MALONE SAT ON THE FLOOR IN A TIGHT EMPTY ROOM THAT opened off the upper gallery. He and Christl had taken refuge inside after avoiding the tour group. He'd watched through a one-inch space beneath the door as lights inside the chapel were dimmed and doors banged shut for the night. That had been over two hours ago and there'd been no sounds since, except the hushed murmur of the Christmas market leaking in through the room's solitary window and a faint whistle of the wind that ravaged the exterior walls.
"It's strange in here," Christl whispered. "So quiet."
"We need time to study this place without interruptions." He was also hoping that their disappearance would confuse Hatchet Face.
"How long do we wait?" she asked.
"Things need to settle down outside. You never know, there still could be visitors inside before the night is finished." He decided to take advantage of their solitude. "I need to know some things."
In the greenish light from the exterior floodlights he saw her face brighten. "I was wondering when you'd ask."
"The Holy Ones. What makes you think they're real?"
She seemed surprised by his inquiry, as if she'd expected something else. More personal. But she kept her composure and said, "Have you ever heard of the Piri Reis map?"
He had. It was supposedly created by a Turkish pirate and dated to 1513.
"It was found in 1929," she said. "Only a fragment of the original, but it shows South America and West Africa in correct longitudes. Sixteenth-century navigators had no way to confirm longitude-that concept wasn't perfected until the eighteenth century. Gerardus Mercator was one year old when the Piri Reis map was drawn, so it predated his method of projecting the earth on a flat surface, marking everything with latitude and longitude. But the map does just that. It also details the northern coast of Antarctica. That continent wasn't even discovered until 1818. It wasn't until 1949 that the first sonar soundings were made under the ice. Since then, more sophisticated ground radar has done the same thing. There's a near-perfect match between the Piri Reis map and the actual coastline of Antarctica, beneath the ice.
"There's also a notation on the map that indicates the drafter used information from the time of Alexander the Great as source material. Alexander lived in the early part of the fourth century before Christ. By then Antarctica was covered in miles of ice. So those source materials showing the original shoreline would have to be dated somewhere around ten-thousand-plus years before Christ, when there was much less ice, to around fifty thousand years BCE. Also, remember, a map is useless without notations indicating what you're looking at. Imagine a map of Europe with no writing. Wouldn't tell you much. It's generally accepted that writing itself dates from the Sumerians, around thirty-five hundred years before Christ. That Reis used source maps, which would have to be much older than thirty-five hundred years, means the art of writing is older than we thought."
"Lots of leaps in logic in that argument."
"Are you always so skeptical?"
"I've found it's healthy when my ass is on the line."
"As part of my master's thesis I studied medieval maps and learned of an interesting dichotomy. Land maps of the time were crude-Italy joined to Spain, England misshapen, mountains out of place, rivers inaccurately drawn. But nautical maps were a different story. They were called portolans-it means 'port to port.' And they were incredibly accurate."
"And you think that the drafters of those had help."
"I studied many portolans. The Dulcert Galway of 1339 shows Russia with great accuracy. Another Turkish map from 1559 shows the world from a northern projection, as if hovering over the North Pole. How was that possible? A map of Antarctica published in 1737 showed the continent divided into two islands, which we now know is true. A 1531 map I examined showed Antarctica without ice, with rivers, even mountains that we now know are buried beneath. None of that information was available when those maps were created. But they are remarkably accurate-within one half-degree of longitude in error. That's incredible considering the drafters supposedly did not even know the concept."
"But the Holy Ones knew about longitude?"
"To sail the world's oceans they would have to understand stellar navigation or longitude and latitude. In my research I noticed similarities among the portolans. Too many to be mere coincidence. So if an oceangoing society existed long ago, one that conducted worldwide surveys centuries before the great geological and meteorological catastrophes that swept the world around ten thousand years before Christ, it's logical that information was passed on, which survived and made its way into those maps."
He was still skeptical but, after their quick tour of the chapel and thinking about Einhard's will, he was beginning to reevaluate things.
He crawled to the door and peered beneath. Still quiet. He propped himself against the door.
"There's something else," she said.
He was listening.
"The prime meridian. Virtually every country that eventually sailed the seas developed one. There had to be a longitudinal starting point. Finally, in 1884, the major nations of the world met in Washington, DC, and chose a line through Greenwich as zero degree longitude. A world constant, and we've used it ever since. But the portolans tell a different story. Amazingly, they all seemed to use a point thirty-one degrees, eight minutes west as their zero line."
He did not comprehend the significance of those coordinates, other than they were east of Greenwich, somewhere beyond Greece.
"That line runs straight through the Great Pyramid at Giza," she said. "At that same 1884 conference in Washington, an argument was made to run the zero line through that point, but was rejected."
He didn't see the point.
"The portolans I found all utilized the concept of longitude. Don't get me wrong, those ancient maps did not contain latitude and longitude lines like we know today. They used a simpler method, choosing a center point, then drawing a circle around it and dividing the circle. They would keep doing that outward, generating a crude form of measurement. Each of those portolans I mentioned used the same center. A point in Egypt, near what's now Cairo, where the Giza pyramid stands."
A pile of coincidences, he had to admit.
"That longitude line through Giza runs south into Antarctica exactly where the Nazis explored in 1938, their Neuschwabenland." She paused. "Grandfather and Father both were aware of this. I was first introduced to these concepts from reading their notes."
"I thought your grandfather was senile."
"He left some historical notes. Not a lot. Father, too. I only wish they both would have spoken of this pursuit more."
"This is nuts," he said.
"How many scientific realities today started out the same way? It's not nuts. It's real. There's something out there, waiting to be found."
Which his father may have died searching for.
He glanced at his watch. "We can probably head downstairs. I need to check a few things."
He came to one knee and pushed himself off the floor. But she stopped him, her hand on his trouser leg. He'd listened to her explanations and concluded that she was not a crackpot.
"I appreciate what you're doing," she said, keeping her voice hushed.
"I haven't done anything."
"You're here."
"As you made clear, what happened to my father is wrapped up in this."
She leaned close and kissed him, lingering long enough for him to know that she was enjoying it.
"Do you always kiss on the first date?" he asked her.
"Only men I like."