Arcadia Burns

A REUNION


ROSA SLEPT LIKE THE dead until morning. Once awake, though, she remembered her date with Alessandro, and got up in frantic haste, showering and eating breakfast in record time.

The helicopter was waiting on the landing pad near the palazzo. In jeans, black sweater, and sneakers she climbed aboard and buckled her seat belt. As usual, the pilot complained about everything that was wrong with the old chopper, but she trusted him when he told her, with a gloomy expression, that they were likely to arrive safe and sound just this once.

Soon the gray volcanic cone of Mount Etna rose ahead of them. To avoid the treacherous winds blowing up its slopes, and to keep out of the monitored airspace of Catania, the pilot took the helicopter farther south over the open sea. Keeping their distance from the coast, they followed its course northeast and then, flying low over the water, raced toward the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the toe of the Italian boot.

Below them, the steely blue Mediterranean rushed past, the crests of the waves throwing the helicopter’s shadow back and forth like an oil slick. Apart from a few sailboats, the sea could have been swept clean.

Only some time later did two dots appear on the horizon.

“There they are,” said the pilot’s voice in Rosa’s headset. She was sitting beside him in the cockpit, but the helicopter made too much noise for her to go without ear protectors. Soon after that the headset began to crackle. They were entering the area where Alessandro’s people scrambled radio traffic.

The Gaia, the Carnevares’ 130-foot yacht, lay dazzling white on the water. From above, Rosa saw that the whirlpool on the sundeck had been covered with an awning. No one was using the luxury seating either.

The second boat, rocking on the waves not far from the yacht, was not as impressive at first sight, although Rosa was sure it couldn’t be worth much less than the Gaia. Belowdecks the modest-looking vessel had hundreds of cubic feet filled with high-tech equipment. She knew what vast sums the Colony’s day-to-day operations—not to mention the use of the unmanned drone diver—required.

The helicopter came down squarely on the Gaia’s landing pad.

Alessandro, ducking low, hurried toward her as she jumped down from the cockpit. He hugged her while they were still below the circling rotors, and then they walked hand in hand to the railing, as the chopper rose in the air again behind them. The pilot waved a hand in farewell, turned west in a tight curve, and flew back toward the coast.

She gave Alessandro a long kiss as the noise of the helicopter died away in the distance. He held her tight as if the wind might carry her off with it across the sea. A hot, tingling sensation ran over her from head to foot, so unexpected and exciting that it took her a moment to work out what it was—her new skin reacting to his touch. Its tinge of pink had faded by now, but her nerves were in turmoil as she felt Alessandro near again. She had expected a chill, the sign of the snake stirring inside her, but instead a comfortable warmth took possession of her. She nestled closer in his arms.

When they finally moved apart, she realized that so far she had felt him but hadn’t looked at him. She looked now—and it was a shock.

He was pale and seemed exhausted, with dark rings under his eyes. His brown hair was even messier than usual, and the dimples that were always there couldn’t disguise the fact that he clearly hadn’t had much to smile about in the past few days. Even in his weary state he was still outrageously good-looking, and his green eyes easily outshone his pallor, but she could tell that something was wrong. All at once her own exhaustion disappeared.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“I haven’t been sleeping much. And when I did, I had bad dreams.”

She’d had those, too, but she had already decided to keep the reason for them to herself for the time being. Not just out of consideration for him, but also out of sheer self-interest. She wasn’t going to let Tano’s ghost cast a shadow over their reunion. She had that much power over it. Tano might have taken possession of her body, but with a little effort she could wipe him from her memory.

“If I’d known you were coming here, I’d have—”

She put her hand on the back of his neck and silenced him gently with another kiss. Only then did she ask, “What’s wrong?”

“Well, my own people would like to be rid of me, and sooner or later someone will try to do something about it, but that’s nothing new.” He smiled with the mixture of melancholy and determination that no one had mastered as well as Alessandro. “How about you?” he asked. “You stopped calling.”

“Later, okay?”

He looked her in the eye. “You’ve found out something.”

“Give me a little time?”

“They hurt you.”

“Alessandro, please…I’ll tell you all about it, but for now I just want to be with you. We don’t have to tell each other all our problems right away.”

He took her hand and led her from the landing pad to the wood-paneled interior of the yacht, and along a stairway with gold fittings down to the main deck. When they were in the open again, Rosa saw that the Gaia and the Colony were fastened together with cables as thick as a man’s arm. They moved from one vessel to the other along a gangplank.

