by Ronan Frost
Several shadows appeared to be reaching out, clawing at the darkness around the statues casting them.
It was an unnerving trick of the light.
Rye just walked on, eyes front, listening for any indication they might have company.
Most of the passageways were in semi- if not complete darkness, while the galleries were still spotlit, meaning the art itself was often the only thing they could see in any of the rooms.
They climbed a set of white marble stairs to the second floor. The middle of each step had been worn smooth by the passage of art-loving feet over the last hundred and more years.
On the landing, with a choice of left or right, with a thick red rope cordoning off half of their options, they pushed through glass doors marked THE IMPRESSIONISTS and hurried through banks of loose brushwork and light palettes and all of those split seconds of life the artists had so brilliantly captured.
Beyond two more smoky sets of glass doors the distant lambent glow of computer screens cast some light, guiding them deeper into the complex.
Every turn had several bilingual signs pointing the way.
Art Restoration was up in the farthest reaches of the place, isolated from the hubbub of the museum’s day-to-day existence.
In this case, that isolation was a godsent as it meant they were unlikely to draw unwanted attention.
The Russian checked her watch, then pointed in the direction of another elaborate marble staircase that wouldn’t have been shamed in Versailles.
They climbed the stairs in silence.
Even in the darkness there was an incredible sense of space and emptiness that was probably some sort of artistic metaphor for the relationship of the viewer to the artist’s creation or some such bullshit, Rye thought, smiling wryly to himself. It was the kind of wise-ass remark Hannah used to make all of the time. And again, he was hit by a pang of loss, realizing something so simple was gone from his life for always. What he would have given for just one more dumb remark from her.
Through another set of doors—these wooden, not glass—and a final vacuum-sealed door before they reached a different part of the museum. Even the air in this section felt different, as though it was processed to remove the pollutants and chemicals that might otherwise cause the art to deteriorate.
A wall of offices, each one specializing in some specific stage of renovation or other, and a larger “clean room” dominated this level. The fifth and final room up here was given over to the spectrography and deep X-ray equipment the department used to examine every layer of a painting before beginning work on its restoration. All the rooms on this level had one thing in common, they looked more like science labs than an artist’s studio.
Rye laid the canvas out on the flatbed of the graphene scanner even as Carter powered it up.
He didn’t really understand how the thing worked, and without the time to get to grips with stuff, they had to rely upon the magic of a different piece of technology to get the job done.
“Okay, we’re in place,” he told Byrne through the earbud.
“Model?”
“It’s a Treelogic graphene scanner.”
“Okay, give me a second and I’ll talk you through it,” the voice in his ear said, supremely confident that in just a few seconds the mysteries of the machine would be cracked wide open. “It’s really pretty cool stuff. The graphene inside the scanner acts as a frequency multiplier which allows it to generate terahertz frequency deep scans which can actually penetrate all the way down to the gesso layer and varnish itself, which used to be impossible. We’re talking superfine details all the way down to the brushstrokes, even pigments and hidden defects within the canvas without damaging the art itself. The technology is incredible. Way more detailed than anything X-rays or reflectography could manage. And because it’s all done at terahertz frequencies it doesn’t heat the canvas up at all. It’s still pretty much prototype tech, but if this bad boy is half as good as the inventors promise, it’s going to offer the Blavatsky’s secrets right up.”
“Thanks, Wikipedia Man,” Carter Vickers said, grinning as he stood up. The immense scanner hummed into life. “That’s all fucking fascinating, but can you use it? Otherwise we’re looking at the world’s most expensive lump of metal.”
“Pretty sure that’s downstairs,” Byrne said, deadpan. “Right, do what I tell you, exactly.”
THIRTY-FIVE
It took two hours for the canvas to give up its secrets.
