Cradle of Solitude

by Alex Archer

  Typical Garin.

  In the same language, she replied. “And that’s just about what I’d expect from a bore like yourself. Shall we do this all night?”

  Garin laughed, a deep baritone that filled the room with his pleasure.

  “Always the feisty one,” he said, switching back to English. He held up his hands, palms out. “I surrender, Annja. You win. Please, sit down. We have a lot to talk about.”

  She did as he asked, taking a seat on the couch opposite where he sat and curled her legs up underneath her. The room was furnished in post-modern minimalist, it seemed—all black and chrome functionality with little that wasn’t absolutely needed. The couch, however, proved to be surprisingly comfortable.

  Garin gave her a frank look for a long moment and then answered her original question. “I was at the Cradle of Solitude because of you, Annja.”

  She raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything, waiting for him to expand on his remark.

  “As I’m sure you realize, information is power and much of Dragontech’s success comes from the fact that we have greater access to more detailed information than our competitors.”

  Or your enemies, she thought.

  “We monitor a wide variety of communication channels through several different processes, looking for certain words or phrases that can give us a leg up in our business dealings. After you came along and claimed the sword, your name was one of the terms I asked our monitors to watch for. As the emergency response lines are one of the frequencies we monitor, when you gave your name to the 1-1-2 operator this afternoon, the call was flagged and sent to my attention.”

  So that’s how he always seems to keep tabs on me, she thought.

  “No sooner had word of your call been relayed to me than we intercepted another transmission, this one from a cell phone tower in Paris, which also mentioned you by name. That was a tape of that call I played for you earlier.”

  Annja suddenly had an image of Garin sitting amid a bank of computer monitors, listening to signals bounced down from satellites all around the world. Shades of Big Brother. It was just a bit creepy to think that a man with Garin Braden’s resources was intentionally keeping regular watch over her.

  Garin went on. “I tried to reach you by cell phone to warn you of the problem, but was unable to do so. As my team and I were already here in Frankfurt, I made the decision to attempt to warn you in person. It would seem I arrived just in time.”

  His story had the ring of truth to it. He hadn’t been able to reach her on her cell because by then it was lying at the bottom of the river somewhere; she’d had it in her pocket when she made the leap off the roof. The distance from Frankfurt to the monastery was about half an hour air time, which would have put his arrival in the right time frame for him to have intercepted and then reacted to her emergency call.

  Given what they’d been through in the past, it wasn’t a big surprise that she hadn’t trusted him right off the bat. In the early days, he’d tried to kill her on more than one occasion. Lately, though, he seemed to have come to peace with the fact that she wasn’t going to surrender the sword to his control willingly and had gone from being a threat to an occasional ally and, dare she say it, even a friend.

  One thing was for certain, no one could ever say her life wasn’t complicated.

  “What, exactly, are you caught up in this time, Annja?” he asked.

  Deciding to take him into her confidence, she told him everything that had happened to her since leaving the dojo the morning before.

  He listened silently until she got around to describing the note Parker had left for Sykes, then interrupted.

  “The FotS? You’re certain that’s what it said?”

  She was. She no longer had the letter, but her recall of anything she’d read was quite good and she was certain she had it down word for word.

  “That’s interesting. I wonder…?”

  Before she could ask what it was he was wondering about, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and hit the speed dial key.

  “Griggs? Dig up whatever we have on the Friends of the South and bring it to me, please.”

  He closed the phone and gave her his attention once more. “Go on.”

  She finished out the rest of the tale, describing the letter the puzzle box had contained and her belief that it led to the missing Confederate treasure.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought. She’d trusted him this far so letting him know her ultimate objective—recovery of the treasure—wasn’t all that big a risk. Besides, Garin knew her pretty well and would sense that there was a bigger motive behind it all than just identifying the remains.

  His next comment showed that was true.

  “You don’t care about the value of the treasure itself, do you?” he asked. “You just want to solve the mystery.”

  She nodded. Finding the actual treasure would be nice, no doubt about it, as her bank account was looking more than a bit dismal, but for her, the real accomplishment would be discovering exactly what had happened after the treasure had supposedly been “stolen” on that night in 1865. That was the prize she was after.

  The door behind them opened and a medium-size black man with a shaved head and a soul patch on his chin stepped inside. His name was Matthew Griggs and he was some kind of senior operative with Dragontech Security. Annja had first met him in the aftermath of the Indian tsunami, when he’d flown in by helicopter to rescue her and the rest of her dig workers.

  “Ms. Creed,” he said in that lilting island accent of his, a smile on his face.

  She smiled back at him. “Nice to see you, Griggs.”

  Griggs crossed the room and handed a manila folder to Garin, who thanked him and began leafing through its thin contents as Griggs left them alone once more.

  Annja itched to know what was in the file, but there was no way she was going to give Garin the upper hand by asking. She’d known him long enough to understand that he was constantly turning everything into a competition, vying for dominance with every issue no matter how big or small. He knew she’d want to know what was in the file. He would purposely keep it from her until she asked. But if she asked, she lost face in his eyes, which only reinforced his already monumental ego. Of course, making her play the game at all was considered a win for him as well in his eyes, so it was a losing proposition for her either way.

