Blood of the Reich

360/60/60=1”

“That’s perfectly clear,” Jake joked.

“No, it obviously means something. Is it a date? A year has 365 days, not 360.”

“The ancient Babylonians and Egyptians started with that as the length of the year, before astronomy was refined. And that’s why we use it for bearings today. I think three hundred sixty means degrees, like compass degrees. This is another bearing, perhaps. Sixty… plus sixty. That’s one hundred twenty, about opposite where the needle is fixed. And one is… I don’t know.”

“Why have another bearing?”

“To cross the first?”

“But it wouldn’t cross. It just leads in the opposite direction. That doesn’t help.”

“Let me think.” He pursed his lips, studying the relics, in a way she thought was irresistibly cute. Yes, she’d fallen. “Have you ever used a nautical chart?”

“No,” she said, silently condemning her own lack of caution in affairs of the heart, but then sometimes magic just happened, didn’t it? And…

“The nautical mile is based on the length of one-sixtieth of a degree, or one minute of one degree of latitude on the earth’s surface. That’s a distance just a little longer than our land mile.”

“But his invisible writing has two sixties.”

“Which would suggest a nautical second, which my boating days taught me is about a hundred feet. A hundred and one, I think.”

“So one inch on his map equals a hundred feet.”

“Is that all? That means to his fingerprint from the bullet hole is only a few hundred yards.”

She looked at the cloth again. “Wait. Is this another number?”

They peered. Less distinct than the first were more numerals: