“You think you’ll be satisfied with taking pictures of famous sites around the world? Trotting the globe isn’t enough for you, and you know it.”
Richard scratched under his shirt collar. He gazed off in the distance, mulling over the best way to respond. Ultimately, Hank was right in one respect. Richard craved something beyond being just another travel writer, taking pictures of himself pointing at monuments and regurgitating the information that everyone else already knew. Such activities felt self-important and aggrandizing. He was sure to get plenty of pats on the back from fellow Princeton alum, but would it truly be satisfying work? What Richard feared the most was navigating listlessly through life without making his mark on the world, a world he desperately wanted to explore. And he couldn’t help but wonder if that’s where he was headed if he turned down Hank’s offer. However, the twisted path that led to this offer were still befuddling.
Earlier in the afternoon, he had left his hotel a few miles across the border in Nice, France, with Pauline, a young woman he’d met by randomly when the clerk assigned them the same room by mistake. Richard viewed the chance meeting as the fates bringing together two like-minded free spirits. When she agreed to accompany him to the Monte-Carlo Casino, he was pleased—but not as much as when he converted their fifty francs into more than eight hundred. However, it was all just a dream, thrown away when Richard let visions of yachts and mansions dance in his head. In a matter of minutes, they’d lost everything, including their joy. That’s the state Richard was in when Hank approached—and also the moment Pauline struck off for another roulette table in an effort to build her own fortune apart from Richard, who had mistakenly given her bad strategy advice. Without Pauline to keep him company, what could it hurt to take up Hank on his offer? Now, a few hours later, Richard wondered if he would even live long enough to regret it.
“Richard?” Hank asked, snapping his fingers. “Are you still with me?”
Richard emerged from his contemplative state. “Yeah, I’m still here.”
“But are you with me?” Hank asked again.
Before Richard could respond, he noticed Pauline trudging across the floor toward him with a sour look on her face.
She stopped in front of him. “You’re back.”
He nodded. “Got here maybe ten minutes ago. What’s the matter?”
“I lost it all,” she said.
“How much?”
“Everything I brought with me, except enough money to get back to the hotel tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” Richard said. “This was all my fault. We should’ve quit while we were ahead earlier.”
“This night has been most forgettable,” she said. “But you did make an agreement with me earlier this evening. You promised that if it wasn’t memorable, you’d do something fun with me.”
“Are you sure it hasn’t been memorable?” Richard asked. “I doubt you’ll ever forget the night you won a small fortune and then lost it in Monte-Carlo.”
“I’ll remember it only if you make good on your promise.”
Richard smiled. “Want to go cliff diving?”
She nodded. “I just checked outside. The clouds are gone and the moon is out again. It’s better than staying miserable in here.”
“I can’t disagree with that,” Richard said.
He turned toward Hank. “Thank you for the offer, sir. But I’m going to have to decline.”
“What about Egypt?” Hank asked.
“What about it?” Richard replied. “I’m not going to let a little thing like a lack of means prevent me from reaching my next destination. Farewell, Mr. Foster.”
Richard turned toward Pauline and offered his arm. “Shall we?”
A wide grin spread across her face.
“What was that all about?” she asked. “What did he want you to do?”
“Nothing I’m interested in. Now, let’s go find a cliff.”
Chapter 3
Nice, France
HUNCHED OVER THE TABLE, Karl Wilhelm adjusted the magnification on his jeweler glasses while studying his bonsai tree. Approaching one of the upper branches slowly, he snipped off a leaf with his trimmer. He leaned back in his chair to examine his work again. A slight upward curl formed at the corners of his mouth.
Footsteps thundered down the hall toward his room before the door to his hotel room flung open. Wilhelm didn’t take his gaze off his plant. His men surrounded him, trained to remain silent until spoken to.
“Did you get the tickets?” Wilhelm asked as he moved in steadily to snip another leaf from the tree.
“Our train leaves for Marseille in the morning at seven o’clock,” answered Hans Reinhard, Wilhelm’s second in command.
“Excellent,” Wilhelm said. He made a precise cut before setting the trimmed piece over to the side in a neat pile.
The men remained quiet as he continued to work. After a long pause, one of the men, Felix Ludwig, spoke up.
“Sir, when are you ever going to be finished with that tree?” he asked.
Wilhelm maintained his stare on the bush. “In horticulture, your work is never truly finished, even for those who reap a harvest. There is always another crop to produce or seeds to plant.”
“Don’t you ever grow tired of such a tedious hobby?” Ludwig pressed.
Wilhelm turned in his chair toward the inquiring young soldier, lifting up the magnifying lenses and peering over the top of his glasses.
“The only thing that would make this hobby tedious was if I ever expected it to be finished,” Wilhelm said. “There’s always a leaf to be cut or a branch to be trimmed. If I wanted to admire my creations, I would work with dead wood, not living things. Such artistry requires a ruthless commitment to perfection, much like our mission.”
“But one day our mission will be completed,” Ludwig countered.
