Hunt at World's End by Gabriel Hunt Page A

might try to steal it for the gold, so he shipped it to me for safekeeping.”
    “And you brought it to Borneo,” Gabriel said. “Does he know?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “How not exactly?”
    “He thinks I’m still in the States. I asked Michael not to tell him about the grant.”
    “And Michael agreed?” Gabriel asked.
    She shrugged. “I told him I didn’t want to worry Uncle Daniel, that he’d be anxious for no reason. Remember, Michael just thought I was going to be studying in a library.”
    “Yeah,” Gabriel said. “You sure fooled everyone.”
    “Are you going to tell me you’ve never told a lie when you’ve been on the trail of something big?” she said. She returned to the oilcloth and pulled out a second item, a folded piece of paper. She kicked aside a pile of clothing to clear a space on the floor, then opened the paper and spread it out. It was a copy of an ancient map of the eastern hemisphere with penciled-in grid lines crisscrossing over the crude drawings of continents and landmasses, dividing the map into little squares. Cuneiform symbols similar to the ones on the Star appeared in many of the squares.
    “This is an enlargement of Arnuwanda’s map,” Joyce continued. “The cult has one too. It’s easy enough to get, you can copy it out of any book on ancient Anatolian history. Without the Star it’s nothing. But with the Star…here I’ll show you. Hold your flashlight above the Star and shine it down.” Gabriel pulled the flashlight from his belt and switched it on. He positioned the beam to shine through the Star so that its shadow fell on the map.
    Gabriel smiled. “The symbols.”
    “Exactly,” Joyce said. The beam passed through the cuneiform symbols around the perimeter of the Starand projected them onto the map. “It’s Nesili, the language of the ancient Hittites. Now check this out.” She gripped the starburst shape at the center of the device and turned it. It clicked along a hidden track and as it did the outer perimeter rotated in the opposite direction. She kept turning it, apparently trying to align the symbols from the Star with those on the map, but the ones on the map were printed in a different order—they didn’t match.
    “How confident are you,” Gabriel said, “that it’s the real Star?”
    “Oh, it’s real,” Joyce said. “This is just Arnuwanda being a sneaky bastard.” She kept turning the starburst slowly, one click at a time. “Obviously it’s a puzzle of some kind, and for the longest time I had no idea what the key could be. But I had a lot of time to think in that cage.”
    Gabriel kept his eyes on the map, trying to find a pattern to the symbols.
    “The legend says that when Teshub scattered the Three Eyes around the world, he gave each for protection to a different one of the three natural elements,” Joyce continued. “Earth, water and…well, no one’s sure what the third one is. In the earliest translations of the legend, they couldn’t decipher the difference between earth and whatever the third element is, so they called it ‘loose earth,’ but that was just a way of saying ‘We don’t know what this symbol means.’ Unfortunately the original tablet the legend was carved on was destroyed centuries ago, and ever since we’ve only had those faulty translations to work from.”
    “You think the three elements are the key to making this thing work?” Gabriel asked.
    “I do,” Joyce said. She pointed to one of the Nesilisymbols. “This is the one that means ‘earth’—ordinary earth, like dirt or soil.” She turned the starburst until the symbol was directly opposite her on the rim, then held the Star so the projected image lined up perfectly with an identical symbol on the map. The beam from Gabriel’s flashlight passed through one of the tiny green jewels and hit the map with a virescent pinpoint.
    Right in the center of Borneo.
    Joyce said in a hushed voice, “Arnuwanda made several trips to Borneo. I’ve been