“Aye,” said Morgan. “Very much so.”
As Elena had predicted, they would reach Valletta Harbor at Malta without incident. The weather remained fair, the winds favorable, and the ship made good time. Gordon was an old sailor, and had much experience on yachts and other sailing vessels. So he took to the situation with eager energy, and was soon much endeared by the local crew. It was as if they could perceive he was a man of some authority, for MacRae acted as though he was used to giving orders, and to the locals, it was clear that he was the man in charge of this little troop of visitors.
Elena spent a good deal of time in the Master’s cabin, finding that her presence on deck became a distraction for the crew, who kept looking her way, and speaking to one another in low whispers. They saw few ships in the transit, and the sight of Valletta was a thrilling moment, particularly for Captain MacRae.
“Look at the place,” he said, eyes alight. The city had a golden hue, from the yellowish stone that made up many of the buildings. “It’s like we were inside a movie. Do you realize we are the only humans to see the harbor this way in the last couple hundred years? Look there, see that star shaped fort? That’s Fort Saint Elmo, first built by the Knights of the Order of Saint John in 1551. It protected this place from the Ottoman Turks until the Knight left in 1798, and Napoleon thought to take the place two years later in 1800. The locals rebelled and, with our help, showed the French the door. Since then, Malta has been a British colony. The Maltese were only too happy to sign on with us, particularly since they knew Bonaparte was out to take the place.”
“We’ll want to see Alexander Ball,” said Elena. “Our contract here is safely concluded, but this is the very ship that sails for Cerigo, and we need to make sure we can stay on board when that happens. Ball was much liked by the Maltese, and instrumental in bringing the place under British rule. He’s the one with the authority to see that we get safely to Cerigo. I’ve taken some time to question our ship’s Master. He tells me they will normally be the better part of a week off loading supplies here.”
“Who will we find at Cerigo?” asked MacRae.
“Any number of associates to Lord Elgin’s famous mission. We might find Mister William Richard Hamilton, Lord Elgin’s personal Secretary, or a Mister Giovanni Battista Lusieri, a man hired to create illustrations of the Marbles. Feodor Ivanovich was a Russian from Astrakhan that was taken on to make casts of the Marbles. The Reverend Philip Hunt was Lord Elgin’s Chaplain. He’s the man who drafted the so called ‘firman,’ a letter granting permission for the excavations to proceed at the Acropolis, and he interpreted his permission to view and document those artifacts quite loosely. I suppose we’re here now because of his… ingenuity.”
“Strange that none of them had any idea of what they were doing,” said Morgan. “No one knew anything about this hidden key.”
“Apparently not,” said Elena. “Frankly, I’m not sure we know what we’re doing either, other than to seize this chance as the only way we might possibly retrieve that key.”
“Which is yet another mystery,” said Morgan. “Oh, we know what they can do—secure the entrances to these time rifts. Yet I have to note that this rift was hidden in plain sight. There was no mysterious door to be opened, and nothing for a key to unlock. Yet here I’ve been told that the very key we’re after had geographic coordinates engraved upon it that pointed directly to St. Michael’s Cave. So what are we missing here?”
“A good point,” said Gordon. “I’m willing to speculate it has something to do with that box we left on the ship.”
“That’s my thinking as well,” said Elena. “The box was capable of moving the entire ship! That action was engaged by the simple insertion of the key I had, a key that did open a mysterious door beneath Delphi.”
“It did two things,” said MacRae. “It led us to Delphi, and then fit into that box, hand in glove, and brought us to the 1940s. You said you came to believe it was simply to find this other key, but how would we have possibly known about it? It was pure happenstance that we even learned it existed.”
“Not entirely,” said Elena. “The apertures in that box were clearly engineered to hold keys. They were clear evidence that other keys existed—seven, to be precise.”
“For what purpose?” asked Morgan.
“That’s part of the quest we’re on,” said Elena. “Once we get our hands on this key, perhaps we’ll know more.”
“What would we possibly learn?” said Morgan again. “This other fellow, Professor Dorland, he knew of this key—even claimed he once had it in his possession. Now, the man seemed clever enough. Yet he didn’t seem to learn anything more about this business.”
“Well here’s what we do know, said Elena. “We’ve a box that does something pretty damn amazing when I insert the key I was bequeathed. I was led to the site where we recovered that box by specific orders I received from the Watch. That was a secret group within the Royal Navy established by Admiral Tovey, and within that box, I find a note from him as well.”
“Well then why didn’t you ask him about it and be done with all this mystery?”
“Of course I asked him,” said Elena, giving Morgan those wide eyes. “He knew nothing about it—at least at this time. Perhaps Tovey doesn’t come into knowledge of the box for years. We can’t think about this in a linear fashion. We found the box in 2021, and it brought us to the 1940s. Whether we were meant to or not, we happened to learn of this key associated with Saint Michael’s Cave, and found ourselves in a perfect position to retrieve it—until the Germans complicated things by sinking the Rodney .”
“I still don’t see the connections,” said Morgan, shaking his head.
