Roberts & Maclay
Thriller
Copyright © 2021 by Roberts & Maclay (Roberts & Maclay Publishing). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the authors, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Translator: Edwin Miles / Copyeditor: Philip Yaeger
Imprint: Independently published / ISBN: 9798501801554
Cover Art by reinhardfenzl.com
Cover Art was created with photos from: depositphoto.com, Plane: icholakov01, smoke Plane: YAYImages, Fire Plane: Noppharat_th, Bullet: iLexx, Waterfall: dubassy, Wall: jipen, river: adamov_di, Temple small: lunamarina, Temple big: diegograndi, Bridge: pawopa3336, Mist: shmeljov, Big Smoke: v74, Big Fire: bisagraph . gmail.com, Sky: portokalis // Person: neo-stock.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
www.robertsmaclay.com
[email protected]
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
About the Authors
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“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
Marcus Aurelius
1
Somewhere in the jungles of Central America, February 2018
Leaves and branches whipped painfully at her face. The formidable humidity drew perspiration from every pore of her body, and sweat flowed in small streams down her back. Panicked, panting, she ran on through the undergrowth. She had no time for caution, no time to check that she was not about to run headlong into a poisonous plant or dangerous beast. Something far more menacing was right behind her.
Dr. Sienna Wilson was running for her life. She leaped over rocks, vaulted tree trunks in her path, ducked beneath low-hanging branches. The rest of her team was dead. Or more precisely, they had murdered each other, simply because they had been ordered to do so. She herself had managed to escape her colleagues’ fate only at the last moment. Luck had been on her side, and she had survived. Only now did she realize that they had crossed into sacred territory, had desecrated holy soil. Although the native inhabitants had been outwardly remarkably friendly toward them, something had seemed off. Alarm bells had been ringing in her gut from the start.
Days before, she had set off with a small team—herself, her boss Dr. Emanuel Orlov, three other researchers, and two soldiers that Orlov had hired to protect them. The Central American jungle was home not only to poisonous animals, insects and plants, but also to local cartels and freedom fighters who regularly kidnapped employees of the Western companies that were making inroads into their lands. The kidnappers then extorted millions out of the companies to finance their guerrilla wars. Scientists and tourists were also common targets, and some had never been seen again. And then, of course, there were the indigenous tribes.
Just a few weeks earlier, the press had reported on the case of two employees of the food company NutriAm. They had been working at a drinking water bottling plant and armed men had abducted them on their way to work. The company had been forced to pay two million dollars to free them and prevent a public execution on YouTube. Two million was pocket change for a company like NutriAm, but it was a fortune for freedom fighters waging a war against a corrupt regime. Orlov had read the reports, and insisted on bodyguards. They were cheaper than the insurance premiums.
The team had been tasked with finding exotic plants for the Genesis Program, a non-profit research center in the southwest of England. The ambitious botanical project comprised two enormous domes on 120 acres in Cornwall. Inside the larger dome, they simulated the climate of a tropical rainforest, while the smaller replicated a Mediterranean climate. The artificial ecosystems housed more than five thousand different kinds of plants.
The Genesis Program was a popular tourist attraction, but the scientists employed there were more than just well-paid gardeners. They also carried out invaluable research. The two domes had answered the question of whether such closed ecosystems were viable at all, a crucial issue for long space missions, especially NASA’s planned mission to Mars. But it also applied to the very real possibility that climate change and environmental degradation might soon make parts of our own planet uninhabitable, causing famine and leading to a shortage of drinking water. The Genesis Program could well provide much-needed solutions.
The team had battled through the jungle for several days without success before finally stumbling across something they could use. It was Dr. Wilson who’d found it. The plant she discovered—or rather rediscovered—had long been thought extinct. Others in her field had held this rare species of orchid to be no more than a fantasy. But there it was, in all its glory. Sienna and Orlov had gazed at its glorious blooms in disbelief. A seaman who had sailed from Spain to Central America with Hernán Cortés in the 16th century had described it in his diary, and in honor of his homeland had christened it Orchidea espagnola.
