by Alex Archer
That was all well and good, except for the fact that expecting the remains of a Confederate ironclad, one of only thirty such ships ever built, to still be sitting on the side of the river after all this time was ridiculous, even to someone with her sense of optimism. She’d been witness to some strange miracles in the past few years, but that was asking too much. The historical value of the vessel alone would have resulted in its being salvaged in the modern era, if it had even lasted that long.
She wasn’t willing to give up without looking into it, however. Bernard’s life might depend on it.
Maybe it’s in a museum somewhere, she thought.
A quick search in Google brought up some information on the subject.
The ship had, indeed, run aground in 1864, just as SouthernRising’s message had indicated. After the war, the Union Navy made plans to free the Marietta from its inglorious beaching in mid-1894, intending to use what scrap iron they could salvage from the wreck on other reconstruction projects. The salvage crew managed to raise the hull from the clay it had been mired in over the years, but a lack of funding kept them from transporting it north until later that fall.
Once the money had been raised, the crew returned to the site, only to be delayed once more as a category-four hurricane came roaring out of the Atlantic and rushed across most of Georgia in early October.
After several days the hurricane eventually blew over, but the damage had been done. The hulk of the Marietta had been carried away by the flooding waters of the Savannah River, never to be seen again.
“Damn it!” Annja said.
Without the ship, and Ewell’s Rifle, they were dead in the water, no pun intended.
With no better idea of what to do next, Annja sent a message to SouthernRising via the email address he’d left at the end of his newsgroup posting.
Would you happen to know if any trace of the Marietta was uncovered after the hurricane?
To her surprise, his reply was almost immediate. She must have caught him at the computer.
Check this out, he suggested, including a link to an article from The Atlanta Constitution dated six months before. The article was in reference to a University of Atlanta–funded expedition to try and locate the Diamond Jim, a famous twin-wheeled paddleboat that had sunk in 1952 in the Savannah River. During the search, the university crew had chanced upon an area of the river bottom that had “an unusually high concentration of iron.” There was some speculation in the article that the wreck might be that of a cargo barge that had gone down several years before during another period of flooding.
Annja looked at that article and in her gut she knew.
It wasn’t a barge at all.
It was the missing Marietta.
But when she suggested as much to Garin at breakfast a half hour later, he laughed.
“You can’t be serious, Annja!” he said. “A single reading of a mysterious metal anomaly in the middle of the river is your proof that the ship we’re looking for, one that vanished over a hundred years ago, is sitting there waiting for us to come and get it?”
Annja nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” She caught his gaze with her own and stared back at him with complete confidence in her conviction. “Think about it, Garin. When have you known me to be wrong about this kind of thing?”
She’d been good at tracking down lost tombs and ancient civilizations before she’d taken up the sword and ever since she’d done so she’d only gotten better. It was as if the sword helped her focus in some strange way, made her better at those things at which she already excelled.
Grudgingly, he had to admit she could be right.
“Even if that is the Marietta,” he said, “how is that going to help us? It’s been underwater for more than a century and that’s not taking into account that it was put there by a hurricane. We’ll be lucky if it isn’t scattered into a thousand pieces across the river bottom.”
“We won’t know until we look and see, now will we?” she replied.
The question was, how were they going to manage that?
23
The plan, when it came to her, sounded reasonable, but she was going to need some help getting the equipment necessary to pull it off. That meant she needed to get in touch with Doug.
She put a call in to his office and, much to her surprise, got him on the first ring. “Hi, Doug.”
“Don’t ‘Hi, Doug’ me. Why is some police inspector named Laroche calling me at all hours of the day and night looking for you, Annja?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t have any idea, would you?”
“Not particularly,” he replied.
“Well, then, he’s probably a little ticked off that I left the country, given that I’m a witness in a murder investigation.”
“Murder investigation? I thought the guy you found in the catacombs had been dead for decades?”
“He has. It wasn’t Captain Parker that I—”
Doug cut in. “Good. We can’t do a show about reanimated skeletons in the Paris catacombs if the guy’s only been dead a few years. Who would believe that?”
Annja sighed.
“The show isn’t about reanimated skeletons, Doug,” she answered patiently.
“It will be when I’m done with it,” he muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, nothing. So why is this guy chasing after you?”
Annja explained as quickly as she could about her trip to the monastery, the riddle inside the puzzle box and the savage attack on the monastery’s occupants that followed. She also told him about Professor Reinhardt’s kidnapping.
As annoying as he might sometimes be, Doug was reasonably quick on the uptake in a crisis. “So you’re trying to beat these guys to the missing treasure, in hope of bargaining with it for Reinhardt?”
“Got it in one, Doug.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Where are you now?”
“A little town called Washington, Georgia. We deciphered the first clue, which led us here. But in order to get any further, I need some equipment that I can’t get on my own.”
“So you want me to use the show’s cache, if you will, to get it for you?”
