Clive Cussler - Spartan Gold

“Cannon,” Sam said, stopping in his tracks. “Sort of.”

Remi followed his outstretched arm. Thirty yards away in the middle of the lawn was a waist-high stone pedestal. Mounted atop it was an ornamental bronzed sextant, a premodern navigation tool generally used to find the altitude of the sun above the horizon. Where most sextants were no larger than an opened hardcover book, this one was four to five times that size, measuring roughly four feet on a side. Its comically large telescope resembled the barrel of a blunderbuss.

Sam and Remi walked over. There were fewer people here; most visitors were sticking to the gravel paths, their attention focused on the chapel, the mountains, or the fjord.

“There’s a plaque,” Remi said. “It’s in German.”

Sam leaned down for a better look and translated: “Presented August of 1806 to Elector Maximilian I Joseph, House of Wittelsbach, member of the Confederation of the Rhine and King of Bavaria by Napoleon I, Emperor of the French.”

“If that isn’t a clue I don’t know what is,” Remi said. “Here, Sam, look at this.”

He moved to where she had knelt down. The lower part of the sextant consisted of a vertical index arm designed to slide over a curved arc engraved with notches, each indicating one-sixtieth of a degree. A gap in the index arm showed the arc’s current reading. It was set to seventy.

“Not a trio,” Remi said. “Would have been nice if it’d been set on three.”

Sam suddenly grabbed her arm and moved them around the pedestal, putting it between them and the chapel area. Through the arms of the sextant they could see Kholkov and his partner walking down the path toward the outbuildings nearer the trees.

“Maybe it is,” Sam said. “Let’s think outside the box: If the sextant is our cannon and the notches on the arc are quoins—the wedges—this part of Laurent’s riddle is metaphorical.”

“Go on.”

“Remember the line: ‘A trio of Quoins, their fourth lost, shall point the way to Frigisinga.’ That suggests that a fourth quoin would complete the group. If you have a completed group, what percentage do you have?”

“A hundred.”

“So each quoin would represent a quarter of the total. How many notches on the arc?”

Remi checked. “A hundred forty-two.”

Sam mentally did the math:

142 / 4 quoins = 35.5

35.5 x 3 quoins = 106.5

He said, “Okay, so if we were to lift the barrel to a hundred six degrees . . .”

They both knelt behind the sextant and imagined the telescope angled upward to its new position. It was aimed directly at the for wardmost minaret atop the red-roofed onion domes.

“I guess that’s what you call X marks the spot,” Remi said. “Met aphorically, of course.”

“Triangle marks the spot,” Sam corrected. “Hopefully.”

They hadn’t taken ten steps back toward the chapel when a voice came over the loudspeaker, making an announcement first in German and then in English:

“Attention, visitors. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we have just been alerted of an impending storm. Due to expected heavy winds, we will be closing the park early. Please proceed immediately but calmly to the dock area and follow the instructions of park staff. Thank you.”

Around Sam and Remi there came the babble of disappointed voices and mothers and fathers calling to children. Faces turned upward, scanning the blue sky.

Sam said, “I don’t see any—”

“There,” Remi said.

To the southwest a narrow wall of purplish black clouds were rolling over the peaks of the mountains. As Sam and Remi watched, the front seemed to roll like a slow-motion wave down the slopes toward the fjord.

Visitors began moving toward the docks, some trotting, some simply strolling. Staff members in light blue shirts acted as shepherds, gently encouraging stragglers and helping parents round up children.

“I don’t know about you,” Sam said, “but I’m not keen on—”

“Me neither. We’re staying. Need to find a place to hide.”

“Come on.”

With Remi close on his heels, Sam headed for the shore, some fifty yards away, where a path led left, toward the forest, and right, toward the docks. They turned left and started trotting, passing a dozen or so visitors headed in the other direction. One of them, a man herding two toddler boys in green lederhosen, called out to them in German.

“You’re going the wrong way! The docks are this way.”

“Dropped my car keys,” Sam replied. “Be right back.”

A minute later they were inside the tree line. The path curved left, toward the outbuildings, but they kept going straight, ducking under the handrail and into the underbrush. After a hundred feet they stopped and crouched down beneath the boughs of a pine tree. Above, leaden clouds began rolling over the peninsula, blocking out the sun.

For the next twenty minutes they watched through the trees as visitors hurried down paths and across lawns toward the docks. A few minutes later they glimpsed one of the electric tour boats chugging up the fjord, passing two more coming down from the north, all three nosing their way through serrated whitecaps.

Slowly the cacophony of voices died away, leaving only the wind whistling through the trees and snow-muffled shouts of “all aboard!” from the dock area. The loudspeakers, which had been repeating the evacuation notice every thirty seconds, stopped broadcasting.

“Getting colder,” Remi said, hugging herself.

Sam, having heeded the guidebook’s advice, pulled their Wind-breakers and knit caps from his backpack. Remi donned the clothes and pulled her hands into her sweatshirt’s sleeves.

