The Jeep slid to the left a second time, and the tires grazed a rough patch that bordered those grisly ditches. I pressed toward the right and tried not to speed too much, though I was happy to notice that the starlight was just beginning to fade in favor of the slightest suggestion of gray dawn.
“It could be a substitution code,” Erik went on. He didn’t appear to have noticed that we had nearly gone rocketing into that ditch. “Or it could be an ephor—the Spartans used those. It’s where you write a cipher on a strip of paper that has to be wrapped, in the Spartans’ case, around a staff of specific dimensions; without that you had nothing but gibberish. Perhaps the text needs to be written out in some similar way, a paper of a particular size, or wrapped round. Or it could be a transposition code, after all. Just not like Caesar’s.”
“What is that, exactly?” I asked, only half concentrating on what he was saying. “Is it where you arrange words in a block? And then scramble them?”
“Yes. You transpose them in a numerical order. The Romans used that. As did the Greeks. That one’s found all over the ancient world—so if you had, I don’t know, six, one, five, two, four, three, and the letters S-G-T-H-S-O, that would spell Ghosts.”
“I’m not really a math person,” I said, distractedly.
“But I tried out a few versions of it, and no go. So then I tried out this version of a stream code developed in the 1500s by this man named Blaise de Vigenere. He’d shift up the letters according to a prearranged random order, and the trick was, you didn’t have to remember the order at all. You just had to remember a word. Say, if the order was: the first letter shifts by five, and the second by fourteen, then the next by twenty-three, and the fourth by four, and the fifth by eighteen—this is the famous example—you wouldn’t have to remember that at all. You’d just have to know the word foxes, because that’s what aaaaa translates into under that scheme.”
“You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, I think,” I said. “You’re applying the principles of sixteenth-century cryptography to a pre-Christian text.”
“It’s just that I can’t think of anything else to apply. It’s like what Tapia wrote in his journal, about the first time he saw the panels—‘this book has no rhyme nor meaning that I can discern, and perhaps can be read not by any living man at all, but only by those who have long been dead, and busy themselves now with the dark and busy translations of Hell.’ “
“Not too cheerful,” I said. But at this point I had more or less stopped paying attention.
Ahead of us, a flickering light ornamented the black air. It veered behind the curtain of rain.
It was just a tiny blur of red in the thinning dark, like a flame. And then, as I hurled closer, the blur separated into two trembling disks.
Those were the taillights of a car.
CHAPTER 23
Lola?”
“What?” I was spying out the windshield but had no idea what kind of car we might be trailing.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, yes. Or, no. Sorry. What were you saying?”
Erik shuffled the papers on his lap and tried to smooth them out with his hands.
“I was telling you about Tapia. And his ideas about the Stelae.”
Keeping my eyes on those tiny blurred stars of light, I maneuvered past a fallen branch, then asked, “Where did Tapia find the panels again? It wasn’t Flores, if I’m remembering. It was in the forest, somewhere. Around water.”
He looked down again at his notes. “Codes—codes—codes. If this is encoded, what would they want to encrypt?”
“I don’t know, but I was asking you—about the panels?”
“Oh, yes—he found them in the forest, the southern edge of it, before it clears and ascends into the plateau. I told you this, remember. They were originally right by a waterway—a river. The river Sacluc. Where we might be going, actually. It’s miles long, and a lot of relics have been excavated there. Here—I’ll show you.”
He began sketching out a map for me on a piece of paper, but the rain battered the Jeep’s rubber windows, and I had to work at evading yet more branches in the highway, as well as some deeper flooding. The wind rushed toward us harder, and the growing dawn revealed that mud oozed out in larger doses onto the highway from the surrounding hills. Some of these banks did not look altogether steady, as they were sloughing large chunks of themselves onto the pavement. The taillights skittered and jumped about a mile or two ahead. When the gloaming lightened further, I could make out that the car was long and low, though I could not tell what color or make it might be. I narrowed my eyes at it.
