The Coordinate Read online

  The Coordinate

  By Marc Jacobs © 2019

  The Story

  Two teens…

  A vast cosmos…

  One ancient mystery to solve...

  Logan West and Emma James grew up together but are now high school seniors going in totally opposite directions after graduation. When they are assigned to work together on one last history project, they hardly expect the monotony of high school life to change. Instead, as they decode a series of unexplained clues hidden within their history project itself, Logan and Emma manage to unfold an ancient mystery that has baffled scientists and archeologists, one with powerful implications for the present day. As they embrace the adventure they’ve stumbled upon, and a growing romantic attraction to each other, Logan and Emma find themselves caught up in a dangerous, high-stakes race across the globe to decipher mankind’s past in order to save humanity’s future, not to mention their very own lives, with a mystery that just might reach towards the stars…

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Marc Jacobs

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, or copyright owners, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, or to use or reproduce any portion of this book, write to [email protected].

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events neither are the product of the author’s imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2019

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-578-51959-3

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-578-51960-9

  Publisher: Marc Jacobs

  [email protected]

  www.marcjacobsauthor.com

  Dedication

  To My Loving Family, Friends and Editors

  This book is dedicated with love and appreciation to my supportive

  family, friends and editors who have inspired me, challenged me and helped me to

  make this journey to the stars a reality.

  Contents

  The Coordinate

  The Story

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Chapter 1 – Chamber of the White-Eyed Star God

  Chapter 2 – Five Years Later…

  Chapter 3 – A Head Start

  Chapter 4 – A Good Mystery

  Chapter 5 – Dewey’s Lair

  Chapter 6 – 18,194 Questions

  Chapter 7 – Technical Difficulties

  Chapter 8 – An Unexpected Answer

  Chapter 9 – Peer Pressure

  Chapter 10 – The Vatican Secret Archives

  Chapter 11 – History, Revisited

  Chapter 12 – The Four Corners of a Triangle

  Chapter 13 – Finally, A Little Help

  Chapter 14 – The PAPA

  Chapter 15 – A Change of Plan

  Chapter 16 – The Hvit Fuge Stranda

  Chapter 17 – The Enemy Among Us

  Chapter 18 – Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen

  Chapter 19 – The Wisdom of Courage

  Chapter 20 – What Would Emma Do?

  Chapter 21 – Déjà Vu

  Chapter 22 – An Old Friend

  Chapter 23 – 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

  Chapter 24 – Two Minutes

  Chapter 25 – Time’s Up

  Chapter 26 – Full Triangle

  Chapter 27 – Black Monday

  Chapter 28 – Who Are You?

  About Marc Jacobs

  Contact Marc and Receive Updates

  Leave A Review

  There’s More!!!

  Praise for The Coordinate

  Credits

  Chapter 1 – Chamber of the White-Eyed Star God

  Leaning on one knee halfway up the outer steps of the Copán Temple, Dr. Jonas Arenot squinted at the Mayan hieroglyphs as if doing so might pull more information out of them that years of study by previous scholars failed to extract. Time was running out on his team’s grant from Harvard University where he was a professor in the Archeology Department. Considering what Harvard was paying for his team’s two-month summer trek to the Copán ruins in western Honduras, they expected results. He knew his reputation was on the line given his repeated failure to turn up anything notable on any of his prior costly expeditions.

  Frustrated, Dr. Arenot wiped the sweat from his forehead, running his hands through his thinning brown hair and graying sideburns.

  Puzzled by Dr. Arenot’s intense scrutiny of the hieroglyphics, graduate assistant Martin O’Brien felt compelled to ask him, “What are you looking for?”

  “A clue, Martin, a clue.”

  “A clue?” Martin replied, confused.

  “Yes, a clue. A clue as to how they did it.”

  Martin did not follow. Although he had been studying under Dr. Arenot for years, he still hadn’t mastered the skill of interpreting the hidden messages woven into the professor’s vague responses implying Martin should know what he was talking about.

  “How they did what?” asked Martin.

  Dr. Arenot looked at him quizzically, surprised he didn’t understand. At this point, Dr. Arenot stood up on the steps and explained, “The United States, a world superpower, has only been around a couple hundred years. The Roman Empire lasted, what, 1,500 years?” Dr. Arenot put his hand on one of the sixty-two steps leading up to the flat top of the pyramid-shaped temple. “But here, we stare at a longevity beyond compare. The Mayan civilization lasted for thousands of years. Don’t you ever wonder how they did it? Despite modern society’s supposed sophistication and technology, never a day goes by that I don’t wonder how we’re going to make it another 50 years much less thousands like the Mayans. There’s a thing or two we can learn from these hieroglyphics… and if I don’t come up with something in the next two weeks, Pushire is pulling the plug.”

  Martin, stunned, did a double-take. “But… but how can he do that? We’ve still got two months left on our funding.”

