Family law attorney Stan Stopher sat in his rented Chevy and made sure the address was correct. He glanced at the envelope and the name, and they matched with what was on the old neon sign out in front of the building. Stan opened the car door and stepped into the Las Vegas heat that hit him as if someone had just opened the door of a blast furnace. He walked back to the trunk, retrieved the aluminum box, then hesitated. This act of delivering the case was tantamount to admitting that he would possibly never see her again. He knew she was in trouble, but for the life of him couldn’t figure out why she was sending the fossil to a pawnshop.
He closed the trunk, walked up to the door, and pushed down on the old thumb plate. The door easily opened. He didn’t notice that the cameras placed in the doorway and three more across the street followed his every move. He felt the blessed air-conditioning strike him in his face, instantly cooling his sweaty brow. He set the case down and removed his sunglasses as his eyes adjusted to the brightly lit shop, then retrieved the case and followed a cramped aisle toward the back of the shop. Two young girls were going through the used CD collection, but other than them, the pawnshop was empty of customers. A large black man was seated behind the counter, reading a newspaper, both of his muscular arms resting on the glass. At least, to an untrained eye, he was reading. Stan was an observant man and he saw the black man’s gaze take in his thin frame. Then the man closed the paper and looked up at him overtly. His left hand stayed on the glass countertop but his right disappeared.
“Hi, there,” the black man said. “What have you got? I hope it’s not vinyl LPs; can’t get rid of ’em anymore,” he said, indicating the aluminum case.
Stan placed the shiny box on the counter and smiled. “No, I would never sell my collection of phonograph records.”
“Oh, then how can I help you?” the clerk asked. His right hand was still not in view.
“Well,” Stan reached into his shirt pocket and brought out the envelope and his business card, “a close friend of mine asked me to deliver this,” he said, tapping the container and handing the black man the card.
The clerk looked more closely at the bright aluminum box and then stepped on a small red button on the floor by his foot.
“I see, Mr.—” he looked at the business card, “Stopher. Let’s start with who your friend is and then we’ll move on to what’s in the case.”
At that moment another man stepped out from behind a curtain at the back of the counter and without looking, only whistling, walked around to a rack of sunglasses. He started using a pricing gun left-handedly to mark the price of the glasses.
“Well, the container belongs to a very dear friend whose name is Professor Helen Zachary. She is director of Zoology at Stanford University, and what is in the box is for the recipient only.”
“And that is?”
Without looking at the envelope he said the name he had memorized, “Dr. Niles Compton. Does the good doctor own this establishment?” Stan asked.
“He owns the building, we just lease. I can deliver this, as long as it’s not a bomb,” the clerk said and smiled. The man pricing sunglasses didn’t. The fingers of his right hand were lightly tickling a Beretta automatic pistol lodged just inside the front of his shirt.
“No, nothing as exciting as a bomb, I’m afraid.”
“Well, we can get it to him. Can I help you with anything? Maybe add to your collection of LPs?”
“No, thank you, your prices are kind of steep, I noticed.” Then he became deadly serious. “Look, I need to know where this case is going. This is a very dear friend of mine and I’m worried beyond measure.”
“Sir, if you were instructed to deliver this package to Dr. Compton, you can bet action will be taken to help. I’m sure someone will be in touch as soon as possible.”
The attorney wasn’t satisfied, but put his faith in the fact that Helen must have known what she was doing.
Staff Sergeant Will Mendenhall watched as the old man left the shop. He looked at the card and then over to Lance Corporal Tommy Nance, United States Marine Corps.
“We better get this X-rayed,” said Mendenhall, standing from his stool, where he had been in easy reach of the .45 automatic holstered behind the display case. As he grabbed for the aluminum box, he heard the click of an M-16 being placed on safety from behind the curtain. “Watch the store, Corporal, and try to get those two girls to buy something.”
Corporal Nance straightened his collar and walked over to the girls, his broad smile gleaming.
“Hi, there,” he said as suavely as he could.
The tallest one turned around and smiled, revealing a mouth full of braces. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. Nance’s interest deflated. He kept busy ticketing for the next twenty minutes, listening to the two underage girls giggle and flirt with him. Sometimes gate duty truly sucked.
The back room at the Gold City Pawnshop was no different in appearance than a hundred others with in the Las Vegas City limits. Stored there were items just tagged as collateral and others that had been pulled off the shelf for not selling. It was the door in the back that led to the office that hid the wizard behind the curtain.
