Lattimer waited for Ellenshaw this time. He knew that finding the corpse of the long dead pilot had made the boy far more jittery than he had been.
“Now, wait till you see this,” he said as Ellenshaw stepped up beside him.
The older man shone his large flashlight onto the wreckage of the downed aircraft. It was in so many pieces that Charlie just assumed it belonged to the dead pilot and the ejection seat. The thickest of the wreckage was imbedded into the base of the plateau, looking like it covered a crevasse of some sort. Lattimer shone the light around the bulk of the smashed aircraft and then smiled. He stepped up and pulled a large section of what had been the plane’s fuselage away from the rock. He quickly stepped back when it fell free and hit the soft floor of the forest.
“I’ll be goddamned and go to hell. Look at that, son.”
Charlie stepped up and saw that the wreckage had been jammed tight into the opening of a cave. It was a broad expanse of darkness beyond. Ellenshaw saw Lattimer as he opened the old journal they had found earlier that day. He studied a small drawing that was sketched on the back of the last page. The old man smiled and slapped at the old leather-bound book, sending one of its rotting pages to the ground. When Charlie reached for the dislodged page, Lattimer placed his large boot on it. When Ellenshaw looked up, he saw the look in Lattimer’s eyes that froze him cold. It was as if he was having his pocket picked and had caught the man in the act. Ellenshaw straightened, leaving the handwritten page where it lay. Lattimer never lost that murderous look as he slowly reached down and picked it up. He seemed to relax when he had the page safely in hand.
“Don’t want it torn is all,” he said by way of explanation. “Now, are you ready to go see what’s inside?”
Just as the words escaped Lattimer’s mouth, the beating of wood started. It was close and it totally unnerved the young student. He looked around wildly as he thought the noise was right behind him. Then he looked right, then left. The noise was coming from all directions. Ellenshaw never considered himself to be a coward, but the noises he was hearing drove a hard wedge in between what he wanted to be and who he really was.
“Good God, what is that?” Charlie asked, trying hard to keep his nervousness in check.
Lattimer, looking just as astounded as Ellenshaw, only turned and walked toward the opening of the cave.
As Charlie watched the man leave in amazement, he turned and saw a flitting shadow among the trees. The darkness moved again, this time to his right. Whatever the shadow thing was, it was large. It moved from tree to tree. Then Ellenshaw saw what the strange noise was as a dark figure raised something to the sky and then swung it. The object hit the tree with such force that Ellenshaw actually felt it through his boots. The club struck the tree again and then he heard something that chilled him to his bones: the thing in the trees growled. It was a deep, menacing, and primal sound that sent Ellenshaw stumbling backward toward the cave’s opening. He backed into the total blackness of the interior and immediately bumped into Lattimer. As he watched the opening, there was no movement, only darkness. Charlie was even afraid to shine the light there for fear of what he would see. As much as the thought of a missing link intrigued him, he didn’t care to meet it in all that inky blackness that was prevalent between moon fall and sunrise.
Lattimer moved away deeper into the cave. Charlie turned and started to follow as silence descended from the outside. The beating of wood on wood had ceased, and even that sudden silence was frightening. As Ellenshaw turned, he saw designs on the wall in the glare of his flashlight. The depiction was that of ancient man—hunter gatherers of the last ice age. Ellenshaw had seen many examples of this kind of historical documentation before in a hundred different sites from Colorado to New York. They depicted man for what he was, a skilled hunter of the animal life that inhabited the Stikine River Valley.
As he moved back along the caves wall, the paintings became older looking, and far more faded. The years depicted on the wall must have covered four to five hundred years of prehistoric life. Many scenes of snows and the baking sun, repeated over time, told Charlie that this cave and surrounding area must have been home to a large group of ancients.
