Sandecker drove Trout to his Georgetown town house and gave Austin a lift to Fairfax. Austin dropped his overnight bag inside the door and went into the den-study, a spacious room with dark wood colonial furniture and walls lined with shelves for his books and progressive jazz collection. The red light was blinking on his telephone answering machine. He clicked through the messages and was happy to hear that Joe Zavala was back from England. Austin grabbed a tall can of Speckled Hen ale from his refrigerator and settled into a black leather chair with his phone. Joe answered on the first ring. They talked at length. Zavala filled him in on his interview with Lord Dodson, and Austin gave a summary of Jenkins's visit to NUMA and the successful mission to the Ataman ship.

After he hung up, Austin walked out onto the deck and drew a deep breath of river air into his lungs. The exercise cleared his head, and he began to think about the drama that had played out on the Black Sea decades ago. With the passage of time, the people who had struggled for their lives had no more substance than the lights glowing like fireflies along the Maryland shore. Yet the long-ago echoes of their voices were still being heard more than eighty years later.

According to Zavala's report, the empress and her daughters were traveling on the Odessa Star with some of the royal treasure when the ship was attacked and sunk. Razov probably had the treasure now. Austin was uncertain why a man who already had more money than Croesus would go through so much trouble to dive for treasure. Greed knows no bounds, he concluded.

More important was the fact that the Grand Duchess Maria had escaped. Lord Dodson was worried about political turmoil if and when the news got out. Austin frowned at the tacit approval of the British Crown in the sordid tale. The story might embarrass some families, but all those involved were long dead. Mendacity by those in high office was no longer the scandal it once had been. Austin was more concerned about how the story connected to Ataman and the supposed plot against the United States.

Austin glanced at his watch. He hadn't realized the late- ness of the hour or how worn-out he was. He crawled up to his bedroom in the turret of the old Victorian boathouse, crashed into bed and was asleep within minutes.

AUSTIN WAS UP at dawn, dressed in T-shirt, shorts and baseball cap, put a pot of Jamaican coffee on to brew and went downstairs to where his twenty-three-foot Mass Aero racing scull was stored under the house. He was lifting the forty-pound scull off its rack in preparation for a morning row on the Potomac, when he heard the telephone ring. Irritated at having his routine interrupted, he sprinted up the stairs to the main level and snatched the phone from its cradle.