by David Wood
Maxie frowned but decided to let the rare display of pique pass without comment. “Tell them to take a look at a place called Villa Gessell.”
“It’s in Argentina,” Alex added, “just up the coast from Mar del Plata.”
“Got it. I just have to follow up on this lead first.”
“Dane, you need to move this to priority one.” When Maddock did not reply, Maxie moved the phone away and saw, displayed on the small screen, the words, “Call ended.”
He stared at the phone for a few seconds before putting it away. He understood Maddock’s frustration, even sympathized with it, but he really didn’t have the time or patience to hold his platoon leader’s hand. Personal tragedy notwithstanding, Maddock was still part of a team and needed to buck up and play his part. He decided to give his subordinate a few minutes before calling him back for a more pointed conversation without an audience.
He turned to Alex again. “I’m afraid that’s all we can do for now. I appreciate you bringing this to me.”
“Of course. I hope it helps you guys find whatever it is you’re looking for.”
She stood, preparing to leave. Anticipating her, Maxie bounded to his feet and offered his hand. “I’ll do my best to keep you updated,” he said. “Assuming of course that I’m kept in the loop, which...”
He trailed off as he glimpsed something from the corner of his eye. In the instant he had risen from the bench and turned to Alex, the man with the camera, whom he had earlier noticed studying the bronze plaques, had shot a quick but meaningful glance in their direction. He had looked away just as quickly, returning his attention to one of the bronze relief images that adorned the exterior of the low wall that encompassed the Granite Sea. It happened so fast that Maxie’s natural impulse was to dismiss it as a coincidence. Despite years of driving a desk, his training as a Naval Special Warfare operator told him to ignore that impulse.
Alex sensed the shift in his demeanor. “What’s wrong?”
He saw the tendons in her neck tighten, signaling that she was about to turn her head. “Don’t look,” he said, his voice low but calm. “Don’t react. We’re being watched.”
She forced herself to relax, nodded and maintained eye contact with him. Her hands fell loosely to her sides, closer to where he assumed her sidearm was holstered. “Where?”
“My three o’clock,” Maxie said. “Twenty meters. Caucasian male, dressed like a—”
Before he could finish the description, the subject’s head snapped up and swiveled in their direction again, and this time there was no mistaking his intent. His right hand darted into the camera bag.
“Down!” Maxie shouted, reflexively tackling Alex to the ground.
His instincts did not let him down. A fraction of a second later, he heard the muted jackhammer report of a suppressed machine pistol, and the slightly louder noise of rounds striking the wall behind them, just a few feet to the left of where they had been sitting a moment before. Maxie felt something strike his back. Not a bullet, he decided, but a fragment of stone, blasted loose by one of the rounds.
Alex had dragged her pistol—a Glock 23—from its holster and now rolled away from the incoming fire, coming up in a kneeling stance. She held the small gun before her in a two-handed grip, looking for the target, but the man had disappeared from view, ducking down behind the low wall.
Probably reloading, Maxie thought. The shooter had probably burned through an entire magazine with that one burst, which suggested either poor fire discipline, or more likely, that he had plenty more in the bag.
Some part of him—the part that had been cultivated in the Naval Academy and refined through years of leadership—was coldly assessing the situation. The gunman’s decision to start shooting seemed hasty—a reaction to being discovered, perhaps—and yet the very fact that he had been packing a suppressed machine-pistol bore testimony to his capacity for violence.
The shooter had preceded him to the rendezvous, which suggested he had probably been covertly watching Alex, which could have meant that Bones’ decision to involve her in the search for the U-boat had unwittingly placed her in the crosshairs. But then again, Alex was a federal investigator, and almost certainly had enemies of her own.
Either way, this seemed like a fight they couldn’t win. He grabbed Alex by the shoulder. “We need to get to cover.”
She looked at him, her eyes flashing with anger, and he could tell that she had no intention of backing down from this fight.
“Alex!” he yelled. “Look around you!”