  Instead, she sat back and waited patiently for Garin to finish reviewing the documents in front of him. Several minutes passed. Finally, perhaps realizing that he wasn’t going to get any kind of rise out of Annja, Garin closed the folder and spoke up.

  “You might not care about the treasure but it’s clear that someone else does.”

  There wasn’t any doubt about that. Whoever they were, they were clearly willing to kill over it, as well.

  “Sounds like you’re going to need some help,” Garin said.

  She had to admit that was true. She was going to need some help. The question was whether Garin Braden was the best person to provide it.

  “What did you have in mind?” she asked.

  He didn’t hesitate.

  “Sixty-forty split on the treasure, with the larger portion going to me as I’ll be putting up all the financing and security for the search.”

  Annja immediately shook her head. That would give him control over the find and there was no way she was going to allow that. He’d auction it off to the highest bidder and the lost Confederate treasury would disappear into some private collector’s vault, never to be seen again. As far as she was concerned, the treasure was a part of history and deserved to be shared by all. The finder’s fee they’d receive from the government would be more than enough compensation.

  She made a counteroffer. “Fifty-one, forty-nine split. I retain control of the expedition and make all decisions regarding whether it goes forward or not. You provide funding and materials, which will be paid back out of my portion of the find if we’re successful.”

&
nbsp; Garin opened his mouth to say something, but Annja cut him off.

  “Without what’s up here,” she said, tapping her forehead in the process, “you’re dead in the water.”

  To her surprise, he grinned. “Done!” he said, and stuck out his hand to shake on it. While doing so, Annja couldn’t help but wonder if she’d outnegotiated him or just fallen victim to some trap she hadn’t seen coming.

  It was not a pleasant feeling.

  Garin set the file he’d been examining on the coffee table between them, but didn’t offer any comments on its contents. Instead, he asked, “What happened to the note Parker left behind with the puzzle box?”

  “They were stolen when the gunmen first attacked the monastery.”

  Garin didn’t like hearing that. “So we are dead in the water until we identify the attackers and retrieve the messages?” he asked.

  “I didn’t say that. Give me something to write on.” He got up, walked into the next room and returned with a pen and pad of paper in hand. Taking them, Annja quickly reconstructed both the letter that had accompanied the puzzle box, as well as the rather cryptic instructions the box itself had contained, from memory. When she was finished, she passed them over.

  He glanced at the note to Sykes briefly and then turned his attention to the riddle. After studying it for several minutes he said, “Seems easy enough. All we have to do is find where Parker’s doppelgänger is buried and we’ll have the treasure, right?”

  “Wrong. It’s never that simple.”

  “So enlighten me.”

  She waved a hand at the pad in general. “Messages like these were never as straightforward as they seemed. Content was important, yes, but it was often what wasn’t being said that was the real key.

  “Four paragraphs, four different clues. Most people would do what you just did—jump to the final clue with the idea that if they can solve that, they can solve the puzzle overall. But that’s incorrect.”

  “So you’ve said,” Garin replied dryly.

  Ignoring him, Annja continued. “Perhaps incomplete would be a better word than incorrect. The fourth clue will eventually have to be solved so the effort to do so wouldn’t be entirely wasted. But if you look at the wording of each paragraph, you can see that they have to be solved in a specific order.”

  Pointing at each of the individual paragraphs in turn, she said, “Each clue is dependent on the one before it. You can’t find the Lady without the key. You can’t find the doppelgänger’s resting place without the rifle. You can’t find the treasure without the resting place.”

  Garin nodded to show he understood.

  “In this case, it seems to be even more important than usual, because each clue requires you to bring a physical object to the next location. Arrive at the final location without them and the treasure will still elude you.”

  He glanced at the paper. “So we start at the top, ‘in the cellars of the wine god.’”

  “Right. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that phrase—‘wine god’?”

  “Bacchus.”

  It wasn’t the answer Annja was looking for, but it was a correct one nonetheless. Bacchus had been the Roman god of wine and the madness or euphoria it produced. It was from his name the English word bacchanal originated.

  Should have seen that one coming, she thought. Garin loves wine, women and luxury, so naturally he’d think along those lines.

  “Right part of the world but wrong culture,” she told him.

  “Well, Dionysius, then,” came his swift reply.

  “Correct. So how does someone named Dionysius fit into the story of the missing Confederate treasury?”

  Garin scowled. “I don’t have a clue,” he said. “You’re the one with all the answers. Why don’t you tell me?”

  Now there was the Garin she was used to. Impatient and not one to take kindly to remarks on his intelligence, oblique as they might be.

  “When trying to find information on Captain Parker, I came across several sites that listed some of the common theories regarding the location of the treasure,” Annja said. “As you might guess, the Union Army was particularly interested in locating it. Seize the treasury and you basically eliminate the South’s means of waging war, because no money meant no supply and no pay for the soldiers.