Staff Sergeant Will Mendenhall was sitting and looking at the aluminum case and shaking his head. He had just finished speaking with Lieutenant Commander Carl Everett, who had ordered the attorney followed. A two-man team was currently tailing Stanley Stopher to wherever he was staying. Just in case they needed him for any reason. When Mendenhall had explained what the X-ray had turned up, security protocol went into immediate effect. The case and envelope addressed to Director Compton was sitting on the watch commander’s desk.
Mendenhall heard the elevator arrive from the lower level, and the false-fronted wall slide aside. He turned and stood when he saw it was not only Carl who had arrived, but Major Collins also.
“So, we have a skeletal hand in a box?” Jack asked.
“Yes, sir, wasn’t expecting that,” Mendenhall said with a smile.
“And our tail is still in contact with our attorney friend?”
“Yes, sir, they just checked in. It seems Mr. Stopher is heading for McCarran airport. You want them to follow along?”
Jack pursed his lips and thought. “I’ll have the USC field team pulled off duty and tail him long enough to make sure he’s who he says he is.”
Jack looked the container over and then read the heading on the envelope. He then pulled the computer monitor around to face him and Carl. The X-ray image was still up and he examined it. “Nothing but the aluminum case, bone, and foam, with a hard rubber gasket lining the lid and soft neoprene for atmosphere evacuation. The computer is one hundred percent on this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Still, how is it that someone can walk right in off the street and know that this is a gate to the Group?” Carl asked.
“Simple, if he didn’t know it was a gate and was instructed to deliver the item to this address by a former Group member,” Mendenhall ventured.
Both Jack and Carl stopped talking and stared at the sergeant.
“Or maybe not,” Mendenhall said, looking embarrassed for interrupting the two officers.
Jack looked from Mendenhall and then back to Carl, who slapped the sergeant on the shoulder.
“Look, Will, anytime that you see your commanding officers overlooking the obvious, feel free to make them look and feel like idiots,” Carl said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, let’s play postman and deliver the mail,” Jack said as he pocketed the envelope and lifted the container.
Two hours after they had delivered the strange box and envelope to Director Compton, Jack was with Sarah on the first vault level. He was supervising the installation of the new eye-scan security system that was to be patched into the Cray supercomputer, Europa, which would allow the new system to be fully operational in each of the eleven thousand vaults on the three levels of artifact storage. Sarah McIntire was in charge of the actual installation, due to her experience with the surrounding granite walls, as it wouldn’t do to have a cave-in on the vault level. This particular level was one of the first excavated in 1944 when the caves underneath Nellis were expanded for the new home of the Event Group, as ordered by then president Roosevelt.
Jack tested the last system installed on this level by placing his right eye to the rubber-lined glass lens. The smoke-colored glass panel to the right printed out his name and rank and parent service. Then Europa, which replaced the sexy-voiced computer system of the old Cray, told Jack that he was cleared for Vault 2777 just as the fifteen-foot stainless-steel door opened with a hiss.
“Goddammit!” Jack said aloud when the familiar sexy female voice cleared him to enter. The last time he had worked with Europa, the electronic voice had been programmed with a new male auditory system, clean, functional, and definitely not sexy. Someone had gone back and intentionally synthesized the old female voice that sounded uncannily like Marilyn Monroe’s.
“What is it?” Sarah asked as she stepped up with a clipboard after checking the wall and ceiling strata for the thousandth time.
“I’m going to ream Pete Golding’s ass in the computer center. Someone changed the auditory program on Europa back to that female voice.”
“There was a rumor that someone was going to do it. No one liked the male voice. It sounded too much like—” Sarah caught herself before she said it and bit her lower lip. “You want to get something to eat?”
“Sounded too much like what?” Jack asked, narrowing his eyes.
Sarah smiled as she pretended to write something on her clipboard.
“Lieutenant, while you’re writing, you may as well place yourself on my shit list if you don’t answer my question.”
“All right, everyone thought it sounded like you. It was just too damned creepy.”
“Like me? It didn’t sound like me … who said it sounded like me? …it wasn’t me at all,” he protested.
Mendenhall joined them. “Last sensor is in on this level, Major,” he said as he flipped a screwdriver into the air and caught it.
“Sergeant, did the Cray auditory system sound like me?”
Mendenhall stopped suddenly in his tracks. “You know, I didn’t peel the plastic protectant off the monitor screen. I’ll be right back and then—”
“You’re not going anywhere; answer my question.”
“It was weird, Major, I’m not kidding. It felt like Big Brother …and … well …it was just … strange,” he said as he looked down at his boots.
“I told you.”