It was this same plant that might now cost Sienna her life. In rediscovering the orchid, they had wandered into a region that no white person had ever walked out of alive. And now Sienna knew why. Just minutes before, she had witnessed what the orchid could do. And she had succeeded in escaping its power.
She had no idea how long she ran without looking
back. Fear and adrenalin drove her on.
“Sienna!” she suddenly heard someone call behind her. She knew the voice—it was Dr. Orlov. Like her, he was on the brink of exhaustion. But also like her, he had survived.
“Did you see it, Professor? Did you see what happened to our team?”
Orlov nodded and lifted his hand. In it was an orchid.
2
Kulibin Park Hotel, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
“Can we finally concentrate on the next job? It’s important!”
Theresia de Mey was head of Blue Shield, the UNESCO-associated organization for the discovery and protection of cultural heritage. And right now, she was pissed. Three tired pairs of eyes looked back at her.
“Mother, we were sealed inside a cave just a few hours ago. We barely managed to escape with our lives. I want to find El Dorado just as much as you do, but can’t we take a couple days off before we start again?” Hellen de Mey asked.
Tom Wagner looked over at Hellen. It was obvious to him how exhausted she was. He was used to the kind of adrenalin rollercoaster they’d just been through, but it seemed to be taking a toll on her. “Give Hellen and François a couple of days’ R&R,” he suggested. “Then we’ll all be ready to focus on the job. Meanwhile, maybe you can tell us exactly what it’s all about?”
“Wagner, if you made the effort to actually read the brief, you’d save us all a lot of work.”
François Cloutard, behind Tom, chuckled. He’d been quiet since the meeting began but seemed to be having a fine time. Still, his wound was not making things easy for him, and he, perhaps even more than Hellen and Tom, had earned some time off. He’d been shot in the thigh just the day before, but had refused to stay in the hospital. The doctors had patched him up but he’d signed himself out again despite their protests. A man like François Cloutard was not about to let a mere flesh wound slow him down. “Madame, you know me and you know my past. I am an art thief, a smuggler, and a grave robber. I would like nothing more to go in search of El Dorado, but . . .”
He paused briefly and sipped the coffee that a waiter had served them there in their suite just a few moments earlier. He grimaced. “Un moment,” he said. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out his hip flask, poured a solid dose of Louis XIII cognac into the coffee cup, then took another sip. His face brightened. Theresia de Mey sniffed impatiently and drummed her fingers on the table. “Beaucoup mieux,” Cloutard said, “Madame, Hellen is exhausted. I am injured. You do not want to send us back to the front like this, do you? Even with new clues to the location of the greatest hoard of gold in human history, I am sure you would like us to be at our very best for the search.”
Cloutard gave Theresia de Mey a wink, and a hint of a smile appeared on her face. For a moment she lowered her eyes. Then she abruptly stood up, sighed, and paced back and forth through the suite.
“Is everything all right, Mother?” Hellen could see that something was weighing on Theresia.
“Everything is all right, yes. It’s just that we’ve already postponed this project too long. We have to get things moving.”
“Then let me start alone,” Tom suggested. “I can kick things off, and Hellen and François can rest up a little and join me in a few days.”
“The problem is that we need Hellen at the start.”
Hellen suddenly pricked up her ears. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll have to go back a little if we want everyone—” here, she looked disdainfully at Tom “—to understand.”
Tom tilted his head to one side. He could take a hint. It was about time he did something to counter Theresia’s image of him as no more than some rent-a-goon.
“The Albertina museum in Vienna has an enormous collection,” Theresia began, “most of it not even catalogued.”
“You mean the Albertina folks have no idea what they’ve got stashed in the basement?” Tom said.
“You could put it that way,” Hellen confirmed.
Cloutard was sitting up now, his interest aroused. Simultaneously, Tom and Hellen waggled their index fingers in front of Cloutard’s nose. “Don’t even think about it. Nothing gets stolen from the Albertina, understood?” Tom brusquely made clear.
“Bien, bien. J’ai compris,” the Frenchman said, raising his hands defensively.
