The Opal (Book 2 of the Matt Turner Series)

by Michael Siemsen

  “I’ll find the soonest flight outta JFK,” Jess said. “I’ll give you a call.”

  “Where you going?” Roger asked.

  “Home. To pack.”

  Roger looked ready to argue, then just compressed his lips and nodded.

  Jess grinned. “Hey, Matty’s my boy, too, right? Let’s go bring ’im home.”

  * * *

  Roger parked the Tahoe in long-term and hauled out his rolling duffel bag. Slung over one shoulder was a backpack with various gear he had accumulated over the years. He didn’t know whether the TSA would give him trouble for any of it, or, if they did, which items would be no-go’s. He had removed two knives from it before leaving home, as well as three loose .45 rounds that were rolling around in the bottom. Still in the duffel were a set of tactical night-vision goggles, a half bag of zip ties, a first-aid kit, two Meals Ready to Eat with iffy expiration dates, clothes, and a few other odds and ends that had been either left in the backpack for years or stuffed in because they might prove useful. Slung over his other shoulder was his laptop case with notepad, pens, chargers, and other essentials.

  Traffic stopped at the light, and he hustled over the crosswalk to Departures. His cell phone rang in his pocket, and he cursed under his breath as he put down his gear. The screen read “JC Mobile.”

  “You here yet?” Roger said.

  “Look to your right.”

  He looked left for some reason, felt dumb, then looked right. Jess was waving at him from the sidewalk, four entrances down. He had three other people with him. Roger hung up and wrestled his bags back onto his shoulders before hiking over to join them.

  “We have forty-five minutes,” Jess said. “Let me introduce you to your team.”

  Roger was dumbstruck. “You got these . . . you all are, uh . . .”

  “We’re going to help you bring him home, sir,” replied a young woman with big eyes and a military tone and demeanor. She wore a black down vest over an orange-patterned flannel. Her shiny black hair hung at shoulder length. “I’m Núñez, sir.”

  “Sorry, Rog,” Jess said. “Let’s do intros. Everyone, you know this is my old partner, Sergeant Roger Turner, retired.”

  “Just ‘Roger,’ please,” he said, holding his hands up as if in surrender.

  “And, Rog, this is everyone. The unfortunately named Chuck Kohl—’Chuckles’ to those with no respect.” Jess winked as the tall, stout, mustachioed thirty-something to his right rolled his eyes and reached out to shake hands. “He’s on my task force. Real hard-ass—sorry, I mean bad-ass. Seriously, though, I brought him over from SWAT—he’s good.”

  “Good to meet you, sir,” Kohl said, shaking hands.

  “And this is Paul, with DOJ. You may not remember this, but you met him when he was about this high and still pissing himself.”

  Paul said in a deep voice, without a hint of a smile, “I still piss myself.”

  “Ben Kleindorf’s boy?” Roger said, shaking the 24-year-old’s hand.

  “Ben couldn’t come himself,” Jess explained, “so he arranged for the next best thing. He got Paul off a shit detail in Brooklyn, so everyone wins. Lastly, I got . . . Miss? What is it, Núñez? You gotta rank? First name?”

  “Just Núñez, sir.”

  Jess shrugged. “Ben said he’d get us a field-trained fluent Spanish-speaker to translate as needed.” He leaned close and cocked his head toward Núñez. “Not sure what her story is. Just met a few minutes before you showed up.”

  “Well, I just want to thank all of you,” Roger said. “It’s really . . . well, just unbelievable what you’re all doing for my family. I, uh, thought I was going this alone, but I’m real glad I’m not.”

  As they all walked into the terminal together, Kohl turned to Paul Kleindorf, who was sporting what appeared to be a few days’ worth of facial hair. “You Justice guys don’t have to shave, huh?”

  Paul continued walking without looking at him. “Not our faces, anyway.”

  FIFTEEN

  “Again, it’s nonsense,” Rheese said as he transferred gear from a duffel bag into a backpack: flashlight, headlamp, bug repellent, huge point-and-shoot digital camera that Matt thought must be the first model ever produced. Rheese continued moving items as he went on. “I’m not saying the opal or Sayf Allah couldn’t, at some point, have fallen into the hands of the Norse people. That is to say, they spent time in North Africa and the Middle East, fought for the Byzantines, but the timing would be all wrong, and they certainly wouldn’t have been in Cuba that far back.”

