Spartan Gold

“Yes, or maybe an Islamic artifact somewhere in Bavaria.”

Sam, now on his own laptop, did a quick search. “Nope, nothing jumps out. Let’s keep going. Try another line.”

“We’ll go back to the begi

Sam plopped down in a chair and leaned his head back, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb. “I don’t know. . . . Something about the line is familiar, though.”

“Which part?”

“I don’t know. It’s right there. I can almost see it.”

They sat in silence for nearly a half hour, each wrapped in thought, their minds swirling with co

Finally Remi looked at her watch. “It’s almost midnight. Let’s get some sleep and come back to it fresh in the morning.”

“Okay. It’s frustrating. I know I’m missing something, I just can’t put my finger on it.”

Four hours later as they lay asleep in Yvette’s guest suite Sam bolted upright in bed and muttered, “There you are!” Remi, a light sleeper, was instantly awake: “What? What’s wrong, Sam?”

“Nothing. I think I’ve got it.”

In their pajamas they returned to the study, turned on the lights, and powered up their laptops. For twenty minutes Sam sat at the keyboard, typing and following links as Remi watched from the corner chair. At last Sam turned around and smiled.

“It’s from a book I read in college—The Days of the Upright by a guy named . . . Roche. He talks about the origin of the word ‘Huguenot.’ ”

“French Calvinists, right?” Remi asked. “Protestants.”

“Right. Pretty big group from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. Anyway, there are a lot of explanations for where the word ‘Huguenot’ comes from. Some think it’s a hybrid—from the German word Eidgenosse, meaning ‘confederate,’ and the name Besan çon Hugues, who was involved in early Calvinist history.

“The etymology most historians subscribe to comes from the Flemish word huisgenooten, which was what some Bible students in Flemish France were nicknamed. Huisgenooten would gather secretly in one another’s homes to study scripture. The name translates as ‘House Fellows.’

Remi stared at him for ten seconds before murmuring, “Sam, that’s brilliant.”

“What would have been brilliant is if I’d come up with it eighteen hours ago.”

“Better late than never. Okay, so we’re talking about Huguenots.”

“Anguished Huguenots,” Sam corrected.

Remi stood up and went to their whiteboard and used the dry-erase marker to circle their list of synonyms for ‘anguished.’ There were dozens. No obvious co

“So, let’s talk about amber,” Sam said, turning to the second part of the line. “ ‘In amber trapped.’ How do you get trapped in amber?”

They brainstormed this for a few minutes before Remi said, “Let’s try this: What happens when something gets trapped in amber?”

“You die,” Sam offered.

“Before that . . . Immobilized.”

“Frozen in place.”

“R ight . . .” Head down, eyes closed, she paced back and forth. “Frozen in place . . . Like a snapshot.”

Sam, his head resting against the chair’s headrest, leaned forward. “Like a painting.”

“Yes!”

He spun around in his chair and started typing on the laptop. “Painting . . . Huguenots . . .” He sca

“Anything?”

“Massacre,” he muttered.

“What?”

“ ‘Massacre’ could be, in a stretch, synonymous with ‘anguished,’ couldn’t it?”

“Sure.”

“Then how about this: a painting by François Dubois called The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.”

“What’s the context?”

Sam sca

“If that isn’t anguish I don’t know what is,” Remi murmured. “Okay, so combine that with Bavaria. . . .”

Sam leaned forward and began typing again, this time using for his major search terms “Dubois,” “Saint Bartholomew,” and “Bavaria,” in combination with “day” and “massacre.”

“Might as well throw in our synonyms for ‘Hajj,’” Remi said, then dictated from the whiteboard: “ ‘Mecca,’ ‘pilgrimage,’ ‘Islam,’ ‘pilgrim’ . . .”

Sam finished typing and hit Enter. “A lot of results,” he whispered, scrolling through the page. “Nothing obvious, though.”

“Let’s start subtracting and mixing words from the search.”

For the next hour they did just that, trying permutations of their search terms until finally, near sunrise, Sam found something interesting with the combination of “Saint Bartholomew,” “Bavaria,” and “pilgrim.” He said with a grin, “Lightbulb just popped on.”

“What?” Remi said, then leaned in and read from the screen:

“Saint Bartholomae’s Pilgrim Church, Bavaria, Germany.”

CHAPTER 45

SCHÖNAU, BAVARIA

Unbelievable,” Sam whispered.

He and Remi stepped to the wooden railing of the overlook and stared at the vista below. Finally Remi murmured, “I don’t think the word ‘beautiful’ even begins to capture this, Sam. Why did it take us this long to come here?”

“I have no idea,” he whispered back, then lifted his Canon EOS digital camera and took a picture. They’d been to Bavaria before, but never this area. “Even ‘breathtaking’ doesn’t seem to fit, does it?”

“Not even close. I can almost hear ‘The Sound of Music.’ ”

Below them lay the emerald waters of the Königssee (King’s Lake) Fjord. Measuring just over half a mile at its widest point and bracketed on both sides by thickly forested granite escarpments and jagged snowcapped peaks, the Königssee meandered its way from the village of Schönau in the north down to the Obersee, or Upper Lake, five miles to the south. Long ago severed from the Königssee by a landslide, the Obersee sat tucked away in its own oval valley surrounded by alpine meadows bursting with wildflowers and encircled by tumbling waterfalls, sights that attracted nature lovers and photography buffs the world over. A special boat service ran from Schönau to the Obersee’s Salet docks.

Aside from the occasional wake from the handful of electric tour boats that soundlessly plied the Königssee, the lake’s surface was perfectly calm, a sun-dappled mirror reflecting the greens and grays and ochers of the surrounding forests and cliffs. Everywhere Sam and Remi turned lay yet another perfectly composed alpine postcard.

Two-thirds of the way down the Königssee, where it narrowed to only a few hundred yards before widening again and curving southeast toward the Obersee, Saint Bartholomae’s Pilgrim Church sat in a clearing of trees on the Hirschau Peninsula.

An architectural hybrid of sorts, half of Saint Bartholomae’s Church was an old Bavarian ski lodge with white stucco exterior walls, steeply sloped gray shingle roof, and heavy wooden shutters painted in greens and yellows, while the other half was made up of a cluster of three red-roofed onion domes atop of which further rose two spires: one a windowless dome, the other, sitting nearer the water’s edge, a more traditional steeple, with a sloped hip roof and shuttered slit windows.

“Is it ironic that Hitler also loved this place?” Remi asked, “or just a little scary?”

Berchtesgaden, the municipality in which the Königssee sat, was also home to Adolf Hitler’s mountaintop retreat known as the Eagle’s Nest.