  “It was generally thought at the time that Parker and his men had hidden the treasure on the grounds of a plantation owned by Dionysius Chennault, an elderly planter and Methodist minister.”

  Garin grinned. “So the cellars of the wine god are most likely…”

  “…the wine cellars of the Chennault plantation,” Annja finished for him.

  Garin got up from the couch, suddenly energized. “Excellent! We’ll start there first thing in the morning.”

  “You might want to leave a little more time than that,” Annja said. “After all, the plantation is in Washington, Georgia.”

  16

  After Annja had gone to sleep, Garin sat in the living room alone, considering the turn of events that had brought him to this point.

  He was not a man who believed in coincidence, not after all he’d seen in the centuries since that fateful day under the hot sun when an innocent woman had been consumed in the flames before him. Fate’s bloody fingerprints were all over his memories of that event and many others since. The fact that he was still alive and well, hundreds of years after his body should have returned to the dust from whence it came, reminded him that there were forces at work in the world that he just did not understand. He’d come to believe that while some things were just the luck of the draw, others happened for a reason.

  He thought about the events of that afternoon. He’d been monitoring Annja’s movements for some time; it was just common sense for him to keep track of her, given that the sword she carried was in some way responsible for his continued existence. He’d never planned to be in a position to help her if she ran into difficulty; in fact, if he’d had more time to think about it, he probably wouldn’t have helped. She was constantly courting danger and he was usually content to sit back and watch. But when the word of the current situation had reached him, something in his gut had prompted him to take action.

  The results, as they were, only confirmed his sense that the Fates had reached down once more and interfered in his life.

  He glanced at the file he held in his lap. His pretense of reviewing the material in front of Annja was just that, a sham. He was intimately aware of the contents of most of his files, for the same mysticism that had kept him alive for so many years had also blessed him with a remarkable memory, and this particular file had been reviewed and added to multiple times over the years. The Friends of the South was simply a front for a small but ruthless organization, and several times during the past two centuries Garin had found his interests and goals in direct opposition to theirs. He’d worked hard, then and now, to be certain that they did not gain the upper hand with regard to such situations.

  He hadn’t thought about them much in the past several months, other matters having occupied his attention, and then Annja showed up out of nowhere, in need of assistance and running from the machinations of his old enemy. Coincidence be damned; that was the hand of fate if ever it had shown itself.

  Garin got up and fixed himself a glass of brandy, swirling the liquid in the glass as he considered the opportunities available to him.

  As he’d told her earlier, he fully intended to help Annja recover the long-lost Confederate treasure. She thought he had a strictly monetary interest in the adventure, but that was the least of his concerns. He’d accumulated a vast treasure of his own over the years. After all, it wasn’t all that difficult when you had literally centuries in which to do it. Even if they found the treasure intact, it would only be worth a tiny fraction of what he already controlled. The value was certainly not enough to even be worth the effort, really. Sure, there might be some value in offering it intact on the black market to the private collector’s ci
rcuit, but the work involved in doing so made it hardly worth the effort.

  No, the true value in helping Annja rested in other areas. First, she’d feel some sense of obligation to him as a result, thanks to her do-gooder general nature. That alone made it worthwhile; he could manipulate that at a later time to his advantage, he was sure. Having her beholden to him was a strategic opportunity he just couldn’t pass up.

  Never mind it would drive her nuts thinking about it and that would prove to be a source of amusement for him in the future, he had no doubt. Second, beating the Order at its own game was an opportunity that didn’t come around all that often. While Garin was loath to admit it, the Order had gotten the better of him the last time they had clashed and he fully intended to balance the books by making things as difficult as possible for them now. The current head of the Order was not the crafty adversary his ancestor had been, preferring blunt-force tactics over the chesslike precision that had been exhibited in the past, and Garin had no doubt that he was by far the intellectual superior.

  17

  Blaine Michaels stared at the one-hundred-and-forty-year-old missive and, after two hours of close scrutiny, had to finally admit that he didn’t have a clue as to what it was trying to tell him. The legal pad beside him was full of the notes that he’d taken as he’d tried to work through the puzzle, but he was enough of a realist to know that it all amounted to nothing useful. He just wasn’t wired to think this way.

  He understood that William Parker’s instructions were designed to lead the recipient to the location of the missing gold, with each stanza being a separate clue, but that was as far as he could go. He had no idea who the wine god was, never mind the Peacock. And how was a key supposed to lead you anywhere? It just didn’t make any sense.

  The day had not gone as well as he had hoped. After spending much of the morning reviewing the material his team had stolen from Professor Reinhardt’s office at the museum, he’d correctly deduced that the only real lead was the scrap of paper naming the monastery. He’d expected to find much more and was frustrated that he didn’t understand how or why the monastery fit into the situation. Things had continued their downward slide when his team ran into that damned Creed woman at the monastery a few hours later. What was supposed to be a simple smash and grab like the one at the museum had turned into a bloodbath. She’d actually attacked several of his men with a sword of all things! His men had managed to corner her on the rooftop, but she’d gotten away by jumping off the edge into the river below.