When the door was fully open, the music ended. Tyler and the others crept forward until they were at the entrance.
“Oh, my God!” Alexa shouted and dashed inside.
“Wait!” Tyler ran after her. She was already kneeling by a figure propped against a display case.
“He’s alive,” she said, her fingers pressed against the carotid, “but barely breathing. We need an ambulance.”
André Laroche wasn’t on the run. He had locked himself inside his own vault.
TWENTY-TWO
Brielle stood back while Tyler and Alexa tended to Laroche and Grant called emergency services. She looked around and saw that one person was missing.
“Where did Ms. Dunham go?”
She didn’t wait for a response and went to look for her. It wasn’t a good sign when the loyal assistant didn’t stick around to see what was inside the safe.
Brielle backtracked her way toward the entrance and saw Dunham emerge from a side hallway. Without hesitation, Dunham raised a semiautomatic pistol and fired.
Instinctively, Brielle ducked, and the first two shots went wide. As bullets whistled past her, she dodged left and took refuge behind Bigfoot in the alcove. Several more rounds slammed into the stuffed beast, and then heels clacked in triple-time toward the front door.
Brielle poked her head out to see Dunham climb into a BMW. It laid patches of rubber on the stones and was gone.
Tyler yelled from around the corner. “Brielle, are you all right?”
Brielle emerged from her hiding place. “I’m fine. It’s clear now.”
Tyler stepped out from behind the wall. “What happened?” Grant followed, inspecting the bullet holes in the wall.
“It was Marlo Dunham. She shot at me and took off. Silver BMW. I didn’t get the plates, but it’s probably her car.”
Grant shook his head in disbelief. “Why?”
“Because of what we found in the vault. She must have left the room when she realized we were about to open it and would find Laroche inside.”
“I’ll call the police and tell them to be on the lookout for her car,” Grant said. “With only two directions off Mercer Island, she should be easy to spot.” He made the call while they walked back to the vault.
As they waited for the ambulance, they checked out the vault’s contents. Display cases ringed the interior. Each held an artifact, all of them labeled. One claimed the item was a lock of Bigfoot’s hair. Another was the tooth of a Tasmanian wolf, dated 1956. The biggest display case was at the back and held a six-foot-long fish that had been stuffed and mounted. It was labeled a coelacanth.
“What is all this stuff?” Grant wondered aloud.
“It must be André’s treasure,” Alexa said as she cradled Laroche’s head in her lap. “He believed that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster were real, out there waiting to be discovered. Like the Tasmanian wolf, which was declared extinct a hundred years ago, but there are people who think a few still roam the wilds of that island.”
“And the big ugly fish?”
“The last coelacanth was thought to have died in the Cretaceous Period, but fishermen caught one off the east coast of Africa in 1938, proving the species was still in existence after sixty-five million years. Since then, they’ve been caught regularly. I had no idea he had one. I’ve only seen it one other time, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in DC.”
“So he thinks the Loch Ness monster is like the coelacanth?” Tyler said. “It’s been around since the time of the dinosaurs, and we just haven’t seen it all these years?”
“It might not be a dinosaur, but the coelacanth does show we could be surprised by more species yet to be discovered. That’s what makes my job interesting.”
“I think I’ve found something interesting,” Brielle said, standing at a small pedestal with a case on it.
Tyler and Grant looked over her shoulder as she carefully flipped through a notebook. The pages were yellowed with age.
A single word was emblazoned on the cover above a swastika: Altwaffe. Old weapon.
Brielle felt a chill as she thought of Wade, who had aged fifty years in little more than two weeks.
Sirens wailed in the distance. The paramedics and police would arrive at the mansion any minute.
“Grant,” Tyler said, “did you bring that high-res camera?”
“Just like you asked.”
“Then let’s get a picture of every page in the book. We’re going to have to turn it over to the Feds, but I don’t want to be cut out of the loop.”
