Race for the Flash Stone (The Anlon Cully Chronicles Book 2)

by K Patrick Donoghue

  A few minutes later, they settled around an oak picnic table on the patio. Under shade provided by surrounding pines, Antonio scrolled through messages on his phone while Pebbles munched on pizza.

  Anlon appeared through the kitchen door and sidled down the steps sporting a tray laden with glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. As soon as the tray hit the table, Pebbles snagged the pitcher and filled the glasses. She gulped hers down to cool the sting of the jalapeños and then raised the next slice to devouring position. In between bites, she asked, “Are you sure you guys don’t want some? It’s super yummy.”

  Both wisely declined.

  “Your loss!” Pebbles said with a smile, enthusiastically chomping away.

  Once Antonio finished reviewing his email, he placed the phone on the table and inhaled the crisp mountain air. Stretching his arms, he yawned. “So, what’s this about live fish?”

  Pebbles froze in midchew and dropped the half-eaten slice back in the open pizza box. “Yeah! What gives?”

  With a shake of his head, Anlon shoved at Antonio’s shoulder. “Nice. Thanks a bunch!”

  “Oh, pah-leazze! I haven’t forgotten,” Pebbles said. “Your bizarre little fish are sitting on the kitchen counter. Did you think the pizza would make them invisible?”

  “Actually, I did hope a carb coma might make you forget.”

  Laughing, Antonio pushed back at Anlon and said, “Shrewd move, buddy! But didn’t you tell me you have another package coming tomorrow morning? Isn’t this gonna play out all over again?”

  “What?” yelped Pebbles.

  Training an evil eye at Antonio, Anlon said, “Dude, loose lips sink ships.”

  Antonio raised his glass to hide a devilish grin. Through the table, Anlon felt the vibration of the pizza box slamming closed. He cringed and thought, Oh, well. So much for the peace offering.

  With her ice-blue eyes boring holes through his body and soul, Pebbles demanded, “Explain. Now.”

  “Okay, okay.” Anlon said. “Relax, will ya? They’re zebrafish.”

  “Um, I can read a packing slip. I meant, why have zebrafish joined your unexplained collection of seaweed, fungus and rocks?”

  Antonio asked, “Fungus? Seaweed?”

  “Yeah, you should see his office. Looks like the swamp-thing moved in!” Pebbles said.

  “Technically, they are not fungi. They’re lichens. They bind with fungi, sort of a coexistence,” Anlon said.

  “Whatever! They stink. The seaweed and the lichens are nasty.”

  “It’s algae, not seaweed.”

  “Ugh! You’re impossible!”

  Antonio clapped heartily and cut in. “Round one to Pebbles. Now, return to your corners and regroup!”

  Ignoring Antonio’s interruption, Anlon said to Pebbles, “All right, all right, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Let’s go to my office and I’ll explain.”

  Antonio hid behind another sip of lemonade, and thought, Tree shaken, not stirred. Now, let’s see what drops out!

  Pebbles reached the door to Anlon’s office first. Turning to Antonio, she placed her hand on the doorknob, crinkled her nose and cautioned, “Gird yourself. Your eyelashes might fall out.”

  Leaning her shoulder into the door, Pebbles pushed against boxes partially blocking the entrance. She still couldn’t believe Anlon’s pristine workspace had been turned into the hoarder’s paradise that met her eyes. Boxes of Devlin’s research papers and artifacts were stacked three high on every open inch of the floor, save a narrow path leading to Anlon’s desk and another that snaked behind it. Atop the desk itself, piles of papers and files balanced precariously next to his laptop. Behind the desk, several fishbowls lined the windowsill while a few others sat on a long credenza. In these tanks, Anlon had assembled a colorful array of lichens, algae and now fish. On the built-in cherrywood shelves along the far wall, rows of baseball-sized rocks teetered in front of neatly arranged books. And to the opposing wall, Anlon had tacked a huge world map adorned with pushpins, sticky notes and other scribbled annotations.

  One by one, they squirmed along Anlon’s makeshift path until reaching the desk. Anlon removed packages from the two guest chairs and invited them to sit. Stepping cautiously around the desk, he slid into his own chair.

  “What in God’s name happened in here?” Antonio asked with a laugh, wiping crusty debris from the seat of his chair.

