Spartan Gold Page 17

  Sam took his foot off the accelerator and let the Lancia coast to a stop. Fifty feet behind them the SUV was seesawing at the road’s edge. Aside from the faint rhythmic groaning of stressed metal, all was quiet.

  Remi sat up, looked around.

  “Careful,” Sam whispered.

  “Are we going to help them?” she asked.

  A hand emerged from the darkened interior of the SUV and grasped a windshield wiper. A muzzle flashed from within the cab.

  A bullet thunked into the Lancia’s bumper.

  “The hell with them,” Sam said and stepped on the accelerator.

  “That’s gratitude for you,” Remi said. “We could have bumped them into that ravine.”

  “Something tells me we’re going to wish we did.”

  CHAPTER 28

  GRAND HÔTEL BEAUVAU VIEUX PORT, MARSEILLE, FRANCE

  Even as Sam tipped the bellhop and shut the door behind him Remi was dialing the iPhone. Selma answered on the first ring. “Safe and sound, Mrs. Fargo?”

  “Safe and sound,” Remi replied as she sat on the bed and kicked off her shoes. “Now will you tell me why we’re in Marseille?”

  After leaving Kholkov and his mustachioed partner teetering on the precipice, they’d driven at the Lancia’s best speed to Nisporto. Umberto, his forearm wrapped in his own shirt, used the sat phone to alert his cousin to their arrival.

  Nisporto, a village of a few hundred people, sat in the nook of a V-shaped cove ten miles up the coast from Portoferraio. When they arrived, Umberto’s wife, Teresa, and his cousins—all five of them—were waiting at the back door. While Teresa tended to Umberto’s wound, which had missed hitting any bones or arteries, the cousins bundled the now-conscious Bianco into the garage. The mother of the house, Umberto’s aunt Brunela, ushered Sam and Remi into the house and straight to the kitchen table, where she set about feeding them homemade pasta with onions, capers, olives, and red sauce. Thirty minutes later Umberto reappeared, his arm bandaged.

  “We’ve put you in some danger,” Sam said.

  “Nonsense. You’ve helped me redeem my honor. I think my father would have been proud.”

  “I think he would, too,” Remi said, leaning over and kissing him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

  Sam asked, “Do we want to know what you’re going to do with Bianco?”

  “Here and in Corsica, he’s untouchable. On the mainland . . .” Umberto shrugged. “I’ll make some calls. I think with the right evidence, real or otherwise, the Carabinieri will be happy to embrace him. As for the other one, his partner . . . he’s a coward. We’ll be fine, my friends. Now, finish eating and we’ll see about getting you off the island.”

  Knowing Bondaruk’s influence and Kholkov’s thoroughness made the Marina di Campo Airport too risky, they’d enlisted Umberto’s cousin Ermete, who ran a charter fishing boat, to ferry them back to Piombino on the Italian mainland. From there they’d returned to Florence, checked into the Palazzo Magnani Feroni, and called Selma, who’d directed them to e-mail her the photographed symbols from Laurent’s codebook then head straight to Marseille. The next morning they dropped the book itself into an overnight envelope for San Diego, then headed to the airport.

  “Why all the mystery? Remi now asked Selma. Sam sat down on the bed and Remi put the phone on speaker.

  “No mystery,” Selma replied. “I was hashing out some details, but I knew you’d want to be in Marseille one way or the other. By the way, Pete and Wendy are working on the symbols right now. It’s fascinating stuff, but the book’s condition is the big question—”

  Sam said, “Selma.”

  “Oh, sorry. Remember Wolfgang Müller, captain of the UM-77? I found him.”

  “Him? You mean—”

  “Yep, he’s still alive. Took a lot of legwork, but it turns out he was aboard the Lothringen when it was captured. After the war he was shipped back to Germany by way of Marseille. He got off the boat, but didn’t take the train home. He lives with his granddaughter. I’ve got their address. . . .”