Brielle picked up the notebook to hand it over and felt a piece of paper underneath. She didn’t want to cede anything to the police that she didn’t have to, so she deftly swiped it to her side as she gave Grant the book.
Tyler flipped through the pages rapidly for Grant to capture the words on video.
“I’ll bring the paramedics in,” Brielle said and left them to finish documenting the notebook.
The ambulance stopped in the driveway, and two paramedics jumped out with their gear. She led them to the living room and pointed them to the vault. She stayed behind to read the page she had acquired.
Dear Alexa,
I pray that you are the one who found this note. If you are reading this, then you understood my email and discovered my body. I’m sorry for the mysterious email, but I couldn’t let Marlo Dunham know that you were the sole person with the code to get into the vault. If she had realized what I’d sent, she would have killed you. She has held me captive for nine days. I know she planned to kill me when she no longer needed me, and I thought locking myself in the one place she couldn’t get to me was the only option left.
I know she betrayed me and planned to unleash the Altwaffe. When I bought the canister and notebook, I thought it was simply a way to find the Loch Ness monster, and so did the unwitting seller. But when I realized what it was, Marlo convinced me not to turn it over to the authorities, fearing that it would be turned into a potent weapon by the government. Instead, I locked it away, unsure of how to destroy it safely myself. Little did I realize that I was being deceived by my trusted assistant.
She took the weapon, but left the notebook, possibly to implicate me. She didn’t know that the notebook also contains the formula for an antidote. It’s a fairly simple process, once you have the key ingredient, but no one on earth has it.
The reason is simple. To make the antidote, you must have a tissue sample from the Loch Ness monster.
As police rushed past her, Brielle shook her head and read the sentence three more times to make sure she had read it right. The next sentence was even stranger.
The Nazis claim to have acquired a sample taken by Charles Darwin himself. I know that’s difficult to believe, but you must. It’s the only way to undo the damage that I have done by not destroying the Altwaffe when I should have. If only I had recognized Marlo’s insanity sooner.
I can’t take the chance that Marlo has found a way into the vault, and that it is she instead of you reading this note. I can’t lead her to Nessie and help her destroy any hope for a cure. On the back of this page are clusters of numbers and letters. You must follow in the footstep of the Sun King’s Apollo. Place the sheet so that Apollo’s hallux is aligned with the 2n of your favorite animal and his lateral one is aligned with the 2n of that animal’s most feared enemy. Starting at three, the resulting connected code will lead you to a book at the current home of Darwin’s intellect. There you will learn how to locate the creature and find a cure.
I’m sorry to burden you with this quest. I wish I could have seen you again, my dear, but it was not to be. Please understand that I only had the best of intentions.
Your friend,
André
Brielle flipped the sheet over and saw hundreds of numbers and letters speckling the page. There was no identifiable pattern to it, as if it were a connect-the-dots drawing.
“What are you reading?” Tyler asked, startling Brielle. She was abou
t to come up with a lie, but Tyler stopped her. “I saw you take it from the vault. You need to work on your sleight of hand.”
She pulled him aside and whispered to him. “We have to keep this quiet.” She handed him the note.
He read it, then looked at her. “This is incredible.”
“I know. It’s hard to believe.”
“That’s the problem. We need the antidote within the next week.”
“Why?”
Tyler glanced around to make sure no one was listening. “The weapon’s already been deployed. Through the sprinklers inside the Salle Gustave Eiffel. People are already starting to die.”
“My God. Wasn’t Grant inside at the time?”
Tyler nodded solemnly. “And they don’t have any idea how to treat it.”
Wade’s wrinkled face flashed in front of her. “Then this is our only hope.”
Tyler was taken aback. “You really think going after a mythical creature is the best use of our time?”
“Your own sister made a video recording of it.”
“She made a video recording of something. Why don’t we go after Bigfoot while we’re at it?”
“The Nazis obviously believed it,” Brielle said. “And Victor Zim does, too. Why else would he try to abduct Alexa?”