“Did you wake up on the smart side of the bed this morning, Doug?”
“That depends on who you think is going to pay for whatever it is you need.”
Annja glanced across the table at Garin. “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve got the payment issue handled. You just get me the gear.”
She could hear him moving something around on his desk, which she hoped meant he was going to write it down. It was going to be a long list.
“All right,” he said, “I’m ready.”
ON THE OTHER SIDE of town, Blaine Michaels climbed out of the back of the van in which he’s been discussing the current status of their search for the missing treasure with Professor Reinhardt. He used his handkerchief to absently wipe the blood off the knuckles of his right hand as he considered what to do next.
He had not been pleased to arrive at the plantation last night only to discover that Annja Creed and a companion had arrived before him. The prattling idiot of a Realtor hadn’t known much, but Blaine knew she was on to something, anyway. No one else would have had reason to ask about the phrase “where two mouths meet.”
Clearly, the Creed woman had made a copy of the missive containing the clues to the treasure before his men had obtained it from her vehicle. Now she was using that information to try and find the treasure for herself.
The woman doesn’t know when to quit, he thought.
Creed and Reinhardt had the same information available to them and, so far, Creed had been faster off the mark. As an American, her knowledge superseded Reinhardt’s when it came to cultural and local references. If things continued in that fashion, he’d be runner-up for the treasure and that was something that was simply unacceptable. It could not, would not, happen.
It was time he was a bit more di
rect in his response to her interference.
He took his phone out of his pocket and made a call. When it was answered, he asked, “Where are they now?”
The man sitting five tables away from Annja and Garin never looked in their direction as he replied, “The Good Day Diner on Main, between West and Stevens.”
Michaels nodded to himself. That should work quite nicely.
“All right, here’s what I want you to do.”
THEY WERE GOING TO NEED a boat if Doug managed to secure the equipment they’d requested, so Annja flagged down their waitress and asked her if she knew where they might rent one. The waitress, Sue, wasn’t certain, but she was willing to help, and inside of ten minutes she’d queried the regulars and come up with a name.
“Jimmy Mitchell,” she said, handing Annja a napkin with an address and phone number written on it. “Hank says that he rents out his fishing trawler from time to time when money’s getting low. Which, for Jimmy, is just about all the time.”
Annja didn’t know who Hank was, but she was happy enough to have a lead to work with and thanked the woman for her assistance.
“Anything for my favorite TV host!” Sue replied, winking at her. “I’m a big fan of the show.”
In all the hubbub, neither Annja nor Garin saw the man a few tables away get up and slip out the back door.
As Garin watched with a bemused expression on his face, Annja signed one of the diner’s T-shirts at Sue’s insistence, then paid the bill, leaving a generous tip in the process.
“Not a word!” she said to Garin, once they were back outside on the street. The last thing she needed was to be ribbed by him all day for the notoriety the show gave her; she was having a hard enough time dealing with it already.
Jimmy Mitchell lived in the next town over, so they decided to drive there and see if they could speak to him in person. While Mitchell might be willing to rent out his boat, Annja had a feeling that he’d be less inclined to do so to strangers and she wanted to increase their chance of success as much as possible. It was easy to say no to someone over the phone; it was harder in person.
They’d parked at a meter several yards away from the diner and headed in that direction.
Behind them, a motorcycle turned onto the end of the street and headed toward them.
Annja saw the bike make the turn out of the corner of her eye and she registered its presence in the back of her mind, but she didn’t pay any real attention to it at first. They were on a public street, after all, and vehicular traffic was to be expected, even in a quaint little town like this.
But when the driver kicked the bike into high gear, the roar of the engine cut through the mental fog like a siren, sending adrenaline pumping through her system. Time seemed to slow as she turned to her left, looking back up the street toward the oncoming traffic.
She caught sight of the biker right away, as he was now less than twenty feet away and coming on like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the war cry of his steed a steady growl as the engine spurred the bike onward.
The biker’s hand was coming up, something long and dark held securely in his grip.
Shotgun, Annja thought in the slow-motion reference of her hyperaware state, and knew instinctively that she and Garin were the target.
She had only seconds to act.
As the bike roared inexorably closer, Annja shoved backward with her left hand against Garin’s chest, sending him off balance and stumbling out of the line of fire. At the same time she spun to her right, coming around in a semicircle that would put her a foot or two to the right of where she’d been standing the moment before.
She called her sword to hand.
The weapon responded as it always did, flashing into existence in a heartbeat, the hilt suddenly there in the palm of her hand, the blade quivering like a falcon eager to strike.
Annja didn’t disappoint it.
The would-be killer had made an amateur mistake, closing the distance between himself and his targets in the hope of getting a tighter shot pattern rather than taking them out from farther away and then using a second shot to finish them off when they were no longer a threat. Annja made good use of his blunder.
