by K. T. Tomb
“Thank you,” Cash replied. “The honor is mine.”
“I have two questions, actually. My first question is, your book explores the idea that Atlantis might be somewhere yet to be found. Do you think it is out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered?”
“I think anything is possible,” Cash answered. “I do believe that there is much that we do not yet know about the world and the universe. What drove me to approach the story, telling it from the angle that I did is a simple idea that recurs every time I begin research for a book. The legends, the stories, the forgotten histories of mankind; if so many such reflections can come from a common source which have been proven and found, then why would one single story such as that of Atlantis befuddle us for so many centuries? Perhaps the answers are right before us but we just do not have the eyes that can see them. Yet.”
The woman spoke again. “My second question, Ms. Cassidy, is that there is some speculation about what happened during the time you were lost at sea. Some theories include that you somehow found Atlantis and spent some time there. How do you address these speculations?”
Cash let out a small chuckle.
“I think if I had found the city of Atlantis, my book would have been a little bit different than what has been published. While I appreciate the idea of discovering something so fantastic as a legendary city, I do have to clarify that the book I have written is completely fictional.”
“Thank you,” the woman said with a gush and sat back down, still grinning from the brief interaction with her literary idol.
“Any other questions?” Cash invited.
A man she had not seen before stood up toward the back of the room. He wore a sports jacket over a black T-shirt. His beard had been trimmed close to his face and his eyes were covered by dark sunglasses. He also wore a baseball cap pulled down low, marked by a sports emblem, the Mariners. He stood still for a moment, debating on whether to speak or not.
“Did you have a question, sir?” Cash asked.
The man looked up, his face hidden. “Yes,” he said after a long pause. “Yes, I have one question. Your book is remarkable. I wanted to comment on the character you had written, the metaphorical representation of Poseidon from the title. In the end, the story does not clarify if he is a good guy or a bad guy. It seems every story must have an antagonist, but you leave that vague. Can you explain your reasoning for that?”
Cash peered across the crowd at the man, who had an inkling of familiarity about him which she could not place.
“I can answer that quite easily, sir. As human beings, it is apparent that we all have a little bit of both good and bad within us. Any given situation allows us to make the decision one way or the other. I wanted the reader to identify with this character in such a way, to allow them to examine his motives as if they could be their own. I did not want to paint him as a completely bad guy. Underneath the surface, I believe that people are really good at heart. Wouldn't you agree, sir?”
The man stood, shuffling a moment with her inquiry.
“Yes, yes. I suppose I do.” He sat down again, but before he did, he removed his sunglasses and nodded this thanks to Cash across the tops of the assemblage. Almost immediately, she recognized the deep blue of his gaze. She nodded back to him with a faint but knowing smile.
The end
Cash Cassidy returns in:
The Lost City of Gold
A Cash Cassidy Adventure #3
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THE
LOST CITY OF GOLD
A Cash Cassidy Adventure
#3
by
K.T. TOMB
The Lost City of Gold
Published by K.T. Tomb
Copyright © 2015 by K.T. Tomb
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
The author wishes to dedicate this book to the late
Elmore Leonard.
The Lost City of Gold
The Quest of El Dorado
An alien Indian, hailing from afar,
Who in the town of Quito did abide.
And neighbor claimed to be of Bogata,
There having come, I know not by what way,
Did with him speak and solemnly announce
A country rich in emeralds and gold.
Also, among the things which them engaged,
A certain king he told of who, disrobed,
Upon a lake was wont, aboard a raft,
To make oblations, as himself had seen,
His regal form overspread with fragrant oil
On which was laid a coat of powdered gold
From sole of foot unto his highest brow,
Resplendent as the beaming of the sun.
Arrivals without end, he further said,
Were there to make rich votive offerings
Of golden trinkets and of emeralds rare
And divers other of their ornaments;
And worthy credence these things he affirmed;
The soldiers, light of heart and well content,
Then dubbed him El Dorado, and the name
By countless ways was spread throughout the world.
—Juan de Castellanos, Parte III, Canto II (1850).
Prologue
El Dorado, originally El Hombre Dorado (the golden man), El Indio Dorado (the golden Indian), or El Rey Dorado (the golden king), is the term used by Europeans to describe a tribal chief of the Muisca native people of Colombia, South America, who as an initiation rite, covered himself with gold dust and dived into Lake Guatavita. Imagined as a place, El Dorado went from a city to a kingdom and an empire of this legendary golden king. In pursuit of the legend, Spanish conquistadors Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro departed from Quito (now capital of Ecuador) in 1541 in an expedition toward the Amazon Basin, as a result of which Orellana became the first known person to navigate the entire length of the Amazon River.
El Dorado or Eldorado is now the name of numerous places, especially mining towns, in South America, the United States and elsewhere, as well as the name of many films and TV shows, pieces of music, sports teams, and other items.
