Necropolis

have to make before we realize what we're up against?"
    "Then maybe it's time to use one of the doors," Richard said.
    He had the diary and he slid it onto the table in front of him. All ten members of the Nexus stared at it.
    Only a few months before, they had been prepared to spend two million pounds to get their hands on it, and here it was, right in front of them. They wanted to reach out and touch it. And yet at the same time, they were afraid of it, as if it was a snake that might bite.
    "I've been trying to work this out ever since Ramon brought it to us," Richard went on. "I've read bits of it, though I won't pretend I've understood very much…even with a Spanish dictionary and a magnifying glass. But there is one thing we do know: Twenty-five doors were built around the world for the Gatekeepers to use. They all connect with each other and they can all be found in sacred places. One of them is in St. Meredith's. When Matt went through it, it took him directly to the Abbey of San Galgano in Tuscany."
    "Scott and I found one of the doors in a cave at Lake Tahoe," Jamie added. "It took us to the Temple of Coricancha in Cuzco, Peru."
    "That's four of them," Richard said. "But there are twenty-one more, and our friend, the mad monk, may have helped us. He's made a list…"
    He unfastened the diary and opened it, laying it flat so that everyone could see. Everyone leaned forward. There was a very detailed map covering two pages, drawn in different colors of ink. It was just about recognizable as the world, although a world seen by a child with only a basic knowledge of geography. America was the wrong shape, and it was too close to Europe. Australia was upside down.
    Joseph of Cordoba had used more care decorating his work. He had sketched in little ships, crossing the various oceans with their sails unfurled. Insect-size animals poked out of the different landmasses, helping to identify them. There was a tiger in India, a dragon in China and, at the North Pole, what could have been a polar bear.
    "I don't know how much you know about old maps," Richard said, "but for what it's worth, I studied them a bit at university. I did politics and geography. This one is fairly typical of the sixteenth century.
    That was a time when maps were becoming more important. Henry VIII was one of the first monarchs to realize how much they could give away about a country's defenses. And everyone was using them to steal everyone else's trade routes. You see these little bags here?" He took out a pencil and pointed.
    "They're probably bags of spice. Joseph may have drawn them to represent the Spice Islands because that was what everyone wanted."
    "There are stars," Jamie said.
    They were scattered all over the pages — the five-pointed stars that he and Matt knew so well.
    "That's right. There are twenty-five of them — one for each door. The only trouble is, like a lot of the maps being drawn at the time, this one isn't very accurate. As far as I can make out, there seem to be doors in London, Cairo, Istanbul, Delhi, Mecca, Buenos Aires, and somewhere in the outback of Southern Australia. There's one here, close to the South Pole. But the world's changed quite a lot in five hundred years, and trying to identify the exact locations isn't going to be easy."
    'You mentioned a list," Tarrant said.
    'Yes…" Richard turned a page, and sure enough, there was a long row of names, all of them in tiny handwriting. "The problem we've got here is that the names don't quite match up with the modern places, and half of them are in Spanish. Here's one, for example: Muerto de Maria. It took me half the night to work that one out."
    "The death of Mary," the bishop translated.
    "Or Mary's death," Richard said. "Do you get it? Marydeath. Or the church of St. Meredith in London.
    It's like a crossword clue, although I don't suppose Joseph was doing it on purpose to confuse us.
    Coricancha isn't named at all. It's just represented by a flaming sun — but then, of course, the sun was sacred to the Incas."
    "Is there a door in Hong Kong?" Matt asked.
    "There's certainly a door somewhere nearby," Richard said. He turned the page back to the map. 'You can see it here — and if you look at the list, there's a reference to a place called Puerto Fragrante and a little dragon symbol. But that could be anywhere."
    "May I see?" Mr. Lee reached out and took the diary in both hands, holding it as if he was afraid it was about to crumble away. He looked at the