He peered at them on his laptop screen, tilting his head first one way, then the other, until muttering something under his breath. He stood up suddenly, marched down the hallway, and returned a minute later with a tiny book bound in red-dyed textile. This he flipped through for several more minutes before calling, “Aha! Just as I thought: the characters are a derivation of Lowa and yet another royal dialect. The inscription is meant to be read vertically, from right to left. Roughly translated, it says:
“Through fulfillment, prosperity
“Through resistance, anguish . . .”
Wendy said, “I think I read that in a self-help book once.”
“I have no doubt,” Karna said, “but in this case it’s intended as a warning—a curse. I suspect these characters were inscribed on each of the Sentinels’ boxes.”
Pete said, “In short, ‘Take this to its destination, and you’ll find happiness; interfere with or impede that, and you’re screwed.’”
“Impressive, young man,” said Karna. “Not the words I would use, of course, but you arrested the gist of the message.”
“Would this have been intended for the Sentinels?” Wendy asked.
“No, I don’t think so. It was designed for the enemy or anyone who came into possession through illicit means.”
“But if the dialect is that obscure, who aside from Mustang royalty would have been able to understand the warning?”
“That’s beside the point. The curse stands, ignorance be damned.”
“Harsh,” said Pete.
“Let’s take a closer look at this box, shall we? In one of Remi’s pictures, I noticed the tiniest of seams along a bottom edge of the box.”
“We noticed that too,” Wendy replied. “Hold on, we’ve got a close-up . . .”
A few clicks of the mouse later, the image in question filled Karna’s screen. He studied the photo for several minutes before saying, “Do you see the seam I’m talking about? The one that looks like a series of eight dashes?”
“Yes,” said Pete.
“And the full seam opposite that?”
“Got it.”
“Forget that one. It’s a decoy. Unless I miss my guess, the dashed seam is a combination lock, of sorts.”
“The gaps are almost paper-thin,” said Wendy. “How can—”
“Two millimeters, I would say. You’ll need a shim, of sorts; a thin but strong type of metal or alloy. Inside each of those dashes will be a brass or bronze flange, each with three vertical depression settings: up, middle, and fully down.”
“Hold on,” Wendy said. “I’m doing the math . . . That’s over sixty-five hundred possible combinations.”
“Not overly daunting,” Pete said. “With enough patience, and time, you could eventually pick it.”
Karna said, “True, if not for one fact: you only get one crack at it. Enter the wrong combination, and the internal mechanism locks itself.”
“That does complicate things.”
“We’ve not yet begun to unravel the complications, my boy. Once past the combination, the real challenge begins.”
“How?” Wendy said. “What?”
“Have you ever heard of a Chinese puzzle box?”
“Yes.”
“Think of what you have before you as the mother of all Chinese puzzle boxes. As it so happens, I believe I have the combination to the initial locking mechanism. Shall we get started . . . ?”
Three hours later Sam and Remi, now awake, refreshed, and armed with cups of tea, joined Karna before his laptop just in time to hear Pete exclaim through the iChat window, “Got it!” On-screen, he and Wendy were leaning over the worktable, the Sentinel box between them. It was brightly illuminated by an overhead halogen lamp.
Another iChat screen popped up on the screen, this one displaying Selma’s face: “Got what?”
“It’s a Chinese puzzle box,” replied Wendy. “Once we got past the combination, a narrow panel popped open. Inside were three tiny wooden switches. Following Jack’s directions, we flipped one. Another panel opened, then more switches, and so on . . . How many moves now, Jack?”
“Sixty-four. One more to go. If we’ve done our job, it’ll open. If not, we may lose the contents forever.”
“Explain that,” Sam said.
“Oh, goodness, I didn’t mention the booby trap, did I? So sorry.”
“Mention it now,” Remi said.
