On the honest business level, regular employees entered a glass entrance to administration offices that ran along one entire wall of the building. The rest of the spacious floor housed thousands of valuable paintings, sculptures, and a great variety of antiques. All had impeccably bona fide origins and were legally purchased and sold on the open market. A separate department at the rear housed the preservation department, where a small team of master craftsmen worked to restore damaged art and ancient artifacts to their original splendor. None of the employees of Zolar International or Logan Storage Company, even those with twenty years of service or more, remotely suspected the great clandestine operation that took place beneath their feet.
The driver exited the tunnel and entered an enormous sprawling secret sub-basement whose interior floor space was even larger than the main surface level 20 meters (66 feet) above. About two-thirds of the area was devoted to the accumulation, storage, and eventual sale of stolen and smuggled artworks. The remaining third was set aside for the Zolar family's thriving artifact forgery and fabrication program. This subterranean level was known only to the immediate members of the Zolar family, a few loyal copartners in the operation, and the original construction crew, who were brought in from Russia and then returned when the subterranean rooms were completed, so no outsiders could reveal the facility's existence.
The driver slipped from behind the steering wheel, walked around to the rear of the van and pulled a long metal cylinder from inside that was attached to a cart whose wheels automatically unfolded once it was pulled free, like an ambulance gurney. When all four wheels were extended, he rolled the cart and cylinder across the huge basement toward a closed room.
As he pushed, the van driver stared at his reflection in the polished metal of the cylinder. He was of average height with a well-rounded stomach. He looked heavier than his actual weight because of a tight-fitting pair of white coveralls. His medium brown hair was clipped short in a military crew cut, and his cheeks and chin were closely shaven. He found it amusing that his shamrock green eyes took on a silver tint from the aluminum container. Now deceptively dreamy, they could turn as hard as flint when he was angry or tense. A police detective, good at providing accurate descriptions, would have described Charles Zolar, legal name Charles Oxley, as a con man who did not look like a con man.
His brothers, Joseph Zolar and Cyrus Sarason, opened the door and stepped from the room to affectionately embrace him.
'Congratulations,' said Sarason, 'a remarkable triumph of subterfuge.'
Zolar nodded. 'Our father couldn't have planned a smoother theft. You've done the family proud.'
'Praise indeed,' Oxley said, smiling. 'You don't know how happy I am to finally deliver the mummy to a safe place.'
'Are you certain no one saw you remove it from Rummel's building or followed you across the country?' asked Sarason.
Oxley stared at him. 'You insult my capabilities, brother. I took all the required precautions and drove to Galveston during daylight business hours over secondary roads. I was especially careful not to break any traffic laws. Trust me when I say I wasn't followed.'
'Pay no heed to Cyrus,' said Zolar, smiling. 'He tends to be paranoid when it comes to covering our tracks.'
'We've come too far to make a mistake now,' Sarason said in a low voice.
Oxley peered behind his brothers into the reaches of the vast storage room. 'Are the glyph experts here?'
Sarason nodded. 'A professor of anthropology from Harvard, who has made pre-Columbian ideographic symbols his life's work, and his wife, who handles the computer end of their decoding program. Henry and Micki Moore.'
Do they know where they are?'
Zolar shook his head. 'They've been wearing blindfolds and listening to cassette players ever since our agents picked them up in a limo at their condo in Boston. After they were airborne in a chartered jet, the pilot was instructed to circle around for two hours before flying to Galveston. They were brought here from the airport in a soundproof delivery truck. It's safe to say they haven't seen or heard a thing.'
'So for all they know, they're in a research laboratory somewhere in California or Oregon?'
'That's the impression laid on them during the flight,' replied Sarason.
'They must have asked questions?'
'At first,' answered Zolar. 'But when our agents informed them they would receive two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash for decoding an artifact, the Moores promised their full cooperation. They also promised to keep their lips sealed.'
'And you trust them?' Oxley asked dubiously.
Sarason smiled malevolently. 'Of course not.'
Oxley didn't have to read minds to know that Henry and Micki Moore would soon be names on a tombstone. 'No sense in wasting more time, brothers,' he said. 'Where do you want General Naymlap's mummy?'
Sarason gestured `toward one section of the underground facility. 'We've partitioned a special room. I'll show you the way while brother Joseph escorts our experts.' He hesitated, pulled three black ski masks from his coat pocket and flipped one to Oxley. 'Put that on, we don't want them to see our faces.'
'Why bother? They won't live to identify us.'
'To intimidate them.'
'A little extreme, but I guess you have a point.'
While Zolar guided the Moores to the enclosed room, Oxley and Sarason carefully removed the golden mummy from the container and laid it on a table covered with several layers of velvet padding. The room had been furnished with a small kitchen, beds, and a bathroom. A large desk was set with note and sketch pads and several magnifying glasses with varied degrees of magnification. There was also a computer terminal with a laser printer loaded with the proper software. An array of overhead spotlights was positioned to accent the images engraved on the golden body suit.
When the Moores entered the room, their headsets and blindfolds were removed.
'I trust you were not too uncomfortable,' said Zolar courteously.
The Moores blinked under the bright lights and rubbed their eyes. Henry Moore looked and acted the role of an Ivy League professor. He was aging gracefully with a slim body, a full head of shaggy gray hair, and the complexion of a teenage boy. Dressed in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the sleeves, he wore his school tie knotted under the collar of a dark green cotton shirt. As an added touch he sported a small white carnation in his lapel.
Micki Moore was a good fifteen years younger than her husband. Like him, she had a slender figure, almost as thin as the seventies era fashion model she had once been. Her skin was on the dark side and the high, rounded cheekbones suggested American Indian genes somewhere in her ancestry. She was a good-looking woman, beautifully poised, with an elegance and regal bearing that made her stand out at university cocktail and dinner parties. Her gray eyes focused and then darted from one masked brother to another before coming to rest on the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo.
'A truly magnificent piece of work,' she said softly. 'You never fully described what it was you wanted my husband and me to decipher.'
'We apologize for the melodramatic precautions,' Zolar said sincerely. 'But as you can see, this Inca artifact is priceless, and until it is fully examined by experts such as you, we do not wish word of its existence to reach certain people who might attempt to steal it.'
Henry Moore ignored the brothers and rushed to the table. He took a pair of reading glasses from a case in his breast pocket, slid them over his nose and peered closely at the glyphs on one arm of the suit. 'Remarkable detail,' he said admiringly. 'Except for textiles and a few pieces of pottery, this is the most extensive display of iconography I've ever seen produced on any object from the Late Horizon era.'
'Do you see any problem in deciphering the images?' asked Zolar.
'It will be a labor of love,' said Moore, without taking his eyes from the golden suit. 'But Rome wasn't built in a day. It will be a slow process.'
Sarason was impatient. 'We need answers as soon as possible.'
'You can't rush me,' Moore said indignantly. 'Not if you want an accurate version of what the images tell
