Chalk grinned wide and cocky at Senator Morgan. “Everything’s peachy, Lil. I’ve never let you or Uncle Sam down before.”
The lady from Wisconsin smiled back. She enjoyed twitting Chalk. He hated her so much for this he balled his fists white, but he pressed them hard into his lap to keep from lashing a fatal karate chop at her gullet.
Half closing her eyes, she purred, “We’ve got forty minutes before we land at Dulles.” Pulling out a small lace hanky that was more air than thread, she dabbed cookie crumbs from the corners of her mouth, brushed more crumbs off her broad bosom, then hooked her thumb toward the sleeping quarters at the back of the jet. “Feeling lucky?”
Chalk groaned inside. No, she did not want sex, thank God, at least not from him. In addition to the bed, the aft compartment held an elegant metal chess board arrayed in ivory pieces secured with small magnets in case of turbulence or unsportsmanlike fits of pique. In his boyhood, Chalk was a ranking chess genius. The Senator, on the other hand, was a haphazard latecomer to the game with no sense of strategy, nor any inkling of tactics. She might as well have been removing Chalk’s pieces from the board by fillips from her middle finger as by any talent. Yet Chalk had brought her to checkmate only once, in their first game years ago. He’d done it in five moves.
The win resulted in such howls of protest from the Senator that they had brought the plane’s first officer sprinting back through the compartment door with his pistol drawn, and a wide-eyed look that feared assassination had taken place at Flight Level 43. Senator Morgan did not speak to Chalk for the rest of that flight, nor did she did return Chalk’s calls for the next two weeks during her sulk; and in the interim they had lost out on several lucrative deals.
Now, Chalk made a point of losing every game, attributing his early success to beginner’s luck. She was conceited enough to believe she was outsmarting him ever since. Unwilling to roll over completely, Chalk forced her to work for every win as much as her feeble skills allowed.
For some reason, the Senator’s near stochastic way of playing was getting even worse, if that were possible. It was more and more difficult for Chalk to prolong their games, let alone throw them. He would never risk spanking her again for fear of another ridiculous outburst, another expensive silence. As he followed her back through the seats to the chess board, he mused that in working with the Senator, there were too damn many ways to get screwed.
CHAPTER 3
Stay cool. Get in the airlock. Focus. Ben coached himself over and over in a numbing mantra of delay and denial that he had used hundreds of times on long sniper missions. How could his mind encompass the enormity of what he had just discovered? He would think about it, deal with it, later.
Then the mantras failed him, and the facts hit home in his gut like point-blank bullets. This was his father. Missing for so long, and so close to home, to reunion. Why the hell did Ben have to be the one to find him? And if this wreck and the drowned remains were only a few days old, where had his father been for the other fifteen years, presumed — what exactly — dead? Alive, but uncaring?
Pulling out more old tools from his days in the service, Ben mentally smashed this heavy slab of news into smaller fragments. Then he swept them behind a thick inner wall where a hundred other dead faces waited for resurrection and justice. With his mind freshly cleared and tightly tuned, he went to work.
Ben already knew the boxes with their space-age locks and metal skins would resist ordinary prying and bashing. Maybe he would lug them to his house to cut them open with his welding rig. Lord, no. That would draw too many questions.
Now that was something odd. Ben could not pinpoint the moment he decided this was night work. ‘Til now he had been a truthful and forthcoming man in all matters. To his surprise, this dark choice had come naturally, subconsciously. Perhaps it was his Smith Island heritage rearing up like a long-dormant gene. His people’s DNA was not only ready for hard work in honest sunlight, but was also steeled for bloody twilight jobs. This wreck and everything to do with it was for the shadows. He confirmed the decision. Without a doubt this matter was best handled away from prying eyes. Ben’s own certainty disturbed him. This path involved denying Pap the final rites he was due. No rush on that now. Worry about it later.
There had to be a key to these boxes. Ben rifled the pockets of the dead man’s field jacket. Just a nameless body, he told himself. Ben was simply gathering intel. Seeking assets. Nothing more than he had ever done in the service of his country. He found no key. There was something heavy weighing down the coat’s large side pocket, but Ben did not pull it out. He knew what he was looking for. He focused on hunting up the key.
He carefully patted the pants’ slash pockets, then lifted the flaps to the mid-thigh cargo pockets. Loose change, a small penknife. Where was that key? Not sure if he were girding himself for nausea, remorse, or both, Ben pushed the May West aside and reached beneath the shirt collar. He avoided looking at the face again. Felt a simple chain. Dog-tags? He lifted the chain over the head of the — thing. The not-Pap. The not-human. Not one, but two gray, flat metal plates dangled from the chain. They were as wide as a credit card, and as thick. They were several inches longer than the average MasterCard. There were no letters, nor any numbers. Just random-looking grooves and holes milled into both sides.
Without another look at the body, Ben slogged back to the wreck. More ice water leaked down his back to complement the chill in his heart. He pulled up the corner of the tarp he had freed before. More silt churned. Another infuriating wait for clearer water. He tried the first key. There was a scraping and ringing sound, metal on metal. The lock did not yield. Ben turned the key over. Slid it in again. Still nothing happened. His curiosity boiled. What the hell had Richard Willem Blackshaw died to bring home?
At that thought, Ben suddenly looked around him for his mother, Ida-Beth. He had good reason to believe she too might be close by. There was no sign of her. Thank God, and just as well. Ben wanted to remember her the way she was when he last saw her alive years ago, not decaying down here like his father.
Ben’s cold, stiff fingers fumbled as he tried the second key. Nothing budged. He flipped it over, and nervously scraped it around the opening before lining it up square and sticking it in again. Finally, he heard the dull pergaddus clank and thud of a deadbolt springing open. He heaved back the heavy lid with both hands.
Even on the floor of the Chesapeake, with the sun hidden above fifteen feet of turbid water and a scudding layer of gray cloud, there was absolutely no mistaking the radiant gleam. Ben’s eyes widened. He reached out. Oh my blessing! The box was jammed with gold.
CHAPTER 4
Ben shut the lid as if someone might have seen. Silt whirled. Feeling foolish, his heart pounding, he lifted the lid again. Both magnificent and unreal, but there it was. With the broken end of his knife, he easily etched a thin line in the soft surface of one of the big gold bars. That is when he noticed a faint image cast into each piece. It looked like a roughly sketched, lopsided smiley face. As if the cheery seventies icon had suffered a stroke. If this were the minter’s mark, it was the strangest and crudest Ben could imagine.
Ben pried one of the luminous slabs out of the close-fitting box. Over twenty pounds, he reckoned. He had no idea what it was worth, but he knew it was a fortune. Then his mind shuddered to a halt like a heavy-duty pick-up truck on a washboard dirt road. This was just one bar. Just one bar from just one box. He stared at the full cargo. A quick count. Two boxes deep, times two boxes wide, by five boxes laid end to end along the boat’s keel. Twenty boxes, and all of them could be filled like this one. Not possible!