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Sam nodded. “Maybe. I seem to remember a page in his journal that was nothing but dots. Did I imagine that?”
“No, I remember it,” Wendy said. “I’ll find it.” She disappeared into the archive vault.
“I can see the gears turning in your head,” said Remi. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t think we’re meant to combine Aztec words with numbers. I think we’re meant to translate them. For example, take the symbol for ‘flint’ and replace the letters with corresponding numbers.”
Remi was jotting along on her pad:
6 , 1 2 , 9 , 1 4 , 2 0
“A simple substitution code,” said Milhaupt.
“Right,” Sam said. “I think Blaylock’s spirals are just window dressing. Look at the two rotated sketches. If you straighten out the ends of the spirals, you get a horizontal line of glyphs and a vertical line of glyphs.”
“Essentially a grid,” said Remi.
Wendy’s voice came over the intercom. “Sam, I found that page you mentioned. It’s on the screen.”
Selma grabbed the remote and switched on the TV. As Sam had described, the page consisted of nothing more than groupings of seemingly randomly placed dots—row after row, column after column.
“How many clusters?” Sam asked.
Remi was already counting. “One hundred sixty-nine. Thirteen down and thirteen across.” She smiled. “Same number as your spiral grid idea, Sam. And the same number of months in the Aztec calendar.”
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Milhaupt said, “We have a winner. Now you just need to plug your dots into the grid and figure out what it all means.”
HAVING CHASED BLAYLOCK’S RIDDLES for what seemed like months, Sam, now certain he was closing in on his quarry, attacked the “Blaylock Dot Grid Mystery” with a gusto that took him through the evening and into the early-morning hours of the next day.
Translating the Aztec-Nahuatl glyphs first into their Anglicized meanings and then into numbers was straightforward but time-consuming. Once done, he began plugging the dot clusters into their corresponding rows and columns until he had what looked like an LSD-inspired Sudoku puzzle on steroids. Next he began experimenting with various cryptographic methods, hoping to stumble upon something that clicked. Shortly before midnight, he found just that: a binary-type system where the dots’ positions determined which numbers in the grid were used.
After hearing Sam’s theory, Remi said, “You’ve worked this out? Tested it?”
“I did. Aside from the ‘empty’ clusters, they’re all latitude and longitude coordinates. This is a map.”
CHAPTER 38
GOLDFISH POINT,
LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA
COFFEE IN HAND, SAM AND REMI WALKED INTO THE WORKROOM at eight A.M. to find Selma, Pete, and Wendy standing before a six-foot-wide map of the Indian Ocean tacked to the wall with blue painter’s tape.
Six hours earlier, at Pete and Wendy’s urging, Sam and Remi had gone to bed, leaving them to plot the coordinates on a world map.
“Of the one hundred sixty-nine locations in Blaylock’s grid, eighty-two of them were null,” Pete now explained. “Of the remaining eighty-seven, fifty-three were located in the middle of the ocean, which left us thirty-four latitude and longitude points that matched up with land. That’s what you see plotted here.”
The coordinates were marked by red pushpins connected by white string. In rough, the pins formed a giant inverted V that started near Madagascar, peaked 2,800 miles to the northeast at Sri Lanka, and ended off the central coast of Sumatra, 1,400 miles to the southeast.
“Where are the other pins?” Sam asked.
Selma replied, “We pulled some out, most of them well inland. We wanted you to see this particular pattern first.”
Both Remi and Sam recognized the gleam in Selma’s eyes. During the night, she, Pete, and Wendy had discovered something significant.
“Go on,” Remi prompted.