The Eden Legacy

II

Knox arrived back in Eden hoping to find some message from the kidnappers inside the door; but there was nothing. He went through the lodge and all the cabins just in case, then headed down to the boathouse, but again without success. While he was there, however, he decided to take another look at that ceramic, make sure his imagination wasn’t running away with him. And there was something else he wanted to check out too.

The Kirkpatricks were self-evidently an intellectually curious lot. If a subject was of interest to them, they’d acquire books and articles about it. That was no doubt why Adam had the charts on board the Yvette, so that he could study them while out on the water. And it was why they kept those books on the treasure fleet and underwater archaeology in the basement. Knox had been following in the Kirkpatricks’ footsteps so far. Everything he’d discovered about the Chinese wreck, they’d got to first. So maybe they’d figured out other things that he still hadn’t. If so, it was a good bet that they’d have bought reading material on those subjects, and that they’d have stored it in the basement. The shelves, in brief, might be his shortcut to their state of knowledge.

He turned on the generator, slid open the panel, unlocked the door and went down, walked along the shelves. There were textbooks and articles on Zheng He and his treasure fleets, on the Ming Dynasty and Chinese shipbuilding techniques. There were archaeological works on the Chimu, the Incas, the Aztecs and other New World civilisations. There were books on the Renaissance, on the history of mapmaking. Several volumes were ageing badly, missing their spines. He pulled one down, opened it up. It was a biography of Ferdinand Magellan, the man widely credited as being the first to circumnavigate the world. A slight fiction, of course, because he hadn’t completed the circumnavigation himself. He’d died in the Philippines, leading an attack on islanders who’d had the temerity to refuse conversion to Christianity. But eighteen of his men had made it all the way. Eighteen out of two hundred and thirty-seven, sailing the one ship that had survived from the original fleet of five.

Since finding the Fra Mauro map, Knox had had a scheme in his mind, of a treasure ship sailing west to South America from the Cape and then returning. Even his discovery of the Chimu ceramic hadn’t changed that scheme; he’d just thought they’d found the Magellan Straits first. But what if they hadn’t turned back east? What if they’d kept going west? Why else sail so far north up South America’s western coast if they’d been planning to turn around again and head back across the Atlantic? The Chinese had known the world was round. They’d known circumnavigation was possible. And they’d been on a voyage of discovery. What greater discovery than circumnavigation, than achieving Chinese mastery of the globe?

Sailors, when faced with crossing large bodies of water, often sailed to the latitude of their destination port, then aimed directly east or west towards it. Running the latitude like this not only made navigation easier, it also minimised time spent on the open seas, and therefore offered the crew their best chance of reaching their destination before their supplies ran out. The Straits of Magellan were a good thousand miles south of the Cape of Good Hope, and far, far further south of Beijing. It would have made perfect sense, therefore, for them to head north along the Chilean coast to Peru, trading with any natives they found and thus restocking their holds with provisions for the long voyage ahead. By Knox’s rough reckoning, sailing east from Peru would have brought them up against the coast of Australia. Logically, they’d have wanted to head north, but Chinese ships had forever been at the mercy of the winds, so perhaps they’d been driven south, then on to South Africa before turning round again and heading for home, finding these reefs instead, being denied the immortality of their achievement by A noise behind him, the scuff of shoe on stone. He whirled around to see a man at the foot of the steps, his legs bare and damp, as though he’d just waded through water, his handgun held out ahead of him.

The man in the black shirt.

Boris.