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start cracking up.” Gideon leaned forward again, putting his face right up to the screen, looking at a drawing on the page.
    “Maybe… I’m wondering about this book, Gid. I can’t be sure, but it looks like the Jesuit transferred a lot of what was in the little journal he found on the dead man into here, and somehow followed in his footsteps. There’s stuff that doesn’t make sense, and a lot of little notes and drawings that seem connected somehow… But honestly, I think he had found something.”
    “Found what? He had the letter all along. I thought that was the important thing here.” Gideon rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t even sure why he was trying so hard with the book—he couldn’t read Portuguese or Latin, and the little drawings didn’t make much sense either.
    “OK, here’s what it looks like. Now, I’ve only skimmed through it—we’ve only had it 12 hours, and I did sleep some in there. Father Eduardo leaves Lisbon in a panic, but thinks he’s escaped whoever is chasing him. He’s on this ship, the Sao Miguel, and he’s following the spice route, so he goes down along the tip of Africa, and up to India. Lots of stops along the way, and he kind of becomes a missionary of sorts, finding local Catholics and having mass and stuff like that. But on the ship, he realizes that the dead guy’s journal… I think that guy’s name was Sebastian or something like that… Anyway, his journal seems to be leading to some kind of treasure, or at least something important.”
    “Wait, it’s a treasure map? ” Gideon stared at her in astonishment.
    Rei nodded, her hazel eyes brimming with excitement. “Well… yeah. I think so. About halfway through this book—Father Eduardo’s journal, I mean—he gets to Goa, India. Goa was basically the capital of the Portuguese Empire in Asia, so it was big and modern. A big Catholic presence there. But it was old, too, a lot older than the Europeans. The Ottomans—the Muslims—had been there, for one thing. Father Eduardo stayed there awhile, but he seemed to do a lot of what we’d call archeological research. And then there’s a gap in the journal of about a year. And when he starts writing again, he’s on a ship called the Santo Antonio de Tanna, heading back to Lisbon the way he came… Only now he’s a business man, not a priest, and he’s got a wife. He doesn’t say it in here, but we know from Mr. Xavier that the priest changed his name from Eduardo Borges Santos to Joao Pastorinho Xavier. He got married, and had several children. He lived out his life as a wealthy trader in Lisbon, and started this company. No one in the family knows where he got the money—Jesuits took a vow of poverty, among other things. And this journal doesn’t say. So… what did he find?”
    “Could he have inherited money?”
    “There’s no indication of that. And why change his name?”
    “Maybe he couldn’t leave the order without, I don’t know, making the Inquisitors mad?”
    Rei shook her head. “This was the 1680’s. There weren’t internet registries and telephones. All he would have had to do was leave Goa and go anywhere he wanted that he’d never been before, and no one would have ever known a thing. I think he found something, Gid. And I think… well, I think he left clues to it on his voyage back. Which means… I think it means the treasure is still out there.”

    Gideon and Rei stood in front of Luis Xavier, shifting a little uncomfortably in the silence as he stared at them with a blank face, black eyes intense.
    “So what you are telling me is that, all this time, my family has thought it was protecting the Catholic Church, but what we were really doing was hiding away a map to a tesouro? A treasure?” His voice rose on his disbelief.
    Rei nodded. “ Yes, I think so.” She explained what she had been able to glean from the journal so far. “I do think that the letter, certainly at the time Father Eduardo, or Joao Xavier, had it, was political