“Could that be her?” I asked.
Erik looked up from his notes and drawings. “What?”
“Is that her?”
“Oh, look at that. Well. I can’t see anything from here—I don’t know.” He squinted too. “Maybe. But—no, stop that—don’t speed up.”
I continued driving in an involuntary serpentine route over the slick road; the car before us veered slightly and righted itself in the mud. The rain pounded down. Several minutes passed, and then I realized I had to push the speed slightly higher than was advisable to make sure that was Yolanda’s car. While I edged forward over my steering wheel, Erik finished his map and waved it in the air.
“This is it, this is where Tapia found the Stelae,” he said.
I glanced over to see what he’d drawn:
I looked down at this chart, then back at the road, and at the car. Then I looked at his sketch again.
And this is where I began to understand.
“I’ve seen that map before,” I said. “Tapia wasn’t the only one who explored there.”
“That’s true,” he said. “Like I was saying before, a lot of people have found relics here. Even Von Humboldt traveled along the Sacluc for a while.”
“No, listen. De la Cueva made a map just like it for her sister, Agata. When she was in the forest looking for the Jade. And that’s Von Humboldt’s trail too? So they were all in the same place as Tapia, right?”
Just as I was saying this, and making all the deductive correlations, I realized that this wasn’t really the best time to discuss it. I had just come into complete view of the long brown car, and saw the outline of a cowboy hat within its cab. A massive jolt of adrenaline thrashed through my body and sent its electric impulses down to my right foot, which smashed the gas pedal down to the floor of the Jeep. Yolanda did the same, so that we were both barreling through the marsh at about fifty miles an hour, while another section of the hillside smashed down between us. The landslide sent out a large sticky wash of stuff onto the highway and down its rain-filled ditches, along with heaps of mud and rock that our Jeep flailed up and over, wheels madly spinning. Erik and I heaved back and forth in our seats. Yolanda’s car slooped around in the sludge and nearly tipped into one of the ditches.
“Erik.” I was hunched over the steering wheel. “I’m going to get her.”
He had gone as pale as a flounder, but his academic hysteria compelled him to yell at me some perfectly grammatical argument that had something to do with the Stelae and the river Sacluc and how there was a vast tract in the area described by the map that had never been perfectly combed by any of the explorers.
“It is interesting, though,” he said. “Now that you mention it, it is slightly weird that no one, including Von Humboldt or your de la Cueva or anyone else for that matter, reports seeing the Stelae until Tapia does in the 1920s—”
I saw the long brown old car skid onto the mud that had spilled onto the highway, and I saw too the car plummet, quick and rough, into the ditch off the side of the road. The front of the car crumpled and began to plunge into the mud, which began to cover it as it continued to slide down the mountain. It engulfed the woman inside.
“Oh—no no no no,” I heard myself screaming. “We’ve got to help her!”
I slammed on the brakes, opened my door, and raced out into the mud as fast as I could toward Yolanda.
CHAPTER 24
The car had fallen on its driver’s side into the ditch, and already the landslide covered half of it in a thick and rocky mud. Rain surged down, helping to speed up the burial. Erik, having bolted from the Jeep at the same time as I did, began shoving away the stones and sludge with his hands and forearms. Through the smeared glass we could see that Yolanda—unmistakably her, from the twisting face I glimpsed through the dirt—was mired in rising black water that entered from below through a shattered driver’s-side window. Though I was nearly blind from the downpour, I saw that she was hoisting the filched duffel bag above this pool. Hauling back more rock and dirt that continued to fall in a slow ooze from the hillside, I grasped onto the handles of the two passenger-side doors, but my fingers slipped away from them; she had earlier locked them, and so was caught inside.
“She’ll drown in there!” Erik yelled at me.
I moved more mud and yelled at her through the window. “Yolanda! Open the car!”
But there was no answer as the rain kept hammering down on us.
“Yolanda, move it!”
“What is she doing?” Erik yelled.
