“I’ll have to take your word for that. I never met her.”
“You did, as a baby, but I don’t expect you’d remember that. What did the attorney want?”
“She left me some money.”
“That’s how she was. Good heart.” Jack paused. “So how did you find me, and how do you know I changed my name?”
“She passed on some personal papers about my father, and apparently she’d been keeping track of you. I guess she was still interested in keeping in touch. She mentioned you were using a new name.”
“I’m surprised. She never reached out.” He stopped as Allie entered with two cups of coffee and placed them on the table.
“Hope you like it black. We don’t have any milk. Sorry. You want any sugar?” she asked.
“No, black’s fine,” Drake said.
She stared at him for a moment and then left them to their discussion, returning to the kitchen.
Both men took appreciative sips of the rich hot brew before setting the cups down to cool. Jack leaned back in his chair and resumed talking.
“You say she left some papers?”
“Right. About my father. His history. About you and him going to South America. Where he died.”
Jack nodded. “That’s correct. Another sad day.”
“I want to hear about it. She says he was murdered.”
Jack looked away, seeming to drift to another place, then took another gulp of coffee. “That’s right. Killed in the jungle. In Peru.”
“How did it happen?”
“You want the long version or the short one?”
“I just flew hours to hear it. Might as well take the scenic route.”
Jack exhaled and nodded again. “Like I said. I always knew this day would come. You know, I recognized you from twenty yards away. You look that much like him. A young version, but still, you got his build and his face. Eerie, really. Like a carbon copy.”
“I’ve seen photos of him. We do look a lot alike.”
“Yup. Well, I suppose there’s no point in beating around the bush. Patricia was right. He was killed like a dog by Russians.”
Drake’s eyes widened. “Russians? What were Russians doing in the South American jungle? And why kill him?”
“That’s where the story gets complicated.”
“Complicated or otherwise, I want to know everything…”
“Then I’ll start at the beginning. With two men. Vadim Olenksi, formerly of the KGB, and his sidekick, Sasha Berekov. Two of the worst miscreants to ever walk the earth. Dangerous as diamondbacks and twice as mean. They were looking for the same thing your father was. I guess they wanted to eliminate the competition. So they killed him.” Jack gave him a bleak look, tormented, as though the wound he was opening was as fresh as the morning frost. “They killed him without a second thought. And the reason we all changed our names and moved the hell away from wherever we were, dropping everything, leaving whatever we had behind, was because we were all worried they’d do the same to us.”
Chapter Nine
“I don’t understand. Why would two former KGB operatives want to kill everyone connected to my father?” Drake asked.
“Because of what they thought one of us had. Your father’s journal. The key to finding the treasure they were after.”
“His journal?”
“Yes. Your father had a nearly photographic memory, but he was a writer, and he liked to set things down on paper. He laid out all his reasoning, including the result of his research, which took him years. Almost a decade, actually. This was before the Internet, so you had to go to libraries and museums in whatever country had the resources you were looking for. He must have taken a half-dozen trips to Peru and Bolivia and Brazil before the final one. He was like a man with a disease.” Jack stopped, considering his next words. “Your dad ditched the journal before he went south. He never told me where he hid it.”
“I inherited his memory, too, I guess. It’s not eidetic, but it’s close. Why would he hide the journal?” Drake asked.
“Even then he understood it contained a lot of information some might do anything to get their hands on.”
“Sounds paranoid.”
“Paranoia becomes prudent planning when a threat appears. He learned that from me. You learn to live by that maxim in Special Forces.”
“I expect you do,” Drake said, trying to be polite.
Jack took another pull on his coffee. “What do you know about what he was looking for?”
“What I learned from Patricia’s notes. Something about a lost Inca city of gold. You mean he actually thought it was real?”
“Not at first. But over time, he became convinced of it. Paititi. Where the pre-Columbian treasure of the Incas was stored, lost forever to history when the Spanish systematically eradicated their culture. But he wasn’t the first to believe that the legend was based in fact, so not as crazy as it sounds. Plenty of bright minds have gone in search of it, only to come up dry. From all over the world. As recently as in the last few years.”
“Maybe because it doesn’t exist. Like the El Dorado. Or any of the other treasure myths.”
“Perhaps, but your father didn’t believe that. And he was the smartest man I’ve ever known. And the man was like a lamprey once he latched on to something.”
Drake paused. “How did you know him?”
“Met in high school and were buds ever after. Only he went to college and I went into the service. When I left after seven years, it was like nothing had changed. Except, of course, for the bullet wounds and scars. I was in the Rangers. Caught the tail end of ’Nam. Trust me — the movies got that completely wrong. Even the most realistic can’t capture what it was like. It takes a lifetime to get over that kind of thing. I’m still working on it.”
“How did you wind up hooking up with him to go to South America?”
“It was a natural fit. He needed someone who knew his way around the jungle and was combat hardened — someone who could handle a gun and a knife in case we ran into trouble. Don’t get me wrong. I trained him to be about as good as anyone could get, but his heart wasn’t in it. He wasn’t a fighter. He was an explorer. Anyway, I spent a couple of months in the rainforest with him. It’s my deepest regret that the Russians got to him when I was making a supply run. Only a three-day trek roundtrip, but it was enough.”
Drake leaned forward. “How? How did he die?”
“It was probably painless. Do you really want to hear this? Why? What’s it going to change?”
“I need to know. Everything,” Drake said softly.
Jack shook his head and then shrugged. “All right. When I got back to our camp, I found him by a stream. He’d been shot in the head, execution style. I don’t know whether he’d been beaten or tortured…the animals had gotten to him.”
“How do you know it wasn’t the natives?”
“I’m confident it wasn’t them. Early on in our jungle days he rescued a small Indian child who was drowning and returned her to her father. From that point on, he was untouchable to them. I wouldn’t say they were in love with him, but they let him do his thing while they went about their business. Plus, deep in the Amazon, the Indians don’t have guns. They use bows and blowguns. And back then, the drug cartels hadn’t moved in — Colombia was the primary cocaine-growing region, so the jungles of Brazil and Peru weren’t infested with killers like I hear they are now. That leaves the Russians. Your father and I knew they were in the area, looking. But obviously, we misjudged what they would do to find the treasure.”
Drake studied Jack’s face. “Tell me more.”
“Not much to tell. Cutthroats. Vicious. No conscience. Ex-KGB, they were trying to find the treasure for their employer, an oligarch — one of the bosses that wound up running the filthy place. The only positive is that seventeen years ago both of them wound up in a Siberian prison. So they got what was coming to them, even if it wasn’t for your father’s death.”