blank

did not strike Charlie as the type who would steal. Or lie.
"Anachronism?" Charlie finally asked. "You said something about an anachronism? And what kind of 'grid sector'? What are you talking about?"
She looked blank for a moment. "The grid sector of our dig, of course. What else would it be?"
Well, that was clear as the muddy Tiber.
"Dig?" Charlie prompted.
"Archaeological dig," she said, as if that explained everything.
"Oh. Great." Archaeology had never been one of his interests, not even a minor one. Images of Indiana Jones raiding King Tut's tomb and unearthing glittering golden urns came to mind.
"I'm a grad student," she added helpfully. "Physical Anthropology and Classics, with a specialty in early Imperial Rome. That's why I speak classical Latin. I was," and her voice turned bitter again, "only a semester away from a Ph.D."
He grunted, hardly having heard the last statement. He didn't want to admit the sense of inadequacy her fluency in his "adopted" language had given him. "All right. So this Bartlett was implicated, but not apprehended?"
"He vanished into thin air. And from the looks of things, maybe literally."
Charlie nodded. There had to be a tie-in to Carreras, somewhere. "So, putting aside for a moment the technical how-to's of this, you think he marooned you here because you spotted something which gave him away, or at least something