legs.”
Proving it, he flew through the back rooms and halls.
Behind them, shouts changed in timbre, indicating the raiding party had entered the castle.
Fee’az led them to crude stairs leading down. “This way.”
They reached a narrow, low tunnel, barely taller than a crawlway. It shot off to the south. Fee’az scurried ahead.
After fifty steps, it ended at an old rusted iron grate. The bars had long been sawed away, leaving only stumps. They pushed through and out into the castle’s silted-up moat. Crumbled stone walls marked the boundary.
Gray glanced behind him. The crawlway must have been the castle’s old sewer line.
Waving them to stay low, Fee’az led them along the moat, toward the eastern bay. Shouts still echoed from the castle. The smugglers had not yet realized the mice had fled.
Reaching the water, Gray saw the plane still waited, unmolested.
Fee’az explained, “Dirty smugglers. Never steal plane. They pinch little.” He demonstrated by holding his fingers apart, almost touching, then shrugged. “Sometime kill. Throw bodies to sharks. But never take something so big. Government will send bigger planes, bigger guns.”
So not worth the risk.
Still, erring on the side of caution, they used oars to silently paddle the boy’s boat out to the waiting seaplane. Fee’az waved them on board.
“Come again! Come again!” he said, formally shaking each hand.
Gray felt obligated to give him some bonus for pulling their asses out of the fire. He reached to his pack, fished inside, and handed him the princess’s golden headpiece.
The boy’s eyes widened, holding the treasure with both hands — then pushed it back toward Gray. “I can no take.”
Gray folded his fingers over it. “It will cost you only a promise.”
Fee’az glanced up to him.
“There are two bodies, two skeletons, in the castle. Under the room of crosses.” He pointed to the castle, then out to the distant hills. “Take them away, dig a deep hole, and bury them. Together.”
He smiled, unsure if Gray was joking.
“Will you promise?”
He nodded his head. “I will get my brothers and uncles to help.”
Gray pushed the golden headpiece toward him. “It is yours.”
“Thank you, sir.” He shook Gray’s hand and said with all the solemnity of a blessing, “Come again.”
Gray climbed into the plane.
Minutes later they were airborne, shooting up out of the bay and headed back toward the international airport.
Gray returned to the rear seat, joining Vigor.
“You gave the boy the princess’s headpiece?” the monsignor said, staring down at the boy’s retreating skiff.
“To bury Marco and Kokejin.”
Vigor turned to face him. “But such a discovery. History—”
“Marco has done enough for history. It was his last wish to be buried in peace with the woman he loved. I think we owe him that much. And besides, we don’t need the headpiece.”
Vigor stared at Gray, one eye narrowed, plainly sizing him up, judging his generosity. “But you thought the headpiece might hold a clue. That’s why you took it.” The monsignor’s eyes widened and his voice raised. “Dear Lord, Gray, you actually solved the angelic code.”
Gray pulled his notebook out. “Not quite. Almost.”
“How?”
Seichan overheard their discussion and came back to join them, standing between the seats. Kowalski twisted around, peering over the seat back.
Gray answered the monsignor. “I solved it by throwing out all our old suppositions. We kept looking for a letter-substitution code.”
“Like the inscription in the Vatican spelling out HAGIA.”
“I think that was done to purposefully mislead. The big mystery on the obelisk is
“Show us,” Seichan said.
“In a moment.” Gray checked his watch. Eight minutes left. “I still have part of the puzzle to figure out. The three keys. Keys organized in a certain order.”
He opened his notebook and tapped the three angelic symbols.
Gray continued, “With the obelisk’s code always in plain sight, the keys only served one purpose. To reveal the correct way to read the code. The obelisk has four sides. But on which side do you start? In which direction do you read it?”
Gray flipped his notebook open and found the original page of script supplied by Seichan. “For the gold- inscribed symbols to be so important, they must be written somewhere on the obelisk. And so they are.”
Gray circled them.
“This sequence only appears once. It’s unique. Notice how it wraps from one of the obelisk’s surfaces to the next. It’s delineating where to begin reading and in which direction.”
He added an arrow.
“So you must reorder the sequence to match the keys.” He flipped the notebook pages, searching through the eight variations that he and Vigor had mapped out earlier. He found the right one and circled the key symbols. “This is the proper way the map must be laid out to be read correctly.”
Seichan leaned closer. “What map are you talking about?”
“This is what I noticed back at the chapel,” he said. “Watch.”
He took a pencil and began poking holes through the page and marking the next blank page.
“What are you doing?” Vigor asked.
Gray explained, “Notice how some of the diacritical marks — those small circles in the angelic script — are darkened and others are not. We know from the second key how that symbol’s black diacritical mark ended up being a marker for the Portuguese castle. So the blackened circles on the obelisk’s code must be markers, too. But markers to what? If you poke out each dark circle onto a fresh page, stripping all else away, you get this.”
“Well, that sure helped,” Kowalski said sarcastically.
Gray rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin, concentrating. “Something’s here. I can sense it.”
“Maybe you’re supposed to connect the dots,” Kowalski said with no less sarcasm. “Maybe it’ll form a big flashing arrow spelling out
Seichan frowned. “And maybe it’s time for you to shut the hell up.”
Gray did not need their bickering. Not now. Kowalski was fine as a getaway driver, good in a firefight, but Gray needed sage advice, not kindergarten suggestions, like connect the dots.
Then he saw it.
“Oh my God!” Gray sat up, fumbled his pencil, and grasped it more firmly. “Kowalski is right!”
“I am?”
“He is…?” Seichan responded.
Gray turned to Vigor, clutching his forearm. “The first clue! In the Tower of Winds.”
Vigor frowned — then his eyes widened. “Which holds the Vatican’s astronomical observatory…where Galileo proved the earth moved around the sun!” Vigor tapped the sheet. “These are stars!”
Gray took his pencil. He had been staring hard at the sheet and recognized a familiar pattern. “This is a