Jack was about to say something when Alice Hamilton’s voice came out of the speaker built into the vault’s door frame: “Will Major Collins please report to the main conference room, please, Major Collins to the conference room.”
“Hey, wasn’t that Alice?” Sarah asked brightly.
Jack didn’t respond at first. He looked at Sarah and then Mendenhall.
“We’re not through with this voice imprint thing. I want to know who was in on it.”
“You want us to rat on our comrades? The sergeant here said you would try and track down those involved …” She stopped when she saw Jack smile. “What?”
“Lieutenant, you just told him who was involved,” Mendenhall said with his chin on his chest.
“And tell Commander Everett I’ll be speaking to him also,” Jack said as he turned and walked away.
Sarah flinched and closed her eyes, and the sergeant grimaced.
“Shit,” both Mendenhall and Sarah said at the same time.
Alice Hamilton, the semiretired administrative head of the Event Group, greeted Jack at the door just as she had when he had first arrived over a year ago. She was beaming and looking quite a bit younger than her eighty-one years. She was wearing her hair in her customary bun and holding her ever-present file to her chest. Jack walked up and hugged her.
“Alice, I forgot how your smile brightens this place up,” he said, placing her at arm’s length to look her over. “What the hell’s going on? Did you find a fountain of youth out there?”
“Oh, knock it off,” she said, embarrassed.
“How is the senator, getting along all right?”
“He’s a bear, constantly pacing back and forth in his study. I suppose Niles has told you he calls the poor man every other day, asking what’s going on.”
Jack had only worked with the former director of the Group on one mission prior to the president’s retiring him, but in that short amount of time the former OSS operative and senator from Maine had made an indelible mark upon Jack’s life. The man was, to put it frankly, brilliant.
“Niles said he looks forward to bouncing things off the senator; I’m sure he’s no bother. So, what brings you here?” he asked.
Alice frowned and looked around the reception area. Niles had not yet exited his office across the way to begin the meeting, so she thought to take a brief moment and fill Jack in.
“Jack, we have a serious situation down in South America. A former member of the Group has gone and gotten herself … well, lost. She hasn’t been heard from as she missed her call-in time to her associate three days ago.”
“Go on,” Jack said as he walked with her.
“Well, this professor was asked to leave by the senator fifteen years ago. She became obsessed with something she came across and couldn’t let it go. It drove her close to insanity, she even went as far as to ‘borrow’ certain files from the Group, from the senator’s private files as it turned out, and she accessed other areas, we’re not sure which, but they had to have been serious intrusions for Garrison to act as harshly as he did. It was Niles who brought all of this to the attention of the senator back then; basically he was the one responsible for the Group’s firing her.”
Jack stopped and looked at Alice. His brows rose as he waited for the punch line.
“She was Director Compton’s fiancée, Jack. They had been engaged for two years. I’m afraid Niles is real close to this situation, but we can’t dismiss his participation in this, because the good professor may have stumbled onto something she has searched for a very long time. You have the power to say no to Niles for security reasons if he wants to go after her; just hear him out before you decide.”
At that moment Niles Compton walked from his office with his new assistant following close behind. He saw Jack and Alice and nodded as he continued on to the large conference room. His assistant rolled her eyes as she fought to keep up. Jack gestured for Alice to proceed, and he followed her into the room.
Five members of the upper echelon of the Event Group were present in the room, and one person Jack didn’t know. They all took their seats when Niles cleared his throat. The director picked up a remote control and punched in a button. A wide-screen television slowly slid down behind him.
Consult Group number one consisted of Jack, as head of the department’s security; Niles, as director; and Alice, because she knew most of the 298,000 files and vault contents by heart and could access her amazing memory at a moment’s notice. Then there was Virginia Pollock, the deputy director of Department 5656; Pete Golding, of the Computer Sciences Department; and, for a reason the others weren’t privy to, Heidi Rodriguez, of the Zoology Department.
“I excused Mathew Gates from this meeting as it really didn’t concern languages, at least not yet. I did ask Heidi here to join us, because for the past two hours she’s been quite busy assisting me with some research and can speak for the scientific end of things.” Niles gestured to the dark-haired diminutive woman of about forty, who smiled and nodded to the others.
Niles pushed a button on the remote and a three-dimensional image appeared on the screen behind him. The visual was assisted by a small multicolored plate that acted as a 3-D lens. It produced a clear and precise picture that would have been the envy of Hollywood.
“Good God, what is that?” Pete asked.
