“We need to find a name for this thing,” Sam said.
“Napoleon’s Gold,” Remi suggested with a shrug.
“Works for me.”
Selma said, “Okay, Napoleon’s Gold. I suspect he meant it to work like this: Find one bottle, decode it with the book, then follow the riddle to another bottle—”
Sam caught on: “Then use that label’s code with the book and the first bottle to decode the next line—”
“And its riddle, which leads to yet another bottle . . . and so forth. The good news is—and this is another guess—I don’t think there’s any sequence to the code—in other words, Laurent designed it so any bottle would lead to another riddle.”
Remi said, “If all this is right, why did he hide three bottles together at d’If?”
“No idea. We might find out down the road.”
“We’re ignoring the elephant in the room,” Sam said. “We know for sure one of the bottles is lost—the shard from the Pocomoke proves that. Without that bottle, we could be missing the last riddle—the one that points us to Napoleon’s Gold.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Remi replied. “I guess we won’t know until we reach the end.”
“Selma, what are the chances the bottle Kholkov recovered in Rum Cay is doing them any good?” Sam asked.
“Slim. Unless they have a codebook, that is. And based on how he’s been on your heels every step of the way, I’d say they’re lost.”
“Here’s elephant number two,” Remi said. “At some point we’re going to have to get our hands on the Rum Cay bottle.”
“Which means,” Sam said, “a trip into the lion’s den.”
SEVASTOPOL
Two thousand miles east of Marseille, Hadeon Bondaruk sat at his desk, hands clasped before him. Spread across the burgundy leather blotter were a dozen high-resolution color photographs, each one highlighting a separate line of symbols. For the tenth time in an hour, he picked up a lighted magnifying glass and studied each photo in turn, focusing on the minute details of every symbol—the right angle of this square, the looping curve of a truncated omega, the tilt of a crescent moon . . .
Nothing. There was nothing!
He tossed the magnifying glass across the desk then swept his arm over the surface, scattering the photos.
Despite its monetary value, alone the bottle was worthless to him, and now that the Fargos had Arnaud Laurent’s book, he had to assume they would quickly begin to unravel the code. As much as he wanted to blame Kholkov for the book’s loss, Bondaruk had to admit he’d also underestimated the Fargos. They were treasure hunters—adventurers. Neither he nor Kholkov had anticipated they would be this much trouble. Or this resourceful. Perhaps they should have foreseen this. After all, it stood to reason the Fargos’ escapades had landed them in enough dicey situations to have seasoned them.
Still, their resources couldn’t hope to match his own. On Napoleon alone he’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. His researchers had dissected the man’s life, from cradle to grave, had tracked down not only his every known descendant, but those of the dozens of friends and advisers and lovers Napoleon might have confided in, Arnaud Laurent included. Every book written about Napoleon had been scanned into their computer database and parsed for clues. Period artwork, from battle scenes to portraits to rough sketches, had been scoured for anything that might point the way—a symbol on a tunic button, a finger pointing at something in the background, a book on a shelf behind Napoleon’s head. . . .
And for all that, for all the money spent and time invested, he had nothing but a useless bottle of wine and a pictograph of a damned insect.
His desk phone chimed and he picked it up. “It’s me,” Vladimir Kholkov said.
“Where have you been?” Bondaruk growled. “I was expecting your call last night. Tell me what’s happening.”
“We tracked them to Marseille yesterday afternoon. I met them and proposed a truce—and a partnership.”
“You what? I didn’t tell you to do that!”
“Proposing a truce and keeping a truce are two different things, Mr. Bondaruk. At any rate, they didn’t budge.”
“Where are they now?”
“Back in Marseille.”
“Back? What does that mean?”
“I had to leave France; I’m in La Jonquera, on the other side of the Spanish border. The French police are looking for me. Someone put out a bulletin.”