“I don’t know. But I’m certain there’s no sea monster living in Loch Ness. It’s a legend perpetuated by cranks and hoaxers.”
“So certain that you’re willing to bet Grant’s life on it?”
Tyler went silent, then said, “Why are you so quick to buy into this?”
“Because I saw one of my closest friends turned into an elderly man virtually overnight. That makes me ready to believe almost anything, especially if it helps me get the bastards who did that to him. Do you have a better idea?”
Tyler scratched his temple in thought. After a full minute, he cursed under his breath. “All right. I can try convincing Agent Harris, but how does she ask her superiors to put resources into finding the Loch Ness monster? I can imagine sitting in their position and thinking it’s nuts.”
Brielle nodded at his point. Despite her confidence in presenting her case to Tyler, she wasn’t sure if they’d find anything at all. “Then we have to do it ourselves.”
She saw Tyler wrestling with the thought of keeping information from the Feds. He was a big boy scout; doing things the right way was in his blood.
Finally he said, “We know Alexa and Grant will go along with this, so we’ll keep it to the four of us until we have irrefutable proof.”
He pocketed the sheet. Once Laroche’s comatose form was carried away to the hospital, Harris arrived and they spent the next hour answering her questions about the vault, Dunham, and the notebook. Neither Tyler nor Brielle mentioned the letter left by Laroche.
Dunham’s gunshots were enough to implicate her. Her car was found abandoned at Mercer Village Shopping Center. She was on the run with a BOLO issued. The be-on-the-lookout alert had every Washington law enforcement agency on the hunt for her, so they were confident about catching her, but Brielle thought she might have been ready for such an eventuality.
When the FBI was done with them, the four of them finally had the privacy of Grant’s SUV to discuss the note. Grant looked especially hopeful that there was now something he could do to prevent his own death.
Alexa read it twice.
“Laroche may not be any help for a while,” Tyler said. “The paramedics said he might have suffered a stroke and don’t know if he’ll make it. Alexa, do you understand his clues?”
“The stuff specific to me, sure. I told André that the harp seal was my favorite animal. So cute. And the harp seal’s most feared enemy is the polar bear. So those chromosome numbers are easy to find. But then I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with it.”
“What’s the current home of Darwin’s intellect?” Tyler asked her.
“Where his brain is,” Grant said. “We need to find where he’s buried.”
Alexa shook her head. “No, André specifically said his ‘intellect.’ We have to go where his thoughts are preserved.”
“How can his thoughts be preserved?”
“Of course! The largest collection of Darwin’s letters, notes, and books is at the University of Cambridge library in England. The numbers must point to a specific document in the library. We’ll need to find the right combination of numbers. There must be millions of possibilities on this page.”
Brielle leaned forward. “What’s a hallux?”
“It’s a big toe. The lateral one must refer to the little toe.”
“So we need Apollo’s big toe and pinky toe,” Grant said. “Great. That makes no sense.”
An image of a foot flashed in Brielle’s mind. “The statues in the backyard!” she shouted in triumph. “That has to be what Laroche meant.”
“Because one of the figures was missing a foot?” Tyler asked.
“It’s a statue of Apollo. I’ve seen it before.”
“We can’t use it obviously, but then neither could Marlo Dunham,” Tyler said. “Laroche must have traced the foot to make the clue and then he destroyed it or threw it in the lake.”
“So we’re back to zero,” Grant said.
“No, we’re not,” Brielle said. “The reason I recognized the statue is because it’s a replica.”
Alexa snapped her fingers. “The fountain in the driveway! That’s a replica, too!”
Brielle nodded. “They’re both from the same place. We have to go to France.”
Tyler furrowed his brow at her. “Why?”
“Because the original statue was designed for the Sun King, Louis XIV,” she said, “and it’s now sitting in the gardens of Versailles.”