“Yolanda!”
Still, there was nothing.
But then here, very dimly, very faintly, came her voice, like a cat yapping in its cage.
“What in the hell ARE YOU DOING?!”
Down in the bottom of the car, Yolanda’s body began to move around with increasing violence; she seemed to be struggling with a safety belt. The car was flooding with water and mud.
“You ran me OFF THE ROAD!” she hollered at us again.
I raised my arm and with rapid violent strokes brought it down on the glass of the front-seat window. I was really hurting myself. I hit at that window again and again, and Erik bashed at the glass too with both fists. The window cracked into a net, and when I hammered down on it again, a section of it gave way and fell inside the cabin of the car. I reached in and flicked up the door’s lock. Erik and I shoved aside yet more mud and with a great slow creak opened the door. We could see the filthy, soaking, bedraggled and behatted Yolanda floundering in the deepening well of the car as the water crept up her chest, toward her chin. Beneath the brim of her Stetson, blood seeped down. She was also still trapped by her seat belt, which was hidden from us well below the rising black water. Her right arm stuck out from the water as she held the duffel above her head.
“Take it!” she screamed. “Or else you’ll never be able to find your mother!”
I reached in, grabbed the duffel, and threw it at Erik.
“Now get me out of here!”
I peered down and wiped the mud and rain off my face.
“Hold me by the waist,” I said to Erik.
“What?”
“Just do it! I have to lower myself into the car, and I don’t want to slip.”
Erik reached down and got a firm grip on my jeans’ belt, and I began to crawl down into the car. The water had filled the bottom third of the cab, and Yolanda thrashed in her seat while trying to extract herself from the belt. In her dazed state, hampered by the mud in the water, she couldn’t find the button to press. I hung down while the landslide continued to pour sludge into the car, which sank deeper into the ditch. I grabbed the part of the belt crossing Yolanda’s chest.
Her lip was cut; her eyes shot over to me. But she spoke in what was now a calm-sounding voice. “Get it off. Get that off me. The water’s coming—”
“Hold on.”
I thrust my hands into the water, toward her waist, and followed the line of the belt. The seatbelt’s plastic latch lodged under her hip, and because of the coldness of the water I had trouble feeling exactly where the button might be.
“Cut me out,” she said. “Do you have a knife?”
I tried to look back up over my shoulder. “Erik. Do you have a knife?”
“No,” he said, after a hesitation. “I didn’t buy one.”
“I thought I wouldn’t be so afraid of dying like this,” she said, evenly.
“Just hold on,”I said.
“Here, let me get in there,” Erik said.
“I’ve got it—I’ve got it,” I said. “Just don’t rush me.”
“Get me out of the belt, Lola,” Yolanda repeated.
I closed my eyes and plunged my hands deeper into the water. I closed them around the belt’s lock. The water still rose from beneath and also poured down from above. Mud, too, slid into the car, onto my back and neck, down onto Yolanda’s face. The rising water passed her neck and reached her jaw. She flailed about, once, so that I lost my grip. I could barely see anything through the rain.
“Stay still! Move up,” I yelled.
My fingers circled the lock again, beneath her body, and I fumbled around under the water with my eyes closed until I touched the button. I pressed it, but nothing happened. She and I looked at each other, and I felt myself begin to go to pieces. Yolanda leaned away from the side of the car, pulling herself up by gripping onto me, and I pushed the button a second time. It gave, and the seatbelt unlatched.
“Get up, get up, move up!”
I slipped my hands beneath her armpits, and she pressed against the car door with her legs, so that I lifted her, slippery as a weasel, from the black pool of water.
I hauled Yolanda out of that car, pulled from behind by Erik, and she came, coughing and sliding and bleeding. The car had sunk three-quarters into the ditch and was nearly filled with water. Clay slid down Yolanda’s face, and she shouted into the rain, saying something I couldn’t hear. I saw that her legs moved in a dancy, jerky way when she stepped away from the ditch onto the mud-slicked highway and then tumbled onto the pavement, bringing me down with her.
