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“I’ll see what I can do. There aren’t many ancient peoples with a more complex history and culture. Even after a full semester of it, I felt like I’d barely scratched the surface. Every symbol has multiple meanings and every god multiple identities. It doesn’t help that most of the historical accounts are biased toward the Spanish.”
“Victors write the history,” Sam said.
“Sadly true.”
Sam took a sip of wine. “It seems a safe bet that Rivera and whoever he’s working for share an obsession with Blaylock—even separated by a hundred forty years. Don’t ask me how, though. The Aztec angle can’t be a coincidence. Or are we too close to the forest?”
“I don’t think so, Sam. It’s the one common denominator that links Blaylock, the ship, the bell, and Rivera. The question is, where do the middle two fit into it?”
The waiter appeared with their salads.
Sam said, “We still don’t know how Rivera got interested in the Shenandoah in the first place. Hell, we don’t even know if it is the Shenandoah. Aside from Ophelia, which is Blaylock’s own invention, the ship had two other names: the Sea King and El Majidi. We’re not only dealing with what but also when.”
“What if they stumbled onto something to do with Blaylock—another journal or some letters, for example. Worse still, what if Selma’s right and Blaylock’s bout with malaria left him insane, and the doodling in his journal is pure fantasy?”
“In other words,” Sam said, “we could all be on a wild-goose chase.”
AFTER DINNER they shared a wedge of strawberry-rhubarb pudding cake and finished with two cups of decaf Ethiopian coffee. They were back in their room shortly before nine. The message light on the telephone was blinking.
Remi said, “I knew I forgot something: I didn’t give Julianne our cell phone numbers.”
Sam dialed into the hotel’s voice-mail system and turned on the speaker. “Sam, Remi, this is Julianne. It’s about eight-thirty. I’m going to go work from home, but I’ll be back at the library by six tomorrow morning. Come by around eight. I think I’ve found something.”
CHAPTER 24
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
THEY ARRIVED AT THE RESEARCHERS’ ENTRANCE AT SEVEN FORTY-FIVE and were met by a security guard, who checked their credentials then escorted them to the Special Collections Room on the second floor. They pushed through the door and found Julianne Severson sitting at her workstation, head resting on the desktop. She was wearing the same clothes as the day before.
As the door clicked shut, she jerked upright and looked around. She saw them, blinked rapidly a few times, then smiled. “Morning!”
Remi said, “Oh, Julianne, please don’t tell us you never went home.”
“I almost did. I meant to, really, but I was following a thread that turned into another and another . . .You know how it goes.”
“We do,” Sam replied. “If it helps, we brought a Venti Starbucks dark roast and bagels and cream cheese.”
He held up the box. Severson’s eyes widened.
AFTER GULPING DOWN half the coffee and most of a bagel, Severson wiped her lips, ran her fingers through her hair, and joined Sam and Remi at the worktable. “Better,” she said. “Thanks.” Beside her was a manila folder stuffed with printouts and a yellow legal pad covered in notes.
“Before we’re done here I’ll of course print out all the reference material I’ve found, so right now I’ll just give you the highlights.
“The good news is, everything I found had long ago been declassified and is now open source. I spent the night connecting dots, using private archives, university collections, War and Navy Department docum
ents, Secret Service records, nonfiction books and periodicals . . . You name it, I checked it.”
“You’ve got our full attention,” Sam said.
“First let me show you a picture of my Blaylock. Tell me if it matches yours.”
She pulled a photo from the folder at her elbow and slid it across the table. On her iPhone Remi pulled up a scanned version of the Blaylock photo they’d found in the Bagamoyo museum. Severson’s version showed a tall, broad-shouldered man, in his late teens or early twenties, wearing a Union Army officer’s uniform. Sam and Remi compared the photos.
Sam said, “That’s him. In ours he’s older, a little grayer and weathered, but it’s the same man.”
Severson nodded and took back the photo. “The man you know as Winston Lloyd Blaylock was in fact named William Lynd Blaylock: born in Boston in 1839, graduated from Harvard two years early at the age of nineteen with a degree in mathematics—specifically, topology.”
“Which is?” Remi asked.