“No, but I’ve read about some of the discoveries he’s made in marine archeology over the years. He’s got quite a reputation.”
Rodier’s brow furrowed. “Not all of it good.”
Sandi made a slight grin. “Oh yeah, have you met him?”
“No. But I’ve heard things.”
“Like what?”
“He’s the son of shipping mogul, James Reilly. Like his father, he’s a bit of a playboy. Spends a lot of time in exotic locations with expensive toy cars and beautiful women.”
Jesse shrugged, thinking about his new-found wealth. “Hey, that doesn’t sound like too bad a life if you have the money.”
Rodier gave a small wave of his hand. “Real people in the world have to earn their way in life. It can’t all be given. No one who ever significantly contributed to society had everything given to them.”
Sandi folded her arms across her chest. “All right. Let’s judge Sam Reilly by the sort of man we meet, not the one we’ve heard about. I for one am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt — at least until he arrives. You never know, maybe he’ll be the first rich guy who’s decidedly down to Earth.”
In the distance, the sound of a powerful engine being gunned echoed throughout the mountain ranges.
Jesse glanced over his shoulder, and spotted a red Porsche Carrera 911 convertible, driving at least double the speed limit down the narrow residential street.
Sandi looked up and asked, “What is that?”
Rodier met her eye, grinning all the way. “That Ms. Larson, I believe is Sam Reilly — the first down to Earth rich guy you’ve ever met…”
Chapter Eight
Sandi Larson disliked everything about Sam Reilly.
He was handsome, for sure, but no amount of attractive physical features could make her warm to the man. Reilly was, as Rodier had forewarned her, everything that was bad about children brought up with unlimited wealth, starting with the fact that he raced down the residential street in a three hundred-thousand-dollar red sports car without any thought for the other road users he might just kill.
She ran her eyes across him.
His clothes were thoroughbred Ivy League — monogramed polo shirt, beige cargo pants, and a pair of hideous gray metallic sneakers that looked like they belonged to a popstar from the eighties. He was roughly six feet tall, with well-groomed blond hair, blue eyes, and cheesy smile full of evenly spaced teeth. His features were all classically patrician, as though good breeding and money could produce something worthy of Michelangelo’s chisels. He was overtly handsome, like something out of the set of a Calvin Klein photoshoot.
Sam Reilly ran his eyes across her, too — making no attempt to hide any lascivious thoughts he might have. He shook her hand, holding it for a moment longer than he should have, and said, “I see this ancient mask is not the only beautiful thing I get to see today.”
She ignored the comment, turned to Jesse and said, “Okay. Now that we’re all here, let’s go see this thing.”
Seeing her discomfort, Jesse nodded and motioned toward his old Dodge Pickup. “Come on, you can ride up front with me. The mine site is about thirty minutes from here.”
“Sounds good.”
She climbed into the front passenger seat, while Reilly and Rodier sat in the back. Jesse started the big diesel engine, and headed out along the same road they had come in on. About ten miles out, he turned off the blacktop and onto an old logger’s trail. It took them up a steep embankment, leveling out on a narrow trail.
Sandi glanced at Jesse who, despite the thousand-plus foot drop over the edge, seemed undeterred. He had probably driven this route hundreds of times over the years. The thought reassured her. She wasn’t afraid of heights, but she would have hated to die before getting the chance to see the extraordinary mask.
Her mind turned to the image of the mask she’d seen.
It was decidedly Neanderthal. Not Mayan, as Rodier had first theorized. Either way, it was about to disprove what was long held to be fact — that Homo sapiens were the first to cross the Bering Strait land bridge and colonize North America. Even if she was wrong and Rodier was right, it dispelled the long-standing belief that the Mayan empire only extended into South America and never this far into North America.
Whatever the case may be, it was going to be interesting to find out.
Jesse pulled up the Dodge next to the entrance of an old, seemingly abandoned mine shaft, set the handbrake and killed the engine. A derelict mine cart followed a dilapidated set of narrow-gauge railway tracks that led through an adit that looked like it had well since passed its use-by date.
Her lips formed a half-smile. “You found the mask in there?”
Jesse shrugged. “Afraid so, ma’am. Is that going to be a problem?”
Sandi opened the door and got out. “No problem. Just amazed that you’re still working the old mine. Let’s go.”
“Very good.”
Jesse handed out miner hard hats with attached flashlights to all three of them. He then reached down and started up his generator. Lights led in an irregular, lurching path down the tunnel, and a buzzing sound echoed up from the tunnel.
“Fans and pumps,” Jesse told them. “Safety precautions. I have a multi-gas detector with me that’ll start making an unholy racket if we wander into a bad patch. If that happens, I want you to turn around and climb out of the tunnel as fast as you can without endangering yourself. Just get the hell out.”
There was a general murmur of agreement among all three of them that they wouldn’t have to be told twice.
Jesse glanced at their faces, holding his gaze for a moment longer, and said, “All right. Then follow me.”
Sandi took the hard-hat, switched on the overhead flashlight and followed him into the mine. Behind her, Reilly and Rodier were discussing the structural integrity of the old shaft. She didn’t care. Jesse had told her he’d been down the mine for nearly forty years and had never had a problem. That was good enough for her.
She moved with a determined stride as she walked into the mine shaft, which ran straight into the side of the rock, gradually angling lower as it penetrated deeper into the mountain.
Rodier said, “Are you the Sam Reilly that discovered the Magdalena in Sweden a couple of years ago?”
“Yes,” Reilly said. Jesse had no idea what they were referring to.
“Oh!” Larson said. “The airship! I’ve read a little about that!” And she started rattling off the story. In 1939, an airship took off from Nazi Germany with a number of wealthy Jewish passengers eager to escape the land of Hitler and the Kristallnacht. The airship had vanished for decades. A few years previously, Sam Reilly had discovered the airship…underground. The passengers had all expired, but the contribution that it had given to history was, as Larson said, incalculable.
Reilly let her ramble on. For some reason, as Larson spoke, he seemed to be getting more and more irritated.
They finally reached the part of the tunnel where Jesse had blasted, and the conversation stopped.
In an appalled voice, Larson said, “Oh, no.”
“What?” Jesse asked.
“The roof has caved in, hasn’t it?”
Jesse laughed and explained to her about using sand and amalgam to help muffle the blast, then showed her the passage where they would crawl through. “After I saw how much glass was inside there, I decided not to open it up any farther.”
Larson crawled through, amazed by the glittering obsidian that covered every nook and cranny, even outside the wall of amalgam. That’s how it was. Once you knew that a certain type of rock was there, it popped out at you everywhere. The trick, especially with gold mining, was to know what to look for in the first place.