“It’s a fossil that former Group member Helen Zachary’s ex-husband sent back from Peru fifteen years ago, when he had been a construction consultant for the Peruvian government. They were dredging and widening three tributaries of the Amazon River, for added space for commerce along the river,” Niles said. On the screen behind him, a full-color image of the fossil slowly turned 360 degrees.
Virginia Pollock cleared her throat.
“Yes, Virginia?” Niles asked.
“We’re not going to start this again, are we? I mean—”
“I know what you mean. For those of you that don’t know, Helen Zachary was terminated from the Group for her fanaticism about this fossil,” he said, frowning in the direction of Virginia. “Things have changed. Helen came into possession of new information about the Padilla expedition,” he said, looking around the room.
“You can learn about the legend of that expedition from the folders in front of you; due to the hurried nature of the situation, we will not cover the historical aspects of this at this meeting. We must move on,” Alice said.
“Helen used the files she stole from the Group’s first complex in Virginia, where our old data and equipment are stored. She deduced from those files where the diary of Padilla was possibly hidden in the Vatican Archives in 1874. It seems one of the files contained an old OSS report of an Army Corps of Engineers study of the region in the Amazon basin and its history from the late thirties to 1940. She used that information to track down one or two known sources that depict the exact route of the Spanish expedition. In short, she may have found the valley and the very lagoon detailed in the legend, as taken from the diary.”
“Did she leave you the route, Dr. Compton?” Jack asked.
Niles smiled and removed his glasses. “Helen is a very complex woman, Jack. She trusted no one in her search for the origins of the fossil.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and then continued. “The Padilla legend has many parts; the diary and lost maps were only a couple of the stories to come out of that time. As Helen reported to us a few years ago, she discovered that the Vatican put the clamps on the diary, a supposed map Padilla had made in case the diary was lost, and two samples of something, probably gold, which the survivor may have carried out.”
“So, if she had made these discoveries in the old files, why didn’t the Group move on her request?” Jack asked.
“Because in the end, even with all of her data, it was all just circumstantial, no hard evidence at all. In the end, the Padilla legend is just that, a legend, a story handed down, about which not one single fact has come to official light.”
“Fifteen years ago, the Group was split as to the authenticity of the legend, even though our top anthropologist was adamant that she was dealing with fact, not just a myth. Her department was able to finally verify that Padilla did actually exist and that he was regarded as one of Pizarro’s best officers. The files that were stolen also detailed the rescue of a group of doctors from Princeton and the University of Chicago from Brazil in 1942. I don’t know what she could have learned from them. The team of OSS men was led by our own Senator Garrison Lee.”
“As I said, it’s all just a fanciful legend,” Virginia said as she pushed the file away from her. “What have we learned about this fossil?” she asked.
“I’ll let Heidi answer your question. Please make it quick, Doctor.”
“Well,” Heidi Rodriguez said as she stood and walked to the screen. “I’ll try and abbreviate my conclusions, although this specimen hardly calls for an abbreviated anything. To begin with, the age of the fossil is between four hundred and eighty and five hundred and eighty years old,” she said, “an accuracy measurement of plus or minus one hundred years.”
“What?” Virginia asked as she stared at the image on the screen.
“Yes, our methods of dating fossils are much improved since Helen Zachary was here. But then she suspected its age anyway, because of the legend.” Heidi picked up a pointer. “Now, if you will look here you can see dried and hardened tissue, more than likely cartilage of some sort along the third knuckle of each digit, even the thumb. It appears to have been scaled tissue that stretched from digit to digit and between the index finger and thumb.”
“What are you saying?” Pete asked as he took a break from chewing on his pencil.
“I’m saying that the creature this hand belonged to had webbed fingers. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is fact and not legend,” Heidi said, looking at Virginia.
“Helen is missing. She left for South America five weeks ago and hasn’t returned, hasn’t checked in.” Niles held up the letter Helen had left him. “She stated in this letter that the diary was in the possession of the Archdiocese of Madrid. She also stated she had received help from a man,” he looked at his notes, “a Mr. Henri St. Claire, a French money man. We indexed that name with our files, and lo and behold, the name of an old friend came up as using that particular alias once before, Colonel Henri Farbeaux.”
Silence at first greeted Niles’s revelation. Of all the people in the world to have turned up, none of them expected that.
“It seems Dr. Zachary has fallen in with a bad crowd,” Jack said finally.
“Yes, it would seem,” Niles answered. “I have a call in to our supposed new friend in France, and Ms. Serrate has agreed to pay us a visit here in the States in case she can be of assistance. I don’t like the fact that his name has surfaced twice in just a matter of a few weeks. And now with Helen’s disappearance, I fear she may have stumbled onto something outside of her expertise.” He gave the letter to Alice. “Bring everyone up to speed on what Helen had to say.”
