PRESENT DAY-1996

Brock Lovett watched intently the small monitor inside the submersible, as his assistant Lewis Bodine carefully threaded the ROV or remotely-operated vehicle through the wrecked stateroom of the great sunken ship. "Watch the floor, Lewis" Lovett said sternly. "I am, I am…don't tell me how to drive Snoop". Continuing into the interior of the room, the ROV's camera spotted various detritus…bits of broken porcelin, a rusted bed frame, shattered glass fixtures. It then proceeded to a specific corner of the room.

The robotic vehicle drifted slightly, as its light fell upon the prize they were looking for. It was a steel combination safe. "Pay day!" Lovett proclaimed. And the two men smiled at each other.

Upon on the deck of the Russian research vessel, the safe's hinges were burned off with a welding torch. Lovett himself grabbed the door and pulled it free. Water poured out as well as a leather pouch. He prodded the inside with a small rod. Small jewelry, an opal ring, a brooch, a man's pocket watch. But little else. "Crap" was Lovett's only response.

Meanwhile Bodine had picked up the leather pouch and began looking through it. Some papers, mostly receipts by the look of them from art dealers and clothing stores, many in French. And one sketchbook. He flipped it open gently. There was one page in it. A trained engineer, he recognized the drawing on it immediately….it was a metal furnace connected to a steel ladle, where molten steel is poured from the furnace, but with what is known as a 'lance' in it. Water-cooling and oxygenation feeds were linked to it. Notes indicated what seemed to be the modern oxygen steelmaking process, but not as detailed. Then Bodine saw the date…April 14, 1912. "Holy shit…Boss, look at this!"

Lovett, no engineer, looked at the drawing puzzled. "What am I looking at, Lewis?" "It's an oxygen steelmaking system." "So? Isn't that pretty standard?" Bodine shook his head, still holding the drawing delicately. "No,no.. Look at the date." Lovett again shrugged "Yeah, the night she went down." Bodine frustrated "No! This process of steelmaking was developed in Austria… in the early 1950s!" Lovett now interested looked closer. In the left hand corner was a written "Payment in full". Obviously a woman's hand-writing. In the right corner, near the date, were initials…."HRH"

The television interview later that day went much better than Lovett's discussion with his investors. The interviewer from CNN (remotely from Atlanta of course) was delving into the charge, perhaps rightly, that he was a "grave-robber." Lovett protested, citing his use of museum-qualified experts and the care they took in preserving the artifacts they recovered. He held up the drawing. "Look at this. A diagram drawn the night of the sinking still preserved after 84 years." Somewhere in Texas, an elderly woman asked her granddaughter to turn up the volume on the TV.

The next day, Bobby Buell, operations manager for the salvage, rushed up to Lovett as he was readying the submersibles for the next dive. "Brock…call for you." he said holding out a satellite phone, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. "Tell Bruce and David, nothing's changed since yesterday…and to get off my back" shot back Lovett "It's not them," Buell countered, "It's about the drawing." Lovett huffed. "I don't want to talk to some historian either." Buell pressed. "No, it's not an historian…you wanna take this call, Boss!"

Lovett grabbed the sat-phone. "Yes, this is Brock Lovett. Who is this?" "Mr. Lovett, I see you found my husband's plans" came the obviously elderly voice on the other side, "I trust it wasn't too disappointing not finding the Heart of the Ocean?"

An hour later, Lewis Bodine is arguing with Lovett on deck, as the submersibles were being de-activated and stowed. "What the hell is this, Boss?" Lovett smirked "Who else is around that knows what happened to that diamond, Lewis?" "Yeah, but her? She's got to be a hundred years old." "One hundred and one in a month…and the only one left who knows anything about that diamond." Bodine insisted "But, we've both read the history of …those two…they make no mention of it." Lovett waved him off "She knows where it is…I can feel it."

Two days passed. In a torrential downpour, a huge passenger/cargo helicopter was landing on the deck of the Russian ship. Though it looked like a large Coast Guard chopper, it was in fact privately owned. The company name was clearly seen on the sides and both Lovett and Bodine stared at it, impressed. Nearly everybody in the world knew the name.

They helped the elderly woman out of the helicopter and into a wheelchair. A woman in her 30s held an umbrella over the woman and they rolled her into the interior of the ship. Minutes later, they were all in her stateroom.

"Is this stateroom okay with you, Mrs. H…" "Rose," the lady interrupted, "Call me Rose, Mr. Lovett." Lovett smiled "Is this okay for you?" "It's very nice, thank you." She began, with the woman now identified as her granddaughter Allene or "Allie", to unpack her belongings…mostly photographs. "Well," Lovett began, "Is there anything I can get you?" "Yes," Rose answered, "I'd like to see my husband's drawing."

In the Preservation Area of the Lab Deck, the group was looking at the drawing, lying in a tray of water, until a better way to preserve it could be found... Lovett laid the tray on Rose's lap. Bodine pointed to several features on the drawing. "This is amazing!" he said showing where the oxygen tank connected to the lance, "This process wasn't developed until forty years after the Titanic went down. Austrian engineers at Linz after the war." Rose sniffed, "Austrian engineers! If they had listened to him in the 20s, they might have won the war. Good thing they didn't, actually."

"Rose", Lovett began gently, "This is what we were hoping you could help us out with." He pulled out a photo, obviously an old pre-World War-One photo done as a digital. It showed a huge diamond in the center of a necklace of smaller diamonds. "Louis-XVI originally wore it, but the theory is it was cut in two, re-shaped into a heart-shaped stone and made into this necklace. This is the only photo, from the jeweler in Paris around 1911."

"It was a dreadfully heavy thing," Rose added, "I only wore it once, when he gave it to me. And took it off very quickly."

Lovett continued, "I tracked down the insurance records, sealed under pretty tight orders. The claim was settled. Do you know who that claimant was?"

Rose smiles. "Someone named Hockley, I'd imagine." Lovett smiles back, they both knew it was a trick. "Yes. Nathan Hockley, steel tycoon. For his son, Caledon, who bought the necklace for his fiancée? It was filed after the sinking, so it had to have gone down with the ship." He cleared his throat. "From the stories told and the biographies of you and your husband, I'm under the impression you were that fiancée…originally." Rose nodded. "And I'll gladly credit you for any help you can give us in finding it."

Rose waved him off. "I don't need any credit, Mr. Lovett. All I want is this drawing to put in our museum." Lovett nodded "Of course."

In a separate area, Bodine and Buell had laid out several of the artifacts recovered from the stateroom where the safe was, and the adjoining one. A brooch, an ornate hair comb, and a fancy hand mirror. Rose picked them all up gently. She grasps the mirror "This was mine. Looks just like it did the last time I saw it." She turned it over and stared into it. "Reflection's a bit different."

"Rose," Lovett pressed, "Are you ready to go back to 'Titanic'?"