As he moved deeper, forgetting all about his terror of a moment before, and losing Lattimer as he moved farther and faster, Charlie began to see paintings of a large animal, always standing away from the hunters, but never too far away from them, either. The beast was humanoid. He saw it was bipedal and was far larger than the small humanoid group. Ellenshaw tilted his head and was sure he saw in the faded paintings that the beast seemed to be watching the activities of the men. Charlie smiled, intrigued by the facts before him that the men and the giant beast seemed to live in a harmonious environment. He ran his fingers over the ancient depiction of the large animal. He quickly pulled his hand away when Lattimer screamed. Ellenshaw turned at the loud noise, then he realized it wasn’t fright: It was an exclamation of pure joy. As he approached the bend in the cave, Ellenshaw heard Lattimer as he talked loudly to himself.
“Hell, I don’t even have to dig it out! Just pick it up and spend it!”
Ellenshaw saw an amazing sight. Lattimer was standing up in an old, broken-down wagon. He lifted a sack into the air and then allowed its contents to fall out. The gold coins made loud thumping sounds on the wagon’s wooden bed. The laughter came flooding through the sound of the thumping noise.
“Look at this, boy! Uuuuunited States gold double eagles—must be a million of ’em!” Lattimer said, letting the empty canvas sack fall to the floor of the wagon with its former contents. He looked up through the flashlight’s glare at Ellenshaw. “Okay, okay, you can have some, but I get the mother lode here, boy . . . the mother lovin’ lode!”
Charlie didn’t know why; he just started backing away. He felt they were no longer alone in the cave. What in the hell was the gold doing this far from civilization? He thought about the possible downed aircraft and its long dead pilot. Could the two be related somehow? As he looked around the strange drawings as he left Lattimer, he saw the shadow of the second wagon farther back. How much gold was there, and why was it here? As he backed away, he saw more wreckage—it was if the pieces were brought into the cave. He saw an oblong container, or what looked like a container, lying against the far wall. He also spied backpacks, canteens, torn and shredded tents, and all manner of camping gear. As strange as it seemed to him, it was if something were collecting the trash from outside and storing it.
“Boy, I got a mission for you.”
“Huh?” Charlie said as he found himself staring at the collected pieces of lost humanity lying on the cave’s floor.
“If you do it, you’ll never want for anything ever again; all I want you to do is take this”—he held up the journal—“and mail it to my father in Boston. He’ll know what to do. I’ve written instructions on the last page by the written map. That will give me the Providence I need. He’ll get my lawyers to get the claim filed in Ottawa. I have written my account of finding the cave and doubled the description of this area.” Again he looked around wildly. Then he reached out and handed Charlie ten golden double eagles. “I think that will cover the postage,” he said as he started to laugh crazily.
Ellenshaw shook his head as he gained his feet. He knew then that the years of loneliness and failure had driven the old man insane, maybe even murderously so.
“I’m going to stay here and get the gold ready to move out, I’ll hire some of the locals to help me get it downriver. First, I have to make sure they don’t know what it is they’re moving.”
“Don’t be crazy, Mr. Lattimer. Come back now; don’t stay here alone,” Charlie said as he looked around the cave nervously. “I don’t know what’s out there, at least I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I don’t think they like us being here.”
“Son, superstitions don’t scare me. I’ve heard the stories these Indians talk about, they’re made to keep the young ones in line and out of the woods at night. Now, you
go and take this with you. You kids can find your way back easily enough.” Lattimer pressed the journal into Charlie’s hands and then his face became a mask of menace. “And you will take care not to spread the word about my find, right, boy?”
Ellenshaw didn’t answer. He clutched the old journal in his hands and was sure Lattimer would just as easily murder him right there if he failed to give him the answer he wanted to hear.
“Yes, sir, I’ll tell no one, and I’ll mail the journal to your father.”
The excited glee came magically back into Lattimer’s facial features. He smiled and slapped Ellenshaw on the back.
“Good luck, son. Get across the river as quick as you can and put some space between you and the north shore, understand?”
