Wolf stepped past Elijah and activated the electronic lock on the door. They had installed fingerprint-activated locks six months earlier. Elijah knew because he had made the request and signed the orders. Not only did they often have millions in gold in the lab, but there was also more than a million dollars’ worth of equipment in that room.
“So what have you been up to, Wolf?”
“I get bored and my mind wanders. I don’t want to have too much time on my hands. You know what I mean. They won’t let me leave this mountain, and there is nothing more for me to do here until they bring me more gold. But this,” he said, squatting down and opening a cabinet, “this has been one of my greatest pleasures these days.”
Wolfgang removed what looked like a rolled-up swath of dark velvet fabric. He carried it over to one of the tables in the lab and carefully unrolled then folded back the fabric.
When he saw it, Elijah drew in a quick breath. The detail in the metalwork was exquisite.
“I remembered the design on your back, you see, when Belmonte brought it in from the same site where they located those documents. It was that last dig up near Tuguegarao. He told me to destroy it because we had no way to prove its provenance. He said we aren’t in this business to sell to private collectors, so I was to extract whatever I could.” Wolf lifted the sword from the table and handed it to Elijah. “I couldn’t do it—and I thought you would understand.”
The heft of the blade felt balanced across his palms. “Hmm. Yes.”
Wolfgang would not look directly at Elijah. When he spoke, his face was turned away. “Ah, I was right. I knew you would see it that way. I’m not an expert, but I have spent some time doing research since I’ve had little else to do. It’s an eighteenth-century Chinese ceremonial sword—more of a broadsword than a saber. The Qianlong emperor had many swords made with that dragon along the dorsal edge during that period. Much of the gold on the hilt there is only gold leaf, but the scales on the dragon’s back are all solid droplets. And then there are the jewels. That was all that Belmonte saw. But I knew you would appreciate that is not where the value is.”
“Quite right,” Elijah said. “You know me well, Wolf. I appreciate beautiful things.” He wrapped both hands around the hilt and lifted the sword, stepping back from the table. The blade was only about twenty inches long, but it felt perfectly balanced. This was not only a ceremonial sword. This blade was a true weapon. Elijah closed his eyes and he was certain it wasn’t his imagination. He really did feel the tingling of a force flowing from the dragon sword in his hands to the ink on his back.
He’d once been a lost kid on the streets of Reno being raised by his older sister. Then he had discovered that he had been born in the Chinese year of the Wood Dragon. He’d found his way to a dojo, and between reading about Asia and studying martial arts he had become a different young man. God meant for him to find his path, and now the Good Lord meant this sword for him.
The sword’s blade was a mess right now, but he would bring back the edge in time. He lifted it over his head, then brought it down from right to left and the sound of the wind whistling past the blade sounded like a wing in flight.
The phone on the desk rang. Wolfgang hurried over to answer it.
Elijah set the sword on the velvet cloth. It would be a crime to destroy such a weapon merely for the gold, but most of the men in the Enterprise lacked vision.
“Right,” Wolfgang said. “I’ll tell him.” He hung up the phone. “That was Belmonte.”
Elijah ran his fingers over the dragon’s scales from the head to the tip of the tail.
“He said to tell you that Benny’s got the old man, but he doesn’t have the artifact anymore. The old man gave it or sold it to someone else. They want you to go to Bangkok.”
The sheer incompetence of them all ignited his need to cause pain. In a flash, he saw a vision of himself grasping the jeweled hilt and swinging the sword at Wolfgang’s neck like a crusader beheading an infidel.
Elijah drew a deep breath. He folded the ends of the fabric toward the center, then rolled up the sword. He slid his palms under the package, lifted it, and extended it to Wolfgang.
He knew the German wanted the sword for himself, but the man had decided to confess his disobedience so he would not risk being accused of stealing. He was offering it to Elijah just as he had offered his little blond wife.
“You will keep this safe for me,” Elijah said.
The skin around the German’s left eye twitched. “Of course. Whatever you say.”
Aboard the USS Bonefish
Sea of Japan
June 18, 1945
It took some finagling to find berths for the boy and Lieutenant Colonel Miyata—as Ozzie had promised to call him. With the extra technicians for the FM sonar aboard, the sub was already overcrowded, and many of the men were hot-bunking three to a bunk as it was. At last he managed to get them eight hours each of sleep time in a couple of berths in the compartment just forward of his quarters.
On any other ship as a junior officer, he would have had his own cabin, but not on a sub. He shared a cabin with two other officers. Since one of the three was always asleep in there, it wasn’t as though having a cabin afforded him any privacy. But he did have a small compartment in the cabin where he kept his personal effects, clothes, and a few books.
Ozzie was thinking about what was stored in his kit that night as he stood atop the conning tower smoking a cigarette with the sub’s second in command, Lieutenant Commander Dustin Westbrooke, Jr. Ozzie hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that gold all evening, and when an outlandish scheme popped into this head, he couldn’t let that go either.
