“Aye,” said Morgan. “Very much so.”
As Elena had predicted, they would reach Valletta Harbor at Malta without incident. The weather remained fair, the winds favorable, and the ship made good time. Gordon was an old sailor, and had much experience on yachts and other sailing vessels. So he took to the situation with eager energy, and was soon much endeared by the local crew. It was as if they could perceive he was a man of some authority, for MacRae acted as though he was used to giving orders, and to the locals, it was clear that he was the man in charge of this little troop of visitors.
Elena spent a good deal of time in the Master’s cabin, finding that her presence on deck became a distraction for the crew, who kept looking her way, and speaking to one another in low whispers. They saw few ships in the transit, and the sight of Valletta was a thrilling moment, particularly for Captain MacRae.
“Look at the place,” he said, eyes alight. The city had a golden hue, from the yellowish stone that made up many of the buildings. “It’s like we were inside a movie. Do you realize we are the only humans to see the harbor this way in the last couple hundred years? Look there, see that star shaped fort? That’s Fort Saint Elmo, first built by the Knights of the Order of Saint John in 1551. It protected this place from the Ottoman Turks until the Knight left in 1798, and Napoleon thought to take the place two years later in 1800. The locals rebelled and, with our help, showed the French the door. Since then, Malta has been a British colony. The Maltese were only too happy to sign on with us, particularly since they knew Bonaparte was out to take the place.”
“We’ll want to see Alexander Ball,” said Elena. “Our contract here is safely concluded, but this is the very ship that sails for Cerigo, and we need to make sure we can stay on board when that happens. Ball was much liked by the Maltese, and instrumental in bringing the place under British rule. He’s the one with the authority to see that we get safely to Cerigo. I’ve taken some time to question our ship’s Master. He tells me they will normally be the better part of a week off loading supplies here.”
“Who will we find at Cerigo?” asked MacRae.
“Any number of associates to Lord Elgin’s famous mission. We might find Mister William Richard Hamilton, Lord Elgin’s personal Secretary, or a Mister Giovanni Battista Lusieri, a man hired to create illustrations of the Marbles. Feodor Ivanovich was a Russian from Astrakhan that was taken on to make casts of the Marbles. The Reverend Philip Hunt was Lord Elgin’s Chaplain. He’s the man who drafted the so called ‘firman,’ a letter granting permission for the excavations to proceed at the Acropolis, and he interpreted his permission to view and document those artifacts quite loosely. I suppose we’re here now because of his… ingenuity.”
“Strange that none of them had any idea of what they were doing,” said Morgan. “No one knew anything about this hidden key.”
“Apparently not,” said Elena. “Frankly, I’m not sure we know what we’re doing either, other than to seize this chance as the only way we might possibly retrieve that key.”
“Which is yet another mystery,” said Morgan. “Oh, we know what they can do—secure the entrances to these time rifts. Yet I have to note that this rift was hidden in plain sight. There was no mysterious door to be opened, and nothing for a key to unlock. Yet here I’ve been told that the very key we’re after had geographic coordinates engraved upon it that pointed directly to St. Michael’s Cave. So what are we missing here?”
“A good point,” said Gordon. “I’m willing to speculate it has something to do with that box we left on the ship.”
“That’s my thinking as well,” said Elena. “The box was capable of moving the entire ship! That action was engaged by the simple insertion of the key I had, a key that did open a mysterious door beneath Delphi.”
“It did two things,” said MacRae. “It led us to Delphi, and then fit into that box, hand in glove, and brought us to the 1940s. You said you came to believe it was simply to find this other key, but how would we have possibly known about it? It was pure happenstance that we even learned it existed.”
“Not entirely,” said Elena. “The apertures in that box were clearly engineered to hold keys. They were clear evidence that other keys existed—seven, to be precise.”
“For what purpose?” asked Morgan.
“That’s part of the quest we’re on,” said Elena. “Once we get our hands on this key, perhaps we’ll know more.”
“What would we possibly learn?” said Morgan again. “This other fellow, Professor Dorland, he knew of this key—even claimed he once had it in his possession. Now, the man seemed clever enough. Yet he didn’t seem to learn anything more about this business.”
“Well here’s what we do know, said Elena. “We’ve a box that does something pretty damn amazing when I insert the key I was bequeathed. I was led to the site where we recovered that box by specific orders I received from the Watch. That was a secret group within the Royal Navy established by Admiral Tovey, and within that box, I find a note from him as well.”
“Well then why didn’t you ask him about it and be done with all this mystery?”
“Of course I asked him,” said Elena, giving Morgan those wide eyes. “He knew nothing about it—at least at this time. Perhaps Tovey doesn’t come into knowledge of the box for years. We can’t think about this in a linear fashion. We found the box in 2021, and it brought us to the 1940s. Whether we were meant to or not, we happened to learn of this key associated with Saint Michael’s Cave, and found ourselves in a perfect position to retrieve it—until the Germans complicated things by sinking the Rodney.”
“I still don’t see the connections,” said Morgan, shaking his head.
“I can’t say I do either,” said Elena, trying to be sympathetic. “Let me put it this way. It’s a puzzle, to be sure, but if we are to solve it, first we have to collect all the pieces. There are seven apertures, and I’m betting there are seven keys. We have two in hand, and this one will be the third.”
“The Box,” said MacRae quietly. “The first key moved us to the 1940s. I’m willing to bet that the second and third will move us somewhere else….”
The other two looked at him. It made perfect sense. Elena had once thought the very same thing, that the box was capable of moving anything in its immediate vicinity through time, and that each key would lead to a different point on the continuum. But why? This was what she voiced now.
“Yes,” she said. “Use a different key in that box, and we might end up somewhere else. I could have tested the proposition with the Key I received from Tovey—the one Fedorov gave to Admiral Volsky to deliver.”
“Fedorov? That young Russian Captain?” Morgan raised an eyebrow. “How did he come by it?”
“I was told it was given to him, by that older gentleman he introduced to us at the Alexandria conference—Kamenski. No, that isn’t correct. Fedorov told me he simply found it on the nightstand, in the quarters the Director occupied onboard that ship—Kirov.”
“I was wondering how the Russians might figure in all of this. Could it be that ship came here to look for this key, just as we did?”
“To be honest, we had no idea we were coming here to look for anything at all,” said Elena. “No, I don’t think the Russians sent Kirov here deliberately. Fedorov said it was started by an accident in the Norwegian Sea, and I believe him.”
“Yet you say he found the key in the Director’s quarters aboard ship?”
“Correct, and this Kamenski fellow simply vanished.”