by Alex Archer
After a century and a half I certainly hope not, Annja thought.
“Do you have any idea what the object was that Captain Parker placed into the abbot’s safekeeping?”
Annja was thinking it might be another letter, or maybe a journal. A journal would be ideal, as it might describe in more detail what was going on.
But Abbot Deschanel’s answer surprised her.
“It was a wooden box. About the size of a microwave.”
A box?
“Do you, by chance, still have the box?”
Then, at last, Deschanel showed some of her own excitement.
“I do,” he said, his grin spreading from ear to ear. “And because you have come asking for Captain Parker’s legacy in his name, you’ve allowed us to fulfill our vow to him. This is a blessed day indeed!”
He rose, saying, “I’ll just be a moment,” and slipped out the door, leaving Annja waiting anxiously for his return.
It took less than ten minutes. When Deschanel came back through the door, he was carrying a small chest. It was about the size of an old-fashioned bread box and was covered with a thick patina of dirt and dust, as if it had been stored in the back of a closet for some time.
It’s probably been sitting in the same place for the past hundred years, Annja thought.
He set it down on top of his desk and gestured for her to open it.
This is it. This is what you came here for.
She could feel her pulse racing, could hear her heart pounding in her ears as she realized that the box in front of her might hold the answers to several questions. What had Parker been doing in Paris? Why the letter of introduction from President Davis? What, exactly, had happened to the missing Confederate treasure?
With hands that only slightly trembled, Annja opened the chest.
Inside was a small lacquered box the size of a jewelry case.
She recognized it immediately.
It was a Japanese puzzle box.
“May I?” she asked.
The abbot nodded. “Be my guest,” he said.
Reaching inside, she drew out the puzzle box and set it down next to the crate. As she did so the slip of paper that had been stuck to the bottom of the box came loose and drifted to the floor.
Picking it up, Annja saw that it was a short note in an unfamiliar hand.
Sykes,
Time is of the essence so I must be brief. The FotS want more than Davis is willing to grant and the negotiations have turned ugly. I fear for my life. This box contains everything you need to locate the specie stolen from the wagon train. I trust you will see that it reaches the right hands if I do not return.
Faithfully,
Will
She’d been right! Thanks to her research earlier that morning, she knew that Parker’s second in command had been a man named Jonathan Sykes, so there seemed little doubt now that the remains did, indeed, belong to the Confederate captain as she’d suspected.
It was the contents of the rest of the note that really caught her attention, however.
Specie, she knew, was a term used to describe money in the form of coins, usually gold or silver, that provided the backing for paper money issued by the government. Parker had to be referring to the money from the treasury. The wagon train he’d driven out of Danville had been ambushed by brigands; his official report had listed the gold as stolen.
If the note was to be believed, then Parker clearly knew exactly where the treasure was, which made the official report a bold-faced lie.
She didn’t have to think about it very long to come up with a handful of reasons for his doing so, either. Perhaps he’d been ordered to fake the treasury’s disappearance. Perhaps he’d taken it upon himself to protect it during the hectic days at the end of the war. Or maybe he’d simply taken advantage of the opportunity to secure a future for himself and his family for when the war was over.
Any way it happened, the answer to a historic mystery was about to be solved.
All she had to do was open the puzzle box.
She thought about what she knew about puzzle boxes. Originating in the Hakone region of Japan in the late eighteenth century, puzzle boxes, or disentanglement boxes as they were sometimes known, were exquisitely crafted works of art that could only be opened by following a certain sequence of movements. Some were made up of multiple sliding pieces that, when moved, unlocked other pieces, which in turn released a side panel of the box, and so on, until the top was finally released, allowing the box to be fully opened. Others required putting pressure on certain locations in a specific sequence, which then released various panels that eventually unlocked the box. An individual box might require as few as two or as many as sixty-six moves to open it.
The trick, she knew, was finding the right starting point.
She picked up the box and examined it carefully. It was made of a highly polished hardwood—linden or perhaps cherry—and was lacquered to a fine finish. A mosaic of different colored squares covered the top, but the sides were free of decoration of any kind. Nor did it show even the slightest hint of any seams.
For all practical purposes, it looked like a solid block of wood.
Annja knew better, though.
She examined the mosaic, looking for a pattern that might provide a hint as to where to begin. When that failed, she began to press the colored squares in a variety of common patterns. Four corners. A cross in the center. Crisscrossing the middle.
Nothing.
She glanced up at the abbot, who was watching her curiously.
“It’s a puzzle box,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “In order to open it, you have to follow a certain sequence of motions.”
He nodded sagely. “And how to do you know that you are on the right path?” he asked.
“You don’t.”
