The Kingdom

It did. They watched for a few more minutes as the boat’s navigation lights grew more distant, then finally merged with the light clutter of Vlore in the distance.

Sam looked at his wife. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

They covered the remaining mile in about twenty minutes. Having already done a virtual reco

Measuring roughly three miles from north to south and a mile at its widest point, Sazan resembled, Sam thought, a misshapen guppy. The park station was on the guppy’s back, a cove on the northeastern coast, while their landing site was the guppy’s tail, at the extreme southern tip, near the old World War II-era fortifications.

Mostly devoid of vegetation save ground brush and a few patches of dwarf pines, the rocky terrain was dominated by two high hills near the island’s center. It was on one of these hills that they hoped to find the old monastery and, if Earta’s information was accurate, the occupants of the Zvernec Island graveyard, including the late Bishop Besim Mala.

As was normal for Sam and Remi, they were traveling far and jumping through a lot of hoops based on a big “if.” Such was the life of professional treasure hunters, they’d learned during their years of searching.

As they neared the shore, the waves got choppy, crashing on jutting rocks and half-submerged coquina flats. The plastic kayaks performed admirably, bouncing off the rocks and skidding over shoals, until Sam and Remi were able to half paddle, half push themselves into the shallows, where they climbed out and waded ashore.

They crouched down to catch their breath and survey their surroundings.

The rock-strewn beach was barely deeper than their kayaks were long and was backstopped by a four-foot-tall rock wall; beyond this wall, a steep hill dotted with green scrub. Halfway up the hill, a garage-sized structure was built into the hillside.

“Pillbox,” Sam whispered.

Higher up the hill stood what looked like a stone shack-a lookout post, perhaps-and higher still, a hundred yards away on the crest of the hill, was a three-story brick barracks-style building. Black glassless window openings stared out over the sea.

After five minutes of looking and listening, Sam whispered, “Nobody home. Anything catch your eye?”

“No.”

“I don’t see any graffiti,” Sam remarked.

“Does that mean something?”

“If I were a kid living in Vlore, I doubt I could resist sneaking out here. While it wasn’t my thing as a teenager, I knew plenty of guys who would’ve spray-painted the hell out of that pillbox just to prove they’d been here.”

Remi nodded. “So either Albanian youth are particularly law-abiding or . . .”

“Nobody who sneaks over here stays free long enough to make mischief,” Sam finished.

23

SAZAN ISLAND, ALBANIA

Under the light of a half-moon, they began slogging their way up the hill road. Though the crest was only a crow’s flight mile away and a few hundred feet higher than the barracks, the road’s serpentine path doubled the actual distance.

Finally they reached the last bend in the road. Once around it, they spotted the crest of the hill. Sam gestured for Remi to wait, then ducked off the road and picked his way through the scrub brush until he could see over the crest. He gave her an All clear wave, and she joined him.

She said, “The promised land.”

“A promised land that’s seen much better days,” Sam replied.

Though before leaving for the peninsula they’d studied the structure on Google Earth, the overhead view had shown the church as merely an unremarkable, cross-shaped building. Now, up close, they could see a conical belfry, tall boarded-up windows, and a once-red tiled roof bleached pink from centuries of sunlight.

They found the main double doors locked, so they circled the church. On the north side they found two items of interest: a waist-high ragged hole in the brick wall and an unrestricted view of the northern half of Sazan, including the Park Rangers station half a mile below, situated on a man-made breakwater cove illuminated by pole-mounted lights. Sam and Remi counted three boats and three buildings.

Remi said, “Let’s find Bishop Mala and get out of here.”

24

SAZAN ISLAND, ALBANIA

As soon as they ducked through the hole in the wall, they realized their task was going to be much harder than they’d anticipated. Instead of stepping into an open space, they found themselves standing in a labyrinth.

On either side and ahead of them, eroding wooden coffins were stacked eight high and four deep, forming a corridor that was barely wider than their shoulders. Headlamps illuminating the way, they walked to the end of the corridor. They found themselves at a T-turn. To the left and right, more coffins.

“Are you keeping count?” Sam whispered.

“A hundred ninety-two so far.”

“The Zvernec graveyard isn’t that big.”

“It is if they were packing them shoulder to shoulder and stacking them. We know Mala died in 1436. Even if his was the first burial, we could be talking about five-plus centuries.”

“I just got a shiver down my spine. Left or right?”

Remi chose left. They walked a few paces. Ahead, Sam’s head-lamp washed over an exterior brick wall.

“Dead end,” he said.

“Was that a pun?”

“Freudian slip.”

They turned around, and, with Remi in the lead, proceeded past the T-turn and down the adjoining corridor. At the end of this, a right turn, followed by another sixty-four coffins, followed by a left turn and more coffins. The pattern continued through another five turns until the body count exceeded six hundred.

At last they entered an open space. Here the coffins were also stacked eight high, all the way to the vaulted ceiling’s crossbeams. Sam and Remi turned in a circle, headlamps sweeping over walls of white pine.

“There,” Sam said suddenly.

On the western wall, behind a mountain of rotting pine, was a row of stone sarcophagi. “Fourteen,” Remi said. “The same as the number of mausoleums in the graveyard.”

“That’s a bit of good luck,” Sam replied. He counted the coffin wall behind the sarcophagi. “Unbelievable,” he murmured. “Remi, there are over a thousand corpses in this building.”

“Earta must have been mistaken. After the storm and flood, they must have taken all the bodies. Zvernec isn’t so much a graveyard as it is a charnel pit.”

“There’s no smell.”

“According to Selma, the last burial was in 1912. Even with embalming, there’s probably little flesh left.”

Sam smiled and sang softly, “Dem bones . . . dem bones . . . dem dry bones.”

“Don’t give up your day job. Let’s check for markings. Mala’s mausoleum bore a huge patriarchal cross; maybe they did the same for his sarcophagus.”

A quick check of the end of each sarcophagus showed no crosses. Sam and Remi walked along the row, using their headlamps to peer on the top of each stone coffin. Of the fourteen, three had been chiseled with the Eastern Orthodox Church symbol.

They sat together on the floor and stared at it. Remi asked, “How heavy do you think each one is?”

“Four, five hundred pounds.” Then, after a moment: “But the lid . . . that’s a different story. Crowbar.”

“Pardon?” Remi asked with a smile. She was used to her husband’s cerebral non sequiturs; they were his way of working through problems.

“We forgot a crowbar. That lid weighs a hundred pounds at most, but prying open that seam while the sarcophagus is wedged in there . . . Damn, I knew I had that We’re forgetting something important feeling.”

“Luckily, you have a plan.”

Sam nodded. “Luckily, I have a plan.”

Having long ago learned the universal value of three items-rope, wire, and duct tape-Sam and Remi rarely went into the field without them even when the specific task or journey didn’t obviously call for any of them. This time, in a hurry to beat nightfall, they’d forgotten one of the trio in addition to the crowbar: wire. The fifty-foot coil of climbing rope and the duct tape would be enough, Sam hoped.