The possibility that this metallic object was made of iridium raised two intriguing questions: just how ancient might it be and where did it come from. In his mind TNT had played with the thought that the artifact could be older than the dinosaurs and may not have originated on this planet. If that were true, this would be the rarest object ever found. And it would be priceless.
From his jacket pocket TNT pulled out a small instrument that looked like the remote control for a television. He turned it on and ran it over the surface of the artifact. The machine began to buzz as a needle on a screen moved all the way from left to right.
“It’s definitely radioactive,” Torrance commented as he turned off the Geiger counter and stuck it in his pocket. “My consultants suggested checking it for radioactivity. Iridium is radioactive for only a very short time. This artifact has been lying on this altar for centuries. That’s a fact that’s indisputable given where it’s situated below Pakal’s tomb. If this object is still radioactive and if it’s also made of iridium then it’s a variation of the element scientists haven’t seen before. At least on earth.”
“At least on earth? Are you suggesting…” Cory knew exactly what he was suggesting and he knew how close to the truth the entrepreneur likely was.
“I’m not suggesting anything.”
“Sorry, Mr. Torrance. I’m just wondering…”
Torrance’s words were clipped, uttered through clenched teeth. He was furious. “Shut up, Cory, for God’s sake. You talk too much. But I know you’ll never tell anything about the things you’ve found here. Isn’t that right, Cory, or should I say Paul? If I ever find out you’ve breathed a word about this discovery things will go very, very badly for you. You and I both know if your past is revealed you’ll lose everything. You’ll never work again, except maybe making furniture in a prison workshop. There’s no statute of limitations for a person who does what you did.”
Cory angrily stared at him, teeth clenched. He forced himself to be quiet. I’ll kill this bastard.
TNT smiled cruelly. He hates me as much as I hate him.
“All right then, Cory. Your secrets are safe with me. And because I hold your fate in my hands, my secrets are safe with you. Keep it that way and you’ll be fine. No one will know what you really are. Or what you’ve hidden.”
Torrance turned and started up the stairs. Cory walked behind him with an attitude of subservience. They joined the others in the room at the top of the Temple of the Inscriptions.
“Is everything good?” Dr. Ortiz asked anxiously as Torrance emerged from the stairway. “Did you learn anything new?”
“No. I didn’t even touch the artifact – right, Cory?” He smiled at the archaeologist who nodded his head. “I just wanted some time to take it all in. To be there with the object, observe it, wonder about it. I appreciate your allowing that, Dr. Ortiz.”
Chapter Fifteen
The man called Cory Spencer was a twenty-six year old graduate student pursuing an advanced degree in archaeological studies at the prestigious Sussex University in Pennsylvania. Born Paul Emerson and raised in El Paso, Texas, the boy had had a tragic past.
He hadn’t started out wanting to be an archaeologist. To be honest, Paul hadn’t started out as much of anything. He struggled in school and barely managed to pass even the early grades. At home his father, frustrated at never being sober enough to hold a job for long, exploded in a drunken rage almost every night. His mother and sister took the brunt of the punishing abuse – verbal, physical and emotional – that his father inflicted upon them.
The boy usually managed to duck and swerve, avoiding most of the swings his father dealt with fists and furniture. Sadly, his eight-year-old sister wasn’t agile. She had been born with a clubfoot, putting her father into a violent outburst from the moment she arrived. He constantly spewed venom, calling her a useless cripple, his cruel words causing the child to whimper and cry. “Stand up and take it,” the man would yell, kicking her as she lay curled up on the floor.
Paul Emerson was eleven years old and in the sixth grade on the day it all ended. He had been in a fight at school that afternoon just like so many other times, and he ended up being on suspension for five days. Suspension didn’t help anything. Paul couldn’t learn anyway. He was very bright but his mind was filled with hatred, confusion and fear. Counselors and teachers had given up on him. His parents never came to teacher conferences. No one cared so Paul fell through the cracks.
On the last horrible night they were at the dinner table. Paul’s father suddenly screamed at his mother about the meal she had fixed. He threw his plate and hit her in the face, hot gravy scalding her skin as the plate shattered into a thousand pieces on the floor. Something snapped in Paul Emerson’s head. He didn’t remember the dinner knife he had in his hand as he came around the table. He never replayed in his head what happened, so he never recalled exactly how he managed to overpower his father with nothing but the knife. The coroner said it likely started with the old man’s eyes. Paul had gone for them first to incapacitate him. Then he had stabbed and stabbed, hundreds of times, until the man died on the kitchen floor.
Paul lay next to his father’s body, exhausted but relieved that the ordeal was over for his mother. Then he watched as she fell on her husband’s body, sobbing and holding him. Paul stared, amazed at her grief. Was she sorry this monster had finally been stopped? His mother looked at him and screamed, “Why? Why? You’ll die in prison for this. They’ll kill you. You murdered your own father. How are we going to live? Get out! Get out! I never want to see you again. Get out of here!”
And eleven-year-old Paul Emerson did exactly that.
