Chihuahua, Mexico
It was only when she stepped off the plane at General Roberto Fierro Villalobos International Airport that Avery realized she had spent more than half of the preceding forty-eight hours in the air. It had been two days since she’d slept in a bed or had a hot shower. Her body was definitely feeling the former, and her nose was acutely aware of the latter. The others seemed immune to the hectic pace; it was probably business as usual for them.
Aside from being tired and grungy, Avery was also more than a little anxious about the current political climate in Mexico. In the wake of the Juarez student massacre, the State Department was strongly advising Americans to avoid travel, particularly in areas off the regular tourist routes. Remote and rural, Chihuahua was exactly the kind of city that might conceal anti-government or criminal elements, the kind of people who would think nothing of abducting foreign tourists for ransom or simply making them disappear altogether. Avery felt quite sure she had already used up all her luck when it came to being kidnapped. The conspicuous presence of men in camouflaged combat uniforms armed with assault rifles did not allay her concerns. They were probably federal police or military troops, but their very presence only underscored the danger they were facing.
The others seemed unfazed by this. Avery hoped this meant her worries were unfounded, but after what had happened at the Library of Congress, no place was truly safe. She did take some small comfort in the knowledge that Kasey and Sievers were both armed. Before leaving D.C. Kasey had procured traveling documents for them all, including credentials identifying her and Sievers as FBI agents with international carry permits.
Avery’s hopes of an overnight stay in Chihuahua were quickly dashed. Within half an hour of arriving, they were on the move again, traveling in a rented Toyota RAV4 along Mexico’s Federal Highway 16. She understood that time was in short supply, and that a night wasted in relative luxury might cost them the race, but that did not mean she had to like it.
Staying on the move did have one advantage, however; a moving target was a lot harder to hit.
The closest landmark of any significance to the target coordinates was an archaeological site called Cuarenta Casas. Avery thought she was well-versed in pre-Columbian antiquity, but her research on Cuarenta Casas had come as a real surprise. The forty houses from which the site took its name were actually adobe structures, built into caves like the cliff dwellings of the American southwest by the Paquime culture, which had been contemporaneous with the Aztecs further to the south, and the Anasazi to the north. The culture had declined in the fourteenth century, but caves had been occupied as late as 1520, which meant that, despite their remote location, they had never been lost. The caves would have been the perfect place for someone—Patton’s mysterious ‘Devil’—to hide a treasure in the early years of the twentieth century.
The road trip through the Mexican countryside was similarly at odds with her preconceived notions. She had expected rough dirt roads lined with dilapidated shacks and weathered adobe houses, and people wearing sombreros and serapes, riding burros everywhere. The reality was far more prosaic. The federal highway was a well-maintained four-lane divided road that sliced through mile after mile of farm country, nestled in the gently sloping foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental range. Kasey remarked that it was not much different from a drive up the I-5 in California. It was one of the few times that she, or in fact that any of them spoke. Everyone, it seemed, was alone with their thoughts. It was only when they stopped for fuel that Avery was reminded that she was in a foreign country, and only then because the signs were in Spanish.
Avery napped a little, then took her turn behind the wheel, driving for an hour before letting Sievers take over. Somewhere between hours three and four, the road became two-lane highway but it was not until they were about thirty miles north of a place called Ciudad Madera that the going finally became a little more rugged. Even then, the dirt roads that climbed into the mountains were not dissimilar to back roads Avery had traveled in her native Nova Scotia. The weather was cool but dry, and the roads were, for the most part, firm enough that they did not need to make use of the Toyota’s low-range four-wheel drive.
A sign on an unlocked gate informed them that the site was closed for the winter, but they continued on to the road’s end, where more signs identified the trailhead leading to the Cuarenta Casas archaeological preserve. They hiked along the trail to the base of a long plank staircase leading up the cliffs, where Kasey, after consulting the Garmin Epix wristwatch-style GPS unit she had picked up at an airport gadget shop before leaving D.C. announced, “We’re here. More or less.”
“So what do we do now?” Sievers asked. “It’s not like we even know what we’re looking for.”
