“The stranger or the hoodie?”
“The hoodie was the one with the gun. As far as I could tell, the stranger was unarmed. They disappeared for a minute. Then the stranger came back out again.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, alone.”
“So, he took out the two goons and left them in the bathroom?”
“Yep. Then, he comes out here, sits at his table again. The last guy comes over, starts panicking, freaking out. You know? Gets all loud and angry. You could tell he was scared because of the way he kept chattering, making threats. Then he got too close.”
“Too close?” Petty leaned in again. The grip on his own fingers tightening to the point his knuckles turned white.
“Yeah. Like this stranger was a snake, coiled and ready to strike. He snatched the guy’s head and started bashing it against the table. Broke his nose, I think. There was a good bit of blood. The stranger beat his head against the table until the guy blacked out and fell on the floor.”
“And when the threat was done, the stranger left?”
“He stood up, walked over like nothing had happened, paid in cash for his food, and left us the guns he’d taken from the robbers. Told us to hold them until the cops arrived.”
“And that was it? The guy just disappeared?”
“Yep. He walked out and drove off.”
“Did you happen to see what he was driving?”
Mary looked up at the ceiling for a moment, considering the question. She thought hard for a minute and then shook her head. “Not really. He’d parked off to the side of the building. When he left, it was still dark. I saw the taillights, but that was about it. And even then I didn’t get a good look. Might have been a pickup truck, though. Looked like those kinds of lights.”
“This man,” Petty said, “what did he look like?”
Mary gave the same description she’d given the cops earlier. It did little to help him out. She described a man with brown hair, cut short. His face had sported a scraggly beard. None of that matched the description for Sean Wyatt, but that meant nothing. Petty knew that if Wyatt was on the run, he would have changed his appearance. Wyatt was likely a master of disguise, as cheesy as it sounded. The man had served the United States government on an endless string of covert missions. The clandestine nature of his operations would have required him to have a firm grasp on staying inconspicuous.
Such a job would have made enemies all over the world, and keeping his identity a secret was paramount. Petty had gone undercover enough times to understand the routine. He’d never been caught, not even close. Wyatt would possess the exact same skills. So, even though Mary the waitress described a man that looked almost nothing like Wyatt, Petty knew it was him. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind.
“Can I go now?” Mary asked, snapping him away from his thoughts. “I’m really tired, and I’ve been here over ten hours.”
“Sure, Mary. Go get some rest. Thanks for your time.”
He felt no sympathy for her. He’d not slept much in the last two days, either. She slid out of the booth and started toward the door.
“Oh, Mary?” Petty said.
She stopped and turned around slowly, wary he was going to ask a new series of questions. “Did he do anything or say anything unusual before leaving?”
She shook her head. “No. He was just nice. You know, heroic.”
She turned back toward the door and left, disappearing a moment later around the corner.
Petty stared down at the table. Great. Now this guy is going to be some kind of outlaw folk hero. Not if he could help it. He needed to get in front of this thing, but how? There was no telling where Wyatt might be or where he could turn up next. That was the bad news. There was, however, a glimmer of hope. Petty was on the right track. It came down to simply waiting for Wyatt to make a mistake. Then he could pounce.
23
North Dakota
Sean walked down the gentle slope with a heightened sense of caution. He glanced back one time to check on his car, but the real reason was to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He’d only seen a few other cars out on the main road, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t watching. For all he knew, whoever was behind this may well have arrived before he had and taken up position.
That, of course, was doubtful. If the person or persons behind this entire conspiracy had the slightest clue about Fort Mandan and its relationship to the Madison letter, they’d have no need for Sean and his friends.
He’d called IAA headquarters and spoken to Tara and Alex. Apparently, Tommy wasn’t immediately available, but the kids had been invaluable with their research and insights.
Sean had stayed on the phone as he found a road across the river. Based on the guidance from Tara and Alex, he was able to locate an old side road that was little more than two grooves cut into the earth. Part of him wondered if it was an old wagon trail, untouched and overgrown from the last hundred or so years.
A few strands of long grass poked out from the veil of snow covering the ground. The ruts were shallow but certainly pronounced against the rest of the surface.
While he was on the phone with Tara and Alex, they’d done a quick survey of the area, using aerial photos and satellite images to get a better idea of any potential anomalies that might exist in the local geography.
At first, he thought they would probably find nothing, and he sat in his SUV for nearly an hour, hidden behind a thicket of trees while they conducted their search.
It turned out to be worth the wait when Alex called back and let him know that they were able to find something.
“It’s probably nothing,” he’d warned, “but it’s more than anything else we could find in that area.”
Sean had to take the chance. He was there, after all. What did he have to lose?
They’d spotted an edge or a line in the aerial map. It was subtle, possibly nothing more than the location of an old farm fence or maybe a retaining wall used to stem the flooding during rainy times of year. He’d come this far. Sean figured it was worth a shot.
