He shook his head. “I don’t know, but this has to be why Mariella Montez brought the flag to New York. She was going to give it to the Hunt Foundation and ask us to send an expedition down there. I’m sure of it.”
“Well…in a roundabout way she got what she was after, then, didn’t she?”
“I guess you could say that.” Gabriel chuckled. “An expedition of one.”
“Two,” Cierra corrected.
He had glanced down at the flag again, but something about the soft tone of her voice made him look up at her. She had been holding the towel around her, but it had slipped a little, leaving the upper slopes of her breasts uncovered. Gabriel had a good view of the enticing valley between them. It was nicer geography than any you’d find on a map, he thought.
“Two,” he agreed as he lifted a hand, slid his palm along her arm and shoulder, enjoying the sleek warmth of her flesh. His hand went behind her head, into that damp tangle of midnight-dark hair, and urged her closer to him. She rested her hands against his chest as their lips met.
That left the towel loose to slide down so that nothing was between them. Gabriel felt his desire growing as the kiss became more urgent. The surroundings were hardly romantic, but that didn’t matter all that much when the attraction between two people was strong enough, as it was here.
And at least nobody was shooting at them right now, he thought as he pushed the flag aside so that Cierra could lie back on the bed and pull him on top of her.
Chapter 12
Now that they had a better idea where they were going, speed was of the essence, Gabriel thought. But there was one stop he wanted to make before he and Cierra left Villahermosa and headed south through Chiapas toward Guatemala.
The next morning Cierra made a phone call to the museum. The young man who answered, a graduate student at the university who was interning for the semester, was very upset, she told Gabriel later. Everyone believed she had been kidnapped. Esparza had apparently told the police he had received a ransom demand from the kidnappers, who had first tried to snatch Cierra at the museum and then ambushed her and her escort after they left Señor Esparza’s party two nights previously.
Covering his tracks for when she turned up dead, Gabriel thought when he heard about the phony ransom demand.
Cierra had assured Luis, her intern, that she was all right and that she hadn’t been kidnapped. The opportunity to lay her hands on a valuable artifact had come up unexpectedly, she told him, so she’d had to leave town in a hurry without letting anyone know where she was going. What she needed him to do was to access the information in the office computer about Enrique Montez, who had sold the Fifth Georgia’s regimental battle flag to the museum. Yes, she knew the sale was a hundred years ago. Yes, she realized that the records were incomplete and out of date. She understood how difficult it was, what she was asking. But if Luis could make an effort to track down the Montez family, Enrique’s descendants, and find out if they were still in Villahermosa, and if so where they were, that would be a great help, por favor. He would be demonstrating his research skills, which would surely put him in good standing for a full-time position after he got his degree. Oh, and if he could keep the assignment strictly confidential, just between the two of them…
Gabriel and Cierra waited by the phone, gave Luis the three hours he insisted he would need, and then she called again. He picked up on the first ring and even from halfway across the room Gabriel could hear the elation in his voice. He had the information—what a stroke of luck, the previous director had ordered all the records updated just five years earlier, and this was one of the files that had gotten the full treatment. They had a telephone number for Jorge Montez, the great-great-grandson of old Enrique, who was an executive now in one of the oil companies headquartered in Villahermosa. Or at least he had been five years ago. Cierra thanked him copiously, promised him the earth and sky in terms of reference letters and job prospects, and got off the phone as quickly as she was able, which wasn’t nearly as quickly as she and Gabriel would have liked.
Another phone call, this one to Montez’s office, gained them the news that Montez still worked there but hadn’t gone into the office today. Instead he could be found working from his home, a sprawling mansion with a beautiful lawn that sloped down to the Grijalva River. Gabriel nodded appreciatively as they approached it. So this was what life in Mexico was like if you were an oil company executive.
Not unexpectedly, there were bodyguards at the wrought iron gates leading into the estate, but Cierra had called ahead and spoken to Señor Montez, telling him that she was the director of the Museum of the Americas in Mexico City and that she wished to speak to him about a flag the museum had purchased from his ancestor a century earlier. The bodyguards searched Gabriel and Cierra, looking at them with intense suspicion because of their clothes and the rattletrap old pickup, but it wasn’t long before they were shown into an airy breakfast room with large windows overlooking the lawn and the river.
“Dr. Almanzar,” Montez greeted Cierra as he stood up from a glass and aluminum table where an attractive, middle-aged woman remained seated. He introduced her as his wife Dolores, then went on, “I am so pleased to meet you.” He frowned a little at their clothes, just as the guards had done. “And this is Señor Hunt?”
“That’s right,” Gabriel said as he shook hands with the man. “From the Hunt Foundation in New York. We’re working with Dr. Almanzar on this matter.”
“Something about my great-great-grandfather’s flag?” Montez asked, still frowning. He was around fifty, with steel gray hair and a neat mustache. “I would not normally have agreed to meet with you on a day when I have so many obligations already, but it is not always that one gets a telephone call about the events of a century ago. This flag you are asking about, it is the one passed down to Enrique by his grandfather Hortensio, the one Hortensio received from the gringo warlord El General?”
“That’s right,” Cierra said. “You know the story?”
Montez said, “It is a family legend, how the American Confederates visited my family’s home all those years ago.”
“Not this house, though,” Gabriel said. “It’s not old enough.”
“Oh, no,” Montez replied with a shake of his head. “At that time my family still had a plantation in the country. That was before oil was found in the region. El General and his men rode through there and stopped on their way to wherever it was they were going.”
“Tell him about the tigre, Jorge,” Señor Montez’s wife urged.
“Of course, of course, but first…would you care to join us for breakfast?”
“That would be wonderful, señor,” Cierra said.
When she and Gabriel were settled at the table with plates of food and steaming cups of coffee in front of them, Montez began telling them about the jaguar—because that was what the word tigre meant, Gabriel knew.
“In those days the tigres still came out of the forest and raided the plantations, carrying off livestock and some-times children as well. One of old Hortensio’s daughters was out riding one day when her horse scented a tigre and bolted in panic. The girl was thrown off. She was not hurt badly by the fall, but she would have been easy prey for the tigre had not El General Fargo come along at that moment. With one shot he killed the tigre, even as it leaped at the girl.”