Lost Empire (24 page)

“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.”

 

 

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 documents, 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.

Sam replied, “It’s spatial mathematics—curved surfaces, deformed areas. The Mobius strip is a good example.”

“Then it’s no surprise Blaylock had a thing for the Fibonacci spiral. Sorry, Julianne, go on.”

“A month after he graduated, he was hired by the War Department.”

“As a cryptologist,” Remi predicted.

“Right. By all accounts Blaylock was a genius. A prodigy.”

Sam and Remi looked at each other. Given the references to the Fibonacci sequence and the golden spiral they’d found in Blaylock’s journal, they’d wondered if there were more to the journal than met the eye. Namely, hidden messages or codes. Over the years they had learned many things about those who hide and hunt treasure, but one lesson stood above all: People will go to extraordinary lengths to keep their obsession from prying eyes. If this were true in Blaylock’s case, he would likely use the method he knew best—mathematics and topology.

Severson continued: “A few days after Fort Sumter was attacked in April 1861, Blaylock quit his job and joined the Union Army. After initial training he emerged as a second lieutenant and was immediately thrown into the fray, fighting throughout July and August in several battles: Rich Mountain, Carrick’s Ford, First Bull Run. Apparently he proved himself much more than your average math nerd. He was promoted to first lieutenant and acquired a chestful of medals for gallantry.

“The following spring, in 1862, he was transferred to the Loudoun Rangers and served under Samuel Means, who was in turn under the direct aegis of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Sam, as you already mentioned, the Loudoun Rangers were the equivalent of a modern-day Special Forces. They worked in a small unit, behind enemy lines, living off the land, conducting raids, sabotage missions, and intelligence gathering. They were a tough bunch.

“Shortly before the Rangers were absorbed into a regular army unit in 1864, Secretary Stanton tapped Blaylock and a few others for recruitment into the Secret Service. A few months after that Blaylock surfaced in Liverpool, England, under the name Winston Lloyd Babcock, where he worked undercover for a man named Thomas Haines Dudley.”

Sam said, “Lincoln’s spymaster.”

“You know him?” Severson asked.

“I’ve read a few books where he’s featured. He was Quaker, as I recall. U.S. Consul in Liverpool. He ran the Secret Service spy network in the UK.”

Severson added, “He had almost a hundred agents, all of whom were dedicated to stopping the covert flow of supplies from Great Britain to the Confederacy. While England was officially neutral during the war, there were a great many Southern sympathizers, both in and out of the government. Care to guess what Blaylock’s primary assignment was?”

Remi answered; both she and Sam had been reading between the lines. “The reflagging of merchant ships for Confederate Navy use,” she said.

“Right again,” replied Severson. “Specifically, Blaylock ran a cell that was focused on a ship called the
Sea King
—later known as the CSS
Shenandoah
.”

“The one that got away,” Sam said. “Not only that but got away and spent the next nine months wreaking havoc with Union shipping until after the end of the war.”

Severson continued: “For Blaylock it was a personal and professional disaster.”

“Professionally?” Sam repeated. “Was he reprimanded? Relieved of duty?”

“I found no evidence of that. In fact, quite the opposite. Thomas Haines Dudley was an avid supporter of Blaylock’s. He wrote several glowing evaluations of him. In an 1864 letter to the chief of the Secret Service, William Wood, he called Blaylock ‘one of the finest agents I have had the pleasure to have in my employ.’ I suspect Blaylock simply took the failure so personally that it impacted his work. Two weeks later he boarded a ship in London for the return voyage home. When he got there he discovered that his wife, Ophelia, had died while he was in transit. In a bit of tragic irony, she’d been killed during a raid by a Confederate guerrilla band known as Mosby’s Rangers—one of the very units Blaylock had fought against during his time in the Loudoun Rangers.”

“My God,” Remi whispered. “That poor man. Do we know whether Ophelia had been the target? Did Mosby and his men seek her out because of her husband?”

“It doesn’t appear so. By all accounts she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“So not only did Blaylock come home in disgrace, but he came home to find the love of his life snuffed out,” Sam said. “Remi, I’m starting to think the malaria was only part of his mental problems.”

“I agree. It’s understandable.”

“As is his obsessive personality,” Severson added. “Selma e-mailed me the ship sketch he did. To rename a ship after a woman . . .That’s true love.”

Remi asked, “Julianne, did they have children?”

“No.”

“What happened after he got home?”

