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Pete said, “I’m nothing if not chivalrous. Go ahead, Wendy.”
Wendy took a deep breath, reached into the box, and flipped the appropriate switch. An inch-wide rectangular hatch slid open beside her fingers.
Karna said softly, “Now gently slide your pinkie finger up along the inside of the box until you feel a square button.”
Wendy did so. “Okay, got it.”
“Slide that button . . . let me see . . . slide it to the right—no, left! Slide it to the left.”
“Left,” Wendy repeated. “Are you sure?”
Karna hesitated a moment, then nodded firmly. “Yes, left.”
“Here I go.”
Through the laptop’s speaker Sam and Remi heard a wooden snick.
Wendy cried, “The top’s open!”
“Now carefully lift the lid straight upward. If it’s there, the disk will be suspended from the underside.”
Moving with exaggerated slowness, Wendy began lifting the lid an inch at a time. “It’s got some heft to it.”
“Don’t let it swing,” Karna whispered. “A little more . . .”
Pete rasped, “I can see a cord hanging down. Looks like catgut or something similar.”
Wendy kept lifting.
The halogen light reflected off something solid, a curved edge, a glint of gold.
“Be ready, Peter,” said Karna.
Wendy lifted the lid the rest of the way. The remainder of the cord rose from the box. Dangling at its end: the prize, a four-inch-wide golden disk.
With latex-gloved hands, Pete reached out. Wendy lowered the disk into his palms, and he transferred it to a foam-lined tray on the table.
The group let out a collective breath.
“Now comes the hard part,” Karna said.
“What?” Wendy said with exasperation. “That wasn’t the hard part?”
“I’m afraid not, my dear. Now we must ascertain whether we do in fact have the genuine article.”
21
VLORË, ALBANIA
The Fiat’s dashboard clock clicked over to nine a.m. just as Sam and Remi passed the welcome sign for Vlorë. Albania’s second-largest city, of a hundred thousand souls, sat nestled on a bay on the west coast, overlooking the Adriatic with its back to the mountains.
And with any luck, Sam and Remi hoped, Vlorë was still home to one of the Sentinel disks.
An hour after Wendy and Pete had extracted the Theurang disk from the box and set about determining
its provenance with Karna, Selma’s face reappeared in an iChat window on Karna’s laptop’s screen.
In her characteristically curt manner she said, “Jack, your research methods are impeccable. Sam, Remi, I think his theory about the two priests holds water. Whether we can find them and the other two disks is another matter.”