Avery looked to Stone, wondering if he had cracked the riddle during his long contemplative silence—he had said the least of any of them during the road trip—but he did not seem to be paying attention. He was gazing, with an indifferent expression, at the cliffs high above them, where the Paquime had built their dwellings in shadowy scalloped recesses. Finally Avery herself ventured a guess. “The diary said the Spear would point the way. My brother came across a clue like that once, and he solved it when he realized he had to look in the direction a certain statue was pointing.”
Sievers raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Your brother does this cockamamie stuff too?”
Avery put her hands on her hips. “That’s right. After he left the SEALs...” She paused for dramatic effect. “He became a professional recovery expert.” She thought ‘recovery expert’ sounded more respectable than ‘treasure hunter.’ “He’s found stuff you wouldn’t believe.”
Sievers merely shrugged.
“Anyway,” she went on, “it’s a spearhead, right? Maybe we’re supposed to affix it to something—like the shaft of a spear, and whatever direction it points is the way we’re supposed to go. If it’s something like that, then we don’t even need the actual Spear. We just have to find where it should go.”
She glanced at Stone, hoping for confirmation, but he gave no indication he had even heard her. Instead, he continued to stare into the distance, as if her suggestion did not even merit comment.
Kasey was more direct with her criticism. “I don’t know. That sounds a bit too Raiders of the Lost Ark for me.”
“Well, if you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears.”
“Sorry, got nothing. I suppose we can look around. Maybe we’ll find a sign that says, ‘Spear of Destiny’ goes here. At least it will give us something to do while we wait for the Dominion to show up.”
“Did Patton come here?” Stone said, not looking away from the cliffs.
Avery, still feeling a little defensive, immediately replied. “This was your idea.”
Stone finally turned to face her. “That’s not what I mean. This is the right place. But we don’t know if Patton ever came here, do we?”
“He fought Julio Cardenas near Rubio. That’s less than a hundred miles from here as the crow flies.”
Stone accepted this with a slight nod. “All right. But that would have been in 1916, more than thirty years before he would have the Spear of Destiny in his hands. And we know that he was killed shortly after that. He would never have had a chance to come here and set things up with the Spear of Destiny.”
“So what are you saying?” Kasey broke in, sounding only slightly less annoyed than Avery felt. “Did you get the clue wrong?”
“Maybe.” Stone’s gaze kept wandering, as if the conversation could not hold his interest, but Avery recognized the eye movement as indicative of both recollection and creative processing. This was what Stone did best, sorting through the raw data, looking for the connections that others missed. She had been trying to do the same with her suggestion, but evidently had missed some critical piece of evidence.
Set aside my prejudices, she reminded herself.
“Patton wasn’t talking about the Spear of Destiny,” she said. It was more a question than a statement. She was thinking aloud, testing the plausibility of the idea simply by putting it into words, but as soon as she said it, she knew it was true. “There’s another spear here. Maybe not a real spear... Maybe a rock formation, or a petroglyph.”
“Patton said the Devil came to him.” Stone might have been talking to himself. “The Devil gave him a gift. The gift is a secret, left here like a seed planted in a fallow field. The Devil told him how to find it. Told him, ‘Go to Cuarenta Casas.” This place is the starting point. Patton could have gotten these latitude and longitude coordinates from any map.”
“The Devil told him about the ‘spear,’ whatever it is,” Avery said. The ideas were flowing now. She was seeing the problem in a whole new light. “Possessing the Spear of Destiny made Patton remember that.”
“‘The Spear will point the way.’ It’s misdirection. Anyone who didn’t know him would think the diary was talking about the Spear of Destiny, but he meant something else. A spear that points the way...”
“A compass points north,” Sievers offered.
Stone’s eyes stopped moving. He faced Sievers. “That’s it. He gave map coordinates with no cardinal directions. Anyone who recognized what those numbers meant would also know that the ‘spear’ is a compass needle. It’s so simple.”
Sievers straightened, looking very pleased with his contribution. “So from here, we just go north?”
“Well, that sounds easy enough,” said Kasey. She looked skyward, marking the location of the sun, then turned until she was facing in a northward direction and looking right at the cliffs of Cuarenta Casas.
“Not as easy as it sounds,” countered Sievers. “Standard military reporting requires direction and distance. North could mean anywhere between here and the North Pole.”
“Maybe that’s where we’re supposed to go,” Kasey said with a smirk. “The gift must be in Santa’s workshop.”
Sievers ignored the comment. “There’s also the question of whether we’re supposed to follow true north or magnetic north.”
