Allison obliged. “Richard said the coat equals the key. Now we have linguistic proof of that. Schliemann mentioned coat and key on two different occasions.”
“In what context?”
“Unfortunately, context is rather difficult. The policeman did his best to record what Schliemann was saying, but he struggled a bit. Sometimes we couldn’t read his shorthand. Other times he mangled the words. Occasionally he drew long blank lines in his journal to indicate that something was being said that he couldn’t comprehend at all.”
“And the different colors?”
Jones answered. “That was our attempt to give the words some kind of framework. After a while, we noticed that Schliemann clustered the same words together over and over again. We weren’t able to reconstruct long passages-there were too many missing words-but we lumped certain words together. By doing so, we felt it added meaning.”
“And what did Schliemann mean by coat and key?”
“Both times he said coat and key, he also mentioned location. So we know those words are connected. Our best guess is still a coat of arms. We’re hoping it will point to a city or a specific family, thus revealing the location of the treasure. Or at the very least, another clue.”
Payne studied the lists some more. “I only see two cities mentioned. And no names.”
“Actually, we had some problems with proper nouns. Most translation programs have a limited number of words in their vocabularies. Common words like key and coat were easy to translate, because they are words that tourists might use. But names and locations were much harder for us. We lucked out on Olympia and Constantinople. The cop must have been familiar with them, because he actually wrote them in his journal.”
“Speaking of Constantinople, how do the red words connect together?”
He handed the notebook to Allison to refresh her memory. But she didn’t need to look at it. She had spent so much time with the words she knew them all by heart.
“Three words-Constantinople, treasures, and fire-support the original story. Treasures were supposedly removed from the city before fires were set by rioters.”
“What about the other red words?”
“Schliemann mentioned them with the others, occasionally changing his word order. As for what he meant, we’re still unsure. At this point, any theory would be conjecture.”
“Actually,” Jones admitted, “most of this is conjecture. I mean, we translated a century-old conversation, which had been spoken in more than a dozen languages and was then transcribed in Italian. The odds are pretty good we messed some stuff up.”
Allison agreed. “He’s right. Errors are a distinct possibility. But that being said, if we were unsure about a word, we didn’t put it in one of our columns.” She slowly turned the pages and showed Payne everything that they had attempted to translate. There were far more words in their scrap heap than in their actual lists. “We’re pretty confident in what we showed you.”
Payne nodded his approval. He considered it a minor miracle that they had been able to do all this work in a single night. It would have taken him a month, if he could have done it at all. “One question, though. Why didn’t Richard have coat or key in any of his columns?”
“You know,” Jones said, “that bothered us, too. He wrote the coat equals the key at the bottom of a page, but we couldn’t find those two words anywhere in his translations.”
“Any theories on why not?”
Jones nodded. “One. And you’re not going to like it.”
Payne leaned back in his chair. “Go on.”
“We think maybe, just maybe, that Richard used his legal pad as his scratch pad. You know, to work things out before he transferred them to a different page. Kind of like we did.”
“Sounds practical to me. So where’s his main page?”
“We think there’s a chance that he had it on him when he was killed.”
Payne groaned. “Why do you say that?”
Jones glanced at Allison. “Go on. Tell him.”
“Because Richard often carried a folded piece of paper in his shirt pocket. Depending on the color of his shirt, you could see it in there.”
“But you never read it?”
She shook her head. “Nope. I never read it, so it could have been anything.”
“Still,” Payne said, “we have to assume the worst.”
“Which is?”
Jones answered the question. “All the work we just did is currently in the hands of the Russian police, and they’re trying to figure out what it all means.”
“But that’s not all,” Payne stressed. “On the day that Richard was killed, he was scheduled to meet with Ivan Borodin. If Ivan’s phone number was on that paper, there’s a good chance the cops have called him and asked him about Richard’s death. And if that happened, there’s a damn good chance that Ivan called the cops and told them about us.”
57
Ouranoúpoli, Greece (4 miles west of Mount Athos)
Nick Dial’s eyes sprang open in the darkness. He blinked a few times, trying to regain his bearings, before he realized where he was and what was happening. His cell phone was ringing on the nearby nightstand. Outside his window, the sun had not made an appearance. The only light in the hotel room was coming from the phone’s tiny screen.
Dial tried to read the name on his caller ID, but drowsiness prevented it.
“Hello?” he answered groggily.
“Nick, it’s Henri.”
There was no teasing or joking. Toulon’s voice was solemn.
Dial sat up and rubbed his eyes. It was early in Greece but even earlier at Interpol Headquarters in France. “What’s wrong?”
“The Spárti police just called. George Pappas and two other officers never returned from their fact-finding trip in the Taygetos Mountains. No one’s heard from them since they left yesterday afternoon.”
A few seconds passed before the information sank in. “What do we know?”
“Pappas is well respected in Spárti. He’s not a drinker or a hothead. He has a wife and family. He’s not the type of guy who would go on a bender and disappear for a few days. Plus, there were two other officers with him. One’s a ten-year vet, the other a rookie. What are the odds that they all ran off together?”
Dial considered other variables, not ready to jump to any conclusions. “Any theories?”
“Car problems are a possibility. Many of the villages are remote, and cell phone coverage is shaky at best. There is always a chance that they are stranded.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“A few hours I could understand. Twelve hours seems unlikely. Three officers should have been able to flag someone down in that time.”
“What about a car wreck? Some of the roads near Metéora were pretty treacherous.”