Mound of Cahokia: Book Four of The Island of Bones

A bearing on the rim of a carved disc out of Jamestown. A carver kneeling by lamplight in a borrow-pit on the flatland north of the great plaza in the cold moon of eleven hundred and forty-two. And a foundation in Lisbon that has been learning the bearing's secret name for five months before the federation that owns the disc has finished reading it twice.

Dr. Iris Lettsome - epigrapher-ethnobotanist, federation chair-of-board, eight days off the porch at White Street - reads the rim-bearing on a January morning at the green house at Hull Bay and understands, before Kwame Cudjoe has finished setting the kettle, that the next link in the chain lies in flat black soil under a mound a thousand miles from any coast the federation has ever worked. The bearing points at Cahokia. Cahokia is on federal and state land. The descendants of the people who built it are five sovereign nations who have spent four centuries watching outsiders cut their ancestors' ground without leave.

The federation's January vote is unanimous, and it is the hardest vote it has ever cast. Empty hands. No excavation. No ground-penetrating-radar pass of its own. No fieldwork until the descendant nations - the Caddo, the Osage, the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, the Pawnee, the Quapaw - say the federation may set foot on that ground.

Carmen Núñez, the federation's attorney at the Madrid Trust, builds a nine-page brief on a foundation Iris has never heard named - the Fundação Atlântico de Arqueologia Marítima e Continental, of Lapa, Lisbon - and on its chair, a man whose father is serving United States federal time for a porch ceremony Iris sat through fourteen months ago at Cayo Hueso. The Lapa foundation has been running GPR carts across the southwest borrow-pit complex at Cahokia since February. It does not have a permit. The Illinois State Historic Preservation Officer has not yet finished sending the certified Section 110 inquiry it will hand a federal grand jury in August.

A Caddo elder of Binger, Oklahoma, carries the federation's first letter from her kitchen table to the Caddo Council. The Caddo Cultural Preservation Officer flies to St. Thomas on a return ticket and sits at the dry-stone wall behind the green house for a working afternoon. The Osage Congress convenes at Pawhuska on the twenty-second of April. The descendant nations' council convenes at Pinson on the eighth of May. The federation does not draft the council's questions, and the council does not draft the federation's.

In a field tent at the borrow-pit complex, a Portuguese geophysicist named Tomé Vasconcelos opens a second sealed envelope on a Tuesday afternoon and makes a quiet decision about a man on the western cart who has just named himself in full for the first time.

In Philadelphia, an Assistant United States Attorney pulls a two-hundred-and-forty-three-page packet across her desk on the first of August and an FBI Art Crime agent reads it three times. In Lisbon, the Polícia Judiciária waits at a Portela gate on the eighth, MLAT in hand.

The mound stands. The borrow-pit waits. The federation does not break the ground.

The Mound of Cahokia is Book Four of The Island of Bones - a nine-volume Caribbean treasure-hunt thriller about a chain of keepers who have been carrying a single bearing across five hundred years, and the institutions that have spent five centuries trying to bury it.

The bearing reads.

The ground keeps its own counsel.