The Loch Ness Legacy (18 page)

I’m sorry to burden you with this quest. I wish I could have seen you again, my dear, but it was not to be. Please understand that I only had the best of intentions.

Your friend,

André

Brielle flipped the sheet over and saw hundreds of numbers and letters speckling the page. There was no identifiable pattern to it, as if it were a connect-the-dots drawing.

“What are you reading?” Tyler asked, startling Brielle. She was about to come up with a lie, but Tyler stopped her. “I saw you take it from the vault. You need to work on your sleight of hand.”

She pulled him aside and whispered to him. “We have to keep this quiet.” She handed him the note.

He read it, then looked at her. “This is incredible.”

“I know. It’s hard to believe.”

“That’s the problem. We need the antidote within the next week.”

“Why?”

Tyler glanced around to make sure no one was listening. “The weapon’s already been deployed. Through the sprinklers inside the Salle Gustave Eiffel. People are already starting to die.”

“My God. Wasn’t Grant inside at the time?”

Tyler nodded solemnly. “And they don’t have any idea how to treat it.”

Wade’s wrinkled face flashed in front of her. “Then this is our only hope.”

Tyler was taken aback. “You really think going after a mythical creature is the best use of our time?”

“Your own sister made a video recording of it.”

“She made a video recording of something. Why don’t we go after Bigfoot while we’re at it?”

“The Nazis obviously believed it,” Brielle said. “And Victor Zim does, too. Why else would he try to abduct Alexa?”

“I don’t know. But I’m certain there’s no sea monster living in Loch Ness. It’s a legend perpetuated by cranks and hoaxers.”

“So certain that you’re willing to bet Grant’s life on it?”

Tyler went silent, then said, “Why are you so quick to buy into this?”

“Because I saw one of my closest friends turned into an elderly man virtually overnight. That makes me ready to believe almost anything, especially if it helps me get the bastards who did that to him. Do you have a better idea?”

Tyler scratched his temple in thought. After a full minute, he cursed under his breath. “All right. I can try convincing Agent Harris, but how does she ask her superiors to put resources into finding the Loch Ness monster? I can imagine sitting in their position and thinking it’s nuts.”

Brielle nodded at his point. Despite her confidence in presenting her case to Tyler, she wasn’t sure if they’d find anything at all. “Then we have to do it ourselves.”

She saw Tyler wrestling with the thought of keeping information from the Feds. He was a big boy scout; doing things the right way was in his blood.

Finally he said, “We know Alexa and Grant will go along with this, so we’ll keep it to the four of us until we have irrefutable proof.”

He pocketed the sheet. Once Laroche’s comatose form was carried away to the hospital, Harris arrived and they spent the next hour answering her questions about the vault, Dunham, and the notebook. Neither Tyler nor Brielle mentioned the letter left by Laroche.

Dunham’s gunshots were enough to implicate her. Her car was found abandoned at Mercer Village Shopping Center. She was on the run with a BOLO issued. The be-on-the-lookout alert had every Washington law enforcement agency on the hunt for her, so they were confident about catching her, but Brielle thought she might have been ready for such an eventuality.

When the FBI was done with them, the four of them finally had the privacy of Grant’s SUV to discuss the note. Grant looked especially hopeful that there was now something he could do to prevent his own death.

Alexa read it twice.

“Laroche may not be any help for a while,” Tyler said. “The paramedics said he might have suffered a stroke and don’t know if he’ll make it. Alexa, do you understand his clues?”

“The stuff specific to me, sure. I told André that the harp seal was my favorite animal. So cute. And the harp seal’s most feared enemy is the polar bear. So those chromosome numbers are easy to find. But then I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with it.”

“What’s the current home of Darwin’s intellect?” Tyler asked her.

“Where his brain is,” Grant said. “We need to find where he’s buried.”

Alexa shook her head. “No, André specifically said his ‘intellect.’ We have to go where his thoughts are preserved.”

“How can his thoughts be preserved?”

“Of course! The largest collection of Darwin’s letters, notes, and books is at the University of Cambridge library in England. The numbers must point to a specific document in the library. We’ll need to find the right combination of numbers. There must be millions of possibilities on this page.”