“If the box contains a disk, it will be suspended in the middle of the primary compartment. Set into the sides of that compartment will be glass vials filled with corrosive liquid. If your last move is the wrong one or you try to force the compartment open . . .” Karna made a hissing sound. “You get an unidentifiable lump of gold.”
“I hope I’m wrong,” said Selma, “but I don’t think there’s a disk in there.”
“Why?” asked Pete.
“Odds. Sam and Remi stumble upon the only Sentinel box ever found and it just happens to contain the one genuine disk in the bunch?”
Karna said, “But they didn’t ‘stumble’ upon it, did they? They were following in the footsteps of Lewis King—a man who had spent at least eleven years chasing the Theurang. Whatever his motives, I doubt he was on a goose chase that day at Chobar Gorge. It appears he never found the Sentinel’s burial chamber, but I suspect he wasn’t there for an empty box.”
Selma considered this. “Logical,” was all she said.
“One way to find out,” Sam said. “Who’s going to do the honors? Pete . . . Wendy?”
Pete said, “I’m nothing if not chivalrous. Go ahead, Wendy.”
Wendy took a deep breath, reached into the box, and flipped the appropriate switch. An inch-wide rectangular hatch slid open beside her fingers.
Karna said softly, “Now gently slide your pinkie finger up along the inside of the box until you feel a square button.”
Wendy did so. “Okay, got it.”
“Slide that button . . . let me see . . . slide it to the right—no, left! Slide it to the left.”
“Left,” Wendy repeated. “Are you sure?”
Karna hesitated a moment, then nodded firmly. “Yes, left.”
“Here I go.”
Through the laptop’s speaker Sam and Remi heard a wooden snick.
Wendy cried, “The top’s open!”
“Now carefully lift the lid straight upward. If it’s there, the disk will be suspended from the underside.”
Moving with exaggerated slowness, Wendy began lifting the lid an inch at a time. “It’s got some heft to it.”
“Don’t let it swing,” Karna whispered. “A little more . . .”
Pete rasped, “I can see a cord hanging down. Looks like catgut or something similar.”
Wendy kept lifting.
The halogen light reflected off something solid, a curved edge, a glint of gold.
“Be ready, Peter,” said Karna.
Wendy lifted the lid the rest of the way. The remainder of the cord rose from the box. Dangling at its end: the prize, a four-inch-wide golden disk.
With latex-gloved hands, Pete reached out. Wendy lowered the disk into his palms, and he transferred it to a foam-lined tray on the table.
The group let out a collective breath.
“Now comes the hard part,” Karna said.
“What?” Wendy said with exasperation. “That wasn’t the hard part?”
“I’m afraid not, my dear. Now we must ascertain whether we do in fact have the genuine article.”
21
VLORË, ALBANIA
The Fiat’s dashboard clock clicked over to nine a.m. just as Sam and Remi passed the welcome sign for Vlorë. Albania’s second-largest city, of a hundred thousand souls, sat nestled on a bay on the west coast, overlooking the Adriatic with its back to the mountains.
And with any luck, Sam and Remi hoped, Vlorë was still home to one of the Sentinel disks.
An hour after Wendy and Pete had extracted the Theurang disk from the box and set about determining
its provenance with Karna, Selma’s face reappeared in an iChat window on Karna’s laptop’s screen.
In her characteristically curt manner she said, “Jack, your research methods are impeccable. Sam, Remi, I think his theory about the two priests holds water. Whether we can find them and the other two disks is another matter.”
“What else have you been able to discover?” asked Sam.
“At the time of their deaths, both Besim Mala and Arnost Deniv had risen to the rank of Bishop and were highly respected in their communities. Both had helped found churches and schools and hospitals throughout their home countries.”
“Which suggests their burial sites could be more elaborate than a six-foot-deep rectangle in the earth,” Karna said.
“I found no mention of the particulars, but I can’t fault your reasoning,” replied Selma. “In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the EOC—”
“The what?” asked Remi.
