The Navigator

Chapter 49

“SHOULDN’T THEY BE UP BY NOW?” Saxon said, sounding a note of concern.

“Don’t worry. They’re both experienced divers,” Trout said.

He and Saxon sat in the rubber raft near the marker buoy. Trout was more worried than he let on. He had glanced at his wristwatch a few minutes before Saxon spoke. Gamay and Zavala were pushing their air supply to the limit, especially if they needed decompression stops. Dire scenarios materialized in his imagination. He could picture the divers lost or their tanks entangled in the unknown passages below the hotel.

Trout had been staring at a blue heron skimming over the lake when he saw a disturbance on the surface.

He pointed at the mounding bubbles. “They’re up!”

He grabbed his paddle and told Saxon to do the same. They dug in and were only a few yards from the first head to break the surface. Gamay. Zavala surfaced seconds later.

Gamay inflated her buoyancy regulator and floated on her back. She pulled the regulator mouthpiece from between her teeth and took gulps of fresh air. Trout tossed a rope to his wife.

“Hey, beautiful, how about a ride?” he said.

“That’s the best offer I’ve heard all day,” Gamay said in a weary voice.

Zavala hitched onto the line behind Gamay. Trout and Saxon towed the two tired divers into shallow water. The divers removed their tanks and fins and slogged onto shore. They dropped their weight belts, climbed to the edge of the grassy banking, and sat down to rest.

Saxon hauled the raft onto shore. Trout opened a cooler and passed around cold bottles of water. He was unable to contain his curiosity. “Don’t keep us in suspense. Did you find King Solomon’s mine?”

A faint smile came to Zavala’s lips. “He’s your husband,” he said to Gamay. “Maybe you should break the bad news.”

Gamay sighed. “Someone beat us to it.”

“Gold prospectors?” Trout said.

“Not exactly,” Zavala said. He got to his feet and retrieved the carrying bag from the beached raft. He pulled out the pewter box, which he handed to Trout. “We found this in the mine.”

Paul’s eyes blinked rapidly as he stared with speechless disbelief at the name embossed on the lid. He handed the box to Saxon.

Saxon was less restrained. “Thomas Jefferson!” he burst out. “How can that be?”

Gamay slipped a small knife out of a leg sheath and gave it to Saxon. “Why don’t you do us the honors?”

Despite his excitement, Saxon exercised extreme care as he picked away at the rusted fastener. The lid had been sealed with wax, but it opened easily. He gazed into the box for a few seconds, and then lifted out two soft squares of vellum, wrapped in stiff waxed paper and marked with lines and Xs and tightly written script. He put the squares together where their ragged edges matched.

“It’s the rest of the Phoenician map,” he whispered. “It shows the river and bay.”

Gamay took the vellum from Saxon’s trembling hands and studied the markings without comment before passing them to her husband.

“The plot thickens,” she said.

“This plot is as thick as clam chowder,” Trout said with a shake of his head. “Where exactly did you find this stuff?”

Gamay described their dive into the cave and down the shaft. Zavala picked up the narrative, laying out their exploration of the cave tunnels and the chamber where the box rested on a stone platform.

Saxon had recovered from his shock and put his mind to work again.

“Fascinating,” Saxon said. “Any indication of gold?”

“Nothing that we could see,” Gamay said.

Saxon’s eyes narrowed. “Either there was gold and you didn’t see it or the mine had been played out and abandoned.”

“In either case, how does what they found fit in with the stories of King Solomon’s fabled gold mine?” Trout said. “Is this Ophir or not?”

“Yes and no,” Saxon said. He chuckled at Trout’s puzzled expression. “Some people believe Ophir was not a specific location, but the name given to several different sources of the king’s gold. This may have been one of his mines.”

Gamay stared out at the placid surface of the lake. “What better place to hide something than an abandoned mine with nothing of value in it?”

“Which brings us back to the Phoenician expedition,” Saxon said. “Its purpose was to hide a sacred relic.”

“Which raises the question of what happened to that relic,” Trout said.

Gamay picked up the metal box. “Maybe we should ask Mr. Jefferson.”

Saxon had been holding the vellum squares. He held them up for a better look at the markings and said, “This is interesting. I believe the map is a palimpsest.”

“A palim what?” Trout said.

“It’s a term for vellum that has been used more than once,” Saxon said. “Byzantine monks perfected the practice of washing and scraping writing from vellum so it could be used again, but the process could be much older. See there, when you hold it to the light, faint writing is visible.”

He passed the vellum around for the others to examine.

“Too bad we can’t retrieve the original message,” Trout said.

“Maybe we can,” Saxon said. “The curators at the WaltersArt Museum in Baltimore recently deciphered a thousand-year-old message that had been hidden in a palimpsest. They may be able to do something with this. I wish Austin were here to share these wonderful discoveries. When will he be back from his errand?”

Zavala had been thinking about Austin even in the subterranean depths of the lake. Austin was a survivor, but by allowing himself to be kidnapped by the ruthless Baltazar, he was jumping into the abyss. As he got to his feet and prepared to collect his dive gear, he said, “Soon. Damn soon, I hope.”