  “There’s a new rock star in town and her name’s Professor Jill Quimbey, daughter of Lord Quimbey of the, um, something Isles overseas. And the Department’s ready to give our funding over to her and her cyber-technetic archeology.”

  “I thought she wasn’t coming until January?”

  “Well, it appears they lured her six months early with my grant money,” griped Dr. Arenot, still smarting from last year’s International Archeology Symposium when organizers bumped him from his speaking slot to fit in Professor Quimbey. Dr. Arenot was not looking forward to working with her, at all. Still, he couldn’t help but admit that he found some of her theories fascinating. Not ‘groundbreaking’ like others did, but intriguing, nonetheless. “Here, look at—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, the ground started shaking, the result of a small tremor common in these parts. Dr. Arenot and Martin steadied themselves to avoid falling down the steps. After fifteen seconds, the minor earthquake stopped. When it was over, Dr. Arenot returned his attention to the hieroglyphs, seizing the opportunity for a teaching moment for his grad student.

  “Look at these,” he said to Martin, leaning back down on one knee to point out a series of hieroglyphs carved into the steps, which archeologists referred to as the Hieroglyphic Stairway of Copán. Martin leaned down beside the professor who continued, “Here, this sequence is one of my favorites, and it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Can you read it?”

  Martin gave it a shot. “The God of the Heavens—”


  “Stars,” Dr. Arenot interrupted, helping Martin with the translation. “The God of Stars.”

  Martin tried again. “The God of Stars lights the heavens, revealing the secret truth hidden within.”

  “Good… keep going,” Dr. Arenot approved.

  “A truth that will learn…”

  “Teach,” interjected Dr. Arenot, correcting him again. “A truth that will teach...”

  Martin started over. “The God of Stars lights the heavens, revealing the secret truth hidden within; a truth that will teach man the way to the gods.”

  “Excellent,” said Dr. Arenot as he sat down on the steps and looked at Martin. “Now, what do you think that means?”

  “It represents…” Martin paused. The professor appeared distracted. “Dr. Arenot?” he asked.

  The professor remained lost in thought for a moment, and then blurted, “Martin, grab the others and bring the infrared thermographer, cosmic particle detector, and 3D laser scanner into the temple and meet me at the Kneeling Wall.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Just meet me down there!” exclaimed Dr. Arenot.

  Dr. Arenot dashed down the steps to the Copán Temple’s ground-level entrance. With a flashlight in hand, he proceeded into the narrow mouth of the temple and down a dim corridor to the relatively insignificant ‘God of Stars Kneeling Wall.’

  He gazed upon the wall’s perfectly-etched stone blocks, the time-tested work of masterful Mayan stonemasons. Most walls inside the temple had multiple hieroglyphics on them, each telling a complete story, but the Kneeling Wall had only one hieroglyph on it standing for the “God of Stars.” As a result, over the years, it had attracted far less attention from scholars than the others.

  This wall had been catalogued years ago, and Dr. Arenot had walked by it countless times over the last six weeks. But today, something occurred to him that he had never thought of before: did the hieroglyphics which read, ‘the God of Stars lights the heavens, revealing the secret truth hidden within,’ refer to the metaphorical guidance the gods gave to the Mayan people that could be found in their culture’s constellations, or did it mean something else entirely?

  The God of Stars lights the heavens, revealing the secret truth hidden within, pondered Dr. Arenot. Was there a secret truth hidden within? He knew there was nothing behind the wall because his team had scanned it when they first arrived. But as he thought about the Copán people’s historical references to the Kneeling Wall describing how the gods instructed them to kneel down at the God of Stars, today, for the first time, Dr. Arenot considered whether there was something hidden down below ground. He had not scanned the floor for subterranean spaces in this corridor yet.

  Dr. Arenot’s team of six grad students arrived with their flashlights in hand. “Here you go, Dr. Arenot,” said Maggie Samuels, handing him the infrared thermographer, cosmic particle detector, and 3D laser scanner. The state-of-the-art equipment was brand new, the latest in stone scanning technology. When it became available in handheld form, at Dr. Arenot’s request, the Board of Trustees authorized the purchase for this sabbatical, banking on his expedition turning up something of interest.

  “Thank you,” said Dr. Arenot. “Keep the thermographer,” he said to Maggie. He handed the 3D scanner to Martin and kept the cosmic particle detector for himself. “Let’s give it a whirl.”

  “What are we looking for?” asked Maggie.

  “To see if the Copán people have been trying to tell us something for five hundred years,” answered Dr. Arenot.

  Maggie and Martin turned on their devices. Dr. Arenot bent down and pointed his cosmic particle detector toward the stone floor.

  The particle detector used subatomic particles known as muons, to identify gaps and hidden chambers behind stone. Muons traveling in open space move quickly while muons traveling through rock move slowly and eventually stop. By monitoring the speed of the muons, the detector, after syncing up with the 3D scanner, could formulate a rudimentary image of what was behind or below the stone.

