When he was twenty-six, his wife had been ripped away from him in a car accident. The driver wasn't drunk. He'd fallen asleep at the wheel. It could have happened to anyone. Then there was the irony of where Holmes now worked, as chairman of a company that produced the very thing that propelled automobiles.
Holmes never recovered from the accident. He threw himself into work, into making himself into something untouchable. To numb the pain in his heart, he dabbled with drugs, but that never touched it. Buying companionship helped him forget things for a little while, but his guests always left in the middle of the night, taking their compensation with them and never looking back.
In his thirties, he realized how much time had gone by and how pointless life truly was. It was nothing but a series of events, some good, some bad, and in between there were choices to be made.
Holmes chose to stop caring about anyone.
The day he consciously made that decision, he started to feel better. His focus went purely to building his empire, to crushing anyone who got in his way, and to eventually becoming one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Part of it was for the money. After all, cash bought things that produced pleasure. The real reason behind it all, though, was that as long as Holmes was building something, he didn't have to care about anything else or anyone.
He worked tirelessly. An efficiency expert to the core, he cut out the fat from his business systems and used it to fuel his one-man empire.
The only thing that stood in his way had been the board of directors. "Shortsighted old fools," he said. "They got what they deserved. To think they were going to try to cut me out. I built their company into what it is. Ungrateful. That's what they were. Ungrateful, greedy swine."
Holmes's only regret was that he couldn't see the look on that insolent Jerry's face as he plummeted to his death. What he would have given to hear Jerry's screams. Holmes imagined it was like a little girl squeal. Jerry talked big, but Holmes knew those types. They were little dogs with a big bark. Nothing more.
That dog would bark no more. And now Holmes had total control.
His phone abruptly started ringing in his pocket, rousing him from his thoughts. "Tell me you have good news."
"I do."
"That's a relief. I was starting to think you were running into problems."
"I am. I have good and bad news."
"Pfft. You know, just once I would like to get only good news. Seems like life has a rule about that or something. You can only get good news if you take it with bad."
"I assume you want the bad news first."
"Actually, no. Let's start with the good."
"I checked with my source; you're completely in the clear. We've put out some social signals suggesting a known terrorist group is taking credit for the attack earlier today. Next thing the authorities will find is traces of an explosive that is a calling card from that group. We've already nabbed the fall guy. He'll be dropped off at police headquarters with a dud bomb attached to his chest and his tongue cut out. He won't make it five steps before they shoot him on the spot."
Holmes changed his mind about that drink. He stepped over to the liquor cabinet, grabbed a bottle of a chic single malt scotch, and poured it into an empty glass. After a long, steady sip, he set the glass down and let the liquid streak down his throat before speaking again.
"Good. And the bad news?"
"The Americans are proving to be a problem. They took out three of my men earlier tonight. I'm going to have to handle this personally."
Holmes had been afraid of that. He knew about Sean Wyatt's reputation with the IAA. Before that, he couldn't learn much. It was a history shrouded in secrecy. That usually meant he worked for either a government entity or an extremely shady organization. Didn't matter. Both of those career paths made him extremely dangerous, which was why Holmes hadn't put Jack directly on the job. Jack was one of the few people Holmes trusted.
"No," Holmes said. "Bring in someone else. I heard about some guys out of Serbia who were looking for work."
"That's who Wyatt killed earlier today."
Crikey. "Then we get others. Money is no object. You hear me? Spend whatever it takes to get the best out there. Track Wyatt and his cronies, and sic those dogs on them. I don't care if you have to bring in a whole strike team, make it happen. We need the location of that relic. Everything depends on it."
A moment of trepidation passed between the two.
"I'll bring in the guys who did the elevator job," Jack said. "Their skills go beyond just demolition and explosives."
"Just make sure that you get them on it immediately. And tell them not to destroy anything that might help us in our search. They can't just walk in and blow up the evidence along with the targets. We need anything they've found totally intact."
"Understood. They'll be thorough, but careful."
"Good. Keep me updated."
"Of course, sir."
Holmes ended the call and set the phone on the counter. He stared at the golden liquid in his glass for a second and then took another huge gulp, finishing off the rest. The burn going down his throat was only slight, the way good scotch was meant to be. He took a deep breath and poured another glass.
These American meddlers were becoming a real problem, he thought. Maybe it was time to start using a little leverage.
22
Alice Springs
No one in the group slept well during the rest of the night. After a group effort to take the bodies down to the trash bin and dispose of them, they decided to leave the hotel and try sleeping in the car at one of the camping areas nearby.
At nearly five in the morning, Reece woke suddenly after a restless half hour of sleep. He looked around in the darkness and rubbed his eyes. Unable to go back to sleep, he pulled out his phone and quietly opened the door. He stepped out into the cool early morning air. His brain raced—something that happened more and more frequently lately. Most of the time he was overly concerned about his bills and payments that were past due. At the moment, he was thinking about something else.
