Sam braked heavily so that one of the riders, stuck in the deadly zone on the wrong side of the road while overtaking, was able to pull in front of him.
He came around the next bend and pulled onto the curb.
There were still three motorcycle riders behind him. They slowed down with him. Sam shook his head, wound down the window, and waved at them to pass. He eyed the riders, their faces invisible behind tinted helmets. They didn’t move.
What the heck’s wrong with you?
Sam pushed the gear into first, released the clutch, and floored the engine. The Lamborghini took off hard, accelerating up the next climb. The dirt bikes were fast, but with their nobly tires were not designed for the blacktop. The LM002 was much faster. Yet the riders fought to keep up with him.
Were they playing a game?
He squinted trying to split his time between watching what was ahead of him and the riders behind him. Up ahead, two more motorcyclists — the ones who had nearly been killed trying to overtake him earlier — seemed to have slowed right down, below the speed limit, as though waiting for him. As soon as he got close, they took off again, setting the pace to match his.
Sam put up with the game as the highway weaved in and out through a series of escarpments and valleys. The road narrowed, with a steep drop on the right-hand side, leading to the Blue Mesa Reservoir far below. The riders seemed to encroach farther and farther into his personal driving space — removing any doubt he might have that they were intentionally closing in on him.
The question was, why?
The riders seemed to surround him, blocking part of his vision ahead as well as behind. He swung the wheel to the right and the rider next to him backed off. In front of him, the riders stayed barely a car length ahead of him. Somehow slowing down, constantly forcing him to brake to avoid hitting them.
He was in a three-ton truck. What did they think was going to happen?
Sam glanced at his rearview mirror.
One of the riders was so close that the bike’s front wheel seemed to disappear beneath the Lamborghini’s utility tray.
He tapped the brakes, just enough for his brake-lights to glow red.
The riders dropped back for a moment and then opened their throttles all the way to close whatever gap Sam had created.
The bikes moved with the synchronous precision of professional high divers. Coming in close and then parting.
Sam had had enough; he braked hard coming to a full stop.
One of the riders swerved and flew past him. Another one slowed to a stop right next to him, lifted his visor to meet Sam’s eye.
Sam wound down the window. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
The man reached for a handgun strapped to the side of the bike’s fuel tank.
Sam spotted it out the corner of his eye. He dropped the clutch and gunned the pedal, thankful for the Lamborghini’s unbelievable acceleration off the mark.
The rider fired a couple shots, but Sam had already gotten ahead of the man, and the shots raked the back of the LM002’s utility tray.
Now that any pretense of normal road rage was out, the riders seemed to race harder to catch him. Sam took the heavy truck from side to side across the lanes of the highway, making sure not to let any rider get close enough to the side of him to get a decent shot off.
A couple tried to shoot from behind, but they were wasting their time and bullets. It would have taken a near miracle to hit him through all the reinforced steel and tubular aluminum that made up the frame and paneling of the Lamborghini, Sam reassured himself, thankful that the Italian car company had originally built the truck with specifications designed to be pitched to the military.
Sam let his speed creep up, trying to outrun the slower dirt bikes. He was starting to get ahead too, when he came around the next bend, and found a large truck — an eighteen-wheeler — coming his way.
It had drifted onto his side of the road.
Sam jammed on his brakes, but it was too late. There was nothing he could do. He was going too fast. The heavy Lamborghini didn’t have ABS and its wheels locked up, causing it to slide. He swung the wheel round the opposite direction, trying to control the slide, but it didn’t work.
Instead the LM002 ran off the road, rolling down the near vertical embankment for nearly three hundred feet, bounding up and over a series of boulders, before being stopped suddenly by a large tree.
On impact, Sam swung forward, hitting his head hard on the truck’s A-pillar, knocking him out cold.
Chapter Seven
Jesse McKenzie waited patiently for his guests to arrive.
He had listed the image of the mask on a renowned archeology forum and had received interest from three separate parties, all of whom were willing to pay $10,000 just to examine the mask and inspect the site where it was found.
Rick Rodier, an archaeologist, Sandi Larson, an anthropologist, and Sam Reilly, a millionaire and a legend in the world of oceanography and marine recovery. The archaeologist worked with the University of Chicago, the anthropologist with Oxford University, and Sam Reilly — the youngest of the three of them, belonged to the Global Shipping Reillys. Each had their own reasons for wanting to examine the mask, but it was Reilly whose story most intrigued him, arguing that it was a worldwide concern.
In his email, Sam Reilly had said that he was also an amateur diver and had found something similar himself lately, and would pay handsomely for the opportunity to study the mask, and anything else similar that Jesse had found.
At 3:30 p.m. Rodier and Larson were the first to arrive at his house in Nathrop. They had met at the airport and hired a compact rental car together.
Jesse greeted them out in front with his wife. “I’m Jesse and this is Betty, my wife.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Rodier replied with a firm handshake. “I’m Rick Rodier. Professor of archeology at the University of Chicago. And this is Sandi Larson, from Oxford.”
“Welcome to Nathrop,” Jesse said, shaking Sandi’s hand. “Nice flight?”
“Fine,” Sandi answered, her eyes wide with genuine pleasure. “Wouldn’t have mattered if it wasn’t. For a find like this I would have crossed the Atlantic in a single engine biplane if I had to.”
Jesse smiled brightly, revealing crooked teeth.
He was confident he’d found the right people to be examining the strange mask. He took the two academics in at a glance. The two couldn’t be more polar opposites, despite both being at the top of their respective fields. Rick Rodier was tall, with the sort of comically lanky figure that almost looked like it had recently been released after spending too much time on some sort of medieval torture rack. His hair was salt and pepper, leaning more toward the salt than the pepper. He wore a kind smile and a friendly disposition on his face, which looked like it had been carved out of hardship, betraying every one of his eighty-two years of life.
In contrast, Sandi Larson was short with wide brown eyes, the same color as her hair. Despite her overnight flight from the UK, she looked bright, and vivacious. At just forty years of age, she’d already achieved tenure at Oxford in the faculty of anthropology. She had an athletic figure that suggested many of her years of study had been spent in the field. She was striking, a combination of intelligence, youth, and beauty that came close to paralleling his own wife some twenty years earlier.
Betty asked, “Can we offer you a drink or anything?”
“No thank you,” Rodier and Larson replied.
Larson added, “I’m afraid we’re both too impatient to see the mask to eat or drink anything. Do you know when Mr. Reilly is meant to get here? I had expected to see him at the airport.”
Jesse shook his head. “Shouldn’t be long now. He was driving on I-70 coming through Grand Junction when we spoke this morning. Said he was planning on driving through on his way to Colorado Springs tonight. Truth be told, I would have expected him to be here by now. Do you know him?”