Martina placed her devices at the bottom of her bucket and was turning to leave when she heard a knock at the door and a click of the lock. She froze as the door swung open and a housekeeper entered, carrying a jar of mints. The housekeeper stopped and stared at the Russian. “Are you turning down this room?”
“Naw, they just wanted a’nuther towel,” Martina said in a practiced East Ender accent. She pointed to the towel in her bucket and made for the door, slipping past the night housekeeper and walking briskly down the hall. She didn’t look back until she had left the hotel and walked two blocks south.
Satisfied she had drawn no further interest, Martina circled around the neighborhood to Mansfield’s hotel and knocked on the door of his street-view room. He pushed aside a room service table topped with a half-eaten steak and a bottle of Montepulciano and invited her in.
“Any trouble?” He poured her a glass of wine.
“No.” She took the glass and set it down without drinking. “The listening devices are in place and activated.”
She reached into her bucket and handed him a disposable cell phone. “The van will record all conversations and notify you of any potential transmissions. You are welcome to join the technicians for eavesdropping.”
“I’ll just wait for the call.” He gave a smug grin. “Were you able to arrange a meeting with the financial expert?”
“Yes. Ten o’clock tomorrow.” She handed him a folded note with an address.
“Joining me?”
“No, I will be on surveillance duty at that time.”
“A pity. You sure you won’t stay for a drink?”
Martina shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to disrupt your studies.” She handed him the tablet. “I downloaded the contents of a flash drive the woman had stored in her room safe. You’ll also want to check the photographs I took of another object I found in the safe. Good night.”
Martina turned on her heels and let herself out the door. Mansfield activated the tablet and pulled up the file copied from Summer’s flash drive. It was her underwater video footage of the Canterbury. Mansfield watched the sixty-minute recording of the shipwreck, which concluded with a surface shot of the Tavda at dusk near the wreck site.
He started to set aside the tablet, then remembered Martina’s parting comments. He opened the digital folder marked PHOTOGRAPHS, and out sprang a half dozen images of the gold bar. With eyes wide, he stared at the Russian Imperial Seal engraved on it, then reached over and picked up the in-house telephone.
“Room service? I’m going to need another bottle of wine, please.”
39
At precisely eight in the morning, Perlmutter collected Dirk and Summer in his rented Rolls-Royce. It was only a short drive to the hospital, where they caught Jack Dahlgren a few minutes before he was wheeled into surgery. They waited in the cafeteria drinking coffee until Dahlgren cleared the recovery room a few hours later. Groggy from the medication, he laughed with his friends after being told he would make a full recovery. Dirk promised to smuggle him a beer on their next visit, and they left him in the watchful care of a nurse who resembled the singer Adele.
The Rolls was soon on the move again, tailed discreetly by a silver Audi sedan. Their destination was Churchill Gardens and a penthouse flat in a large gray stone building that fronted the Thames River. A cramped elevator carried them to the top floor, where Perlmutter rapped a miniature anchor knocker affixed to a polished hall-end door. A large sandy-haired man holding a pot of tea welcomed them in.
“Just off the boil,” Charles Trehorne said in a soft, upper-schooled accent. “My wife Rosella set it just before slipping out to run some errands. Please do come in.”
The flat resembled a private library. Walnut shelves stuffed with nautical books filled the open floor plan, accented with oriental carpets, antique ship prints, and modern leather furniture. Dirk and Summer looked at each other and smiled.
“Your residence bears a striking resemblance to St. Julien’s home in Washington,” Summer said.
“Yes, the books,” Trehorne said. “An occupational hazard. But I believe Julien has a more exquisite collection.”
“Only in numbers,” Perlmutter said. “We’d make a formidable maritime repository if we consolidated resources.”
“Best in the English-speaking world, I daresay. Please sit down.” He ushered them to a round table beside a glass wall that overlooked the river.
Summer watched a small dredge move by. “Stunning view of the Thames.”
“Inspiring and distracting at the same time,” Trehorne said. He poured tea while Perlmutter helped himself to a plate of scones. Trehorne reached into a nearby book cabinet and produced a bottle of Balvenie single malt Scotch hidden in back. He poured a stiff shot into his cup of tea and passed the bottle to Perlmutter. “A pleasant fortifier, if you like.” Trehorne sampled the results with satisfaction and set his cup back on the table. “So, tell me about this Yankee interest in a Royal Navy C-class cruiser.”
“We located the Canterbury by chance off the coast of Norway,” Dirk said, “then found we weren’t the only ones interested in her.”
“Julien told me about your scrape with the Russians. It leads me to believe there was more to her last voyage than meets the eye.”
“What can you tell us about the Canterbury?” Summer asked.
Trehorne opened a file that he had prepared. “The Canterbury was commissioned in October 1914, the second in the Cambrian class of light cruisers built by John Brown and Company. She was assigned to the Harwich Force early in her career, defending the eastern approaches to the English Channel. She saw light action in the Mediterranean in 1916, then was assigned convoy duty near the end of the year. She was lost off the coast of Norway in February 1917, later determined to have been sunk by the German U-boat UC-29.”