“If you’re lying to me,” she said, “I will find out. Your suppliers will dry up, and your customers will know you are
Hull put up his hands in acquiescence. “I assure you that’s all I know. If you can’t find him, I think that says more about the Russian intelligence forces than it does about me.”
Bedova looked at him for several seconds. Hull was a skilled liar. If he was holding back, she would never know. But she didn’t think he would give her a false lead.
She stood. “One more thing.”
“Yes?” he said, coming around his desk.
“If you attempt to warn Colchev that we are coming, you won’t live to the end of next week.”
“No need to threaten me, Ms. Bedova. I’m fully invested in your success. Literally.”
She nodded and walked out. While she rode the elevator down, she texted her team.
Find out how quickly we can charter a flight to Alice Springs.
FOURTEEN
“I don’t care what it costs,” Jess said to Tyler and Grant, putting her phone away and taking a seat on the sofa next to Fay. “We need your help.”
While Jess had taken a call, the rest of them had moved to the living room for coffee and gone over Fay’s story twice more. The tale was the same all three times, so Tyler was confident Fay wasn’t lying. Whether she had all the facts right was another matter. Memories could grow hazy over that stretch of time.
Jess seemed surprised that Tyler hadn’t jumped at the chance to join them on their quest. “Come on? What do you say? Want to have an adventure?”
Tyler glanced uncomfortably at Grant, who shrugged as if to say, “Why not?”
“Don’t you think a private detective would be a better choice?” Tyler said. “We’re engineers.”
“But you’re also investigators. Who else would I hire? Some local PI who tracks down ex-husbands late on their child support?”
“You need some kind of international investigation firm.”
“How much more international can a firm be than Gordian? Your website says you have offices in thirty-five countries.”
“But you also want to find out how the Roswell incident is connected to the Nazca lines. Don’t you want an archaeologist?”
“I’ve already talked to a dozen archaeologists,” Fay said. “They all thought I was crazy.”
“Besides,” Jess said, “Nana has been working on this for five years nonstop. She could have a PhD in the subject by now if she had gone to school for it. I bet she knows as much about the Nazca culture as anyone.”
“What do you want us to do?” Grant said.
“We want you to help us track down whoever it was that attacked me,” Fay said. “They have to have some answers about the engraving.”
“At the very least we have to know why they want the artifact,” Jess said.
Tyler’s eyes went to the engraving. “Did you show it to the police?”
“Yes,” Fay said. “They didn’t believe me. They think this is about something else.”
“Like what?”
“They said they think it was a pair of robbers who showed up under false pretenses to get the cash in my house.”
“How much cash?”
“I have a safe with a hundred thousand dollars inside. Part of Henare’s life insurance payout. I use the money to pay for travel to Peru twice a year to study the Nazca lines and their ancient city of Cahuachi. The safe’s fireproof, so it survived. The police think I must have told someone about it, but I didn’t. I have no idea how thieves could have known about the money.”
“Why would they burn down your house and chase us if they were looking for cash?” Tyler said. “Burglars would have bugged out when things got hairy.”
Fay shrugged. “I’m just telling you the police’s current theory. I’m sure it’ll change, but they said the investigation might take a while.”
“And we don’t have that much time,” Jess said. “More men could come back at any time.”
“Or never,” Grant said.
“Maybe. But until we find out what was so important about this piece of wood, Nana and I will be looking over our shoulders constantly. Even if she gives it to someone else, she may not be safe.”
Tyler sighed and looked at Grant. “What do you think?”
“I’m up for it if you are. We were going to take a few days off anyway.”
Jess and Fay looked at him expectantly. Finally, Tyler said, “All right. We’ll do what we can.”
Jess pumped her fists in the air. “Yes! I knew you wouldn’t let us down.”
“Thank you so much,” Fay said.
“The only problem is that we don’t have many leads,” Tyler said. “We’ll contact Billy Raymond and see if anyone has asked him about Fay, since the video seems the likely place where these guys heard about you.”
“I’ll get on that,” Grant said, and took out his phone as he left the room.
“We can take the piece of wreckage and the engraving back with us to Seattle for analysis in our lab. We might get some new info about the materials used.”
“We might want to put that off for a while and go another direction,” Jess said. “The phone call I took was from a contact I have with the police.”
“You have an in with the cops?” Tyler said.
“I still do occasional decoding work for them.”
“Do the police have a lead?” Tyler said.
Jess nodded. “Yes, they do, but they think it’s pretty thin. One of the tourists at Shotover Jet posted a video online of you three commandeering the jet boat. He also caught the men chasing you on camera. Apparently it’s plastered all over the Web.”
“Someone recognized Foreman and Blaine?” Tyler asked.
“So he claims. An Australian student at a Charles Darwin University extension campus. He emailed the police telling them that he thinks he saw one of the men last week.”
“Where was this?”
“At a research facility just outside Alice Springs in central Australia. The student’s name is Jeremy Hyland.”
“Are the police following up on it?”
Jess shook her head. “Foreman and Blaine’s passports had no stamps for Australia, so the New Zealand police thought it was just the ramblings of an overexcited kid, even though he provided a pretty detailed description of Blaine. They’re swamped with the rest of the investigation right now, so his lead is a low priority.”
“Why do you think he’s right?” Tyler asked.
“Because I called Hyland. He said he’s pretty sure he saw Blaine at his university facility. He was driving the car of a man who came to see their research.”
“Pretty sure doesn’t sound very sure.”
“He also mentioned that Blaine was missing part of his left ear.”
That got Tyler’s attention. He thought back to his fight on the jet boat and remembered Blaine’s torn left earlobe up close, just before Blaine was crushed against the rock outcropping, most likely mangling the evidence of the disfigurement.
But Fay had noticed it, too.
“That’s him!” she blurted out. “It looked like the lower part of Blaine’s ear had been ripped off. He
“And even better,” Jess said, “the student claims to have seen Blaine’s passenger just yesterday driving down the main highway through Alice Springs.”