TWENTY-THREE
Zim allowed himself to enjoy the steady breeze while the thirty-five-foot power boat motored toward the town of Sidney on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. The late afternoon sun was starting to fade over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but they would reach port before dark. Then it was onto a flight from Victoria International Airport to Calgary, then to Heathrow in London and on to Paris after that. Zim wanted to absorb as much of the open air as he could before being crammed into a plane for the next fourteen hours.
The vessel reminded Zim of the one his father had owned when he and his brothers were young boys, the days when they’d gone out on long weekend excursions on Lake Michigan, the days before his father’s job at the auto parts factory was destroyed by the company owned by a Saudi sheik who bought the plant merely to shut it down. Those were the last happy times Zim could remember, and it was his first taste of how ruthless Arabs could be. The family had sold everything and moved to California looking for work, where his father was reduced to pounding out dents at an auto body shop until he drank himself to death.
Despite how much he reveled in the motion of the boat on the waves, Zim knew he couldn’t return to that life on Lake Michigan. He was a wanted man now and always would be. Stepping onto the dock in Everett was probably the last time he’d set foot in the United States. Europe would become his new home. If he ended up dying on this operation, at least he’d be going out in the birthplace of the white race. And he’d do it while making the Arabs pay for what they’d done to his family.
Pryor was down in the bunk napping while Marlo Dunham lounged next to him in a sweater and jeans that hugged her slim body. Pryor had been lusting after her ever since they’d picked her up on Mercer Island, but Zim felt no attraction to her. Brunettes didn’t do it for him. If he ever took a wife, she would have to fit the Aryan ideal of a tall blonde Viking goddess. Maybe he’d settle in Norway. Carl had said it was filled with his type of woman.
“How long until we arrive?” Dunham asked.
“A couple of hours,” Zim said. “We’ll be in plenty of time for the flight.”
“I’m not concerned about that. You both need to alter your appearance to match the passports or we’ll be arrested the moment we go through security in
Victoria.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got the disguises in the cabin. We’ll put them on before we dock. What about you? You’re as wanted as we are now.”
“I’ve got a blonde wig, a different nose, and glasses.”
“Blonde, huh?”
Dunham sneered at him. “Don’t even think it. I’m not interested.”
“What if I don’t care?”
“What if I don’t show up at the airport and you have no plane tickets? Remember, I funded your jailbreak, and I control the purse strings on this mission. Without my money, your friend Pryor over there wouldn’t be able to build a flashlight.”
Zim gritted his teeth. He didn’t relish being in thrall to this or any other woman. “Relax. It was a joke. Besides, I don’t want Carl’s sloppy seconds.”
Dunham gave him the finger, leaned back, and put on her sunglasses.
She had hooked up with his brother four years after Victor was sent to prison. Carl told him it was fate, but Zim always thought it was a little convenient that she latched onto him just before presenting her plan to attack the summit with this old Nazi weapon. He later learned that she had found out about the tragic Zim brothers and seen an opportunity. Carl was too much of a stooge to realize what was happening. Dunham pushed all of his buttons in precisely the right way.
She had used their shared mutual tragedies to reel Carl in. Years before, Dunham had fallen in love with some kind of peacenik who joined an aid organization supporting the Palestinian cause. Just like a woman, she was so head over heels for the guy that she went to Gaza with him. When an Israeli airstrike hit the apartment complex they were living in, her boyfriend was killed, and Dunham was injured so badly that not only did she lose the baby she was carrying, she lost the ability to ever have children.
Zim didn’t like Dunham, but he could identify with her sudden change of attitude. Tragedy could do that in an instant. Dunham returned to the US stewing in hatred and convinced that both the Israelis and Palestinians were scum. Laroche kept a close watch on Israeli news and, unaware of her pathological grudge, took pity on Dunham because his own mother had been killed in a Palestinian suicide attack. He offered her a job to take advantage of her education in archaeology, which she had planned to indulge when she moved to the Middle East. Laroche hoped her background would dovetail with his cryptozoology passion. With no other job prospects, she took the position and worked for him faithfully for the next three years, despite his allegiance to Israel.
The Loch Ness Legacy tl-4 Page 14
