Or where Jimmy was, for that matter.

She carefully maneuvered the boat into its slip and then shut down the engine. She watched the activity going on around her through the darkened wheelhouse windows, waited for her chance and then made a break for it, leaving the boat tied up behind her.

31

Blaine Michaels had given Annja just seventy-two hours to solve the final clues and find the treasure. That wasn’t a lot of time to begin with and she’d wasted several hours of it getting the boat back to dock. Annja was feeling the pressure as she got inside the rental car and pulled out of the marina.

She recited the third clue again to herself as she drove.

“‘Take the rifle to the place of Lee’s greatest failure, where the Peacock freely roamed. Find the spot where my doppelgänger rests eternal, deep beneath the loam.’”

Now that she’d gotten a sense for how Parker had constructed the verses, she was fairly confident that she knew how to decipher this one.

The Lee in “Lee’s greatest failure” was most likely Robert E. Lee. No other Lee held greater significance for the South. Parker would have known that his executive officer, Sykes, would understand who he was referring to immediately. That meant in order to locate her next destination, she had to figure out the place and time where Lee had failed more spectacularly than at any other.

That it was most likely a battlefield went without saying. While Lee had his share of troubles as a young man, none of his personal failures would have meant as much to Captain Parker as the events that unfurled in the closing days of the war. Lee’s actions and choices had significance at that point that went far beyond his own person. He was the symbol of a nation, the iconic presence who could rally the Rebels just by passing through camp, and his greatest failure, she reasoned, would have had national significance, as well.

Annja considered the major battles where Lee had been defeated. There was Cheat Mountain. He’d earned the nickname “Granny Lee” when his vastly superior Confederate force of fifteen thousand men had been unable to defeat two thousand Union soldiers. Seven Days, South Mountain and Antietam in 1862. Gettysburg in 1863, of course, followed by the tactical draws of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor. The final defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia, the backbone of the Confederate armed forces, at Appomattox in 1865.

While the obvious choice might be Appomattox, something about it just didn’t feel right to Annja. It hadn’t been a failure in the sense that Lee had done something tactically wrong; he’d simply run out of the food, ammunition and the men he needed to keep the war effort going. That wasn’t so much Lee’s failure, she knew, as a failure of the nation.

Scratch off Appomattox, she thought.

Likewise, she could forget about the battles in the early part of the war, as well. Cheat Mountain, South Mountain, the Seven Days—none of them had any major impact on the success or failure of the war overall. Both sides had been feeling each other out, getting a sense of this thing called civil war.

That left her with two choices.

Antietam and Gettysburg.

Gettysburg might be better known to the average American, she thought, but it was Antietam that held the most significance for the war effort. Lee had chosen to ignore his advisers and push north, into Union territory, rather than try to defend Vicksburg. His immediate goal had been to secure desperately needed supplies from the rich farm country of Pennsylvania, but his decision proved to be a monumental error. Antietam proved to be the bloodiest single-day battle in the entire Civil War, with more than twenty-five thousand casualties. It was the first major battle fought on Union soil, but it did not turn out the way Lee had hoped. The Confederacy lost control of its western region and Lee himself nearly lost his army. He’d been forced to fight his way clear at Gettysburg and the Antietam campaign had been the last time Lee invaded northern territory. From that point on, it had all been downhill.

There wouldn’t have even been a Gettysburg if Lee hadn’t lost the fight at Antietam.

Lee’s greatest failure, Annja reasoned, was therefore Antietam.

That was where she had to go next.

It was all well and good, except for the fact that Sharpsburg, Maryland, was more than four hundred miles from her current location in northern Georgia. She was looking at seven, maybe eight hours of driving time and that was without any major stops.

There had to be an easier way.

Annja drove a bit farther until she saw a fast-food restaurant ahead of her. She pulled into the lot and found a place to park. Taking her laptop out of her backpack, she fired it up and connected to the restaurant’s free Wi-Fi service. Just a few moments later she connected to an online travel site and was looking to find the fastest and easiest way to get to Pennsylvania.

As it turned out, Antietam was only fifty miles or so away from Washington, DC. If she could catch a flight into Washington from either Atlanta or Savannah and rent a car on the other end, she could save herself several hours.

And if you rest on the plane, you might actually start to feel like a human being again, she told herself.

She checked the flight schedules. Atlanta sounded like the more logical choice, as it was the bigger airport, but as it turned out, a flight leaving Savannah at 5:20 p.m. not only got her into Washington sooner, but it saved her additional driving time as she was closer to that airport.

She booked the flight and then took a moment to check her email. There were several messages from Commissaire Laroche, first asking and then demanding that she get in touch. She didn’t have time to deal with him, so she simply deleted the messages, telling herself she’d get in touch when this was all said and done. Right now, she needed to focus on finding the treasure and freeing Garin.

Realizing it had been hours since she’d eaten, Annja went to the drive-through, picking up a soda and a few cheeseburgers for the ride. As she was waiting for her order, three police cars went roaring past the restaurant, sirens blaring, heading in the direction of the marina.

The police could have been going anywhere, responding to a hundred different calls, but upon seeing them Annja was convinced that the bodies aboard the Kelly Mayhad been found and that any minute now they’d realize where she was and come looking for her.

The sooner she got out of there, the better.

The food server handed over her order and Annja drove off, getting on the highway and heading south toward Savannah as quickly as she dared.

32

The Savannah airport was larger than she’d expected, but not by much. She found the car rental return, dropped the keys and the rental agreement, unsigned since it was in Garin’s name, into the slot and headed into the terminal. She checked in at one of the self-service kiosks and then quickly made her way toward security.

While she was standing in line at the security checkpoint, she noticed a man in a dark windbreaker and jeans a few lines over. Something about him looked familiar, but she couldn’t place where she had seen him before. He glanced in her direction, his gaze sliding over her without showing any sign of recognition, and Annja decided that he was just another traveler waiting to get through security.

No big deal.

She handed her ID and boarding pass to the security agent, waiting a moment for him to review it, and then moved on and dealt with the X-ray machine. After collecting her things on the other side, she headed for her gate.