Campbell tapped his keyboard, and the underwater picture disappeared. He half turned and spoke to one of the women at the instruments. “Give me number thirty-four on seven, Ruth, please.”
The gray-blue surface of the sea came on-screen, obviously a photo taken at a steep angle from a great height.
“What you see here,” Campbell told Rosa and Alessandro, “is secret material that I…well, let’s say I borrowed it.”
“Looks like Google Earth,” Rosa commented.
“Almost. And that’s why I mention it, so that you won’t be surprised, later, about certain items I’ll be charging you for.” The treasure hunter paused and then went on. “The Mediterranean between North Africa and southern Italy is a part of the world under more surveillance than most. And around Sicily the security network is biggest of all.” He added, with an ironic undertone, “There must be a great many people in these parts earning their money through illegal activities.”
“With stolen military photographs?” Rosa suggested.
“I’m about to show you an enlargement of our mysterious picture. If the water was as transparent as everyone thinks, we’d be able to see the twelve statues now.”
“Or their plinths,” said Alessandro.
“No,” the professor contradicted him, “because this picture was taken before the statues were salvaged. As you’ll see.”
“When was that?” asked Rosa.
“On January seventeenth, just under a month ago. Of course there was no nonstop filming of every square sea mile, but photographs were taken at regular intervals. Every yard of the Mediterranean has some satellite camera or other turned on it about every forty-five minutes. All we had to do was get hold of the material we wanted and evaluate it.”
“So?”
“Here, forty-seven minutes later.” The picture changed, and this time a boat could be clearly seen at its center. “And again three-quarters of an hour later.” No change; the vessel was still in the same place. “There they are,” said Campbell.
Alessandro narrowed his eyes. “Who?”
“Not the army, that at least is certain. And the boat we’re looking at here is obviously smaller than the Colony. It has no crane, just a set of cable winches along the rail. Obviously the statues were dragged away underwater, then brought to the surface and unloaded somewhere else.”
He zoomed in closer to the vessel, but now the picture was so pixelated that he withdrew again with a grunt. “Ruth, how the hell do I get that filter on-screen?”
The woman behind them at the console told him a sequence of keys. When Campbell entered the code, his face brightened again. This time the picture was much sharper. Once again he tapped his ballpoint on the glass surface. “Here, and here, and here…those are the divers they sent down.”
The three figures were still not clearly visible, only pale outlines at the rail.
“Looks like they’re not wearing diving suits,” said Alessandro.
“Strange, isn’t it?”
“Do you mean they went down there without any diving equipment?”
Campbell nodded. “No suits. No oxygen flasks. Not even flippers, for God’s sake!”
Alessandro shook his head, baffled. “What exactly are we looking at, please?”
Campbell cleared his throat. “Four pictures farther on, they’re coming up from the water again.” He brought up a new picture on the screen: the boat, the sea—and the three pale outlines, two of them still in the water, the other on a ladder outside the hull. “About three hours later. Not nearly enough time for three of them to cut seven of those statues away from their plinths and collect the leftover fragments.”
“Maybe they went down again later,” said Rosa.
“We’ve checked all the pictures from the day when you two were there to the day when we began our investigations. Nothing. The boat was there only on January seventeenth, and for less than four hours. And as far as we can work it out, only those three divers went into the water during that time. Without any equipment apart from a few tools that were probably cutters of some kind.”
Campbell paused, to let his words sink in. Rosa and Alessandro said nothing.
“But that’s not all,” he finally said. “The vessel set off again a little later. It’s not in the next photograph. However, we did succeed in tracing its route.” He was going to give Ruth instructions over his shoulder, but she was already ahead of him.
“Got it,” she called. Rosa heard her fingers tapping the keys.
Several satellite pictures appeared on the screen in quick succession, but this time the coordinates at the edge changed with each photo. “They’re on their way south,” Campbell explained. “They go south for about