He walked down the embankment toward the shore, noting on his phone the images that the kids at the lab had sent. According to the map, the northwest corner of the original fort’s foundation was down near the shore, barely cutting out into the banks by a mere ten or so feet. That was, of course, assuming that it was the fort they were all looking at and not some other man-made feature cut into the natural geology.
Sean slowed his pace as he neared the shore, and when he got to the edge he came to a stop as he gazed down at the dark river flowing below his feet.
The Missouri River was an impressive stretch of water. The longest river in North America, it stretched over twenty-three hundred miles, emerging from western Montana and running all the way to Saint Louis where it joined with the Mississippi River. It was not an insignificant tributary.
Sean caught himself gazing at the massive confluence, longer than intended, and snapped his attention back to the map on his screen. According to what he was seeing, he was standing on the point of the corner. He had to force himself to look down and focus intensely on the ground before he noted the anomaly.
It was subtle, barely noticeable, but as he stared at the earth he realized the aberration. The indentation was only inches deep, if that, and barely more than a foot wide. It stretched in a straight line for several feet until it disappeared into the grassy hillside where it met the shore’s drop-off. He looked to the left and noted that the same kind of line formed another potential wall, this one longer. It ran at an angle to the shore another twenty feet down from where he stood.
Sean blinked against the cold breeze and tightened his Oakleys against his face to keep the chilly air from causing tears to stream down his face. He’d always had that issue, ever since childhood. When the weather turned cold, the slightest wind would cause him to tear up, blurring his vision and causing people around to ask if he was okay.
He chuckled at the thought and con
tinued analyzing the terrain. He spun around, arms flailing in his winter coat like a child on a snow day. Just up the hill, about one hundred yards away, was the edge of a small forest.
He’d noted the woods when making his way to the river, and figured it was a likely location for something to be hidden, if in fact he was in the right area. He had to be. Sean shook off the negative thoughts. They were unhelpful, and he’d learned a long time ago to ask if something was helping or hurting. If it was the latter, he’d learned to let it go and focus on the solution. That’s how he’d done things for years. That line of thinking had saved his hide more than once.
“This has to be it,” he said to himself.
Another shiver of cold shot through his body. The coat and winter pants certainly helped stay the freezing air, but it couldn’t be entirely prevented. Sean looked back at the river, once more at the two faint lines in the ground, and then returned his gaze to the forest. That had to be it. He recounted the riddle out loud. “A hundred paces from the corner.”
It was time to see if there really was something there or not, or if he was even in the right place. Only one way to find out.
He trudged up the hill, finding it much more treacherous than the walk down. On several occasions, his boots slipped on the slick snow, and he caught himself scrambling to maintain balance.
He’d left his pack in the SUV, electing to go it with only a sidearm and a hunting knife to protect himself. If he needed to return to the vehicle, it was a short walk away, just across an open meadow.
Sean pushed up the hill, his feet slipping every few steps until he reached the crest where the slope rounded off at the top. There, it was only another fifty feet of flat earth to reach the forest.
His eyes darted left and right. He thought he heard the sound of a car in the distance, but one never came into view. He was off the beaten path—that was for sure—and the nearest road was several hundred yards away. The bad news was that, until he reached the cover of the woods, he was out in the open. The good news was he’d hear or see someone coming from almost a literal mile away.
Sean kept his eyes peeled, scanning the horizon in every direction until he reached the forest. Upon passing the first few rows of trees, he found himself overwhelmed with a sense of safety. The thick tree trunks surrounded him, a safety net against both the cold and any curious eyes that might be watching.
He was fairly certain he’d have seen someone observing his movement, but there was always the possibility. He’d been out in the open before, watching targets while camouflaged and they’d never been the wiser. The same thing could very well happen to him.
Sean shrugged off the paranoia. His immediate concern was finding the clue.
He walked dead ahead, doing his best to maintain a straight course from the corner of what he hoped was the old foundation of the original Fort Mandan. He pulled out the phone once more and glanced at the notes he’d made. The paper was still in his pocket. The copy of the original Madison letter was protected by laminate, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have a backup. Sean had transferred every piece of crucial information from the letter to his phone in case he ran into trouble at some point. Of course, if he did, anyone with half a brain would take both the note and his phone, so maybe the digital copy was more for his own peace of mind. He’d saved it to a Dropbox folder, though, which was password protected and also meant he could access it from essentially any computer or mobile device anywhere in the world.
Sean heard a sound to his right, and he pulled out his weapon, aiming it in that direction. He crouched to one knee and listened. The breeze was gentler here in the forest, the trunks partially blocking out the wind. Outside the woods, the wind had been a constant whistle in his ears. Here, it was barely a breath brushing against his eardrums.
His breath came out of his mouth in cloudy bursts, visible for a moment and gone the next. Even his breathing was a constant reminder of how cold it was.
He didn’t see anything unusual in the woods and lowered his weapon. This time, however, he didn’t return it to the holster. Better to be ready in case of an attack.
