forty-six
Present Day
Dubnik Mine, Slovakia
“My actions seem silly and immature sixty years later,” Madame Flora said to Archie.
He sat with his head bowed. “I was a fool.”
“And I was too hotheaded,” she said. “I’m truly sorry, Archibald.”
He looked up at her. “I am too, Flora.”
The fire had died down. Madame Flora got up and stood close to the glowing embers. “You want to know what was in that journal,” she said to Archie. “It was my story. I wanted Goering’s future carrier to read that instead of his hateful memories.”
He stared at her for a minute without speaking. Then he chuckled. “Yesterday I would have scolded you for breaking the sanctity of the depositary. But today…” his voice trailed off.
“What will you do today?” she asked softly.
He looked up. “Today I just want to know the rest of your story.”
She nodded and turned to me. “Bring your copy—I’m ready.”
“Let me get it,” I said.
Val and I walked over to the van. “She’s actually going to tell Mr. Morgan,” Val whispered, rubbing her hands together and blowing on them. “I wonder how he’ll take it.”
“I wonder how the twins will take it,” I whispered back. I tried to imagine finding out that my great-grandfather was one of the richest people in the world. I opened the back of the van and dug for my bag. I pulled out the journal copy Archie had made and the translation Val and I had completed.
Madame Flora took the copied journal pages from me while Sue hung a battery-powered reading light on a pole over the old lady’s chair.
Archie handed her his reading glasses. “Just in case.”
“Thank you.” She put on the glasses and looked at the pages for a few minutes while we waited. Then she spoke to Rose and Marie. “Girls, I wrote this in Nuremberg, during the trial. You should pay attention—maybe you’ll learn something.”
“Yes, Grandma,” they said.
Madame Flora turned to Archie. “Let me read you everything before you ask any questions.”
She cleared her throat. “I wrote this in an alphabet once common in Istria. It’s called the Glagolitic script. My father taught it to me when I was a little girl. We used it for writing secret notes to each other, when we didn’t want my mother reading them.”
She pointed at the cover. “This says Flora Drabarni, 1946.” She flipped to the next page. “The language is Romany, and I’ll have to translate as I go. Bear with me.”
Archie glanced at me. “You figured this out?” he asked.
“With Val’s help. It’s only a few pages,” I said.
He nodded. “I am glad I left it for you.”
Hopefully he’d still feel that way after he heard what it contained.
Madame Flora read us the fairy tale about the princess, her fairy godmother, the wolf, and the knight captain. When she was done, the princess’s final dream hanging in the air, nobody spoke for a minute. She handed me the pages, and we all watched the fire’s fading embers.
Finally Flora looked up at Archie. “There’s a reason you felt so connected to Jamie. He’s your son.” She nodded toward the twins. “Rose and Marie are his granddaughters.”
Archie stood up and walked over to her. He knelt down on the cold, hard ground at her feet and took her hand in both of his. He raised it to his lips and held it there. “Over the years I have had some very detailed and explicit dreams of us in Nuremberg,” he murmured. “But I never once dared to think those dreams actually could be true.”
Madame Flora reached out with her other hand and caressed Archie’s white hair. Then she leaned forward and wrapped her arm around his shoulders and buried her face in his neck. Archie let go of her hand and embraced her.
After a minute of listening to them sniffle, George looked at the twins. “Better keep that diving gear ready, girls,” he said loudly. “When we get back, you’ll have to recover that ring from the bottom of Lake Quinsigamond.”
That broke the tension, and Rose, Marie, Archie and Madame Flora were on all their feet, hugging each other and exclaiming in joy.
Val and I brought the journal back to the van. As I replaced my bag in the luggage compartment, its hook caught on the carpeted side and pulled a side panel loose.
Val tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at a small black box duct-taped to the wall where the carpet had been. “What’s that?” she asked. The box had an extended antenna and a blinking red light on its side.
“Some kind of tracking device,” I said. It looked low-tech. I stuck my head around the door and called for George and Sue to come over.
George stood with his hands on his hips and stared at the black box. “Somebody wants to know where we are,” he said. “Let me disable it.” He reached into the luggage compartment.
I grabbed his shoulder and said, “Maybe we should leave it.”
He straightened up. “What’s your plan?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have one. But we don’t know who’s on the other end. Why let them know we’re on to them?”
He eyed the device. “If it has a microphone, they already know.”
“If it had a microphone, it wouldn’t have been parked under the carpet in the luggage compartment,” I said.
“Good point,” he said. He scratched his head. “Well, as long as we’re here and not moving, I guess it’s not doing us any additional harm. But let’s at least look for the listeners.”
“You have tools to find them?” I asked.
“Of course I have tools,” he said. He turned to Sue. “Let’s break out the gadgets.”
He and Sue lifted two yellow cases out of the luggage compartment and flipped them open. He removed the foam egg-crate packing and took out three antennas, a yellow box with a small video screen, and a bag of lithium batteries.
