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.”

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 aredead 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 incompletewould 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 bacchanaloriginated.

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 circuit, but the work involved in doing so made it hardly worth the effort.