Sean turned back to his original path and was about to walk ahead when something caught his eye. There was a tree right in front of him, only a couple dozen feet away. The trunk was wide and thick, obviously older than many of the smaller, skeletal trees that occupied the woods. It was an oak, likely several hundred years old. Sean had seen trees like that before. There was one such oak on the campus of a local university he frequented that had been dated back to around the Middle Ages. He wondered how that was possible. That tree had likely gone through quite a history, and he often considered what it would say if it could speak. Such thoughts were silly and unproductive, but they came to his mind nonetheless during moments of quiet reflection or fanciful daydreams.
He locked his gaze on the tree as he approached, his feet moving unconsciously beneath him, carrying him toward the strange sight. In the two hundred-plus years that had passed since Meriwether Lewis had walked in this area, things had changed. Trees had grown. Settlers had established homesteads, farms, and even small towns. And the natural world had changed as well.
Sean stopped at the tree and stared at the surface of the bark. A long line curved back and forth from about six feet high down to around his ankles. The engraved design had healed over time, the bark growing back to cover up the wound that had been cut into it. That didn’t change the fact that it was easy to see, especially considering the clue Sean carried on his phone. The way was marked by a serpent. It couldn’t have been more obvious, even though now it didn’t look much like a snake at all. The only discerning feature was the curve to the creature, but Sean knew that had to be it. Based on the scarring of the bark, it had to be close to two hundred years old, at a minimum.
He’d spent nine years of his life working for the founder of a massive snack cake empire. When Sean was in college, his boss had asked him to do some surgery on a giant oak that stood in the yard directly in front of the house. Sean had never done anything like that before but did his best to research how an arborist would handle it. He believed he’d done a good job, and more than a decade after leaving the place, he went back to see how the tree was doing. He was happy to find it alive and well, and the places he’d cut were growing back, much like what had happened to this trunk.
He wasn’t an expert, but he knew a little, and Sean’s rapid calculation told him this was the spot. He glanced around once more and then knelt down in the snow at the base of the trunk.
Sean started scraping away the hard snow, but he soon realized that would be an endeavor in futility. He panted for breath; once more dense clouds burst from between his lips and out of his nostrils.
He was frustrated but not defeated. This was the right place, but how would he dig up whatever was hidden here?
He stood and looked around for a big branch he could use to cut into the frozen earth, but he saw nothing that would do the job. Even if he had a shovel, the ground was as hard as stone. He put his hands on his hips for a moment then walked around the tree, tracing a line with one gloved finger across the bark. When he was on the other side, Sean found the solution to his problem. At the base of the tree was a hollow cut out of the trunk near the ground. It may have occurred naturally, or perhaps it had been the doing of Captain Lewis, but either way it presented Sean with the possibility that maybe he wouldn’t have to dig several feet into solid ground with his bare hands.
He crouched down again and craned his neck to get a better view into the shallow darkness. The cavity wasn’t deep, less than a foot into the trunk that was at least twice that thick if not more. The edges of the hole were scarred much like the serpent on the other side, which caused Sean to consider perhaps it had been cut on purpose. It didn’t matter at this point. He had to find out what was there, if anything.
Doubt crawled into his mind and caused a burning sensation to seep into his gut. He knew that a couple of hundred years had passed, a
nd in that time people had surely come through this forest constantly. It would take little more than a curious child wandering through the woods to come upon this tree and have a look inside the hole. That didn’t matter, though, he had to check.
He got down on his hands and knees, the cold earth sending a freezing sting through his skin and joints. He tilted his head and switched on the flashlight on his phone, holding it into the dark recess. There was nothing on the ground or on the curved walls of the inner part of the tree. He noticed no signs of disease or insect infestation, either, which was surprising. Then he saw something that didn’t belong, an object that dangled from a hook drilled into the interior wall of the trunk.
A metal box, rusted and corroded from time was hanging there by a thread; the rusty chain on the hook looked brittle enough to break at any moment. How it had hung on that long was beyond Sean. He reached in and grabbed the box, carefully lifting it so the hook would come free of the chain.
When it was loose, he pulled it out into the light and examined it closely.
He could see there was a thin, crumbling layer of wax coating the box that had worn down over time. As he handled the container, it broke away in chunks and flecks that fell to the ground at his feet.
Sean heard another noise. Or did he? His head snapped up, and he flashed a quick look around the woods. It had plunged back into the eerie, peaceful silence of a forest in winter.
Satisfied no one was there, he yanked out his hunting knife and began digging away at the wax along the seam between the lid and the main compartment. It didn’t take much effort to pry the old sealant out of the grooves. In less than two minutes, he had removed all of the wax. He lifted the rusty metal clasp that was the final barrier to the contents and looked over the surface of the lid one more time. There were no designs carved into the metal, no emblem or logo that represented anyone’s family or military designation. Just a plain metal box from two hundred years ago.
The Omega Project Page 19