Two men and a woman, all in blue overalls, were standing by the Colony’s rail, smoking and looking at them. One of the men, gray-haired and tanned brown by the sun, nodded briefly in Rosa’s direction. Professor Stuart Campbell, Englishman and egocentric treasure hunter—he was in charge of the investigations that Alessandro had commissioned the group of marine researchers and archaeologists to carry out.

“Signorina Alcantara,” he greeted her.

“Professor Campbell.” She didn’t like the way he looked at her, as if she were some dumb little blonde who had hooked Alessandro. However, she wasn’t interested enough in Campbell for it to infuriate her seriously.

Alessandro let her enter the control room of the Colony ahead of him. Half a dozen men and women, also in overalls, were sitting close together in front of a great deal of radar and echo-sounding equipment. The windowless room might as well have been inside the drone that was operated from here by remote control through the trenches and ravines on the seabed. The air was stuffy, and cigarette smoke from outside drifted in through the doorway, which did nothing to improve the atmosphere, but the others didn’t seem bothered.

“Here,” said Alessandro, pointing to one of the screens. “Take a look at that.”

It was a three-dimensional diagram of the seabed, covering three hundred square feet. Alessandro used a touch pad to alter the perspective. As he moved two fingertips apart on the pad, the virtual camera zoomed in on the curving lines of the pattern.

“Those are the exact coordinates from the Dallamanos’ documents,” he said.

Rosa looked intently at the graphics. They took some getting used to. “Looks empty.” Which would explain why when she and Alessandro had tried diving, twice, they had found nothing either time.

“Wrong,” said a red-haired woman in her midthirties. Rosa had forgotten her name, but on her last visit the redhead had been the only one on board who would condescend to give her more than a brief greeting. “To call it empty isn’t quite accurate.”

“But?”

The woman archaeologist moved Alessandro’s hand aside and used the touch pad herself. Perspective and size changed rapidly as she zoomed in on an inconspicuous part of the network of lines. A brief tap on the keypad, and at once a second and much finer pattern overlaid the first. Rosa’s brow wrinkled. “Stones.”

“That’s what we thought ourselves at first,” said the woman. “Not statues, anyway—not what we were looking for.”

Rosa glanced inquiringly at Alessandro.

Patience, his eyes said.

The researcher dragged a cursor down to the edge of the picture. A column of figures in the corner changed. The framework filled in from the outside; then it looked as if someone had placed a gray cloth over the structure.

Rosa leaned closer to the screen. “Round stones?” she asked skeptically.

“Plinths.”

“Twelve of them,” added Alessandro. “All inside that square.”

Rosa ran her fingers through her hair. “Does that mean…?”

“Someone got here ahead of us,” said the woman. “Someone snapped up the statues from under our noses.”

“But no one knows the coordinates!”

“Are you sure?”

“Dallamano was taking us for a ride,” she murmured.

Alessandro shook his head. “Not necessarily.”

“You of all people defending him? He almost killed you.”

“According to him, your aunt had the documents in her hands, at least for a few hours. And Pantaleone got them from her. We don’t know who may have been told about the contents of the documents, by either or both of them.”

“Not to mention the fact,” the researcher added, “that this area is more than three miles offshore, outside the country’s borders, so in theory anyone could have come across them. Maybe by chance, maybe because he knew what he was looking for.”

Rosa snorted. “Chance!”

“We don’t believe that either,” one of the men said behind them. Rosa could smell the cigarette smoke that he brought into the control room even before she turned to him.

Professor Campbell pointed to a monitor on the opposite wall. One of the men at the controls vacated his seat for the professor. Rosa exchanged a glance with Alessandro, who nodded encouragingly at her.

“Let’s get to the reason why I asked you to come here, Signore Carnevare. Look at this.” The treasure hunter indicated the screen, where the different camera angles of the underwater drone were changing in quick succession. Finally he stopped at one of them. “This one was taken by the starboard camera on Colony Two.”

One of the floodlights moved over the seabed. Crevices and holes gaped wide in the rock. The Strait of Messina was constantly exposed to underwater earth tremors, and was encrusted with geological scar tissue.

“How deep is it?” asked Rosa.

“ Not very deep. A little over a hundred and twenty feet. We’re also searching the bed with divers, but that’s laborious, and not half as effective as the instruments on board Colony Two.” Campbell kept the photograph on the monitor and tapped the glass with a ballpoint. “This is what I’m interested in. It’s one of our plinths.”

