scalene triangle—two unequal sides.”
Now Sam caught on. He smiled. “Pythagoras was the father of the isosceles triangle—two equal sides . . .”
“ ‘His stride a battle of rivals,’ ” Remi quoted again.
“So we’re looking for an isosceles triangle.”
“Right. Probably marked by Laurent’s cicada stamp. That leaves us with one line: ‘A trio of Quoins, their fourth lost, shall point the way to Frigisinga.’ ”
Sam looked over his shoulder and scanned the crowds until he spotted Kholkov, who was strolling around the landing area. His cohorts wouldn’t be far away. Sam was about to turn away when he saw Kholkov pull a BlackBerry from his pocket and study the screen. He jerked his head up, looked around, then gestured to someone in the crowd. Ten seconds later his three companions were huddled around him. After a brief conversation two of them turned and started jogging back to the dock. Kholkov and the other man headed for the chapel path.
“Took the bait,” Remi said.
“But only partially. That’s what I was afraid of. The question is, when will he realize the obvious?”
“Which is?”
“That he’s got us trapped. All they have to do is stake out the dock and wait for us to come back.”
CHAPTER 47
Quoin,” Remi murmured, thinking aloud as they walked. “Three options: a wedge used to secure printer’s blocks; wedges used to raise the barrel of a cannon; or architectural cornerstones. It has to be the last one. I don’t see any printing presses or artillery.”
Sam nodded absently, half his attention on keeping Kholkov and his partner in sight; they were halfway down the path to the chapel. Their heads swiveled this way and that, searching for their quarry.
Remi continued brainstorming: “A lot of corners around, but we have to assume it’s not one of the wood buildings.”
The split-rail fence on their left gave way to a hedge-lined
“Cannon,” Sam said, stopping in his tracks. “Sort of.”
Remi followed his outstretched arm. Thirty yards away in the middle of the lawn was a waist-high stone pedestal. Mounted atop it was an ornamental bronzed sextant, a premodern navigation tool generally used to find the altitude of the sun above the horizon. Where most sextants were no larger than an opened hardcover book, this one was four to five times that size, measuring roughly four feet on a side. Its comically large telescope resembled the barrel of a blunderbuss.
Sam and Remi walked over. There were fewer people here; most visitors were sticking to the gravel paths, their attention focused on the chapel, the mountains, or the fjord.
“There’s a plaque,” Remi said. “It’s in German.”
Sam leaned down for a better look and translated: “Presented August of 1806 to Elector Maximilian I Joseph, House of Wittelsbach, member of the Confederation of the Rhine and King of Bavaria by Napoleon I, Emperor of the French.”
“If that isn’t a clue I don’t know what is,” Remi said. “Here, Sam, look at this.”
He moved to where she had knelt down. The lower part of the sextant consisted of a vertical index arm designed to slide over a curved arc engraved with notches, each indicating one-sixtieth of a degree. A gap in the index arm showed the arc’s current reading. It was set to seventy.
“Not a trio,” Remi said. “Would have been nice if it’d been set on three.”
Sam suddenly grabbed her arm and moved them around the pedestal, putting it between them and the chapel area. Through the arms of the sextant they could see Kholkov and his partner walking down the path toward the outbuildings nearer the trees.
“Maybe it is,” Sam said. “Let’s think outside the box: If the sextant is our cannon and the notches on the arc are quoins—the wedges—this part of Laurent’s riddle is metaphorical.”
“Go on.”
“Remember the line: ‘A trio of Quoins, their fourth lost, shall point the way to Frigisinga.’ That suggests that a fourth quoin would complete the group. If you have a completed group, what percentage do you have?”
“A hundred.”
“So each quoin would represent a quarter of the total. How many notches on the arc?”
Remi checked. “A hundred forty-two.”
Sam mentally did the math:
142 / 4 quoins = 35.5
35.5 x 3 quoins = 106.5
He said, “Okay, so if we were to lift the barrel to a hundred six degrees . . .”
They both knelt behind the sextant and imagined the telescope angled upward to its new position. It was aimed directly at the for wardmost minaret atop the red-roofed onion domes.
“I guess that’s what you call
“Triangle marks the spot,” Sam corrected. “Hopefully.”
They hadn’t taken ten steps back toward the chapel when a voice came over the loudspeaker, making an announcement first in German and then in English:
“Attention, visitors. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we have just been alerted of an impending storm. Due to expected heavy winds, we will be closing the park early. Please proceed immediately but calmly to the dock area and follow the instructions of park staff. Thank you.”
Around Sam and Remi there came the babble of disappointed voices and mothers and fathers calling to children. Faces turned upward, scanning the blue sky.
Sam said, “I don’t see any—”
“There,” Remi said.
To the southwest a narrow wall of purplish black clouds were rolling over the peaks of the mountains. As Sam and Remi watched, the front seemed to roll like a slow-motion wave down the slopes toward the fjord.
Visitors began moving toward the docks, some trotting, some simply strolling. Staff members in light blue shirts acted as shepherds, gently encouraging stragglers and helping parents round up children.
“I don’t know about you,” Sam said, “but I’m not keen on—”
“Me neither. We’re staying. Need to find a place to hide.”
“Come on.”
With Remi close on his heels, Sam headed for the shore, some fifty yards away, where a path led left, toward the forest, and right, toward the docks. They turned left and started trotting, passing a dozen or so visitors headed in the other direction. One of them, a man herding two toddler boys in green lederhosen, called out to them in German.
“You’re going the wrong way! The docks are this way.”
“Dropped my car keys,” Sam replied. “Be right back.”
A minute later they were inside the tree line. The path curved left, toward the outbuildings, but they kept going straight, ducking under the handrail and into the underbrush. After a hundred feet they stopped and crouched down beneath the boughs of a pine tree. Above, leaden clouds began rolling over the peninsula, blocking out the sun.
For the next twenty minutes they watched through the trees as visitors hurried down paths and across lawns toward the docks. A few minutes later they glimpsed one of the electric tour boats chugging up the fjord, passing