  The next morning they got up and walked to a café, Le Capri, a few blocks away on Rue Bailli de Suffren overlooking the Vieux Port, or Old Port, which was filled with sailboats of all shapes and sizes, their sails dancing in the offshore breeze. The bright morning sun glinted off the water. At the mouth of the port, rising from the north and south shorelines, were the forts of Saint Jean and Saint Nicholas. Above these on the hillsides stood the Abbaye de Saint Victor and the churches of Saint Vincent and Saint Catherine. Farther out, in the Bay of Marseille proper, lay the four-island archipelago of Frioul.

  Sam and Remi had been to Marseille three times together, the last a few years earlier on their way to the Camargue up the coast. Every May some twenty thousand gypsies from western and eastern Europe gathered there to celebrate their gitane heritage.

  They finished breakfast and hailed a taxi, giving the driver an address in the Panier, a cluster of medievalesque neighborhoods filled with tightly packed pastel-painted houses sandwiched between the town hall and the Vieille Charité. Wolfgang Müller lived in a two-story butter yellow, white-shuttered apartment on Rue de Cordelles. A blond woman in her mid twenties answered the door when they knocked.

  “Bonjour,” Sam said.

  “Bonjour.”

  “Parlez-vous anglais?”

  “Yes, I speak English.”

  Sam introduced himself and Remi. “We’re looking for Monsieur Müller. Is he at home?”

  “Yes, of course. May I ask what this is about?”

  They’d already discussed this and decided honesty was the best course. Remi replied, “We’d like to talk to him about the UM-77 and the Lothringen.”

  The woman cocked her head slightly, her eyes narrowing. Clearly her grandfather had told her about his time in the war. “One moment, please.” Leaving the door open, she walked down a hall and disappeared around the corner. They heard muffled voices for a minute, then she reappeared. “Please, come in. My name is Monique. This way, please.”

  She led them into the front room, where they found Müller sitting in a rocking chair in front of a muted television tuned to France’s version of the Weather Channel. He wore a gray cardigan buttoned up to his throat, and his lap was covered in a blue and yellow argyle blanket. Completely bald, his face heavily wrinkled, Müller watched them through a pair of placid blue eyes.

  “Good morning,” he said in a suprisingly strong voice. He gestured with a trembling hand to a floral-patterned couch across from him. “Please. Can I offer you some coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” Remi answered.

  “Monique tells me you found Ilsa.”

  “Ilsa?” Sam asked.

  “It’s what I named the 77. After my wife; she died in the Dresden bombings a few months after we left Bremerhaven. You found her in the cave, in Rum Cay?”

  Remi nodded. “We were doing some exploring and came across the entrance. We found her sitting on the bottom, in almost pristine condition.”

  “She’s still there?”

  Sam smiled. “Well, no, not exactly. There was a . . . problem. We used her as what you might call an escape raft.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The main entrance collapsed. We rode the 77—”

  “Ilsa.”

  “Rode Ilsa down the underground river and out through another cave.”

  Müller’s eyes went wide and he smiled. “That’s astounding. I’m glad she was put to good use.”

  “We’ve arranged to have her transported back to the U.S. If you’d like, we’ll have her shipped—”

  Müller was shaking his head. “That’s kind of you, but no. Keep her; take good care of her.” He smiled and shook his finger at them. “Something tells me you didn’t come all this way just to tell me that.”

  “We also found the UM-34.”

  At this Müller leaned forward. “And Manfred?”

  “Captain Boehm was still aboard her.” Sam recounted their discovery of
the sub, leaving out any mention of Bondaruk or Kholkov. “The authorities are salvaging her right now.”

  “Mein Gott . . . We’d always worried about the weather. Those boats weren’t meant for open ocean.” Müller’s eyes went distant for ten seconds, then he blinked and refocused on them. “Manfred was a good friend of mine. It always pained me that I never knew what happened. Thank you.”

  “The reason we’re here is the wine,” Remi said.

  “The wine? Oh, the bottles . . . yes, we were going to celebrate with them after the mission was over. Are you telling me they survived?”

  Remi nodded. “One aboard the 34, and one aboard Ilsa.”

