You asshole. I’ve faced down invisible armies and rusalka. I’ve found vimana keys. Have you done that? I’ve probably faced more weird shit than half the CIA combined.
Shay kept a smile plastered on her face. “Oh, I’m not exactly useless outside of the classroom. Digs in remote areas aren’t always the safest thing, you know.”
Daniel looked her up and down, but the look in his eyes was clinical and detached, with not a hint of a leer. “Guess you keep fit for all that field work, and you’re right. The world’s not a safe place, and it’s become even more unpredictable these last few years.”
“Yeah, something like that, and what about you?” Shay glanced over her shoulder, having just noticed no waitress had ever stopped by. For all she knew, the entire diner was a CIA front.
Daniel gave her another too-perfect smile. “What about me?”
“You’ve got your little silence cube, which suggests you aren’t just a pencil pusher.” She almost mentioned the defensive seating but didn’t want to tip him off that she was more than a professor.
Daniel laughed. “I get out into the field for fun on occasion, sure.”
There was an ease to the man she found disarming, but there was also an almost forced quality to it. Every once in a while, the façade would drop for a second and the eyes of a calculating and dangerous man looked at her.
What’s your deal, Goldstein? You planning to track down aliens and kill them to make sure they don’t threaten the country? If so, I better keep close to you to protect James.
Shay made a show of glancing at her phone. “I’m flattered by all this, but I do have to go. I have a lecture to deliver at the university.”
Daniel raised an eyebrow. “A CIA agent shows up to recruit you to help him with, among other things, investigating aliens, and you’re concerned about being late for your day job?”
The tomb raider shrugged.
He laughed. “I know I’m making the right choice in reaching out to you. You must love your work.”
“I do.”
“Okay, then. I’ll see you around, Professor Carson. It should go without saying, but just to be clear, I’d rather you not mention our little conversation to anyone.” A hint of menace crept into his eyes. “And remember, I am with the CIA.”
Shay snickered and stood. “Who would believe me even if I told them?”
“Good point. Until next time, then.”
She offered him a final polite nod and turned to leave, still unsure whether to trust the man or if he knew more about her than he was saying. She wanted to believe Peyton had fooled the CIA, but the whole conversation also could easily be some sort of long-play manipulation by the government.
Does he work for Project Nephilim or Ragnarok? Maybe they figured out I’m on to them.
Shay stepped out of the diner with doubts swirling in her mind.
Chapter Twenty
Shay threw her arms out to her side to get the attention of the students filling the room. The lecture on Lake Toplitz was going even better than she’d anticipated.
They are eating this shit up. Nice.
“Deadly traps. That’s what I’m talking about. Of course, even with all that gold most likely sitting on the bottom of the lake, no one’s been able to recover it, and there have been fatalities.
“Given what we know about magic now, we can’t dismiss out of hand that magical traps haven’t been set up to guard the treasure. Even though magic was contained before the truth about Oriceran came out, that’s not the same thing as saying there was no magic. So, many of these lost treasures have to be considered much more dangerous than before.”
Murmurs swept the room as Shay advanced her presentation slide from a picture of gold bars to an image of an eagle pin.
“And the gold’s not the end of it,” Shay continued. “Which argues for traps even more. We now have a fairly good idea that the Nazis had access to a number of magical items, and many of their great treasure hordes likely also included such things.”
Shay aimed her laser pointer at the picture of the eagle pin as she finished her lecture, the students all listening with rapt attention.
“Recent evidence suggests that artifacts like this might be on-site, and at least one might have been an artifact of magical nature—an enchanted eagle pin. Unfortunately, any useful artifacts are lying under piles of unstable logs at the bottom of a deep lake. It’s not exactly an easy site for recovery, and any sane archaeologist would stay well away from it because of the dangers.”
“What about the gold?” someone shouted from the back. “Is it all still there, you think?”
The rest of the students laughed.
Shay shrugged. “We can only presume that most, if not all, of the gold is still there, along with the pin and other artifacts, if it was indeed at that location, which it very well might not have been.” She shook a finger. “Now, I know some of you are thinking this is just a lot of legend and second-hand rumor, but when you examine the strands of evidence together and how they point at one another, you quickly see that they all point the same direction.”
She pressed a button on her pointer/clicker, and a picture of Heinrich Schliemann replaced the eagle pin. “In these sorts of situations one can’t ever be sure, but remember, everyone thought Schliemann was a nutjob until he found Troy. Sometimes, you’re just going to have to be fine with being called crazy until you prove you’re right.”
The students laughed again.
Mary, who was sitting in the front, shot her hand up. “Professor Carson, I just wanted to say you really did your research. It’s like you were there.”
A few other students nodded in agreement.
Basing a lecture around an actual tomb raid might have been risky, but with the artifact secure
