“We are now.” Ana glanced toward Pitt. “What happened outside?”
“There’s nobody here. Where’s the rest of your team?”
Ana pointed to Mikel, who was now sitting upright in a dazed state. “That’s it.”
“Officer,” Pitt said, “we have two men here who need immediate medical attention. Everyone else could use some fresh air.”
A paramedic team waiting outside the compound was called in to treat Stenseth and Mikel. They carried the two out on stretchers and took them to the hospital in Burgas, along with a few of the Macedonia’s crew members suffering the worst effects from the carbon monoxide poisoning. Ana, Pitt, and Giordino should have been among that group, but they refused treatment, helping the remaining crew outside and taking relief in the fresh sea air.
As Ana briefed the lead relief officer, Pitt walked over to the warehouse. He noted the flatbed truck was gone. A panel of corroded aluminum rested against the wall where the truck had been parked, and he studied it with curiosity. Pitt recognized it as a cargo door from an airplane.
He returned to Ana, who was speaking with the officer about the disappearance of her colleagues and vehicles.
“You might check the lagoon.” Pitt pointed to the newly graded road and the nearby front-end loader. “Did everyone make a clean getaway?”
Ana nodded with a scowl. “We’ll search for the workboat, but it could be in three different countries by now.”
“Don’t forget the flatbed truck. It’s missing from the warehouse, and they seemed to value the object it carried.”
“Yes, that might be easier to track down.” She gave a detailed description to the officer. When he stepped to his car to call in the data, Ana approached Pitt. “Do you think they knew we were coming?”
“No, but they were prepared.”
“We’ll fi
nd them.” She looked at the Macedonia’s crew, huddling around the building. “They’ve called in some buses to transport everyone down to Burgas. Are you and Al going to stay in Bulgaria much longer?”
“I’m due back in Washington shortly, but there’s one thing I need to do first.”
“What’s that?”
Pitt gazed at the empty warehouse with a resolute look.
“I need to make one more dive in the Black Sea.”
62
A stiff breeze from the northwest rippled the waters around Cagliari as Dirk and Summer climbed out of a cramped airport taxi. While Dirk collected their bags and paid the driver, Summer looked across the boulevard at Sardinia’s capital city. A blanket of rustic brownstone buildings rose up the hillside, enveloping the old Italian port that had changed ownership more than a dozen times through the centuries.
“I don’t see our ride,” Dirk said. He was looking in the opposite direction at the bustling port, one of the largest in the Mediterranean.
“The Iberia isn’t due for another couple of hours. Let’s go find a coffee somewhere.”
They walked off their flight from London by strolling along the waterfront to a cozy sidewalk café. Though she didn’t need the jolt, Summer joined her brother in ordering an espresso, having learned on a trip to Milan that proper Italians never drink latté after noon.
“I still say we should have gone to Greece and searched for the Pelikan,” she said, dousing her espresso with sugar.
“We’ve been over this,” Dirk replied. “It came down to logistics. There are no NUMA vessels available in the Aegean for at least a week. We might have been able to charter something out of Athens, but that would have taken a few days to organize. Instead, we’ve got the Iberia available right now in Sardinia, close to where the Sentinel went down.”
“What about Mansfield?”
“We can’t control his moves. He may well be looking for a boat in Greece, too. Besides, there are no guarantees that the gold is on the Pelikan. Julian and Charles are back at the National Archives hunting for new leads on both vessels. They might find the truth before anyone else does.”
From his vantage by the window, Dirk kept a lookout to sea, eventually spotting a blue-green dot sliding across the horizon. The turquoise-colored Iberia, an intermediate-sized NUMA oceanographic ship studying subsurface currents in the southern Mediterranean, slowly sailed into the harbor and docked at Cagliari’s inner port facility. An energetic captain by the name of Myers welcomed them aboard a short time later.
“Thanks for swinging by and grabbing us here,” Dirk said.
“No trouble at all,” Myers said. “We were running low on fuel and water and needed to make a port run anyway.” The captain swayed on his feet, feeling the leftover effect of some bumpy seas. “The crew is quite excited to be participating in a shipwreck search.” His eyes were bright. “Everybody is wondering what it is. A Phoenician trader? Maybe a Roman galley?”