—Wikipedia.com
“Sorry Tim, I’ve got to do this. Don't know when I will see you again, Cash.” This was all the note said that she left on the desk of her study in the big house in Barry before she left. She knew she would cause her husband, Tim Mathews great sorrow, but she really did have to do this. She had known she had to since she had met with Jack and Makeda in London the week before. She had mentioned the conversation they had to her husband, but he had shaken his head and pretty much ignored the whole thing after that.
After that, she mentioned the idea to her agent, who had done exactly the same. But the idea would not leave her alone; it had actually taken over her mind. So, unbeknown to Tim, she made the booking for the flights to Colombia. She had made the contacts pretty rapidly and only yesterday did she tell Tim her plans. He just shook his head, told her it was a stupid idea and then ignored the whole thing again.
So now she was heading to the station to catch the train to Cardiff and from Cardiff airport she would go to Heathrow. Then tonight, by the time Tim would get home from the country club and read the note, she would just have boarded the plane to Bogotá. She had planned it to perfection. She would be in Colombia by the time he could get a hold of her. That way she would not have to deal with his criticism of her plan. It was genius really, he’d only have a few days to ponder her betrayal before the start of the new semester, then he’d be embroiled in school business for the next four months.
She had been preparing her kit for the trip for a week now, plundering her attic and shed and roaming around Barry, Cardiff and even Swansea to get everything she would need. It had been difficult because the o
ne shop she really needed to visit to get gear was in Newport and only a street away from the University of South Wales Campus where Tim was now based. They’d transitioned seamlessly out of his assignment in California over the course of the last year much to Cash’s delight. She did not want to run any risk of him seeing her go in there. He would figure the whole thing out in seconds. And of course the plan was dangerous, perhaps stupidly so, but something being dangerous had never stopped her before.
Cash turned her phone off the moment she went through security at Cardiff airport and did not look at it again. At Heathrow, she pulled out her laptop and began working. There was research to be done and, thanks to an acquaintance, there was free and fast Internet available for her use.
There was an email from her agent, which she also ignored. It would be the same rubbish, telling her not to do what she was planning. She had had to tell him the day before, and she did not want his meddling.
There was one email she did want to read. It was from a guy in the so-called Mocro Maffia. She knew he operated in the Amsterdam underworld, though he lived in Almere. When she heard the report of the police raid in Almere the other week and did not hear from him, she was actually quite anxious about the man. Not because she cared necessarily, but because she knew it would take forever to find out what she wanted without his help. But it seemed he did remain at large, despite the weapons found at his neighbor’s house. Apparently, the police had not had the sense to check his house and shed too.
That email contained an attachment, and in it was everything she would need in the coming weeks.
She downloaded the file and a copy of the email itself and then deleted the email. There was something she did not want anyone to find. And with the recent revelations about what they get up to at GCHQ, she took no chances.
She roamed around the airport for a while, finding half decent things to eat and drink and trying to pass the time. She looked at maps of the places she had to go to and she checked the routes there. She checked the addresses of the contacts she had just been given and then dug up her Spanish dictionary when her laptop battery ran out. After a while she got another book out, a French book this time. It was one of her favorite books of all time, Voltaire's Candide. The satire just worked and was one of the funniest stories she knew. It was a fallback book for her, something she would pick up when she was bored or when she did not know what else to read.
After chapter onel she walked to one of the book shops and scrounged through the shelves. Some of her own books were on the shelf there and she ran a finger over them. Every single one of those carried memories. Not memories of being shut up in a room writing, but of doing the research on them all over the world, starting with her native Australia and then spread out all over the world.
Her book about the Grail quest was there too. It had come out last year and had been an instant bestseller.
There was not much in the shop that caught her attention though, and in the end she bought the biggest bestseller of the moment, Katie Price's latest autobiography. She bought Bill Bryson's new book too, because she reckoned she would not be able to entertain herself with Jordan for the duration of the flight to Bogotá.
Eventually the time came to board and she made her way to the gate. She had a business class seat and was allowed to board early because of that. Business class meant she could lay flat for most of the journey too. That was the benefit of having some money to your name and some security: you could spend the money on comfort when you wanted to go places. The next few weeks would be uncomfortable enough, she reckoned. Although that would be relative of course; she liked being out in the forests and jungle and she knew she had prepared well. But while she liked that and had no problem with it, lying flat and having half decent food for the next twelve hours would be an enormous improvement over sitting up in a narrow seat with a fat, smelly man rolling over into her seat.
The journey began reading about Jordan's sexual experiences and swiftly turned to watching Murdoch Mysteries on the screen in front of her because she could not bear Katie Price in bigger than bite-size chunks. Cash reached for her computer bag and pulled out a yellow binder that kept a stack of hurriedly printed articles from the Internet. She hadn’t had the time to read through all the stories written over the last year or so on the topic of El Dorado, but she had comforted herself with the thought of having plenty of time to do so on the plane.
