It had taken over a hundreds of historians, archaeologists, cryptographers, and amateurs working together to solve the puzzle eggs that had been found and to find their connection to the Amber Room.

Helen was pleased that the Athens court reducing Mom’s days in prison due to her continual cooperation with the Russian government to recover panels of the Amber Room. Already two fragments had been discovered in underground tombs in Vienna and Berlin.

And now the search had reached the happy city of Heraklion, Crete, to a lonely crypt at the back of an old, crumbling church.

Agneta Sanna’s crypt.

Helen stood at the edge of the excavation site, taking videos of the scene. Next to her, Reuben was doing the same. Snap. Snap.

She wondered about the secrets that had been buried with Agneta for fifteen years. Today, they would peek into what was beneath.

The Petros eggs that Helen and her Mom had worked on in Javier’s Villa Isidora had put INTERPOL, the FBI Art Crime Team, and various departments of antiquities from Italy all the way to Russia on a nine-month quest to find at least one wall of amber, stolen from Russian history.

No one had thought of checking Agneta’s burial ground in Crete, of all places.

Why Crete? That was an answer that Frederico Costa had taken with him to the grave.

The first excavation had begun around and inside the crypt days ago.

When Helen glanced over to see how Reuben was reacting to the possible find, she spotted someone in the crowd.

At first she thought it was a younger version of Javier. Maybe in his forties.

But on a second look, Helen realized it was one of Javier’s guards, who looked like his employer—now serving the rest of his life in a Roman prison.

That guard must’ve escaped somehow and evaded the roundup at Javier’s Villa Isidora.

Helen tugged at Reuben. He tilted his ear toward her.

“Behind you,” she whispered. “Looks like one of the guards in Javier’s villa in Tremezzo.”

“I don’t see anyone,” Reuben whispered back.

“I’m going to text Kolovos.”

“I thought they’re all in jail.”

“Maybe he got out. Or he never went in.”

In any case, he was Kolovos’s problem now, not theirs anymore.

Someone came out of the crypt to make an announcement that they had found something, throwing the crowd into a cheering frenzy and putting the Hellenic Police force on full alert all around the crypt and graveyard.

Helen clapped along with everyone else in attendance.

“It could be days before we have the next piece of information, so please be patient,” the representative said.

Nearby, reporters resumed broadcasting in various languages. Within earshot of Helen, a BBC reporter was interviewing a professor of antiquities from Athens.

“If they do find even one panel of the Amber Room, it would probably be very fragile and in poor condition,” she said.

“Well, we know that the Russian curators of the Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg would be thrilled to death—no pun intended—if we find anything amber today,” the reporter said. “Thank you for being with us, Professor Antonis.”

The reporter concluded by saying that this find would lead to other excavations around Europe.

Helen knew that the same process would be repeated at various sites up and down Europe, tracing the paths of a war-torn past in the hope of finding trails and maps to lots panels of the Amber Room.

Still, they might not find what they sought. The Amber Room, glorious as it might have been, could have been lost to history and World War II. Only God knew where those amber walls had been hidden. Treasure hunters had searched for decades to no avail. Why would their counterparts today fare any better?

For Helen and Reuben, this was as far as they would go.

It was time to move on from a long and difficult past.

Palmeiro had been declared too old to be sent to prison, and he had given up all his fortunes and stolen goods to the state to be returned to their rightful owners.

As life sometimes was, Palmeiro was diagnosed with brain cancer only a couple of weeks ago, and that would be his short and suffering prison.

Helen and Reuben had promised to take some videos of this historic event so that Palmeiro could see that he had been a part of history.

Helen could not get used to calling him Grandfather, and she had not even tried. Some day she might.

As for Mom, sitting in prison, she was all too happy to find out her own father was still alive. Though they could not see each other, they could talk on the phone.

And that had to be enough for both of them.

“Ready to go?” Reuben asked. “I’m running out of battery on my dinky smartphone. And there will probably be no news until later, anyway.”

Helen was glad that Reuben decided to use a smartphone again. As with all things, there was a learning curve, but at least he could text her.

“I know we have a wedding to finish planning, but I feel like taking the rest of the day off, since it’s a Saturday and all.” Helen sighed.

“We’ll keep the wedding simple.” Reuben put an arm around her waist. “We’ve decided on a laid-back honeymoon in Oia, where we met. What could possibly go wrong?”

Helen didn’t respond.

A lot was on her mind. Wedding planning… Work. Mostly work.

Work was quite heavy for her these days. Moving an office from Brussels to Athens had been a chore, if not for the helpful assistance of Reuben, who spoke fluent Greek.

Helen had already decided to offer him the job of office manager and local liaison.

As for her Savannah office, she had been talking to her sister and brother-in-law about their running the office there. Ming Wei had his own PI firm, but they had been discussing merging them for years. Perhaps it would finally happen.

If it didn’t happen, Hugo would continue to manage her Savannah office.

More things to add to the prayer list.

“Time for lunch?” Reuben asked.

“Is it already? Let’s go then. We can follow this excavation online.” On the way to their car, Helen spotted Kolovos and a local police officer talking to Javier’s guard.

Quietly, he let them handcuff him. Before they took him away, he glanced in Helen’s direction.

She patted Reuben’s arm. “See?”

Reuben turned.

And froze.