“I’ll read just the pertinent information,” she said, opening the letter.
“Read it in its entirety; leave nothing out,” Niles said as he sat heavily into his chair.
Alice scrutinized him a moment, then read
Dearest Niles—
I know this must be a great shock to you, but you are the only person in the world I can turn to. Hold on to your hat, I’ve found the route of Padilla! I have the exact location of the valley and am on my way this very day. Imagine, after all these years, the valley everyone told me did not exist, in my sights at last! I wish you were coming along, but I know it would be difficult for you for many reasons. I know I hurt you deeply, but I must ask something of you, dearest Niles. I’m afraid I have made some enemies in my quest for my Captain Padilla outside of the senator and yourself. It seems people may, just may I say, be coming after me. One of my earlier backers, a Mr. Henri St. Claire, could come after the diary or discover the trail of the papal medalists that led me to the archbishop. If you receive this letter, that means I have found trouble. I cannot give you details of my route to the site in case they track this letter to whom I left it with, but you may begin with the archbishop of Madrid. You should have no trouble from there in locating me (hopefully). The other items the legend says came out with the Padilla diary are lost forever, I tracked them through foreign-born papal medalists involved in hiding them with papal authorization in 1874, and know for a fact that one of the items no longer exists as it was lost forever. The other is still buried at the Vatican Archives, having never left. But thanks to those old dusty files the senator had, and which I’m afraid I stole, I found the last and best piece, the diary itself, hidden in Spain.
I think of you every day, Niles. Please forgive me after all these years.
Love always,
Helen
Everyone in the room looked from one to the other. None of them looked at Niles and he seemed grateful for that small mercy. He unknotted his tie and stood.
Virginia cleared her throat as she always did when she had a point to make. “She seems to give away a lot of information for someone to track.”
“No. We have the files in the Group’s old facility in Arlington, so no one but us can get to them,” said Niles.
“If Farbeaux is involved, that makes this …this situation delicate, to say the least. Obviously, according to his history, he would be after—” She opened the file and flipped through the pages until she found the one she wanted. She raised her glasses to her eyes and read, “The El Dorado of the Americas. Now if that is just a legend or not, it makes no difference. Between Farbeaux’s making a play for whatever is there and those missing kids, I feel we must go. If we can, that is,” Virginia said as she closed the file and looked at Niles expectantly.
“Jack?” Niles asked, holding his breath because he knew the auspices of the security department could veto the Event declaration for safety reasons. Niles knew he could override every voice in the room except Jack’s; his was the only one Niles could not because of losses of Event personnel in the past. Jack’s department was their only fail-safe to keep losses at a minimum.
“I agree, but regardless of the need you feel to hurry, we have many problems to overcome, the least of which is finding out just where in the hell it is we are going.”
“I’m not as worried about that as much as what we’ll find once our people get down there,” Pete said as he stood.
There was a knock at the double conference room doors, and Niles’s new assistant walked over to answer it. She stepped aside and a private first corporal in the red-trimmed coveralls of the Communication and Signals Department entered.
“I figured the first place to start is to get a team to Madrid to speak with the archbishop, for obvious reasons,” Niles said. “PFC Hanley here was to make an appointment for us.”
Instead of announcing anything to the gathered department heads, the private went straight to Niles and handed him a slip of flimsy, then departed the room. Niles scanned it and then looked around the table.
“Well, who’s to go to Spain?” Virginia asked.
Compton handed the yellow paper to Alice and then removed his thick glasses.
“It looks like we have to do this the hard way,” Alice said, as she lowered her own glasses, which dangled from a long gold chain. “It seems Archbishop Santiago was murdered yesterday afternoon.”
The news was greeted with silence and dismayed looks.
It was Alice who broke it.
“This does not fit Mr. Farbeaux’s profile at all. He’s not a cold-blooded killer, he only takes life as a necessary function in saving his own skin, and the archbishop would have posed no threat to him.”
“I think we may have to reevaluate certain realities here. Something is out there that is driving people to extremes, so let’s start with blank paper and not go in with any preconceived notions,” Jack said, looking from face to face.
“We’ll have to start here, in our own files. The answer is there, Helen Zachary found it, and so will we. I’ll break down everyone’s duties and get back to you. As of,” Niles looked at his watch, “0945, I am declaring an Event. I’ll speak with the president. Excused,” he finished.