George inserted the batteries into the antennas and the box and flipped on their switches. “This is the best passive heartbeat scanner I could get my hands on,” he said.
He reached into the case and pulled out three threaded spikes. He screwed them onto the base of each antenna, then handed two antennas to Sue. “Place them at least a hundred yards apart, darling,” he said.
Sue took the antennas and headed across the clearing.
George handed me the other antenna. “Stick this into a tree about halfway up the hill.”
Val and I climbed up about twenty feet over the mine’s entrance. I reached up and jammed the spike into a tree trunk. Then we returned to the van.
George pressed some buttons on the yellow box. “Once the antennas synchronize with each other, we’ll get a clear picture.”
A minute later the box beeped, the screen flashed, and a daytime satellite image of the clearing appeared. A bunch of red dots lay superimposed over the picture.
George pressed a button, and the image zoomed in. “The antennas each have a GPS chip,” he said. “This baby’s got a 3G cellular card to connect to the Internet—the same as your mobile phone. That map is the latest and greatest satellite image, brought to you by your favorite search engine.”
“How about the red dots?” I asked.
“That’s us,” He said. “The antennas listen for the electrical signature of a human heartbeat. When they find it, they broadcast its direction back to the box. The computer in here triangulates the position and mashes up the information with the map.” He tapped the screen. “These four dots are us, and those four are the Morgan-Drabarni family reunion taking place by the fire.”
“And these two in the corner?” Val asked.
“Those dots, my dear, are probably the local cops, sent by Dara Sabol,” he said. He turned around and pointed toward the entrance to the clearing. “About fifty yards down our driveway.”
“We can’t have them watching us,” Sue said. “Let’s pay them a visit.” She reached into the luggage compartment and pulled out a green carry-on duffel bag. She o
pened it up and removed two black balaclavas, two pairs of black gloves, and two black hooded sweatshirts. She tossed a set to George, and they both put them on.
George pulled down the balaclava so we could see his mouth. “If we’re not back in ten minutes, call the cavalry,” he said. He pulled two nightsticks out of the carry-on, handed one to Sue, and they jogged toward the entrance.
Val and I watched their red dots move away from the clearing and up the entrance road. They converged with the other two dots, and after a couple of minutes, two of the dots headed further down the road and out of range of the display.
George and Sue came jogging back. “Did you watch us on the box?” George asked.
I nodded. “Who were they?”
“Some local talent with badges. They didn’t speak much English.”
“You should have brought me with you,” Val said. “My grandfather was from Lviv, just over the border in the Ukraine. I can speak a little Slovak.”
“Maybe it’s better if they don’t know that,” I said.
George slapped the nightstick into his gloved palm. “In any case, we reminded them that this is a private party, and it’s time to go home to bed.”
The twins had gone to their tent, and Archie and Madame Flora sat by the fire, holding hands and murmuring to each other.
I nudged Val. “Ready to get some sleep?”
She nodded, and we said good night. George held up the yellow box and told me he and Sue would keep an eye out for others.
Inside the tent, we zipped our sleeping bags together, laid them out on the air mattress, and climbed in.
Val snuggled into my arms. “Mr. Morgan made me cry when he knelt down in front of Flora,” she whispered.
“You know, if we hadn’t translated that journal, they’d still be thinking the worst about each other.”
“Remember how upset I was the other day?”
“About how everybody’s been doing the wrong things for all the right reasons?”
“Exactly,” she said. “But now we’re all doing the right things.”
I flipped onto my back and pulled her on top of me. “Still, that’s sixty years down the drain for those two.” I reached up and ran my fingers through her hair. “If I got you pregnant, would you hide my child from me?”
She bent her neck and gave me a long kiss. “First show me how you’d get me pregnant.”
forty-seven
Present Day
Dubnik Mine, Slovakia
I woke at five to the sounds of chopping wood. I slid out of bed and gasped when I planted my bare feet on the cold tent floor. I got dressed and unzipped the tent flap.
A thick layer of frost covered the ground. George and Sue stood under a lantern in front of a large stump. Sue swung the axe, and George placed, gathered, and stacked the wood. Their breath made puffs in the cold air.
I felt around for my jacket and climbed out. After I zipped up the tent, I headed over to the woodcutting couple. “Need any help?” I asked.
“We’re just about done,” Sue said. She took a swing at the log George had stood on its end. The axe bit into the wood, and she lifted it, flipped it over, and slammed the back of the axe into the stump. The axe head rang as the log halves fell to the ground.
George stacked the two halves on the stump, and Sue quartered them. Then she swung the axe into the stump and led me over to the van.
“The cops came back twenty minutes ago,” George said as he showed me the yellow box.
“It looks like they brought friends.” I pointed at the six red dots that formed an arc around the entrance to the clearing.
He nodded. “Last night Sue and I laid out a listening net. But we need Val to translate what they’re saying.”
“Let me get her,” I said. I walked back to the tent and poked my head in. Val had gotten dressed and was slipping on her shoes. “Your translation services are required,” I said.