To her credit, she did, and almost immediately divined the meaning behind his plea. They were the gunman’s target—there seemed no question about that—but there were more than a dozen people milling about the memorial plaza, only a few of whom seemed to have grasped that they were practically in the middle of a firefight. Most remained oblivious, or worse, curious. All of them were innocent civilians, and potential collateral damage from the shooter with his fully automatic weapon or from Alex’s Glock.
Motion caught his eye. The gunman was back up, stabbing the extended barrel of his weapon toward them. Alex responded by aiming her weapon at him. She didn’t fire a shot, but her actions succeeded in causing the man to duck his head down, though not before he squeezed the trigger, unleashing another burst that stitched an arc across the Granite Sea.
Something plucked at Maxie’s right sleeve just above the elbow. The pain came a moment later. He ignored it, and grabbed Alex by the arm, dragging her toward the end of the wall. She offered almost no resistance, which struck him as odd until he took a second look and saw why.
Alex had gone rigid. She was clutching her chest with her left hand. A red stain was visible through her clawed fingers, slowly spreading across the fabric of her blouse. There was another stain, this one shaped like a handprint, on her arm. The blood was his. Under his uniform jacket, his shirt sleeve was soaked through from his own bullet wound.
Alex’s head came up, her eyes meeting his. Her teeth were clenched in a rictus of agony, but she was still clinging to consciousness. And her weapon.
She thrust it toward him.
He took it, his fingers curling naturally enough around the Glock’s small pistol grip. His fingers were tingling, losing feeling. He switched the weapon to his left hand. In his younger days, before he’d gotten promoted out of operational status, he’d become proficient shooting with either hand. It was a perishable skill and he was out of practice, but accuracy wasn’t as important right now as being able to break the five-pound trigger. He quickly checked left and right to make sure the gunman wasn’t trying to flank their position, and then, with the Glock at the ready, risked a peek above the low wall. There was no sign of the gunman. Either he was also ducking down or, more likely, he had broken contact and melted away.
Maxie pointed the gun skyward and fired three shots.
He eased back down and placed the pistol on the stone pavement next to Alex. Her normally golden skin had gone a ghastly pale. She was losing blood and probably in shock. He awkwardly tore open her blouse, exposing the wound, about an inch above the top of her bra, and pressed his left fist against the bloody hole. His right hand was numb, useless.
The discharge accomplished what the suppressed rounds from the machine-pistol could not. Even before the echoes of the reports died away, cries of alarm went up and people began fleeing the area. But clearing the plaza was only a blessed side-effect. Maxie’s real intent was to alert the authorities. FBI Headquarters were only a block away. Maxie had no doubt that help would be arriving soon.
Soon enough to save Alex? God only knew.
SIXTEEN
Germany
Maxie had not been mistaken in identifying Maddock’s annoyance during their phone conversation, but he had misread its underlying cause. Maddock, who had received the call well after midnight, had been speaking in front of an audience. He, Leopov and Petrov, were sharing a hotel room, and while the others could not hear Maxie’s side of the conver
sation, Maddock had chosen his words—and his tone—deliberately to avoid revealing too much to the others, or more precisely, to Petrov.
As Bones had intuited from Maddock’s cryptic Star Wars reference, Maddock did not completely trust that luck had been the deciding factor in their escape from Telesh’s villa. The mere fact that the Russian gangster had left them alone and unguarded in their makeshift prison was suspicious enough to make him think that Telesh might be tracking them somehow in the hope that they would lead him to Lia Markova. That was one reason for his decision to delay a reunion with the rest of the team in order to pursue the myth of Helen’s Charm across two continents.
From the ruins of Hisarlik, they had flown to Berlin to visit the Pergamon Museum, where Priam’s Treasure had been displayed until World War II. A helpful docent reiterated the tale of how the artifacts had come to the museum, and subsequently been lost, but was not able to provide any deeper insights. When the Red Army had seized the treasure from a secure bunker under the Berlin Zoo in 1945, they had also taken all records pertaining to the collection’s provenance. The docent then suggested that, if they wished to know more about the man who had discovered the ruins and the treasure of ancient Troy, they might want to visit the Heinrich-Schliemann Museum in Ankershagen, a small town about a hundred miles to the north.
