Spartan Gold by Clive Cussler Page A

is?”
    “No. I’ve been skipping around. I’ll start looking. Here’s more: ‘Wolfi said I deserved two since I had the harder task.’ I wonder what it was.”
    “Don’t know, but at least we know where Ted’s shard came from. Somewhere along the line Boehm lost one of the bottles.”
    The intercom on the wall above Remi’s head crackled to life.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Fargo?” Despite repeated attempts, they’d yet to get Selma to call them by their first names.
    Remi reached up and pushed the Talk button. “Yes, Selma.”
    “I, uh, have something. . . . Well, I’ve found . . .”
    Sam and Remi exchanged curious glances. In their ten years working with Selma they’d never heard her sound anything but decisive and curt.
    “Is everything all right?” Remi asked.
    “Uh . . . well, why don’t you come down and I’ll try to explain.”
    “We’re on our way.”

    They found Selma sitting on a stool at the center worktable, eyes fixed on the bottle of wine before her. Pete and Wendy were nowhere to be seen.
    Selma’s appearance was a mixed metaphor. She wore her hair in what Remi had dubbed a “modified sixties bob,” while her horn-rimmed glasses, which she wore on a chain around her neck when not in use, were straight from the 1950s. Her default fashion usually involved khaki pants, sneakers, and a seemingly endless supply of tie-dyed T-shirts. Selma didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear, and had only one addiction: herbal tea, which she drank by the potful. One cabinet of the workroom was devoted to her tea, most of which had names neither Sam nor Remi could pronounce.
    Sam asked her, “Where are Pete and Wendy?”
    “I sent them home early. I thought you’d want to hear this in private. You can decide later if you want to tell them.”
    “Okay . . . ” Remi replied.
    “Please tell me you haven’t found a bottle full of liquid Ebola,” Sam said.
    “No.”
    “Then what?”
    “I’m not sure where to start.”
    “Wherever you’d like,” Sam said gently.
    She pursed her lips, thinking for a few moments, then said, “First of all, that symbol on the bottom, the bug . . . I’ve got no idea what it means. Sorry.”
    “It’s okay, Selma. Go on.”
    “Let me back up. Let’s talk about the box itself: The hinges and the latch are brass, and the wood is from a species of beech tree found in only a few places in the world. The biggest concentration is in the Pyrenees Mountains of southern France and northern Spain.
    “As for the wrapping inside, that could be a discovery unto itself. It may be, depending on how all of this dates, the earliest European example of oilskin. It’s calfskin—six layers of it—soaked in linseed oil. The outer two layers are dried out and slightly molded, but the interior four are in perfect condition.
    “The glass is fairly remarkable as well—very high quality and quite thick, almost an inch, actually. Though I’m not inclined to test the theory, I’m fairly certain it could stand up to a fair amount of abuse.”
    “The label on the bottle: hand-tooled leather, glued to the glass as well as bound at the top and bottom by hemp twine. As you can see, the markings on the label were etched direcly into the leather, then filled in with ink—a very rare ink, in fact. It’s a mixture of Aeonium arboreum ‘Schwartzkopf’— ”
    “English, please,” Remi said.
    “It’s a type of black rose. The ink is a mixture of its petals and crushed beetle—a spitting beetle native only to the islands in the Ligurian Sea. As for the details on the label itself . . .” Selma pulled the bottle closer, waited for Sam and Remi to come over, then turned on an overhead halogen task lamp. “You see this phrase . . . mesures usuelles —it’s French for ‘customary measurements.’ It’s a system that hasn’t been used for a hundred fifty years or so. And this word here . . . demis —it means ‘halves,’ roughly the equivalent of an English pint. Sixteen