Page 33 of Beloved Sacrifice

“I’ve been grieving for a long time.”

That took him by surprise. Did she mean she’d grieved for him?

“So the purists stole all the art.” Her tone was louder and painfully neutral.

He brought himself back to the moment. “If you assume the art was stolen, and look at it again, the picture changes.”

“What do you mean?”

“How much do you know about the naval campaigns from WWII?”

“I’m sure I learned about them in school.”

He turned to the “in progress” wall, examining the details and dates he’d laid out there. It had taken years for him to refine his theories to this point. He’d started out with too little information, then had too much. Now he was close, and before he’d gotten the transcript of a call between all three of his parents in which Elroy had told Barton he thought Caden was dead, and he couldn’t get ahold of Rose, he’d planned to go to the coast, to the old port, and check out the last part of his theory.

“I’m going to tell you a story.” He took a step back, leaning against the wall so he could take his weight off his right leg.

“In nineteen forty-two, the USS Bluebird was sent to attack a Spanish ship headed for South America. The U.S. military had received intelligence that there was a Spanish ship carrying ‘treasure.’ The Bluebird’s captain was a man named John Kirkpatrick. He was a member of the Trinity Masters.”

“How do you know?”

“I snuck into Harrison’s office and checked the records.”

Rose whistled. “Ballsy.”

“I spent a lot of time in the tunnels, mapped them. I knew how to get in and out of the Grand Master’s office.”

“They have the real map now,” she warned him.

“We don’t need what’s in the tunnels anymore. What matters is here.” He pointed at the wall.

She stepped closer, looked at the one grainy image of the Bluebird he’d been able to find.

“The records of the USS Bluebird are all suspiciously light, but what I was able to piece together was that it was headed for the Spanish ship when the Bluebird ended up in a firefight with a German ship. It won the battle with the German ship, and then hours later sank the Esperanza. It wasn’t hard, Esperanza was a cruise ship, but it was flying the flag of neutrality.”

“Flag of neutrality?”

“The Spanish flag. Spain remained neutral throughout the war. Flying their own flag was supposed to keep them safe.”

“So the Bluebird sank a neutral ship?”

He nodded. “The newspapers said it was because it had been taken over by the Germans, that the German ship was actually an escort. But from the records I was able to take from the Grand Master’s office, including diaries of seamen, I think the Bluebird had intelligence that said the Esperanza was full of treasure—sometimes that was used as code for soldiers and assets. The records say that the Esperanza took on water so fast that it sank in ten minutes. None of the treasure was recovered. According to the records.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think that the Esperanza really was a neutral ship, and the whole thing was organized by the Masters’ Admiralty. There must have been people high enough up in the Nazi party that they even sent a German battleship as escort.”

“Why a German ship?”

“This was early nineteen forty-two. The Germans were winning the war.”

“So the Esperanza didn’t sink, or at least not that fast. The Bluebird crew boarded it and took the treasure—all those things hidden in the tunnels.” Rose looked at him, though her words had been phrased as a statement.

“Yes.”

“And they covered it up because they sank a supposedly neutral ship.”

“More than that,” Weston said. “I think that there was something on that ship that made Kirkpatrick realize all those things belonged to the Masters’ Admiralty.”

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