The Spirit Banner

“Good enough,” she said, with a shrug of her own that clearly said she wasn’t going to make an issue of it. “Then I guess it’s okay to tell you…I think it’s real.” Annja couldn’t keep the smile from spreading across her face as she admitted it.

Davenport let out a whoop of joy. “I knew it!” he shouted. “I just knew it.”

Mason was up, shaking his employer’s hand, congratulating him, the two of them laughing and talking, when Annja broke in again.

“I said I think the journal is real. Unfortunately, the map is not.”

That brought both of them up short. Davenport’s voice held a trace of steel as he asked, “What do you mean the map is not? ”

Annja brought her laptop over to the table in front of the chairs where they’d been seated and turned it around to face them.

“Look,” she said. “This is a full-scale image of the map from the back of the journal.” The map appeared on the screen before them. “I cleaned it up some, but otherwise it is exactly the same. No image enhancements or anything like that.”

The two men nodded to show they were following her.

“Now this,” she said, calling up another image, “is a modern-day map of the same area. I’ve reduced it to scale to match the other one.” The two maps appeared side by side.

Davenport glanced between them. “I don’t see…Oh.”

Annja grinned. “Yeah. Oh.” She tapped the keyboard and they all watched as the two images slid over each other. Doing so allowed them to see that Curran, or whoever had drawn the map, had deliberately introduced errors into the positioning of many of the major landmarks. For instance, the Onon River had been moved slightly to the east while the Hentiyn Nuruu mountain range had been relocated a good distance to the south. The other errors were similar in nature; Annja had counted eleven in all.

Davenport stared at the map in confusion. “Why would he do that?”

Annja opened her mouth to reply but Mason beat her to the answer.

“He wanted to pass on the information but didn’t want to make it easy in case it fell into the wrong hands. Remember, there’s no way for anyone at that time to verify the map short of going there themselves. So a few subtle alterations and, voilà—the secret is safe.”

Davenport frowned. “So the map’s a fake? It won’t lead us to the tomb?”

Annja smiled. “The map’s authentic all right, in the sense that it is as old as we expected it to be, and more than likely penned by the individual we think penned it. The thing is, it just doesn’t give accurate directions to the tomb. At least, not directly. The location of the tomb is in there, we just have to break the code to get it.”

Davenport’s eyes shone with curiosity. “Code?” he asked.