Hunt at the Well of Eternity by Gabriel Hunt, James Reasoner Page B

normally be flown.
    It was an N …for North .
    The damned thing was a map.
    Those two winding lines represented a river making its way generally from north to south. A curving line of right-angled marks crossed the wavy lines, and when looked at from this direction they resembled caret marks…which were sometimes used on maps to signify mountains, Gabriel thought. Little squiggles that were meaningless marks one way became smoke from those mountains when looked at the other way.
    Volcanoes?
    His pulse was racing now. The reason those marks were slightly darker than the other designs on the flag was because they had been drawn on there after the flag was made, after it had been flown in battle, possibly for a number of years. But not any time recently—they were faded by time, too, just not as much. So: Sometime after the start of the war someone had drawn a map on the flag. The most logical person to have done that was the flag’s owner—General Granville Fordham Fargo.
    But what was it a map to?
    He was so engrossed that he almost didn’t hear the bathroom door open. He did hear it, though, and glanced up to tell Cierra about his discovery.
    The words got stuck in his mouth when he saw that she was standing there in the doorway with nothing on but a towel, wrapped loosely around her torso. Its lower edge fell barely below the curve of her hips, leaving her sleek, honey-golden legs bare. Her arms and shoulders were bare as well, and her raven hair was damp and tumbled loosely around her neck.
    Even though the sight of her affected him strongly, it wasn’t enough to make him forget what he had found. His voice sounded a little strained, though, as he said, “There’s a map.”
    She stiffened. “A map? What are you talking about?”
    “On the flag.” He gestured toward it. “Someone drew a map on it. It’s hidden in the picture, but if you look closely you can see it.”
    Cierra hurried forward. If she had intended to seduce him—and the pose she had struck in the bathroom doorway certainly hinted that she had—she had forgotten about doing so as soon as she heard the word “map.”
    She lowered herself onto the bed next to Gabriel and leaned forward to study the flag. Her eyes followed his finger as he traced the river and pointed out the mountains.
    “You can see the letter N when you look at it from this direction,” he said, rotating the flag. “That’s north.”
    “Of course,” she said with a trace of impatience in her voice. “How could we have missed this?”
    “Nobody ever said we were looking for a map. And whoever drew it did a good job of concealing it. Unless you were looking for them, you’d think these were just random marks in the picture.”
    “But whoever drew it would know where they were.”
    Gabriel nodded. “That’s right.”
    “General Fargo?”
    He shrugged. “Or one of his followers. You can tell from the way the ink is faded that the map wasn’t added any time recently. My gut tells me that Fargo either drew it or had someone draw it.”
    “That’s smoke coming from the mountains. They’re volcanoes.”
    “Exactly.”
    “There are volcanic mountains here in Mexico.” A frown appeared on her face. “But the river’s not right. You can see the way the mountain range curves around and runs in an east-west direction, while the river bisects it from north to south. The closest area that matches that terrain is—”
    “Guatemala,” Gabriel said.
    Cierra nodded. “Yes. It has to be. The southern tip of Mexico swings to the east to form the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and that orientation continues on over into Guatemala. The rivers run down from the rain forests to the north into the mountains.” She looked up from the map and met Gabriel’s eyes. “But what’s there?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t know, but this has to be why Mariella Montez brought the flag to New York. She was going to give it to the Hunt Foundation and ask us to send an expedition down