Avery frowned. “There’s a difference?”
“True north is the earth’s axis. All maps are aligned to true north because it’s a fixed location. Mostly, anyways. But compasses point to magnetic north, where the earth’s magnetic field is the strongest. Depending on where you’re standing, there can be several degrees of difference.”
“It will be magnetic north,” Stone put in. “The spear points the way. He’s talking about a compass needle.”
“No problem.” Kasey began pushing buttons on her wrist GPS. “I can set this to find magnetic north.”
“Problem,” said Sievers. “The magnetic north pole is constantly moving. It’s moved several degrees in just the last decade. There’s no telling how much it’s moved since 1945.”
“Or 1916,” added Stone. “If Patton was merely relaying the information he was given, ‘Go to Cuarenta Casas and head north,’ then he might not have taken that into account either.”
Kasey looked at her watch. “I wonder if this thing can adjust for that.”
Sievers was not finished. “There’s also the question of geomagnetic anomalies. Iron ore deposits can mess with compass readings. Most maps adjust for that in the declination, but your GPS will almost certainly give a different reading than a regular ferromagnetic compass from the early twentieth century.”
Kasey dropped her hands to her sides in disgust. “Well, that’s five hundred bucks wasted.”
Stone stared at the device on her wrist. “We need a compass. A real one.”
“I told you,” Sievers countered. “Magnetic north has changed.”
“Maybe, but if there is an iron deposit here, something specific to this area, then that won’t have changed, right?”
Sievers considered this in silence.
“Well, I don’t have a real compass,” Kasey said, with more than a trace of sarcasm. “Maybe we can get one at the gift shop when it opens.”
“I can make a compass,” Sievers said. “That’s basic elementary school science project stuff.”
“Do it,” Stone said, his tone no longer speculative. “We’ll compare your results with Kasey’s GPS. If they’re the same, we can rule out local magnetic anomalies. Then all we have to do is estimate how much the pole has shifted over the last century.”
“Right,” griped Kasey. “That’s all we have to do.”
“It’s guesswork, but if we can’t figure it out, then neither can the Dominion, so it’s a win for us.”
They returned to the RAV4 so that Sievers could gather what he needed to fashion a field expedient compass, which consisted of a few items salvaged from the communal trash bag and a needle from a travel-sized sewing kit Sievers took from his backpack.
“You brought a needle and thread?” Avery asked.
“I never go anywhere without ‘em.”
“In case you pop a button?” Avery asked.
“Something like that.” He grinned as if he’d made a joke. “To make this work, we’ll need to magnetize the needle by rubbing it against a magnet.”
“Did you bring a magnet, too?”
“Several of them actually. The magnets in the door speakers would be perfect, but I don’t want to have to tear the car apart to get at them.” He rooted in his backpack again. “I think I may have something that will work in here.”
A moment later, he was disassembling the ear bud of a pair of headphones. When the plastic shell was cracked to his satisfaction, he began repeatedly sweeping the sewing needle across the exposed miniature speaker, always moving in the same direction. “The old Army survival manual says you can magnetize a needle by rubbing it against a piece of wool,” he said, after a few seconds. “But that doesn’t actually work. You need a real magnet to make a magnet.”
“Good to know. Just in case you’re not around next time I need to make a compass.”
When Sievers was satisfied that the needle was magnetized, he placed it on a piece of polystyrene foam torn from a food container. He then filled a paper cup with bottled water and set the foam with the needle in the center of the cup. When he let go of it, the needle began to rotate as if someone was gently blowing on it. Sievers waited until it stopped moving, noted the direction the needle was pointing, and then tapped the foam to start it spinning again. A few moments later, the needle was again pointing in the same direction.
“Voila.”
“Nice work, MacGyver,” remarked Kasey. “The good news is that your Boy Scout contraption agrees with the GPS magnetic. That should save time.”
“Hang on to it, Sievers,” Stone advised.
Sievers nodded and carefully poured the water back into the bottle. “What’s the declination?”
“Magnetic north is about eight degrees east of true north.” Kasey held the GPS so they could all see the topographical map displayed on the small screen. “If we head in that direction, it will take us cross country over these hilltops. Not much there really. And we still don’t know which way the compass would have pointed a hundred years ago.”
