Return (Matt Turner Series Book 3) (2 page)

After three brief safety pauses, and the extended stop fifteen feet below the surface, his head was finally above water, Leonardo scanned about with stinging eyes, spotting the bobbing research vessel,
Pharos
, about two hundred feet away. He spat out his regulator and blew his diver’s whistle, waving his arms in the air. Alarmed crewmembers spotted him and scrambled into action, jumping into an inflatable dinghy, and zipping to him in less than two minutes. The driver swung around him, curling the dragged tow rope around him.

“What’s happened?” the ship’s medic called out to him as the dinghy slowed beside him, and Leonardo grabbed hold of the rope. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Leonardo called back. “Diver in the site down there! Taking a piece off the Cleo statue! A thief!”

The crewmembers peered around as they took Leonardo’s heavy double-tank rig, heaving it into the small craft, and then pulled him up from the water.

“I see a fisherman over there,” the driver said. “Looks like he’s by himself.”

Leonardo peeled off his neoprene hood, and wiped his eyes on the medic’s shirt sleeve. “Get us back to the boat, fast. Any others besides the fisherman?”

“Not that I can see,” the driver said as he restarted the small engine, and steered them back toward Pharos.

Ten minutes later, Leonardo and three others plunged back into the water as their liaison from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities spoke on the satellite phone with his contacts. Security forces had already been dispatched to the beaches and harbors.

Below the surface, they found Étienne posing for photos. Leonardo’s expression was all Étienne needed to see. Confusion morphed to dread, and he joined the group as they rushed back toward the statue of Cleopatra VII.

The divers gathered around Leonardo as he pointed at the triangular hole in the statue’s creamy black shoulder. Étienne nudged his underlings aside and shone his flashlight into the cavity, peering in. He grasped at the bundle of tools strapped to his vest and found a thin ruler, dipping it into the opening until it stopped. Just under 12cm deep.

Leonardo shifted his focus to the opposite shoulder, and the identical triangle carving in the relative position. He used a hardened rubber pick to probe the outline while studying it through a magnifying glass. As far as he could tell, the groove had been etched in, as with all the other decorative lines. But the piece he’d seen the diver extracting had been of a different material than the statue’s dark stone—perhaps red granite, like the vast majority of Ptolemaic sculptures from the area. Two months ago, he’d cleaned that very shoulder. He couldn’t believe he’d overlook such a disparity in color and texture.

Leonardo turned back to the others as they continued studying the cavity. His eyes shifted to their feet and the sand beneath them. He tapped Étienne and gestured for them to back away before he shifted his weight and allowed his body to sink to the sea floor. And then he saw what he suspected, surrounded by tiny fragments of mortar: a black, triangular wafer. He plucked it from the sand and brought it up for the rest of the group to see.

Étienne’s eyes widened, and Leonardo imagined the lead archaeologist was thinking the same thing as him:
How would anyone in modern times know about a hidden artifact inside the shoulder of a submerged, just-discovered, two thousand-year-old statue?

Étienne took the piece from him, pinching two points between thumb and forefinger, and placed it over the hole in Cleo’s shoulder. The surrounding stone’s grain lined up with the triangle—a cap that had concealed the secret compartment beneath it. Unless someone had decided to x-ray the statue, they’d have never found the now-missing piece hidden within.

* * *

Étienne jabbed a finger toward the small black triangle on the table as his eyes moved from person to person inside the ship’s cabin. The slim, habitually calm Frenchman was incensed. “Somebody say to me how this man knows to look for this? And someone tell me, why
now?
”

Their Ministry liaison hung up his phone and joined the group. “None of the security personnel at the ports have seen anyone come in with a small boat.”

“Tell them not only small boat!” Étienne yelled, and the crew flinched. They had never heard him shout in anger. “It could be anybody! Merde. He could swim up to any shore from here to Alexandria.”

“Étienne-” The ship’s medic put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t try to calm me, okay? I don’t need to be calm right now. Whatever that thing was, I want to know! With all our work …” Étienne’s voice faded to a whisper. “Why … why now?”

“I have an idea,” one of the interns interjected. Heads turned to face the usually silent young man. “Maybe it was this.”

