Free Lost City of the Templars by Paul Christopher

already ravaged riverboat.
    The first Tucano peeled up and away to the right while the second came in firing its wing cannons and machine guns. The second Tucano barely had time to peel left before the Shrikes hit their target and a fireball roared up from the wreck, obliterating what was left of the ship. The two aircraft droned off into the distance.
    “Can we make it in the Zodiacs?” Peggy asked as the aircraft disappeared.
    “According to Fawcett’s journals, they were about a hundred and eighty miles upriver from here before they headed into the jungle. I don’t want to travel at night, so that means at least three days.”
    “How will we know where to get off the river?”
    “The notebooks mention steep cliffs and rapids. On his diagram he called them the Falls of Babylon; there were tiers of rocks beside the rapids with cascades of foliage and giant red hibiscus flowers.”
    “Let’s hope they’re still blooming,” said Peggy.
    “And let’s hope we get there first,” answered Holliday.
    •   •   •
    Dimitri Rogov, Steven Cornwell, so-called project manager of the Excalibur Marine Exploration Corporation, and Tashkin Akurgal, head of Excalibur’s security division, sat around the table in the suite at the Hotel Quinto in Barcelos and stared down at the large topographical map of the Rio Negro area.
    Cornwall was ex–Special Boat Squadron, his gray hair in a military cut, his hard square face tanned and seamed by a life spent in climates other than that of his native England. Akurgal was in his fifties and built like a wrestler, which he’d been in his youth, with a shaved head, dark eyebrows, a thick salt-and-pepper mustache and a long wormlike scar along his right cheek from temple to chin that he never talked about.
    “Lord Grayle sent this by courier. It arrived today; it’s a blowup of a map that was found in one of Fawcett’s notebooks,” said Rogov.
    “How the hell did he get them?” Cornwell asked. “I thought you said the Blackstock woman wouldn’t sell them.”
    “She didn’t know what she had at that point.” Rogov smiled. “Then she showed them to Holliday and that was that, but when they took them to London to put them in a safe-deposit box, they got a copy of all of them made at the Colour Company on Curzon Street. Grayle had a tail on them and he bribed one of the employees to make copies. Simple.”
    “Maybe it was simple to get, but what the hell does it mean?” Cornwell said, staring down at the map. It clearly showed the Xingu and Negro rivers and the land beyond it but very little more except a superimposed diagram of a dotted line with a letter at each end and beneath that a phrase. Beneath the phrase was a symbol:
     
     
    N . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . . R
    by the Compass and the Square

    Rogov explained, “According to Grayle, the phrase is a coded Masonic greeting, among other things. The compass and the square are two of the three ‘Great Lights.’ The third Great Light was originally the Ark of the Covenant but is now generally thought to be the Old Testament.”
    “And the line with the two letters?”
    “Grayle has a theory about that. His grandfather backed Fawcett’s last expedition, but in the end Fawcett never returned. The symbol was a clue meant for a fellow Mason, which both Fawcett and Grayle’s grandfather were. The compass forms two sides of an equilateral triangle, the base of which is the line with the two letters. Fawcett’s Lost City was the third point of the triangle—the hinge on the compass.”
    “But what good does that do us?” Cornwell asked. “You have to know what the two letters stand for and how long the line really is in geographical terms.”
    “And that’s the problem we have to solve before Holliday does. We must first of all get ahead of him. The transponder is still operating. He’s heading in a