Stone stared at the little map for nearly a minute. “We have to consider the human factor. Patton, and whomever it was that told him about this, didn’t have access to precise satellite maps and navigational aids, but he must have believed that those two clues—starting point and compass direction—were all anyone would need to find it. If we follow magnetic north and keep our eyes open, maybe we’ll see what they saw.”
Equipped with fresh water bottles and a buffet of granola bars, they blazed their own trail up to the hilltop and began walking. The cool air and sparse vegetation made for an easy trek despite the altitude—at more than a mile above sea level, Avery found herself quickly growing winded—but the unvarying terrain held little promise for finding clues in the landscape.
After about a hundred yards, Stone suggested checking their position against the makeshift compass. Sievers dutifully decanted some water into the cup and placed the needle. It rotated half a turn and then came to rest pointing at a forty-five degree angle to the left of their direction of travel. Sievers raised a suspicious eyebrow and then repeated the process, with the same results.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a magnetic anomaly,” he declared. “Could be a big deposit of iron ore.”
“That’s not north,” Kasey said. “Are we just going to wander around and hope we get lucky?”
“The spear will point the way,” Avery murmured.
Stone nodded. “Let’s see where it points.”
Kasey, outvoted and pessimistic to begin with, assented without further protest. The new course took them down a moderately steep slope to the bottom of a draw and then back up the other side where Sievers took another compass check. This time the needle pointed in almost the same direction as Kasey’s GPS.
Stone turned around and studied the landscape they had just traversed. “We passed it,” he said, unequivocally. “Back this way.”
He was halfway back up the hill when he came to a sudden stop. Avery reached his side a few seconds later and immediately saw what had arrested Stone’s attention.
To call it a cave entrance would have been an exaggeration. It was more of a vertical hollow, mostly covered over with years, perhaps even centuries, of sediment that washed down the hill. But the accumulation could not completely hide the opening—barely larger than a rabbit hole—that disappeared into the hillside.
“Sievers, try the compass here.”
Sievers did, and the result was astonishing. The needle did not merely orient toward the depression, but actually began drifting across the water to bump against the side of the cup. “Okay, definitely some kind of big magnetic anomaly there.”
“This is the place,” Stone said, confidently. “We need to dig this out.”
“You think there’s something buried here?” asked Avery.
“It looks more like the entrance to an abandoned mineshaft,” Sievers said.
“Seriously?” complained Kasey. “Why does everything have to be underground?” Then as if to laugh it off, she turned to Sievers. “Don’t suppose you know how to MacGyver a Coke can into a backhoe?”
“Nope. Might be able to do something with a tire iron from the car, though.”
“Maybe we should consider coming back tomorrow,” Avery said. “With some real tools. It’s going to be dark in a couple hours.”
“I think it’s going to be dark in there no matter what,” Kasey muttered.
“I brought a MagLite,” Sievers said.
“Of course, you did.”
Stone turned away from the mine entrance, an eager gleam in his eye. “This is what we came for. The answers are right in there.”
“And they aren’t going anywhere,” retorted Kasey.
“We aren’t the only ones looking for it.”
“He’s right,” Avery said. “We should at least try to dig through.”
Sievers, looking as if he had known all along this was a decision they would reach, said simply, “Be right back.”
The tire iron proved to be a very effective pick-axe, loosening the soil enough that it could simply be scooped out of the way. It took less than an hour to widen the hole at the top of the depression enough for Sievers to shine his flashlight in and verify that the tunnel opened up beyond the cave-in. He kept digging until it was big enough for him to crawl through, and then proceeded to do exactly that.
He was no tunnel rat. In fact, tight spaces freaked him out a little. His assertiveness was a sham to cover for what he saw as an embarrassing weakness. It was a strategy that had served him well in other panic-inducing situations.
After a short crawl through the freshly dug passage, he slid down a slope of accumulated debris and into a cramped tunnel hewn into solid rock.
“It’s a mineshaft all right,” he called over his shoulder. He played the light down the length of the passage. Wooden support frames had been placed at intervals, but the beams looked ready to crumble into dust at the slightest disturbance. Cobwebs shrouded the corners and Sievers saw animal spoor. Rats, or some other sort of rodent, had made a home of this place long after the ore had played out.