  Dr. Arenot began moving the particle detector along the floor’s stone surface, surveying several stone blocks in the corridor in front of the Kneeling Wall. When he got to the block at the foot of the Kneeling Wall, he lingered a bit longer. After thirty seconds, renderings from the cosmic particle detector started registering on the 3D scanner.

  “Dr. Arenot, you’ve got to see this,” said Martin. “The 3D scanner is showing a space below the stone in front of the Kneeling Wall.”

  “Let me see that,” said Dr. Arenot, surprised he might actually have been right. Martin leaned over to show him. “Would you look at that!” exclaimed Dr. Arenot. “There’s something down there.” Dr. Arenot suddenly felt validated by his instincts. “It’s showing what appears to be a corridor below us.”

  “Where does it go?” asked Maggie.

  “I don’t know, it leads out of range,” replied Dr. Arenot, still analyzing the scanner. How had he missed this, he chided himself.

  “What do you think’s down there? A tomb?” asked one of the other grad students.

  “Only one way to find out; we’ve got to find the way in,” said Dr. Arenot, examining the floor. “Here, let’s clear some of the mold and dust from the seams around this stone block.”

  The professor’s grad students did as asked. When they finished, the seams around the stone looked like the seams around the other stone blocks in the temple wedged together to form a solid floor; but there was an increased depth to the ridges around this one that Dr. Arenot had not noticed before beneath the dust and mold.

  “Hand me a wedge,” he said. One of the students handed it to him. Very carefully, Dr. Arenot inserted the wedge into the seam, and it sunk farther than he expected. There was definitely something different about the seams surrounding this stone. “Martin, Justin, bring in the crowbars.”

  Excited, the students ran outside to fetch the crowbars Dr. Arenot requested. It was not long before Martin and Justin returned with the tools. Once they did, Dr. Arenot’s team went to work inserting the crowbars on each side of the stone in order to lift the block up. Dr. Arenot had one grad student photo-document the process while another student filmed it. After half an hour, they carefully extracted the stone block from the floor, revealing an opening with ledges set down below that were holding the stone up.

  “Shine some light down there,” said Dr. Arenot.

  One of his students pointed a flashlight into the opening. They could see steep stairs.

  “Someone grab the PicPro,” directed Dr. Arenot. He wanted to lower a camera down for a closer look before climbing in. Martin grabbed the expanding stick with a video camera affixed to the end. “Okay, lower it in,” Dr. Arenot instructed him.

  Martin extended the PicPro down into the opening. Maggie provided illumination with her flashlight. With the PicPro’s wireless signal syncing up with the PicPro app on Dr. Arenot’s smartphone, the professor watched the live stream feed as Martin slowly rotated the PicPro camera 360º.

  “It’s a passageway. Looks okay to me,” said Dr. Arenot. With a flashlight in hand, he took a deep breath and started lowering himself into the passage.

  “Be careful, it could be booby-trapped,” warned Martin.

  “What do you think this is, an Indiana Jones film??” snapped Dr. Arenot, tired of archeology students who were overly influenced by Hollywood movies. Ignoring the warning, Dr. Arenot lowered himself the rest of the way in. “Come on down,” he called back up to the others.

  His students eagerly climbed down into the opening. They found themselves in a low-ceilinged corridor filled with cobwebs. They followed the passageway until coming to an abrupt end at a stone door approximately five and a half feet tall. The door was already partially ajar. Etched above it were more hieroglyphic symbols.

  Although Dr. Arenot deciphered the hieroglyphics immediately, he asked the grad students accompanying him, “Does anyone want to take a swing?” They all failed to venture a guess, too ove
rwhelmed by the excitement of the moment. After all, none of them had ever made a ‘discovery’ before. Sighing with disappointment, Dr. Arenot said, “It reads ‘Chamber of the White-Eyed Star God.’”

  “That’s odd,” said Martin, unfamiliar with the Copán’s reference to the Mayan God of Stars as the ‘White-Eyed Star God.’

  Dr. Arenot smiled and said, “‘That’s odd,’ is usually what people say right before something interesting happens.” He pushed open the inner door and then, unexpectedly, paused to allow the nerves ripping through his stomach to work their way out of his system. When ready, Dr. Arenot ducked below the stone threshold leading into the Chamber of the White-Eyed Star God. One by one his students lowered their heads and followed, unaware that they were all about to make a profound discovery that would finally pique the interest of Harvard’s Board of Trustees, not to mention change the course of human history.

  Chapter 2 – Five Years Later…

  When the alarm went off, MegaWave’s ‘Jagged Edge of the Sun’ blasted out of the radio. Logan West groaned at the thought of starting another school week. It was October 17th. Only eight more months and thirty-four Mondays to go in his senior year at Jersey North High School before graduation.