“There’s not much to tell. I found only one record of him. In 1865 he was hired by a newly founded school called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It appears Blaylock settled back into civilian life as a math teacher.”

“Until March 1872, when he resurfaced in Bagamoyo.”

“And four years after the
Shenandoah
was sold to the Sultan of Zanzibar,” Remi said, then added wryly, “a mother of all coincidences. Unless Blaylock’s grief had turned to rage. The
Shenandoah
got away on his watch and his wife died in the process. If he was actually insane, he may have somehow come to blame the
Shenandoah
for his loss. It’s a stretch, but the human mind is a mysterious thing.”

“You may be right. Only Blaylock could answer that,” Severson said. “But I can tell you this much: I don’t think he went to Africa on a whim. I think he was sent there.”

“By whom?” Sam asked.

“Secretary of War William Belknap.”

 

 

REMI AND SAM WERE SILENT for several seconds as they absorbed this information. Finally Sam said, “How do you know this?”

“I don’t know, with certainty,” Severson replied. “At this point my case is circumstantial and based on private letters between Belknap, Secretary of the Navy George Robeson, and the director of the Secret Service, Herman Whitley.

“In a November 1871 letter to both Belknap and Robeson, Whitley cites a recently received intelligence report. He doesn’t mention the source, but there were three lines that jumped out at me. First, intelligence reports that ‘suggest apostles of Captain Jim following in his footsteps’; second, ‘our man in Zanzibar playing us for the fool’; and third, ‘I have it on good authority the anchorage in question is frequently empty.’”

Remi said, “‘Our man in Zanzibar’ could be Sultan Majid II.”

“And ‘Captain Jim’ could be the
Shenandoah
’s captain, James Waddell,” replied Sam. “Whitley’s choice of language is interesting: ‘apostles. ’ A man like him wouldn’t have risen to his position without a firm grasp of language. An apostle is a firm believer, someone dedicated to following a leader’s example. As for the empty anchorage . . .”

“That could refer to where the Sultan had supposedly abandoned the newly renamed
El Majidi
,” said Remi.

“I agree.”

“There’s more,” Severson replied. “In a letter that followed a few days later, both Belknap and Robeson encouraged Whitley to contact ‘our Quaker friend’—Thomas Haines Dudley, I’m guessing—and ask if he might have any agents that could investigate the ‘vessel in question.’ Six weeks later Whitley replied. According to ‘the Quaker’s sources,’ the vessel in question was spotted, but not at its anchorage. It was in Dar es Salaam, returning to port—and I quote—‘fully-rigged for sail, steam, and cannon, and crewed by skilled sailors of Caucasian descent.’”

Sam and Remi were silent for ten seconds. Finally Sam said, “Unless I’m seeing something that’s not there, I’d say Captain Waddell’s ‘apostles’ remanned the
Shenandoah
for war.”

“The best part’s yet to come,” Severson said, “In that same letter Whitley informs Belknap and Robeson that he’s ordered the Quaker—Dudley—to dispatch his best man to investigate the situation in Dar es Salaam.”

“And we know who Dudley considered his best agent—Blaylock.”

“Who arrives in Bagamoyo a couple months later,” Remi added.

“It seems to fit, but you said it yourself, Julianne: It’s all circumstantial at this point.”

“I haven’t finished cataloging all the letters, but in the interim I think I know someone who can help. How do you two feel about a trip down to Georgia?”

 

 

AFTER LISTENING TO THE REMAINDER OF JULIANNE SEVERSON’S presentation and her hunch about where they might unravel the next portion of Blaylock’s story, Sam and Remi booked an early-afternoon flight out of Dulles. They touched down in Savannah shortly before three.

While Sam stood at the Hertz counter and made arrangements for a car, Remi checked her voice mail. Car keys in hand, Sam walked up to her.

“Selma got the bell this morning,” Remi announced.

Sam smiled and let out an exaggerated sigh. “I have to admit, after all we went through to get that thing, I had visions of it falling off the plane and dropping into the ocean.”

“Me, too. She says it’s in great condition. She called Dobo; he’s coming to pick it up.”

Alexandru Dobo—who preferred to be addressed only by his last name—was a full-time surfer/beach bum, part-time restoration expert, and their go-to guy for projects beyond their expertise. As the former curator of Romania’s Ovidius University’s Architecture, Restoration and Conservation Department and the primary consultant for Constanta’s Romanian Navy Museum and the National History and Archaeology Museum, Dobo had yet to encounter an artifact he couldn’t restore.