The ghostly images on the screen changed imperceptibly as layer by layer the scanner looked deeper into the painting. There was nothing even remotely maplike to be seen, and that didn’t change as Byrne guided them through the intricacies of the software. They isolated areas of the painting, homing in on brushstrokes magnified so much they looked more like the white caps of a raging sea. They shifted their search. They looked deeper into the paint, seeing shadows and shadow shapes that in turn became nothing as the graphene scanner penetrated the next layer of Blavatsky’s creation.
It was looking increasingly obvious that, despite all the rumors and promises, there was no map.
But Greg Rask wasn’t about to give up, no matter how long the odds.
In reality, they would have needed weeks, if not months, to properly analyze the painting, but they didn’t have that luxury, so if nothing was immediately obvious they moved on, and on, and on, until Rye said, “Wait. What’s that?”
It was a single spot, smaller than a piece of punctuation left by a pencil, but it was obvious that it didn’t belong on the canvas. His mind raced with the clichés of microdots and other spy paraphernalia he’d seen in countless half-baked movies, but it wasn’t that. Sometimes a spot was just a spot, and they were damned.
Or so it looked until Carter noticed a second peculiar dot and Iskra tapped the screen isolating two more.
“This has to be it,” the Russian said, indicating a third.
“But what is it?” Carter Vickers asked the room, knowing none of them had the answer. So far, they’d isolated no more than half a dozen of the peculiar dots. “Some sort of braille?”
“A star chart?” guessed Rye, pointing at three dots which looked vaguely like Orion’s Belt.
“Not sure about that,” the thief said, isolating a couple of others which looked out of place. “But I’m no astronomer.”
“Can you scan the layer where these spots are,” Rye asked, “and isolate them from everything else? Maybe it’s like some sort of join-the-dots thing hidden beneath the picture or something.”
“Sure, give me a couple of seconds to calibrate the software,” Carter said. He was getting used to the basics of the machine now, even if he wasn’t exactly proficient in its intricacies. Good to his word, a minute or so later the scanner began to scour the layer between the gesso and the varnish, picking up all sixty tiny imperfections on the surface of the canvas. He printed them out and, using the networked software, sent a copy back to Byrne in the US.
“What am I looking at?” Byrne asked.
“We’re kinda hoping you’d tell us,” the thief said. “You know, using some of that Wikilike genius of yours. Maybe it’s some sort of Morse code? Or some sort of dot code?”
“Helpful as ever, my light-fingered friend,” Byrne said in their ears. “First thought is Rye might be onto something with a star chart—after all, that’s a traditional form of navigation, and we’re supposedly looking at a map—so while you lot get yourself to the rendezvous point, I’ll run it against all of the star charts I can find and look for points of similarity. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
But it was never going to be that easy.
THIRTY-SIX
The rendezvous point was Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport, a twelve-hour flight from Romania.
It was a major hub servicing over twenty airlines, connecting with Budapest, Rome, Vienna, Istanbul, Frankfurt, and countless other destinations.
They used the time to catch up on much-needed sleep, though Rask
spent much of the flight in conference with Byrne back in the US. The video link provided Rye with his first look at the young tech’s lair. It looked like something Bruce Wayne would have been proud of. Byrne barely made eye contact with the camera. He talked obsessively as he worked, mostly saying “No. No. Shit. No.” in a running commentary of disappointment.
He pulled up every star chart imaginable, going through them grid by grid as he tried them from every conceivable angle and rotation, switching them for northern and southern hemisphere orientations as he tried to match the mysterious dots against astronomical objects and planetary position tables, and still came up blank.
It took several increasingly frustrating hours to realize they were getting nowhere fast.
“Face it, folks, it’s not written in the stars,” Carter said, from his seat.
He had his feet up on the leather of the seat across from him and a can of Coke perched on the armrest.
“Sixty dots. Ten of which are slightly more pronounced than the others. It’s got to be significant. Maybe we’re looking at them the wrong way,” Rye offered, thinking of an old movie he’d seen. “Maybe it’s not meant to be flat, but rather side on, like musical notes on sheet music?”
