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“We’ll be back as soon as we can.” Tristan clapped Weston on the shoulder. “Don’t leave.”
“Rose, do you want me to come with you?” Marek asked with concern.
“No.” She shook her head. “I know it’s silly when we’re on a deadline, but I just…” She plucked at the slinky white skirt. “I can’t keep walking around in a nightgown and shirt.”
“Of course,” Marek said. He pulled out his wallet and passed her a few pound notes.
She took the money, folding it into her palm. “Thank you.” Turning to Tristan, she said, “Shall we?”
Once Tristan and Rose were gone, Weston practically threw himself into a chair and flipped open the manual. It was forty pages long, and there were three to six entries on each page. That meant there were somewhere between a hundred and twenty, and two hundred and forty different tapes. Elliot had told him over the phone that most were thirty minutes, but a few were longer. On the low end, that meant there were sixty hours of tapes.
“I’m going to go through the book, try and identify the most likely ones. You pull them.” He scanned the first page, then flipped to the second.
“Weston, what aren’t you telling me?”
With a wince, Weston looked up. Marek was standing, hands braced on the back of the chair on the opposite side of the table.
“Just…just help me find the tapes.”
Weston grabbed a pad of paper and pen that Elliot had left for him, then kept scanning. After a moment, he heard the chair legs scrape as Marek sat. Weston jotted down three possible names from the first five pages, ripped off the sheet and passed it to Marek. Without a word, Marek pulled one of the banker’s boxes over and flipped off the lid.
They worked in silence for half an hour. Weston had identified twenty names—individuals who, based on the information in the manual, had talked about what was going on in 1942, or mentioned ships or the water. He’d put stars by the ones who’d mentioned anything oceanic.
When he looked up, Marek had already sorted them into two piles. The larger of the two were the tapes he’d put asterisks by.
Twenty tapes. Best case scenario, there was only ten hours of audio. Worst case, it was twenty hours or more.
Even at only ten hours, there was no way he could do this alone. He had to have Marek’s help.
Which meant he had to tell Marek what they were looking for.
You trust Marek. He was so used to doing things alone, he had to keep reminding himself of that.
“You remember what we told you, about the purists.”
“I remember.”
“It’s a bit too much to go into right now, but I’ve been…I’ve been looking for a way to blackmail them. They have a secret, something they’ve been protecting for a long time. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to find that secret.”
“And once you knew this secret, you were going to threaten to expose it, unless they released Rose, Caden, and your sister Tabitha?”
“Something like that,” Weston evaded. He wanted to trust Marek enough to tell him the truth, but he couldn’t let a little bit of heavy petting fool him into forgetting that Marek had ties to the Masters’ Admiralty. He might not be a member, but he had enough family influence that they’d sent a knight to find him after he’d gone off the grid for only a few hours.
What Weston planned to do was blackmail the Andersons. He had a gut feeling that Marek would be more of a “let the light shine on the truth” sort of person rather than a “beat them at their own game” blackmailer.
“Here.” Weston pushed the smaller stack, the one that was memories from 1942, to Marek. “You listen to these.”
“What am I listening for?”
“Any mention of a ship, the Esperanza, docking here or being seen here.”
“Esperanza? A Spanish ship?”
“Yes. It would have been flying the Spanish flag.”
Marek looked at him, his eyes dark, one cheekbone streaked with golden sunlight from the windows. Marek was an incredibly handsome man. Whole. Fit. Strong.
Weston grabbed a Walkman and put the headphones on. Rather than popping in the first tape right away, he went back to the manual, rereading the entries for each of the tapes. Using the scant information listed for each one, he put them in a rough order, with the most likely tape first.
