“Clearly Mr. Blaylock was absorbed with the Aztecs, yes?”

“‘Absorbed’ isn’t the word we’ve been using,” Remi said.

Sam said, “The second part of the line-‘words of Father Algarismo’-has us stumped.”

“I am happy to say I have your answer. At last, my love of obscure mathematical history has come in handy. There is no Father Algarismo, you see. It’s another one of Mr. Blaylock’s tricks. Algarismo is the Portuguese derivation of the word ‘algorithm.’ Quite simply, it means digit.”Remi said, “Then, translated, the last line reads, ‘Words of the Aztecs combined with numbers.’ Sam, you’re the cryptography guy. Is any of this ringing any bells?”

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.”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.”

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.

“After you got back from Madagascar and proposed the east-to-west Aztec migration theory, I started doing a little digging. In recent years a number of archaeologists and anthropologists have been finding more and more evidence that the Malagasy people of Madagascar arrived there in the first or second century, having sailed there from Indonesia-specifically, the island of Sulawesi. I came across a map of the route the Malagasy were believed to have taken.”Selma picked up the remote and powered up the TV across the room.

The route, depicted as a red line on a map of the Indian Ocean, from the Indonesian Archipelago to the east coast of Africa, was nearly identical to the one on the workroom’s wall.

“Incredible” was all Sam could say. “So Blaylock beat present-day experts to this theory by a hundred twenty or so years,” Remi said. “That’s impressive, but I don’t-”

“There’s more,” Selma said. Pete and Wendy got up on step stools, removed the pushpins, peeled back the tape, and pulled away the map. Beneath it was a second map, this one spanning from the east coast of Africa to South America. Like the first map, this one was covered in red pushpins connected by white string.“These are all Blaylock’s?” Sam asked.

“Yes.”

The pushpins began near the coastal city of Lumbo in Mozambique and proceeded across the waist of Africa to the west coast of Angola before island-hopping first up the coastline, then west across the Atlantic to the easternmost bulge of Brazil, where they turned north and followed the coast of South America past Trinidad and Tobago and into the Caribbean Sea.Remi asked, “Are we to believe Blaylock visited all these places?”

Sam replied, “He captured the Shenandoah in 1872, then went treasure hunting for his jeweled bird. Who knows how long he was at sea? It could have been decades, for all we know.”“This looks familiar,” Remi said. “Pete, Wendy, put the first map up beside this one, please.”

They did as she asked.

Remi stared at this configuration for almost a full minute before smiling faintly. “Do you see it?” she asked.

“See what?” asked Sam.

In answer, Remi walked to one of the workstations. “Wendy’s been teaching me a little Photoshop. Let’s see how good a learner I am. Everybody go sit down. This might take me a few minutes.”With her upper body blocking the computer monitor, no one could see what she was doing. At the worktable, Sam leaned sideways on his stool, trying to get a peek.

“Forget it, Fargo,” Remi muttered. “Sorry.”

Twenty minutes later, Remi turned in her seat and addressed the group. “Okay. We all remember the Orizaga Codex?”

Everyone nodded.

“Remember the symbol spanning the upper half?”

More nods.

“Turn on the TV, Selma.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Sam. “We were staring at it the whole time. It wouldn’t win any cartography awards, but all the big pieces are there. Remind me: When did the Malagasy arrive in Madagascar?”“First or second century.”

“And when did the Aztecs first emerge in Mexico?”

“Sixth century.”

“The Malagasy blaze the first trail from Sulawesi, then a few centuries later, a bigger armada-a hundred ships if the Orizaga Codex is accurate-arrives in Madagascar, but they don’t stop there. They keep heading west until they find Mexico.”