“A good soldier knows that he will always have a homeland to defend or an enemy to squelch,” Wilhelm said. “Our mission is not just one thing. We’re here because we all want to see Germany restored to its rightful place in this world, which is an unmatched power. And for the time being, we must lie in wait. But when we flex our might, we will avenge all these unjust sanctions that have crippled our empire.”
“In that case, we should be training with our fellow soldiers,” Ludwig said. “When the moment comes for us to rise up, we need to be the most prepared force in the world. I can hardly see how these types of missions will prepare us for that.”
Wilhelm stood and removed his gloves before slamming them onto the table. None of the soldiers flinched, all of them accustomed to their leader’s physical outbursts. After methodically moving around the table, Wilhelm came nose-to-nose with Ludwig before replying.
“Perhaps you’re too young to appreciate all that we had before the war,” Wilhelm said. “You missed all the privilege and prestige of what accompanied being from our incredible empire. Yet our leaders thought there was more for us, and rightly so. But it took nearly the entire world to stop us. Our leaders have promised that we will never succumb to such a fate again. That is why we’re on this mission. We already have excellent forces, but we want to possess all the resources winning a war against the rest of the world would require. And we’re going to do it by stripping the world of its richest resources—every country’s treasures from their heritage. We will stuff our coffers so full that it will be impossible to stop us from ruling every corner of the earth.”
“Wouldn’t we be better thieves than treasure hunters?” Ludwig asked, unfazed by Wilhelm’s diatribe.
“Our motives would be exposed, leaving us subject to the heavy-handed sanctions from those monsters who have sought to destroy us through monetary means,” Wilhelm said. “That’s why you have all been selected, an elite group of men who can each mask your nationality while all possessing the other skills necessary to capture the treasures of ancient civilizations.”
Ludwig nodded. “I understand, sir. I hope you don’t regard my questions as i
f I was viewing your direction of our team as anything less than ideal.”
“Great leaders aren’t afraid of questions,” Wilhelm said as he started pacing around the room. “They’re only afraid of failure. Now, go get some sleep. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
All of the men scurried out of Wilhelm’s room and to their own quarters down the hall, everyone except Hans Reinhard. Once the last soldier filed out, Reinhard closed the door behind them and locked it.
“Ludwig can be a little tempestuous,” Reinhard said.
“He’s very skilled, but he is naive. I don’t take offense to his questions. I will take offense if he questions my leadership. We need him for this mission.”
“Who will you send into Dr. Miller’s house tomorrow?”
Wilhelm shrugged. “As long as Ludwig is one of the two men, does it really matter?”
Reinhard settled into the chair across from Wilhelm, who donned his jeweler glasses again and resumed trimming his bonsai tree.
“Did you have something you wanted to talk about?” Wilhelm asked as he focused his attention on the plant.
“Sir, I know that you may not know the answer to this question, but I need to ask it.”
“Go ahead.”
Reinhard sighed for continuing. “If we secure this treasure—”
“When we secure this treasure,” Wilhelm corrected.
“When we secure this treasure, how much longer will we be on this particular mission?”
Wilhelm chuckled. “Do you have somewhere else you need to be?”
“No, it’s just that I—I miss my wife and daughter and—”
“Your sacrifice isn’t unique,” Wilhelm said. “Everyone on this special team is leaving friends and family behind, people we love and cherish. But it’s for those people that we’re all here.”
“But my daughter, sir, she’s—”
“I have daughters, too. I have three of them, to be exact. But you won’t hear me bemoaning the fact that I won’t be able to see them for a while. Now, I chose you to be my second in command because I thought you had the fortitude to handle leading these men with me. But now that you’re coming to me with these mundane excuses, I’m starting to wonder.”
“No, sir, it’s not like that,” Reinhard said, waving his hands. “I just want to know how far along this particular treasure could advance our goals.”
“Don’t waste your time on such conjecture,” Wilhelm said as he placed his tools on the table. “We’re going to be traversing every continent until the Reichswehr has enough resources to put Germany’s boot on the throat of the world.”
“But you’re certain that Dr. Miller was lying?”
“Without a doubt. Now, go check on the men before curfew. We must ensure that everyone has a good night of sleep. Tomorrow is critical for gathering the information we need to move forward.”
Reinhard stood and saluted Wilhelm before exiting the room. Left alone, he snipped off one final leaf before leaning back to admire his work. For the moment, everything was perfect. But it wouldn’t stay that way nor could Wilhelm do anything to prevent the tree from requiring any more tending. Such was the nature of his hobby, which was not much different than his work.
He prepared for bed, mulling over how he would handle the next day. All he needed were the documents to identify the exact location of Dr. Miller’s findings while working on some ancient Egyptian texts and his team could begin the excavation process of one of the richest treasures in the world.
* * *
HANS REINHARD RAN HIS FINGER across the small portrait of his daughter as a tear trickled down his face. While rushing to get to Monte-Carlo for the meeting with Dr. Miller, Reinhard never had the opportunity to tell Wilhelm about his little Emilia, his precious schatzi.
