Then gunfire.
It sounded like a brief firefight—a one-sided firefight.
After a moment, through the smoke, a figure appeared.
Seichan, covered in blood and with her clothes still smoldering, crossed into view. She must have dived out a back window as the grenade inside the cabin blew. She pointed toward the parking lot. She wasn’t indicating that it was time to go. A single figure remained, standing next to a Humvee.
Mitchell Waldorf.
The traitor turned toward the vehicle, but Monk was one step ahead of him. From his perch, he took out the truck’s tires and drove Waldorf back from the vehicle. If they could capture him alive—a Guild operative buried deep in the government—he could prove to be invaluable, a resource capable of exposing much about the workings of the organization.
Waldorf must have realized the same thing.
He lifted a pistol to his chin.
Gray swore, goosed the backhoe for more speed. Seichan ran toward him. Waldorf smiled and shouted at them cryptically: “This isn’t over!”
The single pistol shot rang brightly.
The top of the man’s head erupted in a blast of skull and brain matter. The body slumped to the pavement.
Certainly looks over to me.
Still, the sight of the man’s last smile stayed with Gray. A cold fear settled in his gut. What did the bastard mean?
7:19 A.M.
Ten minutes later, Gray and the others were speeding down the Natchez Trace Parkway in the second Humvee they’d stolen that day. They’d taken one of the assault team’s vehicles, figuring they’d be less likely to be bothered that way. Plus, they needed the extra room.
Monk lay sprawled across the backseat, stripped to the waist, his belly bandaged in a pressure wrap from an emergency medical kit Gray had found in the back of the Army vehicle. Apparently the assault team had been expecting some injuries. He’d also found a morphine stick and jabbed Monk in the thigh with it.
His friend’s eyes already had a happy glaze around their edges.
Seichan, with her cuts and lacerations taped, manned the wheel, leaving Gray to examine the buffalo hide. He’d fetched it from the grave before leaving. The leather was brittle, but he was able to unfold it, revealing an image of a riotous battle dyed into the skin, showing Indians in the midst of waging a great war. Thousands of arrows flew, each delicately but indelibly tattooed into the skin. Elsewhere, pueblos tumbled from cliffs. Faces, feathered and painted, screamed.
Gray remembered Kat’s report from Painter, about the destruction of the Anasazi following the theft of sacred totems from the Tawtsee’untsaw Pootseev. Was that slaughter—that genocide—being memorialized on this buffalo skin?
This raised a larger question.
Gray had the buffalo hide open to the middle, spread over his lap. A large section was missing. He felt the surface with his fingers. It was much rougher.
“Lewis scraped this part of the artwork off the hide,” Gray said.
“Why?” Seichan asked.
“He’s written something here in the blank space.”
He stared down at the meticulous lines of script, flowing in a large swatch down the middle. While everyone was tending his or her wounds, he had sponged off the old blood that still covered most of the hide. The iron in the hemoglobin had stained the skin, but the words he found there were still legible.
“Only it makes no sense,” he said. “It’s just a jumble of letters. Either it’s a code, or Lewis really had gone mad.”
Seichan glanced down at the hide, then back to the road. “Didn’t Heisman say Lewis and Jefferson communicated in code? That they exchanged messages in their own private cipher.”
“That’s true.”
Gray pictured Lewis dying over that long night, waiting for Mrs. Grinder to find him. He had plenty of time to write this last message to the world, but what did it contain? Did it name his killer? Was it his last will and testament?
Gray’s fingers again rubbed the tough hide, where it had been crudely abraded. What did Lewis erase here? Along the edges, bits of what looked like a map remained: a corner of a river coursing down a mountain, some pass through another range, a piece of a lake. Was this a more detailed map of the terrain around the lost city of the Tawtsee’untsaw Pootseev? Did the gold map point to the general position, while this dyed rendition offered a more precise location? Is that how Fortescue was able to find it out west—that is, if he did in fact find it?
Gray put the bits together in his head. “I think the traitor, General Wilkinson, killed Lewis for the gold tablet in his possession, but he never knew about the significance of the buffalo hide. After his assassination, Lewis didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands, so he scraped it clean and left this last cryptic message to the world. He used his own blood and body to hide it.”