  “See, I told you!” Pebbles said.

  Anlon ignored the exchange of jibes and glanced at the zebrafish happily circling their bowl. It was a shame some of them would be sacrificed in the name of science. Turning his attention back to his guests, he asked, “Are we ready to talk, or are you two going to bitch some more?”

  Pebbles opened her mouth to contest the accusation, but Antonio held out a hand and said, “Let me take this one.” To Anlon, he said, “I’ve known you a long time, my friend. This, right here, is beyond immersion.”

  With a smile, Anlon replied, “It does look a bit obsessive, doesn’t it?”

  Antonio and Pebbles nodded in agreement. Pebbles again readied a comeback, but Anlon spoke first. “Call me what you may, I guarantee both of you will feel differently by the time we leave this room.”

  “Assuming we can find a way out!” needled Pebbles.

  Ignoring the dig, Anlon said, “So, I’ve been trying to figure out where Devlin left off, where he was headed with his research. Obviously, he didn’t expect to get tossed off a mountain, so he didn’t leave much of a trail to guide us. Or so I thought.”

  He trained his gaze on three pocket-sized notebooks lying next to his laptop. Reaching between the paper stacks on the desk, he handed two of the notebooks to Pebbles. “I’m pretty sure they’re important. Maybe more important than the Waterland Map. Take a look.”

  One cover was labeled Martinique and the other Guadeloupe. Pebbles passed the Martinique journal to Antonio and then cracked open the Guadeloupe book herself.

  Inside, the journals were full of notes and hand-drawn diagrams. In the Martinique volume, most of the notes were made in pencil, but there were others inserted here and there with a blue pen. Toward the back, several pages were exclusively recorded in blue ink. The Guadeloupe journal contained similar recordings.

  As they flipped through pages, Anlon said, “Devlin was definitely hunting for something, but the more I’ve thought about it, the less I’m convinced he was after the Stones.”

  Pebbles said, “Don’t tell me, let me guess. He was looking for seaweed and fungus.”

  “Very funny,” Anlon said. Holding up the third notebook, he pointed to the word Dominica on the cover and said, “This one is the most interesting. Devlin apparently found one of the Stone caches here. I say ‘apparently’ because he wasn’t successful recovering any of the Stones.”

  “Really?” Pebbles said. She looked up at the wall map. “Where is it?”

  Anlon winnowed his way between boxes to reach the map. Antonio and Pebbles rose to join him. “You see the two red pushpins, here and here? And the one with both a black and green one, there?”

  Pebbles followed Anlon’s finger as it passed first to Guadeloupe and Martinique and then to Dominica. She said, “All in the Caribbean.”

  “I’ve been to Dominica,” Antonio said. “It’s very lush. Like a rainforest. Haven’t been to the other two, but if I’m not mistaken, there’s a pretty famous volcano on Martinique.”

  “Yep, Mount Pelée,” Anlon said. “In fact, all three have prominent volcanos.”

  “Volcanos?” Pebbles asked. She thought of Tumaera and asked, “Are volcanos important?”

  “I think they might be. Lichens love volcanic rock, by the way,” Anlon said.

  “Ah! Finally, we get to the lichens,” Antonio said.

  “Same true for the rest of your bilge collection and little fish? Do they love volcanos, too?” asked Pebbles.

  “Eh, not all algae, just the stinky ones percolating in these two bowls,” Anlon said, smiling. “And zebrafish like w
ater, not lava.”

  Pebbles gazed back at the map. There she found six black pins, six green pins and two additional blue ones. The blue pins marked two islands: Isabela and Ometepe. The remaining black and green pins were all situated on continental land masses. She asked, “What’s with the different color pins?”

  “Good question. The red pins are the two islands where Devlin struck out looking for Stones. The black and green pins show my best guesses of Waterland Map sites. One of the sets, black or green, is correct, but I haven’t figured out which yet. I won’t know for sure until we go hunting for one of each,” said Anlon.

  “Why does Dominica have both black and green?” Antonio asked.

  “Well, if Devlin did find a cache on Dominica, then we have one reference point on the Waterland Map. But there’s no way to figure out how to align the rest of the cache locations from Devlin’s map with only one reference point. Yesterday, I found two different ways to align the map where a cache location comes close to Dominica. Just don’t know which one is right.”