No one laughed at the suggestion, but if it was music, it was no lost concerto. They played flat tuneless tones with absolutely no musicality to them.
“Braille?” The thief suggested, but there was no rhyme or reason to the clusters of dots even when condensed to a more readable scale.
“It’s not Morse code, it’s all dots, no dashes,” Iskra offered. It was the first thing the woman had said since they’d boarded the plane. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a code. There are hundreds of codes we would never crack without a cypher.” Which was painfully true, but a truth Rask didn’t want to acknowledge.
Up on the screen, Byrne shook his head. “I’ve got nothing. Seriously, it’s garbage. There’s no map here. But there has to be a way of reading this,” he said, doing well to mask his frustration. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have sent assassins after you.”
It wasn’t a terrible assumption—why risk discovery, coming out into the open in a very public attack on them, instead of staying in the shadows if the map wasn’t decodable?
“We need to remember when this was made. It’s not some sophisticated computer-generated code, it’s over a hundred years old, and it’s a map, not a key. If we remember that, these sixty points of reference have to correspond with something in the region.”
“Mountains,” Rye said.
“What are you thinking?” Rask asked immediately. He leaned forward.
“It’s when you said region. What’s the one thing that comes to mind when you think about the landscape of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and those areas?”
“The mountains.”
“And they’re not just mountains; we’re talking about the Himalayas, the most extreme mountain range in the world, with sixty peaks over twenty-three thousand feet, and ten over twenty-six thousand.”
“Good. Good. Now you’re thinking. Jeremiah, can you overlay the scan on a map of the mountain range?” Rask asked Byrne.
“Already on it,” he promised, but it didn’t take more than a few seconds to hit the first stumbling block. The ten more pronounced markings didn’t line up with any of the highest mountains on a topographical map of the region, which seemed to negate the theory.
But Byrne had an answer of sorts for that. “Remember, this is what I do, or at least a version of it. Bear with me. Now, when Blavatsky wrote the Secret Book of Dzyan, that was back in the 1880s, and maps of the region were crude at best. They only listed something like forty peaks above an elevation of eighteen thousand feet, not the sixty we know today. Any sort of exploration of the territory was a perilous undertaking.” Rye nodded even though Byrne wasn’t looking at him. “It wasn’t until well after World War II that ground photogrammetry and satellite reconnaissance was sufficiently advanced to create an accurate map of the mountain range. Then we started using aerial photographs and plotting glacial erosion in the changing landscape. Back in the 1880s, we’re literally talking about the very first climbing expeditions into the region.”
“So, the map could be wrong,” Rye asked.
“Put bluntly, yes. The question is how wrong, and if it’s reconcilable to the more modern maps. It’s safe to assume she never went to the region, so she was working off secondhand information, including the relatively crude 1850s-era maps compiled by d’Anville, the French cartographer. One of the things d’Anville was renowned for was removing what he considered largely fictitious features from his maps, like Shambhala. Not that we were ever likely to find a simple X marks the spot.”
“What if we find a map from before his?” Carter suggested. “Try and line them up? See if the dots reveal a secret entrance to the lost city or something?”
“Theoretically, not a horrible idea, but the only known map of the mountains that predates d’Anville was drawn up by a Spanish missionary several hundred years earlier and is essentially worthless. We’re talking a Here Be Dragons sort of thing. What I can do is look at the current satellite imagery for any telltale changes in the light spectrum that might indicate the presence of hidden chambers or caverns or something underneath the surface, but even the most advanced remote sensing is going to struggle with the terrain. There’s so much we don’t see with the naked eye, frequencies outside the visible spectrum, that actually have an impact on the land above and the vegetation, so we might, just might, get lucky. Remember, unlike 1880, there are millions of satellite images of the Earth being taken every day. All sorts of changes can show up across them if you know what you’re looking for. It’s just time-consuming.”