Reinhard stared at the photograph until his eyes blurred with tears, wondering if he’d ever see her again. Two days before the team deployed, he took her to the doctor where he received gut-wrenching news. Emilia was dying from cancer. The doctor who treated her was hesitant to say how long she might have to live, but he estimated around a year based on the history of his previous patients with the disease.
“Maybe more, maybe less,” was as definitive of an answer as Reinhard could get from the doctor.
With the weight of that news, Reinhard wanted to back out of the mission, but his wife encouraged him to go. She rubbed her stomach, which was bulging from her long-awaited second pregnancy.
“Your mission is important,” said his wife, Annemaria, who was the daughter of General Paul von Hindenburg. Her loyalty to her country was difficult to match, even for a patriot such as Reinhard. He suspected it was one of the traits that made him so attractive to her. Growing up in General Hindenburg’s house, she couldn’t have merely just married a loyal countryman—he had to be a soldier, and one who was committed to the nation above all else.
And if Reinhard had been asked just days before learning of Emilia’s fatal illness if he would have put anything above his devotion to his country, he would have emphatically said no. One fifteen-minute visit in a doctor’s office changed all that. This was his schatzi, the girl who had managed to wrap him around her finger for the past decade, the girl who he knew was waiting for him to return from the Great War. The thought of not seeing her again terrified him. Never to hear her singing to her dolls as she twirled them around her room was an unbearable thought.
I’ll see you before you can even miss me, schatzi.
Reinhard clutched the picture before drifting to sleep on a damp pillow.
Chapter 4
Nice, France
RICHARD AWOKE THE NEXT morning with a thud, hitting the wooden floor hard. The jarring introduction to his morning left him in a disoriented state as he attempted to regain his bearings. Glancing down at his attire, he noticed he was wearing only a pair of boxers. He pulled the blanket off the couch just above him and covered his waist.
A woman wrapped in a housecoat squinted as she stood over him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Her face came into focus. It was Pauline. Then the events of the previous evening rushed back—the wispy clouds zipping in front of the pale moon, the jagged cliff, the numbing cold when his body hit the water, and the frigid walk home while soaking wet. He remembered enough to realize that hitting the water from such a tall height accounted for his throbbing headache and his hazy memory.
“I think so, but there are gaps in my recollection,” he said as he sat up.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You were a perfect gentleman and refused to let me stay alone after those men tried to snatch my purse on the way home.”
“Perhaps I overstayed my welcome.”
She flashed a smile. “You were fine. Not that my purse contained any money for them to steal. But it was rather chivalrous.”
“My head hurts, and now you’re reminding me of everything that went wrong earlier in the evening,” he deadpanned.
“Well, you didn’t promise the night would be memorable specifically for you. But it appears as though you haven’t forgotten what made it forgettable.”
“The ebb and flow of gambling has a way of making you want to erase everything from your memory, at least when you end up on the negative side of things.”
She chuckled. “Believe it or not, the most memorable thing you said all night was in your sleep.”
Richard froze, unsure if he wanted to ask her what he said.
“My, how quickly you’ve turned red,” Pauline said as a faint smile spread across her face. “Don’t worry. I already told you that you were the perfect gentleman. You didn’t say anything that you should regret.”
“That’s a relief.”
Pauline held up her index finger. “However, you did say some strange things regarding some people you encountered in your dream. You kept telling them to leave you alone and pleaded with them not to kill you.”
Richard swallowed hard and dismissed her concerns with a logica
l explanation.
“I had quite a bit of childhood trauma,” he said. While he considered himself an honest person, he understood the foundation of selling a lie: base it on the truth and you’ll never get caught spinning a blatant tale.
“What happened?” she asked.
Richard took a deep breath and was about to launch into a long story when a knock at the door interrupted them.
“Expecting someone?” he asked.
She furrowed her brow and then shook her head.
“I’ll answer it,” he said as he got up and draped a blanket over his shoulders. As he neared the door, Richard said, “No one requested a bellhop here.”
“I’m not a bellhop,” came the familiar voice.
He glanced over his shoulder at Pauline.
“It’s Hank Foster,” he said softly. “I’ll handle it.”
She nodded before retreating to the bathroom.
Richard opened the door and scowled. “How on Earth did you find me?”
“Have you forgotten what I do for a living?” Hank asked.
Richard shook his head. “No. But what are you doing here at this time of the morning? I’m only awake because I fell off the couch a few minutes ago.”
“You’re an even better spy than I thought.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hank looked down at the floor. “Too many good men succumb to the allure of a woman’s warm bed and divulge costly secrets, but not you. You sleep on the couch.”
“Can you just get to your reason for being here?” Richard asked. “I’d really like to go back to sleep.”
“So would I, but I can’t help but wonder if you’re thumbing your nose at your destiny.”
“I already told you that the adventure you’ve promised me isn’t the kind I’m interested in,” Richard said. “Now, if you’ll please see yourself out.”
Hank didn’t budge. “I need a smoke. Join me on the balcony, will you?”
Richard sighed and shook his head, realizing that Hank’s relentless ways were battle tested. Resisting would’ve only prolonged the conversation.
The Secret of the King's Tomb Page 2