“No,” Hammond said, smiling and swirling the cube in the crystal tumbler. “I don’t have a single place in the whole goddamned world I have to be.”
3
Somewhere Sunny
“You don’t want to know?” Dwayne Roenbach said.
“I don’t,” Caroline Tauber said with an easy smile. They lay in the shade of a cabana on a sugar sand beach. Dwayne was propped on an elbow and running the palm of his hand gently over Caroline’s swollen belly. She wore a maternity swimsuit they bought in Majorca that had a panel open to leave her, to Dwayne, beautiful belly exposed.
“Boy or girl. Doesn’t matter?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that.” She laughed.
“But you didn’t ask. You were right there, and you didn’t say, ‘Hey, am I having a girl or a boy?’”
“We’ll know soon enough.”
“I should have been there,” Dwayne said.
“To check for a wee-wee?” she asked.
“No son of mine will have a wee-wee, Mama.” She laughed.
“Seriously, I should have been with you,” he said and lay back on the chaise they shared.
“It was just an ultrasound. You had to be with the guys. You saw where the treasure was buried,” Caroline said and used both hands to smooth out the sunblock Dwayne had been applying to her tummy.
He made a hmmph noise. But it was true. Dwayne had a vantage point on the day, two thousand years plus prior when the crew of a Phoenician bireme pulled an iron-bound chest ashore on an islet in the Aegean. Caroline witnessed them actually burying it at the foot of an escarpment, but Dwayne would not allow her to travel, especially on an extralegal trip to uncover a hidden fortune in gold coins. Especially since it was far from a hospital.
Dwayne marked the spot on the charts she indicated. The Ocean Raj, the modified container ship they were leasing through a shell corporation, remained moored in the sea near Nisos Anaxos in the chain of tiny atolls on the diamond sea. This was the island where Dwayne and Caroline witnessed the arrival of the Lion of Ba’al, the pirate boat that dropped off the trove of coins two millennia before.
The treasure was buried in a pit on a beach that was now covered by twenty feet of water as ocean levels rose and land masses sank over time. It would be simple enough to retrieve it from the relative shallows. The difficulty came with doing so in secrecy. Many had hunted for the legendary gold coins over the centuries. The first to uncover them was entitled, legally, to bragging rights only. The Greek government would grab the goodies, so the salvage work would have to be done on the down-low.
The former SEAL, known to them only as Boats, devised a plan to literally suck the treasure out from under the world’s nose. A suction device was ordered from Fukuwara, a Japanese firm specializing in undersea exploration gear. It was purchased through the same shell corporation that Lee Hammond formed to lease the Raj. The manufacturer in Kyoto questioned the need for an extra nine hundred meters of reinforced tubing, but payment in cash quelled their objections as well as their curiosity. The Raj made for the port at Alexandria and picked up what Chaz Raleigh called “the world’s biggest Hoover” in Alexandria. Boats and his Ethiopian crew fit it at sea while they returned to Nisos Anaxos.
They moored a quarter mile off the west coast of a collection of rocky atolls spiraling north of the coast of the main island. After several dives, they set up the steel framework needed to position and weigh the business end of the hose on the sea bottom. Over several nights they hauled sand and debris through the hose and aboard the Raj where anything larger than a dime was sifted from the silt.
On the second night, the coins began to appear on the sifting screens. They came up in rust-colored sand, the oxidized remains of the iron-banded chest. The coins numbered in the thousands and looked like dirty gray discs. Jimbo Smalls struck the edge of one with the blade of a knife, and the exposed metal gleamed with a rich yellow hue. When Boats was satisfied that they’d sucked up all they could they reeled in the hose and set course for anywhere but the scene of the crime.
Lee Hammond called the day before from Paris to let Dwayne and Caroline in their luxury hideaway know that the prize was going to add millions to their collective kitty.
“Well, I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere,” Dwayne said, pressing her hand in his. He settled back on the chaise to listen to the gentle surf rolling in.
A shadow blotted out the sun, and Dwayne opened his eyes to find a waiter from the hotel standing over him.
“Yes?” Caroline said.
“I am here to remind you of your luncheon reservations at Chiro’s, sir and madame.” The waiter smiled professionally.
“Reservations?” Dwayne asked.
“In thirty minutes. Party of three.” The waiter bowed once and departed.
“Party of three?” Dwayne said.
They had enough time to go to their suite and change from swimsuits into clothes more appropriate for the hotel’s main restaurant. The dining hall was mostly empty as it was mid-afternoon and well past lunch serving hours. The maître d’ led them to a table at the rear of the room, partly sheltered by potted palms.
Seated at the table was a dark-haired man with eyes of the most unusual tarnished green. He half stood to greet them.
“Hello, Samuel,” Dwayne said, pulling a chair out for Caroline.
4
Galilee
“This is not my idea of a vacation,” Hammond said and slapped a mosquito, leaving a smear of blood down his arm.
“I thought you said you like adventure,” Bat called back from a turn in the trail.
“That doesn’t sound like me.”
“Then what’s your idea of a vacation?”
“Anywhere you are, sugar.” He trotted to catch up with her, but she moved fast through the trees ahead of him.
Bathsheba Jaffe laughed as she hiked