A faint shuffling noise warned that someone was coming through, and indeed a few seconds later, Stone emerged from the dugout tunnel. Avery came next, almost jittery with excitement at the prospect of exploring the old mine and finding the mysterious treasure that, to all appearances, lay concealed somewhere within. She brushed past the two men and headed deeper into the mine, almost to the limit of the cone of illumination cast by Sievers’ single miniature flashlight.
Several minutes passed before Kasey finally came through. After straightening up and brushing the dirt off, she scowled at the others as if daring them to make a joke about claustrophobia. Sievers knew exactly how she felt.
“Hold old do you think this place is?” Avery asked as she ran a hand along one of the support beams. Little puffs of wood dust rose from her fingertips like smoke.
Sievers winced. “That’s probably not a good idea. And to answer your question... Old. A couple hundred years, maybe.”
Avery drew her hand back but did not appear to be the least bit apprehensive about venturing deeper into the excavation.
Sievers had explored a few caverns in his lifetime, as well as crumbling ruins in Afghanistan and Iraq. The mineshaft was nothing like those. It reminded him more of a crawlspace beneath a house—cramped and miserable. He could not imagine what life had been like for the miners, toiling forward a few inches at a time, dragging out rocks by the bucket full for months on end, just to procure a few ounces of silver or gold. The ceiling was low, barely high enough to allow him to walk upright, and the air was thick with the smell of damp earth and mildew.
The shaft was not perfectly straight but meandered left and right, probably following the course of the ore vein. After about a hundred feet, it opened up into a larger chamber, with upright support pillars and some rickety-looking scaffolding positioned along one wall. As they entered, a low, groaning noise filled the air and a stream of dirt began to trickle from the ceiling right in front of them.
“Officially not liking it here,” Kasey whispered.
Sievers swept the area quickly with his light, locating two more tunnels that led off in different directions, then scanned the area below the scaffold platform. The area was strewn with heaps of loose rock and litter from random cave-ins, along with broken tools and scraps of wood, detritus not worth packing up to the surface. Then the light fell upon something that he did not expect, and he froze in shock and horror.
“Is that...?”
It was. Resting at the base of the wall and staring back at them was the unmistakable outline of a human skull.
Avery hurried forward, as if finding skulls in dank abandoned holes in the ground was the most natural thing in the world for her, and knelt beside the skeleton to which it was still attached. Sievers and the others approached also, but with slightly less enthusiasm. Stone seemed distracted, peering into the darkness of the adjoining tunnels and sniffing the air experimentally.
As Sievers overcame his initial surprise, he saw the remains with more clarity. The skull, yellowed with age, was not completely intact. Several of the front teeth were missing, and there was an irregular hole, about the size of a quarter-dollar coin, in the top of the cranium. The skeleton was dressed in dark clothes, possibly a suit, though the garment was so ragged from the passage of time and rodent predations that it was impossible to say with any certainty. The object clutched in one bony hand, however, while covered in a scale of rust, was instantly recognizable.
“That’s a gun,” Avery said, confirming his observation. She knelt over the skeleton, this time taking care to touch nothing, and studied the tableau like a crime scene investigator. “I think he...”
She trailed off, unwilling to formalize the observation, but Sievers had already put the clues together. The missing teeth, the top of the skull missing, the gun in hand; the man had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A suicide.
Her visual inspection complete, Avery now reached out, gently tugging something out from under the skeleton’s left arm. It was, Sievers saw, an old-fashioned valise bag. The boiled leather had been gnawed at the corners, but was otherwise intact, as were, presumably, its contents, though when Avery tried to loosen the buckle holding it closed, the strap snapped off in her hands. She shrugged and then with only a little more caution, pried the case open. “Bring the light over here.”
Sievers approached and shone his light down into the interior of the valise. There was a glint of metal reflecting in the deepest recesses, but what immediately caught his attention was a folded sheet of parchment positioned intentionally so that anyone opening the bag would immediately encounter it. Avery picked up the paper and carefully unfolded it.
The page was covered with meticulously precise lines of flowing script. The writing looked like a long continuous line, mostly flat but for little peaks to indicate individual letters. “What is that? Arabic?”
Avery laughed. “Seriously? It’s cursive. This is how people used to write before text messages.”
“You can read that?”
“In my line of work, you have to be able to read old handwritten letters.” She continued reading silently for several seconds. When she got to the end, she let out a gasp. “I’ll be damned.”