  Anlon cleared a space on his desk and then retrieved a steel tube resting on the credenza. He uncorked a plug from one end and slid out the Waterland Map. He laid it out on the desk and then retrieved a second map of equal size from a desk drawer. The second map was made of clear plastic and showed the Earth’s current topography. Anlon layered the clear map atop Devlin’s Waterland Map and aligned the longitude and latitude lines of both maps.

  “Now,” he continued, “this positioning shows the relationship between the two maps when aligned as Devlin drew the longitude and latitude. When lined up this way, you can see the color-coded spots where Devlin marked Stone caches are pretty much all in the oceans…way far away from any land in most cases. You’ll also notice, none of the cache locations are anywhere near Dominica.

  “So, let’s assume the planet flipped over from the asteroid encounter. I flip the Waterland Map upside down, like this, and now what do you see?”

  Antonio quickly scanned the map and said, “Still no Dominica.”

  “Right…and only a few of Devlin’s marks are on land,” Pebbles said.

  “Correct on both counts. So, that only leaves two possibilities,” said Anlon. “Either Devlin was a terrible mapmaker, or the Earth didn’t make a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree flip. I was leaning toward bad mapping, but it might be a little of both.”

  Anlon returned the current world map to its original upright position. Then, he slowly rotated it until he found a color-coded site on the underlying Waterland Map that aligned near Dominica. He said, “So, I’ve tried this multiple times, and only one of Devlin’s cache locations comes close to Dominica when I rotate the map starting with Devlin’s original coordinate grid.”

  Pebbles looked at the cockeyed alignment of the two maps. “So, the Earth didn’t do a full one eighty?”

  With a nod, Anlon said, “That’s the implication. But, I’m not sure this is the right way to align the map.”

  “Why?” Antonio asked.

  Anlon again returned the current world map to its original position atop the Waterland Map and pointed at the aligned coordinate grids. “Because the ancient Egyptians didn’t know about Greenwich.”

  “Excuse me?” Pebbles said.

  Tapping on the clear world map, Anlon said, “The world map’s longitude is based on a prime meridian through Greenwich in England. But the Waterland Map is based on a wall drawing Devlin lifted from a pyramid at the Giza complex.”

  Pebbles massaged her wrists and leaned over the map. “So, you’re thinking the prime meridian on Devlin’s map might be aligned through Egypt instead?”

  “Exactly. When the thought struck me yesterday afternoon, I mocked up a new world map with the prime meridian through Giza and had the copy center in town print it out.” Anlon pulled out a second clear map from the desk drawer and substituted it for the Greenwich oriented map. “Observe that no cache location is near Dominica when the two maps are straight up. Take my word, when you flip it over, none of them line up with Dominica either.”

  Excited, Pebbles rotated the map slowly. When it was nearly inverted, a cache location crossed the West Indies. “Oh, my God, look at that!”

  Anlon leaned back in the desk chair and pointed at the wall map. “Yep. The black pins show the land-based cache locations using the Giza orientation. The green ones are based on Greenwich. Which is correct? My money’s on the Giza orientation, but there’s no way to know which set is right without finding another cache. Regardless, both orientations suggest the planet flipped less than a full one eighty.”

  “What about the blue pins?” Antonio asked.

  “I found them listed on a blank page near the end of the Dominica book. To me, it looks like Devlin planned to tackle them next, but there may be other reasons he wrote them in. As a point of interest, both have sizeable volcanos. But it’s puzzling why he was interested in them other than the fact they are volcanic. Neither island is a Waterland Map site, black or green,” Anlon said.

  He passed the Dominica journal to Pebbles. “There are two other mysteries in this little book. Look toward the back. A few pages before the island list, Devlin drew a picture. Look familiar?”

  Pebbles riffled the pages until she came across the drawing. “Hey, that’s the dragon statue!”

  “Dragon statue?” Antonio asked.

  Pebbles handed Antonio the notebook and pointed to the drawing. At the same time, Anlon stepped behind the desk and opened a box. After rummaging through some packing material, he withdrew a foot-high statuette and placed it on the edge of the desk in front of Antonio.

  Antonio approached the desk and compared the two renderings. “Yep, they do look similar.”

  “What’s the other mystery?” Pebbles asked.