“Ah, so the box mirrors life, no?”
She supposed that it did, though that didn’t help her get it open.
Parker hadn’t left any instructions telling Sykes how to open the box, so she knew that the key had to be something they both would have understood. Maybe a prearranged symbol or word? Maybe something that Sykes would associate with Parker, something that he would think of right away?
She ran through the obvious list of ideas—names of their wives or children, birth dates, their current ranks in the Navy. None of them worked.
She looked at the layout of the colored tiles on the lid again. The checkerboard was fourteen squares wide by eight squares high. The fifth and tenth vertical row were slightly darker than the others, subtly dividing the mosaic into three even sections four squares across by eight squares deep.
Three even sections.
Her thought from a few minutes earlier came back to her.
It had to be something Sykes would immediately think of, something that was important to both of them.
Three even sections.
Could it be that easy?
Reaching out with one finger, she pressed firmly on the squares in the first section and traced the letter C.
A sharp click sounded.
“Did you hear that?” the abbot asked, excitement in his voice.
She had. It meant she was on the right track.
She did the same thing in the center section, but this time traced an S rather than a C.
Another click.
Grinning now, she moved her hand to the final section and traced the letter A.
CSA. The Confederate States of America.
Something near and dear to both of them.
The square in the exact center of the mosaic slid aside with a sharp snap, revealing a depression beneath.
It was just large enough to fit the average person’s finger.
Intrigued now, the abbot reached out a hand, intending to press the location, but Annja pulled the box out of his reach.
“Wait,” she said. “It could be booby-trapped.”
She’d run into more than a few of those in her years as an archaeologist
and wouldn’t have put it past the box maker to build a trigger into an obvious location like this one.
It would be a good way to lose a finger.
She snagged a pencil off the abbott’s desk and used the eraser end to poke the center of the depression.
Nothing happened.
She tried again.
Still nothing.
“Perhaps the pencil isn’t wide enough?” the abbot suggested.
She tried a third time, but with two pencils held together rather than one.
The box just sat there, silently gloating at them.
After everything she’d been through so far, there was no way was she going to let a stupid wooden box beat her.
She bent over, closer to the table, and stared at the depression in the lid. From that angle it was clear that rather than being smooth, as she’d originally suspected, it was beveled in a simple pattern.
It looked familiar somehow.
She stared at it for a long moment, trying to give it shape and form, to understand what the object that would fit into it might look like.
Suddenly she got it.
“Yes!” she cried, startling the abbott. Getting up from the table she went over to her backpack and dug in the pocket for the envelope containing the ring she’d found during her sojourn into the catacombs the night before.
Parker’s ring.
With the break in at the museum, she hadn’t had the chance to properly catalog and store it. In fact, she’d almost forgotten she still had it.
Taking it out of the glassine envelope she’d stored it in, Annja held the ring up to the light and examined the stone. It appeared to have the same basic shape as the depression in the box. And it was the right size, too.
Annja would bet anything that both Parker and Sykes wore identical rings!
She stepped up to the table and without hesitation pressed the stone atop the ring into the depression in the lid of the puzzle box.
A sudden clicking and whirring erupted from the box, like the sound a windup toy makes when it has been released. Panels across the surface of the box popped open, twisted and turned with the help of mechanical gears buried deep inside the contraption, and these in turn opened others. It took a good three minutes for the box to stop rearranging itself on the table in front of them, and by the time it was finished Annja could see a definite crease where the top separated from the rest.
When she was reasonably confident that the box wasn’t going to start rearranging itself again, she reached out and separated the two pieces.
Inside, in a velvet-lined chamber, another envelope rested much like the one she’d taken from the pocket of Parker’s sack coat.
Just to be safe, she poked that with a pencil as well before reaching in and picking it up.
Inside was a single sheet of stationery.
In the cellars of the wine god
Lies a key without a lock
That will lead you to the place
Where the two mouths meet
There you’ll find the Lady
Left alone and in distress
You must secure her when you’re able
And take Ewell’s Rifle from her crest
Take the rifle to the place of Lee’s greatest failure
Where the Peacock freely roamed
Find the spot where my doppelgänger rests
eternal
Deep beneath the loam
Disturb him in his slumber
Wake him from his rest
To find that which you are seeking
Use the key to unlock the chest
Another puzzle. Annja was seriously starting to dislike this guy.
“Not what you were expecting?” the abbot asked. Grimacing, Annja replied, “No, not quite. I’d been hoping for the answer but this is just another piece of the puzzle.”
“But one more than you had before, no?”
The abbot was right; it was one more piece of information than she’d had before. For that she should be thankful.