Rosa couldn’t see much more than a raised round shape, with a few angular chunks of rock in the background.

“It measures roughly three feet in diameter, but it’s probably taller than that. We can assume that, like the other eleven, it’s sunk deep into the seabed. But we’re going to take a closer look at it.”

The dim, ghostly illumination from the searchlight and the floating particles visible in the foreground of the picture reminded Rosa of the Dallamano photographs. Those, however, had shown a statue of two animals: a panther upright on his hind legs, with the broad body of a giant snake coiled around him. The reptile’s head hung before the eyes of the big cat, and the two of them were looking at each other.

“We’ve compared the photos you gave us with these.” Campbell pressed a combination of keys. The picture of the panther and the snake that they had found at Iole’s house moved over the picture on the screen like a film. The perspectives were not exactly the same, but because of the rocky structures in the background there was no possible doubt. It was the same place, but the statue was gone.

“F*ck,” whispered Rosa.

The treasure hunter smiled. “My sentiments exactly.”

She glanced at Alessandro. The greenish light from the screen intensified the color of his eyes. For a moment she couldn’t look away from him. “Did you know about this?” she asked.

“Not until yesterday. I was going to tell you about it today.”

“Does it mean that’s it? Everything here was all for nothing?”

“Definitely not for nothing,” said Campbell drily. “Wait until you see my invoice.”

“Wasn’t salvaging the statues supposed to be your job?” she asked sharply.

“I’m not through yet.” For the first time he spoke as if he took her seriously. “I have some information that will be new to your friend as well.”

Alessandro’s cheek muscles twitched. “Go on, let’s hear it.”

Campbell zoomed in closer on the round block of stone. “As I said, the plinths probably go down several feet into the seabed. That assumption is based on values drawn from past experience of the geological nature of this region, tremors, volcanic activity, et cetera, et cetera…. But let’s look at the surface of the stone, so far as the picture quality allows it. I already have divers down there who will look more closely at our find, put it under a magnifying glass, but it looks like someone cut the statues neatly away from their plinths.”

“You mean each plinth and its statue were carved from a single piece of rock?” asked Alessandro.

Campbell nodded. “Do you see that fluted structure? What we have there are either traces left by extremely fine conventional cutters, or a laser cutter manufactured specially for an underwater operation like this one.”

“Then someone must have invested a lot of money to get hold of those statues,” said Rosa thoughtfully.

“Going down to a hundred and twenty feet isn’t a problem for a well-trained amateur diver, and certainly not for experienced deep-sea or military divers. With the right equipment, you can stay at that depth for quite some time. However, we’ve calculated that to sever a stone block like that cleanly would probably take several hours. Which means that the teams down there either worked with top-quality respiratory technology, probably the kind used by military divers, or worked in several shifts.”

Rosa’s hand was lying on the back of Campbell’s chair. When she felt the touch of Alessandro’s fingers, they exchanged a fleeting smile. She couldn’t have said just what she had expected of this venture. She had trained intensively as a diver herself, but when she and Alessandro had finally gone down, they had been unable to find anything but rocks and mud. Only after that had they hired a professional salvage team.

“What’s more, we’re talking about twelve statues,” the treasure hunter went on, “and we can now say for certain that at least seven were removed from their plinths by the same high-precision methods. In the photos you gave us, the statues were all of panthers and snakes. Some of them were in pieces, or badly damaged. But even those remains must have been salvaged to the very last fragment, all but the plinths. Whoever did it was very thorough, and also treated his find with great respect. Those people didn’t make it easy for themselves. And we have to assume that they could afford to work without any financial restrictions.”

Rosa nodded to Alessandro. She silently formed the word TABULA with her lips.

Campbell tapped his keyboard, and the underwater picture disappeared. He half turned and spoke to one of the women at the instruments. “Give me number thirty-four on seven, Ruth, please.”

The gray-blue surface of the sea came on-screen, obviously a photo taken at a steep angle from a great height.

“What you see here,” Campbell told Rosa and Alessandro, “is secret material that I…well, let’s say I borrowed it.”

“Looks like Google Earth,” Rosa commented.

