“A little?”
“Comes from being shot at and run off the road.”
“No question. Thankfully, this time you’re wrong.”
They stopped at the intersection and Sam looked back. Only a few slow-moving pedestrians were shuffling down the sidewalk, moving from shady spot to shady spot in an effort to stave off the worst of the sun’s effects. No questionable sedans were prowling the street, no furtive figures with earbuds were spinning suddenly to shield their faces from view.
When they returned to the hotel, Leonid met them in the lobby and they went to the pool bar overlooking the ocean. He walked like an old man and grumbled the entire way about the scuba school killing him slowly with their demands.
“They had me swimming laps — twenty of them, with no break — as my endurance testing. I was winded after two and thought I was hemorrhaging after ten,” he griped.
“But you made it,” Remi said brightly.
“What happened to your face?” Leonid asked, finally noticing something other than his own misery. “It’s swollen.”
“Oh, didn’t we mention it? Someone pushed our car off a cliff and shot at us,” Sam said with a nonchalant wave of the hand. “Remi bumped her head when we were swimming the rapids, trying to escape.”
Leonid regarded them as if they were mad. “No, really. What happened?”
Remi smiled. “I mouthed off and Sam let me have it.”
The Russian shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of you two.”
Sam leaned forward. “We really did get run off the road, Leonid. We don’t know by whom, or why, but it’s what happened. This morning.”
Leonid held his gaze, eyes searching for some sign of mockery, and, when he saw none, his face grew even more somber than usual. “I can’t believe it.”
“I know. We just finished up at the hospital and the police. To say it’s worrisome is the understatement of the year,” Sam admitted. “But we have some good news, too. Or, at least, some interesting news. There may be a treasure somewhere in the ruins.”
“What are you talking about? How do you know?”
Sam gave him the rundown. When he finished, Leonid looked even more upset than before. “Wait. So this is the king’s compound and, in addition to a curse, there’s a buried treasure?”
“You’re acting like that’s bad news.”
“It complicates matters. And it makes me wonder if that’s why you were attacked. Maybe the medicine man wasn’t the only one who knew about the treasure. It’s possible that word’s spread and someone else wants a chance at it. The divers could have talked, or the captains, and anyone who knew the legend would have gone into high gear.”
Remi glanced at Sam. “He’s right. Most people here are barely surviving. The prospect of unimagined wealth can do strange things.”
“Right. But we don’t actually know whether there’s even a treasure, much less where it might be. And let’s not forget it’s in eighty feet of water. In a cursed bay teeming with sharks and crocodiles. Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait until we located it before trying to knock us out of the picture?” Sam said.
Remi shook her head. “You’re assuming whoever did it is rational and logical. And we’re also assuming this has to do with treasure. It could be that we intruded on something we weren’t meant to see, even if we have no idea what it was, and they took action. It could be smuggling, drugs, anything. We shouldn’t assume we have all the puzzle pieces because after only a few days here the odds say we don’t.”
Sam nodded. “She’s right, as usual.”
Leonid grunted. “So where does that leave us? What should we do now?”
Sam’s brow furrowed. “I’m not sure we do anything different except keep our eyes open. We can’t really dive the ruins properly until the boat arrives anyway, so it’s a moot point.”
“I don’t like unknowns. Particularly when they shoot at you,” Leonid said.
“Agreed, my friend. But that’s all we have. I think a better question than trying to figure out the unknowable is how we treat our new knowledge of a possible treasure,” Sam said. “If we’re going to do anything more than catalog the site, we may want to consider bringing in some specialized talent. Because if we’re going to conduct a more thorough search, the ship’s divers aren’t going to do the trick — we’ll want a large pro team with related experience.”
Leonid nodded. “I gather you have someone in mind?”
Sam grinned. “Not someone specific, because many of those we’ve worked with in the past are busy with their own projects. But we have the resources to get whatever we need. Let’s put Selma on it and see who she can find. She can coordinate with the research vessel. Anything they don’t have she can get flown in.”
Remi took Sam’s hand. “He may look like just another pretty face, but every now and then he comes up with a good idea. I agree. Let’s get some serious talent here as soon as possible.”
“When is the boat supposed to be here?” Leonid asked.
“Tomorrow evening.”
The Russian rubbed his face and studied Sam and Remi. The dark circles and bags under his eyes lent him the appearance of an unhappy raccoon. “Then all you need to do is keep from getting killed for twenty-four hours or so while I endure the final tortures of the damned scuba instruction.”
Remi smiled. “Sounds like a good plan.”
“Particularly the avoiding being murdered part,” Sam agreed.
“No more driving around in the boonies,” Remi warned.
“My appetite for adventure is completely sated at the moment. One brush with death per day is more than enough.”
“The problem is tomorrow’s another day.”
“Right, but technically we had two brushes today: going off the cliff and being shot at. So that takes care of tomorrow, too.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Remi said, her tone skeptical.
Sam smiled. “I’m a changed man.”
“Sure you are, Fargo. Sure you are.”
CHAPTER 16
Jeffrey Grimes leaned back in the executive chair and eyed the others in the conference room, the air filled with the aroma of half-drunk coffee, tension, and frayed nerves. The end of another quarter was upon them and the publicly traded conglomerate they operated was going to report a loss — the third straight quarter the company had hemorrhaged money due to its international subsidiaries.
Grimes was a fixture on the Australian business and social scene, legendary for his high-risk strategies that had, until now, turned out to be winners. But the increasingly difficult financial landscape and tightened access to investment capital had proved more challenging than any he’d encountered and several spectacular flameouts had gutted the company’s balance sheet as well as investor confidence.
Going public had seemed a brilliant idea two years earlier when the Australian economy was booming and money was flowing like water. The initial offering had raised almost a billion dollars. But Grimes’s personal stock was locked up and his net worth had collapsed in the wake of bad bets in the mining and petroleum sectors when the company’s valuation dropped by half overnight.
The decline triggered covenants in the company’s debt agreements and now the wolf was at the door, the former golden child of the Australian investment community struggling for survival.
Grimes ran his fingers through his thick salt-and-pepper hair, worn longish and combed straight back, and sighed. “Can’t we push some of the bad assets off into a subsidiary, at least for this quarter? You know, the usual game of musical chairs?”
His chief financial officer, Curtis Parker, shook his head. “The regulators will be all over us. If we transfer anything off the balance sheet, there will be fifty snoops demanding to know where it went and that will open a whole new can of worms. No, whether we like it or not we have to take our lumps and hope we can turn it around next quarter.”