Giordino pulled a gigantic cigar from his breast pocket and rolled it around in his mouth without lighting it, out of consideration for the people at the table who didn't smoke. Sandecker shot him a murderous look at seeing that the label advertised it as one from his private stock. "I'm not a smart man," Giordino said modestly. The Humble Herbert routine was an act. Giordino had been third in his cla.s.s at the Air Force Academy. "For the life of me, I don't see how an organization with a worldwide army of elite killers can operate for years without the finest intelligence services in the world figuring out who they are and what they're up to."

"I'm the first to admit we're stymied," said FBI's Helm frankly. "As you know, crimes without motives are the most difficult to solve."

Little nodded in agreement. "Until your confrontation with these people in Telluride, anyone else who came in contact with them did not live to describe the event."

"Thanks to Dirk and Dr. O'Connell," said Gunn, "we now have a trail to follow."

"A few charred teeth make for a pretty faint trail," offered Sandecker.

"True," agreed Helm, "but there is the enigma of that chamber inside the Pandora Mine. If they go to such extremes to keep scientists from studying the inscriptions, slaughter innocent people, and commit suicide when apprehended-well, they must have a compelling motive."

"The inscriptions," Pitt said. "Why go to such lengths to hide their meaning?"

"They can't be overjoyed at the outcome," said Gunn. "They lost six of their professional killers and failed to secure photographs of the inscriptions."

"It's bizarre that such an ordinary archaeological discovery would cost so many lives," Sandecker said expressionlessly.

"Hardly an ordinary discovery," Pat said quickly. "If it is not a hoax perpetrated by old hard-rock miners, it could very well prove to be the archaeological find of the century."

"Have you been able to decipher any of the symbols?" asked Pitt.

"After a cursory examination of my notes, all I can tell you is that the symbols are alphabetic. That is, writing that expresses single sounds. Our alphabet, for example, uses twenty-six symbols. The symbols in the chamber suggest an alphabet of thirty, with twelve symbols representing numerals, which I managed to translate into a very advanced mathematics system. Whoever these people were, they discovered zero and calculated with the same number of symbols as modern man. Until I can program them into a computer and study them in their entirety, there is little else I can tell you."

"Sounds to me like you've done extremely well with what little you have had in such a short time," Helm complimented her.

"I'm confident we can crack the meaning of the inscriptions. Unlike the complicated logosyllabic writing systems of the Egyptians, Chinese, or Cretans, which are as yet undeciphered, this one seems unique in its simplicity."

"Do you think the black obsidian skull found in the chamber forms a link to the inscriptions?" asked Gunn.

Pat shook her head. "I can't begin to guess. Like the crystal skulls that have come out of Mexico and Tibet, its purpose could be ritual. There are some people-not accredited archaeologists, I might add-who think the crystal skulls came in a set of thirteen that can record vibrations and focus them into holographic images."

"Do you believe that?" asked Little seriously.

Pat laughed. "No, I'm pretty much of a pragmatist. I prefer hard-core proof before I advance wild theories."

Little looked at her pensively. "Do you think the obsidian skull-"

"Skulls," Pitt corrected him.

Pat gave him a queer look. "Since when do we have more than one?"

"Since yesterday afternoon. Thanks to a good friend, St. Julien Perlmutter, I obtained another one."

Sandecker looked at him intently. "Where is it now?"

"Along with the skull from Telluride, it was taken to NUMA's chemical lab for a.n.a.lysis. Obsidian obviously can't be dated by conventional means, but a study under instrumentation might tell us something about those who created it."

"Do you know where it came from?" asked Pat, burning with curiosity.

Without going into tedious detail, Pitt briefly described the finding of the skull inside the derelict Madras by the crew of the Paloverde in Antarctica. He then told of his meeting and conversation with Christine Mender-Husted, and how she graciously gave him the skull after accepting Perlmutter's offer for her ancestor's papers.

"Did she say where the crew and pa.s.sengers of the Madras discovered the skull?"

Pitt tantalized her and the others seated around the table by taking his time to reply. Finally, he said, "According to the ship's log, the Madras was bound from Bombay to Liverpool when it was struck by a violent hurricane-"

"Cyclone," Sandecker lectured. "To a sailor, hurricanes occur only in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans. Typhoons are in the Western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean."