“Almost. And that’s why I mention it, so that you won’t be surprised, later, about certain items I’ll be charging you for.” The treasure hunter paused and then went on. “The Mediterranean between North Africa and southern Italy is a part of the world under more surveillance than most. And around Sicily the security network is biggest of all.” He added, with an ironic undertone, “There must be a great many people in these parts earning their money through illegal activities.”

“With stolen military photographs?” Rosa suggested.

“I’m about to show you an enlargement of our mysterious picture. If the water was as transparent as everyone thinks, we’d be able to see the twelve statues now.”

“Or their plinths,” said Alessandro.

“No,” the professor contradicted him, “because this picture was taken before the statues were salvaged. As you’ll see.”

“When was that?” asked Rosa.

“On January seventeenth, just under a month ago. Of course there was no nonstop filming of every square sea mile, but photographs were taken at regular intervals. Every yard of the Mediterranean has some satellite camera or other turned on it about every forty-five minutes. All we had to do was get hold of the material we wanted and evaluate it.”

“So?”

“Here, forty-seven minutes later.” The picture changed, and this time a boat could be clearly seen at its center. “And again three-quarters of an hour later.” No change; the vessel was still in the same place. “There they are,” said Campbell.

Alessandro narrowed his eyes. “Who?”

“Not the army, that at least is certain. And the boat we’re looking at here is obviously smaller than the Colony. It has no crane, just a set of cable winches along the rail. Obviously the statues were dragged away underwater, then brought to the surface and unloaded somewhere else.”

He zoomed in closer to the vessel, but now the picture was so pixelated that he withdrew again with a grunt. “Ruth, how the hell do I get that filter on-screen?”

The woman behind them at the console told him a sequence of keys. When Campbell entered the code, his face brightened again. This time the picture was much sharper. Once again he tapped his ballpoint on the glass surface. “Here, and here, and here…those are the divers they sent down.”

The three figures were still not clearly visible, only pale outlines at the rail.

“Looks like they’re not wearing diving suits,” said Alessandro.

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Do you mean they went down there without any diving equipment?”

Campbell nodded. “No suits. No oxygen flasks. Not even flippers, for God’s sake!”

Alessandro shook his head, baffled. “What exactly are we looking at, please?”

Campbell cleared his throat. “Four pictures farther on, they’re coming up from the water again.” He brought up a new picture on the screen: the boat, the sea—and the three pale outlines, two of them still in the water, the other on a ladder outside the hull. “About three hours later. Not nearly enough time for three of them to cut seven of those statues away from their plinths and collect the leftover fragments.”

“Maybe they went down again later,” said Rosa.

“We’ve checked all the pictures from the day when you two were there to the day when we began our investigations. Nothing. The boat was there only on January seventeenth, and for less than four hours. And as far as we can work it out, only those three divers went into the water during that time. Without any equipment apart from a few tools that were probably cutters of some kind.”

Campbell paused, to let his words sink in. Rosa and Alessandro said nothing.

“But that’s not all,” he finally said. “The vessel set off again a little later. It’s not in the next photograph. However, we did succeed in tracing its route.” He was going to give Ruth instructions over his shoulder, but she was already ahead of him.

“Got it,” she called. Rosa heard her fingers tapping the keys.

Several satellite pictures appeared on the screen in quick succession, but this time the coordinates at the edge changed with each photo. “They’re on their way south,” Campbell explained. “They go south for about an hour. Then they come to this.”

Rosa narrowed her eyes as if she could see the picture more clearly that way. Alessandro whistled through his teeth.

The boat looked tiny now. It was lying alongside a much larger ship at least ten times its length. The huge vessel was snow white, with complex superstructures, many decks, and several helicopter landing pads.

The next picture came up. The smaller boat beside the gigantic white vessel had disappeared.

“It doesn’t reappear anywhere in this area,” said Campbell. “They must have taken it on board. Including what was hanging beneath the surface from the cable winches. It all seems to have happened very fast. I’d say they were pros—except that even professionals would need some kind of breathing apparatus and diving suits. As it is, I can only say I haven’t the faintest idea who they were. Not the army. And not any treasure hunters that I’ve ever heard of. Experts, for sure—but not from the same planet as mine.”

Still baffled, Alessandro shook his head. “That’s a cruise ship.”

Campbell nodded. His fingers moved nimbly over the keyboard, and he zoomed in on the picture.

The view centered on one of the landing pads, indicated on-screen by a letter H inside a circle. Rosa held her breath.

Something was inscribed on the deck in big black letters, easily visible to pilots flying that way.

Stabat Mater.