Theresia de Mey shook her head. She was starting to realize what a motley crew she’d fallen in with: Thomas Maria Wagner, a former officer in the Austrian counterterrorism unit Cobra, who had a problem with authority and a talent for creating chaos. François Cloutard, art thief and erstwhile head of a global organization of grave robbers and smugglers—she could never be certain whose side he was really on. And her own daughter, Hellen de Mey, archeologist and historian, with whom Theresia had had a frosty relationship ever since the death of her husband, Hellen’s father. Altogether a far cry from a professional special ops team.
“All done with kindergarten, are we? Can we move on? Thank you!” she said icily.
“What have they found in the Albertina, Mother?” Hellen asked.
“We don’t know exactly. What we do know is that documents have turned up in which the name ‘Cortés’ appears and which mention some sort of ‘Golden Path’.”
Hellen’s and Cloutard’s eyes widened. Tom pretended to be just as fascinated, but was already getting annoyed at Theresia again. “Cortés was the Spanish conquistador who slaughtered the Mayans and the Aztecs, right?” he said.
Hellen nodded. “Yes.”
“Then how did the documents find their way to Vienna?”
“The Spanish line of the Habsburgs,” Cloutard said drily. “To explain all the connections now would take quite a while.”
“There’s just one problem,” Theresia said.
Tom grinned. This was where he came in. He was the problem solver.
“Officially, Blue Shield knows nothing about these papers. We were tipped off from the inside, but we can’t simply walk into the Albertina and start analyzing the documents.”
“Then let’s steal them,” said Cloutard, clapping his hands.
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, Monsieur Cloutard,” Theresia said. “But perhaps we should take a more subtle approach.”
“I’ve got an idea,” said Tom. “I’ll fly to Vienna and contact the chancellor. I’ve saved his skin several times, as you know, and he’s eternally grateful to me for that. And then there was that whole Florentine diamond thing. He’s got contacts who can help us.”
“Knowing the bureaucracy in Vienna, that’s going to take a few days,” Hellen threw in. “So Tom goes ahead and sorts things out with the chancellor, and we stay here and treat ourselves to a little rest and relaxation, then we can join him later.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Tom.
Cloutard nodded, too. He had gotten slowly to his feet, supporting himself on his walking stick, and laid one hand on Theresia de Mey’s shoulder.
“You can rely on us, Madame. We will get the job done, as always.”
Theresia de Mey looked up and smiled. Hellen, however, was suddenly unnerved. She did not recognize the look on her mother’s face at all. Warmth? Affection? Before she could follow the thought any further, Cloutard had already put it into words.
“Allow me to invite you to dinner this evening? I happen to know an excellent restaurant here in Nizhny Novgorod.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise us, François?” said Tom, who had spotted Hellen’s chilly gaze.
“All right, Mr. Wagner,” Theresia said. Tom flinched as she deliberately mispronounced his name. “You fly to Vienna tomorrow. Hellen and you, Monsieur Cloutard, will follow in a few days. But don’t keep me waiting long. It is extraordinarily important for Blue Shield that we find El Dorado.”
“I will put out my feelers, too,” Cloutard suggested. “Maybe there are others who know about the documents in the Albertina. We may have competition to deal with.”
“That would be marvelous, Monsieur,” Theresia said with a sweetness
in her voice that made Hellen roll her eyes.
“Why don’t we talk about this in more detail over dinner, Madame?”
Theresia and Cloutard were both on their feet now and already heading for the door of the suite.
“Mother,” Hellen began, although she was not entirely sure what she wanted to say.
“Yes?” Theresia de Mey stopped and looked back over her shoulder at her daughter.
Tom placed a soothing hand on Hellen’s arm.
“Oh, nothing,” said Hellen. “Have a nice evening.”
A moment later, Tom and Hellen were alone.
“You’re not thrilled about that at all, are you?” Tom asked—a rhetorical question, he knew.
“Not even a little bit,” Hellen said with a snort.
“Let’s go get a drink in the bar and you can tell me a bit more about El Dorado. I don’t want to be completely clueless.”
The Golden Path (A Tom Wagner Adventure Book 4) Page 1