Paul had several things going for him. He was smart and crafty, could work well with his hands, and was a surprisingly good communicator. He was also tall, lean and handsome. The best thing was that he looked much older than he was. Nobody who saw him had a clue this boy wasn’t even a teenager.
He hitchhiked or walked, spending the nights in barns and under bridges as he made his way north. He didn’t have a plan and had no idea where he was going. All he knew was he couldn’t stay in Texas. He didn’t know if the authorities would arrest an eleven-year-old for murder. He didn’t know if they would put him on death row and execute him once he turned eighteen. He also didn’t care. He was glad he had done what he did.
The first thing Paul Emerson did was to shed the name his father and mother had given him. He picked Cory Spencer – there was nothing special about it. He just wanted a new name and that one sounded ok.
He made his way northeast to Dallas then Tulsa and onwards, doing odd jobs and taking his pay in cash. He didn’t have a Social Security number or a bank account so the employment options were few. He washed dishes, joined a roofing crew, helped serve at a Salvation Army soup kitchen – whatever there was to do, he did it.
When he finally ended up on the streets of New York, Cory discovered another way to make money. There he figured out that women – and men too, for that matter – would buy his youthful body for an hour of pleasure. It was easy money. All he had to do was perform well and he could make two or three hundred dollars quickly. It wasn’t what he preferred but it bought a place to stay and food to eat. That beat sleeping under a bridge like he had done at first.
One of his patrons was quite wealthy, thirty-something and divorced. Caroline Tipton met Cory as he delivered pizza to her Upper East Side home one evening. Playing out a fantasy she had done many times before, Caroline had answered the door in a see-through negligee. She invited him in and they spent the night together. That started a long relationship. As they got more comfortable with each other, she began to peel away the secrets and learn about Cory’s past. Not about Paul Emerson – that person no longer existed. Cory Spencer had his own story and she bought it hook, line and sinker.
He was fifteen years old when he met Caroline Tipton but his appearance allowed him to tell her he was nineteen. He said his mother and father had been killed in a car
accident in California and he was sent to live with an aunt who didn’t want him, so he took off. He had missed several years of school and had lived on his own, doing whatever he could.
Caroline’s interest in the boy went further than the sexual escapades they shared. She saw his potential and she had the money to help him. Cory couldn’t have hoped for a luckier break than meeting Caroline Tipton. She set him up in an efficiency apartment in Chelsea and paid a small fortune to create a birth certificate for him. That allowed Cory Spencer to get a Social Security card and a driver’s license.
Caroline put him in an academy with both a remedial and an accelerated learning program. The curriculum was designed to bring along those who were behind and allow those who could push ahead to do so. It was perfect. He learned so quickly that he advanced two grades in less than nine months.
By this time Cory was becoming less interesting to Caroline Tipton as a sex toy – she thrived on new things and she found one boy after another to satisfy her desires. But there was something different about Cory Spencer. She felt something for him she didn’t know existed in her psyche. Maybe it was love. Or maybe compassion. She was surprised to discover a new feeling – she actually cared for the boy she had rescued. So Caroline Tipton stuck with Cory. She paid his exorbitant tuition and his rent and helped him every way she could.
Cory graduated with a high school diploma and Caroline got him a job with an acquaintance of hers. She had made several expensive purchases from a Fifth Avenue antiquities gallery called Bijan Rarities over the past few years and became friends with its owner, Brian Sadler. Sadler needed a general backroom guy. He was pleased to fill the position and accommodate a good client at the same time.
Because the gallery had millions of dollars in rarities in house, potential employees were subjected to a background check including a fingerprint search through the New York Police Department’s database. Cory held his breath for ten days – this would be the most likely chance in his life that the truth about his past would be revealed.
He relaxed when Collette Conning, Brian Sadler’s assistant, called at last to confirm the job was his. He had successfully transformed himself from Paul Emerson into Cory Spencer. His future was now secure.
Cory worked at Bijan Rarities for four years while he pursued a bachelor’s degree at NYU. He was a fast learner and soon had risen from glorified janitor to a valuable post. He was put in charge of cataloging items the gallery received on consignment. He had a particular interest in the ancient pieces from Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Americas. Because of his work at Bijan, Cory chose archaeology as his major and graduated with honors.
Brian Sadler was sorry to lose Cory when he was accepted at Sussex University in Pennsylvania as a graduate student in archaeological studies. Cory had been a good employee and Brian was certain he had a great future ahead of him given the young man’s intense interest in antiquities.
Cory Spencer had totally buried Paul Emerson, the juvenile who had murdered his own father. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, a new person had emerged in the killer’s stead. He no longer had to live with the underlying fear he would be found out and imprisoned. And no one was the wiser.
Almost no one.
Chapter Sixteen
Several years ago, Thomas Newton Torrance, already a successful corporate raider, had heard the rumors of what might lie deep inside the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque. For decades people had speculated on King Pakal’s mysterious sarcophagus lid with the strange drawings that looked to many like the Mayan monarch was piloting a spacecraft.
Once he had the money and the power to make things happen TNT could afford to indulge his curiosity and his interests. He wanted to know more about the legends of Palenque. First he researched which universities were pursuing archaeological efforts in the state of Chiapas and at Palenque itself. The results of that research yielded only one name – Sussex University in Pennsylvania.