We sat on the highway, covered in mud and battered by the rain. The pale walls of rainwater caged us. Yolanda’s shoulders began to move, and when I looked back I saw her white teeth and her streaked face—but she wasn’t crying, or cursing, like I’d thought. That girl was laughing at me.
“Hi, Lola,” she said. “Good job with the not killing me.”
“God!”I said.
“Let’s go!” Erik said, hunching under the rain and reaching for me.
“Let’s get to the car!”
I took another flabbergasted look at her, and then we stood up, slipping and staggering in the mud. All of us ran to the Jeep.
CHAPTER 25
Ican’t believe how long it took you to start following me,” Yolanda said once she’d crawled into the back of the Jeep. She spoke to me in English; her voice sounded raw and hoarse. She started to fling our knapsacks and duffels around to find a more comfortable spot. “I mean, I was relieved that you weren’t making a nuisance of yourself. But later, when I thought about it, I was a little surprised. I mean, you’d think—”
“I know, I know,” I said. “Just shake some fake hair in front of me, and I’m useless.”
“And I can’t believe, once you did find me, how quickly you nearly murdered me. You’re the Conan Doyle fan. Seriously, Lola, it’s embarrassing.”
“I think I’d rather have a chat about how you’re a thief, and how you’re also mentally … bananas,” Erik suggested, in the driver’s seat. He pressed on the gas and pushed the Jeep out of the mud in slow turgid starts. Around us we could hear the rattle and plashes of the rain and the deep grinding of the mud under the tires. The Jeep swerved slickly. Then, with a sucking pop, it broke free of some hindrance and began to roll unsteadily down the highway.
“Excellent,” Yolanda said. “Get us out of here.”
“Hey—that duffel bag,” I said, reaching behind and taking up my mother’s Hartmann. For Yolanda had already gotten her hands on it. “Don’t steal this from me again!”
“I already looked inside. I read everything except for that diary—your mother’s, right? I was saving that one for last—but the rest of it’s useless. Is the map in the journal?”
“No.” I clasped the bag in both arms. “It’s—it’s in the rest
of it.”
Erik looked over at me, then back at the road.
“You just have to know the right way to piece things together,” I said, extemporaneously. “You just didn’t read the maps carefully enough.”
“I always read carefully,” she said. She leaned back. “It’s got to be in the journal.”
“Just keep away from my things, Yolanda,” I said. “I mean it.”
“Oh, I’ll behave until you turn around.” She shrugged. “But I’m patient. I’m willing to wait. I just want to make sure that you were telling me the truth about—all that nonsense. My father’s work.”
“You just want to preempt us on a dig,” Erik said.
“We’re not here for a dig,” I said.
“What do you know about it?” Yolanda asked him.
“I know what I know. I’ve heard about you and your—”
“Yes, you’ve heard about Tomas de la Rosa, I’m sure. So—right. I’m here to preempt you on a dig, as you see it.” She made a wide-arcing gesture with her hand. “What are you going to do, throw me out of the car?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” Erik asked.
“I’m just checking,” she said. I turned around to find her staring at me, and then she lowered her eyes. She touched a line of blood that came down from her head and examined her red finger. “Sorry,” she said. She cupped her hand to her forehead; her face buckled for several seconds before smoothing out again. “I suppose I sound paranoid. I think I hit my head.”
“Yes, so enough with that,” I said. “And yes, your head’s bleeding.” To Erik I said, “Watch the road.”
“I’m watching it.”
I pulled a tissue out of my mother’s duffel and brandished it at Yolanda. “You don’t look so good.”
Mud and weedy matter covered her hair in clumps, and her high-boned face had scratches across the left cheek and one small gash on the left side of her lower lip. Dirt striped across the nose, and under her filthy bangs her eyes glistened. I pressed the tissue onto her injured forehead.
The Queen Jade Page 14