As it was already late afternoon, Maddock had decided to spend the night in Berlin and make the two-hour drive in the morning. For added security they had booked a single hotel room, and, as they had done every night since escaping Telesh’s compound, he and Leopov took turns standing watch throughout the night. Petrov had been contentedly sawing logs when Maxie’s call came in; the ringing had roused him.
Maddock’s distrust of Petrov and his fears for Lia’s safety were not however, his only reasons for balking at Maxie’s direction to come in from the cold. The truth of the matter was that Maddock’s desire to find Helen’s Charm, or at the very least, learn the truth about it, had grown tremendously since visiting Hisarlik.
Over the years, he and Bones had been involved in their share of crazy treasure hunts, and from time to time, he had even entertained the notion of making a second career of it when he retired from the Navy. The idea had never been more than just an idle fancy. The Navy—the Team—had been his life for so long that thinking about giving it up had always felt like contemplating the amputation of a limb.
Lately, not so much.
They got an early start and made the drive north in just a little over two hours, taking their time since the museum did not open until ten o’clock. Ankershagen was a sleepy, rural community, surrounded by farmland, with little to offer in the way of traveler amenities. That it was the birthplace of famed archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was the town’s sole claim to fame, even though the family had moved away during his second year of life.
The Heinrich-Schliemann Museum was situated in the farmhouse where Schliemann had been born in 1822, across the road from the church where his father, a Lutheran pastor, had preached. There was no designated parking area, so they pulled off on the roadside and proceeded down a paved path to the museum. The repurposed farmhouse was guarded by a towering, if crude, mock-up of the Trojan Horse. A flight of ladder-like stairs rose up into the beast’s barrel-shaped interior. Its tail was a playground slide.
After paying the nominal admission fee, they moved inside to examine the museum’s collection which was about as spare as Maddock expected. There were several display cases with replicas of Schliemann’s most famous discoveries—Priam’s Treasure, the Mask of Agamemnon—and informational placards in German, English and French describing important biographical details. The walls were hung with portraits and photographs of the museum’s namesake. The earliest pictures showed a bookish man with a bold, sweeping mustache, wearing a top hat and fur coat. Later images revealed his slight build and thinning hair. No one would have mistaken Schliemann for Indiana Jones.
Maddock’s attention was drawn to a photograph that did not feature Heinrich Schliemann but rather an unsmiling, though not unattractive young woman in a high-necked dress, wearing the golden diadem and necklaces that had, if Schliemann was to be believed, once belonged to Helen of Troy.
Maddock didn’t need to read the card next to the picture to know who it was. “Schliemann’s wife.”
“His second wife, actually,” intoned a heavily accented voice from behind them. It was the museum staffer who had sold them their tickets, a pleasant looking middle-aged man with ruddy features and big, weather-worn hands. He looked more like a farmer than a curator. The little plastic badge over his shirt pocket read simply: Lars.
“Forgive my intrusion,” Lars went on. “We are slow today and nothing passes the time like conversation. It would please me to answer any questions you may have.”
Maddock resisted the impulse to simply blurt out the most pressing question, and instead grasped the thread Lars had offered. “What happened to his first wife?”
“First wife was Russian,” supplied Petrov. “From St. Petersburg.”
Lars nodded. “That’s correct. Her name was Ekaterina. Henry—that’s what he preferred to be called—moved to Russia in 1844 as an agent for an import/export company. He learned to speak Russian fluently in a matter of just a few weeks—he had genius for learning languages—and became a Russian citizen. He was quite successful for many years, but in 1850, his brother Ludwig died in California while prospecting for gold. Henry traveled there to pay his respects, and soon realized that there was a great business opportunity in the gold fields. He started a bank in Sacramento, and in six months, earned his first fortune.”
