Sam looked up from his screen. “You having any luck locating that pyramid?”
Tom closed his laptop. “If it did exist, any record of it has long since been destroyed. There’s nothing on the internet.”
“What about the Emerald Star?”
“There’s been a few hits, but nothing that matches that time period.”
“So we’re at a dead end?”
“Yeah,” Tom said.
Sam picked up the phone at the end of the table and dialed a number from memory. The phone rang four times before being picked up by its owner.
“You’re getting slower, Elise,” Sam said. “I remember a time when you used to pick up before it reached its second ring.”
“Is that so?” she asked. “And I remember a time when you didn’t interrupt me when I was on vacation.”
Sam smiled. In the past three years since he’d hired her for her inhuman ability to solve complex puzzles and hack any computer on the planet, he hadn’t recalled Elise ever taking a proper vacation. “That’s right, you said you were going away while the Maria Helena had her maintenance. Where are you?”
“Laying on a sunny beach in a town whose name most people can’t pronounce, and where few people will ever go looking to find me.”
“Not anymore,” Sam said. “I need you to get back to civilization and use that incredible mind of yours to locate something for me.”
“What?”
“Two things, actually.”
“Go on,” she said.
“A pyramid in Namibia and a ship last seen in 1655 bearing the name, Emerald Star.”
“Sure.” Her voice betrayed her usual surprise by what Sam wanted from her, as though for all her knowledge and skills, he basically wanted her to use Google for him. “You want a pyramid that didn’t exist and a pirate ship?”
“Yeah, something like that.” Sam flicked over to the third photo of the pyramid on his computer. It was real, he was certain of it. “How long will it take you to get off the beach and find me some answers?”
“Oh, I’m not planning on leaving the beach today. I’m on vacation, remember?” Her voice was teasing.
“Elise, this is important. It’s about Billie.”
“Relax, I’m already looking it up for you.”
“You take your laptop to the beach?” Sam asked.
“What can I say? I’m still a nerd even if I’m on vacation. And with the free satellite connection the company so generously provides, why shouldn’t I?”
Sam smiled as he listened to the sharp staccato of fingers tapping on a keyboard. He waited on the line for her to tell him how long it would take to find something.
He didn’t have to wait long, before she spoke. “Okay, I’m running two searches through a series of databases, ranging from African and Portuguese newspapers through to maritime and archeology reports. It might take a few minutes, but it’s looking like there’s nothing about a pyramid ever being found there.”
“What about the ship, the Emerald Star?” Sam asked.
“Okay, there were eight separate ships built between 1600 and 1700 bearing that name. Can you give me anything else to make it more specific?”
“No. What have you got?”
“Three were built after 1655 and two were sunk before 1655,” she said.
“And the other three?” Sam persisted.
“There’s a Spanish merchant vessel, which sank on the way to South America in 1656, a Portuguese Frigate that sank at Trafalgar, and a Portuguese barquentine that was stolen by pirates in 1646 — after which, it caused a world of havoc for merchant vessels traveling through the Gibraltar Strait. Apparently it was one of the most successful pirate ships during that era.”
“What happened to it?”
“No one knows. In 1654 it fired two shots at a Portuguese Frigate, before evidently realizing it couldn’t win, and turned to run. It was never seen again.”
“That’s our ship,” Sam said. “Where was it last seen?”
“Causing trouble along the north-west coast of Africa.”
“That’s it?” Sam said. “You can’t get any closer port or anything? What about where she was sailing to?”
“Sorry, Sam — that’s all I’ve got.”
Sam felt the Gulfstream ease off its thrust, as it commenced descent into Malta still thirty miles away. “What about the pyramid?”
There was a pause on the line — maybe just enough to take a couple breaths. “All right, I think I’ve got something for you.”
“What?” Sam asked, feeling hopeful.
“I don’t know if you’re going to like it. There was never any proof, but the story will definitely grab your attention.”
“Go on!”
“A man named Peter Smyth, three years ago went searching for a pyramid his great ancestor once wrote about. He claimed he’d found a journal stored by his late father and written by a guy named Thomas Hammersmith. In the journal Hammersmith described a journey into an African desert that reached all the way to the Atlantic. The purpose of which was to steal a rare golden artifact from an ancient pyramid. He goes on to say the strange relic was a curse that led to the deaths of the rest of their crew.”
“How did he survive?”
“Hammersmith wrote that he was saved by the generosity of an Angel with dark purple eyes who came cloaked in white robes, claiming to be Death, and told him to spread the word — Death was going to save the world.”
Sam said, “I can’t imagine why you thought I’d be concerned about the authenticity of this guy’s story. What did the archeologist say about it?”
“Of course, he never found a pyramid, and the conservatorium of archeology generally placed the story as fiction with no credible basis to go off.”
“But you think he might have been on to something?” Sam asked.
“Well, there’s an interesting note at the end of the article. Apparently Hammersmith was part of a crew who had come there specifically to steal a priceless artifact. After doing so, they were chased like wild animals by the rightful owners who numbered in the hundreds, all the way back to their ship. Care to guess the name of his ship?” she asked, with a hint of a tease.
Sam grinned. “The Emerald Star!”
“Quite a coincidence for a completely made up story, isn’t it?”
“What happened to the ship?”
“He doesn’t know. But what he does know is that a sand storm raged that night, worse than he’d ever seen, and in the process, the entire landscape had changed forever — and he often wondered if the ship still lay buried in the sand.”
Sam took a deep breath in and held it for a moment. “Elise. Tell me you have Peter Smyth’s contact details!”
“No. He went on another journey early last year in search of the pyramid and hasn’t been seen since.”
“Can you find him?”
“Only if he’s left a digital footprint, somewhere. If he walked into the desert and never came back I won’t find anything. He’s definitely not on social media or anywhere else on the internet as far as I can tell. There’s a note somewhere here about him being considered a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Apparently he became concerned that the same people who went after his great descendant were now after him because of what he knew.”
“What about facial recognition?”
“What about it?” Elise asked, and he could imagine her grinning at his naiveté.
Sam persisted. “I thought you said there’s software out there that can locate any person on the planet based on their face.”
“Sure. But the person would need to have the image of their face recorded somewhere for me to locate it. For example, if he went into a bank or a public library I could find it on their database.”