“Eastern Orthodox Church. The EOC—especially those based in the Balkans and southern Russia—tended to make a big deal of such deaths. Crypts and mausoleums appear to be the customary method of interment.”
“The question is,” Karna said, “where exactly were they laid to rest?”
“Still working on Deniv, but Church records state that Bishop Besim Mala’s final posting was in Vlorë, Albania.”
With time to kill until Selma could give them a more specific target area, Sam and Remi spent an hour touring Vlorë, marveling at its beautifully blended architecture that felt at once Greek, Italian, and medieval. Shortly before noon, they pulled into the parking lot of the Hotel Bologna, overlooking the blue waters of the harbor, and took a seat in a palm tree–lined outdoor café.
Sam’s satellite phone trilled. It was Selma. Sam put the phone on Speaker.
“I have Jack here as well,” Selma said. “We have—”
“If this is going to a bad news/good news call, Selma, just give it to us,” Remi said. “We’re too tired to choose.”
“Actually, this is an all good news call—or potentially good news, that is.”
“Shoot,” said Sam.
Jack Karna said, “The Sentinel disk is genuine, I believe. I can’t be one hundred percent sure until I can check it against the wall maps I mentioned, but I’m optimistic.”
Selma said, “As for the final resting place of Besim Mala, I can narrow your search grid to about a half mile square.”
“Is it underwater?” Sam asked, skeptical.
“No.”
“An alligator-infested swamp?” Remi chimed in.
“No.”
“Let me guess,” Sam said. “A cave. It’s in a cave.”
Karna said, “Strike three, to appropriate an American phrase. Based on our research, we believe Bishop Mala was laid to rest in the graveyard of the Monastery of Saint Mary on Zvernec Island.”
“Which is where?” asked Remi.
“Six miles north, up the coast. Find a Wi-Fi hot spot, and I’ll download the particulars to your iPad, Mrs. Fargo.”
They took a short time to relax in the hotel’s café. Sam and Remi ordered a flavorsome Albanian lunch of ground lamb meatballs scented with mint and cinnamon, baked dough with spiced spinach, and grape juice enhanced with sugar and mustard. As luck would have it, the café had free Wi-Fi, so between bites of a delicious lunch they perused their travel packet, as Selma called it. Predictably, it was exhaustive, with driving instructions, local history, and a map of the grounds of the monastery. The only detail she could not find was the actual location of Bishop Mala’s grave site.
After paying the bill, Sam and Remi pointed the Fiat’s hood north. After ten miles, they pulled into the village of Zvernec and followed a lone sign to Narta Lagoon. The lagoon was large, nearly twelve square miles.
Upon turning onto the dirt road encircling the lagoon, Sam drove north until they came to a gravel parking lot on a patch of land jutting into the lagoon. The lot was empty.
Sam and Remi got out and stretched. The weather was unseasonably warm, seventy degrees, and sunny, with only a few billowy clouds inland.
“I take it that’s our destination,” Remi said, pointing.
At the shore, a narrow pedestrian bridge led to Zvernec Island, eight hundred feet away, that was home to St. Mary Monastery, a collection of four medieval-style church buildings occupying a two-acre triangle of grass on the shoreline.
They walked to the head of the bridge, where Remi paused. She stared at the bridge nervously. The ramshackle crossings they’d encountered first in Chobar Gorge, then again on their way to King’s secret dig site in the Langtang Valley, had clearly made more of an impact than she’d realized.
Sam walked back to where she was standing and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “It’s solid. I’m an engineer, Remi. This monastery is a tourist attraction. Tens of thousands of people cross this bridge every year.”
Eyes narrowed, she looked at him sideways. “You’re not humoring me, are you, Fargo?”
“Would I do that?”
“You might.”
“Not this time. Come on,” he said with an encouraging smile. “We’ll cross together. It’ll be like strolling along a sidewalk.”
She nodded firmly. “Back on the horse.”
