at the ready, eyed him warily. “Did your idea work?”
Dombrovski nodded. “The dogs drove Suzdalev straight to me. Our mission is accomplished.” He would secure the specimen in a lead-lined case when they returned to camp.
“So now we return to Yekaterinburg and rescue the tsar, sir?” the man said.
Dombrovski would have to confirm Suzdalev’s claim about the death of Nicholas. If he was correct, it was only a matter of time until the civil war was lost to the Reds.
“Perhaps not, my friend. When we return to civilization, we may need to find a different path.”
As he led his team away from Suzdalev’s final resting place, Dombrovski was already formulating a new route and a new plan. He had to get Suzdalev’s find as far from the communists as possible. Instead of taking the Trans- Siberian railway west toward Moscow, they would head east — to Vladivostok and eventually, to America.
QUEENSTOWN
ONE
They called it the Snow Farm, and Tyler Locke had to admit this winter brought a bumper crop. White stretched across the rolling hills unbroken until it reached the rocky peaks in the distance. As he strolled out the lodge entrance, Tyler zipped up his leather jacket and put on gloves. Although there were no clouds to block the morning sun, it was still a nippy negative ten Celsius outside, not the temperature he was used to in mid-July.
With a wave to the bellman, Tyler walked out into the frigid air. He squinted against the blinding white before donning his sunglasses. In the distance, clusters of Nordic skiers whisked across groomed courses. Behind him he could hear the whine of car engines being pushed to their limits as they raced around a track.
A silver Audi S4 rounded a bend piled high by the Snow Farm’s massive snow blowers. The Audi drifted one direction, then the other, throwing up a rooster tail of snow behind it. The turbo howled as the car accelerated toward the hotel entrance. Just when it looked like the driver was going to blow past him, the antilock brakes chattered, and the car skidded to a stop in front of Tyler.
The driver’s door flew open, and a black man bounded out with a quickness that must have amazed the bellman watching from inside. Though Grant Westfield’s six-foot frame was two inches shorter than Tyler’s, he was built like a tank and moved like a Ferrari. If Tyler shaved off his short brown hair and quadrupled his time in the weight room, he might look half as formidable.
Not that Grant was looking particularly intimidating at the moment. Tyler barked a laugh when he saw that his friend had squeezed all 250 pounds of muscle into an enormous orange parka. To Tyler, Grant looked like the unholy offspring of the Michelin Man and a pumpkin.
“Where did you get that?” Tyler said.
Grant patted the car and smiled. “Isn’t it cool? I talked the guys at the Proving Grounds into letting us borrow it for the day.”
New Zealand’s Southern Hemisphere Proving Grounds, located halfway between Wanaka and Queenstown in the South Island’s Southern Alps, is the leading facility for auto companies that want to torture-test their upcoming cars in winter conditions while the US, Japan, and Europe bask in summer. Tyler and Grant were there to put a top-secret hybrid prototype through its cold-weather paces for an unnamed manufacturer. Now that they were done with their main work, they had one more job to do before they took a few days off to explore some of the adventures for which the Queenstown area was famous.
Skiing, however, would not be one of the activities. Unlike Tyler, Grant hated the cold.
“The car is great,” Tyler said, “but I was talking about your nuclear-powered parka.”
Grant stretched out his arms and then adjusted the black ski hat that covered his shorn head. “It’s awesome. Even Antarctica is afraid of this parka. You don’t like it?”
“
“What are you doing?” Grant said.
“I’m driving.”
“The hell you are. I procured the vehicle, so I get to drive.”
“When was the last time you drove in snow?”
“Two years ago. When we were in Whistler for that job at the Olympics.”
“Exactly,” Tyler said. “You tore the bumper off my Cayenne.”
“An accident. Could have happened to anyone.”
“In the condo parking lot?”
Grant shrugged. “Then this is just the practice I need. Four-wheel drive, top-of-the-line snow tires, electronic stability control.”
“Ten airbags.”
“Right! You’ll be plenty safe. What more could you want?”
Seeing that Grant wouldn’t relent, Tyler trudged back to the other side and got in. Before he even had his belt on, Grant punched the accelerator and they were fishtailing down the road.
“Where to?” Grant asked.
“Left when we get to the highway. The sheep station is north of Queenstown. My phone’s map says no more than an hour to get there, even with your driving.”
“Man, I cannot believe we are doing this.”
“Aren’t you a little curious to see what she’s got?”
“Come on. This lady must be senile. A seventy-five-year-old woman claims to have witnessed the crash of an alien spacecraft at Roswell and has a piece of the wreckage, and you think she’ll hand us anything other than some unidentifiable hunk of twisted metal? If she’s creative, it’ll at least be from a 1947 Buick. Who is she anyway?”
“Fay Turia. Born Fay Allen. Raised on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, until the age of ten when her father’s cousin got him a job as a foreman at a sheep station in New Zealand. The whole family moved down here, and she hasn’t lived in the US since.”
“You checked her out?”
“As much as I could,” Tyler said. “She emailed me a copy of her birth certificate to prove she was born in Roswell. It was legit.”
“So she lived there. Why does she want to hire us?”
“She called Gordian the foremost airplane accident investigation firm in the world.”
“Well, that’s true. At least she’s perceptive in that respect.”
Gordian Engineering was the company Tyler had founded. With a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and a PhD from Stanford, he’d since happily stepped down from his role as president of the firm and now served as its chief of special operations, which meant he could pick and choose the projects he wanted to pursue. Grant was his best friend and the company’s top electrical engineer. Their complementary skills let them oversee a wide range of projects, including forensic accident analysis, demolition, loss prevention, and automotive testing.
But this request was not in the normal line of inquiry. Most of their jobs were for large multinationals that could afford the rates they charged. An individual asking for their assistance was highly unusual.
“Did she ever say why she waited sixty-five years to come out to the world?” Grant asked.
“She said she’s been doing her own investigation on the down low because she heard too many stories about what the government did to the other people who came forward about the crash. But now she’s stuck and wants to see if we can help her out.”
“And you agreed to this out of the goodness of your heart?”
“She sweet-talked me into it. Of course, I wasn’t going to take on the job officially.”
“Probably not something we want to add to our website.”