She opened the binder and reached for the first stapled set of papers. It was an article straight out of National Geographic that was recently written by Willie Drye and spoke of how the legend had eaten away at a well-known explorer, Sir Walter Raleigh, and ultimately caused his demise at the hand of his king.
El Dorado Legend Snared Sir Walter Raleigh
The lust for gold spans all eras, races, and nationalities. To possess any amount of gold seems to ignite an insatiable desire to obtain more.
Through the centuries, this passion gave rise to the enduring tale of a city of gold. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans believed that somewhere in the New World there was a place of immense wealth known as El Dorado. Their searches for this treasure wasted countless lives, drove at least one man to suicide, and put another man under the executioner's ax.
“El Dorado shifted geographical locations until finally it simply meant a source of untold riches somewhere in the Americas,” says Jim Griffith, a folklorist in Tucson, Arizona.
But this place of immeasurable riches hasn't been found.
The origins of El Dorado lie deep in South America. And like all enduring legends, the tale of El Dorado contains some scraps of truth. When Spanish explorers reached South America in the early 16th century, they heard stories about a tribe of natives high in the Andes Mountains in what is now Colombia. When a new chieftain rose to power, his rule began with a ceremony at Lake Guatavita. Accounts of the ceremony vary, but they consistently say the new ruler was covered with gold dust, and that gold and precious jewels were thrown into the lake to appease a god that lived underwater.
The Spaniards started calling this golden chief El Dorado, “the gilded one.” The ceremony of the gilded man supposedly ended in the late 15th century when El Dorado and his subjects were conquered by another tribe. But the Spaniards and other Europeans had found so much gold among the natives along the continent's northern coast that they believed there had to be a place of great wealth somewhere in the interior. The Spaniards didn't find El Dorado, but they did find Lake Guatavita and tried to drain it in 1545. They lowered its level enough to find hundreds of pieces of gold along the lake's edge. But the presumed fabulous treasure in the deeper water was beyond their reach.
Raleigh's Quest
English courtier Sir Walter Raleigh made two trips to Guiana to search for El Dorado. During his second trip in 1617, he sent his son, Watt Raleigh, with an expedition up the Orinoco River. But Walter Raleigh, then an old man, stayed behind at a base camp on the island of Trinidad. The expedition was a disaster, and Watt Raleigh was killed in a battle with Spaniards. Eric Klingelhofer, an archaeologist at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, says Walter Raleigh was furious at the survivor who informed him of Watt's death and accused the survivor of letting his son be killed. “The man goes into his cabin on the ship and kills himself,” says Klingelhofer, who is trying to find the site of Raleigh's base camp on Trinidad.
Raleigh returned to England, where King James ordered him beheaded for, among other things, disobeying orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish.
The legend of El Dorado endures because “you want it to be true,” says Jose Oliver, a lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. “I don't think we've ever stopped seeking El Dorado.”
So where is this lost city of gold? In his 1849 poem “El Dorado,” writer Edgar Allan Poe offers an eerie and eloquent suggestion: “Over the Mountains of the Moon, down the Valley of the Shadow, ride, boldly ride…if you seek for El Dorado.”
After dinner she watched one
more episode of the Canadian detective series and then pushed the button that made her seat go almost completely flat. The bottom folded out and she asked for a blanket. Having tucked herself in, Cash went to sleep, wondering what the next day would bring.
The next day brought the usual airline breakfast, and pain in the ears from the descent of the plane to Bogotá. It also brought her to the slums of the city and bombarded her with intense scenes of excruciating poverty, violence and drug abuse. It brought her to a dealer who sold her a Toyota Hilux and then to a market where she bought food. And lastly, it brought her the start of the jungle and the mountains.
Chapter One
“In 1519, Hernan Cortes sailed from Cuba, landed in Mexico and made his way to the Aztec capital. Along the way, he founded the city of Veracruz, defeating several local, coastal tribes, as he and his soldiers made their way inland. From these tribes he reportedly learned of King Moctezuma and rumors of a “City of Gold.” Whether these stories were the origins of the famous legend of El Dorado is unknown, but it is likely that, on hearing them, Cortes and his men expected to find plentiful treasures when they reached the Aztec capital.”
—The Road to El Dorado (2000) by Josh Jones
Cash ducked and dropped her rifle as she ran for cover; rapidly fired bullets flecking the ground about her. The rest of the party she traveled with were running for cover too. One of them aimed his rifle and returned fire on their attackers. Cash now had no weapon, so she pulled her copy of ‘Love, Lipstick and Lies’ out of the side pocket of her backpack and threw it at them. Then she pulled her machete and sat tight.
“Identify yourselves,” an American voice shouted at them.