  “And the third? Did you find that one? As Manfred had the harder of the two missions, I gave him two bottles.”

  “We found a shard near his sub’s resting place. We’re not sure how it got out of the sub.”

  Müller waved his hand. “The vagaries of war.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” Sam said, “can you tell us about your mission? What were you and Boehm trying to accomplish?”

  Müller frowned, thinking. After a few moments he said, “I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. . . . It was an absurd task, really, concocted by the Führer himself. Manfred was supposed to sail up Chesapeake Bay and attack the navy base at Norfolk. At the same time, I was to attack the ammunition depot in Charleston, but Ilsa had a problem with her screw, so we were delayed. Before we could repair it, we were recalled to Bremerhaven. You know the rest, about the Lothringen and all that.”

  “You’d stopped at Rum Cay for refitting? What kind?”

  “Bigger batteries to increase the boats’ ranges. Another idiotic plan. Both Manfred and I knew the missions were suicide.”

  “Then why did you volunteer?”

  Müller shrugged. “Duty. Indiscretion of youth. Neither of us were fond of Hitler or the Party, but it was still our country. We wanted to do what we could.”

  “We were hoping you might tell us more about the bottles,” Remi said. “Where they came from.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re collectors. As it turns out, they were very old and very rare.”

  Müller chuckled. “I never knew. Well, I might have guessed they were important somehow. My brother Karl gave them to me before we shipped out from Bremerhaven. He told me he found them here, actually—he was in the army and was part of the occupation force.”

  “Where exactly did he find them?”

  “Let me think. . . .” Müller scratched his head. “My memory isn’t quite what it used to be. It was a castle . . . no, not a castle. A fort.” He sighed in frustration, then his eyes lit up. “It was one of the islands in the bay. . . . Do you remember that book by Dumas—The Count of Monte Cristo?”

  Both Sam and Remi had read it. In an instant they knew what Müller was talking about. “Île d’If?”

  “Yes! That’s it. He found them in the Château d’If.”

  CHAPTER 29

  CHTEAU D’IF, FRANCE

  Despite their love for Marseille, the Fargos had never managed to squeeze the Frioul Archipelago and Château d’If into their itinerary, an oversight they planned to correct that night with their own private tour. They doubted the château’s staff would let them explore every nook and cranny of the island. Though neither of them knew exactly what they’d be looking for, or whether they’d recognize it if it appeared, the expedition seemed the next logical step in the journey.

  From Müller’s apartment they took a taxi to the Malmousque, a waterfront district overlooking the Friouls, and found a quiet café. They settled under the umbrella on the patio and ordered a pair of double espressos.

  A mile offshore they could see Château d’If, a faded ocher-colored lump of rock fronted by sloping cliffs, vertical ramparts, and stone arches.

  While the island itself covered just over seven acres, the château itself was a smaller square, a hundred feet to a side, made up of a three-story main building flanked on three sides by cylindrical turrets topped with crenellated cannon slots.

  At the behest of King François I, Château d’If began its life in the 1520s as a fortress to defend the city against attacks from the sea, a purpose that was short-lived as it was converted into a prison for France’s political and religious enemies. Much like San Fran cisco’s Alcatraz, Château d’If’s location and its deadly offshore currents gave it a reputation as escape proof, a claim that was shattered, at least fictionally, by Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, in which the character Edmond Dantès, after fourteen years of imprisonment, managed to escape d’If.

  Sam read from the brochure he’d picked up at the Vieux Port tourist office: “ ‘Blacker than the sea, blacker than the sky, rose like a phantom the giant of granite, whose projecting crags seemed like arms extended to seize their prey.’ That’s how Dantès described it.”

  “Doesn’t seem so bad from here.”

  “Try being stuck in the dungeon for a dozen years.”

  “Good point. What else?”

  “The prison operated by a strict class structure. Rich inmates could buy their way into private cells on the upper floors, with windows and a fireplace. As for the poor, they got the basement dungeons and the oubliettes—which are . . .”

