The Emperor's Revenge (Oregon Files 11)

Still, he did feel a twinge of empathy for the master consigned to that rusty cargo ship, a tramp freighter, whose stern read Nogero.

TWENTY-FIVE

Juan brought Gretchen another cup of coffee from the Gulfstream’s rear galley. Eddie napped on the sofa, Linc lounged while he thumbed through a catalog of motorcycle parts, and Tiny was in the cockpit of the Corporation’s private jet halfway through their flight to Vladivostok. Now that they had more leads in the search for ShadowFoe, the next step was finding out who they were up against. If the hacker was part of a team that had its ship modified at the same naval base where the Oregon was refitted, Juan wanted to know its identity and capabilities. Only by gaining access to the Primorskiy Kray shipyard could they get the answers.

The plan was to introduce Eddie to the current base commander, Admiral Nestor Zakharin, as the son of a Hong Kong communications billionaire wanting his yacht upgraded with the latest armaments. When the Oregon was being refitted, Juan had presented himself as a representative of the “real owner” and had met Zakharin briefly, although the admiral had been just a captain at the time. Gretchen would play Eddie’s aide, and Linc would undertake the role of bodyguard.

Juan handed Gretchen the coffee and sat down across from her. She set the mug on the table and barely looked up from Napoleon’s Diary. For the last twelve hours, she had immersed herself in reading it, translating the emperor’s notations and jotting down references in The Odyssey that might be relevant. Knowing that they were only borrowing the delicate book and planned to give it back to the museum when they were done with it, she turned each page with care.

Of course, the book was already damaged by Napoleon himself. He had torn three pages from it. One was from the scene in which Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops, one was from his passing the island of the Sirens while lashed to the mast so that he could safely hear their beckoning song, and the final page was taken from the perilous passage between the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Without knowing

what notations were on those pages, Gretchen had to piece together any other clues to determine whether the diary really would lead to the Russian treasure that he’d been forced to abandon before it could be taken to France.

“It’s strange that Napoleon would have left such a valuable item behind when he was taken off St. Helena,” she said idly. “If he thought it would lead to the treasure, why not take it with him? Or at least destroy it?”

“If there’s any truth to this story, they went to a lot of trouble to leave a double behind. Napoleon might have been worried that the missing diary would be suspicious and took only a few key pages with him during his abduction.”

“But he left some clues behind, although I’m sure no one would guess they led to a treasure. We wouldn’t have either if it hadn’t been for Delacroix’s letter. Look here.” Juan sat next to her, leaning close to read the diary. A faint whiff of her perfume suddenly brought back their days spent as a married couple.

She pointed to a page with handwriting that looked like the ink scribbles of a seismograph during a magnitude 7 earthquake. The page before it had been torn out.

“How can you read those chicken scratches?” he said.

“It’s taken a while to get used to, but I can now understand most of it in context.” She traced the right-hand margin with her index finger. “This says that the ‘items’ have been stored for safekeeping. I think we can assume that the items he means refers to the treasure. It implies that whatever was on the page before this one is the key for decoding the location of the items, using a system based on the page numbers in this diary. The key is some object that Napoleon encountered in his travels. According to his notes, whatever the object is has writing on it.”

“Then it could have been in the warehouse with the other Napoleon artifacts.”

“That’s possible.”

“But without that page, how are we supposed to figure out what it is?”

“I think I may have a way to narrow it down. Back in Napoleon’s day, they used quills dipped in ink to write. It could be messy if you weren’t careful.” She picked up the magnifying glass next to her and showed Juan the faint outline of ink on the page opposing the missing one. “He must have closed the book before the ink dried.”

Juan could barely make out the reverse image of the word Clé and, next to it, CJ.

“Clé means ‘key’ in French,” she continued. “That’s why he tore out the page, and probably the others as well. Those pages listed the key for deciphering the code. He may have been trying to smuggle the treasure location off St. Helena but never got the chance.”

“But what’s CJ?”

“Maybe we can search the auction database to see if there’s a match,” Gretchen suggested.

“It’s worth a shot.” He rang up the Oregon on his laptop with the jet’s satellite linkup. After two rings, Murph’s face appeared on-screen.

“I was just about to call you,” he said. “We got some intel on your party crashers.”

“Who are they?”

“We don’t have anything on Ivana Semova, but Sergey Golov lit up the CIA’s database. He’s a former Ukrainian frigate captain who got canned when the Russians took over his ship during the Crimea incident. According to the Maltese Oceanic Museum, he and Semova were there representing Maxim Antonovich.”

“Antonovich?” Gretchen said, surprised. “The Russian mining tycoon?”

“The same one. The museum’s rep said that he saw them get off his yacht.”

“Then either Antonovich is behind the warehouse attack,” Juan said, “or Golov and Semova are running some kind of rogue operation in secret.”

“Oh, wait,” Murph said with glee. “It gets better.”

“Spill.”