“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” said MacRae.
“Nor I,” said Morgan. “Do you know who Kamenski was, Miss Fairchild? Well I do, because the two of us were in the same business—intelligence. Kamenski was a former Deputy Director of the KGB. If he had this key, then the Russians know more than you might believe. I’m still suspicious. Where did he find it? How long did he have it in his possession? Why would he leave something of such importance simply lying about on a nightstand?”
“Well,” said Elena, “when we get back, we’ll look up this Fedorov and you can run that by him. All I can tell you is what I’ve learned. How Tovey figures in, and the Watch I served, remains one little mystery here, and the Russian connection is another. The whole thing will likely end up being seven mysteries in an equally mysterious box, but we can only solve them by walking this path. For now, look out there at that harbor, gentlemen. That’s Valletta in 1804, and here we are. It’s damn amazing! I think we’ve more than enough on our hands now without trying to put everything together and see the big picture. We’ve got to simply focus on this mission, get our hands on that key, and then get ourselves safely back to St. Michael’s Cave.”
“Aye,” said Morgan. “Agreed. But I’ll take your advice when we do get back. I want to see this Captain Fedorov and learn what he knows. And I want to know why a highly placed former officer in the KGB, from our time, was cruising aboard that phantom Russian battlecruiser, and with one of the bloody keys in his pocket. And I want to know where he’s gotten himself to, and what he meant by leaving the damn key on that nightstand. These keys go places you say? I wonder where that would take us if we give it a twist in that box?”
“Something tells me we may find that out before this is resolved,” said Elena. “So let’s do the job here first, and see where that leads us.”
Chapter 32
It would be a long month before they would ever get passage to Cerigo. The Lady Shaw Stewart was waiting for other ships to arrive at Malta to form a convoy bound for the Levant. Ship’s Master Parry finally received his orders, to sail for Cerigo with Renard as escort, but the initial leg of the voyage saw them sailing with three other ships. Eventually, the transport veered off, making for the site of the wreck of the Mentor, which was very near the small port of Avlemonas. But Mack Morgan seemed restless, pacing at times as they neared the Greek islands.
“What’s eating at you?” Elena asked him one morning.
“Just fidgeting,” he said. “Been thinking on this whole matter again, and I can’t see how we can get our hands on this key. I mean, that business about us getting to the Selene Horse while it was still submerged has gone out the window now. They’ve already retrieved all the boxes, so our men can’t do the dirty work concealed by water. So we’re back to my old argument about us mucking about with a hammer and chisel.”
“Then we’ll have to try a different approach,” said Elena.
“You know those artifacts will be guarded.”
“Probably, but who will you put your money on, Mack, a few sleepy guards, who have been standing a dull watch on old wooden cases hidden on the beach, or my three Argonauts?”
“Alright, our men can force the issue, but what then? Do we just ransack the cases until we find the one holding the Selene Horse, break into it, and have at the thing with a hammer?”
“I’d like to try a little something different,” said Elena. “I can be quite persuasive, and I think I could convince one of the men in charge of the recovery to let me have a look.”
“You’re going to tell them you’ve come all this way from the British Museum?”
“That would be a good line,” said Elena. “I could say that word came of the mishap, and I was curious to inspect the artifacts and assess their value and quality.”
“But there’s one thing still bothering me,” said Morgan. “This Dorland fellow. He claims he was aboard the Rodney, god only knows how or why. He says he had occasion to get down into the hold where the Marbles were stowed away, along with a good portion of the King’s bullion. He says he found the cases strewn about, one broken open, the base of the Selene Horse chipped, and there was this key. So…. How could we be getting our hands on it here?”
“It has to be here,” said Elena. “This date precedes any other date where the key could have been tampered with or found.”
“You misunderstand me,” said Morgan. “Aye, I grant you that the key may be here, but how do we get it if this Dorland fellow says he found it in 1941? If that’s true, then we fail here. Follow me?”
That was something that Elena had contemplated for some time. The key survived within the Selene Horse into modern times. It had been sitting there in the British Museum all along, and the custodians knew that the key existed. That had been a mystery for some time, though it was known only to a very few. It was thought to be an oddity, and never explained, she thought, until we started receiving those messages from the future, years later…. The keys were very important, they were essential, critical, and they must all be found and accounted for…
Shortly after they arrived she had come to think this whole quest for the key was her real mission here. It was out there, with the Elgin Marbles, aboard Rodney, and she was supposed to recover it. The key was right there, in the base of the Selene Horse…. She was already aware of two versions of that history, and both rang true. The first was the history of the hunt for the Bismarck that she knew from her own time. The second was a similar engagement with that ship, as she and Tovey, Kirov as well, tried to save the Rodney. They had failed, Rodney went down, with the King’s bullion, the Elgin Marbles, and the key in her belly. That was the reason she was here at this very moment, to get to a place in time where they could retrieve the key before it ever saw the inside of HMS Rodney. Yet in both those histories, it clearly was loaded aboard that ship. The British museum even sent the Grey Friars over to sift through the remains of Rodney after the war when the ship was scrapped. Why would they do that, unless they knew the key had been loaded aboard Rodney in 1941? That jogged a memory of a conversation she had with Admiral Tovey…
“Most irregular,” said Tovey. “The Grey Friars sifting through the bones of old Rodney to look for this key… Well, they certainly had to know something of what they were looking for. You say the Watch learned of these keys in those strange signals you received in your time. If that is so, then how would anyone in the 1940’s know about that key, or attribute any significance to it, particularly the Franciscans!”
“Very good questions,” said Elena. “Yet this only remains perplexing when you assume that everyone alive in the here and now is native to this time. As you can see, you are presently sitting here with three people who were born long after your own death.”
“Of course!” It was Fedorov speaking now, exclaiming his surprise in English. Then he spoke quickly, and Nikolin translated. “Other time travelers! … Others may have used those holes in time.”
“Well this is quite a fine mess,” said Tovey. “People coming and going, just as they please, and fiddling with history! I knew this world was something quite different after I learned the truth about you and your ship, Mister Fedorov, but now it seems we have others involved in this whole affair, in these rift zones you speak of, coming and going like servants in and out of the back door.”