“I heard.” She grabbed her jacket and followed me to the van.
George handed her a pair of headphones plugged into another yellow box. She put them on and closed her eyes. After a few minutes she looked up. “They’re complaining about how little they’re getting paid to guard the celebrities,” she said. “They’re trying to figure out who we are. And they want to come over and get some coffee, but nobody knows enough English to ask for it.”
“So they’re friendlies?” George asked.
Val shrugged, and then she laughed. “Now they’re discussing the mine’s vampires. One of the guys just said that strigoi have blue eyes, ginger hair, and two hearts each.”
“Maybe they’ve evolved to survive the wooden stakes,” I said.
“Hold on—someone just asked how to kill them.” She cupped her hands over the headphones and listened for another minute. “Here’s the scoop,” she said. “First you cut out their hearts, then you drive a nail into their foreheads, place garlic under their tongues, and smear their bodies in fat from a pig killed on St. Ignatius Day. Stuff them back in their coffins upside down, and they stay dead forever.”
Sue poked George’s belly. “You forgot the pig fat.”
George was looking at the screen. “We’ll have to figure out a plan for getting that gold out unseen,” he said. “Friendly or not, if these guys see it, they’ll want to share.”
“We’ll need to come up with a diversion,” I said.
“What kind?” Sue asked.
I shrugged. “We’ll think of something. But first let’s get the gold.”
After Rose and Marie planned their reconnaissance dive, Val and I headed into the mine shaft with them and helped them assemble their equipment.
Marie filled their dry suits with argon. “We’ll keep this first dive to ten minutes,” she said. “That limits the decompression, and it saves our residual nitrogen time for the recovery.”
They ran through the dive checklists and slipped into the water. Rose slid her face mask on and bit into the mouthpiece. “Can you understand me?” she asked.
“You’re garbled, but it works,” I replied into the microphone. George had brought special ultrasonic audio and visual gear, but talking was difficult with rebreathers, as the closed-circuit full face masks had a bite mouthpiece.
I handed Rose a spool of nylon rope.
Marie switched on her wrist-attached camera, and Val held up her thumb. “The image is clear,” she said. “I’ll start recording now.”
The twins waved and slid under the surface. I stood at the top of the shaft and watched their descent until they were out of sight, and then I joined Val at the screen.
“It’s beautiful down there,” she said. “I can’t wait until we go.”
I could wait.
“Marie, short strokes on your finning,” we heard Rose say. “You’re stirring up the silt.” The twins had reached the bottom of the first shaft and were making their way through Viliam gallery.
“It should be another fifty feet or so, on your left,” I told them. I watched as Marie swam the camera up to a walled-off portion. “That must be it.”
Marie panned the camera around the edges, showing us well-joined stonework stretching from floor to ceiling. Rose drove a pin into a crack in the wall just before the stonework. She attached the nylon rope to the pin. This would let us find our way back through the churned-up muck after we tore the wall down.
I checked my watch. “You still have three minutes,” I said. “Do you want to see if you can find the alcove your grandmother talked about?”
“Sure,” said Rose. “Straight back?”
I checked the map. “Maybe another forty feet on the right. It might be hard to find—your grandmother said she covered the hole.”
Marie panned her camera around the walls and floor, but none of us spotted anything.
Rose swam in front of Marie and waved to the camera. “We have to head up,” she said. She shone her wrist light on the dive computer on her wrist. “We’ll decompress at fifteen feet for three minutes.”
He plugged it into his screen and played it back. “I’ve worked out a plan to pull down that wall,” he said.
“Where’s Madame Flora?” I asked.
“Still in the tent with Mr. Morgan,” Sue said.
“Are they all right?” Rose asked.
George laughed. “We heard them arguing a few minutes ago—I think they’re fine.”
Marie walked up to the tent and called, “Grandma, are you there?”
A second later, the tent flap opened, and Madame Flora stuck her head out.
“We need you to look at this video and verify the location,” Val said, pointing to George’s screen.
Madame Flora concentrated on a paused image on the video screen. “Can you rewind just a bit?” she asked.
George went back two seconds.
She clicked her fingernail on the screen. “That’s the wall Ned built.”
“And it’s still intact,” I said.
George hit the play button.
“Stop!” she shouted.
George paused again. The image showed the floor of the back alcove.
“That’s the entrance to the opal nest.” She ran her fingers around the bottom edge. “See the foundation of the old wall?”
The screen showed the jagged remnants of a wall rising an inch or two out of the silt on the floor.
“Where’s the trap door?” Rose asked.
“Right in the middle, under these rocks.” Madame Flora had a tremble in her voice. “Still hidden.”
I looked at Val. “We have to go there.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Are you sure?”
Tough question. The dark cave and tight spaces would put my panic attacks and Val’s singing to the test. But if Madame Flora’s story was true, Ned Callaghan’s body was jammed in a tunnel at the bottom of the pit under that trap door.
“I’m sure,” I said. How could I miss this opportunity?
Soul Intent Page 20