As she completed her spin, she lashed up and out with the sword, the razor-sharp edge striking the barrel of the shotgun a split second before the killer pulled the weapon’s trigger.
The sound of metal rang as her sword connected with the barrel of the shotgun. Half a second later the gun went off with a thunderous boom, but by then the killer’s aim was off and the blast blew out the windshield of a nearby car rather than injuring either of its intended targets.
Annja found herself standing on the edge of the street, sword in hand, staring at the biker’s back as he accelerated away from them at high speed. Garin stepped up beside her, a look of fury on his face as he reached inside his coat as if to draw a weapon, but he must have thought better of it at the last moment for his hand came out, empty.
“Are you all right?” he asked through clenched teeth.
“Peachy,” was her reply as she watched the biker make the turn at the end of the road and disappear from sight.
With the threat now removed, Annja released her sword back into the otherwhere.
She was just in time, too, for a second later the doors to the diner burst open and Sue and several of the regulars charged out onto the street.
“Are you okay?” Sue asked, spying Annja and Garin standing near the edge of the sidewalk, next to the damaged car.
“We’re fine,” Annja said quickly. “A motorcycle just kicked up a rock unexpectedly and it shattered that windshield.” She pointed at the vehicle ahead of them, as if that were explanation enough.
“But it sounded like a gunshot,” Sue protested, glancing around as if she expected to see armed gunmen come running from around the corner of the building.
At this point Annja wouldn’t have been surprised if they did.
Thankfully, Garin was thinking more quickly than she was. “It was just a truck backfiring. Coincidence, that’s all.” He flashed a smile, which helped ease Sue’s anxiety and took her attention off the issue long enough for Annja to recover.
“Thanks again for your help,” Annja told her, and then headed off toward their car as if nothing had happened.
Inside, however, she was seething. That was the second time someone had tried to kill her since she’d agreed to help with the case. Three, if you counted the incident in the catacombs, which only an idiot would ignore at this point.
It only made her more determined than ever to be certain that whoever was after her never got their hands on the treasure.
The adrenaline dump had left her feeling worn out and tired, so Garin slid behind the wheel and let her take the passenger seat.
He started the car, paused and then said, “Thank you,” in a tone far more reserved than usual.
Annja knew what the admission had cost him—he hated to be dependent on anyone for anything—so she simply nodded and let it go. She knew he’d have done the same if their positions had been reversed, so she didn’t see what she’d done as extraordinary in any way, just necessary.
One thing was certain, that buckshot would have ripped him to shreds.
24
They decided it was prudent to get out of town as quickly as possible. If someone stumbled on the shell casing from the shotgun or noticed the pattern of holes in the hood of that car, they’d have a lot of explaining to do. As always, Annja didn’t want to waste time answering questions at the police station.
They hadn’t been on the road for more than ten minutes before Annja’s cell phone rang. A glance at the caller ID showed an unknown number.
“Hello?”
“Miss Creed?”
“Yes,” she answered. She didn’t recognize the voice.
“You’re intruding in something that’s not your business, Miss Creed. I suggest you take recent events as a warning and stop while you’re ahead.”
; “Who is this?”
Garin was looking at her curiously, so she mouthed “the Order” at him and put the phone on speaker.
“What you are searching for belongs to me. If you continue to interfere, I’ll be forced to take more radical measures.”
Like trying to kill us isn’t radical enough? she thought.
Annja decided she didn’t have anything to gain by playing dumb so she went on the offensive instead.
“Yeah? Perhaps next time the Order will send a killer who can actually shoot straight. Tell you what, you give it your best shot. I’ll be here waiting.”
The caller, whoever he was, actually chuckled. “They said you were smart, Miss Creed, but I’m having a hard time seeing that. Perhaps this will raise your IQ a few points.”
There was a pause and then another voice came on the line.
“Annja?”
It was Bernard. Or at least she thought it was. It sounded like he was speaking through swollen lips and possibly a broken nose.
“Do what they say, Annja. It isn’t worth—”
The sound of something heavy hitting flesh interrupted whatever it was Bernard was trying to say. It came again, and again, and then there was silence. “Bernard? Bernard!”
The other voice came back on the line. “I’m sorry, Miss Creed, but Professor Reinhardt isn’t able to come to the phone at the moment.”
Clenching her free hand into a fist, Annja fought to keep from screaming into the phone. “If you’ve hurt him, so help me I’m going to—”
“I don’t think so, Miss Creed. You’re not the one calling the shots here, I am. I’ll say it one more time. Stay out of my business or both you and Professor Reinhardt are going to regret it.”
The line went dead.
Into the silence, Annja said, “That is a dead man.”
Garin, who had been quiet until now, finally spoke up. “I take it that means you have no intention of turning back now?”
“Hell, no!” she exclaimed. “It’s more important than ever that we get possession of the treasure, and quickly, or we’ll be too late to help Bernard.”