  “I’ve spent hours with this thing, Doctor,” Matt said. “I’m telling you exactly what happened, from hand to hand. The imprints may not have presented themselves in chronological order, but each time, I know the date right off the bat. It’s a snap to put them in line: from North Africa to Iceland, to Sicily and back to Iceland, the whole story’s coming together. There were a few Egypt blips in there, but those obviously don’t help here. The one thing I can tell you after spending this much time with it is, no pirates—an imprint would have popped up by now.”

  Rheese regarded him for a moment, as if trying to sort out whether it was all a lie, and, if so, to what end.

  “What do you know about the so-called Vikings?” Rheese asked him.

  “Is this a pop quiz?”

  “Yes. What do you know?”

  “The usual public knowledge stuff. The museum never had me work with any of their artifacts, so I guess just the raping-and-pillaging stuff.”

  Rheese chuckled and shook his head in condescension.

  Matt said, “Beyond that, I thought I learned in junior high that they discovered America before Columbus.”

  “‘Discovered’—ha ha, right. They did indeed discover progressively that there was more land to the east of them. They settled in Iceland; then Erik the Red established a colony on Greenland. His son, Leif Eriksson, then set out to find more land and eventually found Newfoundland in Canada. There are theories that he or others made it farther south, perhaps as far as the state of Rhode Island, but there’s not a bit of evidence suggesting further progress.”

  “This Haeming guy said the land he was looking for was called Vinland. Do you know of any place being called that?”

  “Yes, that’s what Leif Eriksson called the land he found. Supposedly, they came upon wild grapes. It’s irrelevant, though. Let’s say this Icelandic fellow did find his way across the Atlantic . . .”

  “Bringing Sayf Allah with him.”

  “Sure, fine. It’s one thing to set up camp a week or two from Greenland, and another thing entirely to have ventured down the entire east coast of North America—and then to decide to hazard another hundred miles to reach an island they didn’t know existed. You don’t understand: these people didn’t risk the open sea. Some other sailor got caught in a storm and spotted Canada. He made it back, and word got around. Only then did someone decide to attempt a crossing.”

  Matt sighed. “And yet an Egyptian opal ends up inside a tree on Cuba . . .”

  Rheese harrumphed and stood up as Matt sat down on the curb outside the small café where they had eaten lunch. Rheese began slathering sunblock onto his arms and nose.

  “Haeming, you say.”

  A-ha, not so certain after all. “Yeah, kind of like ‘lemming’ with an accent.”

  “You’ll need to find out more. Give me something substantive. Garza, where the hell is—”

  “Here he comes,” Garza said, gnawing on a toothpick.

  Fernando “Fando” Solorzano pulled up in the silver van he had just rented.

  Rheese said, “Hopefully, whatever you lads cook out in the field will be better than that rubbish was.”

  Matt watched Garza’s expression when he glanced back.

  “Everything will be handled, Doctor.”

  I’ll tolerate you only so far, Garza’s face told him, but only Matt seemed to notice.

  The van’s side door slid open from the inside, and out stepped Fando. He and G
arza grabbed duffels from the curb and began loading into the back. Matt took the cue and grabbed his own small suitcase while Rheese scrunched his nose to read the ingredients on the sunblock.

  He mumbled to himself, “Blasted cream’s supposed to prevent burning . . . nose is on bloody fire.”

  “I’ll just grab this for you, then, Doctor,” Fando said peevishly, picking up Rheese’s knockoff Samsonite case to load it. At the back of the van, he grabbed Garza, and Matt pricked up his ears. “Raúl hasn’t checked in since yesterday. I’ve gotten nothin’, and he hasn’t responded to my texting, neither.”

  “You get texts from anyone else? Maybe it’s your service.”

  Fando said, “Yeah, I got some from Lorenzo.”

  “He ready for us? We should get moving.”

  “Yeah, he said he got permits and everything. Everything else’ll be there by the time we are. But what about Raúl? Something had to happen, homes. I can’t even think straight right now.”