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him. “You’re right. And I’d do well to remember it.”
She thanked him for his time and asked if it would be all right if she kept the letter.
“Please, take the box, as well. It is yours now—my duty as caretaker has been fulfilled.”
They put the puzzle box back inside the chest it had been stored in and wiped down the chest with a towel the abbot fetched from another room. Once she could carry it without getting her clothes covered with dust, she shook hands with the abbot, picked up the box and followed the monk he’d summoned to lead her back to the front door.
As she got in her car, Annja was full of excitement over what she’d learned. The trip had been well worth the drive. With the information she now had, she could conclude that Parker had been in Paris to carry out some kind of secret negotiation on behalf of President Davis. Not only that, but she could also make a pretty good case that the money from the Confederate treasury hadn’t been stolen by brigands at all, but had actually been rerouted by Parker himself to assist with the mission assigned to him. It was the kind of discovery that could make someone a superstar in the field of archaeology practically overnight and Annja wasn’t at all displeased by the idea. People recognized her on the street thanks to her hosting gig on Chasing History’s Monsters, but she’d much rather gain the respect of her academic peers than the adoration of the viewing audience any day of the week.
Then again, if she found the treasure itself, she could have both!
She was so distracted by thoughts of the future that she nearly ran into a group of six monks walking behind her car as she backed out of the parking space. Thankfully, they were paying more attention than she was and were able to skip out of the way quickly enough. Embarrassed, she gave a little wave of apology, drove back to the gate and headed down the mountain.
She’d been driving for about ten minutes when something started nagging at her. Something about the monks she’d nearly run over. It was right there, on the edge of her awareness. She reached for it…only to have it slip away.
The feeling left her for a moment and she’d convinced herself that it was just a result of her lingering sense of embarrassment for having almost run them over, when the sense that something was terribly wrong overcame her again. The image of her sword flashed before her eyes, as if urging her to make the connection. She concentrated, trying to make the feeling come further into focus. Something about the monks…
She had it!
The scene unfurled before her again on the movie screen of her mind—the monk skipping back away from her car as she got too close, the hem of his dark brown robe riding up over his feet, revealing the pair of dark black boots he wore beneath.
All of the monks she’d seen inside the monastery had been wearing hand-woven sandals.
She slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop. Fortunately, there was no one behind her. As soon as the car had stopped moving forward, she spun the wheel and stomped on the gas pedal, practically sending her little borrowed car into convulsions as the tires spun and she took off back in the direction she’d just come from.
A terrible feeling unfurled in her gut, a sense that some invisible line had been crossed and that she was already too late to stop whatever it was from happening. She quickly found herself urging the car to go faster as she raced up the mountain road at dangerous speeds.
12
Annja rounded the final curve and the sprawling towers of the monastery came into view, the brick blooming in the sunshine. For a moment she thought she’d been mistaken, that her concerns had all been for nothing, but then she saw the smoke billowing out of one of the upper-story windows and knew that she’d been horribly, terribly right.
She drove through the still-open gates, skidded to a stop in the middle of the circular drive and was up and out of the car before the engine had even stopped idling. As she rushed up the steps she willed her sword into existence. Its familiar weight was a reassuring
presence as her hand closed around its hilt.
One glance was all it took to know that the man in front of her was dead. The bullet hole in his forehead stood out starkly against his pale flesh, but did little to hide his features and it was easy for her to recognize him as Brother Samuel.
Someone was going to pay for this, she vowed.
She slipped inside the door and stood in the hallway Samuel had led her through a short time earlier. The office doors on either side of the hall were standing open but as she made her way down its length, cautiously glancing inside each room as she passed, she found that all the rooms were empty.
The door at the far end of the corridor was closed but not latched, so she used the fingers of one hand to ease it open slightly. From where she stood Annja could see part of the cloister and a stretch of the covered walkway that ran perpendicular to her position. The body of another monk lay sprawled across the stone pavement, a dark stain spreading beneath him.
A gunshot rang out, breaking the oppressive silence that lay over the place like a funeral shroud, and Annja jumped at the sound. It was very close. Just beyond the door, in fact, in the section of the cloister she couldn’t yet see.
She gave a push with her hand and sent the door gliding open on well-oiled hinges, revealing the scene in the open space of the cloister just beyond.
A monk in the now-familiar brown robe and sandals was dragging himself on his stomach across the green grass, leaving a trail of bright red blood in his wake from the bullet wound in his leg. Behind him stalked another, similarly dressed individual, but this one was wearing combat boots instead of sandals and carried a 9 mm automatic pistol in his hand. Even as Annja watched, the second man sighted along the length of his arm and shot the wounded monk in the other leg.