There was no mistaking the admiration in Lars’ tone. “He returned to Russia as a wealthy gentleman, and not long after met and married Ekaterina. They had three children together, but the marriage was not a happy one. He continued to have great success in business however, and was able to retire at just thirty-six years of age to pursue his true passion—archaeology. You see, even as a young boy, Henry was obsessed with the story of the Trojan war. He learned Greek so that he could read Homer in the original language.”
Petrov raised an eyebrow at this assertion. “Original language was not modern Greek,” he murmured.
Lars, evidently missing the aside, continued speaking. “He studied the ancient texts and from them, and with help from a friend—an Englishman named Calvert—identified Hisarlik as the site of ancient Troy. While he was waiting for permission to begin excavating, he decided that he needed a partner and companion who was as familiar with Homer as he was. Since Ekaterina would not grant him a divorce in Russia, in 1869, he returned to America, where the law permitted him to divorce her, and then asked his friend, Theokletos Vimpos, Archbishop of Athens, to find him a Greek woman to marry. He was quite insistent that his new wife be a Greek woman, conversant in the works of the poet. Vimpos submitted pictures of three candidates, including his niece.” He gestured to the photograph. “Sophia Engastromenos. Henry immediately fell in love with her, though he was concerned about the difference in age. He was thirty years her elder.”
Leopov’s forehead wrinkled as she made a quick calculation and then her eyebrows shot up, aghast. “She was just a teenager.”
“Seventeen years old,” confirmed Lars.
Maddock was similarly dismayed. “So in addition to being a grave robber, he also robbed the cradle.” He winced as he spoke the words; it sounded like something Bones might say, though perhaps more colorfully.
Lars raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Do not rush to judgment. It was a different time.” He fixed his gaze on Maddock. “Remember, just a few years before, your own countrymen fought a war for the right to keep human beings as property.” He let the accusation hang for a moment before continuing. “In Greek culture, at the time, it was customary for parents to arrange marriage of their children, and Sophia was of age. The bride’s family was expected to provide a substantial dowry. The Engastromenos family had a very successful drapery
business for many years, but had fallen on hard times and Sophia’s prospects for finding a husband were not good. Then along comes a wealthy foreigner who asks nothing more than a woman with whom he can discuss Greek history and mythology.”
“Right,” said a still-skeptical Leopov, eyeing the portrait of the woman adorned with the Jewels of Helen. “He only loved her for her mind.”
“By all accounts, she grew to love him, and there is no doubt that she did assist with the excavations in Troy and Mycenae. She was there with him when he discovered those—” He gestured to the display case containing the replica of the diadem. “And helped him move the pieces off site to prevent them from being stolen.”
“I thought that story about her smuggling them in her shawl was just a myth,” Leopov countered. “Wasn’t she in Athens when he found the treasure?”
“Attending her father’s funeral,” confirmed Petrov with a nod.
The words “father’s funeral” triggered a pang of grief for Maddock, but he hid it behind a stoic mask.
Lars shook his head. “That is not correct. Sophia’s father died in early May of 1873. Sophia did travel to Athens, but returned to Hisarlik shortly thereafter at the urging of her husband. On May 14, he wrote to her, encouraging her to return to Hisarlik to find solace in their shared work. She left the next day. She was most definitely there on May 31, when they discovered the golden treasure outside the walls of Priam’s palace.”
“The treasure was outside the palace?”
“Yes. Under a bronze shield. There were the metal clasps and handles of a chest, but the wood had burned. Henry surmised that a party of soldiers may have been trying to flee the sacking of the palace with the treasures, but were forced to leave it behind.” He paused a moment and then returned to the earlier subject. “May 31, 1873 was Saturday, which is why they had the site to themselves. They worked through the night to clean and remove the treasure which they packed in with Sophia’s clothing. I suspect that is what Henry meant when he jokingly said that they smuggled the treasure out under Sophia’s shawl.”