He carefully shut the door to make sure he didn't rouse the others. It was his turn to keep watch, so the others were dipping in and out of consciousness. Even taking turns with guard duty didn't produce any kind of relaxation.
Reece tiptoed away from the car and pressed the home button on his phone. The screen lit up and cast a bright glow onto his face. He winced at the sudden light and turned away for a moment, looking up at the stars to adjust his vision. As he gazed into the heavens, he remembered why he loved the outback. Billions of stars, planets, solar systems, and galaxies twinkled in the black canvas overhead. A thin gray line streaked across the horizon to the east, a sign that the dawn was on its way.
He looked back to his phone and then back at the others still sleeping in the car. "Come on, Reece. Think."
At the hotel, they'd only taken a few minutes to do some online searches for any information on the royal valley from the riddle. Their efforts had been in vain. There were any number of interesting things that came up. One of the more frequent results had to do with the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
Reece tapped the screen and entered his search query again. Still no hits that made any sense regarding Australia and a royal valley. He lowered his phone and looked up again at the stars.
"Maybe you're being too direct," he muttered. "Think about it. This is a riddle, remember? Mathews wouldn't have made it so obvious to give the actual name of the place. It's more likely a description of what it looks like. Or maybe..."
What if it's a synonym or something like that?
The thought popped into his head as if from nowhere. "What's another word for royal? Royalty, no that's the same thing."
Think, Reece. Think. What kinds of people are royals?
"Kings, queens, princes, princesses, dukes, earls..."
He typed in prince's valley but didn't find anything useful. Next he tried queen's valley. Still nothing. Then,
as he was typing in the word king, it hit him.
"I'm not looking for a valley. It's a canyon. Kings Canyon!" He nearly yelled the last part of his epiphany. "That's it! Kings Canyon!"
He tapped away furiously on his phone. A moment later, the search results for Kings Canyon appeared. He scrolled through some of the images, nodding with every one that passed.
Reece had been to Kings Canyon many times throughout his life. It was a place he knew well. He took tour groups there from time to time.
He stopped on one of the images of a waterfall that spewed into the canyon basin. Where the water flowed over the rocks, the ravine curved around sharply like a boomerang.
Reece's eyes widened. "That's gotta be it. The boomerang, the waterfall, that has to be the place."
He spun around, full of excitement. He wanted to wake the others, but as he looked through the window saw they were still asleep. How they slept in a car like that, he didn't know. Just as the thought occurred to him, Tommy roused in the passenger seat. His eyes pried open and blinked wearily.
He saw Reece standing outside the car with his phone and flashed a curious expression. "What?" he mouthed.
Reece couldn't keep it in any longer. He quietly opened the door and motioned for Tommy to get out.
Tommy shook his head slowly back and forth and opened his door. Sean and Adriana didn't move, though he had a feeling Sean was wide awake and simply faking sleep. Something about his friend was always on full alert, even when he was "resting."
"What?" Tommy asked as he continued rubbing his eyes.
He stepped around to the front of the car and met Reece in front of the hood.
"I've got it, Tom. I know where we need to go next." He could barely contain his excitement.
"Really?" Tommy perked up.
Reece raised his phone and showed the screen to Tommy. It took a couple of seconds for Tommy's eyes to adjust to the bright screen, but when they had, he narrowed his eyelids and stared at the images.
"Kings Canyon," he said quietly. "So we were looking for two wrong things."
"Seems that way. I got to thinking, the bloke that left these clues wouldn't be so direct to tell us the name of the place to go next. Where's the fun in that?"
"Good point."
"So I thought of what royals are called or what they do."
Tommy grinned at his friend and slapped him on the back. "Well done, mate," he said in a terrible fake Aussie accent.
Reece raised an eyebrow. "Don't do that again."
"What? I do pretty good accents."
"Nah, mate. You sound too Pommie."
"Pommie?"
"Yeah, you know. You sound British, which is fine if you're hanging out in London. Here in the outback, though, you sound like a bit of a fool."
Tommy appeared crestfallen. "Really? I thought it was pretty good."
"Let it go, Tom. We've got bigger things to think about. Gotta get a move on if we want to reach Watarrka by midmorning."
"Watarrka?"
Reece flashed a playful smirk. "That's where the canyon is."
The drive west took the companions through the Northern Territory high desert. It reminded the Americans a little bit of Arizona in some places.
Sean had spent much of their travel time trying to figure out how someone had tracked them once they left Milbrodale. Once they were out of Alice Springs, he took fifteen minutes to do a thorough sweep of the vehicle to make sure there were no homing devices attached. He also went through the extra step of switching off the car's satellite connection as well as making everyone turn off any kind of GPS on their phones.
There was another possibility that he considered, but that would take some resources. Then again, if someone was paying men to kill them, that was just the kind of person who might have that kind of wallet.
Fortunately, the Americans had someone like that on their side, too.
"Hey, Alex," Sean said. "How's the vacation?"
"It's fine. You do realize the time difference between where you are and where we are, right?"