  “Just chill,” Garza said, patting his shoulder. “I’ll get a hold of Tessa—she’s still on the island—and have her check in and call me back, sí?”

  “Yeah, yeah, all right.”

  Garza climbed into the rearmost seat of the van, behind Matt. Rheese got in the passenger seat up front, and Fando drove off. Matt could hear Garza’s thumbs tapping away on the screen of his phone.

  Rheese shifted around in his seat. “The problem with your story, lad, is that if the Norse had settled on Cuba, there would be an archeological record. The island has been thoroughly explored for centuries, with not a hint of unexplained artifacts.”

  “So if I could show you something, then what?” Sleeping on the plane and the large meal had him feeling a bit better, or at least better able to think, interpret, and plan.

  Rheese’s eyebrows shot up. “Such as?”

  “I don’t know yet. Gimme back the opal and I’ll see if I can find something.”

  Matt didn’t know what he was looking for, but the Norse guys were about to head out for this Vinland place, and he knew that somehow, in the end, they had reached the island of Cuba. The next imprint could be more of Egypt, more quality time with goats in a winter storm, or even the Cuban sawmill worker who found the opal. He maintained hope that figuring it all out would lead to Tuni’s freedom—and, perhaps, even his own.

  As Rheese dug around in his backpack, Garza spoke up from the back of the van. “How, exactly, does this help us find what we’re looking for, Doctor? I mean, why does it matter if the thing got here with Spaniards, or Vikings, or the goddam Sinaloa cartel?”

  “The conditions under which the artifact arrived mean everything,” Rheese sniffed. “You wouldn’t understand. Here, Turner.”

  Matt took the stone in his gloved hand and placed it in his lap, then rolled up his left sleeve and fished the armband timer out of his pocket. As he slid it on, he could feel the two cold metal contacts slide against the skin of his forearm. He powered it on, and the LCD screen lit up, reading “00:00.” He pressed the up arrow until it read “00:10.” That would be enough time to delve deeper. When the countdown was up, the device would send an intermittent shock into Matt’s arm until he turned it off. It had been his father’s idea when Matt was 14—a way to leave a reading session on his own. During the session, he was always unaware of his own body, but the shocks brought back the sensation of his arms. They had practiced with it for months, tuning the amperage and rhythm, until it became a reflex action to open his hands and pull them to his body when the pulses began.

  Matt slid off his left glove, pressed START on his timer, and rested his flat hand on the gem.

  Immediately, he felt the familiar rushing sound, light-headedness, blurry vision, the shock of changing body positions and motion. In this case, seated in a moving car, then instantly standing, running. Different climate, clothes, anatomy—breasts, in this case—smells, sounds, time of day. Consciousness always followed physical sensation. Someone else’s voice in his head. He had grown accustomed to the transition, and after first “experiencing” an artifact, each repeat session grew easier as he familiarized himself with its personality or, rather, the personalities of those presented within.

  The opal’s first imprint belonged to Tadinanefer. Her emotional stamp being the most powerful, it would always be that way. But Matt had learned to fast-forward through events he had already seen. To him, it looked like skipping through scenes on a DVD in ten-second, one-minute, sometimes ten-minute intervals. He just said things like “Seen it” or “Yes, yes” as the story progressed, until he came to dark space or some new place he had yet to see. The fast-forward had also been his dad’s idea, after Matt discovered that he could rewind and repeat moments.

  “If you can rewind, you can fast-forward, and we don’t have time for you to sit through this whole thing again.”

  “I can’t, Dad . . .”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  As Matt fast-forwarded through Tadinanefer’s imprint, he felt the same old mix of appreciation and resentment he had always had for his father. He reached her dark space, then continued past the rest of the parts he had already seen.

  I am male. My name is Haeming Grimsson. I’m at the stern of the ship, cleaning the salt from my sword while speaking with Finn. The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians again—one of my mentor’s favorites. I wish to discuss Jesus himself, and for Finn to finally acknowledge the remarkable timing of my birth. I’ve hinted at it before—this fact that my birth and the death of Jesus imply an undeniable significance. But every time, he politely accepts it, concedes that it may actually mean something, and moves on. I cannot simply say it myself. Someone else must.

