with time stamps and locations. A quick database sort narrowed these to a list of relevant files.

“Five CCTV files from different cameras,” said Glinn, “all covering the same ten-minute segment on the bridge, in which you claim the captain wrote the note and handed it to you. I’m going to pull them up and play them simultaneously on these monitors. Do you really want me to proceed?”

“Absolutely,” said Garza. “You’ll see we’re right. Play it.” The bravado in his voice sounded hollow.

“If you insist.” Glinn pressed a button, and the videos winked into life on five of the monitors.

“There,” said Gideon, pointing. “The third one. That’s the one to watch.”

The monitor’s bird’s-eye view took in the navigational station and four large flat-panel displays: one with radar, one of the GPS chart plotter, a third a split screen, and the fourth the output from a sonar transducer. To one side stood an old-fashioned chart table, with paper charts, dividers, and parallel rules. Next to it was a series of cubbyholes containing bound logbooks, including the main ship’s log.

The video started dramatically, in medias res. The bridge, illuminated as was customary in a dim reddish light, appeared to be in chaos. Hurricane-force wind and rain lashed the windows. The roaring of the storm, the straining of the ship’s great engines, and the groaning of the superstructure under the weight of the shifting meteorite filled the speakers. The ship was listing alarmingly, and all personnel were hanging on to rails and handholds to keep from falling. The captain stood at the helm while the chief mate, Howell, stood behind the navigation station.

Captain Britton turned. “Mr. Howell,” she said, her reproduced voice crackling slightly as it emerged from a nearby speaker. “Initiate a 406 MHz beacon and get all hands to the boats. If I’m not back in five minutes, you will assume the duties of master.”

She vanished through the rear bridge hatch while Howell initiated the beacon. A siren sounded, red lights flashing, and a mechanical voice bellowed over the intercom: “All hands to abandon stations. All hands to abandon stations,” over and over again.

Three minutes passed as the ship careened still farther, with a vast metallic groaning; slowly righted; then began to heel again. This time, the slanting did not level out; the ship canted and great wallowing waves broke just below the bridge windows, cascading foam and water. One of the windows blew out with a bang and a howling of wind.

And then Captain Britton returned.

“This is it!” said Gideon excitedly, leaning over Glinn’s shoulder and pointing to the middle screen showing the navigation station. “Watch closely—she’s coming over. See…here she comes.” He leaned closer still, bracing himself on the console with one hand while the other stabbed at the screen.

And Britton did stagger over, speak to the navigator—her words lost in the roar—then turned and said something to Howell.

“Here’s the moment!” Gideon said.

Britton made a gesture to Howell, indicating something below, then disappeared again out the rear bridge hatch.

She never touched the paper log. She went nowhere near the logbook.

“Seen enough?” Glinn said acidly.

“Wait,” said Gideon, “she might come back.”

“Gideon, this farce is over. We know she went down to the electronics room, because that’s where her body was found!” Glinn’s voice was cutting. His face was pale and beads of sweat had appeared on his forehead. The video, still running, had disturbed him—just as Gideon anticipated.

“Wait. Wait until the end.”

The slanting of the bridge continued. Howell and the navigator now left their stations, as did everyone else on the bridge, staggering out as the ship continued to heel. The groaning of metal became a shriek; a massive wave blew out an entire row of bridge windows; the sound dissolved into a screaming static—there was a flash of white and then the screen went dead.

think