Sussex’s archaeological department was on the forefront of exploration in Central and South America. Over the past ten years the school had been granted more licenses to carry out digs in that area than any other institution. Their teams had achieved notable success more than once, making important discoveries that advanced knowledge of the Maya, Aztec and Olmec peoples.
Having found the institution he needed to approach, Torrance went to step two. He used a tactic he normally reserved for his hostile takeovers in the corporate world. He made a call to the major New York law firm that handled millions of dollars a year in legal work for him and requested a background check.
TNT discovered long ago that knowledge was the ultimate power. If he knew things others didn’t, he could prevail against an opponent. Before he publicly disclosed his interest in buying a corporation’s stock, before the takeover began, Torrance hired his lawyers to gather every piece of information they could unearth about the people he would be up against. He wanted to know secrets. The darker the better. Knowledge was power.
He did things a little differently with the Sussex investigation. He narrowed the scope of the background check to encompass just those people and things that were germane to the university’s archaeological work at Palenque. It took only an hour for Torrance to scan news reports and magazine articles and create a list of names. These were the people he wanted to know about – the Sussex-sponsored archaeological teams that were working in the state of Chiapas.
The university’s archaeologists had just completed two small projects at Palenque that consisted of opening previously unexcavated buildings. Nothing of importance was found in either but Torrance noted the names of the students who were part of the team. The dig supervisor on both projects was the same graduate student – Cory Spencer.
Ten days after he requested the background check his attorney called. “As you know, sometimes when you order these reports our people find bits and pieces. Other times they don’t find anything. Mr. Torrance, this time we hit the jackpot.”
The attorney explained that Cory Spencer, the graduate student at Sussex, was actually Paul Emerson of El Paso, Texas. When he was only eleven, the lawyer said, Emerson had savagely murdered his father and then disappeared. For the past fifteen years his whereabouts had been unknown.
The lawyer said that the discovery had been made by fingerprint comparison. The boy’s fingerprints were at the crime scene. Years later when Bijan Rarities did a background check on Cory Spencer he had been fingerprinted. Bijan’s check had been limited to New York Police Department records. The match linking Cory Spencer to a youthful murderer from El Paso wasn’t made. But those same fingerprints, matched this time to a national database, revealed the answer to where Paul Emerson had gone.
“Mr. Torrance, ordinarily we’re obligated to notify the authorities…”
Torrance cut him off with a polite, “Of course, of course, but it’s been a long time and this man was just a boy when it happened. It is critical to a project I’m working on that this information remains confidential. And I appreciate that you’ll do that as a personal favor. Thank you so much for everything your firm does for me and my companies.”
And that was that. Torrance had a secret on someone who was an archaeologist with Sussex University. And what a secret. This was even better than he could have hoped for.
Chapter Seventeen
Tuesday
Twelve days after the disappearance
It took less than an hour for President Harry Harrison to find out that Thomas Newton Torrance and Cory Spencer had been alone with the artifact for nearly thirty minutes. It infuriated him that these two might be destroying clues and evidence that might have given information as to Chapman’s whereabouts. But he was powerless to act since they were in Mexico.
Brian Sadler had been sequestered in his office all morning. There were a lot of loose ends to tie up before he could be away in Palenque for three or four days. Since he planned to leave tomorrow there was very little time to get things done. He had instructed his assi
stant to hold his calls and was irritated when a quiet ring interrupted his work.
There was one call he wanted – from Nicole Farber. Brian had awakened missing her even more than usual. He had called her cellphone early this morning but it went straight to voicemail. He glanced up, saw his private line blinking and touched the speaker button. His heart pounded at the anticipation of hearing her voice.
“Hi, babe.”
The same professional female voice he’d heard once before said, “Mr. Sadler, this is the White House. May I transfer a call from the President?”
“Certainly.” Brian’s disappointment was mixed with a tinge of exhilaration. I’m on a call with the President of the United States. No other person on earth can make that statement right now. Even if it’s old Harry Harrison it still makes you a little tingly.
After a pause he heard Harry’s voice. “Good morning, Brian. Where are you?”
“Good morning, Mr. Pres…er, Harry. I’m at the gallery in New York wrapping things up before the trip tomorrow.”
“OK. Brian, I just have a minute but I have some news for you. We talked about Thomas Newton Torrance when you were in my office. Turns out he gets around. You know they tried to bring up the artifact yesterday. TNT flew from London and was at the temple in Palenque for the aborted attempt. Then he took your old employee Cory Spencer down into the chamber with him. For some reason Dr. Ortiz, the government’s archaeological director, granted Torrance and Cory permission to go alone – without any of the government people along. They were down inside the temple for about thirty minutes.
“Ortiz sent people down the minute those guys got out of the tomb and nothing seemed out of place, at least as far as we’ve heard. I’d like you to meet up with this Thomas Torrance. Find out what he’s up to. There’s something going on with him. I want to know what he’s doing and if he had anything to do with John Chapman’s disappearance.”
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