Westbrooke was a weak executive officer—the sort who had risen in the Navy on the coattails of his father, Admiral Westbrooke. Dustin was twenty-four years old, only three years younger than Ozzie, but he was young for his age and not very bright. He was a perfect example of a guy who was nervous in the service—and he had no combat experience to account for it. He had no rapport with the men, most of whom were older than he was. Westbrooke had been flown out to Guam to join the Bonefish when Commander Johnson’s previous executive officer had suffered a burst appendix during training maneuvers with the new sonar. It had been Johnson’s bad luck to get stuck with Westbrooke on this trip. Now, it might turn out to be something Ozzie could work to his own favor.
“So, Westbrooke,” he said, “what are your plans when this thing is all over?”
“You mean the war?”
“Of course I mean the war. You got a girl at home?”
“No. I haven’t got much luck with girls.”
“I’m going to let you in on a secret, okay? Do you want to know what the trick is to getting girls?”
“Why, sure.”
“Girls like the guys with dough. Heck, your old man’s an admiral. You should be able to get yourself a nice new sports car when you get home. Get yourself an expensive haircut, fancy clothes, the best money can buy. Then you’ll have all the girls you want.”
Westbrooke laughed. “Right. My old man’s so tight with his money he squeaks every time he gives me a dollar.”
Ozzie shook his head and tossed his cigarette butt into the sea. “Now that’s a downright shame. Young officer like you risking your life for God and country. You deserve better than that.”
“Try telling my old man.”
They stood in silence for the next several minutes watching the horizon and listening to the soft sound of the water sliding past the hull. The wind had died at sunset and the boat was now slicing through an almost mirrorlike sea. They could see the reflection of the Milky Way like a pale gauzy arc across the water.
“You know, there was a girl once.”
Ozzie kept his face stern but he felt the smile behind his eyes. “What happened?”
“Nothing. That’s the point. Like I said, I’ve never had luck with girls. But this one—Susan Mulligan was her name. She came to a party at our house. She didn’t even
know I was alive.”
“It’s like I said, Westbrooke. Women are attracted to rich and powerful men. And, of course, brave men who aren’t afraid to take risks. I think that’s the sort you are. You just need the car and clothes to attract their attention.”
Wat Pho
Bangkok, Thailand
November 17, 2012
After she paid the entrance fee, the man in the booth handed Riley a pamphlet that explained some of the history of the temple and showed a map of the grounds. Peewee had said three hours. She was about fifteen minutes early, and given that she had just seen him exiting a boat on the other side of the river, she assumed she had beat him to their rendezvous location.
Again, she decided to walk around and familiarize herself with the layout of the compound. Either the old man was going to show, and he’d have some logical explanation for what he was doing fraternizing with the man he’d identified as the enemy, or there was something else going on here, some whole other story she knew nothing about. She was worried that it was the latter.
But as she walked around admiring the huge stone statues of funny-looking old men, some with long beards, others in weird derby hats, she kept coming back to the one word Bonefish. If this was all some kind of scam and this Irv guy really never knew her grandfather, but he had some other goal in getting her up to Bangkok, then how did she explain him coming up with the USS Bonefish? Was it coincidence? She doubted it. Obviously, there was some truth in what he had to say. If there was some, there might be more. She was already here in Bangkok. She might as well learn all she could.
Riley took note of the three exits and the relationship of Wat Pho to the river and the main streets where she could catch a taxi if necessary. All the while she stayed close to buildings, out of the open whenever possible, and stayed alert, checking out every person she encountered. She did not want to be taken by surprise, and now she knew just how good her adversary was.
When she finally got to the chapel that housed the Reclining Buddha, Riley took off her sandals, and rather than leave them on the rack outside she stuffed them into her backpack. She didn’t want to end up running around Bangkok in her bare feet.
It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the low light inside, but when she could finally see down the full length of the statue, she was aghast at the size of it. The statue barely fit inside the building that housed it, and according to her brochure it was almost one hundred and fifty feet long. You couldn’t step back far enough to take it all in. In other circumstances, she would have enjoyed playing tourist, but on this day, she searched the chapel for a shadowy alcove where she could keep her back to the wall and stand watch. She found her spot down by the mother-of-pearl-inlaid feet of the statue.
Riley slid the backpack off and reached inside for the artifact Peewee had given her. She had not had time to examine it. He’d said it was a Tibetan prayer gau. She supposed it weighed eight to ten ounces, and assuming it was pure gold and that gold was selling at around fifteen hundred dollars an ounce, it had significant value beyond any historical value. But was twelve to fifteen thousand dollars enough to make a big fuss over? To some people, yes, but not, she thought, to the sort of people who hire men like the one who had chased her.
Riley thought again about her father and the organization he had belonged to most of his adult life: Skull and Bones. They were the sort of people who could hire a man like that, and it was time she stopped avoiding the issue and considered that possibility.
Skull and Bones was a Yale secret society whose members pledged loyalty to Bones until their deaths. When she had first met Cole, Riley didn’t want to believe his wild conspiracy theory about how the Patriarchs, an inner circle of Bonesmen, had orchestrated the murder of Cole’s father, James Thatcher. Cole claimed his father had somehow learned that evidence was hidden aboard the wreck of the submarine Surcouf that proved how those monsters had been perpetuating the business of war for profit.