“Think they left with the others?” she asked.

“Depends on what Kholkov thinks we did. The safe bet would have been to wait for the last boat and look for us in the departing crowds.”

“Still, something tells me we’d better assume the worst.”

“I agree.”

They waited a full hour after the last boat had disappeared up the fjord. Filled with fat snowflakes, the wind was gusting heavily, shaking the tree canopies. Pinecones thumped to the ground and leaves skittered through the underbrush. Snow began collecting behind tree trunks and on the grass, but immediately melted as it touched the sun-warmed gravel paths, creating tendrils of steam that were whipped into tiny vortexes by the wind.

“Let’s have a look around,” Sam said. “Find someplace to warm up.”

They picked their way back to the path and followed it inland to a clearing where they found a log cabin with a low-slung mansard roof and block windows. It was a long structure, measuring nearly a hundred feet, with a stairway rising up its rear wall to a door. Sam and Remi climbed up it and tried the door. It was unlocked. They pushed through and found themselves in a loft with a balcony overlooking the lower level. The interior was dark save what little gray seeped through the tarnished glass windows.

“It’s not the Four Seasons, but at least we’re out of the wind,” Sam said.

“Comfort is relative,” Remi said with a smile, brushing snow off her sweatshirt.

They found a warm corner and sat down.

They waited another thirty minutes, enough time, they hoped, for any staff members who had stayed behind to catch a final boat back to Schönau. Whether any caretakers had stayed behind Sam and Remi didn’t know, but they’d cross that bridge if it arose. Outside the wind had slackened slightly, giving way to heavy snow. Pine boughs scraped the sides of the cabin like skeletal fingers.

Remi jerked her head around, as though she’d heard something.

Sam mouthed, What?

She put her fingers to her lips and pointed toward the window. A few moments later Sam heard it: footsteps crunching through the snow. Silence, then a thunk of a boot on wood. Someone was mounting the stairs outside. Sam got up, crept to the door, locked it, then returned to Remi. A moment later the doorknob gave a squeak, then a rattle. Silence again. The footsteps thumped down the stairs, then began crunching through the snow again.

A door on the lower level opened.

Remi huddled closer to Sam, who put an arm around her shoulders.

Footsteps again, this time a pair of them. They moved into the cabin and stopped. A flashlight panned over the ceiling, skimmed along the loft railing, then clicked off.

“Hello?” a voice called in German. “Park staff. Is anyone here?”

Remi looked at Sam, her mouth forming a question. He shook his head and mouthed, Kholkov.

“Anyone here? There’s been a weather evacuation.” Kholkov called in German again, then a few seconds later, “No one here. Let’s check the other buildings.”

More footsteps. The door banged shut.

Sam held his palm up to Remi, then put his finger to his lips.

A minute passed. Two. Five.

From below there came the faint scuff of a shoe on wood.

“They’re not here,” Kholkov said in English.

“What makes you think they’re still here at all?” a second voice asked.

“It’s what I would do. And I know how they think; they’re too stubborn to let a little weather turn them back. Let’s go.”

The door opened, shut. Footsteps crunched through the snow and faded away. On hands and knees Sam crawled to the railing and peeked through. He turned and gave Remi a thumbs-up.

“My heart’s pounding like a jackhammer,” she said.

“Join the club.”

“We’re going to have to be careful about our footprints.”

“So are they. In fact, let’s use them while we can.”

CHAPTER 48

They slipped out the door, climbed down the steps, and followed Kholkov’s footprints out of the clearing, stopping every ten feet to look and listen. They were being overly cautious, they knew, but the Russian was a professional at this. There was a very real chance the man would double back and wait in ambush. Their best chance was to locate Kholkov and his partner and keep them in sight while remaining hidden themselves.

The weather was not going to make this easy. The snow was falling more heavily and the visibility had dropped to less than a hundred feet. Already Kholkov’s footprints were filling in. After fifteen minutes of stop-and-start progress they reached an intersection of pathways. Left and right branches led to another pair of stucco/wood cabins, while straight ahead stood a barnlike outbuilding. Beyond that, barely visible through the falling snow, they could see the dark roof of the chapel’s lodge.

To the left, a muffled thump: a door swinging shut.

Sam and Remi ducked off the path and dropped to their bellies in the undergrowth. Ten seconds later a pair of snow-blurred figures appeared on the path to their left, tromped through the intersection, and disappeared into the trees on their way to the other cabin. A minute later came the squeak of door hinges.

Sam slipped back onto the path, crept to the intersection, and looked right. He turned and signaled Remi forward. Together they hurried down the opposite path, to the cabin Kholkov had just left. They ducked inside and eased the door shut. Sam went to the window and knelt down to keep watch. Remi joined him.

After ten minutes Kholkov and his partner materialized out of the snow and turned right at the intersection, heading toward the chapel lodge. Within seconds the weather had swallowed them again.