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THE GROUP BEGAN BRAINSTORMING. At the top of their list was the question of scale. A Fibonacci spiral could be built to any scale. If Blaylock was in fact using a spiral, he would’ve used a reference size for the first box in the grid. They tossed around ideas for an hour before realizing they were getting nowhere.
“It could be anything,” Sam said, rubbing his eyes. “A number, a note, a doodle . . .”
“Or something we haven’t even seen yet,” Remi added. “Something we’ve overlooked.”
Across the table, an exhausted Pete Jeffcoat laid his head down on the wood and stretched his arms before him. His right hand struck Blaylock’s walking staff, which rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor.
“Damn!” Pete said. “Sorry.”
“No problem.” Sam knelt down to retrieve the staff. The bell clapper had torn free of its leather bindings and was hanging by a single thong. Sam picked them up together. He stopped and peered at the head of the staff. He frowned.
“Sam?” said Remi.
“I need a flashlight.”
Wendy pulled out a storage drawer and handed an LED across to Sam, who clicked it on and shone it onto the staff’s head. “It’s hollow,” he muttered. “I need some long-handled tweezers.”
Wendy retrieved a pair, handed them over.
Gingerly, Sam inserted the tips of the tweezers into the opening, wriggled them around for a few seconds, then began withdrawing them.
Grasped between the pincers was a corner of parchment.
CHAPTER 28
“OH, SURE,” SAM MUTTERED. “IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN SOMETHING easy. Like a map with a big X on it.”
Wary of damaging the remainder of the parchment, or anything else that might lie hidden inside Blaylock’s walking staff, Pete and Wendy had taken it into the archive vault for extraction and triage preservation.
Ten minutes later a digital image of what Sam had grabbed with his tweezers appeared on the workroom’s LCD screen:
Pete came out of the vault. He said, “We had to reduce it. The map’s actual dimensions are roughly six inches wide by ten long.”
“What about those notations along the coast?” Sam asked.
“Once we get the map digitized, Wendy’s going to work her Photoshop magic and try to clean them up. Based on their placement and the capital R suffix, they’re probably river names—in French, by the looks of it. The partial word in the upper left-hand corner—‘runes’—might be something we can work with, too.
“There’s another notation,” Pete continued. “See the arrow I superimposed?”
“Yes,” Remi replied.
“There’s some microwriting overtop that little island. We’re working on that as well.”
The archive vault door opened, and Wendy emerged carrying a rectangle of parchment sandwiched between two panes of Lexan clear polycarbonate.
“What’s this?” Remi asked.
“The surprise behind door number two,” replied Wendy. “This was rolled up at the bottom of the staff.”
She laid the pane on the worktable.
Sam, Remi, and Selma gathered around it and stared in silence for ten seconds.
Finally Remi whispered, “It’s a codex. An Aztec codex.”
FACED WITH two seemingly disparate artifacts, they divided forces. Pete and Wendy settled down at a workstation to identify the map, while Sam, Remi, and Selma tackled this new parchment.
Remi began. “Codex is Latin for a ‘block of wood,’ but over time it became synonymous with any type of bound book or parchment. It’s the model for modern book manufacturing, but before binding became common practice anything could be considered a codex—even a single piece of parchment or several folded together.
