scientists. Max was on the upper level, moving along the gantry below the emblazoned Basque letters on the roof beams. He looked at them and dismissed them. The words were a legacy of the generous spirit of Antoine d’Abbadie, encouraging the readers in his library to work and seek wisdom. It didn’t matter. Max didn’t understand a word.
His eyes were glazing over. He’d been in the half-light too long, and trying to read the foreign words on the spines of the folders and books was giving him a crick in his neck. He was looking without seeing, concentration flagging.
And then something caught his eye. He took two steps back. Words had been scratched along the edge of a shelf. Faint, barely visible, and they were small. It was doubtful if anyone would notice them unless by chance. Or unless they were looking.
What he needed was a piece of chalk to highlight the letters. But there was no chalk. What else? Max looked down to where Sayid sat at the trestle table, poring over a volume. He saw what he needed. He ran to the end of the gantry and down to Sayid, praying what he wanted would still be in place.
The old typewriter.
“What? You’ve found something?” Sayid said as Max stuck his nose close to the old metal keys.
“Something,” he said, his fingers already lifting the faded ribbon from the machine. Within seconds he was back at the bookshelf. He rubbed what little pigmentation there was with spit on his finger, then ran the ribbon across the bookshelf’s edge. It worked. The faded scratches lifted slightly, but he could see only a few of the words.
If only Mr. Chaplin were at his shoulder. The soft-spoken teacher at Dartmoor High had found the route to Max’s fleeting attention span in class by teaching them ancient Greek and Roman history. And Dartmoor High was built on a onetime outpost of Rome’s XX Legion; that meant soldiers and battles-and Latin.
“What is it?” Sayid said quietly, looking up to the gallery.
Max studied the words again. “
“Thicko,” Sayid said.
“I can tell you all the battles the Twentieth Legion fought. I can’t help it if they spoke in ancient Italian.”
“Lucifer, though, eh?” Sayid said.
Max scanned the books wedged immediately above the scratched words. A folder was hidden behind them, its corner alerting an inquiring eye to find it. Max reached in and pulled it free.
The worn brown paper had sloughed, like dead skin. He opened it and a few pages fell out. The first sheet was a hand-drawn circle with symbols and numbers around the edge, and inside the circle what looked to be three or four triangles of different sizes.
Scrawled across the top of the page, in a barely legible script, were three more Latin words:
“There’s more!” Max blurted out as he made his way down to Sayid.
He laid the sheets of paper on the table, but Sayid’s attention was elsewhere. He had found a volume of documents.
“Blimey,” Sayid said. “Look at this.”
Sayid placed the big book next to Max’s folder on the table. A diagram filled the page. It was an intricate symbol, a zigzag pattern, all angles and lines. Where the lines did not touch, the spaces formed shapes that made the pattern look like a field of diamonds, while the spaces between the lines made star patterns. This was something.
“You know what this is?”
“Yeah,” Sayid said, still gazing at the drawing.
“It’s all right, Sayid. No hurry. Take your time. You don’t have to share the secret if you don’t want to.”
“Well, it’s just a bit of a surprise, that’s all. My family had books on Islamic art and I’ve seen this before. Wow. Amazing.”
Max stared at Sayid, who was transfixed by the drawing. He turned it this way and that, and no matter which way up it was held the pattern stayed the same.
“I’ll tell you what this is …,” Sayid said, the intricate drawing still holding his attention.
Max sighed, and waited.
“This is the Divine Order,” Sayid told him.
“The what?”
“It’s pure geometry. I think the Arabs got it from the Greeks, but they perfected it. Anyway, that’s what it represents-that the chaos of the universe is part of a plan. At least, I think that’s what it means. And this shape, this diagram, shows the chaos of the universe in a defined order. All very precise.”
“You’ve lost me, Sayid.”
Max’s mind raced. His dad had taught him so many things when they traveled together, but this didn’t trigger any memories. He knew the ancient Greeks had learned from Egypt and Babylonia, and that the Indians and Arabs had mastered astronomy and mathematics, but where did this fit in? Was there anything his dad had told him that would help solve this puzzle?
The thought of his father, alone and struggling with his own illness, stabbed at him. His dad was bigger than life. His strong, adventurous, clever dad. Max let the feeling slip away. No good dwelling on it. But he remembered his dad telling him about the Greek masters. The bloody conflicts of ancient times fascinated Max, and he’d visited battlefields with his father. It was about the time he just couldn’t settle down at Dartmoor High. So his dad told him stories. They walked in the heat of Greece, where warriors had fallen in great battles, his father explaining how the use of geometry had enabled men to build siege machines for thousands of years. It was his father’s way of helping him concentrate in class, giving him something vibrant to grasp when the subject demanded concentration rather than imagination.
Max had struggled at school. When his mum died, the shock and grief resonated through him, a silent weeping he could barely hold in. And to try and understand even the most basic elements of geometry would make his brain seize up at times. So his dad told him about Pythagoras. A Greek master mathematician, a vegetarian mystic who believed he could prove the secrets of the universe through geometry. Secrets of the universe. Now Sayid had told him that the drawing meant exactly that.
“If it’s in this book, then I reckon it’s not part of any clue,” Max said. “But maybe it tells us that Zabala was searching for something to do with astrology or astronomy and was using geometry to help him solve the puzzle.”
Max took the second piece of paper from the folder. It had a row of five numbers across and five down. And only one word, a symbol and a number were written across the top: Mars = 65.
“Mars equals sixty-five,” Max said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Mars is the god of war.”
“I know that, Sayid. But he’s not sixty-five years old, is he? And he doesn’t live at number sixty-five Acacia Avenue.”
“I’m only trying to help. Keep your shirt on. I’m the bloke who helped you get through your maths exam last year, remember? Your mad monk must have put it here for a reason.”
“He wasn’t mad, I’m sure of it. He was a scientist, and he’s giving us another clue along with everything else.”
Max studied the piece of paper a moment longer, gazing at the numbers, willing his mind to make some sense of them.
“I read a book once about spies in the Second World War and they used a code system like this, but that was something to do with letters in a box, not numbers,” Max said.
“I remember that, you were going on about it for ages. And?”
“And … I dunno. I can’t remember how the system works.”