Brielle leaned forward. “What’s a hallux?”

“It’s a big toe. The lateral one must refer to the little toe.”

“So we need Apollo’s big toe and pinky toe,” Grant said. “Great. That makes no sense.”

An image of a foot flashed in Brielle’s mind. “The statues in the backyard!” she shouted in triumph. “That has to be what Laroche meant.”

“Because one of the figures was missing a foot?” Tyler asked.

“It’s a statue of Apollo. I’ve seen it before.”

“We can’t use it obviously, but then neither could Marlo Dunham,” Tyler said. “Laroche must have traced the foot to make the clue and then he destroyed it or threw it in the lake.”

“So we’re back to zero,” Grant said.

“No, we’re not,” Brielle said. “The reason I recognized the statue is because it’s a replica.”

Alexa snapped her fingers. “The fountain in the driveway! That’s a replica, too!”

Brielle nodded. “They’re both from the same place. We have to go to France.”

Tyler furrowed his brow at her. “Why?”

“Because the original statue was designed for the Sun King, Louis XIV,” she said, “and it’s now sitting in the gardens of Versailles.”

Zim allowed himself to enjoy the steady breeze while the thirty-five-foot power boat motored toward the town of Sidney on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. The late afternoon sun was starting to fade over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but they would reach port before dark. Then it was onto a flight from Victoria International Airport to Calgary, then to Heathrow in London and on to Paris after that. Zim wanted to absorb as much of the open air as he could before being crammed into a plane for the next fourteen hours.

The vessel reminded Zim of the one his father had owned when he and his brothers were young boys, the days when they’d gone out on long weekend excursions on Lake Michigan, the days before his father’s job at the auto parts factory was destroyed by the company owned by a Saudi sheik who bought the plant merely to shut it down. Those were the last happy times Zim could remember, and it was his first taste of how ruthless Arabs could be. The family had sold everything and moved to California looking for work, where his father was reduced to pounding out dents at an auto body shop until he drank himself to death.

Despite how much he reveled in the motion of the boat on the waves, Zim knew he couldn’t return to that life on Lake Michigan. He was a wanted man now and always would be. Stepping onto the dock in Everett was probably the last time he’d set foot in the United States. Europe would become his new home. If he ended up dying on this operation, at least he’d be going out in the birthplace of the white race. And he’d do it while making the Arabs pay for what they’d done to his family.

Pryor was down in the bunk napping while Marlo Dunham lounged next to him in a sweater and jeans that hugged her slim body. Pryor had been lusting after her ever since they’d picked her up on Mercer Island, but Zim felt no attraction to her. Brunettes didn’t do it for him. If he ever took a wife, she would have to fit the Aryan ideal of a tall blonde Viking goddess. Maybe he’d settle in Norway. Carl had said it was filled with his type of woman.

“How long until we arrive?” Dunham asked.

“A couple of hours,” Zim said. “We’ll be in plenty of time for the flight.”

“I’m not concerned about that. You both need to alter your appearance to match the passports or we’ll be arrested the moment we go through security in Victoria.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got the disguises in the cabin. We’ll put them on before we dock. What about you? You’re as wanted as we are now.”

“I’ve got a blonde wig, a different nose, and glasses.”

“Blonde, huh?”

Dunham sneered at him. “Don’t even think it. I’m not interested.”

“What if I don’t care?”

“What if I don’t show up at the airport and you have no plane tickets? Remember, I funded your jailbreak, and I control the purse strings on this mission. Without my money, your friend Pryor over there wouldn’t be able to build a flashlight.”

Zim gritted his teeth. He didn’t relish being in thrall to this or any other woman. “Relax. It was a joke. Besides, I don’t want Carl’s sloppy seconds.”

Dunham gave him the finger, leaned back, and put on her sunglasses.

She had hooked up with his brother four years after Victor was sent to prison. Carl told him it was fate, but Zim always thought it was a little convenient that she latched onto him just before presenting her plan to attack the summit with this old Nazi weapon. He later learned that she had found out about the tragic Zim brothers and seen an opportunity. Carl was too much of a stooge to realize what was happening. Dunham pushed all of his buttons in precisely the right way.

