"Microscopic. Invisible to the naked eye. I need proper equipment to read them all, but I helped create them, so I know what's there." He looks up, meeting each of our eyes in turn. "GPS coordinates. Dozens of them. Maybe more."
"Coordinates to what?" Sam asks.
"Gold. Art. Currency. Everything the Nazis stole from Jewish families, from conquered nations, from anyone they deemed unworthy of wealth." Merlin's voice hardens, his fingers tracing the Swan's surface with reverence and revulsion. "Hidden in caves, bunkers, Swiss bank vaults that have been waiting seventy years to be opened."
He pauses, scanning our assembled group. "Have any of you heard of Der Goldzug? The Gold Train?"
Blank stares all around, except from Jenny, whose eyes narrow with recognition.
"Spring of 1945." Merlin continues, his voice taking on the cadence of a history professor. "The Reich was collapsing. The Russians were closing in from the east, while the Americans and British were closing in from the west. The Nazi high command knew it was over, but they weren't about to let their plunder fall into Allied hands."
He holds up the Swan, its facets catching the light. "They loaded a train in Breslau—what's now Wroclaw in Poland. Not just any train. Armored cars, reinforced steel, and the most advanced locomotive they had. Inside? The wealth of nations. Gold bars from the Czech National Bank. Art from the Budapest Museum. Jewish family fortunes from across Eastern Europe. Conservative estimates put the value at four billion Reichsmarks then. In today's money?" He shakes his head. "Twenty-seven billion dollars. Minimum."
"The train left Breslau on May 14th, 1945." He continues. "It was supposed to reach a bunker complex in the Owl Mountains. Seventy-three cars of stolen wealth, guarded by SS units who knew they were transporting the Fourth Reich's seed money—funds to rebuild when the world forgot."
"But it never arrived." Jenny's voice is quiet.
"No. It vanished somewhere between Walbrzych and Wroclaw. Seventy-three train cars don't just disappear, but this one did. The Soviets searched. The Polish searched. For seventy years, treasure hunters have combed every tunnel, every abandoned mine shaft." Merlin's eyes gleam. "They never found it because they didn't have this."
He taps the Swan. "The coordinates on here correspond to railway tunnels that were sealed in May 1945. Tunnels that don't appear on any official map because the Nazis used slave labor to dig them, then killed everyone who knew about them."
"You're saying the train is real?" Forest leans forward. "And it's still there?"
"Not just the train. The Nazis created an entire network. Some of the gold went to Switzerland—we know about those accounts, though the Swiss have been reluctant to release them. Some went to Argentina, funding the escape routes for war criminals. But the bulk of it? Hidden. Waiting."
His voice drops. "There's a coordinate here for Lake Toplitz in Austria. The Nazis dumped crates into that lake in the final days—supposedly just documents, but divers have died trying to reach the bottom. Another coordinate points to the Merkers Salt Mine, where Patton's Third Army found part of the Nazi gold reserves in 1945—but they only found what the SS wanted them to find. The real treasure was moved days before."
"How do you know all this?" Sam asks.
Merlin's face ages a decade in an instant. "Because I was there. Not for the loading—I was with the Resistance then. But after the war, when we were hunting war criminals, I interrogated an SS officer named Richter. He was dying, gut-shot, delirious with fever. He talked about the train, about the network of hiding places. He said there was a map, but it had been split up—pieces given to different officers to prevent any one person from claiming it all."
He looks down at the Swan. "What he didn't know was that the complete map, the coordinates of the caches, had been micro-engraved on a ruby by a Jewish jeweler in Prague—a man named Goldmann. Goldmann was clever. He smuggled the Swan to the Resistance."
Merlin's voice becomes distant, lost in memory. "It came to me through our network in early 1944. This impossible ruby with a swan trapped inside—Goldmann's final masterpiece and his greatest act of defiance. I knew what it contained, knew what it meant. But France was falling. The Nazis were closing in on our cell."
He looks at Vivianne. "So I gave it to the only person I trusted completely. Brigitte. Your grandmother. I told her it was a symbol of our love, and it was. But it was also the key to recovering billions in stolen wealth. I made her promise to keep it safe until I returned."
His voice cracks. "But I was captured two weeks later. Spent the rest of the war in a labor camp. By the time I escaped and made it back to Paris, Brigitte was gone. Her friend—my friend—Henry Faulks had kept her safe during the occupation. Kept her too safe. They fell in love, or what she thought was love. Maybe it was just survival. When the Americans came, Henry had connections, papers, promises of a new life in America."
"She took the Swan with her." Vivianne's voice is soft.
"She took the Swan with her." Merlin confirms. "And for seventy years, I thought she'd betrayed me. Sold the secret to build the Faulks' fortune." He looks at Vivianne with wonder.
"That's what my grandfather discovered." Vivianne speaks slowly, piecing it together. "Somehow, he found out. The Faulks fortune was built on the Swan. On my grandfather tracking down just enough of the secondary caches to seem legitimate. A cave here, a Swiss account there, always with perfect paperwork to explain the windfall."
"The families." Merlin's grip on the Swan tightens, urgent. "The descendants of those who were robbed—they deserve this wealth. Museums that lost their collections. Synagogues that were burned with their treasures inside. Every coordinate on this stone represents thousands of destroyed lives. It has to go back to them."
"It will." Jenny's assurance is firm. "But Merlin, if even half of what you're saying is true, this is the largest recovery of stolen wealth in history. Governments will want to claim it. Switzerland will fight to keep its accounts secret. And Sentinel—if they know what the Swan contains?—"
"They'll kill everyone in this room to get it." Forest finishes.
The weight of that statement settles over us. We're holding the key to tens of billions in stolen wealth—enough to fund a criminal empire for generations.
Vivianne stands, approaching Merlin slowly. "May I?"
He hands her the Swan without hesitation. She holds it, studying the bird within, and I see her grandmother in her face—not the broken woman from the photos, but the young Brigitte who loved a boy named Anthony before the world tore them apart.
She hands the Swan back to Merlin, then does something unexpected—she hugs him. He stiffens, then melts into it, and I see him as he might have been—young Anthony, full of hope and passion, before loss carved him into Merlin.