  Someone calls from behind me, from the mast: “Look! The cliff!”

  Everyone stands. I see it . . . close my eyes. It can’t be real. Open again. No! Finn touches my arm—an attempt to console or an involuntary reflex from the shock of the sight.

  A knarr, much like the one we are now sailing, sits high atop a cliff before a backdrop of the strange, green, southern trees. It has no sail, but the mast stands high. As we draw closer to shore, we see the words carved into the cliff below it. My stomach twists into sour knots. The runic letters read “Kingdom of Southland.”

  Now, that’s something to find!

  Matt paused with a perfect view of the tropical landscape, mountain features, a cove or inlet or whatever they were called. A bay? Above the carved runes, he could see the giant ship, perched like Noah’s ark on the high slopes of Ararat. It was maybe a hundred feet above the beach. How the hell do you get a ship on top of a cliff? Haeming is furious, too. They came all this way . . . almost a full year since Iceland. He thought he’d be a legend like Leif Eriksson himself. But no, like Vinland and everywhere else they stopped along the way, this land belonged to others . . .

  Matt tried to commit the scene to memory. Two peaks on left side, bigger one in the distance, cut off at the top by clouds. The cliff was the essential location, though. He imagined that either remnants of the ship or the carvings in the rocky cliff face could have survived this long.

  Dark space. How long have I been in this? Gotta be close to ten minutes.

  Still wanting to keep his dark space exit opportunities a secret, Matt decided to wait for his timer.

  Oh, here we go again . . . Haeming again . . .

  This place is called Southland—so named by another. At my feet, my friend and mentor sits, dying. I press the pommel of my sword into a break in this tree’s bark. Work it in tight. I hold the sword steady while I carefully pry the stone free with a dagger. I step back. The gem shines at me from its new home, as if the tree had opened a secret eye. Finn leans against the trunk. Slumped, bleeding, he looks up at me weakly. “Outside,” he says, but his mouth doesn’t move right. “What’s she saying, man? What happened? Tell me what happened, goddamn it!” What the hell is that? Something happening in the van . . . How am I hearing this?

  I run my fingers over the gem a
final time and touch Finn’s head. He clutches my wrist, but not aggressively. It’s as if to say, “It had to happen this way . . . Just calm the hell down and pull over!”

  There it is again! That’s Garza shouting! Fando before that . . .

  Tzzzzz . . . tzzzzz . . . tzzzzz . . .

  Finally.

  Matt’s hands popped up and snapped to his chest as his hearing came back. His stomach turned a little, and he figured it was from the physical transition. But then he felt the van swerve, and his brain began processing his environment and its sounds. Yelling, among other noises.

  “Just tell me, I swear to God!” Fando shouted from the front.

  Rheese reached over and tried to take the wheel.

  “Get your fucking hands away from me, asshole!” He slapped Rheese’s hand away and looked in the rearview mirror.

  Garza continued talking from behind Matt: “Fando, man, I’m telling you to pull over the goddamn car and talk to me outside. You’re going to kill us all—WATCH OUT!”

  Everyone snapped their attention forward to see a small car up ahead in the van’s lane, stopped at a red light. In front of it, cars were crossing the intersection. Fando slammed on the brakes and swerved. Loose objects inside the van flew. Matt slammed up against the window beside him, and a stinging pain shot through his cheekbone.

  “Stop the bloody car, you idiot!” Rheese shouted, but it was too late.

  They missed the stopped car, but the van’s brakes weren’t going to stop them before the intersection. An enormous old Buick crossed in front of them, and everyone yelled. The driver’s eyes bugged out, and he slammed his foot down—fortunately, on the gas and not the brake. Fando cut left and missed the Buick’s chrome bumper by less than a foot. At the sound of a squawking horn, all eyes shot left. A huge shipping truck barreled toward them, and Fando was still braking. The truck’s brakes squealed.

  “Go, go, go, go!” Garza and Matt roared in unison.

  Fando gunned it, and the van cleared the intersection as the truck howled past behind them. Fando pulled onto the dirt shoulder and stopped. Everyone sat silent but for the sound of their heavy breathing.