“What were you doing at Berceau de solitude?”

Garin stared at her.

Misinterpreting his silence, she said, “The monastery, Garin, the monastery.”

His reply was in perfect French. “I understood you perfectly, Annja. I was simply distracted by the notion that I think you looked better in that brown robe of yours.”

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 wasgoing 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.