Circle of Bones - Kling Christine - Страница 48
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Where twenty years ago, theirs had been the only sailboat in the anchorage, the big trawler was now anchored among dozens of yachts, and the only boat boys she saw were older men in wooden fishing boats that sported big Yamaha or Honda outboards on their transoms. Even Dominica changed.
Out of habit, Riley looked around the wheelhouse for the GPS to check their position. Above the helm, a big computer screen displayed a color chart of the anchorage. In bold black letters along the bottom of the screen, she read their position in latitude and longitude: 15?34’45.07N: 61?27’39.12W.
She was still staring at the numbers a couple of minutes later when Cole walked in.
“Good morning, Miss Maggie Magee,” he said.
“Hey,” she said without taking her eyes off the instruments.
“How are you feeling this morning?”
She heard his question but her mind was elsewhere. She wondered if it was possible. Though reading those pages in Thatcher’s journal had given her a sense of one facet of the man, she still wasn’t sure about these puzzles. He had been meticulous about building his arguments about the cabal. He cited names, dates, places. Were these numbers just a coincidence or was this going to tell them where to look on the Indian River?
“It’s amazing the way you do that,” Cole said.
When she turned to look at him, his face was no more than six inches from hers. She took a step back, her heart hammering, and she felt her face flush with heat. The tufts of brown hair that poked out from under his baseball cap were damp and she could smell the fresh scent of his shampoo. “What? What are you talking about?”
“The way you focus like that. You shut out everybody and everything.”
“But –” she pointed at the GPS screen, then cleared her throat. “Look at our latitude.”
“Okay. I see it. That’s supposed to mean something?”
“You didn’t spend all night looking for patterns or repetitions in numbers or text like I did. The first number is fifteen. Make you think of any of the coins?”
“You’re kidding, right? It is a 1915 nickel, but he sent that to me years ago.”
“But I’m sure he remembered. The man who wrote the journal pages I read last night didn’t forget any details. What about the next number - the minutes?”
“Thirty-four? I don’t see what that has to do —” he stopped and Riley saw the creases around his eyes deepen. He relaxed the squint and smiled. “Okay. It’s 322 again, isn’t it? This time we add the digits differently. Keep the three, then two plus two equals four.”
“Good. You’re starting to get the hang of this.”
“I was a little rusty. It’s been a few years since the old man sent me puzzles like this. But I think you’re definitely on to something here.”
“Remember in the old days of sailing ships, how sailors were not able to calculate their longitude? They used to just sail a latitude heading straight east or west until they hit land. Maybe this time, we sail the latitude until we hit the river.”
“We need the big-scale chart of the bay,” Cole said. At the rear of the wheelhouse was a small chart table. He pulled out a wide drawer beneath the table and began thumbing through a thick stack of charts. When he found what he wanted, he pulled it out, grabbed some navigation tools, and headed into the galley.
Rather than showing the whole island, this chart showed only the big crescent-shaped bay and several miles of coastline on either side. Cole placed his fingers at the side of the chart about two inches apart, like the legs of a little man. “This,” he said, “is one minute of latitude which is equivalent to one nautical mile.” He dragged his fingers from west to east across the chart and the spread included the whole of the Indian River and half the town of Portsmouth. “It’s not precise enough.”
“Right. We got the first number from the nickel and that gives us the degrees. The French Angel gives us the second number which is the minutes. But latitude is measured in degrees — each of which is divided into sixty minutes, and then the minutes are divided into sixty seconds. If we can figure out what number to use for the seconds, we’ll have it down to within one sixtieth of a mile.”
“Do you think we use the third coin?” Cole asked.
Riley lifted the big silver half-dollar out of the box. “The year is 1964,” she said. “That doesn’t work for minutes. Sixty four is too high a number.”
“Should we add six plus four?”
“That might work,” she said. Riley picked up the stainless steel dividers and spread the two legs of the instrument like the legs of a geometric compass. She then positioned the instrument on the latitude markings at the edge of the chart. She measured and found the mark for 15?34’10.00N. Cole set the parallel ruler on the mark and they saw that it ran south of the river and did not intersect.
“That won’t work, either,” Cole said.
“What else is in that box?”
Cole dragged the box closer to him. “My father used to send me letters with some kind of surprise inside. It was sort of like getting the prizes in the cereal boxes. It wasn’t valuable stuff. Just cool. Like this.” He lifted out a St. Christopher’s medal. “Maybe this is telling us to go to the island, St. Kitts? The real name of that island is St. Christopher.”
“It’s possible.”
“The problem with that theory, though, is that the old man never went to St. Kitts. And he sent me that medal when I was twelve — before he even started his research about the Surcouf. See the phrase on the medal — Saint Christopher Protect Us? That was the key to a simple alphabet cipher. I wrote the letters of the alphabet above those letters and then deciphered the text to read his letter. He started with simple ones like that and as the years went by, they grew more challenging.”
“What about the coins? How did he use them?”
“Well, the first one was the Kennedy fifty-cent piece. For that one, I had to use a bifid cipher. You know, that’s where you create a five by five matrix of numbers. In that case I used the date, 1964 and for the fifth number, I had to play around with the fact that it was a fifty-cent piece. I eventually tried 19645 and that worked. You write those five numbers down and across and it produces twenty-five squares. Then you fill in the alphabet, and each letter winds up with a pair of coordinates.”
“Okay. And what about the Indian Head nickel?”
“That one? Let’s see. That one was more complex, and he used it twice. The first time, it was a Gronsfeld cipher using the word Indian and a key series of numbers.”
“Wait a minute,” Riley said. “You say he used the Indian coin twice?”
Cole opened his mouth to answer her, but he froze, and then reached for the dividers.
Riley beat him to it. She scooped up the instrument and placed one point on the latitude line that crossed the chart, then she squeezed the legs until the other leg was right on the mark for 15?34’15.00N. She slid the instrument across the chart and placed one leg on the black latitude line that ran beneath the Indian River. With that leg anchored, she swung the other in an arc as though drawing a circle. When her arc touched the line on the chart that indicated the river, she stabbed the end of the dividers into the chart. “There,” she said. “I don’t know what it is we’re looking for, but I’m willing to bet we’ll find it right there.”
At that moment, she heard Theo’s feet padding down the side deck. He poked his head in the door. “Dinghy’s in the water, Captain. All’s ashore that’s goin’ ashore. My cousin Zeke’s waiting with his van. A quick trip through customs and immigration, and we’re off. ”
“Oh shit,” Riley said. She’d known this moment was coming and she’d been dreading it.
“Did I say something wrong?” Theo asked.
Riley wiggled her hand back and forth in the air. “It’s just that I’ve got a teensy, little problem with my passport.”
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