"Yeah. I know."
"Must be pretty important, then," Alex yawned.
"I'll get right to it." Sean stepped away from the car and walked toward an outcropping of shrubs. He stared out at the rolling high desert and then took a look back at his friends to make sure they were out of earshot. "I think someone might be tracking our credit card use. There any way you can figure that out?"
Alex paused as he considered the question. "You mean, someone is following you by looking at where your cards have been used?"
"Yeah, maybe. Not sure yet. We had a run-in with some guys, a couple of incidents."
"Did you pick up a bug?"
"I checked the car. No homing devices on it. And nobody has followed us. Trust me, I would have noticed. Out here in the outback, there isn't exactly a ton of traffic."
"Okay, so I can do a check on that and see if there were any anomalies with your transactions. Might be that someone did a periscope on you."
"Periscope? Like the app?"
Alex chuckled. "No, although I do like that app. No, a periscope is what a hacker does to see if an account is worth tapping into or not. When you use a card, it sends a signal to the bank, they send one back, and information is exchanged. Even though they use some of the best security in the world to protect their customers, whenever there is a transfer of signals, that transfer can get a hole poked into it. When that happens, a hacker can periscope in and have a quick look. It doesn't take long. They just get in, see what they want, and then pop back out again."
"But that leaves a trail, right?"
"There's always a trail. Some trails are harder than others to find, but yeah, we can check it out for you. Haven't been doing anything else down here."
Sean still had a beach house in Destin that he'd let the kids use for their vacation time.
"Sounds like you're having a good time. Do yourself a favor and go to The Donut Hole for breakfast in the morning before you head out to the Caribbean. You won't regret it."
"I don't really care for donuts," Alex said.
"Neither do I, but trust me. Their breakfast is worth it. Let me know what you two dig up."
"Okay, will do."
Sean ended the call and glanced back at the others. They were staring out at the spectacular view of red rocks speckled with green bushes and patches of grass. Down in the canyon, thick stands of trees sprouted up, providing a beautiful contrast between the red desert stone and dirt and the lush emerald leaves. A small river flowed through the canyon's bottom, cutting around piles of fallen rock and trails for hikers.
One side of the canyon looked like it had been sliced off by a huge blade, its colorful strata not unlike the Grand Canyon, which had eroded over time and gradually revealed layers upon layers of sedimentary rock.
Sean walked back to the car and looked out at the setting. "Pretty view," he said.
"Yeah," Reece agreed. "I've come camping up here lots of times. Tourists are always pleasantly surprised when I bring them here. They didn't know such places existed down here."
"Australia is a big place," Adriana said. "It's full of all kinds of beautiful things."
Tommy had a sense of urgency to his tone when he spoke. "So where, exactly, are we supposed to go to find the next clue? You said there's a waterfall and we should look there first?"
"Right," Reece said. "We'll head down the canyon trail and then make our way to the falls. Shouldn't take us long to get there. Once we're there, we can have a look around."
"When you say it shouldn't take us long, are you talking about five minutes or two hours?" Tommy asked. "Because I get the feeling it's closer to the latter."
Reece laughed. "No, it's about a thirty-minute hike in from here. So relax, Tom. It's mostly downhill, too."
"Coming back won't be," Tommy muttered.
Everyone grabbed their gear bags and an extra bottle of water they'd picked up at a gas station before entering the national par
k. Reece warned them that the air in the high desert was pretty dry, so staying hydrated was of utmost importance.
Sean took a few sips of his water before they set out on the trail.
Adriana walked over to him and leaned in close. "What did the kids say?"
Sean hadn't wanted to alarm the others, but they needed to know what measures he was taking to figure out how the assassins had been able to track their movements.
"They may be looking at where we use credit cards. If they do that, they can follow a trail and connect the dots. One way or the other, we use cash from now on. Okay?"
She nodded. "You going to tell those two?"
Sean smirked. "Eventually."
They rejoined the others and looked to Reece for the next move.
"Lead the way, mate," he said in a fake accent.
"Hey, well done, Sean." Reece turned to Tommy. "See, that's how you do an Aussie accent."
"Oh, come on," Tommy protested. "That sounded exactly like the way I did it."
"Nah, mate. But keep working on it."
Incensed, Tommy threw his hands in the air. "It sounds the exact same."
"Okay, on we go," Sean said. "Sorry, buddy. Your accent does sound a little Pommie."
"What is with you two and the whole Pommie thing?"
Reece led the way to the trailhead and began the descent into the canyon. Sean and Adriana followed close behind, leaving Tommy muttering words in his bad accent in an attempt to practice.
"Still sounds the same," he said to himself and hurried to catch up.
The lean path leading down into the canyon would have been a problem for Sean had it been any narrower. As it was, he clung to the inner rock wall like an infant grasping its mother, keeping his right hand touching it at all times. As they reached a bend in the trail and rounded the turn, he switched to his left hand, to keep that feeling of stability.
The Sean Wyatt Series Box Set 4 Page 16