“Professor Campbell.” She didn’t like the way he looked at her, as if she were some dumb little blonde who had hooked Alessandro. However, she wasn’t interested enough in Campbell for it to infuriate her seriously.
Alessandro let her enter the control room of the Colony ahead of him. Half a dozen men and women, also in overalls, were sitting close together in front of a great deal of radar and echo-sounding equipment. The windowless room might as well have been inside the drone that was operated from here by remote control through the trenches and ravines on the seabed. The air was stuffy, and cigarette smoke from outside drifted in through the doorway, which did nothing to improve the atmosphere, but the others didn’t seem bothered.
“Here,” said Alessandro, pointing to one of the screens. “Take a look at that.”
It was a three-dimensional diagram of the seabed, covering three hundred square feet. Alessandro used a touch pad to alter the perspective. As he moved two fingertips apart on the pad, the virtual camera zoomed in on the curving lines of the pattern.
“Those are the exact coordinates from the Dallamanos’ documents,” he said.
Rosa looked intently at the graphics. They took some getting used to. “Looks empty.” Which would explain why when she and Alessandro had tried diving, twice, they had found nothing either time.
“Wrong,” said a red-haired woman in her midthirties. Rosa had forgotten her name, but on her last visit the redhead had been the only one on board who would condescend to give her more than a brief greeting. “To call it empty isn’t quite accurate.”
“But?”
The woman archaeologist moved Alessandro’s hand aside and used the touch pad herself. Perspective and size changed rapidly as she zoomed in on an inconspicuous part of the network of lines. A brief tap on the keypad, and at once a second and much finer pattern overlaid the first. Rosa’s brow wrinkled. “Stones.”
“That’s what we thought ourselves at first,” said the woman. “Not statues, anyway—not what we were looking for.”
Rosa glanced inquiringly at Alessandro.
Patience, his eyes said.
The researcher dragged a cursor down to the edge of the picture. A column of figures in the corner changed. The framework filled in from the outside; then it looked as if someone had placed a gray cloth over the structure.
Rosa leaned closer to the screen. “Round stones?” she asked skeptically.
“Plinths.”
“Twelve of them,” added Alessandro. “All inside that square.”
Rosa ran her fingers through her hair. “Does that mean…?”
“Someone got here ahead of us,” said the woman. “Someone snapped up the statues from under our noses.”
“But no one knows the coordinates!”
“Are you sure?”
“Dallamano was taking us for a ride,” she murmured.
Alessandro shook his head. “Not necessarily.”
“You of all people defending him? He almost killed you.”
“According to him, your aunt had the documents in her hands, at least for a few hours. And Pantaleone got them from her. We don’t know who may have been told about the contents of the documents, by either or both of them.”
“Not to mention the fact,” the researcher added, “that this area is more than three miles offshore, outside the country’s borders, so in theory anyone could have come across them. Maybe by chance, maybe because he knew what he was looking for.”
Rosa snorted. “Chance!”
“We don’t believe that either,” one of the men said behind them. Rosa could smell the cigarette smoke that he brought into the control room even before she turned to him.
Professor Campbell pointed to a monitor on the opposite wall. One of the men at the controls vacated his seat for the professor. Rosa exchanged a glance with Alessandro, who nodded encouragingly at her.
“Let’s get to the reason why I asked you to come here, Signore Carnevare. Look at this.” The treasure hunter indicated the screen, where the different camera angles of the underwater drone were changing in quick succession. Finally he stopped at one of them. “This one was taken by the starboard camera on Colony Two.”
One of the floodlights moved over the seabed. Crevices and holes gaped wide in the rock. The Strait of Messina was constantly exposed to underwater earth tremors, and was encrusted with geological scar tissue.
“How deep is it?” asked Rosa.
“ Not very deep. A little over a hundred and twenty feet. We’re also searching the bed with divers, but that’s laborious, and not half as effective as the instruments on board Colony Two.” Campbell kept the photograph on the monitor and tapped the glass with a ballpoint. “This is what I’m interested in. It’s one