“I can’t say I do either,” said Elena, trying to be sympathetic. “Let me put it this way. It’s a puzzle, to be sure, but if we are to solve it, first we have to collect all the pieces. There are seven apertures, and I’m betting there are seven keys. We have two in hand, and this one will be the third.”
“The Box,” said MacRae quietly. “The first key moved us to the 1940s. I’m willing to bet that the second and third will move us somewhere else….”
The other two looked at him. It made perfect sense. Elena had once thought the very same thing, that the box was capable of moving anything in its immediate vicinity through time, and that each key would lead to a different point on the continuum. But why? This was what she voiced now.
“Yes,” she said. “Use a different key in that box, and we might end up somewhere else. I could have tested the proposition with the Key I received from Tovey—the one Fedorov gave to Admiral Volsky to deliver.”
“Fedorov? That young Russian Captain?” Morgan raised an eyebrow. “How did he come by it?”
“I was told it was given to him, by that older gentleman he introduced to us at the Alexandria conference—Kamenski. No, that isn’t correct. Fedorov told me he simply found it on the nightstand, in the quarters the Director occupied onboard that ship—Kirov .”
“I was wondering how the Russians might figure in all of this. Could it be that ship came here to look for this key, just as we did?”
“To be honest, we had no idea we were coming here to look for anything at all,” said Elena. “No, I don’t think the Russians sent Kirov here deliberately. Fedorov said it was started by an accident in the Norwegian Sea, and I believe him.”
“Yet you say he found the key in the Director’s quarters aboard ship?”
“Correct, and this Kamenski fellow simply vanished.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” said MacRae.
“Nor I,” said Morgan. “Do you know who Kamenski was, Miss Fairchild? Well I do, because the two of us were in the same business—intelligence. Kamenski was a former Deputy Director of the KGB. If he had this key, then the Russians know more than you might believe. I’m still suspicious. Where did he find it? How long did he have it in his possession? Why would he leave something of such importance simply lying about on a night
stand?”
“Well,” said Elena, “when we get back, we’ll look up this Fedorov and you can run that by him. All I can tell you is what I’ve learned. How Tovey figures in, and the Watch I served, remains one little mystery here, and the Russian connection is another. The whole thing will likely end up being seven mysteries in an equally mysterious box, but we can only solve them by walking this path. For now, look out there at that harbor, gentlemen. That’s Valletta in 1804, and here we are. It’s damn amazing! I think we’ve more than enough on our hands now without trying to put everything together and see the big picture. We’ve got to simply focus on this mission, get our hands on that key, and then get ourselves safely back to St. Michael’s Cave.”
“Aye,” said Morgan. “Agreed. But I’ll take your advice when we do get back. I want to see this Captain Fedorov and learn what he knows. And I want to know why a highly placed former officer in the KGB, from our time, was cruising aboard that phantom Russian battlecruiser, and with one of the bloody keys in his pocket. And I want to know where he’s gotten himself to, and what he meant by leaving the damn key on that nightstand. These keys go places you say? I wonder where that would take us if we give it a twist in that box?”
“Something tells me we may find that out before this is resolved,” said Elena. “So let’s do the job here first, and see where that leads us.”
Chapter 32
It would be a long month before they would ever get passage to Cerigo. The Lady Shaw Stewart was waiting for other ships to arrive at Malta to form a convoy bound for the Levant. Ship’s Master Parry finally received his orders, to sail for Cerigo with Renard as escort, but the initial leg of the voyage saw them sailing with three other ships. Eventually, the transport veered off, making for the site of the wreck of the Mentor , which was very near the small port of Avlemonas. But Mack Morgan seemed restless, pacing at times as they neared the Greek islands.
“What’s eating at you?” Elena asked him one morning.
“Just fidgeting,” he said. “Been thinking on this whole matter again, and I can’t see how we can get our hands on this key. I mean, that business about us getting to the Selene Horse while it was still submerged has gone out the window now. They’ve already retrieved all the boxes, so our men can’t do the dirty work concealed by water. So we’re back to my old argument about us mucking about with a hammer and chisel.”
“Then we’ll have to try a different approach,” said Elena.
“You know those artifacts will be guarded.”
“Probably, but who will you put your money on, Mack, a few sleepy guards, who have been standing a dull watch on old wooden cases hidden on the beach, or my three Argonauts?”
“Alright, our men can force the issue, but what then? Do we just ransack the cases until we find the one holding the Selene Horse, break into it, and have at the thing with a hammer?”
“I’d like to try a little something different,” said Elena. “I can be quite persuasive, and I think I could convince one of the men in charge of the recovery to let me have a look.”
“You’re going to tell them you’ve come all this way from the British Museum?”
“That would be a good line,” said Elena. “I could say that word came of the mishap, and I was curious to inspect the artifacts and assess their value and quality.”
“But there’s one thing still bothering me,” said Morgan. “This Dorland fellow. He claims he was aboard the Rodney , god only knows how or why. He says he had occasion to get down into the hold where the Marbles were stowed away, along with a good portion of the King’s bullion. He says he found the cases strewn about, one broken open, the base of the Selene Horse chipped, and there was this key. So…. How could we be getting our hands on it here?”
