With that accomplished, she spent a few minutes looking into the issue of Ewell’s Rifle. By the time she was finished, it was after midnight. Knowing she had a long day ahead of her, Annja shut down the laptop and tried to get some sleep.

Unfortunately, rest didn’t come easy, as her thoughts kept wandering to Bernard and whether or not he was being treated properly by those who’d taken him. She fervently hoped Garin was right, that they needed Bernard in good health in order to help them find the treasure, which of course put more pressure on her to figure out the puzzle before they did.

Eventually, restless sleep finally came.

THE NEXT MORNING, when checking her accounts online, Annja found a response from someone with the screen name SouthernRising in the alt.archaeology newsgroup.

The Lady in question is most likely the CSS Marietta,a Confederate ironclad that was nicknamed the “Old Lady” on account of her being one of the Confederacy’s oldest vessels, built at Edwards Ferry, N.C., at the tail end of 1862. Ran aground at the junction of the Broad and Savannah rivers in 1864. The hulk was actually used as a temporary headquarters station during President Davis’s flight south after the fall of Richmond.

I knew it! Annja thought.

It wasn’t a big leap to think that Parker would have considered a grounded vessel as being in distress; he was a Navy man, after all. Depending upon how long the ship was used as a temporary headquarters, it also stood to reason that he would have set foot inside it at some point when the remains of the treasury were under his control, giving him the time he needed to leave a clue behind for those who were to come after him.

That was all well and good, except for the fact that expecting the remains of a Confederate ironclad, one of only thirty such ships ever built, to still be sitting on the side of the river after all this time was ridiculous, even to someone with her sense of optimism. She’d been witness to some strange miracles in the past few years, but that was asking too much. The historical value of the vessel alone would have resulted in its being salvaged in the modern era, if it had even lasted that long.

She wasn’t willing to give up without looking into it, however. Bernard’s life might depend on it.

Maybe it’s in a museum somewhere, she thought.

A quick search in Google brought up some information on the subject.

The ship had, indeed, run aground in 1864, just as SouthernRising’s message had indicated. After the war, the Union Navy made plans to free the Mariettafrom its inglorious beaching in mid-1894, intending to use what scrap iron they could salvage from the wreck on other reconstruction projects. The salvage crew managed to raise the hull from the clay it had been mired in over the years, but a lack of funding kept them from transporting it north until later that fall.

Once the money had been raised, the crew returned to the site, only to be delayed once more as a category-four hurricane came roaring out of the Atlantic and rushed across most of Georgia in early October.

After several days the hurricane eventually blew over, but the damage had been done. The hulk of the Mariettahad been carried away by the flooding waters of the Savannah River, never to be seen again.

“Damn it!” Annja said.

Without the ship, and Ewell’s Rifle, they were dead in the water, no pun intended.

With no better idea of what to do next, Annja sent a message to SouthernRising via the email address he’d left at the end of his newsgroup posting.

Would you happen to know if any trace of the Mariettawas uncovered after the hurricane?

To her surprise, his reply was almost immediate. She must have caught him at the computer.

Check this out, he suggested, including a link to an article from The Atlanta Constitutiondated six months before. The article was in reference to a University of Atlanta–funded expedition to try and locate the Diamond Jim,a famous twin-wheeled paddleboat that had sunk in 1952 in the Savannah River. During the search, the university crew had chanced upon an area of the river bottom that had “an unusually high concentration of iron.” There was some speculation in the article that the wreck might be that of a cargo barge that had gone down several years before during another period of flooding.

Annja looked at that article and in her gut she knew.

It wasn’t a barge at all.

It was the missing Marietta.

But when she suggested as much to Garin at breakfast a half hour later, he laughed.

“You can’t be serious, Annja!” he said. “A single reading of a mysterious metal anomaly in the middle of the river is your proof that the ship we’re looking for, one that vanished over a hundred years ago, is sitting there waiting for us to come and get it?”

Annja nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” She caught his gaze with her own and stared back at him with complete confidence in her conviction. “Think about it, Garin. When have you known me to be wrong about this kind of thing?”

She’d been good at tracking down lost tombs and ancient civilizations before she’d taken up the sword and ever since she’d done so she’d only gotten better. It was as if the sword helped her focus in some strange way, made her better at those things at which she already excelled.

Grudgingly, he had to admit she could be right.

“Even if that is the Marietta,” he said, “how is that going to help us? It’s been underwater for more than a century and that’s not taking into account that it was put there by a hurricane. We’ll be lucky if it isn’t scattered into a thousand pieces across the river bottom.”

“We won’t know until we look and see, now will we?” she replied.

The question was, how were they going to manage that?

23

The plan, when it came to her, sounded reasonable, but she was going to need some help getting the equipment necessary to pull it off. That meant she needed to get in touch with Doug.

She put a call in to his office and, much to her surprise, got him on the first ring. “Hi, Doug.”

“Don’t ‘Hi, Doug’ me. Why is some police inspector named Laroche calling me at all hours of the day and night looking for you, Annja?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t have any idea, would you?”

“Not particularly,” he replied.

“Well, then, he’s probably a little ticked off that I left the country, given that I’m a witness in a murder investigation.”

“Murder investigation? I thought the guy you found in the catacombs had been dead for decades?”

“He has. It wasn’t Captain Parker that I—”

Doug cut in. “Good. We can’t do a show about reanimated skeletons in the Paris catacombs if the guy’s only been dead a few years. Who would believe that?”

Annja sighed.

“The show isn’t about reanimated skeletons, Doug,” she answered patiently.

“It will be when I’m done with it,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, nothing. So why is this guy chasing after you?”

Annja explained as quickly as she could about her trip to the monastery, the riddle inside the puzzle box and the savage attack on the monastery’s occupants that followed. She also told him about Professor Reinhardt’s kidnapping.

As annoying as he might sometimes be, Doug was reasonably quick on the uptake in a crisis. “So you’re trying to beat these guys to the missing treasure, in hope of bargaining with it for Reinhardt?”

“Got it in one, Doug.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Where are you now?”

“A little town called Washington, Georgia. We deciphered the first clue, which led us here. But in order to get any further, I need some equipment that I can’t get on my own.”