Charlie didn’t say anything, he just turned and walked as quickly as he could through the darkness, shoving the journal into his shirt as he moved while hoping beyond hope that there wasn’t anything out of legend waiting for him outside.
Lattimer looked at the stacked bags of golden double eagles. The American currency would not be hard to pass off without garnering too much attention. He would claim to be an investor in gold and that he had bought up the double eagles years before. He shook his head and then ran his hand over his beard.
He had made several torches and slipped them inside cracks in the cave walls. The flickering light showed the paintings that had captured the attention of that kid, Ellenshaw, and for the first time Lattimer studied them. When he stood and took one of the torches from the wall, he held it to the last of the cave paintings and examined it. As he brought the fire closer to the large slothlike beast, he froze. The grunt was a deep-seeded hollow sound and it had come from behind him. He froze and then closed his eyes as a wild, pungent smell assaulted his nostrils.
When a loud scraping sound struck his ears, he turned in the direction of the cave’s opening just as the light from the day was shut out. Someone or something had covered the cave opening. As he started to move toward the front of the cave, he heard the sound of his treasure as the coins slowly slid from one of the many bags. Something behind him had upended one of the sacks and was pouring its contents onto the ground.
He swung the torch toward where he had stacked the thousand bags of double eagles and saw the owner of the many sounds he had heard through the many strange nights in the woods lining the Stikine. The beast was well over ten feet in height and stood with its powerful arms at its sides. As Lattimer watched the empty sack fall from the beast’s enormous hand, he saw that the eyes were fixed on him—the yellow glow of the eyes shone brightly in the torchlight and they seemed intelligent. The deep seated orbs moved only slightly when Lattimer brought the flame of the torch higher so he could see more clearly.
“You leave my gold be,” Lattimer said beneath his breath, the insanity of his own words making his eyes go wide. He wasn’t seeing a magnificent beast standing before him, he was seeing only a thief of a lifetime find.
The great ape grunted and took a step toward Lattimer. The large left arm raised, it was as if the animal was offering something to Lattimer, but the old prospector refused to give the thief any benefit of the doubt. He swung the torch at the large creature and struck its massive hand, making the animal roar in anger. The large muzzle rose into the air and the cave shook with the powerful, voiced exclamation of pain and rage.
Suddenly, before Lattimer knew what was happening, several more of the giant animals appeared in back of the first, and that was when the old man’s mind finally snapped. He screamed and went wading into the beasts of that long-told legend, an animal that supposedly died out tens of thousands of years before that summer of 1968. The animals closed in on L. T. Lattimer and soon after, the secret of the Stikine would be left for others to uncover.
They Who Follow waited for mankind to return to the lost valley that had been their home for twenty thousand years.
The graduate students had been frightened when they hadn’t seen or heard from Charlie Ellenshaw until he stumbled into their camp in the late afternoon. As much as they questioned him on where he had been, the more Charlie clammed up. He sat on the same rock he had the night before and held the old journal in his hands. He had wrapped it in a handkerchief and wouldn’t let anyone near it.
When the others started packing for their return trip downriver, Charlie reluctantly started to help. His silence unnerved the others but they didn’t press him as to why Lattimer hadn’t rejoined them. Charlie had told them that the old man had continued upriver, searching for his gold.
As the rubber boats shoved away from the shore of the Stikine, all thought of the plane wreckage had escaped Charlie’s thoughts; only the vision of the cave’s paintings and what they depicted remained. He watched the trees surrounding their camp slide away from view, with only one thought going through his mind: They were watching.
PART ONE
WHEN DIAMONDS
ARE LEGEND
1
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
PRESENT DAY
The prestigious one-hundred-year-old Rainier Building had been bought in 1991 and had been completely renovated. The first sixteen floors were quite normal, if expensive, two- and three-bedroom condominiums. The seventeenth and eighteenth floors, however, belonged to just one man, the owner of the property and the person who designed the interior of the building: Valery Serta, the son of a Russian immigrant and heir to the vast fortune left to him upon his father’s death in 1962. The family fortune was in the felling of the ancient forests of the great Northwest—forests that filled the pockets of the family Serta since the late twenties and supplied the U.S. markets with rich wood and paper products.