He dropped a magazine onto the table beside the black triangle. Leonardo leaned in with the rest of the group. It was January’s issue of National Geographic, with its enticing, bold-font headline:

DISCOVER THE REAL ATLANTIS…

The crew knew the issue well, each having pored over it, front to back, in search of photos or references to themselves and their finds. All eyes locked on the cover image of the submerged Cleopatra VII, her left shoulder in perfect focus, the triangular groove now seeming to pulse and glow on the page. As Leonardo had suspected, the milky black triangle had blended perfectly with the rest of the statue’s thin decorative lines, carved shapes, and hieroglyphs. He scratched his beard nervously, glancing at Étienne, and their eyes met.

Étienne scrunched his nose, closed his eyes, and shook his head subtly. Leonardo got his message:
I don’t blame you for missing it.

“I am so pissed off, mes amis,” Étienne said to the group. “Whatever that damned thing was, I want it back.”

Philadelphia, PA, USA – Present day

UPenn’s main auditorium could seat 1,259 people, according to the event coordinator, and though Cameron Langley’s seminar hadn’t quite sold out, it sure as hell looked like it had. Standing behind a cherry-wood lectern on the right side of the stage, wearing his second favorite suit, Cameron felt goddamned distinguished. And the audience? Goddamned rapt, if he said so himself.

“… or as Hardy referred to it, ‘object-aided telepathy.’ This rubber band on my wrist—you folks in the back can’t see this, but trust me, there’s a rubber band.” Cameron snapped the band against his skin a few times, close to the lapel mic. “Ouch.” Sporadic chuckles from the audience. “All right, so a few minutes from now, or a week from now, or even a century or more, a skilled psychometrist holding this rubber band could see all of
you
through
my
eyes—like a head-mounted camera—but
more
…” He tapped his temple with an index finger. “In my head, I was thinking about my notes, and the slide after this one, and the next items I plan to share with you; I felt a churn in my stomach, wondered what’s good around here for lunch; felt the rubber band between my fingertips, and, of course, the sting of it snapping against my wrist.” Cameron paused for effect. “Psychometry.”

He waited for the applause he’d received in Tucson at that point in the presentation, but the audience simply nodded, wide-eyed.

Oh well. Moving on.

He clicked the remote to switch to the next slide, glancing back at the expansive screen where the illustrated profile of Dr. Buchanan now shone from the projector. A bit pixelated at such a size, but it was the only picture Cameron could find with Google.

He went on, “Now, as I earlier illustrated, such powers have been reported and observed all throughout human history, but the term ‘psychometry’ was not actually coined until the nineteenth century by this man, Dr. Joseph Rodes Buchanan.”

Another click. A sepia-toned photo of Mrs. Buchanan painted the screen. “Dr. Buchanan’s wife, seen here in this photograph, is who I’d consider the modern era’s very first
documented
psychometrist, and was the subject of decades of research performed with her husband, and outlined in his 1885 treatise,
The Manual of Psychometry: The Dawn of a New Civilization
.
”

Cameron once again gauged the audience’s interest level. Still riveted, but they were surely waiting for him to move on to the ‘star’ subject of the show.

Not just yet.

Glaring sunlight burst from the back of the auditorium—a late arrival entering from the lobby, and the goddamned ushers didn’t hold him until the break. Squinting, Cameron folded his arms across his chest, his gaze chastising the back of the room. The door swung shut, revealing a bearded man in shorts, waving his blundering apologies before slipping into the back row.

Cameron forced a forgiving smile and returned his focus to his notes.

Right. Buchanan.

He glanced back at the towering visage of Mrs. Buchanan, then regarded the room.

A hand beside his mouth signified a confidential admission. “Dr. Buchanan was a bit of a grumpy old fart.” The audience chuckled on cue. “In most of his speeches—delivered to fascinated, rapt audiences, not unlike you wonderful people—he’d digress into ranting diatribes against the ‘ignorant medical establishment,’ skeptical editorialists, and pretty much anyone that questioned his research. Given a modern publicist and a skilled team of handlers, Dr. Buchanan might have, in his time, made ‘psychometry’ the household word it is today. Said handlers would’ve most certainly had Buchanan bring his wife and other test subjects onto the stage with him.” Cameron pointed to the screen. “Why? Because thirty years into his research, Buchanan and his assistants had confirmed over
one
hundred
psychometrists of varying skill levels.”

