The pages showed more than two dozen craft that fit the rough dimensions and approximate age of the ship Juan had seen.

“Any pictures?” Juan asked.

“Yeah, hold on a second.” Murph worked more of his magic, and soon they were looking at sepia-tone photographs dating back more than a century.

Most of them were designed to carry cargo of one type or another. One of them was a ferry built to haul railcars on tracks laid onto the deck, with an arch over the bow to support the wheelhouse. More pictures clicked by.

“Stop!” Juan shouted. “Go back one. That’s her.”

“The Lady Marguerite,” Murph said after checking his laptop. “Built in 1899 for, get this, George Westinghouse, and named for his wife.”

Cabrillo studied the picture, not paying much attention to Mark’s commentary. She wasn’t a commercial vessel but rather a pleasure boat. She was painted snowy white with a dark-colored band around her plucky funnel. Her rear deck was mostly open, but partly covered by a sunshade to protect her passengers from the elements. In the picture, she was moored close enough to shore for a tree to be seen in the foreground. He couldn’t see her in great detail, but he could just imagine her lavish appointments.

“What do we know about her?” Juan asked, imagining himself cruising the Great Lakes while listening to tinny music from a gramophone. “And what’s so special about George Westinghouse owning a pleasure yacht? He was one of the richest industrialists of his age.”

Eric Stone had been polishing his wire-framed glasses and slipped them back onto his nose. “To answer your question: Westinghouse is significant here because he partnered with Nikola Tesla to build the Niagara Falls power station, and together they basically invented the electrical grid we use today.”

Tesla, Cabrillo thought, Yuri Borodin’s last word. This wasn’t a coincidence. It looked as though they had peeled the first layer off the onion of his cryptic death confession. The crazy Russian hadn’t died in vain, of that Juan was certain, but right now he had no idea what his friend had stumbled into.

“Mr. Murphy?” he prompted.

“Hiram Yaeger at NUMA gave me his master passwords to their mainframe. I’m accessing it now, but there isn’t much in the archives about the Lady Marguerite. Let’s see. It says here that she was moved from the Great Lakes to Philadelphia in 1901, and lost at sea in the summer of ’02.”

“Was she insured?”

“Yep, I’ve got the Lloyd’s of London claim right here. She went down with five people aboard. There is no list, but there were no survivors.”

“Storm?”

“Doesn’t say. I’m cross-checking the date for any other losses. No, nothing else was lost. Hold on. Checking NOAA’s archives for the weather. The night of August first, 1902, was clear for the entire Atlantic seaboard.”