She had used their shared mutual tragedies to reel Carl in. Years before, Dunham had fallen in love with some kind of peacenik who joined an aid organization supporting the Palestinian cause. Just like a woman, she was so head over heels for the guy that she went to Gaza with him. When an Israeli airstrike hit the apartment complex they were living in, her boyfriend was killed, and Dunham was injured so badly that not only did she lose the baby she was carrying, she lost the ability to ever have children.

Zim didn’t like Dunham, but he could identify with her sudden change of attitude. Tragedy could do that in an instant. Dunham returned to the US stewing in hatred and convinced that both the Israelis and Palestinians were scum. Laroche kept a close watch on Israeli news and, unaware of her pathological grudge, took pity on Dunham because his own mother had been killed in a Palestinian suicide attack. He offered her a job to take advantage of her education in archaeology, which she had planned to indulge when she moved to the Middle East. Laroche hoped her background would dovetail with his cryptozoology passion. With no other job prospects, she took the position and worked for him faithfully for the next three years, despite his allegiance to Israel.

Laroche’s fortuitous purchase of the Nazi chemical weapon reignited Dunham’s need for revenge, but her plan required muscle to make it a reality. When she met Alexa Locke, she briefly considered Tyler for the job but quickly found out what a do-gooder he was. He would never agree to it. She needed someone who would understand her desire for vengeance, and when she heard about Tyler’s involvement with Victor and Carl Zim, Dunham sought Carl out and convinced him to join forces with her. Carl’s only condition was that they would free his brother once the job was done.

Carl was totally dazzled by Dunham and wrote about her in glowing letters to Victor that his attorney was able to bring in uncensored during regular visits. Victor suspected there was some fabrication and embellishment of the story on Dunham’s part, but it didn’t matter. Their goals were aligned perfectly: now Dunham would get the destruction of Israel and Zim would make Islam a dirty word in the western nations while taking out all of their leaders at once.

Zim put the boat on a heading that would take them around Orcas Island. “How are you going to keep the money flowing now that they’ve found Laroche?”

“Embezzling from that old fool was easy,” Dunham said. “I’ve got enough cash stashed away for whatever we need.”

“Are you sure they won’t find it? You thought they wouldn’t find that vault for weeks and look how that went.”

“And they wouldn’t have if your men hadn’t screwed up and let both Alexa Locke and Brielle Cohen get away.”

Zim shifted in his seat. “I’m down four men because they had help. Tyler Locke and Grant Westfield rescued them.”

“I realized that when they showed up at Laroche’s estate.”

“Which wouldn’t have been a problem if you had killed Laroche when I told you to.”

Dunham had Laroche locked in a room at the mansion, delaying the inevitable need to kill him because of some misguided sense of pity. She learned her lesson when he broke out of his room long enough to send the email to Alexa and lock himself in the vault.

Zim looked at Dunham with undisguised disdain. “Why didn’t you kill them all at the mansion?”

“There was no point in giving myself away if they didn’t get into the vault.”

“You should have had the gun with you.”

“How was I supposed to know they’d open the vault so easily? I’ve been trying to figure out the code for days. The only reason they could do it was because of the clues Laroche sent to Alexa.”

Zim grunted but said nothing. It sounded like a bunch of flimsy excuses to him. If he had been there, all their adversaries would be dead, and he would have destroyed the notebook, making the rest of this mission unnecessary.

“We should split up in London,” Dunham said.

“Why?”

“Because if they get to Versailles before you do, we’ll have to stop them in England. You’ll take Pryor with you to France and meet up with the men there. I’ll take the other half of them and stake out the library at Cambridge.”

Zim scowled at her. She was getting too used to ordering him around. “Are you sure you can handle it?”

“You’re so sweet,” she said with a mock baby voice. “You’re worried about me getting hurt? Please. Carl trained me on weapons. I’m ready.”

“I’m worried about you getting captured and losing our money,” Zim said.

“I’m not going to sit back in a hotel while the Locke siblings and their friends screw up a year of planning. If they find the Loch Ness monster in time to make the antidote, then your brother died for nothing.”