"I stand corrected," Pitt sighed. Admiral Sandecker loved to show off his inexhaustible reserve of sea trivia. "As I was saying, the Madras ran into a violent storm and heavy seas that lasted for nearly two weeks. She was battered and driven far south of her course. When the wind and waters finally calmed, it was found that their water barrels had been damaged and much of their drinking supply lost. The captain then consulted his charts and made the decision to stop at a barren chain of uninhabited islands in the subantarctic south Indian Ocean. Now known as the Crozet Islands, they form a tiny overseas territory of France. He dropped anchor off a small island called St. Paul that was very rugged, with a volcanic mountain rising in its center. While the crew repaired the water barrels and began filling them from a stream, one of the pa.s.sengers, a British army colonel on his way home with his wife and two daughters after serving ten years in India, decided to go on a little hunting expedition.

"The only real game on the island were elephant seals and penguins, but the colonel in his ignorance thought the island might teem with four-legged game. After climbing nearly a thousand feet up the mountain, he and his friends came upon a footpath laid with stones worn smooth with age. They followed the path to an opening hewn in the rock in the shape of an archway. They entered and saw a pa.s.sageway that led deeper into the mountain."

"I wonder if the entrance has been found and explored since then," said Gunn.

"It's possible," Pitt admitted. "Hiram Yaeger checked it out for me, and except for an unmanned meteorological station set up by the Aussies from 1978 until 1997 and monitored by satellite, the island has been totally uninhabited. If their weathermen found anything inside the mountain, they never mentioned it. All records are purely meteorological."

Little was leaning over the table, spellbound. "Then what happened?"

"The colonel sent one of his party back to the ship, and he returned with lanterns. Only then did they venture inside. They found that the pa.s.sageway was smoothly carved from the rock and sloped downward for about a hundred feet, ending in a small chamber with dozens of strange and ancient-looking sculptures. They went on to describe unreadable inscriptions etched on the walls and ceiling of the chamber."

"Did they record the inscriptions?" asked Pat.

"No symbols went into the captain's log," answered Pitt. "The only drawing is a crude map to the entrance of the chamber."

"And the artifacts?" Sandecker probed.

"They're still on the Madras," explained Pitt. "Roxanna Mender, the wife of the captain of the whaler, mentioned them in a brief entry in her diary. She identified one as a silver urn. The others were bronze and earthenware sculptures of strange-looking animals she said she had never seen before. Under the laws of salvage, her husband and his crew intended to strip the Madras of anything of value, but the ice pack began to break up and they had to make a run for the whaler. They took only the obsidian skull."

"Another chamber, this one with artifacts," Pat said, staring as if seeing something beyond the room. "I wonder how many others are hidden around the world."

Sandecker eyed Giordino waspishly as the little Italian chewed on his immense cigar. "It seems we have our work cut out for us." He drew away his eyes from Giordino and trained them on Gunn. "Rudi, as soon as you can, expedite two expeditions. One to search for the Madras in the Antarctic. The second to check out the chamber found by the ship's pa.s.sengers on St. Paul Island. Use whatever research vessels are nearest the areas in question." He turned to the men farther down the long table. "Dirk, you head up the search for the derelict. Al, you take St. Paul Island."

Giordino sat slouched in his chair. "I hope our bloodthirsty little friends didn't get to either place first."

"You'll know soon after you arrive," Gunn said, with a straight face.

"In the meantime," said Helm, "I'll keep two agents on the hunt throughout the U.S. for any leads to the organization that hired the killers."

"I must tell you, Admiral," Little said seriously to Sandecker, "this is not a priority a.s.signment for Central Intelligence. But I'll do what I can to fill in the pieces. My people will concentrate on international corporate syndicates outside the United States that fund or search for archaeological searches. We'll also investigate any discoveries that involved murder. Your new evidence pointing to a neo-n.a.z.i order may prove invaluable."

"Last but not least, we come to the lovely lady in our midst," Sandecker said. He wasn't being patronizing; it was the way he talked to most women.

Pat smiled in poised confidence at seeing every male eye focused on her. "My job, of course, is to attempt to decipher the inscriptions."

"The photos the killers took should be processed by now," said Gunn.

"I'll need a place to work," she said thoughtfully. "Since I am now a nonperson, I can't very well walk into my office at the University of Pennsylvania and begin an a.n.a.lysis program."

Sandecker smiled. "Between Ron, Ken, and myself, we have at our command what are perhaps three of the most sophisticated data-processing facilities and technicians in the world. Take your pick."