Rye, though, was still thinking in three dimensions. He couldn’t shake the idea that the dots might somehow align in a more simplistic manner to the landscape and they were just overcomplicating things. “Humor me,” he said, thinking aloud. “But what if we’re overthinking it?”
“How so?”
“Well, first up, they didn’t have any scientific means to measure the height of the peaks back then, but they did have their eyes. So, what if we’re looking at something really obvious, like the view from the doorway into Shambhala, would that work? Each dot corresponding to the highest points on the landscape, marking the mountain peaks from where the map was drawn. Something like that? Maybe that’s why some are shaded differently, either because they are the ones that can be seen, or can’t be seen, from where the map was drawn?”
“It’d be a unique topographical map, visually accurate to a single place on the planet,” Rask agreed.
“Not bad,” Byrne said. “I might be able to work with that. If the dots correspond to elevations that might even give us a place to start looking. Okay, leave it with me. This won’t be fast, I’m afraid, even if we know the general area we’re looking in, the range itself, the Greater, Lesser, and Outer Himalayas runs fifteen hundred miles, with climates ranging from tropical at the base to perennial snow at the highest elevations. We’re talking grassland, shrubland, coniferous forest, tropical and subtropical broadleaf forests, and glaciers. All in one search radius. That, and the fact that it’s still susceptible to an incredible amount of tectonic upheaval means this isn’t going to be as easy as just looking at a few old photographs. It could take years to do a proper detailed study of a region that size. And then there’s no guarantee we’d find anything. Those mountains don’t like giving up their secrets.”
“Ah,” said Rask, smiling. “But it doesn’t have to be that broad, does it? We know the route Ernst Schäfer’s expedition into Tibet took. It’s documented. We know there are links between Hess, Edmund Kiss, the occult expert, and Guérin, the man we’ve been chasing. We know they were influenced by Blavatsky’s theosophical beliefs and attended the Thule Society as honored guests. But none of that compares to their membership in the SS Ahnenerbe, the occult division of the SS. That’s the mother lode. That expedition is w
here we start looking. We examine the topography of the mountain ranges along Schäfer’s path through Tibet. We follow Himmler’s search for the Holy Grail, because now we’ve got the key. I have total faith in you, Jeremiah,” Rask said. “Is there anything we can do on this end to help you?”
“Not really,” Byrne said. “Like I said, this is why you pay me the big bucks.”
“Very well. Then I suggest we take advantage of the remainder of the flight to catch up on our rest, so we can hit the ground running.” Rask killed the satellite linkup without another word, leaving the screen dark.
THIRTY-SEVEN
They landed in the heart of the rainy season.
It was hot and muggy, the air humid.
The ground was still dark from the last rain, but for now at least the sky was blue.
The buildings themselves presented a wall of color not unlike the gaudy streets of Newfoundland, each block of crumbling concrete offering a wall of reds and greens, yellows, faded blues, and other vibrant lies that wrote over the poverty beneath them. They were so tightly packed the sense of place was claustrophobic, while up on the hill the spire of the monkey temple looked down, separated from the tragedy of Kathmandu by a lush layer of forest.
Rye made his excuses to Vic, explaining that they were going to need equipment if they were serious about venturing into the mountains, and as the only climber among them, he volunteered to take point on procurement, checking out what the city had to offer. His shopping list was fairly basic but necessarily comprehensive, and he had no idea how much of the stuff would be readily available in the city:
Fifty-five-liter climbing packs, minus-forty-rated sleeping bags, ultralight inflatable sleeping pads, water purification tools, knives, ice axes, forty feet of pre-tied Prusiks (to save fiddling with them in the extreme environment), climbing rigging, full carabiner systems (large and small wiregates, a large pear-shaped locking screw carabiner and a smaller auto-locking one), alpine climbing harnesses and belay devices, trekking poles, ascenders, and twelve-point crampons with anti-balling that would withstand the sheer amount of walking they had to do as well as the climbing itself.
