The merchant had spent the last few years paying for his hubris.
‘So,’ Rustichello whispered, ‘do you need to rest for today, or shall we continue?’
The merchant smiled and slowly clambered to his feet. ‘I think we can continue.’
He moved to the gap in the wall at eye level, grateful to no longer smell the latrine. Rustichello’s smiling face quickly appeared on the other side of the opening. The merchant handed him the empty cup through the hole. ‘Thank you, my friend.’
Rustichello took the cup and nodded.
He was only in his fifties, but he looked at least seventy — his hair white, his skin pale, his eyes sunken. He had been captured in an earlier naval defeat, and as a result he had already languished in the dungeon for a decade by the time the merchant had been imprisoned. Everything about him was thin and haggard, the look of a man who was nearly defeated.
The one thing that would return life to Rustichello’s face was story. It didn’t matter whether the tale was told or received, he thrived on sending his mind to other places. At first, the elder man had impressed the merchant with tales of King Arthur, but once Rustichello had heard some of the details of the merchant’s travels to the far edges of Tartary it was the only subject that he wanted to talk about.
And write about.
Amazingly, on the night of his imprisonment — before the pouches on his clothing had been properly searched — Rustichello had discovered a small nook under a loose stone in his cell and had managed to hide a book, a broken quill, a small inkpot, and a pair of spectacles.
Not much, but enough to keep him sane.
The book, a stained and worn copy of Herodotus’s history, had seen better days, but it was serving a different purpose now. The Venetian would talk about his journeys, and Rustichello would carefully write down each word in French in the spaces between the lines of existing Greek text. He was defacing one of the greatest historians who ever lived so that the merchant’s adventures might one day lead Rustichello on a journey of his own.
That is, if the guards never found his hiding place.
And if he lived long enough to be released.
And if he could grab the book before he departed.
Everything, it seemed, came down to that one small word.
If.
‘Shall we begin?’ Rustichello asked.
The merchant turned his back to their window and slowly slid down the wall in his cell. Rustichello did the same. It was their custom to sit with their backs to the wall between them. The Venetian would speak for a few hours each day, until his voice felt dry, while Rustichello scribbled and scratched his quill on the paper of the book, always attempting to tease out more information on the hidden wealth of Asia and the treasures that his friend might have left behind.
‘Where were we?’ the merchant asked through the wall.
‘You were about to describe the people of Tebeth.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said, remembering, as he closed his eyes and left the cell in his mind. ‘The province of Tebeth was terribly devastated at the time of our arrival …’
The merchant had no problem recalling the most trivial details of his journeys abroad, and yet there were some aspects of his travels that he refused to share with anyone. Though he was extremely grateful for the kindness that Rustichello had shown him over the years, he wasn’t ready to trust his neighbor with his greatest secret: the location of his family’s fortune.
That was a secret that Marco Polo would keep for himself.
1
Hector Garcia couldn’t have cared less about the view.
He was there to hack.
Garcia was oblivious to the panoramic landscape of the Rocky Mountains outside the windows of the suite he had leased on the upper floor of the CenturyLink Tower. He hadn’t rented the office for the scenery but for its proximity to the roof of the second tallest building in Denver — and its array of antennas, satellite dishes, and telecommunications equipment. As it was, he had covered most of the windows with thick tinting to reduce the glare on his monitors and to regulate the temperature inside the suite.
The room was kept at a perfect sixty degrees from the industrial-strength air conditioning unit that constantly battled the heat output of the room’s vast collection of computing hardware. Three racks of enterprise-grade servers and switches from Juniper Networks, Cisco, and half a dozen other vendors filled one wall of the room. An adjacent office held the rest of his system in row after row of next-generation devices that resembled stacks in a public library.
The wood floor of the main room was littered with overlapping power cords and network cables, and Garcia lived in the middle like a spider in its web. A collection of tables was configured in a circle, with a small gap to access his comfortable office chair in the center. A total of twenty-four screens — two rings of twelve monitors — encircled the single seat like the walls of a fortress.
In front of the monitors was an assortment of wireless keyboards, mice, track pads, web cameras, and other peripherals, plus an unopened package of Twinkies. Garcia would save the snack cakes for later. He never ate or drank at the desk, preferring to eat in the kitchen down the hall or on the mattress he had thrown in the corner. He’d seen too many people ruin a good system with a spilled can of Mountain Dew. The Twinkies were only there to remind him to get up once in a while to eat.
In his early years as a hacker, Garcia often went to bed hungry because he had spent all of his money on computer equipment instead of food, but money was no longer a problem since he had been hired by an enigmatic Frenchman named Jean-Marc Papineau to assist a team of specialists in finding the world’s most famous treasures.
The first mission had taken the team to the Carpathian Mountains in search of a missing Romanian train. Then they were asked to find the tomb of Alexander the Great in the vast Egyptian desert. After a devastating tragedy on the mission, Papineau had reluctantly paid the surviving team members a portion (twenty percent) of their agreed-upon fee (five million dollars each) while placing the rest of their money in separate trust funds that they couldn’t touch as long as they continued to work on his team. They still hadn’t received payment for their second mission, but Garcia wasn’t the least bit concerned about the money.
In a matter of seconds, he would be forty million dollars richer.
As his eyes skimmed financial transactions on twelve of the monitors, he watched as funds simply disappeared from the accounts of several would-be dictators in Africa, a Ukrainian mobster, and a few corrupt politicians in America before reappearing in an offshore account of his own. To Garcia, it was blood money that none of them deserved, and he was one of the few people in the world who could do anything about it. He would keep two of the forty million as working capital and anonymously donate the rest to charities. The only thing money got him personally was the promise of more computing power, but as long as he maintained his association with Papineau and his team, that would never be a problem.
Five of his monitors were hooked into a quantum computer manufactured by Payne Industries and maintained by Papineau in the team’s headquarters in Florida. Each of the five connections had been established through a back door that Garcia had installed into the quantum. Papineau was aware of and occasionally tracked one of these connections, but the other four would remain undetected as long as Garcia had access to a keyboard.