  “It’s derivative of oublier—‘to forget.’ They were essentially trap doored pits in the floor of a dungeon.” Remi’s French was also better than Sam’s. “You go in and you’re forgotten—left to rot.”

  The phone trilled and Sam answered it. It was Selma: “Mr. Fargo, I have something for you.”

  “Go ahead,” Sam said. He put the phone on speaker so Remi could hear.

  “We’ve deciphered the first two lines of symbols on the bottle, but that’s it,” Selma began. “The other lines are going to take some time. I think we’re missing a key of some kind. Anyway, the lines spell out a riddle:

  “Folly of Capetian, Sébastien’s revelation;

  A city under cannon;

  From the third realm of the forgotten a sign that eternal

  Sheol will fail.

  “We’re working on solving it—”

  “Done,” Sam proclaimed. “It’s talking about Château d’If.”

  “Pardon me?”

  He recounted their meeting with Wolfgang Müller. “The fortress is where his brother found the bottles. I already had the answer; from there it was just a matter of working backward. ‘Capetian’ refers to the dynastic line King François I came from; he had the fortress built. ‘Sébastien’ is the first name of Vauban, the engineer who had to tell the government the fort was all but useless. For whatever reason, the architects had built it with the heaviest fortifications and gun embattlements facing not the open sea, and potential invaders, but the city—‘a city under cannon.’ ”

  “Impressive, Mr. Fargo.”

  “It’s in the brochure. As for the second line, I don’t know.”

  “I think I do,” Remi said. “In Hebrew, ‘Sheol’ means abode of the dead, or underworld. The opposite—eternal Sheol—is everlasting life. Remember the cicada from the bottle . . . ?”

  Sam was nodding. “From Napoleon’s crest: resurrection and immortality. And the other part . . . ‘the third realm of the forgotten’?”

  “It’s the French version of a dungeon: oubliette. To forget. Unless we’re wrong, somewhere in the basement of the château is a cicada waiting to be found. But why a riddle at all?” Remi wondered. “Why not simply, ‘go here, find this’?”

  “That’s where it gets really interesting,” Selma replied. “From what I’ve been able to translate so far, Laurent’s book is part diary, part decryption key. He makes it pretty clear the bottles themselves aren’t the real prize. He called them ‘arrows on a map.’ ”

  “Arrows to what?” Remi asked. “And for whom to follow?”

  “He doesn’t say. We’ll know more when I finish the translation.”

  Sam said, “Well, it seems clear Laurent was doing this on Napoleon’s order
s, and if they went to this much trouble to hide the bottles, whatever’s at the end of the map has to be something spectacular.”

  “Which might explain why Bondaruk has no problem with murder,” Remi replied.

  They chatted for a few more minutes, then hung up.

  “Uh-oh,” Remi said out of the side of her mouth and pointing with her eyes. “Look who’s here.”

  Sam turned around. Kholkov was walking across the patio toward them, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket. Sam and Remi tensed, ready to move.

  “Relax, do you think I’d be stupid enough to shoot you both in broad daylight?” Kholkov asked, stopping before them. He pulled his hands from his pockets and held them up. “Unarmed.”

  “I see you escaped your little fender bender,” Remi said.

  Kholkov pulled out a chair and sat down.

  Sam said dryly, “Please, join us.”

  “You could have easily bumped us off the edge,” Kholkov said. “Why didn’t you?”

  “It occurred to us, believe me. If not for your trigger-happy friend, who knows?”

  “I apologize for that. He overreacted.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to explain how you’ve been tracking us,” Remi said.

  Kholkov smiled; there was none of it in his eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me why you’ve come here.”

  “You suppose correctly,” Remi replied.

  “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not buying,” Sam said. “Your colleague kidnapped, tortured, and was seconds away from killing a friend of ours, and you’ve tried to kill us twice. Tell us why you’re here.”

  “My employer is proposing a truce. A partnership.”

  Remi laughed softly. “Let me guess: We help you find whatever you’re after and you’ll kill us for it later rather than sooner.”