Then that fall day back in DC, Riley began to believe Cole wasn’t crazy after all. In a matter of hours, she learned that her own father was one of the monsters, and he had sat idly by as his fellow Patriarchs ordered her brother Michael’s murder. Then, when that rogue Bonesman Diggory Priest had murdered her father before her eyes, Riley and Cole had escaped and returned to the Caribbean, determined to find the Surcouf and expose them all.
Only it had not quite turned out that way. Thanks to old Henri Michaut, Cole located the Surcouf down in the Caribbean, but he was diving inside the wreck when the volcano on Montserrat erupted, causing an undersea earthquake that rocked the Leeward Islands and sent the submarine’s wreck sliding into deeper water. Cole never surfaced. The madman Diggory Priest died in a boat explosion that same day, and Cole’s first mate, Theo, and Riley were left to try to make sense of what happened. As the police boat approached, they had agreed to report that Cole too had died in the explosion and fire.
She had not gone back to Washington for her father’s funeral. She just wanted to find a quiet cove to anchor her boat and give in to her grief. Eventually, Riley had returned to France, where she had lived as a child. She visited her mother, who had remarried a French national, but found only a woman intent upon distancing herself from her first marriage and the daughter who had been its result.
Thankfully, that bruising discovery wasn’t all that she found in France. It was there that she’d last seen Theo, who’d hinted not only that Cole might still be alive, but also that the two of them had found the Surcouf, along with its secrets. Riley had so wanted it to be true, wanted to believe that the Patriarchs were through.
Then Theo too had disappeared.
It was crazy to think that this business with Peewee and the strange Asian mustache guy could have anything to do with Cole or the Patriarchs. But then again, if there was one thing Cole had taught her, it was to be careful about calling anything crazy.
After thirty minutes of waiting and watching all the people who passed through the chapel admiring the huge Buddha, Riley decided that Peewee was not coming. She realized she was still holding the gold tube in her hand. She’d been rolling it across her palm with her thumb, then pushing it back with her fingers like a devotee counting prayer beads. Flattening her palm, she held the object close to her face and tried to examine it in the dim light. She shook her head, hiked her pack higher up her shoulder, and walked to the closest door to the exterior.
The ground was paved with cut stone, and the single bench was already occupied by a monk sliding on his sandals, so Riley continued barefoot. She found a shady spot down a walkway between two buildings. Off the walkway, she leaned against the column and opened her palm again. The light there was much better. The goldsmith work was exquisite, with tiny beads placed around the caps on both ends and on several strips around the middle. This divided the tube into three bands, each decorated with intricate curling designs forming letters or pictographs, she assumed. Not being an expert on the Tibetan alphabet or language, she couldn’t be sure, but that was what it looked like.
The top had a loop so that the tube could be worn around the neck on a string, and the bottom was a removable cap. It took some tugging, but she pulled the cap free and slid out one of the rolled scrolls of paper. The paper was very thin and the ink had bled through, so though the writing was on the inner side, she could see the designs. The figures looked very different from the writing in the gold-work on the tube.
From the corner of her eye, Riley noted movement, and when she turned to look, she saw the monk wrapped in his orangish-yellow robes and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He smiled at her and pointed at the gau in her hand.
She smiled back, not sure if she was supposed to speak to him or not.
“Excuse me,” he said, and he stepped closer to her. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes. I’m American. Your English sounds very good.”
“Thank you. You are very kind.” He nodded at the object she was holding. “Do you know what that is?”
He nodded again. “Yes. I studied in Tibet, and I speak and write the language. A wonderful country. I have seen many of these prayer gaus. They are worn around the neck to keep the prayer close to the heart.”
“So this is writing on the outside?”
“Yes, it is the Tibetan Buddhist mantra, om mani padme hum, which translates to ‘hail to the jewel in the lotus.’”
Riley sighed. “That’s really lovely.”
“But the scroll you hold looks very strange. May I see it?”
Riley knew that monks were not allowed to touch women or take objects directly from them, so she slid the gold pieces into her pants pocket and unrolled part of the scroll. She held it up for him to see. Each figure was like a little drawing.
“It almost looks like hieroglyphics to me,” she said.
“Hmm. Yes, you are correct. This is not Tibetan writing, and it is not Egyptian either. I study languages, and I have never seen writing like this. It may be a code.”
“Code, huh? I’ve had a little experience with that.” She rolled the scroll back up and pulled the pieces of the gau out of her pocket. She slid the paper back inside and closed the cap. Then she held the object in her palm for him to examine. “Is there any way to know how old this is or when the scroll was written?”
“I am not an expert in objects of antiquity. I cannot say. But there are many places here in Bangkok where you could find people to help you.”
Riley pulled her backpack around to her side and slid the gau through the zipper. “Well, you have been very helpful. Thank you.” She placed her hands together in front of her chest, then bowed her head until her thumbs touched her forehead in the traditional wai, or Thai greeting.
The monk looked down at her bare feet, then smiled.
Wat Arun
Bangkok, Thailand
Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2) Page 8