Sam took her hand, and they started across. Halfway there, she stopped suddenly. She smiled. “I think I’m all better.”
“Cured?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m okay. Let’s keep moving.”
Within a couple minutes they’d reached the island. From a distance, the church buildings appeared almost pristine: sun-bleached rock walls and red-tiled roofs. Now, standing before the structures, it was clear to Sam and Remi the buildings had seen better days. The roofs were missing tiles, and several of the walls were either sagging or partially crumbling. One belfry was missing a roof altogether, its bell slouching sideways from its support beam.
A well-groomed dirt path wound its way through the grounds. Here and there, pigeons sat clustered on eaves, cooing and staring unblinkingly at the island’s two new visitors.
“I don’t see anyone,” Sam said. “You?”
Remi shook her head. “Selma’s brief mentioned a caretaker but no tourist office.”
“Then let’s explore,” Sam said. “How big is the island?”
“Ten acres.”
“Shouldn’t take long to find the cemetery.”
After taking a cursory stroll through each of the buildings, they followed the path into the pine forest beyond the clearing. Once they were inside the tree line, the sun dimmed, and the trunks seemed to tighten around them. This was old-growth forest, with knee-high tangles of undergrowth and enough rotting logs and stumps to make passage a bit of a challenge. After a few hundred yards, the path forked.
“Of course,” Remi said. “No sign.”
“Flip a mental coin.”
“Left.”
They took the left-hand fork and followed the winding trail before coming to a rickety, half-rotted dock overlooking a marsh.
“Bad flip,” Remi said.
They backtracked to the fork and began heading down the right-hand path. This took them generally northeast, deeper into the forest and toward the wider end of the island.
Sam jogged ahead on a scouting mission, turned and called back to Remi, “Spotted a clearing!” A few moments later he appeared from around a bend in the trail and stopped before her. He was smiling. Broadly.
“You generally don’t get this excited about clearings,” Remi said.
“I do if the clearing has tombstones.”
“Lead on, bwana.”
Together, they walked down the path to where the pine forest parted. Oval-shaped and roughly two hundred feet across, the clearing was indeed a cemetery, but almost immediately Sam and Remi realized there was something very wrong here. On the far side was a jumbled stack of pine logs; beside this stack, several house-high bales of withered boughs and branches. The earth in the clearin
g was pockmarked, as though it had undergone an artillery bombardment, and about half of the graves appeared to have been freshly churned.
To the east was a second opening in the trees, this one a nearly straight corridor, at the end of which they could see the waters of the lagoon.
Of the dozens of tombstones visible, only a few were undamaged; all the others were either cracked or partially uprooted from the ground. Sam and Remi counted fourteen mausoleums. All of these showed signs of damage as well, either canted on their foundations or their walls and roofs caved in.
“What happened here?” Remi asked.
“A storm, I’m guessing,” said Sam. “Came off the ocean and ripped across the island like a chain saw. It’s a shame.”
Remi nodded solemnly. “On the bright side, it may make our job easier. We won’t technically be breaking into Mala’s mausoleum.”
“Good point. But there is one more hurdle,” Sam said to Remi.
“What?”
“Let’s look first. I don’t want to jinx us.”
They split up, Sam taking the east side and moving north, Remi taking the west side and moving north. Skipping grave markers, each headed for the nearest mausoleum, stopping only long enough to read the name engraved on the stone facade.
At last, Remi reached the graveyard’s northeast corner, near the jumble of pine logs. As she approached the last mausoleum in her line, it seemed to be the least damaged of the lot, with only a few cracks showing in the walls. It was also uniquely decorated, she realized, her heart skipping a beat.
She called, “Sam, I think we may have a winner.”
He walked over. “Why do you think so?”
“That’s the biggest cross I’ve seen. You?”
“Yes.”
The wall closest to them bore a four-by-five-foot Eastern Orthodox cross, with its three crossbars—two horizontal ones close together near the top and one near the bottom canted sideways.