He paused for effect. The sparse academics in the audience scrawled notes. Casual spectators merely gawked as they always gawked.

“Demonstrations are always more impactful than talking heads on a stage, right? Perhaps Dr. Buchanan enjoyed the sound of his own ranting voice. However, in his writing, we find a much more elegant, acutely focused scientist, and one more than capable of expressing a compelling case to those with the open mind required in his day.”

The house lights dimmed as Cameron activated the video: a dramatic, music-backed, sixty-second slideshow of Buchanan-related images. Recorded back when he was still pinching pennies, Cameron had paid the aging narrator twenty bucks to do the voiceover.

He stepped back from the lectern and watched from the shadows.

"The past is entombed in the present, the world is its own enduring monument; and that which is true of its physical is likewise true of its mental career. The discoveries of psychometry will enable us to explore the history of man, as those of geology enable us to explore the history of the Earth. There are mental fossils for psychologists as well as mineral fossils for the geologists, and I believe that hereafter the psychologist and the geologist will go hand in hand—the one investigating the earth, its animals, and its vegetation, while the other explores the human beings who have roamed over its surface in the shadows. Aye, the mental telescope is now discovered which may pierce the depths of the past and bring us in full view of the grand and tragic passages of ancient history. … Joseph Rodes Buchanan."

The lights brightened as Cameron returned to the lectern with an earnest air. “I only wish he could be here today to witness firsthand the world he foresaw. You see, Dr. Buchanan believed as I do, that psychometry is not some supernatural gift bestowed upon a lucky few. The human mind is a magnificent computer, and the same wondrous gray matter that has given us quantum mechanics, the worlds of Tolkien, the great pyramids, and antibiotics is more than capable of
learning
a new sense. Without taking away from some of the greats discussed here today—in essence, that’s all we’re talking about: a sense.”

Cameron glanced down to his script and read the penciled reminder added in Minneapolis:
PACE HERE
.
With hands clasped loosely behind his back, he began a slow stroll across the stage.

“Imagine with me for a moment a thirteen-year-old boy in a cave. This cave is deep below ground and has no light source whatsoever. Perfect pitch black. The young man was born in this cave and has lived there his whole life, never having used his eyes.” A few
awwws
arose from the audience. Cameron flashed a smile. “None of that, now! Caveboy is purely hypothetical.” Laughs. He resumed, “Living there alone, he isn’t even aware of the
concept
of sight. He uses his other senses to get around, and this is perfectly acceptable to him. He knows no other way. One day, a miner breaks down a wall and daylight streams into the cave. Now, doctors know from a few sad cases that patients who’ve lived entirely in darkness for great lengths of time do not simply
see
when exposed to light. Some, in fact, are never able to see more than faint blobs of color or shades, if that. But for others—those who are able to
train
their inert sensory organs—well, what they see is nothing short of
magical
.”

He advanced through the series of beautiful landscape photographs, allowing several seconds for each to marinate. The onlookers loved him; they loved everything he had to say or show them. He clicked to the blank spacer slide and returned to the lectern. Sated exhales and murmurs of approval.

“Let’s talk about Matthew Turner.”

Postures stiffened and eyes widened. Sporadic applause. Even a gasp or two. They’d all come for this segment—the legendary name Cameron plastered across every brochure, ad, webpage, or event listing—a name that magically loosed the minimum sixty-five-dollar entry fee from each of their bank accounts. But after watching the last forty-five minutes of fascinating material, the Turner portion would now be mere gravy to the attendees. Expectations had been far exceeded. He’d sell and sign
many
books after the show.

Cameron revealed the next slide, the iconic photo of Matthew Turner on the deck of a treasure hunting ship, with tousled hair and a toothy grin. In front of Matthew and the crowd of men and women at his overdressed sides, the archetypal wooden treasure chest of gleaming silver coins sat open—the silver that had made Turner a multimillionaire at twenty-four.