The Prisoner's Gold (The Hunters 3) (2 page)

Their
window
provided meaningful human interaction.

But today, he couldn’t see his friend through the hole.

Suddenly worried, Rustichello lay on the damp floor where it met the moss-covered wall and glanced through an even smaller gap. This one at floor level and designed for drainage. The stench of dried urine in the gutter near the hole was overpowering, but he needed to check on his neighbor, who was deadly silent in his cell.

‘My friend,’ Rustichello said in Venetian, ‘do you need water?’

He knew better than to ask if the man was all right. Both had been to the chamber where the Genoese slapped them around. When they left there, they were
never
all right.

The beaten merchant blinked at him a few times, trying to regain his bearings, then coughed up some blood from his broken ribs. Though he was far younger and hardier than Rustichello, the constant beatings were taking their toll.

‘If you can spare some,’ he croaked.

Their daily rations were minimal at best, but Rustichello would gladly share his water. His neighbor had done the same for him on his own return trips from abuse. He grabbed his tin cup and scooped some murky water from the stone bowl he was given each morning. Then he carefully positioned the cup in the tiny drainage hole on the floor and nudged it through the tunnel, careful not to tip it or touch the drinking rim to the top of the tunnel’s roof.

With a trembling hand, the merchant grasped the thin handle and dragged the cup along the floor until it was right next to his face. He pressed it to his swollen lips and sipped cautiously, pleased when swallowing did not add to his pain.

‘I don’t think they are after information anymore … I’m not even sure they still enjoy the beatings. It feels more like routine now – for them as well.’

‘Must not have been Guillermo, then. That sack of shit enjoys it every time.’

The merchant smiled at the eye on the other side of the wall. They would frequently curse their captors in private, but never loud enough to be heard by the guards or other inmates.

‘No. Not the ogre,’ he muttered. He finished the water in small sips, quietly thankful that Guillermo hadn’t been to work in nearly a week.

It was a small blessing in his current hell.

The merchant had been captured during Venice’s war with Genoa when his ship had run aground on a sandbar near the Anatolian coast. Enemy soldiers had taken him in chains on one of their boats back to the Republic of Genoa – one of the last places a Venetian ever hoped to find himself. Of course, it probably hadn’t helped matters that during the fighting he had fired the severed heads of Genoese sailors from a massive catapult in between the volleys of rough iron balls designed to plunge through the decks of enemy ships.

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.

Present Day

Saturday, March
15

Denver, Colorado

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.

Once the money had been moved, Garcia shifted his focus to the monitors that he used to keep tabs on his team. They had been on vacation since the last mission had ended in November, but he kept track of their whereabouts through a combination of facial recognition software, Papineau’s super-computer, and ubiquitous camera feeds. Garcia could pull footage from a variety of sources from cell phones to security systems. This gave him almost constant supervision of his targets, as long as they didn’t stray too far into the wilderness.

And for those times there were NSA satellites.

He knew Jack Cobb, the team’s leader, had entered the United Kingdom at London’s Heathrow airport, but once he had left the terminal, he had slipped off Garcia’s grid. Cobb wasn’t aware that Garcia was spying on him, but he was quite familiar with facial recognition software and was cagey about cameras all the time.

Papineau was also good at avoiding cameras, but in the Frenchman’s case he knew he was being followed – not only by Garcia but by his employer as well.

The other team members, Sarah Ellis and Josh McNutt, were far easier to catch on screen. Sarah had spent some of her money decorating a small apartment in San Francisco. And one in Dallas. And another one in Toronto. Garcia wasn’t sure why she had so many places, but he assumed it had something to do with her career as a world-class thief.

Or rather, a world-class ‘acquisitions specialist’.

Sarah hated when people called her a thief.

Meanwhile, McNutt had surprised everyone with his recent purchase. The former Marine sniper had spent half of his funds on a beachside bar in Key West, Florida. He lived on the second floor and mostly kept to himself, unless his biker buddies stopped by. Garcia had expected wild orgies with hookers and drugs and more hookers, but McNutt was laying low as Cobb had recommended. Today he was snoozing in a hammock near the shore.

A transaction on one of his monitors completed with a soft ping, and Garcia swiveled his chair around to see the money that he had looted from the son of the former Nigerian president, who had swindled billions from his government’s coffers. The former leader had died in office, but his son was living a cushy life in the south of France. Every month, Garcia lightened his fortune by a few million. No one in his family had yet to even notice.

A second ping confirmed the stolen funds had been sent to fifteen NGOs in Nigeria. Garcia smiled at the transactions, just as his cell phone started to ring. He glanced at the screen and saw it was Papineau calling. He leaned forward in his chair, muted the master volume on his system, and answered the phone.

‘Good afternoon, Jean-Marc. What can I do for you today?’

‘I have another job for the team. Can you please call them in for me?’

‘Right now?’

‘Yes, Hector, right now. It’s time to get back to work.’

‘Yes, sir. But just so you know, Sarah isn’t going to be happy.’

‘Why not?’

Garcia glanced at one of his monitors and grimaced. ‘Right now, she’s kind of busy.’

Pittsfield, Vermont

(
132
miles northwest of Boston)

Sarah Ellis wiped a swath of mud from her face and flung it to the ground. In her left hand she held a plastic bucket filled with rocks. The rope handle was thick and rough. If not for the numbness in her hands and fingers, she would have felt the fibers digging into her flesh.

Just like the rope she used to climb in gym class.

Towering above her, a waterfall surged over a thirty-foot cliff. The clear mountain water splashed and sprayed in the air with a roar of white noise. It took her a moment to gather her senses. She wasn’t sure if she should admire its beauty or curse at it for being in her way.