“It has to be here,” said Elena. “This date precedes any other date where the key could have been tampered with or found.”
“You misunderstand me,” said Morgan. “Aye, I grant you that the key may be here, but how do we get it if this Dorland fellow says he found it in 1941? If that’s true, then we fail here. Follow me?”
That was something that Elena had contemplated for some time. The key survived within the Selene Horse into modern times. It had been sitting there in the British Museum all along, and the custodians knew that the key existed. That had been a mystery for some time, though it was known only to a very few. It was thought to be an oddity, and never explained, she thought, until we started receiving those messages from the future, years later…. The keys were very important, they were essential, critical , and they must all be found and accounted for…
Shortly after they arrived she had come to think this whole quest for the key was her real mission here. It was out there, with the Elgin Marbles, aboard Rodney , and she was supposed to recover it. The key was right there, in the base of the Selene Horse…. She was already aware of two versions of that history, and both rang true. The first was the history of the hunt for the Bismarck that she knew from her own time. The second was a similar engagement with that ship, as she and Tovey, Kirov as well, tried to save the Rodney . They had failed, Rodney went down, with the King’s bullion, the Elgin Marbles, and the key in her belly. That was the reason she was here at this very moment, to get to a place in time where they could retrieve the key before it ever saw the inside of HMS Rodney . Yet in both those histories, it clearly was loaded aboard that ship. The British museum even sent the Grey Friars over to sift through the remains of Rodney after the war when the ship was scrapped. Why would they do that, unless they knew the key had been loaded aboard Rodney in 1941? That jogged a memory of a conversation she had with Admiral Tovey…
“Most irregular,” said Tovey. “The Grey Friars sifting through the bones of old Rodney to look for this key… Well, they certainly had to know something of what they were looking for. You say the Watch learned of these keys in those strange signals you received in your time. If that is so, then how would anyone in the 1940’s know about that key, or attribute any significance to it, particularly the Franciscans!”
“Very good questions,” said Elena. “Yet this only remains perplexing when you assume that everyone alive in the here and now is native to this time. As you can see, you are presently sitting here with three people who were born long after your own death.”
“Of course!” It was Fedorov speaking now, exclaiming his surprise in English. Then he spoke quickly, and Nikolin translated. “Other time travelers! … Others may have used those holes in time.”
“Well this is quite a fine mess,” said Tovey. “People coming and going, just as they please, and fiddling with history! I knew this world was something quite different after I learned the truth about you and your ship, Mister Fedorov, but now it seems we have others involved in this whole affair, in these rift zones you speak of, coming and going like servants in and out of the back door.”
Just like this little foray, thought Elena. Yes, the Grey Friars never found the key in the remains of old Rodney , and I was told why by this professor Dorland. He claimed he found it, and Mack thinks that means we will fail to recover it here.
“Dorland found the key, but only in one version of these events,” she explained. “Then he claimed it vanished! He had it on a chain about his neck, and it disappeared.”
“You mean he lost the damn thing?”
“No, this was something a little more mysterious. He claims it simply vanished. That is clear evidence that some variation in time occurred prior to his initial discovery of the key. It’s the only explanation. He was trying to find a way to recover it himself, talking about visiting the Tubes in London where the Marbles were stored at one time, and then even suggested it might be found here. That’s where I got the idea for this mission when we learned the rift under Saint Michaels Cave led to the 1800’s.”
“Visiting the Tubes won’t work,” said Morgan, “because we know—in both these Bismarck engagements—that the key was loaded aboard Rodney . So no one got to it in the Tubes, or any time b
efore that . See my point? We’ve no reason to be here unless the key does get loaded aboard Rodney , and lost with her sinking. Yet if that is true, then there’s no way we could find the key here. That would prevent it from ever getting to Rodney . This whole thing goes ‘round and round in a circle!”
“Yet Dorland claims he had the key and it vanished. He went back to try and get aboard Rodney to fetch it again, but that mission failed too—perhaps because we find it here.” She smiled.
Each one seized upon the same reason to justify their arguments. Morgan asserted that if Dorland found the key, then they could not get to it here. Elena believed that the fact that Dorland’s key vanished meant that they did get to it here. Yet there was still the tinge of Paradox in the heart of their argument. Morgan did have one good point. If they did recover the key here, then it would never get to Rodney , nor would Dorland ever find it, or lose it. They would have no reason to ever come here, because the sinking of Rodney would not matter. The key would never be there….
She realized now that if they were successful, the first of Morgan’s objections to this mission would come into play—they would change things. She had taken great care to walk softly here. The talk of seizing a ship in Gibraltar’s harbor ended early on. Instead They had simply talked their way aboard the Lady Shaw Stewart , and here they were. No one had been harmed, and as far as she could see, no life line of anyone local to this time had been affected.
Yet the instant any of them set their hand upon this mysterious key, they would change things. This year antedated every other alteration made to the time continuum. It was 1804! This was all playing out well before Kirov ever made its first appearance and started knifing its way through the history of WWII.
Nexus Deep (Kirov Series Book 31) Page 27