The Emperor's Revenge

FORTY-FOUR

The ascent to the surface seemed to take an eternity. Gretchen kept looking from her watch to the water outside the Oregon’s boat garage, where she was waiting for Nomad to surface. According to Max, the sub and Jim suit would be topside in two minutes.

On Max’s orders, the Oregon had moved away from the dive site so that it wouldn’t be directly above the torpedo explosion, which also meant there was no way they could surface in the moon pool. Gretchen, who had been watching the search from the op center, dashed down to the boat garage as soon as Hali told her that’s where they’d be pulling Juan in.

Julia Huxley stood ready next to her with her medical crash kit.

“Is he breathing?” Gretchen asked her.

“I think so,” Julia replied without conviction. “Max says he doesn’t think the suit’s leaking.”

Suddenly, a balloon broke the surface, followed by the Jim suit. Half of the pack holding the environmental systems was crushed.

“Now we know why he was low on air,” Julia said. “We need to get him out of that suit.”

It was an agonizing wait as Max motored over to the suit and the mechanical arms grasped the handle on its front.

Max turned Nomad and sped toward the lights of the Oregon’s boat garage. Technicians attached a line to the Jim suit and winched it aboard. They laid it down on its front, but the latches were jammed shut by the crush damage.

Gretchen didn’t wait for them to act. She took a heavy wrench that one of them was holding and fiercely bashed two latches until they sprung free. The clamshell back snapped open and they hoisted Juan’s limp body out. His lips were bright blue and his skin was ashen.

As soon as they had him lying on his back on the deck, Julia took over. Gretchen stood back and watched as the doctor felt for a pulse. She put a mask on his face and turned the tank’s valve.

“He’s still got a heartbeat,” she said. “He’s also got a nasty bump on the back of his head.” She jostled him lightly. “Juan, wake up.”

Julia rubbed his sternum with her fist to get a response. He remained motionless. The other crewmen watched in concerned silence.

Suddenly, Juan took a huge breath and his eyelids fluttered. Then they opened wide as if he were startled and he tried to sit up, but Julia held him down.

“Juan, you’re on the Oregon. There’s a mask on your face giving you oxygen. I want you to relax for a minute and take deep breaths. Do you understand?”

He nodded slightly. “Who… What happened?” he mumbled. His groggy voice was muffled by the mask.

Gretchen felt a wave of relief wash over her when she heard him speak. She knelt next to him and took his hand. “Your stupid idea about the torpedo worked. You got out of the wreckage just in time.”

“My insides feel like jelly.”

“That’s the concussion effect of the torpedo,” Julia said. “We need to do a CAT scan to make sure there’s no internal bleeding.”

“Don’t bother. I’m all right.”

Gretchen squeezed his hand. “Are you going to disobey doctor’s orders?”

He looked at both of them. And then seeing that he was going to lose the argument, he said, “You two would make good professional arm-twisters.”

“It doesn’t pay enough,” said Gretchen.

“And I already have a job keeping this ship’s sorry lot in one piece,” Julia added.

Juan removed the mask and tried getting to his feet. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

Julia pushed him back down. “No you don’t. I have to clear you with the CT before you’re allowed to walk. I don’t want you passing out on me from blood loss on the way to the medical bay.”

Despite his protestations, they loaded Juan onto a stretcher. Gretchen walked beside him as he was wheeled to get his scan.

“Did we get the container?” he asked.

“Max said they got it on board. Eric and Murph are examining it now.”

“Tell them I want to know the minute they have anything to report.”

She grinned at him. “What, am I part of your crew now?”

“Maybe you should be.”

“You definitely live interesting lives around here. It’s been fun doing some fieldwork again.”

“I’ll take that as a job application.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, but the idea intrigued her more than she let on.

The CAT scan didn’t take long, and Julia pronounced him free of any internal injuries, although he’d probably be sore for a few days. The concussion assessment protocol similarly came up negative. She gave him some pain meds, but he simply pocketed them.

They went up to the deck and found Eric and Murph inside the open container, poring over the engravings etched into the surface of the white granite column.

There were three rows of writing, in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. According to their analysis of Napoleon’s Diary, specific letters in his copy of The Odyssey referred to Greek letters on the column, and the corresponding Latin letters would spell out some kind of clue. Napoleon must have had a drawing of the Jaffa Column with him on St. Helena in order to be able to create the clues, but the drawings were lost or destroyed after the report of the emperor’s death.

Eric looked up from the tablet computer he was using to take photos of the etchings. “How are you feeling?”

“Nothing that a snifter of Rémy Martin won’t take care of,” Juan said. “Have you made any progress?”

“It’s very cool stuff,” Murph said without looking up from his own tablet computer. “The markings are exactly the kind we expected to find based on the clues in the diary. We think we’ve already narrowed down the location to Vilnius, Lithuania. Got a problem, though.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s something you need to solve with logic, deduction, and creativity, but that’s not important right now.”

Gretchen chuckled at Murph’s reference to the movie Airplane! “You did walk right into that one.”

Juan smirked. “My mind must still be fuzzy. I mean, what’s the problem?”

“The damage to the container,” Eric said. “The metal gouged the column on the underside. It destroyed some of the markings, which could make it difficult to find the exact location of the treasure. We won’t know until we get a chance to remove it and stand it up. Max said he’d rig up something in the hold.”

“What’s the time frame?”

“We should have it removed from the container and standing by morning.”

Murph’s phone buzzed. He answered, then said, “Really?”

He tapped on his tablet and handed it to Juan. “It’s for you. A video call.” He looked at Gretchen. “I think you’ll want to see this, too.”

Juan took the tablet from Murph. Gretchen crowded in as well, intrigued as to who could be calling.

Juan answered the call, and Gretchen immediately recognized the face staring back at them. She had first met him a few nights ago.

It was Whyvern, the Albanian hacker. Now she was doubly curious as to why he would contact them.

“Hello, sir,” Erion Kula said. They had never revealed their real names to him, but they’d left an untraceable number for him to use if he remembered anything else about his break-in to ShadowFoe’s computer. “You look like you’ve had a long day.”

“I feel fine,” Juan answered reflexively. “Do you have some more information for us?”

“In a way. I have a message for you. It’s from ShadowFoe. Somehow, she knew I could contact you. Speaking of which, I’m not supposed to know this, but I found out that the message was routed to me through the computers at Monaco police headquarters.”

Gretchen whispered into Juan’s ear, “Rivard?”

He turned to her and under his breath said, “It would explain why the chief inspector of the Sûreté was such a thorn in our sides during the investigation.”

Juan faced the screen again. “What’s the message?”

“ShadowFoe says to meet her on the rooftop of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Nice tomorrow at five p.m. The note said she specifically wants to see Gabriel and Naomi Jackson.”

ShadowFoe must have made the connection between them and the diary. “Did she say why?” Gretchen asked.

“Yes,” Whyvern said. “She wants to give you your money back.”