With a twenty-four-hour house staff of twelve, and with a minimum of two on duty at all times, the old man kept them busy with his imperialistic demands. A loner in his old age, the only visitor he took was from his grandson who was now a student at Harvard, and one or two old friends from the logging business. For some reason, that no one who knew him could fathom, Valery Serta never tired of hearing about the destruction of the woods that had covered the area since the dawn of time. He closed his eyes upon hearing the news of another tract of land that had been cleared and raped of the woods that covered it. The enjoyment stemmed from the dark tales his own father had passed onto him, never explaining why the woods and forests of North America held such a bad place in his heart.
The sky outside the Rainier Building was splitting open on this early Tuesday morning. The thunderclap woke the old man and he rolled over to look at the clock on his nightstand. Six thirty. He knew that sleep would not come again once it was so rudely interrupted, so he slowly threw his covers back and sat up. He yawned and felt around in the semidarkness. His thin, liver-spotted hand hit the glass of water and then he cursed in English as some of it splashed onto the expensive wood. He shook his head and reached for the dentures that he had deposited in the glass the night before. Once that was done, he slowly placed his feet into the slippers that had been perfectly placed by his maids the night before.
As he stood and placed a silken robe over his thinning frame, he stopped and listened; more important, he smelled. Sniffing the air he knew something was amiss. Every morning of his life he started the day with a pot of coffee, six eggs, potatoes, sausage, and toast. However, today there was none of those smells coming from the kitchen, which was situated on the open floor plan just below him on the first floor. He shook his head, angry that his most simple routine of the day was being usurped by people that worked for him. He angrily tied his robe and walked to the door and threw it open. As he approached the railing of the upper floor, he saw that the house was completely silent. The shades were open in the living room and the dull, cloud-laden day filtered in, letting in just enough light that he could see things lying on the floor beneath him.
“What is going on down there?” he asked as he grabbed the railing and tried to focus on the floor below.
Suddenly, a streak of lightning flashed thr
ough the twenty-foot-by-ten-foot plate-glass window that looked out over old Downtown Seattle. In that brief flash of illumination, he saw the bodies. Each of the twelve had been tied up and shot in their heads. He instantly saw his two female maids in the center of what could only be described as an execution circle with his employees’ feet facing outward. With a yelp of terror, Valery Serta placed his hand over his mouth to keep the scream inside. As he started to back away, the words from the darkness, spoken in Russian, made his hand fall and the scream escaped anyway.
“We figured the view from up here into your living room would allow us to dispense with the threats of violence against you. This way you know we mean business—as your adoptive Americans would say—‘from the get-go.’ ” The last was said in heavily accented English.
Serta turned and saw the man who had spoken was standing in his bedroom doorway. He almost went into shock when he thought that the man must have been in his room the whole time he was sleeping.
“As my partner says, we are here for answers, and we will only ask you one time,” said a smaller man who stepped from the large bathroom across the hallway. He was wiping his hands on a towel, which, when finished, he turned and tossed it on the floor. “As you can see, we will not be disturbed for the time being.”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“Now, you see, you are asking questions and wasting our valuable time. Did we not say we killed your staff so you would know we were serious men?”
The old man started shaking.
“Relax, comrade. You have to answer one question and one only, before you join your employees. Until that moment, you have no need of being afraid—you will not be mistreated—unless your answer calls for it.” The smaller of the two men stepped closer to Serta. “Why should you answer, you ask?” The small man with the ponytail tied by a leather strip, nodded at the taller man who produced a cell phone and opened it, and then he pushed a single button and then listened. He handed the phone to the old man.
Primeval: An Event Group Thriller Page 6
