Lost Empire

SAM’S EYES SCANNED THE GAUGES, CHECKING AIRSPEED, ALTITUDE, oil pressure, fuel . . . As was everything else aboard the airplane, the few dashboard labels that hadn’t worn off completely were in Serbian.

The Ikarus Kurir seaplane, painted an ugly shade of gray-blue, was sixty years old, a castoff from the Yugoslavian air force. The windows leaked, the engine knocked, the wheeled pontoons were badly dented, and the controls were so soft there was a two-second delay between the time he pushed the pedals and the plane responded.He’d never been happier with a plane in his life.

A thousand miles east of Jakarta, the Ikarus had been the only seaplane available for rent, purchase, or theft-and, provided he didn’t crash in the next hour, it would take him to Remi. Whether they stayed alive over the next few hours or days would depend largely on the credibility of the Hail Mary pass he and Selma had assembled.

AS SOON AS Rivera’s speedboat had disappeared from view, Sam had retrieved the maleo statuette, grabbed his pack, and sorted through their belongings, taking only the essentials. Blaylock’s letters went into a Ziploc baggie. The swim back to the pinisi took just under seven minutes; the boat ride to the nearest civilization on the eastern coast of Lampung Bay, an excruciating ninety minutes. Once ashore and off the beach, he jogged a mile down a dirt road to a collection of Quonset huts on the outskirts of an industrial farm. He talked his way into the plant office and to a phone and called Selma, who listened, then said, “It’s not enough time.”

“I know that. It’s all we have.”“Should we call Rube?”

“No. There’s nothing he can do in time. Have Pete and Wendy get me back to Jakarta.”

“On it.”

“Now, tell me where things stand. What do we know?”

“Virtually nothing.”

FIVE HOURS AFTER he left Pulau Legundi, Sam touched down in Jakarta. He checked into the closest hotel with a Wi-Fi co

“I could create evidence. Wendy could Photoshop something-”

“As a last resort.” Sam checked his watch. “We’re going to take six hours and work every angle we have. If we don’t get anywhere, we’ll go with your plan. Let’s run through it: Orizaga wandered off, presumably looking for Chicomoztoc. Did he stay on Sumatra?”“We don’t know.”

“Both he and Blaylock were focused on the maleo. Orizaga said he’d know Chicomoztoc when he found a ‘hatchery of great birds.’ He had to have meant the maleo, agreed?”

“It seems likely.”

“Where are they found?”

“They’re on the endangered species list. They’re limited to Sulawesi and Buton islands.”

“How about five hundred years ago?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have Pete and Wendy put together a list of maleo experts.” “We don’t even know if there is such a thing.”

“There are experts for everything. Ask about hatcheries, concentrations, migration . . . Okay, back to Sulawesi: It’s where the Malagasy lived prior to migrating to Madagascar, and we found Blaylock’s outrigger on Madagascar. That’s two votes for Sulawesi. What do we know about Sulawesi prior to the sixth century?”

Sam heard the rustling of paper. Selma said, “Human settlements as far back as thirty thousand years B.C. Believed to have been part of a land bridge between Australia and New Guinea-”“More recent,” Sam said.

“As deep as I’ve been able to dig in the past few days, I’ve found very little until the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese arrived.”

“What about the language or the art? Any similarities to either the Aztecs or Blaylock’s Proto-Aztecs?”

“Wendy’s working on a search, but we’re up against the same problem: Except for a few cities, Sulawesi is thousands of square miles of rain forest, dead volcanoes, and not much else. There are places on that island that have never been explored. There’s very little Internet and even fewer online art collections. If we had a few weeks-”“We don’t. Just do your best. If you find something that looks or sounds even remotely Aztec, flag it.”

“Sam, you have to take a breath.”

“When I’ve got Remi back. Let’s go back to the outrigger. You have the lab report. Remind me: What do we know about the materials used?”

“The wood used was durian. We know where it exists today. I’m working on where it might have grown before the sixth century. Same with the rest of it-the rubber tree, the pandan leaf, the gebang palm . . .”“Let me guess: There aren’t many experts on those either.”

“Not that I’ve been able to find.”

“How about Blaylock’s letters?” “We’ve decoded them all. Unless there’s a code behind the code, there’s nothing else there. That applies to his journal, too. How about the Constance letters you found on the Shenandoah?”

“They’re not coded. The first two letters discuss the voyage to the Sunda Strait. The last was probably written shortly before he died. You can read it when we get home. He tells Constance he wished he’d come home to marry her.”“So sad. How about the maleo statuette you found?”

“It could be emerald or jade or any number of other gems I’m not familiar with. I’ll do a search for minerals endemic to Sulawesi, but I don’t think it’ll solve our problem. I’m going to need access to our server so I can look at everything from here.”“Sure, give me ten minutes.”

“Good, thanks. What are we missing, Selma?”

“I don’t know, Sam.”

“We’re missing something.”

THREE HOURS PASSED. Sam and Selma talked every twenty minutes, discussing progress, dissecting what they knew, and rehashing what they suspected.

At hour four, Selma called again. “We’ve made a little progress. We found a book by a Norwegian botanist that discusses both the pandan leaf and gebang palm. I talked to him on the phone. He thinks that around the fourth and fifth century, both of them were heavily concentrated in the northern third of Sulawesi.”“But not restricted to there.”

“No.”

“I just realized what we’re forgetting.”

“What?”

“The codex. Remember the bush the maleo is sitting on?”

“Yes. Damn. How did I forget that?” “Doesn’t matter. Have Wendy do her thing: Enlarge the image, clean it up, and show it to the Norwegian.”

Sam hung up and returned to his laptop. As he had been on and off for the last three hours, he was scrolling through the gallery of images and scans they’d collected. There were dozens of Constance letters, hundreds of journal pages, the Orizaga Codex, the Fibonacci spirals . . . They all began to blur together.He switched to Google Earth and continued his scan of Sulawesi, looking for anything that might ring the faintest of bells in his head. Minutes turned into an hour.

He zoomed in on a secluded bay on Sulawesi’s northeastern coast. As it seemed with every spot around Sulawesi, islets and atolls were scattered like confetti.

Sam stopped suddenly and tracked his finger backward, moving the map. He zoomed in again, paused, then zoomed some more. He squinted his eyes. Then smiled. “A hollowed-out flower,” he muttered.

HE WAS REACHING for the phone when it rang. It was Selma: “You were right, Sam, there are experts for everything. I heard back from a zoologist in Makassar. She claims up until the early seventeen hundreds, maleos were more migratory. Every year they would congregate in the northeast part of the island for a few months.”On his laptop, Sam was switching between Google Earth and the photo gallery. “Go on.”

“Also, I e-mailed a photo of the codex bush to a curator at the Cibodas Botanical Gardens in Jakarta. He thinks it could be a dwarf durian tree. I pressed him a little, and he thought it was probable the durian had migrated from east to west, which would have put it in Sulawesi about sixteen hundred years ago.”“Fantastic,” Sam said absently. “Can you get to Google Earth?”