  “Look at the page opposing the dragon drawing. Toward the bottom of the page, read out the last couple of lines,” Anlon said to Antonio.

  “Um, let’s see. Ah, yes. Here we are,” Antonio said. “Tried Sound Stone per M, but no judder. Disappointing! Need to find one fast! Running out of time!”

  “M for Malinyah?” Pebbles wondered.

  “That’s my interpretation,” said Anlon. “Devlin went to Dominica looking for something very specific. It could be more Stones, but his note doesn’t say, ‘Need to find them fast.’ He wrote, ‘Need to find one fast.’ He could have meant he was looking for ‘one’ of the caches. I don’t know, maybe I’m overanalyzing it, but I don’t get the time urgency.”

  Antonio spoke up. “Can we go back a second. You made a point of mentioning the two blue-pin islands have volcanos. What’s the significance?”

  Rising from his seat, Anlon snaked between boxes and plucked two chunks of rock from the assortment lining the bookshelves. Handing one each to his guests, he said, “You’re looking at olivine basalt, a magnetic type of volcanic rock.”

  Antonio turned the black-green chunk in his hands. “And?”

  “I’m pretty sure all the Stones were forged from olivine.” Anlon turned to Pebbles and said, “We know they lived near volcanos.”

  “That’s right, Tumaera and Artosae,” Pebbles said. She lifted the basalt chunk. “What makes you think the Stones are olivine? The texture of this looks and feels very different.”

  “I scraped off slivers from the Breylofte and Aromaegh. I had them tested. Both are olivine mixed with kimberlite. So is the dragon statue, by the way. After I do the same with samples from the Sinethal and Naetir, we’ll know for sure.”

  “Okay,” said Antonio. “That connects the Stones with volcanos. Are you thinking Devlin was looking to find where they were made?”

  “It crossed my mind.” Anlon smiled.

  Pebbles slapped the desktop. “You’re thinking he went looking for their homeland, aren’t you?”

  Anlon said, “It makes sense from an archaeology perspective. Remember, Devlin didn’t discover any of the Stones at a dig site. He found them in museums…at least, as far as we know. The archaeologists wh
o did discover them found the Stones among artifacts of later-period cultures.

  “I think it’s possible Devlin went looking for the Munuorian homeland once he found Dominica. I don’t know what led him to consider Isabela and Ometepe versus other possibilities, but I think he might have been on the right track.”

  “Come again? How’d you get there?” Antonio asked.

  “Cassiopeia or cryptochromes?” Anlon asked. “Where should I start?”

  “Huh?” asked Pebbles.

  “Let’s start with Cassiopeia,” said Anlon, turning to Pebbles. “Remember our conversation about Cassiopeia? The memory experiment?”

  “How could I forget?” joked Pebbles.

  Anlon leaned back in the chair once more and clasped his hands behind his head. “Well, Cassiopeia is a northern hemisphere constellation. If you’re above thirty-four degrees latitude, it’s always visible in the night sky. The farther south you go from there, it’s only visible for certain stretches of time during the year. If you go below the southern tropics, it’s barely visible at all.

  “So, if the Munuorians could see Cassiopeia before the asteroid flipped the planet, their homeland had to have been at least north of the southern tropics. How far north is the question. Now, if you’re at the north pole itself, Cassiopeia would be almost dead overhead all year round. The farther south you go, the angle of its orbit is sloped at a sharper angle. If you’re at thirty degrees, the slope is modest, call it midhorizon. If you’re at the equator, the slope is dramatic — it comes close to the horizon at its peak visibility and disappears completely for months of the year for the opposing arc of its orbit.”

  Anlon leaned toward Pebbles and said, “Now we don’t know the time of year in Malinyah’s vision, but Malinyah told you Cassiopeia was visible nearly year-round. And you said their astronomers watched Munirvo’s full approach, which I take as meaning there never was a moment it wasn’t visible. The only way that would have been possible is if Munirvo sat inside Cassiopeia’s W, a point you confirmed in our experiment.

  “See, there’s a pretty narrow latitude band where Cassiopeia would be visible nearly the full year, where something inside the W would be visible all the time, right around twenty-five to thirty degrees north of the equator. That would put the Munuorian homeland preflood in the same band of latitude as Florida.”